#I have a very different view of the framework around oppression in regards to gender than most people | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

lesser-vissir · 2 years ago

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So I read that lame genderkoolaid post and a few by other prominent transunity bloggers, specifically in regards to their ideas regarding the existence of misandry and the framework they've developed in order to describe transphobia. The system, which I don't believe they've actually coined despite loving to make new words, which I will call multisexism.

Multisexism is the idea that sexism is a multivector space containing several "sexisms". There are three main sexism I've seen them identify (misogyny, misandry, and misandrogyny [nbphobia {also Miss Androgyny is a killer drag name}]). Some other sexisms I've seen them identify are a sexism against multigender people and a sexism against intersex people. Since this framework is built around identifying sexisms I would posit there is room for them to add a few more. A possible add would be a modified misandrogyny that specifically targets xenogenders.

From this multisexism space, transunionists argue that transphobia (and gender based oppression as a whole) is a cross product of multiple sexisms, usually a unique cross product for every given person based on how much that person **personally** identifies with experiencing a certain type of sexism.

In this line, transmisogyny and transmisandry become catchall terms for the sexism cross-products experienced by people that identify as transfem or transmasc. This an important distinction since they do not view each person as experiencing the same cross product. Thus transmisogyny and transmisandry are not concrete terms describing a system of oppression but a vague term referring to the many ways a individual people experience bigotry.

I believe this is the core reason behind why they get into so many fights with so-called serano-esque transfeminists.

Multisexism is a very obviously flawed framework of oppression for the simple reason that it is unable to identify benefactors of their various sexisms. Some of them are lifted wholesale from existing oppression frameworks (misogyny, exorsexism) and as a result some of the ways they talk about oppression have made their way into their critiques as well. One good example of this is the term patriarchy. Despite multisexism not being able to identify an oppressor class, they still call the general concept of sex based oppression "patriarchy" even though they make absurd claims like "men suffer under the patriarchy". I wouldn't be surprised if they soon remove patriarchy from their vocabulary and swap it for something else.

Traditional oppression frameworks posit that oppression exists because the oppressor class benefits from the subjugation of the oppressed class. Since multisexism lacks an oppressor class we can conclude that they believe sexism exists because different sexes exist. This explains why they create a sexism for every perceived "sex": male, female, sexless, multisex, intersex. A list which maps roughly with western gender theory, but with intersex thrown in.

One the bigger reasons I said multisexism as ideology is flawed is because it does not present an endgame. Since there is no oppressor class to dismantle, no patriarchy to fight save the specter of bigotry, there is no way given within the framework of multisexism to **end** sexism.

On a similar note, it does not offer an explanation for why sex exists. Since there is no oppressor sex, transunionists are unable to say why the boundaries of the sexes were constructed. Even if they say or believe sex does not exist they only do so because the feminist theory they used as a partial basis says so as well. In this regard, transunity is bioessentialist in that is believes sex is real and inherent, except that they add new sexisms whenever they feel the need to classify a new one.

Why exactly do tranunionists believe they need to have this framework then? Transmisandry is not a new concept, I can find posts from at least as early 2013 making the same points about its existence and complaining that transfems talking about transmisogyny and how AFAB trans people perpetuate it in trans spaces.

Taking them as face value for their own claims on why multisexism must exist, it is because they needed a framework within which it is possible to account for how cis people view trans people as their AGAB.

"ive seen trans men (often those who harass other transmascs in the name of "transfem allyship") insist that trans men cant be subject to misogyny because we're men and to say otherwise is misgendering. and like im sorry but we cannot do meaningful anti-transphobic activism if we are shaping our view of transphobia on "never ever ever implying that anyone sees trans people as anything but the gender they say they are & that that might shape the kind of transphobia they face" like thats just. not realistic." - genderkoolaid

I actually agree with this sentiment (genderkoolaid's asides, well, aside), and I believe most other transfeminists also do. I believe that AGAB is important when discussing transphobia and acknowledging that is not misgendering. In seems odder to me that genderkoolaid would agree with this sentiment since it is the basis of the terms TME/TMA, a framework ey and other transunionists despise.

Assuming this was the only reason to create the multisexism framework, it would be quite easy to dismiss it. Taking a materialist feminist approach and treating sex based oppression as a dialectic is far more capable of handling AGAB's effects on transphobia without having to say things like "trans men experience misogyny because they are seen as women."

This is because a dialectic view of sex based oppression allows us to talk about men and women as classes because there is an understanding that they do not exist except in opposition to each other. Thus saying things like "women's clothing doesn't have pockets" does not misgender AFAB enbies who may also wear clothing without pockets instead of the ludicrous statement "AFAB clothing doesn't have pockets." (Real example btw)

This also allows us to explain oppression through the interaction of the classes of men and women. Misogyny is the way through which men (as a class) are privileged over women (as a class). Exorsexism is the way through which people who do not neatly fit into these constructed classes are forcibly pushed into them. Transphobia is the way in which dissonance between a person and their class is punished.

In one paragraph a dialectic analysis of sex based oppression does more to explain why its various forms exist then multisexism and the transunionists ever will. [As an aside, any toxic masculinity or other supposed harms men face from patriarchy according to MRAs is really just transphobia or, as we shall see, transmisogyny.]

Something ironic is that sexist men have an inherent understanding of this. I once saw an instagram reel wherein the joke "There's 76 genders? Wooohoooo, that means there's now 75 genders men are better than!" was made, showing a better understanding of the dynamics of misogyny (and transmisogyny for that matter) than I've ever seen from a transunionist even if the person in question though the framework was a good one.

We can also use this dialectic framework to analyze and justify why transmisogyny is a separate oppressive axis with distinct benefactor classes.

When we look at the transphobia nonbinary people and transmascs face, largely it is a matter of forcing the individual into one of the two classes: Men™ and Women™. This can be seen from the way TERFs will attempt to make transmascs detransition.

Another insight we can make is about the treatment of AFAB enbies vs AMAB enbies. Since Women™ are an oppressed class, the barrier to entry, so to speak, is lower. This can be seen from the way that Women™ are largely allowed under patriarchy to do things that Men™ do (even if they are seen as inherently inferior) but that Men™ are disbarred from doing things that Women™ do, to the point where if enough Men™ do it, it becomes a Male Thing ie. programming. Of course, that isn't to say that there aren't some misogynists who still thing women shouldn't wear pants, they are not a majority opinion. In fact, most feminist gains have been in expanding Woman™ roles rather than in deconstructing the class dynamic altogether. Something that can only be done by transfeminism since only it focuses on destroying both classes.

Bit of a detour, but the point I was making wrt AFAB enbies was that for a lot of people, it is easier to stomach a Woman™ that is gender non-conforming (in the right ways) than a Man™ who is gender non-conforming (in any way). The generalized form of this is that Women™ are allowed to participate in roles that are for Men™, but neither Men™ nor Women™ are allowed to reject the roles they are given. This can be applied to several other aspects such as why a lesbian rejecting attraction to men is seen as a more offensive statement than saying they are attracted to women. [Hint: its because attraction to women is a thing Men™ do so Women™ are allowed to do it more often they than they are allowed to deny their own role as a Woman™, which is to be attracted to men]

There's much more to be said on the topic, especially wrt how transmascs are treated as Women™ until they pass and can be treated as Men™, which honestly describes a good 90% of so called transmisandry. But! I want to talk about transmisogyny.

Julia Serano posited that there is in fact a third class in sex based oppression, that of the Transvestite™. One of the biggest indicators that this class exists is that trans women are considered neither Men™ nor Women™ once they have transitioned, or even once they have articulated that they are women. This is something that other trans people do not experience. Examples for which can be seen in the oft-debated femboy, and the treatment of AFAB trans people.

Another big indicator can be found in some of the posts by transunionists arguing that transmisogyny can be experiences by anyone. Why is it there there are dozens of posts about non-trans women getting mistaken for trans women and facing violence, but none about non-trans men getting mistaken for trans men and facing violence? It is a strong argument for the existence of the Transvestite™ class.

Serano, has said for more than I could fit here so I will leave it at that and refer you to literally any literature on transfeminism.

Anyways, I think that is more than enough to prove that a dialectical feminism is far more useful for analysis than multisexism. Why then, do transunionists use it? Because it removes accountability for men.

If there is no benefactor class, then there is no real reason to analyze of deconstruct behaviors that benefit them. Thus the only reason transunity exists as an ideology is to disenfranchise trans women. There is no other way to explain their ideological foundations.

#transmisogyny #super long post #@marxists please dont grill me on getting dialectic wrong 😭😭😭#I'm trying my best here #I was just super mad at transunionists and wanted to write out my thoughts

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urbandilemmathoughts · 3 years ago

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Blog #1 Revised

The article Settler Colonialism as a Structure by Evelyn Nakano Glenn highlights the argument that settler projects worked in parallel to the societal structuring of race, gender, and sexual relations. The key term here is settler colonialism, which aims to eliminate and alienate Indigenous peoples. This term is critical for applying the settler colonialism framework, as the differences from classical colonialism have very different implications for race formation. Two key differences include the intention to stay permanently and confrontations with Indigenous peoples. This framework serves as a theoretical foundation for race and race formation, CRT, type of violence(Direct, structural or cultural violence. This means that race, gender, and sexual relations were directly, whether unintentional or not, founded and shaped by the specific goals and how they were obtained from colonization. The reason Glenn categorizes settler colonialism as an ongoing structure is because of the continued effect it has had on relationships between races. While it may have been an event in time, its effects have never gone away or stagnated, only evolved. One of the main characteristics of settler colonialism is its deviation of aim from classic colonialism. The latter aims to acquire resources to support the “metropole,” i.e., the parent state, whereas the former’s goal is to acquire land with the intention to settle permanently. Thus, the treatment of ingenious looks a bit different. Unlike classic colonialism, settler colonialism aims to eliminate Indigenous peoples, which aims to use them as human resources. Given this, racism and oppression will not look the same across the board, much less across races, and the author attests that racism is not comparable through analogies or specific events. The effect of the slave trade is much different from the erasure of Native Americans, yet both are cases of political and economic exploitation.

The second piece of media assigned was Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. Critical race theory was created as a tool to allow us to understand oppression and enslavement and, in turn, criticize it. It is described as a movement in which scholars and activists alike aim to “study and transform the relationship among race, racism, and power.” It does so by questioning the foundational ideas of liberalization and analyzing the social, economic, and legal structure. The idea that it is not the structures that create racism but the inverse, our institutions are instead built up around racism and white superiority, is a principal foundation of this theory. Racism is considered the norm; it is the way it is apparent in every fiber of society and accepted, even if the intention is not rooted in racist ideology. More to the point, it supports the second tenet of CRT, named material determinism, which I find to be one of the most important. It holds that racism serves to benefit the white elite and the white working-class. The incentive to change is absent, on both a political and cultural level, since the interests of white people are met through racism.

When posed with the question, “if racism was cured, would life very much improve for people of color?” Critical race theory thinkers divide up into three categories. I also find these to be important key terms for different trains of thought in reference to this framework. First are the idealists who believe that racism and discrimination are immaterial matters - they stem from thinking, mental categorization, attitude, and discourse. The meaning and symbols of race relations can be shifted and changed through thinking and attitude.

In contrast to the realists, they hold a much more material point of view regarding racism; it is not only thinking/attitudes but how society hierarchically allocates privilege and status. Lastly, we have materialists who require us to look at specific conditions throughout history, such as the rationalization of treatment and exploitation of one group over the other. All these differing analysis camps aid us in effectively using CRT to understand and criticize racism, and more specifically, what each one emphasizes in answering that initial question. It is best to blend the material and cultural forces behind the formation and continued oppression for a more holistic understanding of race as a structure when tackling race reform.

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solacekames · 7 years ago

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Insurgent Supremacists – a new book about the U.S. far right By Matthew N Lyons | Sunday, April 01, 2018

My book Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire is due out this May and is being published jointly by Kersplebedeb Publishing and PM Press. It draws on work that I’ve been doing over the past 10-15 years but also includes a lot of new material. In this post I want to highlight some of what’s distinctive about this book and how it relates to the three way fight approach to radical antifascism. I’ll focus here on three themes that run throughout the book: 1. Disloyalty to the state is a key dividing line within the U.S. right. For purposes of this book, I define the U.S. far right not in terms of a specific ideology, but rather as those political forces that (a) regard human inequality as natural, inevitable, or desirable and (b) reject the legitimacy of the established political system. That includes white nationalists who advocate replacing the United States with one or more racially defined “ethno-states.” But it also includes the hardline wing of the Christian right, which wants to replace secular forms of government with a full-blown theocracy; Patriot movement activists who reject the federal government’s legitimacy based on conspiracy theories and a kind of militant libertarianism; and some smaller ideological currents. Insurgent Supremacists argues that the modern far right defined in these terms has only emerged in the United States over the past half century, as a result of social and political upheavals associated with the 1960s, and that it represents a shift away from the right’s traditional role as defenders of the established order. The book explores how the various far right currents have developed and how they have interacted with each other and with the larger political landscape. I chose to frame the book in terms of “far right” rather than “fascism” for a couple of reasons. Discussions of fascism tend to get bogged down in definitional debates, because people have very strong—and very divided—opinions about what fascism means and what it includes. Insurgent Supremacists includes in-depth discussions of fascism as a theoretical and historical concept, but that’s not the book’s focus or overall framework. As a related point, most discussions of fascism focus on white nationalist forces and tend to exclude or ignore other right-wing currents such as Christian rightist forces, and I think it’s important to look at these different forces in relation to each other. For example, critics of the Patriot/militia movement often argue that its hostility to the federal government was derived from Posse Comitatus, a white supremacist and antisemitic organization that played a big role in the U.S. far right in the 1980s. That’s an important part of the story, but Patriot groups were also deeply influenced by hardline Christian rightists, who (quite independently from white nationalists) had for years been urging people to arm themselves and form militias to resist federal tyranny. We rarely hear about that. 2. The far right is ideologically complex and dynamic and belies common stereotypes. Many critics of the far right tend to assume that its ideology doesn’t amount to much more than crude bigotry, and if we identify a group as “Nazi” or as white supremacist, male supremacist, etc., that’s pretty much all we need to know. This is a dangerous assumption that doesn’t explain why far right groups are periodically able to mobilize significant support and wield influence far beyond their numbers. Yes, the far right has its share of stupid bigots, but unfortunately it also has its share of smart, creative people. We need to take far rightists’ beliefs and strategies seriously, study their internal debates, and look at how they’ve learned from past mistakes. Otherwise we’ll be fighting 21st-century battles with 1930s weapons. For example: because of the history of fascism in the 1930s and 40s, we tend to identify far right politics with glorification of the strong state and highly centralized political organizations. Some far rightists, such as the Lyndon LaRouche network, still hold to that approach, but most of them have actually abandoned it in favor of various kinds of political decentralism, from neonazis who call for “leaderless resistance” and want to carve regional white homelands out of the United States to “sovereign citizens” and county supremacists, from self-described National-Anarchists to Christian Reconstructionists who advocate a theocracy based on small-scale institutions such as local government, churches, and individual families. One of the lessons here is that opposing centralized authority isn’t necessarily liberatory at all, because repression and oppression can operate on a small scale just as well as on a large scale. This shift to political decentralism isn’t just empty rhetoric; it’s a genuine transformation of far right politics. I think it should be examined in relation to larger cultural, political, and economic developments, such as the global restructuring of industrial production and the wholesale privatization of governmental functions in the U.S. and elsewhere. We need to take far rightists’ beliefs and strategies seriously, study their internal debates, and look at how they’ve learned from past mistakes. Otherwise we’ll be fighting 21st-century battles with 1930s weapons. As another example of oversimplifying far right politics, it’s standard to describe far rightists as promoting heterosexual male dominance. While that’s certainly true in broad terms, it doesn’t really tell us very much. Insurgent Supremacists maps out several distinct forms of far right politics regarding gender and sexual identity and looks at how those have played out over time within the far right’s various branches. Most far rightists vilify homosexuality, but sections of the alt-right have advocated some degree of respect for male homosexuality, based on a kind of idealized male bonding among warriors, an approach that actually has deep roots in fascist political culture. In recent years the alt-right has promoted some of the most vicious misogyny and declared that women have no legitimate political role. But when the alt-right got started around 2010, it included men who argued that sexism and sexual harassment of women were weakening the movement by alienating half of its potential support base. This view echoed the quasi-feminist positions that several neonazi groups had been taking since the 1980s, such as the idea that Jews promoted women’s oppression as part of their effort to divide and subjugate the Aryan race. This may sound bizarre, but it’s a prime example of the far right’s capacity time and again to appropriate elements of leftist politics and harness them to its own supremacist agenda. 3. Fighting the far right and working to overthrow established systems of power are distinct but interconnected struggles. A third core element that sets Insurgent Supremacists apart is three way fight politics: the idea that the existing socio-economic-political order and the far right represent different kinds of threats—interconnected but distinct—and that the left needs to combat both of them. This challenges the assumption, recurrent among many leftists, that the far right is either unimportant or a ruling-class tool, and that it basically just wants to impose a more extreme version of the status quo. But three way fight politics also challenges the common liberal view that in the face of a rising far right threat we need to “defend democracy” and subordinate systemic change to a broad-based antifascism. Among other huge problems with this approach, if leftists throw our support behind the existing order we play directly into the hands of the far right, because we allow them to present themselves as the only real oppositional force, the only ones committed to real change. Insurgent Supremacists applies three way fight analysis in various ways. There’s a chapter on misuses of the charge of fascism since the 1930s, which looks at how some leftists and liberals have misapplied the fascist label either to authoritarian conservatism (such as McCarthyism or the George W. Bush administration) or to the existing political system as a whole. There’s a chapter about the far right’s relationship with Donald Trump—both his presidential campaign and his administration—which explores the complex and shifting interactions between rightist currents that want to overthrow or secede from the United States and rightist currents that don’t. During the campaign, most alt-rightists enthusiastically supported Trump not only for his attacks on immigrants and Muslims but also because he made establishment conservatives look like fools. But since the inauguration they’ve been deeply alienated by many of his policies, which largely follow a conservative script. Three way fight analysis also informs the book’s discussion of federal security forces’ changing relationships with right-wing vigilantes and paramilitary groups. These relations have run the gamut from active support for right-wing violence (most notoriously in Greensboro in 1979, when white supremacists gunned down communist anti-Klan protesters) to active suppression (as in 1984-88, when the FBI and other agencies arrested or shot members of half a dozen underground groups). This complex history belies arguments that we should look to the federal government to protect us against the far right, as well as simplistic claims that “the cops and the Klan go hand in hand.” Forces of the state may choose to co-opt right-wing paramilitaries or crack down on them, depending on the particular circumstances and what seems most useful to help them maintain social control. Insurgent Supremacists isn’t intended to be a comprehensive study of the U.S. far right. Rather, it’s an attempt to offer some fresh ideas about what these dangerous forces stand for, where they come from, and what roles they play in the larger political arena. Not just to help us understand them, but so we can fight them more effectively.

#far right #antifascism #definitely going to buy this book #insurgent supremacists #antifa #alt right

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thesouthernpsychologist · 4 years ago

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Part II: Disability Right Movement

Role of Psychology

Crethar and Ratts (2008) define social justice as a multidimensional methodology in which mental health providers attempt to concurrently encourage personal growth and the mutually decent through speak to obstacles correlated to both individual and distributive justice. The counselor or psychologist empowers the client or group to stand up for their beliefs in a healthy manner. Crethar and Ratts (2008) suggest that when they entrust their client, they base the empower around four principles: equity, access, participation, and harmony. Equity is the appropriate dissemination of resources. The Key is the everyone has access to these resources. Participation is that everyone is part of the decision-making process. Lastly, harmony is the best possible outcome for the community.

Kinderman (2013) states that psychologists should speak out against social injustices. Psychologists study human behavior, which makes them a great way to speak out for the injustices in the world. Social change primarily comes from groups and leaders (Louis, Mavor, La Macchia, & Amiot, 2014). Leadership is in a position of power to change injustice in a group quickly; however, some are unwilling to step up and be the voice for change. For the psychologist, social change could go against their code of ethics. Lack of leadership would pose a dilemma for the psychologist to choose between belief or principle of ethics. Kinderman (2013) suggest that psychologist should help other understand human behavior to shape social change.

Ethnic Inequalities on the Psychological Well-Being

People with disabilities are more likely to have lower education, low socioeconomic status, and be unemployed. Psychological well-being is already common in most cases when someone has a disability. According to Chang et al. (2014), disability was one of two factors responsible for depression rates. A person with either suffers from a mental or physical disability is at a higher risk for depression. A disabled person could be discriminated against because of limited resources. Resources may be diverted away from a person with a disability because they are considered to have a reduced quality of life and toward a person with a so-called better chance of having a good quality of life.

Analysis of any Concerns Regarding Ethnic Inequality

Disability can also affect a person’s relationships. According to Wasserman (2016), people that are married are generally happier than unmarried people. Disability can make it difficult for a person to find friendship or love. The disability is seen as creating an awkward degree of inequality and difference. Wasserman (2016) suggests that non-disabled people could think a relationship with a disabled person might be unfulfilling. Relationships are complicated for most people without disabilities. Relationships are viewed as more complex with people with disabilities because of society’s view on people with disabilities. Relationships are only one aspect of inequality that people with a disability experience. They also experience inequality in education, health care, and employment. People with disabilities understand their limitations and will not apply for the job they cannot perform. Some non-disabled people will judge a person by their disability instead of focusing on their qualifications. Society needs to focus on the person in front of us instead of the disability. Lastly, we can recognize a person’s limitations but understand they are far more capable than their disability.

Analysis of the Role of Psychology

Social psychology is a way to tie the individual to social change; however, social psychology is usually based on how individuals view others. Psychology has not had much influence on social change. Historical sociologists have been the first for social change. According to De la Sablonnière (2017), over 70 years ago, social change came up in psychological literature; however, only a few psychologists have to take on social change. Intersectionality is obtaining arise in consideration in psychology. The theory or framework comes from the work of Black feminist scholar-activists and its emphasis on interlocking systems of oppression and the necessity to effort regarding structural-level alterations to stimulate social justice and impartiality (Rosenthal, 2016). Modern curiosity in intersectionality in psychology gives a chance to lure mental health providers’ devotion to structural-level problems and make public integrity and fairness more crucial in psychology (Rosenthal, 2016). Psychologists have learned many subjects of social justice such as prejudice, discrimination, conformity, and numerous subfields around these matters in psychology. The American Psychological Association (2017) code of ethics needs psychologists to uphold all society’s rights, regardless of the stage of life, sex, gender identity, race, background, national origin, belief, sexual orientation, disability, language, or financial status. The code pushes psychologists to become mindful of these features and circumvent bias and unwarranted practices. Hays et al. (2010) suggest that group work is a way to assist in empowering clients at an individual and systemic level. Hays et al. (2010) believe in increasing attention to social justice problems using education, training, supervision, practice, and research. Promoting change within a group could help shed light on the oppression or discrimination of people with disabilities. Psychology could empower people to stand up for equal rights to promote positive change.

An explanation of the relevance of this topic to the field of psychology and the role and responsibilities of psychology concerning the issue

Individuals with a disability have experienced some shame in the world. Non-disabled people are unsure of how to handle a person’s physical or mental impairment. Psychology explore the data about physical or psychological impairment and way to treat the impairment. The field of psychology’s responsibilities should be to support and discover where the hitches are and try to shed light on the issue with the group, legislature, and community to increase the quality of life for those with disabilities.

The American Psychological Association (2013) defines clinical psychology as “a clinical discipline that involves the provision of diagnostic, assessment, treatment plan, treatment, prevention, and consultative services to patients of the emergency room, inpatient units, and clinics of hospitals.” The American Psychological Association (2013) says Clinical psychology combines “science, theory, and practice to understand, forecast and alleviate maladjustment, disabilities, and discomfort as well as to promote human adaptation, adjustment, and personal development.” Psychology concentrates on the intellectual, emotional, biological, psychological, social, and behavioral characteristics of a human role in diverse societies and at all socioeconomic levels.

Publishing Site and Reasoning

For this blog, I am choosing to launch it on the blog site Tumblr. Tumblr is a place where people of different backgrounds and points of view can express themselves, discover themselves, and find new perspectives. It is where your interests connect you with your people. This platform is very user-friendly and has been available since 2007. Using Tumblr, I can reach academics that are casually looking for more psychology-related content and a younger audience that may find comfort in reading information on disabilities and ways social change can be implemented for this social problem. Tumblr is an excellent platform to help facilitate an academic conversation because Tumblr is easily accessible and can be seen from any smart device.

References

American Psychological Association. (2017). Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct. Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/ethics/code/

American Psychological Association. (2013). Guidelines for psychological practice in health care delivery systems. Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/deliverysystems.pdf

Chang, T. E., Weiss, A. P., Marques, L., Baer, L., Vogeli, C., Trinh, N. T., … Yeung, A. S. (2014). Race/Ethnicity and Other Social Determinants of Psychological Well-being and Functioning in Mental Health Clinics. Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, 25(3), 1418-1431. doi:10.1353/hpu.2014.0138

Crethar, H. C., & Ratts, M. J. (2008). Why social justice is a counseling concern. Counseling Today. Retrieved from https://www.txca.org/images/tca/Template/TXCSJ/Why_social_justice_is_a_counseling _concern.pdf

De la Sablonnière, R. (2017). Toward a Psychology of Social Change: A Typology of Social Change. Frontiers in Psychology, 8. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00397

Hays, D. G., Arredondo, P., Gladding, S. T., & Toporek, R. L. (2010). Integrating Social Justice in Group Work: The Next Decade. The Journal for Specialists in Group Work, 35(2), 177-206. doi:10.1080/01933921003706022

Kinderman, P. (2013). The role of the psychologist in social change. International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 60(4), 403-405. doi:10.1177/0020764013491741

Louis, W. R., Mavor, K. I., La Macchia, S. T., & Amiot, C. E. (2014). Social justice and psychology: What is, and what should be. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 34(1), 14-27. doi:10.1037/a0033033

Rosenthal, L. (2016). Incorporating intersectionality into psychology: An opportunity to promote social justice and equity. American Psychologist, 71(6), 474-485.

Wasserman, D. (2016). Disability: Health, Well-Being, and Personal Relationships (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/disability-health/

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lost-in-transition · 7 years ago

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regarding definitions of sex and gender

CW: Sexual assault, misgendering, TERF talking points, simplified interpretations of third gender/nonbinary/transmasculine individuals etc.

In response to claims of circularity and lack of clarity with regards to the definition of self-identified genders, I wanted to try to clear up definitions.

Let us first consider sex, and let us disregard fundamental fuzziness in defining any concept. For organisms that reproduce sexually in a binary form, there are subsets which all (mostly) can produce offspring with those of the opposite subset. This corresponds often to sex-determination genetic or environmental markers, and to specialized anatomy. Leaving aside all sorts of exceptions and corner cases, we can consider it in principle knowable for an individual human being whether or not they belong to a male mating type/reproductive sex, or a female mating type/reproductive sex. Leaving, again, exceptions aside. This specifically refers then to whether gametes from the one can work to fertilize gametes from the other in a spontaneous setting.

Under real-life circumstances animals cannot sequence each others' genomes very often. Assessing whether mating with another can produce offspring therefore becomes usually-efficient guesswork, helped by phenotypic properties - secondary sexual characteristics - which tend to associate with the primary sexual characteristics implementing the mating type. Historically, telling this apart, and various strategies expanding outwards around that, has been a big deal for survival, so all sorts of culture and behaviour and perception of meaning - some of which having neural underpinnings, making for a form of invisible secondary sexual characteristics - have evolved, genetically to some extent, but primarily memetically (and with more and more such encoding likely migrated from genome to memeplexes as cultural memetic carrying capacity expanded).

We can refer to gender as the social construct surrounding sex (with sex referring to many different forms of bimodally distributed biological properties in a species - chromosomal or reproductive anatomy or secondary sexual characteristic sex, but here left primarily referring to mating type). Humans tend to divide other humans based on which mating type they believe them to have, in their perceptions and representations of the world, in their language, in their organizing of social circles and group activities, and in how they come to feel about each other, and what associations they will place upon each other, and what they will expect from each other.

Essentially all of these divisions are describable as mental or social activities undertaken by humans; the division always has a divider executing it, sometimes consciously, usually unconsciously and by habit. This is what it means that the divisions themselves are social constructs. The divider is every human being all the time. The specifics of the division will differ between individuals, between cultures, and across history. The specifics of how it is done have been shown to differ some based on biological properties of the divider - specifically, the tendency of any one person to place themselves into the construct according to their mating type/reproductive sex or not (either not at all or as the other mating type/reproductive sex) is somewhat predictable based on features impacting neurology (genetics and hormonal exposure). This suggests that the social construct of gender is not merely something which was invented de novo, like the social constructs of money or flags of countries, but which has specialized neural underpinnings. Many human beings are primed to learn how to divide in this manner, and will experience some instincts towards doing so.

To then first address claims of circularity: gender as a social construct thus has a definition which ties into the somewhat less complex concept of reproductive sex. The process of dividing by gender is largely one of trying to infer reproductive sex (though it does not always have to be so, as stated below), and labels and associations of gender are mostly inherited from those of reproductive sex. However, reproductive sex is a state of anatomy, whereas gender is an ongoing set of actions and emotions and thoughts and perceptions - it is a social construct. The concern would be situations of "I identify as X. What is X? X is that which I identify as." But the social construct is not reducible to the category it results in, it rather consists of the process of establishing that category.

This process then draws on the external labels and properties of reproductive sex to inform the construction of gender, and does involve a division which mostly will place individuals having a certain reproductive sex into the gendered division group with the same label, where most other such individuals probably but not necessarily also will be found. However, if the process also considers other features, this result is not guaranteed, and this still poses no challenge for the consistent definition of the social construct of gender as a set of divisive processes building on top of and drawing labels from reproductive sex. Gendering is an activity, not in itself the same as its resulting category, nor is it the same as any statement about any property of that category. It is true then that we have a hard time writing a concise dictionary definition of gender without using qualifiers to link it to a time and a place and one or more sets of people. But the same essentially holds true for concepts like "religion" or "justice" or "nationalism" or "value", concepts which likewise play important roles in our lives sometimes because they remain despite our best efforts to the contrary. These things too we can only define through fairly complex schemes which sometimes may appear circular at first glance, whereas in fact they rather refer to sometimes large sets of historical and ongoing practices and exemplars. This is no argument against the validity or utility of gender as defined here.

(I do not think gender as a social construct will ever evolve so that it loses touch with reproductive sex entirely, on a statistical level. But if it did, yet still remained the anchoring point for the instincts and emotions which underlie conditions like gender dysphoria, and for oppressive practices like sexism, then nothing useful would have been lost, and we would still have available the necessary starting point to work to improve situations with regards to those conditions and practices. Were it not for the fact that it is reproduced regardless of our views on the matter, we ought to have discarded as useless long ago anything which essentially is a classifier for reproductive sex, so it does not matter if gender is made a less accurate such classifier.)

(There is one other nominal aspect here worth mentioning. I am saying here that gender is a particular process and activity of dividing humans, mostly drawing back onto reproductive sex, in how we think, feel, speak and act with regards to them. This the meaning of gender as a concept. One can also use the word to refer to the "gender of a person"; this would refer to the label resulting from that process, in the context of a particular person or collective carrying out the division, and a particular person being placed. As an example: If in the schoolyard, teacher A says to child B, "go play with the other girls over there!", pointing to C, D and E climbing rocks, then the gender of B (and C, D and E) in the framework of A at this point, is female. A is probably assuming, or at least considers the possibility salient, that B will produce human eggs some day, as well as most likely expecting a number of other ways in which B, C, D and E should have more in common with each other than with F, G and H playing over by the swings. So yes, we can also speak of the gender of a person in this regard, and it will refer to a particular label resulting from a particular gender construction process. Or if K says, "I am lesbian", she is referencing gender assignment such that any partner X of hers, will have to have been assigned a female label by her own process of constructing gender, as she herself has. Whether or not X must also have ovaries as an implication of this, or whether K herself must, will then depend on the specifics by which K divides humans into genders.)

Thus, gender can be the placement of an individual across divisions made on the basis of beliefs about mating type. However, despite the neural underpinnings, as a social construct, the framework of dividing by gender is malleable, which has also been shown experimentally. On one hand, we can unlink peripheral properties from gender by taking them out of the division. This is vast, ongoing work undertaken by feminists, including myself. We can and should prune down the divisive structure as far as we can, removing gendered stereotypes and unfair expectations. This is the most crucial political issue in the history of the world (to my mind, even more important than that of capitalism or racism, both of which also are more important).

However, beyond that unlinking of peripheral associations with gender, we do eventually come to points where further unlinking is difficult, may take much more time, or may require biological engineering in itself. Among others, beyond having a prepared learning capacity to divide into genders based on beliefs about mating type (and in this division process, be inclined to make use of information such as the statements of others as well as secondary sexual characteristics), most humans may have a prepared learning capacity to prefer and be motivated to act in line with placement of themselves along the side of a division, based on a feeling of positive-emotional sameness with those surrounding other humans placed on that side. While this is by no means anywhere near absolute or universal, it may mean a tendency to seek out same-gender (and thereby same mating type) interactions, as seen often in young children growing up. This would be expected as one mechanism by which gender role behaviour would be taught more easily, thus providing indirect genetic support for memetic inheritance.

That is, I postulate that to some extent, humans will divide (i.e. gender) each other, compare themselves with the resulting groups, and seek to place themselves with the one group rather than the other throughout the process of collective gender divisions. There is an instinct in most humans to polarize themselves in the context of gender divisions at all levels. It may not be strong and is by no way the main driver behind the construction of society, and may not be as visible in adulthood when many more social constructs have come online (though by then it may have deposited itself through gender roles). In most people it is rarely recognized. Most people further seek to polarize throughout gender divisions so that they group with those who have the same reproductive sex/mating type (they are cisgender). Likely some of this need-for-sameness underlies some of body dysphorias experienced by cis individuals when their body is atypical for their reproductive sex with regards to some secondary sexual characteristic; there may exist a drive towards being the same in these regards as the rest of one's side of the gender division, when compared to those on the other side.

In some people, well-documented throughout history and different cultures (constituting perhaps 0.5%-2% of the population?), and with a number of hormonal and neural correlates weakly predicting this state, suggesting complex sex-atypical differentiation, the instinct to polarize oneself in the context of gender divisions is not aligned with reproductive sex. When dividing in their mind and actions people into genders, based on beliefs about their reproductive sex (informed by the statements of others, and informed by secondary sexual characteristics), these individuals will create the same divisions, but will experience an instinct to polarize themselves not so that they group with others having the same reproductive sex, but with those having the opposite reproductive sex (they are binary transgender) or along a more complex pattern (they are nonbinary transgender). This is not the same as not caring about the divisions (that is, being agender). This is instinctually caring about the division, just as most cisgender individuals do, but having an instinct to polarize with a group that does not actually match one's reproductive sex (and as such, usually not one's genetics, anatomy, secondary sexual characteristics, history of being placed along gender divisions by others...). This caring about the outcome of the gender division process, in the sense of having an instinctual preference with regards to one's own polarization into gendered groups, is what we might mean by the term gender identity. Most probably have one. This is not the same as having any love for the process of gendering in itself, or wanting to preserve it. This is about caring about what its results are, when it in fact does occur.

Moreover, with this mismatch, in many transgender individuals it takes place persistently over time, with the instincts for polarizing large enough that the mismatch causes a strong and significant decrease in flourishing - gender dysphoria. This will manifest differently in different individuals, depending on their individual histories, environments, coping strategies, privileges and temperament. I believe most or all expressions of gender dysphoria can be traced to this one mechanism. For some, they will note their own bodies having one set of secondary sexual characteristics, which are the same as those of the sex/gender division group that they are disinclined to be grouped with, and different from those of the group they are inclined to be grouped with. This mismatch develops into body dysphoria, and the resulting emotions may drive development into depression, self-loathing, dissociation or any number of other issues.

Analogously, observing a separation in social roles, behaviours and expectations will remind of the underlying polarization with the wrong gender division group, similarly causing cascading effects. These downstream effects may be the visible phenotype, or they may be masked by coping strategies against the dysphoria, so that for some, it becomes apparent that something was wrong only by the effects with regards to happiness resulting from beginning to fix it. For some the impact of the mismatch between gender identity and assignment within gendered divisions becomes apparent early in life, whereas for some it does not. Many are sufficiently afflicted, whether directly or by cascading effects and resulting secondary mental health issues, as well as by sometimes resulting social misalignment, to commit suicide - rates are unknown but at least 40% of US transgender individuals have attempted suicide pre-transition.

We are able to treat this unhealth through a two-pronged approach. The underlying issue remains for as long as the individual experiences gender divisions (which, again, are ongoing - gender being the social construct around reproductive sex) place the individual in the group mismatched with what their instinctual (and thus existing implicitly as a descriptor of that instinct) gender identity requires. We know of no way to change that instinct. While it is true that the process of gender division here most relevant is that of the individual themselves (the dysphoria stems from you yourself understanding yourself as being polarized with the group opposite to the one your instinct points to), we also know of no way to make an individual stop performing gender divisions in how they understand and interact with the world. Even those politically strongly opposed to the concept (like myself!) find themselves falling into these patterns, likely precisely because they have neural underpinnings; while they are social constructs they are not taught to a blank slate.

Instead, to help transgender individuals flourish, if we want to do so, we need to combine individual processes of transitioning, with societal processes of modifying the criteria by which we perform gender division. These two efforts, by transgender people and by allies, respectively, synergize to reduce dysphoria at the root.

Returning again to sex, there are plenty of secondary sexual characteristics we can safely and efficiently modify medically, over time. Surgeries cannot quite switch reproductive sex, though it can move an individual from one reproductive sex to no longer being effectively of the same mating type. Social transitioning, aided by changes in secondary sexual characteristics from medical transitioning, changes the way an individual is perceived by others and by themselves, compounded by building new habits, and body changes in themselves likewise changes the self-perception of the individual. When what is there is different, what is seen correspondingly becomes different. This is the goal of transitioning, which the individual transgender person may undertake.

Is this somehow false, or a lie? After all, gender as a social construct is built around reproductive sex at its core. Is it then somehow a falsehood if a person with one reproductive sex is placed on the side of a gender division that is labelled after the other reproductive sex? Only if gender is expected to be a statement of facts about the material world. As I've outlined above, it is rather reproductive sex itself which is that fact. Gender, instead, is the set of activities by which we relate to such facts, and one way of such relating, which here allows to improve human flourishing, is to deny their propagation into downstream perception, emotion, thought and action. This is not a delusion. If we would want to fertilize an egg with another egg, we would not use intercourse, we would use laboratory equipment. Facts remain treated as such for purposes of applications where this affects efficacy of our strategies. But denying them a place in our social constructs is not dishonest.

But might it still cause problems? Less than feared. In the process of gendering, even if we seek to make divisions based on reproductive sex, that is not actually how in practice we make most such divisions. Observing a person with a certain set of secondary sexual characteristics, we are often likely to place them into the gender division group we associate with those secondary sexual characteristics, even if we know them to have a reproductive sex different from that which this gender division group is named after and originally evolved to correspond to. Even knowing this (as in, knowing that this person - who can be yourself, or another person - is transgender) we are still more likely to spontaneously place them into the gender division group corresponding to their gender identity. As such, altogether, a transgender person can change their social presentation, can change their body, and compound these changes by observing the recognition of those around them, and in so doing, come to change what group they place themselves in when they - involuntarily, like all of us - divide people into gender in their perception, emotion or action.

That is to say, they may gradually come to understand themselves as being placed in the gender which is aligned with their instincts, those within which their gender identity is the implication. This then reduces dysphoria, and improves chances of flourishing.

The second prong of our strategy is that of changing how gender is constructed. This is where allies, unknowing or knowing such, help. As stated above, the processes that construct gender by dividing humans in our thoughts, emotions and actions did evolve - likely - to identify reproductive sex. Knowing reproductive sex of someone certainly informs our gender construction process regarding them, and the groups we divide into are labelled a priori with the expectations of reproductive sex. But as stated previously, gender as a social construct need not stay just a predictor of reproductive sex, even if it evolved for this purpose. We cannot change everything about it, because it has neural underpinnings. But we do learn about gender from each other, and how we construct it evolves over time across societies. We use the views of others when we make our own divisions of people into categories (and this is why your perception of the gender of a transgender person matters to them, whether they want to or not - as pack animals we cannot help but listen to each other when relating to the world!).

This means that it is possible to formulate and propagate the idea that we should take a person's own stated gender identity into account when we perform gendering. That is, when we divide humanity into groups labelled after reproductive sexes, with respect to our thoughts, words, actions, emotions, we are able to assign weight to what we know of the self-identified genders of others. This is not cleanly a choice; when encountering a person with very clear secondary sexual characteristics, it may still be hard to feel that they are not the gender corresponding to the reproductive sex which we associate those characteristics with, we may still end up - involuntarily, as with all things here - them to the one or other gendered division group that their appearance reminds us of, even if we want to take into account their stated instinctual need to be polarized with the opposite group, their gender identity. This is why a two-pronged approach is needed, individual transitions are also needed. But even so, coming into the habit individually and as a society to treat self-identified gender as a prominent source of input for the processes inside us of constructing gender socially by dividing humans into groups with respect to how we think, feel, speak and act with regards to them, this will eventually make that input more and more salient for this process.

That is to say, by explicitly letting gender mean, primarily, self-assigned, self-identified gender, and propagating this meme, we change the collective social constructs of gender. This has no impact for the 99% of people who are cisgender (claims that it weakens certain feminist efforts are false), but for the 1% that are transgender, it synergizes with their own transitioning, reduces their dysphoria, and improves their chances of flourishing.

Transgender people are blessed by those cisgender allies who, for no gain of their own, are willing to participate in this social transformation by changing how we think, feel and speak. It takes a village to raise a child. Similarly, it takes a society to transition. Older societies like Native Americans and others did similar things (modifying the social construct of gender to allow reduction of dysphoria for their transgender individuals) in creating and recognizing third genders, and this is now how we do it. I honestly feel gratitude, ongoing such, is in order.

So, to stop and take stock. Where has this rant gone?

First, I have reanchored the concept of sex, which can mean different things. A transgender (and transsexual) man who is on HRT and has had a mastectomy, but still have ovaries and a uterus, he still has a female reproductive sex, which he would lose if he also had a hysterectomy. This would not gain him a male reproductive sex, even so. Neither procedure grants him male chromosomal sex. However, he is mostly anatomically male, he is hormonally and neurologically male. So depending on what sex we are referring to, he is either male, female or neither. His gender is male as that is where his own constructs place him, and it is where we place him also, he is socially a man, his gender marker is male, and we should treat him as a man in every regard except not solicit him for sperm donations or purchase of medications against erectile dysfunction. He is all these things even if he wears pink frilly dresses and works in childcare. This is how we should think and speak of him. Moreover, another man who loves only other cisgender men, he should in turn think of and speak of his sexuality not just as "gay", but as "gay, cis only", so as to help disentangle his gender preference from his anatomy/oirigin preference (both are valid, of course, but assuming the first implies the second runs counter to how I hope we will work with language!). We should do this because all of those things are aspects of how we construct gender socially, by dividing people in word, thought, action and emotion, and there we have a choice on whether to make those constructs such that he is recognized, and we ought to make this choice such, for him and for others like him. But yes, sex has (several) meanings that are not the same as gender, and that are neither social constructs nor malleable in the same sense. In some senses a transsexual changes sex, in some sense they cannot as yet do so.

Secondly then, this is also why we need to recognize gender as an even more relevant concept. Some have stated that sexism is understandable not as discrimination by gender, but as discrimination by sex; cis men assaulting and raping cis women choose them based on the material fact of their reproductive sex, not based on their gender identity. As I've outlined, gender identity is not the label others place on us, but the label we need placed on us in order to flourish, so that is beside the point. More relevant, in my above description, gender is the division of humans with regards to our actions, words, emotions and thoughts about them, into categories labelled as and anchored to reproductive sex, and driven and informed - among others - by observations and knowledge of reproductive sex. While it is possible that a hypothetical cis man rapist would shun transwoman victims even with identical anatomy, but would seek out transman or nonbinary AFAB victims, he is still under my definition constructing gender here, it is just that his process of doing so largely does not respect the gender identity or self-defined gender of any other person. That is to say, in this as well as in other cases of sexist oppression and unfairness, gender as I have defined it does describe and capture specifically those behaviours we seek to prevent and modify. Altering how gender is constructed - including by unlinking many stereotypes, expectations and power imbalanced practices - is how we would go about fighting these oppressions, and as feminists this is what we will do. While the challenge has been posed that gender, as opposed to reproductive sex, is somehow ill-defined through circularity, I have outlined above how this is not the case; by understanding it not as a standalone label but as the description of a process drawing, among other things, on reproductive sex, such circularity is not a concern for the clarity or validity of its definition.

Third, I have outlined my current beliefs on the cultural and biological basis of gender, especially insofar as thus gender identity arises implicitly (it may not be something one can look directly at and "feel") as a property of instincts human beings have on where to try to polarize themselves across gender divisions anywhere in life. I have argued here that it is a strong but mostly invisible instinct, which underlies several forms of potentially lethal and debilitating dysphoria in the small fraction of people who are either binary or nonbinary transgender. While manifestations can vary a lot between individuals, this is a severe and significant obstacle to the flourishing of such people. Moreover, it is not a choice, nor is it a political standpoint to somehow prefer the social construct of gender to remain in place. Rather, it is a need to use particular strategies for navigating gender when it does manifest whether we wish it to or not, and those strategies remain perfectly compatible with the víew and agenda of dismantling both many of the associations of gender, and the process of gender divisions as a whole. However, we must also accept that we did not evolve to be blank slates; only transhumanism could bring us there. We as we are will face and live within manifestations of the social construction of gender as a division of human beings with regards to how we feel, think, act and speak about them, for now and for the foreseeable future. We can and should work againt that in itself, perhaps, but we must also do what is needed to cope, and to let as many of us flourish as much as we can.

Fourth, I have outlined how I regard the effort to reduce the dysphoria of transgender individuals as a two-pronged effort. On one hand, there is the individual journey of transitioning - changing one's sex insofar as is needed and possible, for one who is transsexual, and working from one's own position to make one's gender such as to minimize dysphoria, minimize the mismatch between the groups one is placed in, and the groups one have an instinctual preference to be placed in. On the other, there is the society-wide effort to alter how gender is constructed, so as to recognize maximally self-identified stated gender (which is a proxy for gender identity which is an implication of the abovementioned instinct) as a feature informing the processes by which we do divide individuals into genders, on those occasions we nevertheless find ourselves doing it (and we probably do that all the time, because our brains work that way). This makes gender as a social construct less efficient as a neural net predictor of reproductive sex, but makes it more efficient at not preventing transgender individuals from flourishing. These two prongs come together in that what matters for dysphoria is whether or not the individual transgender person is able to find themselves placed in the gender division group their instincts point to (which need not have any bearing on detailed gender roles or stereotypes, which are anyway things we should unlink off of gender!). Whether or not they can will reflect both their individual transition journey and the surrounding societal recognition of their self-assigned gender as informing gender divisions, since all people use their perception of the views of other people to inform their own perceptions, no matter how independent they may believe themselves to be. Thus, successfully reducing dysphoria also builds crucially on top of the work of allies in changing the meaning of gender in public discourse and culture to mean self-identified gender more and more. We are deeply blessed to have you do this, and gratitude is, again, in order.

#gender sex language TERF social_constructs transgender transsexual definitions dysphoria

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comrade-meow · 4 years ago

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(Part 2 of 3)

Sadomasochism

“You’ve got other really fun things, like this idea of disempowerment. Here you’ve got the castration — sorry, I mean the beheading of Holofernes — and then on the right, you’ve got the same thing,” Sofia says, alluding to a pornographic image of two males engaging in a sex act as a woman ‘forces’ one of the men into what would be the submissive female role in heterosexual BDSM practices: bound, with a slave collar, being sexually abused. Sofia does not elaborate on why he believes these two images portray “the same thing”. Presumably he is attempting to establish a correlation between a man being violated as a woman and death; that the loss of the masculine role — castration — is metaphorically equivalent to being killed. Framed this way, the common euphemisms of transgender activism can possibly be traced back to BDSM practices and the narrative that has been constructed around fetishes.

For instance, so-called dead naming (referring to a trans-identified person by their birth name) could also be considered as a reference to ego death, or the complete loss of subjective self-identity. This framework could assist in explaining why it is that trans activists insist that words are literal violence, where the act of naming men as men, for example, deconstructs their illusory, projected self. In turn, it is possible that linguistic ‘transphobia’ can elicit a similar thrill as the sort induced by being humiliated, even when the humiliation is not a taunt, but the truth. In this sense, the public is unwittingly being duped into participating in BDSM, either as the dominant — those who criticize gender ideology — or submissive — trans activists themselves. Crucially, material reality, especially women’s reality, is being used as the vehicle for this rouse. When one considers that BDSM practices involved in forced feminization revolve around humiliation as a key point of arousal, this also could implicate an element of sexual pleasure involved for some in being considered to be subjugated or oppressed — that the male claim to a female identity is, in itself, a fetishization of women’s systemic subordination.

vimeo

The Eroticization of Castration

“Here we’ve got the very traditional sissy porn Lolita dress that my friend Torrey Peters lent me… who wrote an amazing book called The Masker which I recommend for everyone on this chat.”

A brief explanation of Torrey Peters and why this matters: Torrey Peters, a trans-identified male, is a published American author who has found a market for books of written pornography with loosely developed plots. The Masker follows participants in a masking convention, where men don silicone body suits and face masks in order to resemble women and subsequently engage in sexual activity with each other. Peters’ portrays this fetish lifestyle as a pathway towards a decision to permanently alter one’s body through breast implants and hormones. In March 2021, Peters was long-listed for the UK Women’s Prize in fiction for his recent publication, Destransition, Baby, which I have written about here. Peters is increasingly being promoted by US media, and his ex, Harron Walker, also a trans-identified male, is employed by the women’s magazine W and has written for ‘feminist’ outlet Jezebel, having formerly written for the notoriously misogynist platform Vice, as well as Out magazine.

Sofia is also clearly a great admirer of American academic Andrea Long Chu, who has been published in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy (2018) and Differences, a Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (2019). Chu, a trans-identified male, wrote Females: A Concern, which was published in 2019 by Verso Press, and contains remarkable statements of misogyny as though they were undisputed facts.

Here Sofia quotes an essay, Did Sissy Porn Make Me Trans, wherein Chu argues that womanhood can be defined as a state of powerlessness. Chu presented this essay as a speech at a number of reputable universities in the US, including Columbia University, Vassar College, UCLA, and UC Berkeley.

“Castration anxiety is easily mistaken for the fear that one will be castrated. In fact, it is the fear that one, being castrated, will like it. The threat, in other words, is not that you will lose power (this is basically inevitable, and not much worth worrying about), but that you won’t actually want power, after all. Too often, we imagine powerlessness as the suppression of desire by some external force (maybe someone else’s desire), and we forget that desire, in itself, is often, if not always, an experience of powerlessness. Most desire is nonconsensual, most desires aren’t desired.” — Andrea Long Chu, Did Sissy Porn Make Me Trans?

The idea that women are castrated males is not new, nor is it particularly insightful in regards to the reality of women’s lives. Much has been said and written about this in psychoanalysis and in feminist texts. It should be concerning to anyone, men as well as women, that this idea is resurfacing in gender ideology — especially when we consider that children are quite literally being castrated in the service of this belief, both by means of powerful drugs euphemistically referred to as “puberty blockers,” as well as genital mutilation surgeries. The story of David Reimer is a tragic example of this. In 1966, Reimer, whose circumcision was botched as an infant, was experimented on by psychologist John Money, who decided it would be better to raise Reimer as a girl. Money believed that sex was socially constructed, a belief also promoted by current trans activists. Reimer’s case represents one of the earliest modern examples of what is called ‘sex reassignment surgery’, and John Money forced David to imitate sex acts with his brother Brian, instructing David to play the submissive, or ‘female’ role. Money justified these criminal acts by claiming that “childhood ‘sexual rehearsal play’” was important for a “healthy adult gender identity” (As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl, John Colapinto). The sexual abuses inflicted on the twins by Money caused them such severe distress that both Brian and David committed suicide.

vimeo

“There’s something that Andrea Long Chu writes a lot about… how we don’t get to choose what we desire, so there can be so much discomfort in engaging with things that we desire, whether that be in porn or otherwise. What you desire is what you are.” This is a pseudo-intellectual expression of the sentiment that “boys will be boys,” or that men are not accountable for their desires or actions. It’s a sentiment often used to rationalize predatory sexual behavior, one that gets trotted out to blame women who survive sexual abuse, and used in courts of law to avoid punishing men for sexual violence.

vimeo

“I think a lot about coercion. If you look at a lot of sissy porn, a lot of it focuses around worshipping of the cock… it’s seen as the ultimate form of power. How the humiliation works is in talking about the size of a person’s cock, how small it is. The fantasy is about cis women getting to expose and subject men to the trappings of femininity as a form of punishment, humiliation, and dehumanization. I think talking about this within the world of feminism… is really exciting to think about.” The fantasy is about men being dehumanized through femininity. This explicitly demonstrates that femininity — as in, the socially constructed sex stereotypes imposed on women by force, by men — are designed to dehumanize women and girls. This is worth bearing in mind in any discussion of gender identity ideology. Harmful beauty products, purchased in the form of plastic surgery, breast implants, high heels, and excessive makeup are frequently purported to be expressions of selfhood. Additionally, Sofia mentions the humiliation of discussing relative size of a man’s genitalia. This is a recurring theme in forced feminization pornography. Statements are made in favor of ‘forcibly’ transitioning a man into a ‘woman’ due to the assumed inadequacy of his manhood. This can easily be juxtaposed with the previously stated idea that women are merely castrated, or failed, men. It is frightening how a lack of consent is doted upon as an intellectual exercise by all parties involved in the presentation, and by academics who share this view within queer theory, including the aforementioned Andrea Long Chu. The expressed desire for a lack of “agentiality”, a lack of consent, eroticizes aspects of sexual abuse and rape.

vimeo

“In Andrea Long Chu’s essay, she’s saying that sissy porn can’t be queer because it’s about the heterosexual dynamic. My argument is that I don’t think she’s looking at forced womanhood and is looking at other ways that forced feminization is being depicted that don’t revolve around the cis cock being the infallible phallus, the unquestionable source of power.” Forced feminization pornography often eroticizes impotence through the use of contraptions called “chastity cages,” intended to prevent erections. Hormones are another avenue for inducing impotence; the consumption of estrogen by males can cause erectile dysfunction. However, it often still revolves around male genitalia, including the prostate orgasm. Notice that Sofia uses a qualifier when he says, “the cis cock”. Make no mistake, forced feminization pornography is just another iteration of the eroticization of male power in that it centers the male ego and desires, while reinforcing the reductive male projection of women as sex objects.

vimeo

RL: “In her [Andrea Long Chu’s] essay on sissy porn — beyond the heterosexual framing — the way she puts it is to be trans is to be fucked, and to be fucked is not good in her scheme. I don’t see that as quite the same narrative in your work, but humiliation and punishment seem to be operating certainly in some way in both texts.” Sofia becomes frustrated, tosses aside the pornography magazine he had been admiringly referencing throughout, and shifts the focus away from critiques of societal themes by making himself the subject. RS: “[By] transitioning, I knew I was entering a more marginalized, more disempowered role in the world. There is also a desire inherent to that.” Sofia was given a platform by one of the most prestigious universities in the world to show pornography of himself and to espouse ideas that mock half the population — women — by associating women’s existence with acts of degradation and dehumanization for his own sexual arousal. RS: “Gender is coercive… but there is a lot of control that I’m exercising.” RL: “I do love in the structures of these photos how much it is about control, especially… the ones with genital torture.”

RS: “This is when I was getting more into the castration stuff, the desire around disempowerment… I’m thinking about divine ecstasy, the ecstasy that one can experience while in a lot of pain.” Sofia plays a video of himself taking on two roles (which he compares to a painting by Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas, which depicts her agony following her divorce, in a stunning example of appropriation of female suffering), wherein he is being sexually tormented by his ‘other’ female-coded self. He is naked and bound, with a rope around his genitals, in a chair which has had its legs sawed down, forcing him to hold himself up on his toes to avoid castration. He presented this scene publicly, thereby being allowed to display sexual exhibitionism, which is a crime, and to be applauded for doing so. Once again, RL Goldberg returns to the topic of religion. This subject is used as a crutch throughout the presentation to lend validity and authority to what is explicitly the promotion of a BDSM lifestyle as a form of ‘gender identity’, but also speaks to the religious nature of gender ideology. Being unable to rely on science — indeed, being actively hostile towards science — gender ideology relies on the idea of a gendered soul, an innate identity, and reifies the power dynamics deliberately constructed within sex role stereotypes to dehumanize women.

(Continued in Part 3)

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citizentruth-blog · 7 years ago

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The Pseudo-Scientific (and Dangerous) World of Jordan Peterson - PEER NEWS

New Post has been published on https://citizentruth.org/the-pseudo-scientific-and-dangerous-world-of-jordan-peterson/

The Pseudo-Scientific (and Dangerous) World of Jordan Peterson

By all accounts, Jordan Peterson is brilliant and a gifted orator and his self-help guidelines may positively impact people’s lives. On the other hand, the man is arrogant, combative, and his rhetoric about “the left” may be patently dangerous. (Photo Credit: Adam Jacobs/Flickr/Creative Commons)

Without having seen one of his YouTube videos or hearing him speak, I have to rely on second-hand accounts about intellectual and psychologist Jordan Peterson and his ideologies. From what I have read and witnessed about him, Peterson is a charismatic orator, a gifted debater, and intellectually brilliant. He’s also apparently arrogant, confrontational, and dismissive of opinions that are not his own. To even acknowledge his burgeoning popularity is to give credence to his platform and potentially invite a backlash from his adoring followers (though, given my limited readership, this probably all but negates the risk).

So, what is the appeal of writing a blog entry about Jordan Peterson, other than that I needed someone or something about which to write and I didn’t feel like writing about the Trump administration for the umpteenth time?

I suppose my interest was piqued in Peterson only in the last few weeks or so when I began to encounter an onslaught of negative press about the man, his latest book, 12 Rules for Life, and his musings about “enforced monogamy,” the latter of which supposedly is a not a dystopian, government-controlled “insistence” on the virtues of monogamy, but rather a socially and culturally promoted set of ideals which likewise supposedly is reflected in anthropological, biological, and psychological research and theory.

“Enforced monogamy” also informs Peterson’s belief as to a solution to the likes of the attack allegedly perpetrated by Alek Minassian in Toronto last month, evidently a participant in so-called “incel” culture comprised of “involuntary celibate” men who show resentment toward a society that denies them the ability to have sex, actively or otherwise. As Peterson sees it, enforced monogamy is the cure for that anger, and specifically, in Minassian’s case, he was angry at God. This despite any stated political or religious affiliations as indicated by authorities at the place and time of the incident. But, hey—maybe this is just another indication of Peterson’s brilliance that he was able to divine this information!

Some of you may read these musings of Jordan Peterson’s on monogamy and the Toronto van attack and think, “Well, this guy is full of shit—I’ve heard all that I need to hear.” Such is well within your right to believe. You may commence with skimming this article and head toward the conclusion. Still, for those of you like me who choose to dig deeper, beyond the headlines that may exist if only to bait you into clicking and to engender outrage (or are just plain masochistic), it’s worth it to study Peterson’s worldview with the help of those who have reviewed his public statements at length or those who know him personally.

One such reviewer is known by the nom de tweet Natalie Wynn, a transgender ex-academic with a background in philosophy who comments on the cultural and philosophical issues of the day from her YouTube channel ContraPoints. In her latest video, Wynn, while jokingly alluding to Peterson’s past invocations of hierarchies in lobsters in talking about human societal order and putting Peterson’s face on a dummy’s body and soaking with it in a bathtub—this is part of her offbeat charm—acknowledges that after listening to his podcasts, reading his books, and watching his videos on YouTube, she gets why people like him.

For Natalie, Peterson has real talent as a public speaker and life coach, with his major distinguishing quality being that Peterson infuses traditional self-help verbiage with biblical insights, Jungian psychoanalysis, philosophy, and psychology. In this respect, nothing that he presents is really new—especially if you’re familiar with the trappings of AA, Ms. Wynn quips—but as far as she is concerned, from a self-improvement standpoint, more power to the Canadian psychology professor.

The issue with Peterson’s life coaching, however, as Wynn views it, is that it is a “Trojan horse for a reactionary political agenda,” one that opposes progressive politics as something “totalitarian and evil.” Peterson refers to progressive politics by the term postmodern neo-Marxism, and Wynn, using her educational background, painstakingly dissects this use of the terminology. Going through a cursory-yet-lengthy history of modernism, she eventually gets to the point that Marxism is a fundamentally modernist worldview that theorizes the human condition in economic terms, while postmodernism is a kind of skepticism that denies humans’ capacity for knowing universal truths about the world around them.

Accordingly, these concepts would seem to be at odds, and Peterson’s use of the term would only seem to enhance the confusion. As Natalie Wynn outlines, Jordan Peterson’s animus is levied upon a rather nebulous group that includes administrators at colleges and universities, civil rights activists, corporate human resources departments, feminists, liberal politicians, Marxists, postmodernists, and so-called “social justice warriors (SJWs).” It’s a problematically loose association of leftists which ignores the tensions that tend to exist between so many of the subgroups under this umbrella and on which Peterson tries to pin the downfall of Western civilization amid his fearmongering.

Likewise problematic is Peterson’s concept of “the West.” As Wynn breaks it down, Peterson’s “West” is emblematic of concepts like capitalism, individualism, and “Judeo-Christian values,” while “postmodern neo-Marxism” is aligned with anti-Western sentiment, collectivism, relativism, and totalitarianism. Marxism and postmodernism, as Wynn elucidates, are Western philosophies, so this immediately calls Peterson’s framework into question, as does his insistence on SJW ideology as a non-Western function.

Moreover, Wynn argues, if Peterson was really concerned about celebrating individuality, he would be more open to, for instance, the use of gender-neutral pronouns to suit the needs of individual students (Peterson made headlines when he vowed he would refuse to comply with any provincial laws on the use of “alternative” pronouns). In addition, if he were more insistent on preserving “the West” as a geographical and philosophical construct, he would, you know, rail against Buddhism, or own that the Marquis de Sade, for one, was into some stuff that doesn’t really fit with “Judeo-Christian values,” and he was from the West. By these standards, Peterson’s categories seem woefully arbitrary and haphazard.

Thus, despite her mild admiration for Peterson’s attention to the tendency of some people on the left to shout down even slightly different opinions, as well as an appreciation for the need to provide folks with a positive, proactive ideology rather than a liberal focus on everything one shouldn’t be doing and a preoccupation with how society oppresses people without a path to corrective action, Natalie Wynn sees a real danger in Jordan Peterson’s anti-leftist rhetoric.

She’s not alone, either. Bernard Schiff, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Toronto and someone who knows Peterson well as one of his historically staunchest defenders against other faculty at the university, recently penned a special opinion piece for the Toronto Star regarding his change of heart, so to speak, on Peterson and his methods. In Schiff’s opening to his expansive essay, he sets the tone for the piece by explaining what he admires about his colleague, and why he has more recently pivoted on someone he has considered a friend:

I thought long and hard before writing about Jordan, and I do not do this lightly. He has one of the most agile and creative minds I’ve ever known. He is a powerful orator. He is smart, passionate, engaging and compelling and can be thoughtful and kind.

I was once his strongest supporter.

That all changed with his rise to celebrity. I am alarmed by his now-questionable relationship to truth, intellectual integrity and common decency, which I had not seen before. His output is voluminous and filled with oversimplifications which obscure or misrepresent complex matters in the service of a message which is difficult to pin down. He can be very persuasive, and toys with facts and with people’s emotions. I believe he is a man with a mission. It is less clear what that mission is.

So, why did Schiff have to defend Peterson as a fellow professor among the faculty at the University of Toronto? Shocker!—though his celebrity may be bringing out the very worst in him, Peterson was always kind of a son of a bitch. Schiff concedes that Peterson possessed a rather immaculate record before his arrival at the University of Toronto, and despite misgivings from others about his “eccentricity,” he advocated for Peterson because he thought he could bring fresh energy and new ideas to the department.

As it turned out, though, according to Schiff, Peterson wasn’t just a little “eccentric.” He sparred with the university’s research ethics committee, suggesting they lacked the authority and expertise to weigh in on his work (despite, you know, it being their government-mandated job to serve this function). He also, alongside numerous enthusiastic reviews from people who had taken his courses and a rapt audience of those who attended, repeatedly acknowledged the dangers of presenting conjecture as fact, and promptly went ahead and did it anyway in his lectures.

For Schiff, this was fine, albeit vaguely concerning; no one was getting hurt, and Peterson’s sermons were largely confined to the classroom. The turn came, however, when Peterson not only misrepresented the relationship between biology and gender in his opposition to Bill C-16, the aforementioned gender-neutral pronoun policy but misrepresented his own risk at not supporting the law:

Jordan’s first high-profile public battle, and for many people their introduction to the man, followed his declaration that he would not comply with Bill C-16, an amendment to the Canadian Human Rights Act extending its protections to include gender identity and expression. He would refuse to refer to students using gender neutral pronouns. He then upped the stakes by claiming that, for this transgression, he could be sent to jail.

I have a trans daughter, but that was hardly an issue compared to what I felt was a betrayal of my trust and confidence in him. It was an abuse of the trust that comes with his professorial position, which I had fought for, to have misrepresented gender science by dismissing the evidence that the relationship of gender to biology is not absolute and to have made the claim that he could be jailed when, at worst, he could be fined.

In his defence, Jordan told me if he refused to pay the fine he could go to jail. That is not the same as being jailed for what you say, but it did ennoble him as a would-be martyr in the defence of free speech. He was a true free speech “warrior” who was willing to sacrifice and run roughshod over his students to make a point. He could have spared his students and chosen to sidestep the issue and refer to them by their names. And if this was truly a matter of free speech he could have challenged the Human Rights Act, off-campus and much earlier, by openly using language offensive to any of the already-protected groups on that list.

Perhaps this was not just about free speech.

Subsequent actions by Peterson to oppose legislative attempts by the province of Ontario to defend additional trans rights grew all the more worrisome. Peterson railed against the proposed Bill 28 under the premise that it “subjugates the natural family to the transgender agenda.” First of all, and apropos of nothing, the man missed an obvious opportunity to coin a portmanteau in transgenda. Secondly, what the heck is the “transgender agenda,” anyway? And how does it relate to a bill that sought to change the language about families away from “fathers and mothers” to “parents”? Bernard Schiff, for one, is confused, and I find myself similarly perplexed. You might, too.

This sense of wonderment quickly gives way to genuine fear, meanwhile, when considering Jordan Peterson’s conflation of Marxism, the left, and murderous regimes like those of Joseph Stalin that pervert their professed ideology to serve the purposes of the individual at the helm. Here is where Bernard Schiff’s concerns begin to echo those of Natalie Wynn’s. Wynn explicitly states her belief that Peterson is not a fascist. Whether or not Schiff believes Peterson has fascist tendencies is less clear, though he does make allusions to other people’s characterizations of Peterson and fascists in general, so that might tell you all you need to know. Regardless of exact labels, Schiff sees parallels between Peterson’s anti-Marxist, pro-status-quo language and Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist, anti-immigrant fervor. Obviously, this is not a flattering association.

Ultimately, Schiff puts forth that while he may be overstating the potential threat posed by his colleague, to remain silent presents its own risk—one he is not willing to take. Schiff, in suggesting that Peterson does not play by some of his own 12 rules—notably the ones involving assuming the other party knows something you don’t, pursuing what is important and not just what is expedient, telling the truth, and using precise language—expresses regret. Part of that regret lies in his inability to see Peterson’s rise as a self-styled cultural “warrior” coming despite the apparent warning signs. The other half of his regret, if you will, is his role in bringing Peterson to the University of Toronto in the first place. As Schiff plainly writes, “I have been asked by some if I regret my role in bringing Jordan to the University of Toronto. I did not for many years, but I do now.”

Part of what makes Jordan Peterson so frustrating to talk about is his seemingly intentional inscrutability, a quality his devotees laud as a virtue in that the “liberal media” can’t neatly fit him into a box. Indeed, Bernard Schiff goes to great lengths trying to plot out Peterson’s inconsistences. He defiantly asserts his right to free speech, but then actively tries to steer students away from professors whom he associates with “postmodern neo-Marxism.” He claims to be a champion of scientific research and inquiry but rejects attempts by university administration to scrutinize his methods and cherry-picks data to prove his point. He, like so many conservatives, decries those on the left he sees as willing victims but plays the martyr when challenged all the same. He’s calm and collected one moment, and angrily confrontational and defensive in the face of criticism the next. It’s a pretty maddening study in contracts.

Equally frustrating is trying to engage Peterson in a conversation on his terms. Natalie Wynn provides examples of Peterson’s rhetorical style, which essentially puts earnest interviewers like Cathy Newman of Channel 4 News in a no-win situation. As Wynn frames it, Peterson verbalizes something generally accepted to be true, while at the same time implying something more controversial and possibly unrelated. For instance, he’ll say that “there are biological differences between men and women,” but in the context of the underrepresentation of women in government. Your apparent choice is either to fall into the trap of arguing against the factual information Peterson presents, or to try to infer a meaning by which he can argue that you’re misrepresenting his point of view. Whatever that may be.

Wynn highlights how Peterson used this kind of argument with respect to his famous/infamous “lobster” comment, when he led with a discussion of the notion that human social hierarchies are a construct created by Western patriarchy, and followed that with a note about how lobsters exist in hierarchies and how this structure has existed before Western patriarchy. The problem with this line of discourse, instructs Wynn, is that no one is arguing hierarchies are a product of “Western patriarchy,” and that lobster hierarchies are a non sequitur to the discussion of human social hierarchies. That is, no one is trying to start a lobster revolution. Peterson’s argument, as intellectual as it sounds, is gobbledygook, more or less.

Another oft-cited moment in the Newman-Peterson interview was when Newman asked Peterson why his right to freedom of speech should trump a trans person’s right not to be offended, and Peterson countered by asserting that “in order to be able to think, you have to risk being offensive,” and answering her question with another question: “You’re certainly willing to risk offending me in the pursuit of truth. Why should you have the right to do that?” Peterson’s extended response left Newman all but speechless, to which he interjected, “Ha! Gotcha!” Newman, flabbergasted, conceded defeat on this point. This moment is Exhibit A in Peterson’s supporters’ evidence that their icon “won” the interview over Ms. Newman, or “destroyed” her, or “obliterated” her, or did something else to nullify her very existence. Because there has to be a winner or loser in these types of discussions. Right.

Looking back at Peterson’s statements, it’s easier to find the flaws in his reasoning. To equate his personal offense at being challenged to a trans individual’s right to self-identification is a false comparison. This is to say that Peterson’s taking umbrage to a reporter’s queries results in nothing more than his personal irritation, while attacks on personhood for the trans community, a minority group, can lead to continued abuse and physical assaults. It’s not the same thing, something Cathy Newman might’ve been able to express given the time to parse out Peterson’s logic. You or I might’ve found ourselves similarly flummoxed in the same situation against such a skilled orator.

On top of this, Cathy Newman’s reward for attempting to take Jordan Peterson to task for expressed viewpoints and for inadvertently helping to elevate his stature? Numerous vicious personal threats. Peterson did intercede amid the harassment to ask his followers to back off, but his is the kind of sermonizing about the need to defend “Western” culture with obvious appeal to straight white Christian males that lends itself to preemptive strikes against members of the LGBTQ community, people of color, women, and everyone in between. When cultural debates are characterized in the context of a “war,” those who take up the fight with earnest believe all is fair, but this is not automatically the case.

Natalie Wynn ends her segment by abnegating personal responsibility in the debate about Jordan Peterson’s merits, professing she only likes to make YouTube videos for their production value. Bernard Schiff ruefully acknowledges his personal failure in identifying Peterson’s dangerous patterns of behavior and likens his (Peterson’s) desire to preach from the pulpit to the designs of late evangelist Billy Graham. Perhaps there is no single conclusion to be reached about Peterson that would prove satisfactory.

A common thread between the analyses of Wynn and Schiff, though—and one to which I might subscribe in my own thinking—is the idea that maybe those outside his vanguard need to take his meteoric rise more seriously. The “experts” who downplayed the threats of a “Brexit” or a Donald Trump presidency were summarily proven wrong. The hubbub about Jordan Peterson could be much ado about nothing. As with Schiff’s decision not to stay mum, however, do you believe it’s worth the risk of ignoring him?

#12 Rules for Life book #Alek Minassian #Bernard Schiff #Cathy Newman #enforced monogamy #Jordan Peterson #Natalie Wynn

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nofomoartworld · 7 years ago

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Hyperallergic: An Itinerant Museum Picks Apart the Language of Dehumanization

Museum of Nonhumanity, installation view (all images courtesy Momentum 9)

MOSS, Norway — A museum located inside of a kunsthall folded into a larger biennial, Laura Gustafsson and Terike Haapoja’s project for Momentum 9 is a multilayered institutional critique. Their Museum of Nonhumanity, on view at the Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art in Moss, Norway, attempts to undermine the Western, colonial, patriarchal thinking that leads to systems of oppression, as well as the cultural centers complicit in othering, or drawing distinctions between different groups. A tall order indeed.

The museum comprises scaffolding and screens instead of walls, underscoring its temporary, unfinished quality (“being dismantled, under construction,” as Haapoja describes it to me). Their exhibition medium is primarily language itself. Throughout a 70-minute performance, archival texts, images, and dictionary entries in Norwegian and English flash on the screens mounted around the deep, dark room on the second floor of the Momentum kunsthall. Meticulously arranged, the material all relates to 14 different themes, beginning with “person” and ending with “display.” Melancholy music, heavy on violin, emanates from the ceiling. During three of the themes (“resource,” “boundary,” and “anima”), visitors can also listen to audio material with headphones placed on benches around the staggered screens. Around the back, more typical history museum fare awaits, including stuffed animals and the Norwegian constitution. These all come from nearby institutions, grounding the peripatetic work in a specific local culture.

Museum of Nonhumanity, installation view

Gustafsson and Haapoja present their language without comment. Watching stark, bold text regarding the Dred Scott case (the law labeling American slaves as three-fifths of a person), rules about animal experimentation, and the definition of the word “tender” flit across the monochromatic screens, the audience begins to analyze juxtapositions, gaps, and relevance among the assorted ideas. Depending on time of entry and duration of stay, viewers will experience the language and trajectory differently. The underlying idea — that language shapes dehumanization and othering — becomes quickly apparent. The subtle pleasure of viewing comes from gradually grasping the nuances of this process in a reflective atmosphere.

Though the pair originally considered building a massive installation of physical items to present their themes, they decided to focus instead on language, which, though immaterial, has shaped many of the world’s structures. Gustafsson and Haapoja first launched the roving museum in Finland, where they also held seminars about gender equality, empathy, and animal rights and set up a vegan café. The duo envisions the museum as a kind of utopia, “an imaginary institution in a world where there’s no more dehumanization,” says Gustafsson. In Moss, they will similarly organize site-specific programming. In June, they opened an edition in Santarcangelo, Italy, as part of a larger city festival. They’re currently in conversation with stateside organizations about bringing the project to the US. Their itinerant museum has the capacity to reach international audiences while addressing local concerns — a rare, democratic feat. They’ll also preserve the project through a book they’re publishing, featuring their source material, images of the installation, and essays.

Museum of Nonhumanity, installation view

Under Gustafsson and Haapoja’s direction, the concept of nonhumanity grows to encompass wolves, human embryos, and the Tutsi people in Rwanda. The idea of comparing how we treat these groups is a dicey proposition, which the pair acknowledges. “It’s quite delicate,” says Gustafsson; “people get offended.” Haapoja adds, “What we’re really trying to do is to show … [that] the structures of oppression are the same. The linguistic, the reasoning, and the rhetorics of how you do it — the strategy, somehow, that’s the same.”

As I viewed the work, I began considering just how “nonhuman” each element was, as though there was some kind of hierarchy. Wolves seem more nonhuman to me than embryos, which are certainly less human than Rwandan men and women. While this kind of categorization and labeling contributes to the kind of detrimental othering that leads to civil war, colonialism, and enslavement, it also bolsters the pro-choice cause and decisions to test potentially life-saving drugs on mice. Watching the displayed text leads to uncomfortable revelations about viewers’ own values, prejudices, and hypocrisies and asks us to reconsider the merit of certain categorizations over others.

The final section, “display,” includes Encyclopedia Britannica’s definition of “natural history and natural science museums.” The “natural world” it describes notably omits humans, while its undemocratic underpinnings are clear in the final line: “These museums have their origins in the cabinets of curiosities built up by prominent individuals in Europe during the Renaissance and Enlightenment.” For hundreds of years, the wealthy elite have been dictating what we can and can’t see, designating what will be preserved for posterity. As the Oxford Dictionary definition of “spectator” crosses the screen (“a person who watches at a show, game, or other event”), the work addresses its viewer, asking us to consider our own position to the themes explored. Are we merely receiving language and recycling it, or are we actively questioning it and the structures it produces? Ditto for the way we consume museum offerings — both objects and text.

Museum of Nonhumanity, installation view

If the Museum of Nonhumanity promotes a healthy rejection of elite institutional culture, it also advocates for greater acceptance of the sentient world around us. Critiquing power structures is nothing new, but Haapoja and Gustafsson are offering a powerful, physical, and very real alternative. Walk out of their exhibition and you may feel more skeptical of the biennial format and the framework that financially supports it. More than that, you might feel a greater connection to the life around you, outside the museum. Haapoja describes the xenophobia currently plaguing Scandinavia: a “specific kind of racism that comes from not being exposed to any difference.” Worldwide, populism increasingly trumps acceptance. As far as museum takeaways go, a unifying and consideration-inducing sentiment can sound a little ethereal and mawkish, but the Museum of Nonhumanity’s graceful, understated choreography makes it seem like just what we need.

Museum of Nonhumanity continues at Momentum 9 (Momentum Kunsthall, Henrik Gernersgate 8, N-1530, Moss) through October 11.

The post An Itinerant Museum Picks Apart the Language of Dehumanization appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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nataliehegert · 7 years ago

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“I’m scared to go back.”

We were all squeezed into wooden folding chairs with a crowd standing around the perimeter of the room at Last Projects, on the second floor, where an old air conditioner, inadequately exhaling intermittent wafts of cool air, and a set of heavy Venetian blinds blocked out the sights and sounds of Hollywood Boulevard below. It was nearing 10pm.

Their screening was over, and Pink, as she would like to be called, was at the front of the room, standing with her compatriot members of the Tomorrow Girls Troop, describing her feelings about going home to South Korea. Pink has spent the last five years in the U.S., living in Los Angeles and attending art school. She is a video artist, a founding member of the cross-cultural social art group Tomorrow Girls Troop, and in two weeks she is headed back to Seoul.

“One of the biggest fears that I have is that when I go back I will lose myself in that environment,” Pink told me from New York a week later via Skype. A strong patriarchal culture pervades life in Korea, producing a largely stifling and repressive environment, one that Pink describes as an oppressively narrow framework that limits one’s ideas, desires, and choices in life. The video works she has produced so far under the auspices of the Tomorrow Girls Troop critique this situation through the appropriation of Korean and Japanese commercial media. They were shown that evening alongside other works by young Korean and Japanese video artists, co-curated by Minkyung Choi and Takako Oishi-Marks. These works all questioned and challenged the cultural status quo of the two countries in various ways: deconstructing mass media representations of “normal” families in advertising or the representation of women in Korean soap operas; inserting queer bodies in contentious or gendered spaces; and openly demonstrating or discussing sexual taboos.

I was there to moderate a talk following the screening with a few members of the Tomorrow Girls Troop, an emergent feminist art group with members of varied genders and nationalities. Their activities are primarily focused on gender inequality issues in Japan and Korea, pointing to both their own personal experiences and the two countries’ dismal international rankings[1] as evidence that a conversation about feminism needs to take place there. Their members are widespread—spanning New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Kyoto, Seoul and elsewhere. And although the group was started as a social art project, many of its members are non-artists that identify as supporters of feminist, egalitarian, progressive values. They need this non-artist contingent, because Tomorrow Girls Troop is art as social movement. At the moment there are about twenty active members (plus many other supporters), but they don’t keep a strict count.

“It’s super open. Everybody can be in Tomorrow Girls Troop,” one of the founding Japanese members told me, adding emphatically, “I wanna make this group huge.” A young Japanese multimedia artist, Midori is one of the founding members of the Troop, and keeps up their Japanese blog, where she posts projects, calls to action, and Japanese-language articles concerning women’s issues. The group wishes to remain anonymous in print, following the example, and the advice, of their predecessors the Guerrilla Girls. For one reason, cultural critique is often more easily digested when delivered by indistinct individuals, and feminist critique in particular seems to invite the kind of personal attacks that merely serve to distract from the issues at stake. Tomorrow Girls Troop has already experienced this kind of backlash, prompted by its petition to remove the new official mascot for Shima city. The mascot has been pegged as misogynist and disrespectful of women, but some otaku and artists have responded to the call for its dismissal as a threat to “freedom of expression.” “As if women in Japan enjoy ‘freedom of expression’ anyway,” Midori vented over the phone to me one day, after a newspaper article came out in Japan about the petition. Tomorrow Girls Troop regards the mascot as a formalized symptom of a widespread culture of sexual objectification, harassment, and abuse—now endorsed by a public entity and made “official.” “The enemy is misogyny,” she says, not freedom of expression.

The situation for women in Japan has gotten worse since 2000, Midori says, with Japan’s long-term recession and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s right-wing administration contributing to the country’s backslide into conservative values. And while feminist groups like Megalian are making strides in South Korea, Midori stresses that there is no equivalent feminist group in Japan. One of the reasons the feminist message has largely failed to resonate in Japan is because of the grimly militant connotation it holds for many people. The word itself is reviled. “A lot of Japanese scholars, surprisingly, say feminism is fascism,” she says, and this notion has taken root throughout society. Even men and women who are sympathetic to feminist issues are hesitant to associate themselves with the word. Tomorrow Girls Troop aims to transform this attitude through the spread of viral memes like their project to “out” people as Hidden Feminists, as well as through other activist projects, such as a campaign they’re launching next month to change the Japanese dictionary definition of feminism to include the word “equality.”

“If I have an aim, through Tomorrow Girls Troop and through my own practice,” Pink told me, as she prepared for her move back to Seoul, “it’s to make art that broadens people’s horizons about different desires. One of the biggest issues in Korea and Japan, because of the society, is people don’t know what they want. It’s very restrictive, especially for women, they are trained to want [only] certain things. And I want to change that.” Once on the ground again in South Korea, she plans to organize art events, make contact with existing Korean feminist groups, and find more people to collaborate with on the social activism side of Tomorrow Girls Troop. As a video artist, “I’m more interested in the art side,” she says, but even those projects that might be viewed as belonging to more traditional forms of activism—petitions, letter writing campaigns, etc—she argues are still related to art and visual culture. “It’s about representation. It’s about images.” For Tomorrow Girls Troop, the contexts of art and activism are not necessarily mutually exclusive. “I would like to see them collide,” Pink says. “I think that’s the purpose of our group.”

Despite her fears, Pink is ready for the challenges ahead. “As a young woman I was really insecure in Korea,” she told me, “But I hope that now I have more security so that I can pursue the things that I believe in.” An idealistic outlook propels her to look to the future, and also the sincere belief that their actions can make a huge impact. It’s all about what can happen tomorrow.

—Natalie Hegert

[1] According to the Global Gender Gap Index 2014 by the World Economic Forum, among 142 countries, Japan ranked #104 and Korea ranked #117 in terms of women’s access to the economy, education, politics and health.

(Image at the top: Tomorrow Girls Troop, Girls in the Far East | 극동의 여인들 | 東の果ての少女, 2015, video still,1:54)

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Critical Social Work Research Paper

This sample Critical Social Work Research Paper is published for educational and informational purposes only. Like other free research paper examples it is not a custom research paper. If you need help with writing your assignment, please use research paper writing services and buy a research paper on any topic.

Abstract

This research paper examines the history and development of critical social work as an approach and a practice. It reviews the major historical perspectives on a critical social work approach and then outlines an approach to critical social work based on the major tenets of critical social theory, which includes postmodern thinking about how beliefs about how knowledge is made and is inextricably linked to power. Specific concepts (knowledge, power, language, and identity) and some specific ways that might translate into the practice of critical social work are also considered. These include critical reflection and deconstruction/ reconstruction, problematization and research, narrativity, and contextuality.

Outline

Introduction

History of Critical Social Work

Contemporary Understandings

Key Concepts

Common Ideas Underpinning Critical Social Theory

Common Ideas Underpinning Critical Social Work Practice

Knowledge

Power

Language

Identity Creation

Major Practice Applications

Critical Reflection and Deconstruction/Reconstruction

Problematization and Research

Narrativity

Contextuality

Conclusion

Bibliography

Introduction

Critical social work practice is still developing as an approach, and there are varied perspectives on exactly what theoretical frameworks underpin it. In this research paper, I outline a framework using a conception of critical social theory which incorporates common aspects from several related contemporary theoretical approaches such as postmodernism and feminism.

History of Critical Social Work

The idea of a critical social work is relatively recent idea in the history of social work. It is an idea and an approach, which is still developing, and this means that there are many different meanings of the term.

Most writers would, however, agree that critical approaches to social work were born around the 1970s. They were based on the common critique during that era. Social work was characterized, like many other helping professions, as an agent of social control and the state. Contrary, therefore, to its stated helping ideals, the social work profession was seen to support the status quo, and social structures, which worked against the best interests of the very communities and people it purported to help. The social fabric, which justified and supported social inequalities, was viewed as the cause of social problems themselves, and so social workers could not really help people unless they assisted in dismantling the very structures which brought about social ills in the first place. Social change was, therefore, seen as an imperative of social work. This included challenging social oppressions, and empowering disadvantaged groups. Most criticism was directed toward casework, or individualized work, which was seen as founded on personal pathology. Individualized practice was seen as ‘blaming the victim,’ or as pathologizing and changing the people who were actually the blameless victims of a faulty system. This individualized type of approach was regarded as the major influence in the 1950s when the ‘psychiatric deluge’ swamped social work’s initial conceptions of the ‘person-in-context’ (see Fook, 1993 for a full discussion of these terms and trends). These early criticisms were labelled as radical, and spawned a whole body of literature on radical social work, largely underpinned by Marxist analysis (e.g., Bailey and Brake, 1975; Corrigan and Leonard, 1978). These Marxist critiques tended to focus on macro level criticisms directed at material structural inequalities, embodied particularly in class differences. Much of this literature was subsequently criticized for its lack of attention to social work with individuals (Fook, 1993) and indeed for its lack of attention to practice per se.

There was room, therefore, for the radical critique of social work to become more sophisticated. There was a need to include the importance of gender, and gendered inequalities, as an additional aspect of the social structure. Feminist social work (e.g., Dominelli and MacLeod (1982) therefore developed in the 1980s as an important approach in addressing structural inequalities. Critiques of racist and ableist social work were also relevant to this (Dominelli, 1988; Oliver, 1990; Morris, 1991). This development continued, as further types of analyses were introduced which better theorized the nature and causes of social inequalities, and which allowed more sophisticated understandings of power, and the relationship of individuals to their social contexts. How these issues are theorized accounts to a large extent for different perspectives on critical social work which are in contemporary development.

Contemporary Understandings

There are now a number of perspectives on critical social work, which include: postmodern, antioppressive, structural, and new radical perspectives based on neo-Marxist analysis. What each of these shares is a commitment to understanding how power operates to sustain social inequalities. However the specific analysis used, and therefore the specific actions recommended, and the types of social changes called for, vary depending on the perspective taken.

Structural perspectives emphasize the importance of a structural analysis in social work practice, and are more materialist in their orientation (Allan, 2009). A key contemporary Canadian author in this genre is Mullaly (2007). Antioppressive approaches emphasize intersectionality and the imperative against oppression of all types (e.g., Dominelli (2002). Postmodern, and postmodern critical perspectives tend to include more complex analyses of power and difference, and therefore are useful for understanding the operation of exclusion at the everyday level. In social work, the major exponents of this approach include Australians Healy (2000), Pease and Fook (1999) and Fook (2002, 2012). Newer perspectives including human rights, reflexive materialism, and critical race theory are covered in a volume, which includes authors from several different country contexts (Hick et al., 2005).

To a large extent, these varied perspectives are also associated with different country contexts, although there is some overlap. For instance, antioppressive social work is mostly written about from Britain, and is used to some extent in Canada. The term ‘structural social work’ originated from Canadian writers as noted above. Postmodern and postmodern critical perspective have largely been developed by Australian writers (e.g., Fook, 2002; Healy, 2000; Pease and Fook, 1999). Neo-Marxist approaches are having a comeback in the United Kingdom (e.g., Ferguson, 2008). In the United States, it is possible to argue that no specific approach exists, which even roughly equates to critical perspectives (Reisch and Andrews, 2001), although there is significant writing on empowerment (e.g., Simon, 1994). In the United States, there is some argument that critical perspectives have adhered most strongly with postmodern and social constructionist perspectives and it is noteworthy that the term ‘critical’ is rarely used.

Key Concepts

Common Ideas Underpinning Critical Social Theory

Agger (2006) argues that there are common ideas shared by many social theorists (e.g., Foucault, Derrida, the Frankfurt School, feminism), which can be loosely grouped together as critical social theory. These include theories termed critical, postmodern, feminist, multicultural, and selected theories from cultural studies. He terms this a critical social theory “theory cluster” (2006: p. 4), which can be identified by seven common features (Agger, 2006: pp. 4–5):

Opposition to positivist understandings of knowledge making. Knowledge is not wholly ‘objective’ (i.e., simply constructed as an empirical ‘truth’ distinct from and outside of ourselves as knowing human beings). It is also actively made by people (e.g., researchers, theorists, practitioners). We, as members of society are all active participants in creating knowledge from our own social positions and perspectives, and cannot help but bring inherent value stances and biases. (The pronoun ‘we’ is used to refer to us all as people who are ‘social subjects’ i.e., as individuals who live in a society in which we participate to cocreate a shared sense of reality.) Knowledge cannot be value free.

The possibility of progress. Critical social theories build on the past and present to envisage and create a better future, to be achieved through social and political action. Critical social theory both raises awareness of oppression, and demonstrates the possibility of a different nonoppressive society. It not only seeks to facilitate social change, but also offers an analytical base for change.

Domination is both personal and structural, that is, people’s everyday lives are affected by structural institutions and constructions such as gender and race.

Structural domination is also sustained at the individual level through false consciousness or ideology, (or discourse). Ideological or discursive thinking involves believing that there are ideas which are unchangeable, and therefore, taken-for-granted. Continuing to believe that these ideas cannot be changed therefore serves to maintain existing power relations and inequities. The role of critical social theory is to expose these beliefs (and false consciousness or discourse), thereby creating the basis for social change and transformation. By undermining false consciousness (and revealing the discursive functions of ideas, personal, and collective agency are enabled, bringing about personal and social change.

The belief that social change can be brought about by exposing false consciousness at individual levels implies voluntaristic (rather than deterministic) assumptions about people and the possibility of change. It opens the way for social changes to begin at the site of everyday life.

A dialectical relationship exists between structure and agency. Although social structures do influence everyday experience and lives, knowledge of how this happens also enables people to change the ways this happens.

The focus on the connection between everyday life and social structures also places responsibility on personal liberation, rather than on oppressing others in the name of distant future liberation.

Critical social work, based on the foregoing understanding of critical social theory, is therefore an optimistic approach, based on the possibility of personal and social change for the better, achieved through working together in dialogue. It can be summarized as follows. Critical social work is as primarily concerned with practicing in ways, which work toward a society without domination, exploitation, and oppression. It involves understanding how structures dominate and also how people construct and are constructed by changing social structures and relations, recognizing that there may be multiple and diverse constructions of ostensibly similar situations. This understanding of social relations and structures disrupts dominant arrangements, and changes these so that they are more inclusive of different interest groups and perspectives.

Knowledge to inform this understanding is derived in different ways. Empirical knowledge is needed in order to understand how material structures shape lives. But processes of critical self-reflection are also crucial to ensure that dominant structures and relations are challenged in the way they are implicitly enacted in individual people’s everyday lives. Communication and dialogue are necessary in order to ensure that diverse perspectives are included in forging new and inclusive ways of working. Thus, in a postmodern and critical social work both the kinds of social changes that are sought, and the ways in which they are enacted, are important. Outcome and process are integral to each other (Fook, 2012: p. 18).

Common Ideas Underpinning Critical Social Work Practice

This approach and these common theoretical underpinnings can be distilled to four key concepts, which are crucial to the practice of critical social work, namely, knowledge, power, language, and identity creation.

Knowledge

The nature of knowledge and how it is generated are both technical and political issues in critical social work. What constitutes legitimate knowledge (and truth?); who accepts it as such; and what are the legitimate ways to generate and create it involves questions of hierarchies of knowledge and people (and therefore power).

It is important to note that critical perspectives recognize that knowledge can be generated by more scientific; means – commonly accepted methods which purport to discover the nature of ‘facts’ about our empirical world. However, these ‘facts’ may also be disputed because not everyone will agree with the methods used to develop them, or indeed, some ‘facts’ may not be relevant in different historical times, social contexts, or for different players. In this way, the more subjective nature of knowledge, and its generation, must also be taken into account. Knowledge in this sense can never be value free as it is necessarily influenced by who creates it, using what type of methodology, and in what context.

Reflexivity, or our ability to recognize how aspects of ourselves and our contexts influence the kinds of knowledge we produce and value, is an important concept in understanding how we as individuals can actively participate in creating and maintaining knowledge (which may or may not be relevant for other people in other contexts).

Additionally, to promote particular social actions, the knowledge that supports them is promulgated as factual, and therefore, universally agreed upon as true. To do this successfully, alternative perspectives are often suppressed or denied. Thus, knowledge and power are inextricably linked. In this way, views which are touted as ‘true’ may simply reflect the views of whatever group is dominant. This concept is highly relevant in understanding the operation of knowledge and power in professional life. For example, service users must often conform to a predetermined set of criteria about their situation and themselves as people, in order to qualify for legitimate services under particular policy provisions.

Furthermore, a similar process can occur in a more subtle way, with individual people in their personal and professional lives. For instance, most of us, base our actions, at the microlevel, on barely recognized assumptions, which mirror and support social arrangements. These may not be of our explicit choosing, and can work against our interests, or the best interests of the people we, as social workers, are working to assist. An everyday example of this is the decisions about how we behave in meetings. What culture(s) are we choosing to go along with when we decide where to sit, or who and what to support?

Critical reflection is an important ingredient in becoming aware of how we as individuals may create and support knowledge which excludes different (perhaps marginal) perspectives and which may therefore work to maintain social inequalities. I will discuss this in more detail in the last section on practice applications.

In social work practice, assumptions about knowledge are linked with assumptions about theory, what constitutes legitimate theory, and how it is made distinctive from practice. How we construct theory and practice, and the relationship between the two, is therefore a critical issue (Fook, forthcoming). How ways of understanding the relationship between theory and practice can be empowering or disempowering is an important site for social change.

Power

The concept of power, from a postmodern critical perspective, is seen as a dynamic force, which can be shaped and created differently in different contexts. The Foucauldian concept of power, as something, which is exercised, rather than something which is possessed, captures the essence of this idea. This conception of power as something, which can be made in social interactions is vastly different from the more commodified view, which seems to dominate accepted thinking. In dominant thinking, power is seen to reside with social position, and therefore, empowerment involves transferring power from one (more powerful) person to another (less powerful) person or group. This finite view of power is problematic because it infers that empowering one group necessarily involves disempowering another. This means that all situations, which involve empowering people are necessarily conflictual. However, in a postmodern view, this need not be the case. Different people and groups, starting from different social and power positions, may actively work together to create more power and in the process empower each other.

We discussed the relationship between knowledge and power above and it is important to remember that they should not be separated. A site for creating power and empowering others or ourselves, therefore, lies in how we conceptualize power, other people’s power, and our own abilities to influence or act in a situation. This understanding of personal agency is crucial to a critical perspective on power.

Language

How we speak about our world and social phenomena is integral to our understanding of how we actively participate in shaping social structures and relations. Firstly, language involves labelling and categorizing which orders the phenomena we experience. Secondly, language functions to socially recognize phenomena – if something is not named, it is harder to speak or communicate about it, and therefore harder to legitimize or value it.

Furthermore, language is about more than words or phrases. It also includes implications about the phenomena we speak about. This is where the concept of discourse becomes important. Discourse refers to the ways of speaking about, and the messages, which are conveyed about phenomena. In this sense, it is about more than the specific words used in the language itself, but may involve nonverbal messages, implied messages, or messages communicated by the way a situation is structured physically. It may also be about more hidden meanings that are assumed in any given cultures, which are operating in a particular situation. For instance, when binary (‘either – or’ type) categories are used, it is implied that there is no other category or way of being. Often the two elements of the binary are pitted against each other, which suggests that they are mutually exclusive and sometimes opposed to each other. Hence, when we use binary categories, such as ‘theorypractice,’ we get the message that the two are very different and that much education and intellectual gymnastics go into ‘integrating’ the two. Such a split can support other binary categorizations (e.g., the split between academia and practice, or the split between research and practice). So where does ‘practice theory’ fit in such a split? In this way, it is easy to see how any more complex ways of understanding theory and practice may be easily left out. It is this leaving out of other perspectives, categories, or experiences which can also act as a form of power, to silence or devalue alternative views.

When we recognize the power of discourse, and also the power of dominant discourses to discount different perspectives, the concept of narrative becomes important. Narrative in a simple sense refers to the idea that whatever perspective is being touted represents that person’s own story, told from their own social position, experience, and background. Thus, narratives may only represent one perspective, but may also represent a perspective, which has not formerly been recognized. This becomes particularly significant when people have not been allowed to tell their own narrative about themselves, their own biography, and identity. The concept of narrative is an important concept in applying the notion of discourse to practice. This will be discussed further in the last section.

Identity Creation

People’s sense of themselves and who they are socially and personally can change over time, and can also include contradictions. Identity making involves both personal and social elements, and these can be reworked in the light of new experiences. This means that people do have the opportunity to remake a sense of themselves in relation to changing social contexts. It is possible that identities can:

Change

Be contradictory

Be multiple

This perspective represents a major departure from the accepted way of understanding identity, which assumes that people hold an idea of themselves, which remains relatively coherent and constant over time. Indeed, it may sometimes be assumed that a stable identity is crucial to mental health. However, from a postmodern and critical perspective, we acknowledge that because identity is made in context, then an important aspect of coping in life may involve adjusting a sense of self in relation to changing experiences and contexts.

Since identities are changeable, it is important to understand how identities are made, and how these processes can be crucial in constructing social difference (and also in creating discrimination, inclusion, and exclusion). The process of ‘othering’ is a process whereby individual people or groups reinforce their existing identities by creating binary oppositional categories for other people or phenomena, which do not fit their preconceived notions. The ‘other’ group is by definition different. This type of thinking preserves and strengthens boundaries, and presumably, social comfort and certainty. This then forms a basis for discrimination.

Identity politics, as mentioned in relation to the concept of narrative, is therefore important in critical social work. How, and to whom, we accord power to make their own identities, and to coin their own language, becomes an important aspect of making social changes in our everyday lives. And how and whether we recognize and value these new categories are also an important part of critical practice.

Major Practice Applications

There are four major practice strategies which derive from the key concepts as follows: critical reflection and deconstruction/ reconstruction, problematization and research, narrativity, and contextuality.

Critical Reflection and Deconstruction/Reconstruction

As discussed earlier, critical social work includes the notion that knowledge cannot be value free, and that the way knowledge is constructed, and the sorts of knowledge (theory), which is believed to be true, often reflects the exercise of power. In the practice of critical social work, it is therefore important to be able to uncover how this power operates through the knowledge that we choose to believe. Deconstructing language and ways of thinking to discover the operation of power is a method integral to critical social work practice.

In essence, deconstruction is a form of analysing discourses, or “uncovering the ways we talk about and choose to label experience, and how these shape experience” (Fook, 2012: p. 105). In other words, deconstruction involves uncovering the ways that power operates through the ways we label and interpret our experience. What preconceived labels or categories do we accept and choose to maintain? What are we leaving out? What is being distorted? What social rules are being affirmed or created? Whose perspectives are they and what do they have to do with power differences and inequalities? These are the sorts of questions, the answers to which help pull apart our own language and thinking to see how power operates in our own experience.

In the critical reflection model I developed (e.g., Fook and Gardner, 2007), the discourse being analyzed is a person’s narrative about their own experience. Although there are many different perspectives on critical reflection, in critical social work practice, it is relevant to theorize critical reflection as a type of deconstruction of the narratives of personal experience, in order to uncover the hidden assumptions, which inform our practice, and therefore the hidden ways we participate in creating power. These can exist at a very deep and personal level, and uncovering these may help reveal how we can be complicit in supporting views or actions, which can also work against us or the people we as social workers are trying to help.

My model includes two stages (Fook, 2012): the first is deconstruction, where hidden assumptions are uncovered and examined; the second is reconstruction when assumptions (thinking) may be changed, and new ways of practice developed accordingly. This second stage of reconstruction must be an integral part of any critical social work practice. Deconstructing practice experience and thinking must be accompanied by concrete ideas of how practice can be rebuilt on the basis of what is discovered. Critical social theory in this sense provides an analysis, a way of enacting this analysis, and a blueprint for making social changes toward a more equitable and inclusive society. These are contained in a structured and purposeful way, through critical reflection.

Problematization and Research

How we conceptualize and understand the daily ‘problems’ that we deal with as social workers is an integral part of the way we work as practitioners and researchers. Much has been made in the past of the way professionals ‘pathologize’ people and problems, often through a process of ‘othering’ so that any behavior or culture, which appears deviant from the norm is categorized as problematic. How then do we choose to understand and categorize social and personal issues in a way which respects them from an insider’s perspective, but which also values the uniqueness of the perspective enough so that it can be acted upon effectively in a broader social context?

A first step is to see the task of conceptualizing and understanding an issue first and foremost as a research task. The aim of the research is to form a complex and deep understanding of the issue fromthe point of view of the person/people experiencing it. The task of the researcher is to stay open to discovering what this perspective is, and to use methods, which enable this to occur. Thismeans starting with as little preconceived idea as possible, to listen to and accept the language of the person/people involved. It may also mean using communicative and investigative methods, which are most culturally comfortable or appropriate. These will vary greatly depending on your (the researcher’s) gender, social context, age, ethnicity, and so forth, and those of the person/people you are interacting with. It may also mean accepting apparent contradictions (or even new viewpoints which differ vastly from your own), multiple perspectives, and changing interpretations (in line with the postmodern acceptance of fluid identities). Rather than glossing over or leaving out contradictions or changing viewpoints, the task of the researcher is to provide a communicable understanding of the issue or experience, which includes these differences. A complex picture (which derives from the person or situation itself) is aimed at, rather than a consistent or even balanced view.

The second task of the practitioner/researcher is then to mold this understanding into a narrative, which can be communicated to those who need to hear it. Who this audience is will depend on context. For instance, a social worker developing an assessment of a person to receive some form of social assistance may wish to use the language of the relevant policy, and choose to leave out aspects, which will diminish the person’s chances of receiving the assistance. Or aspects that appear not to fit may be reworked in appropriate language. An audience of policy makers may need to hear about aspects of individual experiences, which sit outside the norm, so that their own critical thinking can be stimulated. A target group of social work colleagues might need to know about supporting statistics which will broaden their understanding of the social extent of the issue at hand, and give a context to their practice experience.

This process of coming to a comprehensive appreciation of social problems and issues from insiders’ perspectives may be used equally well for assessment of individual or community situations. The key is to view the assessment not as an attempt to pathologize or fit the issue at hand into a preconceived category, but to be open to creating new categories or labels, and ways of communicating about the issue or situation, which suit the context in which the assessment is being made. This recognizes that conducting an ‘assessment’ is really more of a construction of a professional narrative, constructed to be effective, and relevant in a particular context.

Narrativity

The concept of narrativity refers to an understanding that a perspective on particular phenomena may represent only one perspective from a particular vantage point – social, historical, or political. Narratives, constructed as they are by particular people in particular contexts, function as a form of meaning making. Since the meaning is made in a social context, narratives also perform social functions. Narratives, like discourses, embody power. The principle of narrativity builds on this awareness to suggest strategies for destabilizing this power, and this provides the opportunity to remake it.

The principle of narrativity is related to concepts of discourse analysis, deconstruction, and critical reflection. However, it has special mention here as narrative therapy (see White and Epston, 1990) has become particularly well developed as a movement in its own right. The approach is based on the idea of examining and changing harmful narratives. In summary, it involves: identifying narratives, dominant, empowering, and disempowering; validating the positive ones and externalizing the harmful ones; and rebuilding alternative narratives and validating these further by creating an audience. Such an approach has been used successfully in many different fields of therapeutic work (Duvall and Beres, 2011). Narrative methods, however, can also be used more broadly, in work with communities and also in organizations, and are, therefore, an important component of the critical social worker’s repertoire.

Contextuality

The principle of contextuality arises through recognizing that context influences much of analysis and practice in social work. Contextual practice (practice both within and with context) emphasizes several new ways of approaching practice (Fook, 2012: p. 162):

Understanding the nature of the different contexts in which we work at different times and to developing relevant practice strategies. This may involve recognizing the role of a particular context in shaping certain attitudes or practices; or it may require adapting our ways of working to incorporate methods from past times or other contexts.

Positionality – assuming a reflexively aware stance, simultaneously being able to see outside but also within contexts. This involves being able to understand and identify how we are inextricably part of a situation can also allow us to see outside it, and to use this dual awareness to be sympathetic to any resistance to change, but courageous enough to seek change.

Working with whole contexts (rather than a number of disparate players or aspects). This involves the ability to see beyond the separate elements of a context to appreciate how they work together to create a dynamic whole. This enables working with how people work together, rather than working separately with the people themselves.

Developing practice knowledge/theory that is transferable (not generalizable) between different contexts. This involves understanding that preexisting knowledge is not imposed top-down or from outside a situation, but rather preexisting knowledge is remade as relevant in new situations. New contexts are not made to fit preexisting knowledge, but rather preexisting knowledge is constantly remade from experience with new contexts.

Reframing skills in contextual terms – developing ‘contextual competence’ is the ability to read the cultural climate of different contexts and to practice effectively with and within these contexts (Fook, 2012: p. 187).

Conclusion

Critical social work practice is still developing. Outlined here are some ideas about what it might look like using a conception of critical social theory, which incorporates common aspects from a number of related contemporary theoretical approaches (including postmodernism, feminism). An important concluding thought is that the practice of critical social work requires an openness to new experiences, people, and situations which allows engagement with each other in contexts of uncertainty which are often outside our control.

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