#indigenous theory

[baldhedanxiety]

The Iron Wall - Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotisnky 1923 foundational Zionist text translated from Russian

[nexwsyexw-the-curious]

Marxism is as alien to my culture as capitalism and Christianity are.

-Russell Means, Oglala Lakota patriot, July 1980

Below is an excerpt of the speech from which it comes, and a link to the full transcript at the bottom.

"It takes a strong effort on the part of each American Indian not to become Europeanized. The strength for this effort can only come from the traditional ways, the traditional values that our elders retain. It must come from the hoop, the four directions, the relations: it cannot come from the pages of a book or a thousand books. No European can ever teach a Lakota to be Lakota, a Hopi to be Hopi. A master's degree in "Indian Studies" or in "education" or in anything else cannot make a person into a human being or provide knowledge into traditional ways. It can only make you into a mental European, an outsider. 

"I should be clear about something here, because there seems to be some confusion about it. When I speak of Europeans or mental Europeans, I'm not allowing for false distinctions. I'm not saying that on the one hand there are the by-products of a few thousand years of genocidal, reactionary, European intellectual development which is bad; and on the other hand there is some new revolutionary intellectual development which is good. I'm referring here to the so-called theories of Marxism and anarchism and "leftism" in general. I don't believe these theories can be separated from the rest of the of the European intellectual tradition. It's really just the same old song. 

"The process began much earlier. Newton, for example, "revolutionized" physics and the so-called natural sciences by reducing the physical universe to a linear mathematical equation. Descartes did the same thing with culture. John Locke did it with politics, and Adam Smith did it with economics. Each one of these "thinkers" took a piece of the spirituality of human existence and converted it into code, an abstraction. They picked up where Christianity ended: they "secularized" Christian religion, as the "scholars" like to say--and in doing so they made Europe more able and ready to act as an expansionist culture. Each of these intellectual revolutions served to abstract the European mentality even further, to remove the wonderful complexity and spirituality from the universe and replace it with a logical sequence: one, two, three. Answer! 

"This is what has come to be termed "efficiency" in the European mind. Whatever is mechanical is perfect; whatever seems to work at the moment--that is, proves the mechanical model to be the right one--is considered correct, even when it is clearly untrue. This is why "truth" changes so fast in the European mind; the answers which result from such a process are only stopgaps, only temporary, and must be continuously discarded in favor of new stopgaps which support the mechanical models and keep them (the models) alive. 

"Hegel and Marx were heirs to the thinking of Newton, Descartes, Locke and Smith. Hegel finished the process of secularizing theology--and that is put in his own terms--he secularized the religious thinking through which Europe understood the universe. Then Marx put Hegel's philosophy in terms of "materialism," which is to say that Marx despiritualized Hegel's work altogether. Again, this is in Marx' own terms. And this is now seen as the future revolutionary potential of Europe. Europeans may see this as revolutionary, but American Indians see it simply as still more of that same old European conflict between being and gaining. The intellectual roots of a new Marxist form of European imperialism lie in Marx'--and his followers'--links to the tradition of Newton, Hegel and the others. 

"[...]

"There's a rule of thumb which can be applied here. You cannot judge the real nature of a European revolutionary doctrine on the basis of the changes it proposes to make within the European power structure and society. You can only judge it by the effects it will have on non-European peoples. This is because every revolution in European history has served to reinforce Europe's tendencies and abilities to export destruction to other peoples, other cultures and the environment itself. I defy anyone to point out an example where this is not true.

"So now we, as American Indian people, are asked to believe that a "new" European revolutionary doctrine such as Marxism will reverse the negative effects of European history on us. European power relations are to be adjusted once again, and that's supposed to make things better for all of us. But what does this really mean?

"[...]

"Now let's suppose that in our resistance to extermination we begin to seek allies (we have). Let's suppose further that we were to take revolutionary Marxism at its word: that it intends nothing less than the complete overthrow of the European capitalists order which has presented this threat to our very existence. This would seem to be a natural alliance for American Indian people to enter into. After all, as the Marxists say, it is the capitalists who set us up to be a national sacrifice. This is true as far as it goes. 

"But, as I've tried to point out, this "truth" is very deceptive. Revolutionary Marxism is committed to even further perpetuation and perfection of the very industrial process which is destroying us all. It offers only to "redistribute" the results--the money, maybe--of this industrialization to a wider section of the population. It offers to take wealth from the capitalists and pass it around; but in order to do so, Marxism must maintain the industrial system. Once again, the power relations within European society will have to be altered, but once again the effects upon American Indian peoples here and non-Europeans elsewhere will remain the same. This is much the same as when power was redistributed from the church to private business during the so-called bourgeois revolution. European society changed a bit, at least superficially, but its conduct toward non-Europeans continued as before. You can see what the American Revolution of 1776 did for American Indians. It's the same old song. song. 

"Revolutionary Marxism, like industrial society in other forms, seeks to "rationalize" all people in relation to industry--maximum industry, maximum production. It is a doctrine that despises the American Indian spiritual tradition, our cultures, our lifeways. Marx himself called us "precapitalists" and "primitive." Precapitalist simply means that, in his view, we would eventually discover capitalism and become capitalists; we have always been economically retarded in Marxist terms. The only manner in which American Indian people could participate in a Marxist revolution would be to join the industrial system, to become factory workers, or "proletarians," as Marx called them. The man was very clear about the fact that his revolution could only occur through the struggle of the proletariat, that the existence of a massive industrial system is a precondition of a successful Marxist society. 

"[...]

"So, I suppose to conclude this, I should state clearly that leading anyone toward Marxism is the last thing on my mind. Marxism is as alien to my culture as capitalism and Christianity are. In fact, I can say I don't think I'm trying to lead anyone toward anything. To some extent I tried to be a "leader," in the sense that the white media like to use that term, when the American Indian Movement was a young organization. This was a result of a confusion I no longer have. You cannot be everything to everyone. I do not propose to be used in such a fashion by my enemies. I am not a leader. I am an Oglala Lakota patriot. That is all I want and all I need to be. And I am very comfortable with who I am."

People love to go “ in the Soviet Union they picked your job for you 😭” yeah cunt that’s what we’re doin now too except they make you bark like a dog for three weeks straight first getting denied everywhere you wanna work until you end up somewhere you dont like anyway. Let’s just cut out that middle man why don’t we

[the-aila-test]

Native Media Theory's video on an Indigenous Perspective of Avatar is SO GOOD and you should really take the time to watch it. Always prioritize Indigenous perspectives of films about and/or inspired by Indigenous people

[libraryleopard]

the true detective reddit is primarily full of haters but this post did make me laugh

[scamallach-1]

Excerpt of ‘What Is Indigenous-Rooted Direct Action?’ from Klee Benally’s “No Spiritual Surrender”

[damnesdelamer]

At first, I thought that my difficulties in life were caused by the fact that I was Indigenous. Then, in my thirties, I dis- overed that in truth, it was because I am a woman. It took a long time before I could become a woman, I mean, an Indigenous woman. Being an Indigenous woman is twice as difficult, because you embody two converging political realities. Women are also considered a "minority" in a way, and our struggle is motivated by the need for personal and collective security. So I became a feminist. Because no one is born a feminist, you must choose to become one.

~ Véronique Hébert, Anarcho-Indigenism

[thegentleintellectual]

Text ID: “Falling in love felt fluid. It snowed when we fell in love. Everything reminded me of warm milk. Everything seemed less real. I thought my cup was overflowing. I found myself caressing my own face”

Excerpt From: Terese Marie Mailhot. “Heart Berries.”

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"In these circumstances, the commercial economy of the fur trade soon yielded to industrial economies focused on mining, forestry, and fishing. The first industrial mining (for coal) began on Vancouver Island in the early 1850s, the first sizeable industrial sawmill opened a few years later, and fish canning began on the Fraser River in 1870. From these beginnings, industrial economies reached into the interstices of British Columbia, establishing work camps close to the resource, and processing centers (canneries, sawmills, concentrating mills) at points of intersection of external and local transportation systems. As the years went by, these transportation systems expanded, bringing ever more land (resources) within reach of industrial capital. Each of these developments was a local instance of David Harvey's general point that the pace of time-space compressions after 1850 accelerated capital's "massive, long-term investment in the conquest of space" (Harvey 1989, 264) and its commodifications of nature. The very soil, Marx said in another context, was becoming "part and parcel of capital" (1967, pt. 8, ch. 27).

As Marx and, subsequently, others have noted, the spatial energy of capitalism works to deterritorialize people (that is, to detach them from prior bonds between people and place) and to reterritorialize them in relation to the requirements of capital (that is, to land conceived as resources and freed from the constraints of custom and to labor detached from land). For Marx the

wholesale expropriation of the agricultural population from the soil... created for the town industries the necessary supply of a 'free' and outlawed proletariat (1967, pt. 8, ch. 27).

For Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1977) - drawing on insights from psychoanalysis - capitalism may be thought of as a desiring machine, as a sort of territorial writing machine that functions to inscribe "the flows of desire upon the surface or body of the earth" (Thomas 1994, 171-72). In Henri Lefebvre's terms, it produces space in the image of its own relations of production (1991; Smith 1990, 90). For David Harvey it entails the "restless formation and reformation of geographical landscapes," and postpones the effects of its inherent contradictions by the conquest of space-capitalism's "spatial fix" (1982, ch. 13; 1985, 150, 156). In detail, positions differ; in general, it can hardly be doubted that in British Columbia industrial capitalism introduced new relationships between people and with land and that at the interface of the native and the nonnative, these relationships created total misunderstandings and powerful new axes of power that quickly detached native people from former lands. When a Tlingit chief was asked by a reserve commissioner about the work he did, he replied

I don't know how to work at anything. My father, grandfather, and uncle just taught me how to live, and I have always done what they told me-we learned this from our fathers and grandfathers and our uncles how to do the things among ourselves and we teach our children in the same way.

Two different worlds were facing each other, and one of them was fashioning very deliberate plans for the reallocation of land and the reordering of social relations. In 1875 the premier of British Columbia argued that the way to civilize native people was to bring them into the industrial workplace, there to learn the habits of thrift, time discipline, and materialism. Schools were secondary. The workplace was held to be the crucible of cultural change and, as such, the locus of what the premier depicted as a politics of altruism intended to bring native people up to the point where they could enter society as full, participating citizens. To draw them into the workplace, they had to be separated from land. Hence, in the premier's scheme of things, the small reserve, a space that could not yield a livelihood and would eject native labor toward the industrial workplace and, hence, toward civilization. Marx would have had no illusions about what was going on: native lives, he would have said, were being detached from their own means of production (from the land and the use value of their own labor on it) and were being transformed into free (unencumbered) wage laborers dependent on the social relations of capital. The social means of production and of subsistence were being converted into capital. Capital was benefiting doubly, acquiring access to land freed by small reserves and to cheap labor detached from land.

The reorientation of land and labor away from older customary uses had happened many times before, not only in earlier settler societies, but also in the British Isles and, somewhat later, in continental Europe. There, the centuries-long struggles over enclosure had been waged between many ordinary folk who sought to protect customary use rights to land and landlords who wanted to replace custom with private property rights and market economies. In the western highlands, tenants without formal contracts (the great majority) could be evicted "at will." Their former lands came to be managed by a few sheep farmers; their intricate local land uses were replaced by sheep pasture (Hunter 1976; Hornsby 1992, ch. 2). In Windsor Forest, a practical vernacular economy that had used the forest in innumerable local ways was slowly eaten away as the law increasingly favored notions of absolute property ownership, backed them up with hangings, and left less and less space for what E.P. Thompson calls "the messy complexities of coincident use-right" (1975, 241). Such developments were approximately reproduced in British Columbia, as a regime of exclusive property rights overrode a fisher-hunter-gatherer version of, in historian Jeanette Neeson's phrase, an "economy of multiple occupations" (1984, 138; Huitema, Osborne, and Ripmeester 2002). Even the rhetoric of dispossession - about lazy, filthy, improvident people who did not know how to use land properly - often sounded remarkably similar in locations thousands of miles apart (Pratt 1992, ch. 7). There was this difference: The argument against custom, multiple occupations, and the constraints of life worlds on the rights of property and the free play of the market became, in British Columbia, not an argument between different economies and classes (as it had been in Britain) but the more polarized, and characteristically racialized juxtaposition of civilization and savagery...

Moreover, in British Columbia, capital was far more attracted to the opportunities of native land than to the surplus value of native labor. In the early years, when labor was scarce, it sought native workers, but in the longer run, with its labor needs supplied otherwise (by Chinese workers contracted through labor brokers, by itinerant white loggers or miners), it was far more interested in unfettered access to resources. A bonanza of new resources awaited capital, and if native people who had always lived amid these resources could not be shipped away, they could be-indeed, had to be-detached from them. Their labor was useful for a time, but land in the form of fish, forests, and minerals was the prize, one not to be cluttered with native-use rights. From the perspective of capital, therefore, native people had to be dispossessed of their land. Otherwise, nature could hardly be developed. An industrial primary resource economy could hardly function.

In settler colonies, as Marx knew, the availability of agricultural land could turn wage laborers back into independent producers who worked for themselves instead of for capital (they vanished, Marx said, "from the labor market, but not into the workhouse") (1967, pt. 8, ch. 33). As such, they were unavailable to capital, and resisted its incursions, the source, Marx thought, of the prosperity and vitality of colonial societies. In British Columbia, where agricultural land was severely limited, many settlers were closely implicated with capital, although the objectives of the two were different and frequently antagonistic. Without the ready alternative of pioneer farming, many of them were wage laborers dependent on employment in the industrial labor market, yet often contending with capital in bitter strikes. Some of them sought to become capitalists. In M. A. Grainger's Woodsmen of the West, a short, vivid novel set in early modern British Columbia, the central character, Carter, wrestles with this opportunity. Carter had grown up on a rock farm in Nova Scotia, worked at various jobs across the continent, and fetched up in British Columbia at a time when, for a nominal fee, the government leased standing timber to small operators. He acquired a lease in a remote fjord and there, with a few men under towering glaciers at the edge of the world economy, attacked the forest. His chances were slight, but the land was his opportunity, his labor his means, and he threw himself at the forest with the intensity of Captain Ahab in pursuit of the white whale. There were many Carters.

But other immigrants did become something like Marx's independent producers. They had found a little land on the basis of which they hoped to get by, avoid the work relations of industrial capitalism, and leave their progeny more than they had known themselves. Their stories are poignant. A Czech peasant family, forced from home for want of land, finding its way to one of the coaltowns of southeastern British Columbia, and then, having accumulated a little cash from mining, homesteading in the province's arid interior. The homestead would consume a family's work while yielding a living of sorts from intermittent sales from a dry wheat farm and a large measure of domestic self-sufficiency-a farm just sustaining a family, providing a toe-hold in a new society, and a site of adaptation to it. Or, a young woman from a brick, working-class street in Derby, England, coming to British Columbia during the depression years before World War I, finding work up the coast in a railway hotel in Prince Rupert, quitting with five dollars to her name after a manager's amorous advances, traveling east as far as five dollars would take her on the second train out of Prince Rupert, working in a small frontier hotel, and eventually marrying a French Canadian farmer. There, in a northern British Columbian valley, in a context unlike any she could have imagined as a girl, she would raise a family and become a stalwart of a diverse local society in which no one was particularly well off. Such stories are at the heart of settler colonialism (Harris 1997, ch. 8).

The lives reflected in these stories, like the productions of capital, were sustained by land. Older regimes of custom had been broken, in most cases by enclosures or other displacements in the homeland several generations before emigration. Many settlers became property owners, holders of land in fee simple, beneficiaries of a landed opportunity that, previously, had been unobtainable. But use values had not given way entirely to exchange values, nor was labor entirely detached from land. Indeed, for all the work associated with it, the pioneer farm offered a temporary haven from capital. The family would be relatively autonomous (it would exploit itself). There would be no outside boss. Cultural assumptions about land as a source of security and family-centered independence; assumptions rooted in centuries of lives lived elsewhere seemed to have found a place of fulfillment. Often this was an illusion - the valleys of British Columbia are strewn with failed pioneer farms - but even illusions drew immigrants and occupied them with the land.

In short, and in a great variety of ways, British Columbia offered modest opportunities to ordinary people of limited means, opportunities that depended, directly or indirectly, on access to land. The wage laborer in the resource camp, as much as the pioneer farmer, depended on such access, as, indirectly, did the shopkeeper who relied on their custom.

In this respect, the interests of capital and settlers converged. For both, land was the opportunity at hand, an opportunity that gave settler colonialism its energy. Measured in relation to this opportunity, native people were superfluous. Worse, they were in the way, and, by one means or another, had to be removed. Patrick Wolfe is entirely correct in saying that "settler societies were (are) premised on the elimination of native societies," which, by occupying land of their ancestors, had got in the way (1999, 2). If, here and there, their labor was useful for a time, capital and settlers usually acquired labor by other means, and in so doing, facilitated the uninhibited construction of native people as redundant and expendable. In 1840 in Oxford, Herman Merivale, then a professor of political economy and later a permanent undersecretary at the Colonial Office, had concluded as much. He thought that the interests of settlers and native people were fundamentally opposed, and that if left to their own devices, settlers would launch wars of extermination. He knew what had been going on in some colonies - "wretched details of ferocity and treachery" - and considered that what he called the amalgamation (essentially, assimilation through acculturation and miscegenation) of native people into settler society to be the only possible solution (1928, lecture xviii). Merivale's motives were partly altruistic, yet assimilation as colonial practice was another means of eliminating "native" as a social category, as well as any land rights attached to it as, everywhere, settler colonialism would tend to do.

These different elements of what might be termed the foundational complex of settler colonial power were mutually reinforcing. When, in 1859, a first large sawmill was contemplated on the west coast of Vancouver Island, its manager purchased the land from the Crown and then, arriving at the intended mill site, dispersed its native inhabitants at the point of a cannon (Sproat 1868). He then worried somewhat about the proprieties of his actions, and talked with the chief, trying to convince him that, through contact with whites, his people would be civilized and improved. The chief would have none of it, but could stop neither the loggers nor the mill. The manager and his men had debated the issue of rights, concluding (in an approximation of Locke) that the chief and his people did not occupy the land in any civilized sense, that it lay in waste for want of labor, and that if labor were not brought to such land, then the worldwide progress of colonialism, which was "changing the whole surface of the earth," would come to a halt. Moreover, and whatever the rights or wrongs, they assumed, with unabashed self-interest, that colonists would keep what they had got: "this, without discussion, we on the west coast of Vancouver Island were all prepared to do." Capital was establishing itself at the edge of a forest within reach of the world economy, and, in so doing, was employing state sanctioned property rights, physical power, and cultural discourse in the service of interest."

- Cole Harris, “How Did Colonialism Dispossess? Comments from an Edge of Empire,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Mar., 2004), p. 172-174.

[eretzyisrael]

Source

[rotzaprachim]

The way some modern American leftists use words is just like throwing spaghetti at a wall at this point

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

Charlie Tangaroa and the God of War

book 2 in a middle grade series about a boy whose father is a Ponaturi (sea-goblin)

charlie and his brother are back living their normal lives - until a visiting scientist is stabbed in a local campground, right before a meeting between iwi and the government over local resources

they try to investigate and quickly learn that Whiro, atua of chaos is involved, sowing discord between various groups, and they have to figure out a way to solve things before anyone else gets hurt

cover & illustrations by yours truly!

[queering-ecology]

LGBTQ America: A Theme Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer History—chapter 09. Sexual and Gender Diversity in Native America and the Pacific Islands by Will Roscoe. part 2

Two Spirits in Native Tradition: Roles, Genders, Identities and Diversity cont.

In the twentieth century, ‘berdache’ “became the standard anthropological term for alternative gender roles among Native Americans. By the 1980’s, however, there was call for a change among scholars. In 1990, at a gathering of Native American and First Nations people, the term ‘two-spirit(ed)’ was coined. “Today, the term is used to refer to “both male-bodied and female-bodied native people who mix, cross, or combine the standard roles of men and women” (09-5).

The author acknowledges in a footnote that the term has its limitations (translation errors, and the fact that many tribes believe that all of us have the essence/spirit of male and female in us). But none of his reasons for these limitations match with my main critique both with the term two-spirit but mostly with the way it is often spoken of. Even within the acknowledgement of individuals who do not conform 100% to the Western concept of man or woman, the people are still fit into a binary. They are referred to as ‘male bodied’ and ‘female bodied’ two-spirited people.

To me, this often feels like an easy way for people to ‘short cut’ their understanding of native genders—as soon as they understand the way someone is sexed, they can still fit that person into a category, even if those categories are imperfect. Intersexuality is a ghost when topics of sex and gender arise. More and more, we understand that sex is not immutable, it is yet another social construction—the process of someone developing in utero and then continuing to grow and change in their lifetime is so complex that very often people do not fit neatly into either the distinct category of male or female.

(See the link below for a better image of this)

Whether that is their very chromosomes, hormones, secondary or primary sex characteristics—all these things and more combine to create a person. A person whose very sex is unique to them, as their gender is unique to them. Who knows the true reality of the two-spirit’s biological sex? No one—unless they are given extensive expensive testing that has only recently become available.

The truth is that intersexuality is natural and is common in humans, even in the Western world with its biopolitical control and its dualisms. The reason two-spirit people were and are held so special is because they do not fit neatly into these categories. To me it feels a kind of modern colonial erasure to try and sex the bodies of people who often very clearly and blatantly blurred all barriers. It feels as if it misses the entire point of the term two-spirit, as least as I understand it. But, I have not read much into what other two-spirits (especially elders) think about this concept. “Two-spirit males have been documented in at least 155 tribes; in about a third of these a recognized status for females who adopted a masculine lifestyle existed as well”. (09-6) But as Roscue later adds, “absence of evidence cannot be taken as evidence of absence” (09-8).

In general, the lives of “native women have been overlooked […] and obscured by Euro-American sexual and racial stereotypes. Taking a broader view reveals that women throughout North American and the Pacific Islands often engaged in male pursuits, from hunting to warfare and tribal leadership, without necessarily acquiring a different gender identity” (09-8). Roscoe then offers some examples of Indigenous women being awesome. The author then lists examples of traditional terms for two-spirited people across various tribes and explains that many of them cannot be literally translated into gender binary terms like ‘man-woman’. “These terms have lead anthropologists, historians, and archaeologists to describe two-spirit roles as alternative or multiple genders” (09-6). In fact, “many native societies are capable of accommodating three, four, and possibly more genders, or having a gender system characterized by fluidity, transformation, and individual variation” (09-7).

The author discusses how two-spirit children were identified often as youth by the certain type of activities they liked to participate in. Oftentimes ceremonies ‘marked’ people with two-spirit status. He then goes on to discuss the other ways two-spirits lived in society. “In many instances, male and female two spirits were medicine people, healers, shamans, and ceremonial leaders” (09-8). Certain ceremonial functions were specific to two-spirits and they were often seen to hold great power (09-8). “Because two-spirits occupied a distinct gender status, their relationships were not viewed as being same-sex” (09-9). !!!! This feels so important for some reason!!

Sexual and Gender Diversity in Native Hawai’i

This section further emphases that indigenous peoples have had genders that go beyond male or female, man or woman and also that colonial violence is a tragedy. While I respect and love the people of Hawai’i and their struggles are so, so similar to Native Americans, I believe that the vast majority of Native Hawaiians do NOT consider themselves Native American (or American Indian or even just American) so my covering on this topic will be limited.

Roscoe speaks about the mahu stones that have extraordinarily sacred significance—these stones have a powerful history and connection to the mahu people (their gender diverse term). (This summary is literally so terrible and not at all a true representative of how important and beautiful this topic is, I apologize). Like the people, the stones faced colonization and were figuratively and then literally buried—“in the 1920s they were buried beneath a bowling alley” (09-15). They have since been reclaimed and are now being properly respected but, for the native peoples, “the Land inheres as sacred—beyond human perception and conception, beyond our capacities for belief and imagination—in and of itself” (09-15) and “If there were no humans on earth, they would still be sacred” (09-15). The stone’s spiritual power ‘has never been interrupted’ (09-15).

[shamebats]

Julian Brave NoiseCat, a writer and colleague from the climate justice movement, noticed some uncanny parallels at work: "I'm struck by the similarity of right-wing conspiracy theories to actual policies towards Indigenous peoples. 'replacement theory'—Manifest Destiny QAnon (mass institutionalized child abuse)—boarding and residential schools 'plandemic'—smallpox, alcohol, bioterrorism It's all so Freudian. The fear that it will happen to them stems from an implicit admission that they did it to others. As though the Black, Brown and Indigenous downtrodden are just as hateful as they are and are going to turn around and do to them what they did to us."

From: Doppelganger (Naomi Klein)

[screambirdscreaming]

I used to like saying "gender is a social construct," but I stopped saying that because people didn't tend to react well - they thought that I was saying gender wasn't real, or didn't matter, or could be safely ignored without consequences. Which has always baffled me a bit as an interpretation, honestly, because many things are social constructs - like money, school, and the police - and they certainly have profound effects on your life whether or not you believe in them. And they sure don't go away if you ignore them.

Anyway. What I've taken to saying instead is, "gender is a cultural practice." This gives more of a sense of respect for the significance gender holds to many people. And it also opens the door to another couple layers of analysis.

Gender is cultural. It is not globally or historically homogeneous. It shifts over time, develops differently in different communities, and can be influenced by cross-cultural contact. Like many, many aspects of culture, the current status of gender is dramatically influenced by colonialism. Colonial gender norms are shaped by the hierarchical structure of imperialist society, and enforced onto colonized cultures as part of the project of imperial cultural hedgemony.

Gender is practiced. What constitutes a gender includes affects and behaviors, jobs or areas of work, skillsets, clothing, collective and individual practices of gender affiliation and affirmation. Any or all of these things, in any combination, depending on the gender, the culture, and the practitioner.

Gender encompasses shared cultural archetypes. These can include specific figures - gods and goddesses, mythic or fictional characters, etc - or they can be more abstract or general. The Wise Woman, Robin Hood, the Dyke, the Working Man, the Plucky Heroine, the Effete Gay Man, etc etc. The range of archetypes does not circumscribe a given gender, that is, they're not all there is to gender. But they provide frameworks and reference points by which people relate to gender. They may be guides for ways to inhabit or practice a gender. They may be stereotypes through which the gendered behavior of others is viewed.

Gender as a framework can be changed. Because it is created collectively, by shared acknowledgement and enforcement by members of society. Various movements have made significant shifts in how gender is structured at various times and places. The impact of these shifts has been widely variable - for example, depending on what city I'm in, even within my (fairly culturally homogeneous) home country, the way I am gendered and reacted to changes dramatically. Looping back to point one, we often speak of gender in very broad terms that obscure significant variability which exists on many scales.

Gender is structured recursively. This can be seen in the archetypes mentioned above, which range from extremely general (say, the Mother) to highly specific (the PTA Soccer Mom). Even people who claim to acknowledge only two genders will have many concepts of gendered-ways-of-being within each of them, which they may view and react to VERY differently.

Gender is experienced as an external cultural force. It cannot be opted out of, any more than living in a society can be opted out of. Regardless of the internal experience of gender, the external experience is also present. Operating within the shared cultural understanding of gender, one can aim to express a certain practice of gender - to make legible to other people how it is you interface with gender. This is always somewhat of a two-way process of communication. Other people may or may not perceive what you're going for - and they may or may not respect it. They may try to bring your expressed gender into alignment with a gender they know, or they might parcel you off into your own little box.

Gender is normative. Within the structure of the "cultural mainstream," there are allowable ways to practice gender. Any gendered behavior is considered relative to these standards. What behavior is allowed, rewarded, punished, or shunned is determined relative to what is gender normative for your perceived gender. Failure to have a clearly perceivable gender is also, generally, punished. So is having a perceivable gender which is in itself not normative.

Gender is taught by a combination of narratives, punishments, and encouragements. This teaching process is directed most strongly towards children but continues throughout adulthood. Practice of normatively-gendered behaviors and alignment with 'appropriate' archetypes is affirmed, encouraged, and rewarded. Likewise 'other'- gendered behavior and affinity to archetypes is scolded, punished, or shunned. This teaching process is inherently coercive, as social acceptance/rejection is a powerful force. However it can't be likened to programming, everyone experiences and reacts to it differently. Also, this process teaches the cultural roles and practices of both (normative) genders, even as it attempts to force conformity to only one.

Gender regulates access to certain levers of social power. This one is complicated by the fact that access to levers of social power is also affected by *many* other things, most notably race, class, and citizenship. I am not going to attempt to describe this in any general terms, I'm not equipped for that. I'll give a few examples to explain what I'm talking about though. (1) In a social situation, a man is able to imply authority, which is implicitly backed by his ability to intimidate by yelling, looming, or threatening physical violence. How much authority he is perceived to have in response to this display is a function of his race and class. It is also modified by how strongly he appears to conform to a masculine ideal. Whether or not he will receive social backlash for this behavior (as a separate consideration to how effective it will be) is again a function of race/class/other forms of social standing. (2) In a social situation, a woman is able to invoke moral judgment, and attempt to modify the behavior of others by shame. The strength of her perceived moral authority depends not just on her conformity to ideal womanhood, but especially on if she can invoke certain archetypes - such as an Innocent, a Mother, or better yet a Grandmother. Whether her moral authority is considered a relevant consideration to influence the behavior of others (vs whether she will be belittled or ignored) strongly depends on her relative social standing to those she is addressing, on basis of gender/race/class/other.

[Again, these examples are *not* meant to be exhaustive, nor to pass judgment on employing any social power in any situation. Only to illustrate what "gendered access to social power" might mean. And to illustrate that types of power are not uniform and may play out according to complex factors.]

Gender is not based in physical traits, but physical traits are ascribed gendered value. Earlier, I described gender as practiced, citing almost entirely things a person can do or change. And I firmly believe this is the core of gender as it exists culturally - and not just aspirationally. After the moment when a gender is "assigned" based on infant physical characteristics, they are raised into that gender regardless of the physical traits they go on to develop (in most circumstances, and unless/until they denounce that gender.) The range of physical traits like height, facial shape, body hair, ability to put on muscle mass - is distributed so that there is complete overlap between the range of possible traits for people assigned male and people assigned female. Much is made of slight trends in things that are "more common" for one binary sex or the other, but it's statistically quite minor once you get over selection bias. However, these traits are ascribed gendered connotations, often extremely strongly so. As such, the experience of presented and perceived gender is strongly effected by physical traits. The practice of gender therefore naturally expands to include modification of physical traits. Meanwhile, the social movements to change how gender is constructed can include pushing to decrease or change the gendered association of physical traits - although this does not seem to consistently be a priority.

Gender roles are related to the hypothetical ability to bear children, but more obliquely than is often claimed. It is popular to say that the types of work considered feminine derive from things it is possible to do while pregnant or tending small children. However, research on the broader span of human history does not hold this up. It may be true of the cultures that gave immediate rise to the colonial gender roles we are familiar with - secondary to the fact that childcare was designated as women's work. (Which it does not have to be, even a nursing infant doesn't need to be with the person who feeds it 24 hours a day.) More directly, gender roles have been influenced by structures of social control aiming for reproductive control. In the direct precursors of colonial society, attempts to track paternal lineage led to extreme degrees of social control over women, which we still see reflected in normative gender today. Many struggles for women's liberation have attempted to push back these forms of social control. It is my firm opinion that any attempt to re-emphasize childbearing as a touchstone of womanhood is frankly sick. We are at a time where solidarity in struggle for gender liberation, and for reproductive rights, is crucial. We need to cast off shackles of control in both fights. Trying to tie childbearing back to womanhood hobbles both fights and demeans us all.

Gender is baked deeply enough into our culture that it is unlikely to ever go away. Many people feel strongly about the practice of gender, in one way or another, and would not want it to. However we have the power to change how gender is structured and enforced. We can push open the doors of what is allowable, and reduce the pain of social punishment and isolation. We can dismantle another of the tools of colonial hedgemony and social control. We can change the culture!

[atopvisenyashill]

I am so glad you articulated the criticism of Dany crucifying the slavers as a political folly and not a moral folly like listen I am a Dany fan if I could send asks from my sideblog you would know this but I do not believe we are supposed to just brush off the crucifixion like Dany herself isn’t even fully convinced it was the right thing to do. Remembering it she feels sick and has to shut down her doubts and TELL HERSELF it was right. She is an interesting character to me because she can’t stand the compromises she must make to maintain peace AND YET she does want justice and liberation BUT she also hates the suffering and bloodshed of war AND YET she is quick to command violence on impulse. I do think her peace in Meereen was real (big Meereen Knot Essays believer) but all of her internal conflicts lead her to her mistakes. Can’t stand peace but can’t stand war so she just tears herself apart!! It’s tragic! It’s interesting! So much more interesting than an unambiguously heroic Dany who makes no mistakes ever!

Yeah, like....it's certainly morally messy, and I think it's morally more messy because Dany isn't a slave of the Ghiscari like Missandei or an Unsullied like Grey Worm, Red Lamb, etc who is rising up and using violent revolution to liberate the slave class of Meereen - she is a descendant from a foreign, formerly slaving culture that enslaved most of the cultures represented in Meereen, someone of noble birth who has experienced immense suffering but was able to pull herself out of it because of her immense social privilege and magical abilities, using violence in an attempt to liberate those her family had once helped subjugate while...still keeping herself at the top of the pyramid.

There's a lot of mess and contradictions in this situation and I find it much less interesting (as you say) when people paint what Dany is doing here as unambiguously heroic. I know I sound like a broken clock when I say it, but the justification of "well this culture has slavery and slavery is bad" is the exact sort of rationalization many colonial and imperial powers make when conquering. White Americans made it about various Indigenous communities ("oh well the Iroquois had slaves and conquered their neighbors" yeah and white americans had chattel slavery which is objectively worse so what now??), the UK and France used it as a rationale for conquering most of Africa and parts of Asia; there's always this annoying through-line of "well Africans sold themselves into slavery" and I think making this argument that "Well the Ghiscari are brutal slavers" is really similar. And I know people don’t like the dragon/nuke comparison or the imperialism/colonizer comparisons but….what made the genocides of the Americas, and the colonization and imperialism of the 20th centuries stand out from the wars that came before is the sort of hellish combination of nationalism, political schisms, fervent hatred of the Other, and industrial growth. Never before could people amass armies and kill on such a massive scale before. Never before did we have weapons that were so fucking good at killing. Never before did we have the bureaucracy capable of streamlining the process so damn well! (and not for lacking of trying, shout out rome but like...still). I think the dragons are a commentary on that - when someone has access to technology like that, can one person be left to decide if it’s use is good or evil? can one culture not be completely corrupted by their technological advances? can nuclear bombs or weapons Ever be used for good, and if they can be then where is that line drawn? who draws the line? why does that person get to draw the line? I don't think any of this will have a clear answer because that's not exactly how he does things - he's just writing a scenario about this and letting us analyze why it happens on our own.

So it’s like okay the Ghiscari and Dothraki are slaving cultures...Sacking a city is still a violent, destructive thing to do and she does it three times including to a city she is attempting to rule. The moment she had an inkling she might be ruling Meereen, she should have rethought her actions there so she doesn’t start off alienating a large group of people. Coming in as a stranger from a culture who used to be slavers and constantly making comments about how much she hates the culture she’s ruling over is....not great! Dany going back and forth between "I hate these people I was right to crucify them" and "there's too much violence amongst these people I have to stop the violence" is why the issues in Meereen become so complicated. Does she have reasons for acting this way? Yes! It doesn't change the outcome of her actions!

What's interesting about her is that as you say, she does realize this conflicting dichotomy within herself! That’s like, the entire issue she’s facing in Meereen - she wants peace because she knows that’s what’s best for the people there and yet struggles to control her boredom and temper because she is too traumatized to sit still any longer. She’s associated the constant move, the constant fight, the violence and blood and death and destruction with righteousness, justice, goodness, and we can SEE it’s having a negative effect on her psyche, her emotions. She’s not HAPPY by the ending of adwd, she’s not self actualized, she’s just hardened herself completely in the face of this unending monster of a campaign. She wants off this ride and yet she’s unable to find a way out. I don’t think we’re meant to cheer her on here!! SHE is barely cheering herself on here!!! It’s a burden to her!!!!

[blubberingjellyfish]

In light of soon to come events I'd like to share a piece of theory written from a native perspective