half in place

Invasion Day 2012

2012-01-11T18:39:00.000-08:00

come to this event it will be great:

Invasion Day 2012

26 January 7.30pm

The Hive
Unit B16
22 Smeed Road
London E3 2NR

LOCATION & DIRECTIONS

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=107022917795244575338.00049428982809a4e0468&ll=51.539022%2C-0.022466&spn=0.006993%2C0.013776&z=16

We are on Smeed Road, off Dace Road. The space is 2 minutes walk from the nearest bus stop, 2 minutes walk from Old Ford Lock, 4 minutes walk from Victoria Park, max 10 minutes walk from another 20 bus stops, and about 10 minutes walk from Hackney Wick Station. Stratford, Bow Road, Bethnal Green, Mile End and Central Hackney are also all quite nearby.

January 26th is 'Australia Day' - the nation's annual public holiday to commemorate the founding of the white Australian state. Many indigenous Australians commemorate this annual holiday as 'Invasion Day' in acknowledgment of the dispossession and genocide they have suffered during the founding and maintenance of today's Australia.

We are pleased to invite all those interested in learning about and questioning Australia's colonial history to join us for London's third annual Invasion Day film screening and discussion night.

We will be screening the film Samson and Delilah by indigenous film maker Warwick Thornton, giving updates from the Rollback the Intervention and Stop Black Deaths in Custody campaigns, commemorating the 40 year anniversary of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, facilitating discussion on solidarity and anti-racism and raising funds for the Intervention Rollback Action Group in Alice Springs.

From the director: 'Storytelling has been a way of life for my people over thousands of generations, from singing stories under the stars to celluloid on the screen. The medium has changed but the reasons for telling our stories have not.
I believe that this is a story i needed to tell. You have to believe in your stories and trust that an audience will take the journey with you and your characters.
The audience’s journey through the darkness makes the light brighter at the end. Samson and Delilah’s unconventional love is that light. Their challenges and struggles are inspired by what i see every day as I journey through my own life here in Central Australia. It is real.'

We look forward to seeing you there!

http://www.bankofideas.org.uk/events/event/invasion-day-2012/

We regret that the Bank of Ideas building is not fully accessible. Please email invasiondaylondon@gmail.com with your accessibility requirements and we will do our best to meet them.

occupy everything?

2011-10-22T15:50:00.000-07:00

this is my favourite sign so far. occupations are happening in financial districts in major first world cities all over the place. the new york wall street occupation which was the first to start has now been going for over a month - despite the increasingly bad weather a couple of hundred people are camping out there and maintaining what is now a functioning alternative community in the heart of corporate america. originally an adbusters campaign, the occupations have clearly resonated with people disaffected by government cuts to social services and by a financial industry that has received unfathomable amounts of government cash while hundreds of thousands of people have lost their homes, their healthcare and/or their local library/EMA/child care allowance/etc...

unlike other occupations such as Greenham Women's Common, the Greensboro sit-ins or Tahrir Square, the occupations in the news in recent weeks have very broad principles and demands rather than a specific agenda. indeed the london occupation's initial statement is a fairly open series of declarations about who they are, and it is explicit about being a work-in-progress.

the vagueness of the demands does pose strategic difficulties for the movement (if we can call it that), with some critics from the right dismissing the occupations as a pointless waste of space and time. and it's true enough that the 'occupy everything' branding runs the risk of fizzing out with a somewhat inaudible groan of dissent due to a lack of clarity in its agenda. the lack of defined meaning to what 'occupy' means has also led to very problematic cries to 'occupy sydney/vancouver/albuquerque' or other settler colonial cities which are of course, to the indigenous populations, already occupied. to demand an occupation now ignores the histories of genocide and theft upon which those cities are built, and these problems have been well articulated, and in some cases effectively acted upon (albuquerque is now using '(un)occupy') by local activists and occupiers.

another common criticism of the occupations is that they are simply full of 'the usual suspects' - students and hippies, mainly white and often from privileged backgrounds. having been down at the occupy london camp on the saturday it formed and then again yesterday, six days in, i have to say that that criticism is true enough. though there is some diversity, the reality is that in order to be able to majorly disrupt your life to camp out in central london, you need to have a fairly flexible lifestyle. it is extremely difficult for those on minimum wage jobs and/or with primary childcare responsibilities to be physically present at occupations like these. and i admit that while i was down there i felt annoyed at the number of white dreads, 'free hugs' signs and love symbols splattered around the place. the capitalist system is a mammoth, pervasive and complex machine that will not be undone by replacing $ and £ symbols with <3 symbols, getting a handful of bankers to start meditating or even by hundreds of protestors camping out in financial districts around the first world for weeks and perhaps months on end. that undoing is going to take much more, and it is an unfortunate reality of the mainstream media that it takes this kind of spectacle for it to pay any attention to anti-capitalist organising, when people of colour, the working classes, migrants and other marginalised people have for decades been and are still organising against capitalism in less spectacular but just as important, courageous and innovative ways.

but then that is not the fault of the occupiers, and long-term activists who do that essential everyday work of organising against various kinds of oppression and injustice are also among those who are occupying. as both a physical and virtual space, the occupations are i think providing new room to form alliances, discuss ideas and attempt to strategize together. their insistence on being physically present in places where they do not belong has, most importantly, attracted enough attention and caused enough disruption to unsettle, even if only slightly, the pervasive assumption that There Is No Alternative. and that unsettling has added momentum to those already organising and attempting to think against capitalism.

so i find myself, strangely, wanting to just reiterate what Zizek said here. although he can be off the mark offensive at times, Zizek's message on wall street was a good one:

don't fall in love with yourselves...carnivals come cheap...
beware of false friends (liberals!) who want to turn this into a harmless moral protest (beware those fucking 'l<3ve' signs)... and
the main message is 'we are allowed to think about alternatives'...

to captialism. we are allowed to think about alternatives to capitalism. if the occupations are in fact opening up that conceptual space in popular discourse, then that will be a radical and welcome development, and even the drum circles will have been worth it.

occupy london yesterday:

and last saturday:

trust me

2011-09-21T06:21:00.000-07:00

you know maya the really hot drummer from austra? well she has another project together with robert alfons also based in toronto. they are called trust and they make perfect dark synth-pop with beats and bass so good it will make even the most shattered heart want to beat again. you can download their most recent track bulbform for free here:

and check out their last single candy walls here:

The EDL and Fear of a Brown Planet

2011-09-04T05:00:00.000-07:00

i went to the counter demo against the english defence league (edl) in east london yesterday. the edl, for those who don't know, is an explicitly islamophobic, racist organisation that is accurately labelled as fascist by many commentators. the edl had planned to march to the mosque in whitechapel but were prevented from doing so by a combination of forces. staff at particular tube stations (notably kings cross) closed entrances to prevent edl supporters from travelling east, pubs put forward as edl meeting points chose to shut down business for a few hours, and hundreds of anti-racist and anti-fascist protestors came out in force to make it clear that the edl was not welcome in east london. theresa mae's 30 day ban on all marches through tower hamlets was, unsurprisingly, not so effective - the edl still marched, flags and banners in hand, out from the liverpool street station wetherspoons where they had been drinking and towards tower hamlets. the police no doubt helped in keeping the edl away from their desired end point of the whitechapel mosque but they did let them march, shout racist abuse, chant and sing fascist slogans and THROW FIRE CRACKERS at those who had come out to oppose them. the police allowed the edl out of the pub but pretty forcefully prevented protestors from following them. i could go on and on about the use of police dogs to disperse protestors and the extremely arbitrary decisions about who was allowed through police cordons at different points, but that's not really what i wanted to write about here. in the end i think the day was a failure for the edl and that is something we should feel positive about.

the thing about the edl though is that it is very easy to condem them. it is not easy to put a face to racism - racism is a deeply embedded social structure that affects every aspect of society sometimes explicitly but often in very insidious ways. it is an everyday and everywhere occurrence. the edl provides an ugly, skin-headed face to racism that all of us who benefit from white supremacy on a daily basis can feel good about shouting down, and then continue on with life as usual. that's not to take away in any respect from the incredibly important work that the rally did yesterday, but just to keep in mind that racism is much bigger and more complicated than the edl. signs that compare the islamophobic norwegian killer anders breivik with edl leader tommy robinson reinforce the idea that racism is something that occurs in freakish individuals, rather than something upon which our entire social system is built. campaigning against fascism is not enough - fascism is just an extreme end point and articulation of a racist society.

which brings me to a different anti-racist event i went to on thursday night, a stand-up gig by comedy duo fear of a brown planet. Nazeem Hussain and Aamer Rahman are brown, Muslim australians who use comedy to point out racist assumptions and practices that are far more insidious and difficult to articulate than fascism and the edl. indeed sometimes the racism is left unarticulated, but you are left laughing at this brown man's joke about his sister not being allowed out of the house after 4pm and wondering why that is funny. most of their audiences are no doubt already fairly anti-racist (although they had just come from edinburgh - 'the whitest festival on earth'), and for the anti-racists and people of colour in the audience it is an incredibly affirming and energy-inducing experience to see them live. but for those who have wound up listening to them for reasons other than their radical race politics, this comedy has the ability to communicate a critical awareness of one's own racism and race privilege without it being a negative or punitive experience. their performance is, in my opinion, incredibly productive political work.

would edl members laugh at fear of a brown planet? no, i think their racism is too personalised and too extreme. but moderate racists - liberals and conservatives - might well find themselves at least smiling along with Nazeem and Aamer. check them out if you have the chance.

and while finding links for this post i also found this from Nazeem's recent appearance on a serious political tv show in australia. he calls malcolm turnbull's comparison between osama bin laden and hitler stupid. i love this guy.

Darcus Howe

2011-08-10T06:22:00.000-07:00

for a small insight into the racism of the british middle classes all you need to do is watch the bbc interview respected writer and activist Darcus Howe in relation to the riots.

I've always supported Tottenham

2011-08-08T03:51:00.000-07:00

if you're tempted to listen to BBC5 this morning for some coverage of the London riots, don't. i made that mistake and was barraged by racist callers spouting off false facts and being moderated by a patronising school ma'am announcer who consistently referred to those involved in the riots as 'the hooligans'.

when i was reading the guardian's initial reports on the tottenham riots late saturday night, what struck me was that they referred to Mark Duggan, the man who police shot dead two nights before, simply as 'a father of four'. had Mark been on the other side of a lethal gun shot there is no doubt the media would have been reporting that a black man had shot someone dead on the high street, but in this case i had to independently research to confirm my strong suspicion that he wasn't white.

Mark Duggan was indeed a man of colour. it is still unclear why he was being arrested, let alone why police shot him twice in the head. initial ballistic tests suggest that the 'he shot at us first' story suggested by police is about as reliable as the 'we found Ian Tomlinson on the ground and tried to help him but protesters were stopping us' story that the met released in the wake of the 2009 G20. Ian Tomlinson was a working class white man - his family is still fighting for some kind of justice from the state. having received an unlawful killing verdict from a coronial jury this May and a promise of a manslaughter charge against the police officer who shoved Tomlinson to the ground, they are really not doing too badly. by comparison the family of Sean Rigg, a black man who died in police custody in Brixton in 2008 while being 'restrained' for mental health issues, are still waiting for the initial coronial inquiry to take place.

according to inquest there have been 174 black and ethnic minority deaths in police custody or immediately following police contact in England and Wales since 1993. these deaths are occurring in the pre-arrest and arrest phase, so long before the suspects have actually been tried for the alleged offence. (not that there is any reason to put much faith in the trial process. britain's prisons, like those of its ex-colonies, are still disproportionately filled with people of colour.)

predictably, there is in the media a strong normative divide being encouraged between the family of Mark Duggan, who are allowed to ask for justice, and the feral hooligan youth, who have no genuine politic and simply want to loot stores for new sneakers. so the anger of the family is legitimate and the anger of 'the youths' is not. what this narrative of course misses is that unlike the ConDem's bullshit 'big britain', most of the black residents of Tottenham are in fact in it together, not in the sense that they form some romanticised version of 'community' but in the sense that they are systematically impoverished, killed, harrassed and then ignored by the state. racism is alive and well in britain today and it has material effects. the kids stealing packs of crisps from Aldi and nikes from JD sports are not taking them home to add to their stockpiles of waitrose organic apples and Italian designer brogues.

the riots spread to other poor areas of London over night. let's see what the next few days bring. as my friend Roz said on Saturday, i've always supported Tottenham.

what's my name?

2011-06-28T11:36:00.000-07:00

look everyone it's my latest publication. an interview with katie from austra in the fabulous berlin-based bend over magazine. and that's right, click on the picture to look closely and see that i'm just going by keenan now, you know, like madonna, cher or rhianna. i think my fame has now adequately reached those heights so i've dropped my first name.

not really. i published this under the name of keenan for a few reasons, most of which i'm uncomfortable with now. one reason that i am still comfortable with is that bend over is a queer feminist publication, and lots of the writers use names other than those they were given at birth. part of a queer feminist politic can, i think, be about choosing to leave particular inheritances and expectations behind, particularly those that come from our families or from bureaucracies that demand we be labelled in particular ways. so with that re-naming part of it i'm fine.

a lot of people call me keenan. some of my very closest friends. it's a term of endearment i guess and also a sign of familiarity and belonging - within the group of friends who i study with we often call each other just by our surnames, and it makes me feel like we're part of a team, or even a little family. but the readers of bend over magazine don't know me, so that doesn't make sense here.

the main reason i published this just as keenan was that at the time i did the interview i thought i might be shifting to only using keenan in my daily life, so not going by sarah at all anymore. aesthetically i prefer keenan. it's far less common, it's sharper and way more gender neutral. actually i think it's a boy's name, and it's so hot when girls have boys' names. i think i feel tougher when i go by keenan, 'cooler' and more queer. i was also in a relationship with someone who could only call me keenan, in part because i was introduced to her that way, but in part i think because she wasn't attracted to the side of me that is and always will be sarah. the girl i grew up as, with all my emotional baggage, vulnerability, femininity... tendency to cry almost daily. it's not very sexy, but it's still part of me. tal, whose picture i have tattooed on my arm, usually refers to me as 's.k.'. sometimes though, when we're gently ripping each others' hearts out or trying to re-sew the wound, she'll call me sarah, and everything becomes stronger because it reminds me that she knows who i am.

i'm still at a point where i hesitate when introducing myself to new people, because i'm instinctively unsure whether to say sarah or keenan. but since my latest break up i feel a sense of relief and acceptance at being called sarah. especially from anyone i have a crush on. i still introduce myself as keenan probably about half the time, but i'm not ready to let go of sarah yet. she's a big crying wuss but someone needs to love her.

note: i'm still super happy with this publication! check it out, the pictures are so hot they might melt your eyes.

soundtracks

2011-06-24T03:13:00.000-07:00

it's so annoying when you share your favourite song with the person you're in love with and she loves it too and you spend all this time making out to it and talking about it and re-listening to the best bits of it together and wondering how they made it sound like that and then you break up and you can't listen to that song anymore because it makes you sad.

i break too easily

2011-06-15T12:32:00.001-07:00

there was a 100% chance i would love this song.

Women: a photo project by Goodyn Green

2011-06-13T14:12:00.000-07:00

i really hate having my photo taken, under all circumstances, but am proud to have been a model for this project. if you identify as a woman but are frequently mistaken, insulted or discriminated against because you appear to be breaking some gender laws, Goodyn Green is still looking for models for the next shoot in berlin on june 18. would be nice to see more women of colour involved.

the littlest giant

2011-06-09T15:10:00.001-07:00

me and my bike got hit by a car a few weeks ago. i thought that this blogpost was going to be its obituary. but full city, the best bike shop in london, has brought it back to life with some new black forks and a bit of wheel true-ing. my dad gave me this bike for my 19th birthday, and we have been inseparable ever since. although i know that we live in london and there is always the possibility that theft will tear our worlds apart, i am deeply attached to the gold giant. we belong together. it takes me places and makes my world bigger and easier. it fits my body. in my life as a cyborg, my bike and my laptop are my essential organs. me and the giant have ripped about toowoomba, canberra, brisbane, london, oxford and many places in between. when i was at uni i twice got hit on by guys who identified me as "the girl with the gold giant". we've been in triathlons, gone camping, commuted to schools, workplaces, friends' houses, parties, parks and a million swimming pools. it's not the fastest bike around and it's no longer the prettiest, but i wouldn't have it any other way. congratulations little giant on your successful surgery.

The Sweet Fist List: 6 tips for straight women trying to overcome their heterosexuality

2011-06-08T11:54:00.001-07:00

1. read some radical feminist literature. your desire for men is unnatural. as a woman you have been socialised, probably since birth, into thinking that men are superior creatures that you are attracted to, and that their mutual attraction towards you proves your worth as a person. this is wrong. men are not superior and you are not innately attracted to them. most men are idiots.

2. be patient with pussy. you may not be turned on by the idea of going down on the woman you are in love with right now. it might frighten or even repulse you. but it is not frightening or repulsive to eat pussy. many straight men do it on a regular basis, and you know the pleasure it brings. your fear and aversion come from being socialised in a misogynist and homophobic culture in which same sex attraction and female genitalia are constructed as wrong and repulsive, but they are not. they are in fact the key to phenomenal heights of sexual pleasure, multiple orgasms, days and days of fucking with dicks as optional, reversable and machine-washable extras.

3. your parents aren't going to like it. but that's ok. they didn't like it when you first started dating boys either. if they love you, they are likely to take some time and come around because they want you to be happy. but if not, then you have to decide whether you want to live the rest of your life as a heterosexual in order to please your parents. if they cannot accept you and your hot awesome girlfriend for who you both are then it is likely that your relationship with your parents is not wholly honest and healthy anyway.

4. don't worry about baby-making. there are many many ways around this. you can have babies if you want them. being a lesbo and therefore not falling pregnant incidentally/accidentally may help you think critically about parenting and family structures and what you actually want from having full responsibility for a child. this will probably make you a better parent.

5. butch up a little. your girlfriend is a woman like you. for reasons similar to those discussed in (1) and (2), you might feel repelled when your girlfriend displays qualities that you associate with femininity. this might be worst when she is feminine in ways that you are feminine and that you associate with your own feminine vulnerability. but femininity and masculinity are performed by everyone at particular times regardless of sex. the men you have dated in the past have been feminine too, just in different ways, and through a different body. when they were feminine you found it edgy, courageous and attractive. you need to let your girlfriend be feminine sometimes too. you will both go through periods where you feel feminine and periods where you feel masculine. all healthy relationships involve a level of gender bending.

6. do it your way. there are all kinds of lesbians these days. you don't have to get married, move to the suburbs with your cat and listen to the indigo girls. even though you might have lots of lesbian friends you probably still have some lesbo-phobia that you need to undo. undo it. like all phobias, it's bullshit. santana from glee is a lesbian.

geek parade

2011-06-06T15:30:00.001-07:00

rainy days at the british library locker rooms = umbrella parades. adorable, those academics. i liked the one with pink polka dots.

Energy

2011-06-04T02:55:00.000-07:00

the New York children's choir PS22, the darling of Lady Gaga, Kylie, Tori Amos etc, covered a song by Austra, Katie and Maya's band. and their version is amazing. i love the way the kids sway and use their hands and are so unreservedly expressive. i love the drummer. i love that the teacher chose this song for them. i love the recognition Katie and Maya are receiving. i love everything about this video.

Poetry is Company

2011-05-31T02:57:00.000-07:00

well it's been a long time since i've written a poem. partly because i haven't been moved to but partly because of the cringe i have developed against poetry and the arts. it all seems so self-indulgent. but i have been reading audre lorde, and am convinced by her argument that poetry is not a luxury. not for everyone anyway. it is a necessary tool that connects us to ideas and feelings that are hard to articulate, that we are not supposed to really find or say out loud, and that have the capacity to change the shape of things.

i fell in love with one of lorde's poems and i have started to write one too. i don't like what i've written now except for the first two lines, but it felt important to try to express some of what has been sitting somewhere at the base of my spine for the past few months. when i say i fell in love with lorde's poem, i don't mean it metaphorically. i have never felt connected to a piece of writing as i do to this poem. i heard a few words and felt a spark, then got to know it better and loved it whole. the first morning after i found it i woke up feeling happy and i couldn't quite remember why, like i had made a new friend or met a new crush...it was the poem. over the next few days i felt compelled to read it in horrifically cliched settings like out loud in the bath, though i could never make it through without sobbing. i wrote it out by hand, then typed and printed it on small cards so i could carry it round in my pocket all day. now i know it by heart and have also shared it with the woman who i feel like lorde wrote it for on my behalf. it has been a rollercoaster of mainly sad emotion but it has made me feel so much less alone.

Sister, Morning Is A Time For Miracles
Audre Lorde

A core of the conversations we never had
lies in the distance
between your wants and mine
a piece of each
buried beneath the wall that separates
our sameness
a talisman of birth
hidden at the root of your mother's spirit
my mother's furies.

Now reaching for you with my sad words
between sleeping and waking
a runic stone speaks
what is asked for is often destroyed
by the very words that seek it
like dew in the early morning
dissolving the tongue of salt as well as its thirst
and I call you secret names of praise and fire
that sound like your birthright
but are not the names of a friend
while you hide from me under 100 excuses
lying like tombstones along the road
between your house and mine.

I could accept any blame I understood
but picking over the fresh and possible loneliness
of this too-early morning
I find the relics of my history
fossilized into a prison
where I learn to make love forever
better than how to make friends
where you are encased like a half-stoned peach
in the rigid art of your healing
and in case you have ever tried to reach me
and I couldn't hear you
these words are in place of the dead air
still between us:

A memorial to conversations we won't be having
to laughter shared and important
as the selves we helped make real
but also to the dead
revelations we buried still-born
in the refuse of fear and silence
and your remembered eyes
which don't meet mine anymore.

(I never intended to let you slip through my fingers
nor to purchase your interest ever again
like the desire of a whore
who yawns behind her upturned hand
pretending a sigh of pleasure
and I have had that, too, already.)

Once I thought when I opened my eyes we would move
into a freer and more open country
where the sun could illuminate our different desires
and the fresh air do us honour for who we were
yet I have awakened at 4AM with a ribald joke to tell you
and found I had lost the name of the street
where you hid under an assumed name
and I knew I would have to bleed again
in order to find you
but just once
in the possibilities of this too-early morning
I wanted you
to talk
not as a healer
but as a lonely woman
talking to a friend.

(1979)

i feel like this woman sometimes

2011-05-02T14:21:00.000-07:00

right. i haven't blogged forever and so much has been happening. america thinks it killed osama bin laden, prince william married kate middleton, the tomlinson coronial inquiry came back with an unlawful killing verdict, scott rush finally won his appeal against the death penalty in indonesia, sarkozy and berlusconi managed to have some outstandingly racist laws go through, obama published his birth certificate, austra released their new music video to lose it and britain had a predictably failed referendum on electoral reform. i should have a lot to say about all of this but i don't really. i'm feeling a bit tired. maybe it's also that i'm heading into these final throngs of my phd. what has this last four years of my life been all about? how can i justify it to myself, let alone an examining board? what am i going to do next? did i make a phenomenally bad life decision? i could have done something useful. etc. i'm also living alone in england's white imperial heartland, recovering from two major breakups and trying not to have a quarter life crisis. something like that.

so instead i just want to show you this photo, which i took while my friend coonan and i went sailing in australia recently. this is where the mouth of the brisbane river meets the pacific ocean. see how the water just goes on and on right from underneath you and so perfectly out into the sunrise? but somehow that skinny marker to the left off in the distance manages to stand up and give boats directions where to go. we spent three days on the boat, always in the sun and often in the water

today in the bath i read this by audre lorde: "...there is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman i love". this is from uses of the erotic, a paper she delivered in 1978. i haven't written any good poems lately. or even any good blog posts. i haven't eaten any flowers off the stem either. but i have moved into sunlight against the bodies of people i love - in stunning landscapes of ocean, desert, and even the toowoomba range. after an inspiring workshop at goldsmiths last week i am also fast developing a new relationship with the poetry of audre lorde. so i'm going to draw on her writings, on this photo, on that french woman eating that flower, on the feeling i get while swimming in the lido with the early summer sun beating down on my body, and on the other random bites of beauty that fall into my world, and i'm hoping that they might propel me a little through this time of not knowing quite what to say.

elsewhere

2011-03-21T13:47:00.000-07:00

elsewhere could not be more appropriately named. it is a different space. one that will suck you in if you let it, into its innumerable old things each with its own story to tell (or make up), into its sad island of forgotten leftovers, its gleaming wooden benchtops made from the old rafters and sanded down with love until 2 in the morning, into its whiskey bar on the third floor that opens even later, into its secret sleeping spots and other places to dream, into its eclectic pool of constantly arriving visitors from the community it has grown, into the infectious creative energy of the folk who live and breathe it daily. a living museum set in a former thrift store in greensboro, north carolina.

good bye lady gaga

2011-02-17T07:14:00.000-08:00

my love affair with lady gaga has ended, it has ended badly. almost a year ago i blogged about how much i loved the video for telephone, and gaga in general. i thought her intense aesthetic contained multiple levels of irony that might have real political effects. since then however, lady gaga has done a number of things to piss me off. asked to join the boycott of arizona over its heinously racist anti-immigrant laws, she refused; then she made her number one political priority the inclusion of gays in the US military; and now, her latest single, "born this way". the song is sledgehammer subtle liberal self-help affirmation for all those weirdos out there, by which she means queers and non-white and poor people. it's ok guys, gaga tells us, you should love yourself because you were born this way. that's right, you can't help it, it's not your fault, it's probably genetically determinable. normal people shouldn't judge you for something you could never do anything about.

well gaga, i'm afraid i have to present you with a SHUT THE FUCK UP card*. shut the fuck up lady gaga. race and sexuality are not inherited or made by god, they are socially constructed. i am a raging queer but not because i was born this way; because compulsory heterosexuality and mandated gender roles repulse me. the terms "orient" and "chola" are offensive to many who are put into those categories by white people like you. and many disabilities are acquired throughout life rather than inherited - does that mean people with acquired disabilities should not love themselves? because they're weirdos who were not "born this way"? the same with poverty, like thanks for telling poor people that they're beautiful even though they're poor (whoa, you are SO accepting lady gaga), but some people aren't born that way. some people are born affluent but become poor because they lose their jobs or go into debt or don't engage in the economy in the way they're expected to. i guess they shouldn't love themselves, because they were born normal and became that way. and before you tell a "subway kid" to "rejoice your truth" (wtf does that mean anyway?) why don't you live on the streets yourself for a while first.

also, the music itself is not so catchy.

so, lady gaga, this is the end for you and me. it was fun while it lasted. we'll always have telephone.

*more on this in a later post

oh canada

2011-02-09T01:33:00.000-08:00

is there something in the water in toronto? this southeastern canadian city seems to be breeding a new generation of swelteringly hot young queer women musicians producing genuinely interesting sounds and aesthetics. here are two samples.

AUSTRA "Beat and the Pulse"
Uploaded by domino. - Explore more music videos.

released yesterday this is the video for the first single "Beat and the Pulse" from Austra's upcoming album "Feel it Break", to be released May 17. recently signed by domino, Austra is the brainchild of Katie Stelmanis, who, together with Maya Postepski on percussion, toured Europe promoting her solo album "Join Us" the summer before last. Austra's sound is a thrilling combination of Stelmanis' operatic range and control ("her voice does things to me": friend in living room) and dark gothic pop beats, bass and ambient synth effects. it is testament to what becomes possible when you mix classic human talent/skill with new technology. this video is palpably focussed on women's sexuality, but there is a refreshing absence of cardigans, acoustic guitars, whiny lyrics, white girls with dreadlocks or even riot girl feistiness (not that there is, of course, anything wrong with riot girl feistiness). instead there are a wider than usual range of bodies playing with understandings of femininity and desire as well as understandings of the human - some of the dancers are amphibious, some have tails, some wear crotch-less lace underwear but in a way that is far removed from the generally misogynist, objectifying images of women in mainstream music videos. these mesmerizing semi-webbed creatures are dripping with power, they are performing for themselves and for women in silk shirts and sat on wooden chairs, not for the commercial straight male gaze. each shot is fast and loaded with dimly lit imagery, making the longest scene (from 1.56-2.05) stand out as a deliciously slow flirtation. the exquisitely strong feminine sexuality and blurring of the human and non-human of the video thus nicely match that of the music.

Emma McKenna "Run With It" from What Rabbit on Vimeo.

released two months ago this video for the single "Run With It" from Emma McKenna's album of the same name is also new gothic but with a distinct solo artist beauty. McKenna also has a unique, powerful voice, and dressed in white lace playing an electric guitar with a changing background landscape including a swinging battle-axe and tender glimpses of more ambiguous histories, this video adds to the song's intelligent lyrics. "if all that we have is the past then i'll find you there" - again this is music that we can characterise as feminine, and this track involves familiar themes of lost love and pangs of sadness but there is no desperate pleading, mourning or self-pity. instead there is an acceptance of what has passed and an empowering re-conceptualisation of space and time - the past exists as a place that can be returned to. the song offers a different narrative on breakups and thus a different normative understanding of temporal trajectories for intimate relationships - not ending up together forever doesn't have to mean any kind of failure or waste of time. rather as has been suggested by some queer and polyamorous writers and as is made to happen in this video, each relationship is a thing of mixed emotions and beauty which retains a permanence despite it having ended.

Genocide's a joke at the Oxford Socio-Legal Centre

2011-02-02T07:58:00.000-08:00

i went to a talk called "Australia: A Continuing Genocide?" at the oxford socio-legal research centre yesterday. it was part of the centre's "transitional justice series", the very premise of which is problematic. when is justice ever anything other than transitional? the answer from the centre, i imagine, would be, "when it is being administered by the house of lords or a lower court of the british legal system", as the series features eight talks all focussing on legal issues in "other" (read: ex-colonial and/or predominantly non-white) places - you know, places that are behind. ANYWAY, i was pretty excited about this talk and it was not bad in the end - essentially liberal, but making some emotively powerful points about the ongoing annihilation of aboriginal culture by australian government policies and showing how the effects of these policies fit within Lemkin's original definition of "genocide". during the talk, i made notes getting ready to ask the speaker a question about his lack of critique of the rule of law in the australian state - while he was critical of "government policies", he failed to make the point that the very maintenance of the australian state is dependent upon the ongoing dispossession and control of aboriginal people. when he finished the talk and before taking questions, the chair - a white australian man from the centre - joked, "oh i guess when i accidentally introduced you as an englishman instead of a welshman before that was an act of cultural genocide". a ha ha ha ha. oh god yes, genocide is SO hilarious. most of the room laughed with him. once again i found myself taking up my role as the humourless feminist. then began about a half an hour of questions. first off the bat (and let me tell you, there were A LOT of jokey, blokey, "let's keep this light" references to cricket made throughout the question back and forth) was a white australian guy who was deeply offended by the paper. not because it failed to critique the rule of law in the australian liberal democracy, but because it failed to look at the issue of intent - where did the speaker get off, accusing his country of racism let alone genocide, when there was no evidence of intent to commit genocide, or of "foreseeability" or "recklessness" as to genocide. why, if he fails to take into account intent it would be the same as removing the intent component from murder, and just saying that whenever there are two people in the same place and one of them dies, it's murder. now, this was a guy who has an enormous sense of entitlement, and i would imagine, does not suffer from nerves when asking questions at seminars. but he was shaking as he spoke. shaking, i think, with racist rage in a way that would have made pauline hanson proud. the questions that followed his were phrased somewhat less aggressively but were all from the same perspective - again the issue of intent, genocidal intent is required by international law now, how dare you depart from that legal definition? if you don't focus on intent, it's like if a woman i slept with cries rape you'd just believe her... the northern territory intervention was supported by both sides of parliament and continues to be supported by people who genuinely care very much about the aboriginals and who just don't know how to deal with what is a very difficult situation... if we give them sovereignty they couldn't look after themselves anyway... what's your solution?.. haven't you read peter sutton?

now, in the face of this - by far the most conservative seminar room i have ever been in with a total lack of race critique or self-reflexivity - i realised that i was in fact more closely aligned to the speaker than to anyone else in the room. or at least, anyone who was speaking. i knew that if i didn't say something i would implode later, so i managed to get my hand up and was the last question taken. i returned to the question of intent, and supported the speaker's lack of focus on it. we are not dealing with two abstract hypothetical individuals or the definition of murder under criminal law, we are dealing with white and black australia and a very specific trajectory of racist/colonial history. to focus on intent is to refocus on the experience of white people. it's to say, yes we all acknowledge that what white people did (and continue to do) has caused the cultural and material devastation of aboriginal people, but it's ok because they didn't mean to. this was the first time the word "white" had been used throughout the night. a weird silence filled the room and i worried slightly that they might attack me with their lapel pins. but i went on, making my point about law, the state and it's reliance on aboriginal dispossession, and the speaker's somewhat inconsistent approach to the legitimacy of legal standards. but i wasn't aggressive or flippant. i was nice, and critical but supportive, and i realized that i was channeling stacy, lamble, suhraiya, brenna, davina and a bunch of other amazing folk i have been fortunate enough to have been surrounded by for the past 4 years. and i felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude for how much i have learnt from both profs and other students at kent law school and particularly at the centre for gender, sexuality and law, a very different centre from the one i found myself in. being taught in a feminist, anti-racist environment has meant that i am not as good at taking up space, demanding to be heard and engaging in aggressive academic debate with the gatekeepers of official knowledge as i would otherwise be, but that's ok with me, because at least i'm not a total asshole.

Invasion Day 2011

2011-01-24T03:27:00.000-08:00

Wednesday 26 January 7.30pm
Invasion Day 2011
Offmarket, 111 Lower Clapton Road E5 0NP

January 26th is "Australia Day" - the nation's annual public holiday to commemorate the founding of the white australian state. Anyone interested in questioning the celebration of the founding and maintenance of a nation through policies of genocide and dispossession, and in hearing about aboriginal resistance to the australian government's most recent racist laws is invited to this Invasion Day event. We will be screening thenewly released documentary "Our Generation" (see below), giving updates from the Rollback the Intervention and Stop Black Deaths in Custody campaigns and facilitating discussion on solidarity and strategy.

"Our Generation"
A documentary film by Sinem Saban and Damien Curtis (2010)
http://www.ourgeneration.org.au/

A rollercoaster journey into the heart of Australia’s Indigenous relations, a hidden shame that is pushing the world’s oldest living culture to the edge. Through the stories of the Yolngu of NE Arnhem Land, the film looks at the Government’s ongoing policies of paternalism and assimilation, examines the real issues underlying Indigenous disadvantage, and opens dialogue on ways forward that respect Aboriginal culture and dignity.

A fresh look at unresolved issues, with music by John Butler Trio, Yothu Yindi, Archie Roach, Gurrumul, and Goanna.

For further details contact keenansj@gmail.com

this boat was stopped

2010-12-16T03:36:00.000-08:00

at least 28 Iranian and Iraqi asylum-seekers drowned yesterday within sight of the australian territory they were aiming for. the media keeps emphasizing that there were "women and children" on board. if they were all men, would we not need to feel bad about it? is there a universal innocence about women and children that means that even white australians will be able to relate to the people they can otherwise only understand as "boat people"/"queue-jumpers"/"terrorists"?

there is a definite inconsistency between the expressions of mourning, grief and a-political human tragedy that are being bandied around now, and the welcome this boat would have received had it made it safely to the shores of christmas island. had the tragedy of the shipwreck been averted, australian headlines would today be filled with alarmist, racist jargon about the need for tougher policies of deterrence against asylum-seekers, and those who were on the boat would be beginning their indefinite prison-sentences, waiting in a detention centre where suicide might start to seem like their best option. asylum-seekers come from spaces of death and misery over there, and we create further spaces of death and misery for them to occupy here.

i await with fear the racialised, petty onslaught that will be the political fall-out. abbot and gillard both went to the polls promising to stop the boats. well, this boat has been fucking stopped.

refugee law is part of a broader citizenship/migration system that regulates and overwhelmingly prevents the movement of people who need to move. a refugee policy shift now either to the left or the right might minimize the number of bodies floating onto australian shores, where "we" have to see and think about them, but only a much broader paradigm shift is going to minimize the gross spatial disparity that means that people in some areas of the world are desperate enough to risk their lives and leave everything they know and love to get onto a wooden boat heading across the world to somewhere else.

gay asylum and false sites of blame

2010-12-10T01:25:00.000-08:00

from 5.30 to 7 last night, pretty much the exact timing of the university fee-trebling vote, instead of joining the insurrection outside parliament i was a few blocks further up in a room at the university of westminster law school participating in a recorded conversation about sexuality and asylum. the mp3 file and transcript will go online some time in the new year, and i think it went ok - when i spoke, i spoke well, but it was hard to find the space to speak wedged in between a rep from stonewall and a barrister who specializes in gay asylum cases. stonewall works with the UK border agency, teaching them how to be better at spotting "genuine" homo refugees, and the barrister genuinely and passionately believes in the law, in refugee law in particular. if using refugee law to help gays from Uganda, Iran or Colombia find a life outside the closet in London amounts to participating in a white saviour discourse, he said, then that is ok with him.

i managed to make the point that the kind of gay identity queer asylum seekers are forced to perform in order to prove their sexuality for the UKBA is a specifically western and commercial one - claimants are encouraged by their lawyers to enter normative same-sex relationships (preferably with a British middle class citizen), to frequent their local gay bar, attend pride, shop at gay sex stores and keep their receipts (preferably pay with a bankcard rather than cash so the courts can be sure it was them who made the purchase). this is the "good gay citizen", persecuted due to their sexuality over there, in countries portrayed as backwards, intolerant and politically inferior to British liberal democracy, but welcome here: let us protect you from your unfortunate country of origin, and let us not think too hard about why ex-colonial countries suffer political and social unrest today. the refugee law system requires queer asylum seekers to prove just how badly they fail to fit into the "backward" home country they have moved from - their good gay citizenship here is based on them distancing themselves from their culture there. this distancing process is not just about sexuality, it is also about class and race. applying Jasbir Puar's work on homonationalism to refugee law, the gay refugee who can prove how much he (and it is usually a he - lesbian invisibility is a major problem for judges trying to work out what a real dyke looks like) doesn't fit in at home and does fit in here, stands in stark contrast to the "monster-terrorist-fag", the racialised and sexualised other who repulses all good citizens, gay or straight, birth-right or migrant.

this splintering effect is of course the fault of the refugee law system and not the individuals caught within it - queer asylum seekers and their advocates are only performing what the courts demand of them, and there is much at stake. the problem is though that what is good for the individual might not be good for the broader space in which that individual exists. refugee law will only ever be a bandaid solution to systemic transnational problems of gross economic inequality, social unrest and war.

at one point during the night i pointed out that there were, as we were speaking, huge demonstrations happening down the road in london against the university fee hikes, and that the austerity measures are linked to the increasing restrictions on migration, both being part of the production of a false site of blame and ineffective means of redress for the current crisis. my comment was sidelined as irrelevant to the conversation, but what i should have been able to articulate in response was that refugee law does the same thing. although it helps individuals, the refugee legal system constructs countries of the global south as sites of political backwardness and intolerance and provides the ineffective solution of furthering the geopolitical gap between here and there - constructing britain as a tolerant metropolis willing to provide asylum to those who beg for its protection and who can prove their good (gay) citizenship.

after the conversation i joined my friends on the streets around oxford circus. kids were chanting revolution, smashing top shop windows and throwing paint at charles and camilla. this is civil unrest and disobedience in england, god forbid, and it is grabbing headlines both here and internationally. we the students and those opposed to the austerity measures may have lost the vote yesterday, but what is being fought for in the streets and occupations is systemic change, not the bandaid solutions offered by legal reforms. legal reforms can provide incremental change and sometimes strategically that is worth fighting for. but real change will not come about by lowering the requirement of discretion for gay refugees just as it will not come about by holding a police authorised, candle-light vigil after you've been defeated in parliament. it will come by thinking and acting outside the law and its liberal mindset, and thereby creating new spaces of possibility. and that is of course, a much harder task.

the naomi myth

2010-11-28T12:42:00.000-08:00

i went to see naomi wolf speak at oxford university on friday night. i have to admit i've never read her work directly, but her book "the beauty myth" is something of a white feminist classic and i figured that she might have something useful to say. i was, sadly, mistaken. i've fortunately forgotten much of what she blurted, with unceasing and emphatic condescension, throughout the two hours she spoke (for a great, thorough recap and analysis see this blog). highlights included her number one priority for the achievement of gender equality being voice projection lessons for women (by which she meant women who are students at oxford university, but this definition of women was taken for granted throughout the night); telling the room that they were entitled to speak for indian women, so long as they read about them first; insisting on having men's officers as well as women's officers (again, she meant "at oxford university", but again, this was an unspoken taken-for-granted) because naomi doesn't believe in discrimination; and her constant interruption of almost every student who spoke: "hang on, i want you to SLOW DOWN. young women always speak too fast because they think someone is going to interrupt them". the irony of what she was doing there appeared to be genuinely lost on her.

what i remember most clearly though are two points about how she ended, both of which are appropriately reflective of her talk as a whole. firstly, she found it very difficult to stop speaking. several attempts had been made already by the chair to bring the evening to a halt, but naomi kept on going. 5 more minutes turned into 10 more minutes which turned into 15 more minutes. as the room started getting more confrontational she became increasingly defensive and long-winded, delving into the intricacies of how her charity functions and how hard a childhood she had, points that were completely irrelevant to the issues being raised. she refused to listen to the pleas of the chair to bring her talk to an end, the night eventually coming to something of an awkward halt when the chair insisted for at least the 4th time that she wrap up. this reluctance to finish was entirely consistent with her general lack of respect towards the room all evening, and her obsessive focus on herself. every question came back to naomi, something about her personal experience, her age, her books, her authority, her status.

secondly, she ended with some comments on porn. naomi doesn't like porn, she doesn't think we should watch it. now, if she'd been peddling some hard-line second wave "all heterosexual sex is (or at least might be) rape, all pornography is violence" line, i actually would have had some respect for her. it's a line i completely disagree with, but at least it's consistent, it's reasoned, it's theoretically based in radical feminist politics. but naomi just thinks we should "find joy in each other", in our individual partner instead of in something outside of our relationship. or something equally vague, new age and normative. she threw in some dodgy statistic about a huge percentage of women in porn having been sexually assaulted as children (read, all sex workers are victims), but really she just wants us to bring our focus, our energy (this might have been when she mentioned buddhism) back to our individual partners (or lovers, god forbid). and this is entirely consistent with her badly formulated neo-liberal feminism. her agenda is all about individuals - individual women who will succeed through voice projection lessons, through playing the stock market, through getting degrees at oxford university, and through "natural", tool-free, privatized, monogamous vanilla sex.

well, this is not my feminism naomi. if i can't be listened to, if i can't talk about race and class, if i can't have pornographic sex, i don't want to be part of your revolution. but then, that's not really the issue either, because naomi wolf is a very very long way from anything remotely revolutionary.

i did not know it could be like this

2010-10-19T15:08:00.000-07:00

this is the saddest song i have ever heard in my life

i heart clapton

2010-07-26T10:49:00.000-07:00

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the water has been cut off from our housing block (upper clapton) since yesterday. i can't drink, flush the toilet or cook, let alone take a shower. so i went down to jess and jeanine's (hackney central) to clean myself, which was actually lovely because i also got to eat various delicious treats in their always welcoming kitchen and, you know, hang out. on my way home (lower clapton) a van drove into my bike, from behind me, while i was stationary at a T-intersection. i was fine, but he drove so hard into my back wheel that i couldn't pull my bike out from his front spoiler. he reversed so i could move but my wheel was totally warped and un-ridable. meanwhile two cops were rushing over, i guess it was a slow crime day in clapton, or they just saw an interaction with an older black man and a younger white woman and thought they were onto something. i told them i was fine and didn't want to make a report but they checked his registration papers anyway and, i think, actually intimidated us both into some kind of solidarity. my new friend the guy who drove into me, roland, offered to take me to a bike shop, which satisfied the police, so we put my gold giant into the back of his van, i climbed into the front and off we went down pembury road. we went to a couple of bike shops (lower clapton, stoke newington) where his friends worked but none of them had the right parts to fix it today. i did get to hang out with more local clapton people than i ever have before in my 6 months living here though - you know, black people who've lived here for generations as opposed to us white lesbians who are gentrifying the area today. the circumstances were weird but everyone was fucking lovely. i met roland's brother, his friend from primary school and one of his neighbours. he then dropped me at the edge of the congestion zone so i could go down to my natural middle class habitat look mum no hands (shoreditch) and drink lattes with white people while enjoying free wifi as my bike was being seen to. also hopefully bianca will get me a discount. they couldn't fix it today either, so i left my bike there and took the bus home.

5 hours after leaving for my shower i returned home (upper clapton) to find that there was still no running water. would it take this long for them to fix a pipe in chelsea? a couple of strongly worded phone calls later i joined my fellow wigan house residents down at the emergency tap on the street corner. everyone is out and about with their buckets and bottles and their eagerness to share thoughts on how nonsense and irritating the whole business is. i think rose and i might actually be the only white people who live in our housing block. i had a chat with an incredibly insightful 8 year old boy named ishmael. we agreed on the lamentable state of essential service provision in london under the current government.

today was the most i have ever felt part of clapton. all it took was getting run over, harassed by police and starved of an essential service. none of it would have happened if i didn't live up here on warwick grove. doreen massey talks about the thrown-together-ness of place and how location allows for interactions and alliances that would otherwise be unlikely to happen. john berger says here is where we meet. i like it here in clapton.

proud of what?

2010-06-25T00:38:00.000-07:00

i am living in berlin at the moment and last weekend at pride (or "Christopher Street Day" as they call it over here) judith butler publicly refused a "civil courage" prize from the CSD committee. she used the platform, directly in front of the brandenburg gate and before a crowd of mainly pink dollar party gays and tourists, to criticise the CSD committee for its complicity in racism. she said that CSD refuses to understand antiracism as an essential part of its work, and she spoke about the instrumentalisation of gay rights in cultural wars against migrants and in military wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. as you can imagine, this caused quite a stir. the very shock with which the accusation of racism has been met is itself proof that the CSD committee, and perhaps the white LGBT "community" more generally, does not understand antiracism to be an essential part of their work or their identity. the CSD organisers have rejected any accusation of racism, but there is still this feeling that "race is not our problem/we are a gay movement not a race movement/we do not say explicitly racist things/some of my best friends are black...".

and this is of course, the problem (or one of many) with identity politics. it misses, firstly, the fact that not all gays, queers, trannies, gender-non-conformers are white - some are also - and no less - people of colour, who have been surviving racism all their/our lives.

(i'm not sure whether to use "their" or "our" here. i am mixed race, half white, half chinese-malaysian, but i get read as white almost all of the time. so i experience white privilege almost all of the time. when i was younger i was subject to direct racist abuse a couple of times, mainly when i was with my mother, but for most of my life i have not had to survive and process racist abuse on a daily basis as do most people of colour living in predominantly white states. what i do experience on a daily basis is casual racism, in the media and in conversations that i'm sometimes engaged in and that sometimes i just overhear. the racism is not directed at me, but it hurts and silences me.)

putting "gay" in one category and "race" in another and understanding them as separate campaigns implicitly constructs "gay" as white. "us" gays need state protection against those who attack "us" in the streets (migrants) and those who threaten our personal freedom (islam). this approach racializes "gay politics" in a way that is complicit with the white supremacy on which our western-dominated world is built. the reality of course is that homophobic violence occurs across all communities regardless of race, and if queers are frightened of a powerful institutional religion maligning them then they should be focussing their energy on fighting the catholic church.

more broadly, you cannot single out "homophobia" and "gay rights" and claim to fight against/for them in isolation in the name of social justice. well not unless your goal is to be quietly assimilated into the state, into an economy that depends on the exploitation of many for the benefit of very few, on a severely racialised and gendered distribution of wealth, into a system where people of colour are incarcerated at wildly disproportionate levels and where the racist violence of the state is utterly normalised, whether through border controls, through the criminal justice system or through military wars. that is, unless your goal is to be part of a fundamentally racist transnational state system. this is why any queer or gay movement that does not understand antiracism as essential to its work is complicit in racism, particularly at a time when "gay rights" get held up by western states as a justification for attacking (both culturally and militarily) non-white communities. (for more information on this see the no homonationalism site.) pride used to be political because it was subversive to declare that you were proud not to fit in with social rules about who you can fuck, who you can love and how you perform your gender. it was a declaration that not only were you not going to hide your sexuality, but that you were proud to be "queer", proud to be outside those social rules and the injustice and oppression they perpetuate. the growth of the LGBT movement means that those social rules might have shifted for some, but the broader structures of injustice are still very much in place.

if in 2010 pride is just a party because (middle class, white) gays are now represented on tv, allowed to have civil unions, and given police protection if they are attacked in the street, then i'll take gay shame any day.

it's only natural

2010-06-17T15:17:00.000-07:00

i'm pretty exhausted re thinking about the death in custody of Cameron Mulrunji Doomadgee and the corrupt police investigation that followed. i have written about it here and published on various aspects related to the case and its coverage here and here and the only rally i have ever organised was about this case. so part of me feels like i can't possibly have anything left to say. the level of injustice that occurred from the moment this white police officer wrongly arrested this innocent aboriginal man on an island that has been systematically abused by governments since colonisation, is too great for me to express in words. yesterday though, the state anti-police corruption board finally released its report - almost 6 years after the fact - on the death and its coverup. for a government document, it is appropriately scathing. just one comment stands out from the various press that has surrounded the report, and it's from the police commissioner Bob Atkinson, the highest cop in town. here it is:

"I think that one of the underlying tragedies associated with this is this aspect; that I think in all probability, not just the initial investigating officers but a range of other people as well believed that in all probability that Cameron Doomadgee or Mulrunji had died of natural causes."

Cameron Doomadgee was a healthy 36 year old man who was on his way to go fishing the morning he died. within an hour of coming into contact with senior sergeant Chris Hurley, he was dead. he died of massive internal injuries including having his liver almost cleaved in two. he had several broken ribs, a ruptured portal vein and a black eye. how the top police officer in the state can still make the claim publicly, 6 years later and when we all know the extent of the medical evidence, that anyone in their right mind honestly thought that Cameron Doomagdee died of "natural causes" is beyond me.

well, i guess it's not. because actually i think there are two possibilities for what bob is thinking here. the first is just that he knows how preposterous a statement he is making and he is just lying, continuing the culture of cover-up that has now been well exposed. the second is that he's not lying, that actually he is just reflecting the deeply embedded racism of the australian police force, who have come to criminlise aboriginal people so completely and for so long, that it does in fact feel natural to them when aboriginal people die on their watchhouse floors. it's what happens. they get arrested, they resist, they die, there's some paperwork, policing continues. Cameron Doomadgee did not die of natural causes, but it's natural for police to think so if they work for a white state built on aboriginal genocide.

don't make friends with the arabs

2010-06-01T11:23:00.000-07:00

when a humanitarian aid ship carrying items like wheelchairs, children's toys and building equipment through international waters and towards a severely impoverished and isolated area can be described as "a premeditated and outrageous provocation" that justified killing ten peace activists, something is seriously fucked up. clearly, it's not enough that the IDF kill palestinians, they must also kill their friends. so if you want to take aid to gaza, you better be ready to die in the process.

a year and a half after operation cast lead, which resulted in the deaths of 1500 palestinians and 13 israelis, will this grotesque display of violence done in the name of "self-defence" now be enough for world powers to take effective action? probably not.

zebra

2010-05-02T15:21:00.000-07:00

don't i know you better than the rest? all deception, all deception from you

achingly beautiful track by beach house

the heart series

2010-04-20T07:45:00.000-07:00

come on it's no more self-indulgent than any of my other posts.

what do i do with these bags of hurt?

heart archery

i don't want to think anymore...

2010-03-21T12:03:00.000-07:00

i have to write a blog about lady gaga because since the release of the telephone video last week (in fact, ON MY BIRTHDAY - yes there IS a karmic connection between us) i cannot concentrate on anything for more than 3 and a half minutes or have a conversation without becoming completely distracted by my own obsession with this pop artist. apart from knowing i have an obsessive personality and the fact that i'm trying to write a chapter, i actually cannot explain why i have fallen so hard and fast for lady gaga. it's really reached a level i feel out of control of - i downloaded telephone as my ringtone, i want to spend next saturday learning the dance moves from that video, and the unbridled joy i felt on saturday night when the DJ played first bad romance and then, as the last track of the night, telephone, can only be described as a thrilled hysteria. the entire club was singing along with her, with me, and i could feel a pumping energy running through my body, which was releasing serotonin at a level it cannot usually do on its own. i felt like lady gaga was my friend, and as the track was playing, everyone else in the club understood. understood what exactly, i don't know, but for that entire 9 or so minutes that together constituted the two songs anything was possible. world peace, flying horses, a career as a professional hip hop dancer.

and i am not the only one who's addicted. telephone has been watched over 22 million times in the week and a half since its release, her album and the single are both at number 1 in the uk, her tour is sold out almost everywhere and jack halberstam and other prominent gender studies profs are writing about her. i don't totally understand the stuff about the lesbian phallus but halberstam's description of lady gaga "dragging drag, camping camp, ironing irony" is i think part of my gaga addiction - she reaches a level of total performance i haven't witnessed before. i am a hardcore fan and i don't even know lady gaga's real name - i don't really want to know, because what she is is a performance. a spectacular, provocative, empowered, beautiful performance. if drag is about performing "the other" gender, if camp is about "artifice, frivolity, naïve middle-class pretentiousness, and shocking excess" (as Sontag suggests), and if irony is where there is a discord between the actual meaning and the literal meaning, then lady gaga is performing each of the above in an intentional, highly staged, product placement-funded production - she is representing representation and showing us just what a joke it is. i mean, "lady gaga"? just the name is a piss-take of all the reactions that we do in fact have to her. is she a lady? yes, she's an outrageous diva, but she also won't deny the rumours that she has a dick. is she gaga? those hats and heels would suggest so, but then, so are we every time she does any kind of media release. so is the joke on us or her? or on the multiple layers of inevitably corrupted representations of gender, fame, art, humanity, consumption, knowledge and everything else between us?

everything about lady gaga that could be offensive to a do-gooding middle-class PC feminist like me, isn't, or doesn't have to be (with perhaps one exception, to be discussed below. ok maybe two). her videos, and specifically, telephone, features women dancing in their underwear yes, but it also features one (and only one) man who is a sexist jerk and gets killed by his girlfriend, who then runs away with her black lesbian lover in a pussy wagon. (and that lover is BEYONCE.) the women dancers have toned, thin, stereotypically beautiful bodies, yes, but the kiss between gaga and Heather Cassils, a "real life" gender queer performance artist, is not for the straight male gaze. there are a heap of cultural references i don't understand but there are obvious allusions to kill bill and thelma and louise, both of which are about women who are not to be messed with (and in telephone, they don't kill themselves at the end). it's violent, yes, as was it's predecessor paparazzi, but the violence is ridiculous, it is comical, it is a joke about the "bad things" women do (or are represented as doing), the consequences of which they then (intentionally?) have a reason to escape from. away into the perfectly coloured horizon, with Beyonce. and even the deaths might not be real - a number of those poisoned at the diner come back to dance behind beyonce and gaga in the last dance sequence, or is it just that time is not linear? either way we know from previous videos (bad romance, paparazzi) that death itself does not necessarily mean the end in gaga world. telephone is a fetishization of prison, yes, but look at the trans women guards and the studded leather gloves they use to log in to their online dating sites - this is an S and M site (watch the making of to hear the guards' take on things ).

and then there's the product placement. there are brands everywhere - polaroid, wonder bread, miracle whip, some takeaway store. all of these are old school iconic u.s. brands, and it all happens in a diner after leaving prison, all transport being in an oversized car - the only way it could more blatantly represent the u.s.a is if beyonce and gaga dressed up in the flag in the last dance sequence... oh right, they do. even beyonce's fingernails are painted in stars and stripes. the one brand that isn't that kind of kitsch americana and that i think is the one aesthetic blotch on the film is virgin. the virgin mobile phone is ugly and it doesn't make sense, even in the fantasy world of lady gaga - in part because it's ugly whereas the rest of the video is beautiful (yes, even the other placed products have a particular aesthetic), and in part because she wouldn't have her phone in her pocket in the prison yard. she wouldn't have sunglasses made of cigarettes either i hear you say, but the smoking sunglasses are so very far from anything in "real life" that it's clear that they're a fantastical object, whereas a virgin mobile is too real and mundane to be anything other than an ad for itself. yeah i guess there is something to be said about the meaning of the word "virgin" and the fact that it's grabbed by Cassils in the prison yard but the double meaning isn't clever enough to fit with the rest of the video. all companies are of course profit-driven and vile but virgin is known for being particularly repulsive - remember the urinals shaped as women's open mouths in the virgin flight lounges? and virgin is on record as using prison labour. so the virgin placement for me is the one thing i don't love about the video - it's not an ironic representation of representation like the rest of the clip, it's just an ad and it's ugly.

the second point i'm not sure about is race. and by not sure, i mean i'm genuinely not sure, rather than that i'm passive aggressively saying it's got bad race politics. there's no denying that lady gaga is almost fluorescently white, and that she couldn't get away with some of the ironic/double representative antics that she does if she wasn't white. could a black woman get away with representing herself (even with gaga's level of irony) as a serial killer, a possible hermaphrodite, a chained up unfaithful sex object in a prison wearing sunglasses made out of smoking cigarettes, and still have the enormous popular appeal that gaga has? i don't think so - tavia ngong'o's point about it being different for a racialised body, with a history of being objectified and maligned, to then attempt to be ironic about that objectification and malice, is right. but then i do think that gaga's performance of whiteness can at least be read as somewhat critical - her positioning in a prison being bailed out by her black lover is a reversal of the racially stereotyped roles, and her representation of white wonder woman america is not a glorified one, or at least, it's not straightforward. but i think maybe, that her representation (because she is all representation) of her white body as part of the capitalist excesses of the u.s.a., and the fickle fame and fortune culture of paparazzi is cumulatively a critique of racist, capitalist, misogynist, homophobic, culture. (note i reserve the right to change my mind on this in later posts.)

lady gaga is all aesthetic but she is also living proof that there is more to aesthetics than beauty. or maybe that there is more to beauty than superficial kicks from eye candy. it's not only the people who are beautiful in her videos, look at the perfect colours in telephone - every shot is so visually lush. she makes a video about a woman getting out of prison and murdering a diner full of people including her girlfriend's ex-boyfriend look beautiful. and in doing so she not only gives me a fantastical world to escape into at the click of my mouse, she also unsettles my ideas about what is beautiful and what is not, as well as a whole lot of ideas i usually take for granted. is lady gaga human? in bad romance she seems to be reptilian, and cryogenically frozen, and part machine, and some kind of witch. is she alive (telephone) or dead (paparazzi) or somewhere in between (bad romance)? what does it mean to be human, or alive, or beautiful? what does anything mean beyond it's own representation? i went to a symposium about aesthetics today and some big wigs define it as the realm of the sensuous rather than the rational. i've obviously made a big long-winded thought-through blog about it now, but my initial inexplicable love for gaga in general and telephone in particular was aesthetic - i didn't think, i just had a most pleasurable sensuous response. and yet even without thinking i knew she was doing something interesting to my ideas about the world. is that the power of aesthetics?

i don't know. i don't want to think anymore. i left my head and my, well, you know... i want to watch it again.

confused public servants asked to leave Ampilatwatja protest house

2010-02-18T04:21:00.000-08:00

further to my last post, check out this video of public servants being intrigued that an aboriginal community has managed to achieve in a matter of days and with no government funds what their department has failed to achieve in over two years and with almost unlimited resources and powers - build one house for aboriginal people. they didn't even need to draw on emergency powers, suspend anti-discrimination legislation or send in the army.
amazing action by the walkoff group. you can support them here.

Sorry about the intervention

2010-02-13T07:32:00.000-08:00

published in truthout

Today marks the two-year anniversary of the Australian government’s historic apology to its indigenous population. Beamed on live television throughout the country, tens of thousands gathered before screens in city squares, community centres and school assembly grounds to watch newly elected Labour Prime Minister Kevin Rudd say sorry. Indigenous Australians, some of whom had travelled for days to watch the apology from the lawns of Parliament House, wept as Rudd apologised especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, a policy which continued into the 1970s, resulting in what are now known as the Stolen Generations. Rudd declared the apology to be a turning point for the nation, the beginning of a new chapter in Australian history in which indigenous and non-indigenous Australians would “tackle, together, the great practical challenges that indigenous Australia faces in the future.”

“Great practical challenges” is something of an understatement – indigenous Australians have a life expectancy 17 years shorter than non-indigenous Australians, they make up 2% of the Australian population but 25% of its prison population and many live in conditions of abject poverty unthinkable to the non-indigenous majority. While there are indigenous Australians living throughout the country, the Northern Territory is by far the most indigenous region in terms of population, land held under native title and prevalence of culture. While there is no denying the widespread poverty and despair in many parts of the Northern Territory, it is also where the land rights movement began in the 1960s, and where indigenous cultural practices are still at their strongest today.

In June 2007, a report was released containing allegations of widespread child sex abuse in indigenous communities in the Northern Territory. Then Prime Minister John Howard, whose conservative government had for the past decade refused to apologise to the Stolen Generations, held a press conference to announce that the sexual abuse of indigenous children was a national emergency. He was going to use constitutional powers to override the Northern Territory government and pass emergency laws that would save these children from the paedophile rings, rampant hardcore pornography and “rivers of grog” that were apparently plaguing their communities.

Howard’s government drafted, passed and enacted the Northern Territory Emergency Response Act within weeks. The Act suspended Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act so that people living in “prescribed areas” – all of which were indigenous communities – could be subject to a range of measures that no other Australian citizens were subject to. Measures included compulsory five year leases of their land to the federal government, a total ban on alcohol and pornography, compulsory income management for all welfare recipients, the abolition of the permit system for entry onto indigenous land, and a police task force with special powers of detention and interrogation. To assist with the implementation of these measures the government initially sent in 600 uniformed troops.

These emergency measures, collectively known as “the intervention”, were taken out in the lead up to the November 2007 federal election, in which Howard suffered a resounding defeat. The apology by Kevin Rudd to Australia’s indigenous people was his first motion to parliament as Prime Minister and marked a clear symbolic departure from the Howard era of race politics. This symbolic change has not, however, been met with policy change. As the intervention approaches its two and a half year mark the Rudd government is showing no indications of rolling it back. This is despite the release of its own monitoring report last October, which shows that the intervention is failing to improve the lives of indigenous children or their wider communities. Since the intervention school attendance rates have decreased while child malnutrition has increased, as have alcohol and drug abuse incidents and rates of domestic violence.

The government’s response to the report is that the apparently poor outcomes are simply a result of increased state surveillance and reporting. Even if this is true, it is notable that despite the substantial increase in police numbers and powers, over the entire two year period that the intervention has been in operation only 22 people have been convicted for child sex offences compared with 15 people in the previous two years, and four of the recent convictions were of non-indigenous people.

Indigenous women are leading the political campaign against the Intervention. Mount Nancy town camp resident Barbara Shaw speaks openly about the intervention making it more difficult for indigenous parents to feed and clothe their children. Shaw explains how compulsory income management means that indigenous people have to shop at particular stores in towns, so that those who live remotely are forced to travel hundreds of kilometres in order to purchase food, clothes and other essentials.

The compulsory income management also means that indigenous people often have to stand in a separate line at store check-outs. The obvious stigmatisation and shame brought on indigenous people because of intervention measures were part of what led the UN’s James Anaya to last August condemn the intervention as not only indicative of Australia’s “entrenched racism” against indigenous people, but also inconsistent with Australia’s obligations under international law.

While some have labelled the intervention a government “land grab”, the motivations behind the measures seem more complex than that. Although it is true that the land over which the government has compulsorily acquired five-year leases is potentially valuable mining country, the terms of the leases prohibit the government from undertaking or allowing any mining activity. And excluding their mining potential, these remote areas are worth very little in terms of market value. What is at stake here is the cultural battle between white and black Australia. While there is no doubt that Australia is now a well-settled colony, the indigenous presence remains a persistent blight on the otherwise happy story of “the lucky country”, particularly in the Northern Territory, where the long term effects of colonisation are most evident – both in terms of the social devastation caused by decades of often violent racial repression and in terms of the stubborn survival of an indigenous culture radically different from the dominant settler culture. Under the intervention, indigenous Australians are effectively being given two options. The first is to become “good indigenous people” who spend their money wisely, live in government controlled housing and open up their land and their culture to the rest of Australia – both in terms of state surveillance and in terms of the tourist industry, which clearly stands to benefit from the abolition of the permit system and the “cleaning up” of remote communities. The second is to disperse and quietly disappear into the bush or into the prisons. Either ways solves “the problem” of indigenous Australians.

In defiance of both options, one indigenous community has walked off their land and set up a new, permanent camp outside the boundaries of the intervention’s “prescribed areas”. Ampilatwatja, a community northeast of Alice Springs, has been subject to one of the government’s compulsory five-year leases since the intervention began over two years ago. During that time residents have seen no improvements in their living conditions. The breaking point came when the outmoded septic tanks – straining from overcrowded housing and poor maintenance - burst, causing raw sewerage to flow through the area. The following week, Minister Macklin announced that Ampilatwatja would not be receiving any new housing support under the intervention.

In the words of Ampilatwatja walk-off spokesman Richard Downs, “We have no other choice but have now decided and agreed upon to return to our grandfather’s, mother’s country”. Tomorrow the community will formally open its first house on an area of bushland outside the reach of the intervention. The “protest house” is intended to be a hub for activists resisting the intervention as well as a place where indigenous Australians can reclaim control of their lives and their culture. It is a sad irony that the two-year anniversary of Rudd’s apology to Australia’s indigenous people will be marked by yet another generation having to move off their land to escape government policy.

a blue wristband view of history?

2010-02-08T09:45:00.001-08:00

if you want to you could check out my article on how australia thinks it's postcolonial but really isn't. it's here in the current edition of the alternative law journal

happy invasion day

2010-01-26T10:46:00.000-08:00

from the awesome duo fear of a brown planet

Happy Invasion Day 2010 from Fear of a Brown Planet on Vimeo.

another white christmas

2009-12-24T03:17:00.000-08:00

this is the point where the personal meets the political for me, and froths up into boiling rage that ends in tears and does nobody any good. or does it? i don't know. home for christmas for the first time in 4 years i am tucking into my home-made burger as two older, white men in my family begin a discussion of what might be the second most commonly spoken language in australia after english. chinese was a good guess. or maybe it was sudanese by now, one of them suggested. (australia has a population of less than 0.09% sudanese people, but people from the sudan only started arriving recently, and their dark black skin stands out amongst australia's white liberal masses. so it seems that "they're everywhere". many have come as refugees.) there are problems with the sudanese, one of them suggested, problems amongst them, between tribes.

dear god.

i had already started to walk away from the table, but i exploded a little at this point, something about them being a largely refugee minority in a racist white population, something about the problems between white tribes. but really, my blood was boiling and i just wanted to hit someone and cry. i was not articulate or persuasive, and it only got worse. there was something about syrians and turks, and i had another explosion. my sister pointed out that it's not racist just to recognise that some people come from another ethnicity. no, i said, but it is to talk about them in a particular tone. maybe it was better not to talk about it at all then, one of them men said. yes, i agreed with him, for probably the first time in my life. then the rest of the table told me it was natural for people to form groups, and that at any rate i would never convince any one of my argument by getting upset. i only turn people off.

i guess they're right. i did not put up a persuasive argument. once i'd come into my room and cried i could talk through with rose the problems of talking about "other" races and implicitly constructing whiteness as the natural, superior norm which was entitled to judge others and which had ownership over this land. but not at the family dinner table. instead i explode in inarticulate fits of rage and participate in reconstructing myself as the spoilt child cum recalcitrant teenager i always have been. is it better to walk away? isn't that a cop out too? either way i don't change anyone's mind. am i not smart enough to have anti-racist conversations? are my opinions wrong? is it just too hard to fight the other power dynamics in those conversations? rose pointed out that in awkward family moments, especially as we grow older and add in-laws, white racial bonding is an obvious way for people who happen to be "blood" related to try to socially relate to each other. she's right - i doubt they usually speak that way - but how do i effectively resist in those moments?

when i'm at home, and in particular, with my family, i become totally incapable of having an articulate conversation about really banal racism. i think maybe it's so loaded with everything else, all the other family dynamics that sit just below the surface and are never allowed to be articulated. so part of my explosion comes out of knowledge of things that have been said before. maybe that's the thing about families, we don't give each other much room to change. maybe part of that is a nostalgia for what used to be. the racism is at least familiar.

i need a strategy to deal with banal and not so banal racism in everyday and emotionally charged situations. if anyone has any advice or recommended reading i would genuinely appreciate it. at any rate, it's a good reminder of how totally embedded white racial superiority is in the dominant culture that it's so fucking hard to explain how it works.

beware the axis of, oh...

2009-11-03T10:17:00.000-08:00

for what it's worth, i want to just briefly add my voice to the "lunatics", "fanatics" and "scum" who are calling out white gay activist peter tatchell and some of his supporters on the racist effects of their speech and actions. there is now a growing body of academic work critiquing gay imperialism, that is, the use of white liberal standards of gay liberation to demonise and thus further oppress non-white liberal cultures, and, in particular, islam - they are homophobic and barbaric and need to be saved and enlightened by us. this is not to say that those who engage in gay imperialism are deliberately partaking in racist campaigns (as their benetton-style pictures show, some of their best friends are muslim), but simply that this kind of white gay politics has racist effects. there are now a number of thorough and thoughtful critiques circulating about tatchell and gay imperialism - you can read them here, here, here and elsewhere.

what has been quite stunning is the self-righteous, vitriolic outrage with which tatchell and his supporters have reacted to being called out on their actions. while tatchell himself claims to be a helpless victim of big bad academics (in fact to the best of my knowledge, most of the people who have spoken out against him are young, untenured scholars and activists of colour), his supporters are playing attack dog. apart from personally calling those who have critiqued tatchell as "a piece of scum", "pissant", "little tosser", "a frothing Ahmadinejad shill" as well as the more generic "lunatics and fanatics", peter's defender harry implores his readers that

"The only thing that you really can do, in a situation like this, is to say loud and clear that you stand with Peter, and against the defamers, and that you have nothing but contempt for those who have been hounding this selfless and principled man."

so...this situation is a crisis, we the free/good/selfless world are under threat from the (overhwhelmingly non-white) contemptuous/despicable baddies, there is only one course of action and you are either with us or against us, we love freedom and human rights, they hate us and our (homo-friendly) freedom... sound familiar? really i would like to thank harry for so directly adopting the language of george w bush and giving us such a clear example of gay imperialism.

soap&skin

2009-10-18T13:23:00.000-07:00

i am in love with the music of this scary 19 year old

do it yourself

2009-10-15T03:45:00.000-07:00

when coonan first told me about the punk politics of diy a few years ago, i thought i had no idea what he was talking about. since then i've been slowly realising that me and most people i know do-it-ourselves in a variety of ways, and that diy is not only an important anti-capitalist practice but that it can also help you to overtake the world.

since learning of the politics of diy, my interpretation of it has basically been that by doing things yourself, you're NOT paying someone else to do them and you thereby create a functional space outside the capitalist economy. things you can do yourself include changing your own car battery, growing your own vegetables and fixing your own bike. i get totally hipster haircuts from my friend stacy, make my own wallets from milk cartons and duct tape, and most recently have been tailoring my own trousers. (as an aside, i find it incredibly difficult to buy trousers that fit me. this is because according to the fashion industry, my thighs are disproportionately large for my waist size. so the only trousers that fit around my thighs tend to be "wide leg", even though the rest of my legs are not particularly wide. wide leg trousers are fine but they're cold in winter and i get sick of always wearing the same style. so what i've discovered is that i can just get my wide leg trousers and then rip open the legs along the side seam, all the way up to the start of my wide thighs, and then re-stitch them in a line that actually fits around my leg. so i am doing this now to all my old trousers, instead of going shopping in a likely hopeless attempt to find new ones that fit.)

although "do it yourself" sounds individualistic, diy culture actually contributes to the production of anti-capitalist communities and spaces through people sharing skills and making and doing things for each other. which is obviously why diy is so huge in punk and other alternative communities. but as well as producing spaces outside "the mainstream world" i've also realised lately that diy can also help you overtake it. so for instance my friend sam runs workshops on prison abolition and co-ordinates amazing associated projects that do incredibly important political work, rose pretty much re-built a house and my friend stacy (the haircutter) does dj nights at a little pub in hackney once a month that are turning into a particular queer, ex-pat-tinged, radicals-meet-liberals space. stacy has also introduced me to a bunch of young, mainly queer women musicians who have played drums with the organ (maya), toured with cocorosie (katie stelmanis) and had their CDs played in living rooms across several continents (ohbijou). now, i guess at some point your art stops being diy and starts being professional. is it when you stop making a loss and having to hold down a day job? gossip (yes, they've dropped the the) are still explicitly described as "diy" on lastfm, and they have a major record label, considerable fame and i'd assume a pretty good income. i guess there's the risk of diy being co-opted as a marketable adjective for young trendies, but i also think that some of us are more likely to have to keep doing it ourselves, at least to a certain degree, even when we're rich and famous. so queer and trans folk, plus-sized women, people of colour, with working class backgrounds and/or whose work unsettles the status quo are far more likely to have to continue relying on themselves even when success comes their way.

apart from feeling shamefully excited that i'm now just one degree of separation from katie sketch, hanging out with these queer women musicians in particular also made me realise that i could make music too. i mean, like most middle class children i played piano for a long time and at a reasonable level but it was always my unfulfilled dream to play drums. so over the summer, i just started, buying second hand parts on ebay and finding a cheap, local teacher on gumtree. so now i have a drum kit in my room. i don't know if i'll ever be good enough to play in a band, and for me that really doesn't matter. when i play the drums i'm unable to think about anything else and it's like my body gets lost in the rhythms. it's what i imagine meditation to be like for people who are able to master it. i know this is a pretty selfish achievement but you know, today i conquer the drums, tomorrow the prison industrial complex.

i guess the arts and activism have always been on the fringe of whatever it is that constitutes mainstream capitalist society and therefore been driven by diy politics. the arts and activism are obvioulsy not outside the constraints of capitalist politics and its associated systems of racism, patriarchy and other forms of oppression - almost all artists need to engage in commerce to make money, and the persistent racism on london's "queer radical" e-list lahdidah confirms that activist groups cannot claim any purity of politics. diy can only ever be part of radical politics rather than its sole defining feature. for the mean time, as this love-in blog entry shows, i'm pretty happy being inspired by the amazing things my friends do, and rocking out on paradiddles.

the tall man review essay

2009-10-08T03:53:00.000-07:00

out now in the australian feminist law journal! 12ooo thrilling words of non-stop essay action. my first real academic publication. it's even in databases.

english estate agents = enemies of the revolution

2009-08-29T06:19:00.000-07:00

last weekend i had the bizarre experience of being on the other side of the real estate divide. i went with rose to look at houses that are for sale, putting me in the (prospective) owners/"i have enough money for society to respect me" camp instead of the (prospective) renters/"i am poor so you can treat me like shit and assume that i'm stupid" camp, where i am far more comfortable. predictably, i immediately hated the estate agent, who drove us around hackney in his grotesque black BMW, complete with matching leather seats and top 40 dance tracks hammering out from the car speakers.

next to cops, estate agents sit at the top of my list of least liked professions, and i have a particular dislike for english estate agents, who capitalize on and reinforce the deep fear and mistrust that the land-owning and non-land-owning classes have of each other in this country. english estate agents encourage the propertied classes to live in fear of the working classes who rent their flats so that they are too frightened to deal with them directly and instead pay the agents extortionate fees to "manage" their property for them. when dealing with new landlords - that is, those who have recently transitioned up a class - agents often bully them into signing contracts that bind them into using the agent to manage their property for at least 5 years after they find their first tenants - meaning that even if the landlord grows to trust their tenants and might otherwise establish a relationship where they feel confident enough to just receive the money directly from them, they are legally barred from doing so. which in turn means that the estate agent continues to take a cut of the rent and to charge tenants fees for "services", like 50 pounds per tenant to re-sign a lease contract once it expires, a process which takes around 3 minutes and requires the agents pressing the print button on their computers.

in my two and a half years as a tenant in this country, the "management" provided by agents has also included me paying 150 pounds to the agent to check my references (that is, to make two phonecalls, on numbers i provided them with) and then, because i am a foreigner, having to provide them with a rent guarantor who owns property in britain - a criteria that is by definition very difficult to fulfill when you are a newly arrived foreigner looking for somewhere to live. the alternative was to pay 6 months rent up front, but if i had 2000 pounds lying around would i really be applying to move into a shitty 320 pound a month flat in the backstreets of tottenham? but at least in london they let me put in an application. when i first arrived in whitstable - a kentish seaside town full of white people - i viewed a lovely flat and went straight to the agents' office to put in an application form. but after phoning her partner, who was still at the flat with the only other prospective tenant, the decidedly posh woman who ran the office told me the flat had been given to the woman who viewed it after me - even though that woman was still at the flat while she was telling me this and could not possibly have put in an application yet. i knew from the way she spoke to me in the office and they way her partner looked at me and the two friends i had taken with me to see the flat that the pre-emptive decision was made on the basis of my accent and not-quite-whiteness and the fact that of my two friends, one looked a bit queer and the other was decidedly brown. the agent and i both knew this as i stood in front of her desk and in that moment i felt somehow guilty for causing her the embarrassment of having to tell such an obvious lie.

estate agents have a very powerful effect on who lives where. this is most obvious when agents such as the one in whitstable don't let particular people apply for particular properties, but last weekend i saw the effect agents have from "the other side" as well. as we were driving back to the office rose asked the agent whether he had any properties for sale in bethnal green. she'd have to ask the other branch, he said, but he didn't like bethnal green much, there's a huge asian population and there are schools where the student body is 95% asian, "i mean, how is that supposed to help with integration"? i was literally biting my tongue at that point to the extent that it was going to bleed. i wonder if he feels that expensive public schools, which often have a student body that is 95% white, are anti-social and bad for "integration" too? would he advise us against buying properties in areas where there's a large white population and a lot of expensive public schools as well? the role of estate agents in actively reproducing material structures and spaces of oppression, in this country in particular, should not be underestimated. for the time being i'm just watering our japanese knot weed (see earlier post) and thinking about my friend sarah's suggestion of buying a yurt.

weeds and legal theory

2009-08-18T13:31:00.000-07:00

okay let's face it, the main reason i am addicted to weeds is that mary-louise parker is a gorgeous curvy brunette (although she could be a LOT curvier, i wish she would stop drinking diet soft drinks and start on some full strength smoothies). her character, nancy, is an incredibly strong, edgy woman who uses her sexuality in fantastically immoral ways. in the first two seasons the program also made some politically astute commentary about white privilege and the hypocrisy of upper-middle class US family values, primarily through nancy's relationship with conrad and heylia. later seasons also made witty condemnations of the latest US war on Iraq, the Bush government and right-wing Christianity - mainly through andy and pre-pubescent shane. i feel like the show has kind of gone off the rails since the family relocated to the Mexican border, although it has maintained its occasional subtle commentary on Judaism in the US and the question of being mixed race. the alanis morrisette storyline is pretty clearly pro-choice and i love that last night's episode so clearly depicted andy repeatedly and enthusiastically going down on audra. i'm not thrilled that we lost the only really likable queer character (sanjay) after season 3, and why does it have to be celia who is becoming a lesbian? everyone hates celia. couldn't nancy get it on with audra instead?

i do think that the fact that the season 1 posters looked like this and the season 5 posters look like this is an indication that the show has been sexed up and dumbed down. but the one consistent political theme that has run throughout this program is its critique of law. by normalising the dealers and depicting the huge prevalence of pot-use, the first couple of seasons showed how the criminalisation of marijuana fails to reduce its consumption and forces growers, dealers and users "underground", meaning the law becomes irrelevant to them as a source of any kind of safety or security, let alone justice. the cops depicted are always crooked and there is even a brief scene dealing directly with police racism when captain till attacks and racially abuses conrad. when the human trafficking from mexico disturbs nancy to the point where she feels she has to do something to stop it, she attempts to use the law but it fails her terribly. and now as the end of season 5 approaches, we all know that nancy remains "in danger" while she is shacking up with esteban, but whatever the conclusion of this series will be, i'm fairly certain it won't involve the boys in blue or anyone from the courts system coming to her rescue. and that's enough for me to justify the amount of time i have spent watching it so intensely this very non-academic summer.

sharehouse gods

2009-08-17T05:09:00.000-07:00

Our house is for sale. This really sucks for me because my current sharehouse is the happiest and most stable place I’ve lived, well, possibly ever. We are a group of four non-brits in north east London and although we have to walk 18 minutes to the nearest tube and put up with various household vermin, a living room that’s unbearably cold in winter, a badly broken fence and the world’s worst real estate agents, we love it here. This is only my second year here but I know from my more long-standing housemates that the landlord had not been to visit the house herself for the entire decade it has been functioning as a sharehouse. Last Friday though, she came over to inspect the Japanese knotweed that is apparently bringing down her attempts to sell our home at the price she wants. (It is apparently also making the construction of the London Olympic village very difficult. I think I love Japanese knotweed.) Walking through the hallway and our bedrooms she seemed a little sad and curious, but mainly just detached. The legal title to this property might be in her name but apart from the rent money that enters her bank account every month, she and the house have had no place in each others’ lives for a long time now.
As she was leaving she laughed at a postcard that sits on the edge of the kickboard just inside our front door. “My god, you’ve still got the angel!” We hadn’t really ever paid attention to it, but yes, the postcard at our entrance has been sitting there for over ten years, quietly witnessing the comings and goings of scores of characters, seasons, dramas and mail deliveries. One of my ex-housemates used to joke about items that were lost and found within long-term sharehouses as being granted by and sacrificed to the Sharehouse Gods. Maybe one of them looks like this.

palm island

2009-06-16T12:53:00.000-07:00

almost five years ago palm islander Cameron Doomadgee was arrested for swearing by senior sergent chris hurley and was dead less than an hour later in the palm island watchhouse. he had four broken ribs and his liver had been split in two from having been shoved right up against his spine. when they realised he was dead, none of the on-duty police officers attempted to resuscitate Cameron, nor did they call for any kind of medical assistance. Cameron's family were not notified – in fact when Cameron’s sister went down to the station to ask about her brother and why there had been an ambulance at the station, she was given no information and sent home. she would have to wait another 2 hours before being notified of Cameron’s death. no-one at the station showed a shred of concern for the dead man or his family, but i bet there was a lot of "death in custody while you're on duty" paperwork to do.

once that paper work had gone through, hurley picked up the two "investigating officers" from the palm island airport and had them round for dinner and some beers. these were the men who were supposed to be independently investigating how Cameron was killed. cops don't usually have dinner and drinks with their murder suspects, but they do when it's one of their own, and when it's only a black man who's been killed. a week later the coroner told the palm island community that Cameron's death was an accident. fueled by grief, rage and disempowerment, they burnt down the police station and the courthouse. without starting that riot, it is unlikely that the rest of australia or anyone in power would have paid any attention to what had happened to Cameron – they needed something that journalists could take interesting pictures of and show on tv. three years and a chain of politically frightened and incompetent events later, an all white jury in a racially divided town took less than four hours to find hurley not guilty of the manslaughter or assault of Cameron. this is despite hurley's admission under cross examination that he "must have" caused the injuries that led to Cameron's death. until that point in the witness box, hurley had consistently lied about what happened as he was forcing Cameron out of the paddy wagon and into the station, claiming that there was "a tussle" and that the two men had fallen side by side. the only witnesses to the incident were two other police officers, Roy Bramwell, an indigenous man who was in the police station when Cameron and hurley were having their “tussle”, and Patrick Bramwell, Roy's nephew, who was in the same van and cell as Cameron that day. neither of the police officers would testify against hurley. in fact during the coronial inquiry those two cops refused to give statements about what happened until the police commissioner issued a formal direction that they do so. so much for queensland police being part of the pursuit of justice – throughout the whole palm island affair their boys' club loyalties clearly and consistently won out over any façade that they might actually have a genuine interest in justice, truth, equality or any of the other empty words in their mission statement. Patrick Bramwell committed suicide early in 2006. as did Cameron's 18 year old son, before he could hear the coroner’s decision on what caused his father's death. being put on a stand in a courthouse that has only ever punished you, being literally looked down on by an old white man in a black witch-like coat and being stared at by aggressive white men who are questioning you in a language not your own is a horrendous experience. so is losing your father at 18 and knowing that his death was at the hands of an institution that will be present in your life forever.

the jury decision was also despite expert medical evidence that Cameron's injuries were a result of massive force inflicted on his stomach by a "bodily protrusion" most likely to have been hurley's knee.

it was a strong prosecution case. the evidence strongly suggests that hurley kneed Cameron in the guts after the two of them fell through the door of the police station. it's hard to knee someone by accident, especially when you're an almost 7 foot tall cop and your victim is a drunk abo. he did everything he could to cover it up. and he won in the end. he's not going to jail. he's going back out onto the streets with his gun and his baton. good one chris, you must be proud.

but to be honest, i don't really care about chris hurley. i think he is a fairly unintelligent, cowardly, lying thug who means well and apart from his current brush with fame for killing a blackfella on the wrong day, is a fairly inconsequential man in the scheme of things. what are of much greater consequence are the issues of why the queensland police are unnecessarily arresting indigenous australians for swearing, why police on palm island see themselves as working in a war zone, and why in 2007 a group of 12 "average" white australians found it so easy to acquit a white man of the manslaughter of a black man despite very strong evidence that he was guilty. did they think that because he was drunk and black, he deserved it? did they conclude that in inflicting the injuries hurley was only using "reasonable force" despite hurley being a huge, armed man in uniform at his home station with fellow officers within metres and Cameron an intoxicated, smaller framed and unarmed prisoner with no friends to back him up? how do they think Cameron's liver got sliced in two? do they think that he fell down and punched himself in the guts with a force likened by doctors to that of a car or aeroplane crash? or that hurley's knee or perhaps elbow did cause the damage, but that it was just an accident that he happened to lie about for three years after the incident, until he was under cross examination in a supreme court? or do they know that hurley killed him, that he must have known what he did, but that a white cop killing a drunk black man on palm island just doesn't count as a crime?

i have spent time in townsville and on palm island, and i have no doubt that the jobs the police officers in those communities face is not easy. as non-indigenous australians, we need to ask ourselves whether despite all our rhetoric about equality, democracy, and "a fair go", we in fact still value certain lives over others. and whether, in being complicit with the ongoing underlying racism against indigenous australians that has existed in this country since the white invasion, we empower our police force to take intrusive and violent steps to protect "us" from "them" by controlling them however by whatever means possible. you see i swear all the time, but i don't end up in jail, or dead, for it. the fact that we still have offensive language as a statutory crime is a joke. it is an outdated law and it would be removed if it weren't so useful for cops when they want to pick up blackfellas (and sometimes white ones too, if they're homeless or cheeky, loudly gay, or asian, perhaps). it should be removed from the criminal code.

consistent with its embarrassing arrogance and stupidity throughout the investigations into Cameron's death, hours after the not guilty verdict was announced in hurley’s trial, the queensland police union launched an advertising campaign insisting that hurley should never even have been tried. they went so far as to use the words of Martin Luther King, that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere (namely that the premier should not have allowed the review of the director of public prosecution's original, ridiculous decision not to prosecute). the obvious offence this gross misappropriation of the words of a pivotal heroic black man who fought for justice for black people is going to cause the australian indigenous community only further demonstrates how completely insensitive the police force is towards that community. as the citizens who that police force claims represent and protect, it lies upon us to start making change and showing some goddam respect.

but they look so satisfied

2009-04-18T05:18:00.000-07:00

i have watched this video an embarrassing number of times

Gaza

2009-01-10T07:39:00.001-08:00

Lately I have been getting into emotional debates about why I condemn the Israeli occupation, blockade and now military onslaught of Gaza. I get too upset to articulate myself properly which is something I need to work on, but in the meantime here are my responses to objections that have been put to me about the popular condemnation of the Israeli government’s current campaign of military aggression against the people of Gaza.

Why mobilise around this and not something else? Why are 100000 people marching to the Israeli embassy in London about this when there are other equal or worse humanitarian catastrophes happening in Zimbabwe, Darfur and elsewhere?
Of course there are, and the situations there and in many other places including inside prisons and refugee camps in white countries are sad, appalling, preventable and in need of long term political solutions. They are not, however, being caused by one rich nation with the 4th most powerful military in the world bombing and sending tanks into an overpopulated and severely impoverished area surrounded by an 8 metre high concrete wall which imprisons them, and which that rich nation built. The immediacy and scale of the Israeli military’s onslaught into Gaza makes it something that it is obvious to demand a political solution to now - an immediate halt to the aggression. Humanitarian catastrophes around the world have complex and long histories and causes, and many of those catastrophes do have significant international support from NGOs, charities and political actors who are working at addressing the systemic causes of those crises which can generally be found in colonial legacies and their continuation through policies of international organizations such as the IMF and WTO. That will take a long time, but Israel can withdraw from Gaza now, and is far more likely to respond to international political pressure than for example Mugabe, Obama or particular militias within the Sudan. Many who are involved in the protests against Israeli aggression, including me, see these humanitarian catastrophes as causally connected through systems of capitalism, racism and sexism and are involved in political campaigning targeted at other causes as well.

Palestinian civilians are being used as human shields by Hamas terrorists, so it is the fault of Hamas and not the Israeli military, that they have been killed.
This is the official public relations stance of the Israeli military. The Gaza strip is one of the most overpopulated areas in the world – over 1.5 million people live in an area around 11km by 50km in size, so even if the Hamas government did have an official military base it would be impossible for the Israeli military to drop bombs anywhere in Gaza without causing massive civilian casualties. The mass scale general slaughter of the Israeli operation is emphasised by the fact that they accidentally killed three of their own soldiers through tank shelling. But at any rate, Hamas, which is a political party that was democratically elected into power, does not have anything that can meaningfully be called a military base. Anyone in Gaza who is fighting back is labelled a “Hamas terrorist” or “militant”, but these are members of an elected political party defending themselves and their population however they can. That party is admittedly one which has done a poor job of governing Gaza and which has violent policies towards Israel. But Palestine does not have a military – there is no Palestinian army, navy or airforce. Much of Palestine does not presently even have running water or bread. Their lack of a defence force is why they send home-made rockets over the wall into Israel, causing a minute number of casualties compared with the Israeli operation against Palestinians. It is also why they are smuggle “illegal arms” through tunnels from Egypt – because the Israeli government will not allow them to have even the most minimal military security and because that government has imprisoned Gazans behind an impenetrable wall so that tunnels are needed to obtain everything, not just arms but fuel, food, medicine and water. In comparison, Israel receives $3billion in military aid from the US every year, is the only nuclear power in the Middle East and has the 4th most powerful military in the world.
“Terrorist” is a racially loaded word generally heavy with connotations of Islamophobia. The difference between an Israeli solider and a Palestinian terrorist is that one belongs to a sophisticated, internationally recognised and very well armed institution and the other makes home made rockets and bombs and is condemned as “extreme” by us in the supposedly non-extreme west. Both target civilians, though the Israeli soldier is significantly more successful at killing Palestinian civilians than Palestinian “terrorists” are at killing Israeli civilians.
The Israeli military is responsible for the deaths of the Gazan civilians who they have killed. The current military operation is unnecessary and completely counter-productive. The current operation may topple Hamas, but you can be sure that an angrier, more radical force will replace it.

Thousands of rockets have been fired into Israel by Hamas. The people of southern Israel have the right to live in peace.
Of course they do. And so do the Palestinians. The rockets are condemnable and non-productive and have been lethal. They cannot however be seriously compared to the Israeli military’s F-16 bombers, tanks and thousands of finely trained and equipped soldiers. The rockets have caused a handful of fatalities while the Israeli military has now caused well over a thousand in this battle alone. The Israeli military’s response is completely disproportionate. It is also counter-productive. The number of rockets have increased since this operation began, and some have also been fired from Lebanon for the first time in over 2 years. What is required is dialogue. The rockets would stop if Palestinians were allowed to have normal lives, not imprisoned by a wall, starved of food, fuel, water and medical supplies and forced to wait at checkpoints for hours and days should they try to cross the wall into Israel for urgent humanitarian needs. At least 16 Palestinians have died waiting at checkpoints. The majority live in abject poverty and have no prospects for improvement. This is a people who were violently displaced in 1948, again in 1967, and continually since then as the Israeli government insists on making life for them almost unbearable. The Israeli government backed by the US has brought Palestine to its knees. People blow themselves up, elect extremist governments and throw home-made rockets when they are desperate.

Ultimately this comes down to whether or not you think Israel has a right to be there. The surrounding Arab world will never accept Israel and is bent on destroying it so Israel needs to continue defending itself through deterrence operations.
I do not believe in anyone’s god-given right to be anywhere. In fact I don’t believe in “rights” generally or in state borders. I do however believe that everyone should be able to live in peace and prosperity and to have a home, this includes Israelis and Palestinians.
The 1922-1947 migration of Jewish people into British-controlled Palestinian territories under the UN approved ‘Jewish Mandate’ began a displacement of an indigenous population – in this case the Palestinians. While this area was populated by Jews prior to the year 600, and some had continued to live there, from around 600AD to 1948 the area was a home primarily to Palestinians. The failure of the United Nations to consult Palestinians over the future of this land greatly contributed to the disputes over resources, sovereignty and territory that ensued. In 1948, after Israel claimed independence, Palestinians were further disenfranchised. Israel occupied 77% of the land and over half the indigenous Palestinian population were expelled or fled. After the 1967 war Israel claimed the remaining territories, including the Gaza strip.
Like the case of white settlers in Australia, Canada and the US, the occupation of land through force is a great injustice to the indigenous populations. This does not mean that settler populations do not “have a right” to be there anymore, but it does mean that they have a responsibility to minimise the harm done through this settlement.
It also does not mean that the creation of the state of Israel was just like the creation of colonial states during the Imperial era. One major difference is that the creation of Israel was backed by a recognized international body. In 1922 the UN approved a mandate to allow the Zionist Organization to work—in consultation with His Britannic Majesty’s Government—on the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine. Another important difference is that Israeli independence is intimately bound up with European xenophobia and anti-Semitism and the failures of the international community to intervene in the genocide of Jewish peoples under the Nazi regime. The support for increased Jewish migration into Israel during and following the Second World War was a way for Western European countries to deal with ‘the problem’ of Jewish refugees.
While these differences are crucial in how we talk of Israel as a ‘settler state,’ the creation of Israel and the settlement of Palestine still involved the violent displacement of a people. And while there are obviously complex and deep resentments and divisions between the Israeli government and the Arab governments around it, that does not mean peaceful relations is impossible, and to believe so is entirely defeatist. Relations would improve significantly if the Israeli government stopped imprisoning, starving and killing the Palestinian population.

The real suggestion that has been levelled in these objections I think is that it is anti-Semitism which is driving the international movement opposing the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. There is no doubt that there are elements of anti-Semitism in parts of the pro-Palestinian movement, as there are elements of racism and other kinds of bigotry in many movements on the left. Anti-Semitism has a long history, is alive and well today and must be taken seriously. But Judaism is not equivalent to Israeli military aggression and to suggest so is itself a racist proposition. There is significant opposition to the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the current massacres on Gaza within Jewish communities around the world and within Israel. The battle against anti-Semitism is interconnected with, rather than in competition with, other forms of racial oppression.

Thanks to Anna F for her help with this piece.

international day of solidarity for Lex Wotton

2008-11-19T14:15:00.000-08:00

These are photos from the london rally to mark the international day of solidarity for Lex Wotton on 7 November 2008. Lex was sentenced to 6 years imprisonment by the Townsville District Court for "inciting a riot with damage". Wotton was one of a number of members of the Palm Island indigenous community who took part in burning down the police station, the attached courthouse and part of the police barracks following the death in custody of local man Cameron Doomadgee in November 2004. No police officers were injured during the riots, though one claims to have obtained a bruise on his hip when something was thrown at him. At any rate, all officers present during the riots have been heavily compensated by the Queensland government, (including a A$100,000 payout to chris hurley), as well as being awarded “bravery medals”.
Due to the attention brought to Palm Island by the riots, hurley became the first police officer in white Australian history to be charged with the death of an Aboriginal prisoner in his custody. When the jury announced the guilty verdict, Lex turned to his family and shrugged. Lex was friends with Doomadgee, and a leading member of the Palm Island community. You can write messages of support to him in prison at the following address:
Lex Wotton
c/-Townsville Correctional centre
PO Box 5574 MSO,
Townsville
Qld 4810
AUSTRALIA

interview with pauline

2008-08-17T02:42:00.000-07:00

words published in issue 8 of Girls Like Us magazine
photos by sisco
check out pauline

I first met Pauline in January 2007 on a well below freezing, black night at a kind of “indie” bar in downtown Beijing. I had gone there after my mandarin class to check out what was at the time the city’s best known experimental music night – Thursdays at Pipe. Because most people had already left the city to go home for the upcoming Chinese new year festivities and because it was so cold and miserable in Beijing for those of us still there, this Thursday at Pipe was pretty quiet. Present though was a small but select group of mainly expat Beijingers (“laowai”), including my two best friends in the city and one of the guys from FM3 who invented the buddha machine (a small generative music device that plays nine types of Buddhist chant-like drones on loop – described as “the anti-iPod” and something of a phenomena amongst meditative, experimental music lovers). He was controlling the music and, to my surprise, playing girl punk tracks that he had found on a recent trip to Hong Kong. At a separate table were a couple of Chinese artists and a young laowai woman who was speaking fluent mandarin with them. She had an unusually lesbian haircut for Beijing, was dressed pretty dyke-y and looked, well, hot. I was instantly intrigued - although Beijing is a city of over 15 million, the English-speaking queer scene was very small, and after a few months in the city I felt like I already knew most of the main players. When I enquired of my friends as to who this woman was, they informed me that this was Pauline - a Belgian dj, curator in one of the galleries in dashanzi (the ex-factory district that is now the heart of Beijing’s exploding contemporary art scene), organiser of various “alternative” parties, currently collaborating to produce China’s first festival of video art, and, yes, queer. Actually, it turned out, pretty much every lesbian in Beijing wanted to sleep with her. I managed to get introduced to her during the night and developed what was to turn into my longest running Beijing crush.

While my initial plans of marrying Pauline and having her impeccably cool, multilingual and artistically gifted children never quite worked out, we did grow to become pretty good friends, which meant that I was among the first to know about her numerous arts projects in the city. With her amazing language skills, an obvious understanding of Chinese culture and four years of being an active part of the Beijing arts scene, Pauline was the person to call to find out what was happening in the city’s underground cultural world, and most of my best Beijing nights out and afternoons in were with her.

Almost two years later, and Pauline and I have both left Beijing – I’m now in London and Pauline in Berlin. I visited her recently and found her immersed in yet another foreign urban arts scene. She was still hanging out with some Chinese artists, but was getting to know the German scene now too, and doing a lot of collaborative international projects. With China big on all the commercial news sites at the moment, I asked for her take on it all, and what she’s been up to in her new city of choice.

Do you think that at the moment, because of the Olympics and the amount of international attention on China, that the Chinese urban arts scene is opening up to outside influences and collaborations more than it has in the past?
Yes for sure, but they have been opening up a lot over the last few years already, at an incredible pace. I think with the Olympics it has all just become even bigger and more commercial, and actually more restricted for the non-official events. I’m curious as to how the city will have changed in the last ten months since I’ve been gone. There is so much more money and so many more foreign investors coming in. When I first arrived in Beijing I was really attracted to its underground scene - small initiatives and people eager to do things because there weren’t really any good platforms to show arts or to do arts-driven parties then. That was 2004 to 2006. During that time you saw more and more foreigners coming in, more and more foreign investment, from Europeans, Americans, Koreans, Japanese… It was really exciting for me to be part of building up something. Like when I started with the idea of doing a festival focused on video art, a lot of local artists were really interested because they didn’t have a platform for that yet, it was something new. They had had galleries for a couple of years but none focused on video art and no one was trying to present it in an innovative way or really exploring it as a genre. But then after we did the first festival, the local video art scene grew really quickly and more and more people became serious and professional about it.
So this is the borderline festival of video art right?
Yes
Did it involve mainly local Chinese artists or international artists?
Both. For me it was important to involve a lot of local artists, to create a movement and a proper stage for them in the local context, because a lot of these Chinese video artists would normally only show their work outside China, in Europe mainly, and that meant the local audiences hadn’t had a chance to see their work or get to know them. But then of course it was interesting to show international artists’ work also, to do an exchange, and show pieces of work that China had never seen before.
So do you think that the increase in foreign interest and investment in the Chinese arts scene is good or bad for Chinese art?
Well it means there’s more opportunities for Chinese artists now. But of course it also means they are influenced by western interests. But it is impossible not to get influenced by that today. Beijing is a cosmopolitan metropolis in a globalized world, and fashions make their way everywhere. I think the greatest danger is to the integrity of the Chinese art - if money becomes a drive to make art, it’s not good.
Can you tell me how you became interested in China in the first place? And how you ended up living in Beijing for four years.
It’s a story that started long ago. My father used to tell me when I was little that there was a big old Chinese book in our loft. He told me that when I would be a good girl, he would show me this book. Well he never showed me, but I decided to learn Chinese - a language that seemed impossible to learn, like a secret language. Then I went with my family on a holiday to Thailand when I was 16 and became totally attracted to everything Asiatic, and started to read everything about it, and was really excited that you could do proper studies to learn everything about it at university. For me it was a way to get into the world, and what I wanted most was to go and live in China afterwards and travel to other Asiatic countries. I learned Hindi too and went twice to India.
You speak Hindi?
A bit yes
Jesus
I forgot a lot though, but can still read it.
So were there many other Belgian girls studying mandarin with you?
No we were 15 or something to start with and graduated with five. They were all girls actually and one gay guy. The first girl I fell in love with was my classmate.
Really? Did you go to China together?
Yes we went together on a summer Chinese program after the second year. She had just broken up with her girlfriend and had a secret crush on me. I had one on her too but she was sure I wasn’t lesbian, haha…
So did anything happen between you?
Yes after the summer in China we lived together in Belgium for a year and kissed often, but it just felt like playing, and we never really went for it in terms of a relationship. We never spoke about it out aloud, you know what I mean?
I do, yes. So you left the girl in Belgium and moved to China as soon as you graduated from university. When you went did you plan on being there for four years?
No I just planned on living in China for one year at first. I had a grant to study art critique in Beijing for one year, but after a month I knew that one year would be way too short. Then every year got extended with another year…
And it became your home?
Yes sort of. I felt at home, made really good friends, was talking better and better Chinese, could explore more and more of myself and my environment and didn’t feel like going anywhere else. The first year I was there I also travelled a lot to other Chinese cities and went with public transport all the way from Beijing to the south of Thailand.
Were you out to your friends and to other people in the arts and music scenes in Beijing?
It was the first year in Beijing that I realized that I was totally falling for girls and that for me this was a lot deeper than the relationships with boys that I had had before. Although I’d felt before that I was really in love with boys, it was like for the first time, now that I was out of my natural surroundings in Belgium I felt like I could totally be myself. It wasn’t so easy though – I wasn’t in a queer environment in Beijing and didn’t have people to talk to about it. At first I felt really insecure about it actually. I fell in love with a girl there and had a crazy, unstable relationship with her.
A Chinese girl?
No a French one.
Did you ever have a Chinese girlfriend?
Not really - some flings, and platonic Chinese girlfriends.
There's not really much of a lesbian scene in Beijing is there?
Not one that interested me. The scene was full of these local lesbians totally flipping on western girls, and the parties felt more like venues for checking out the new meat than anything else. I didn’t feel relaxed there. I didn’t fit in. And the scene is also just way too small, so if you go out with anyone, the rest of the circle knows it in a second.
Doesn’t sound much different from any lesbian circle I’ve been a part of…
But it’s good that these lesbian parties are there in Beijing, that there is a least a scene growing. It’s all new there - in 1997 it was still forbidden by law to be gay in China.
Well, “homosexual activity” was illegal in parts of Australia until 1997 as well, and in some USA states until 2003. But I agree that the local gay and lesbian scene wasn’t my favourite thing about Beijing either. Did you ever have any bad experiences playing or trying to get work as a lesbian dj in Beijing?
Once I was asked to dj in this club - I had played there before and I liked the venue because it had a good sound system and great dance crowd. It had a huge Buddha statue in the middle of the club. When I arrived there this time, the club owner and his friends gave me something to smoke and some drinks - they were all having drinks in one of the VIP corners, which is nothing unusual. That was all fine, but then I suddenly started to feel really strange just as it was time to start my set. I didn’t know why I was feeling this way, but it was getting worse and worse. I went to the dj booth to play, and all I could see was this swirl of colours and buttons that I couldn’t even recognise. The resident dj was pressuring me to start and asking what the problem was. Another drink was handed to me. I became very paranoid and although people were dancing, and I was apparently mixing the music, I thought it was all some kind of conspiracy. Subconsciously I was also sure they had put something in the drinks they were giving me. It was awful knowing that I was in control of the music for the whole club, and also knowing that I was not in control of what I was doing. Then in the midst of all this stress and confusion I noticed everyone in the club staring up in surprise at the stage next to me. So I looked over as well, and saw two naked women, one on each side of me, pole dancing. Ha ha, I can tell you, it was the strangest thing that ever happened to me. I was totally uncomfortable but was also unsure if it was real or not. But it was real - it was a special act set up as some kind of extra to please the audience, and maybe they thought they were pleasing me as well. But it did not fit my music at all, in fact they couldn’t even keep the rhythm. They were obviously dancers from the commercial Russian or Chinese pole dancing clubs, and hired for this one night at the club. It was so tasteless, and I was just thinking fuck, I hope the audience realise that they aren’t part of my act. It was my most embarrassing dj gig, and the weirdest too. I left the club after what was apparently a two hour set without wanting to speak to anyone, and never went back there.
Ha, well, no wonder you started organising your own events. So what were your favourite things about Beijing? What do you miss the most?
Well I love talking Mandarin, the Chinese language, and I miss being able to talk it all the time. I miss the small restaurants in my neighbourhood where you could have so much delicious food for very cheap. Like disanxian, this very homey dish with potatoes, aubergine and a delicious sauce.
Did you pretty much eat out all the time in Beijing? It's often cheaper than cooking at home isn't it?
Yes we never cooked at home but went out to eat all the time. You could have all the different regional foods, like the xinjiang places where they had BBQ meat and very good baked bread, and the more southern dishes which are more sweet, and I also loved to eat sushi there, and shanxi food…
So what made you decide to move from Beijing to Berlin?
I came here to visit a few times during the summers over the last couple of years, and it just felt like a place that could be a home for me, a place where I could explore a lot of new things and go deeper into stuff I was already doing in Beijing. It looks a bit similar to Beijing but with clean blue skies, green parks, lots of varieties of interesting art, and bigger music and lesbian scenes.
So the lesbian scene is much bigger in Berlin?
Yes, when I walk around here and go out I see lesbians all the time. And it’s not a closed scene like it tended to be in Beijing - here they mingle with heteros and you have a lot of different scenes within the lesbian world. It just feels like you can be here, like whoever you want and you aren’t made to feel strange or different or anything like that.
And how has it been moving from Beijing to Berlin in terms of your work? Like in Beijing you were pretty high up at a good gallery in dashanzi, and you were part of building up the urban art scene there - is it hard to find your place in Berlin?
Well it takes time for sure, but it took at least a year in Beijing as well. But it’s all moving – I’ve met interesting artists who I want to do projects with, and I’m getting a lot of quality inputs that I was looking for. The networks I am in are linked to Beijing and Berlin but also to Belgium, the UK, cities in the US and so on. In Beijing I met a lot of people, and I’m just continuing projects with people I met or that I am meeting now. It’s going quite well now in fact, and I also needed some time for myself after leaving Beijing.
I guess the arts industry is quite international.
Yes definitely, and we are all connected through the internet. It feels like people here in Berlin are quite open for collaborations too.
So what projects are you working on at the moment? Remind me about your trip to Helsinki - when are you going and what is it all about?
I’m going at the end of August. A Finnish guy, Jani, invited me. He’s been organising this event called Night on Earth (www.nightonearth.net), which is based on the film by Jim Jarmusch, where in five different cities there are stories about local taxi drivers meeting all kinds of people in their taxis – so the stories are happening in different parts of the world but all at the same time. The event came to Berlin earlier this year and continued to Shanghai, then Helsinki will be the final part. I knew Jani already from Beijing - he came there to organise a Finnish event called “Sounds Like Suomi”, where I dj-ed. He liked my music and asked if I wanted to dj for the Berlin part of Night on Earth. Then when he saw the promotion for this video art screening I’ve been organising here in Berlin, he asked me to present it as part of the Helsinki event, as well as do some more dj-ing there. So I’m adapting the screening slightly - it’s called A Performance of Space and features seven short video pieces, mainly from Chinese artists - and it will show in a gallery space in Helsinki on loop for three weeks, and I’ll do a small lecture on it.
Cool, I'm just looking at the nightonearth website now - looks like just your kind of thing – connecting urban arts scenes in Shanghai, Berlin and Helsinki through innovative arts projects…
They need to update the program for the Helsinki part, but you can see what they’ve done in Shanghai and Berlin. Yes it’s my kind of thing. And apart from that at the moment I am preparing a bigger China-oriented moving images event to do in Berlin and New York. I’m preparing to apply for funding and get connected with some local people here who will help with it. And I’ve also been writing for a Belgian art magazine and preparing some smaller events like screenings and another Bloody Sunday for the fall.
Tell me about Bloody Sunday.
Bloody Sunday is an idea that started with Leo, my roommate at the time and partner in a lot of parties and music events I organized in Beijing. She’s like my big sister. We thought that there was a lack of good Sunday afternoon parties in Beijing - like a place where you could hang out on gloomy winterdays and boring summer Sundays. A place to do that became a concept we were working towards creating and then when our friend Isaak joined us we started to brainstorm on what the bigger, underlying meaning of doing parties like that was, and we ended up having this all night discussion about the installation we would build and the atmosphere we wanted to create. With his help and the enthusiasm of a bunch of other Chinese and foreign creative friends we made every month a different version of it; we built literally trees, and swings, gardens of eden, showed each time a program of short films, had live vjs, live musicians, dj sets and swap or fleamarket, made fresh soups and food, like we just spoiled our audience you could say, and had heaps of fun doing it. They were also damned time consuming but totally worth it. The venues changed often, a club we customized, a boat in a public park, the big open courtyard of a gallery etc... Here in Berlin I also organised one, but it was simpler. I will do more Bloody Sundays for sure, but maybe not every month, it’s easier with a big group of people.
Yeah I remember the swings inside at Yugong Yishan. They were excellent. But is there a particular reason it’s called “Bloody Sunday”? I’m guessing it doesn’t have anything to do with the 1972 Irish killings?
No it's got nothing to do with the 1972 massacre and if I held it in Britain or Ireland I would give it another name, but I also like the fact that we re-use and reconstruct a light meaning for a name that has been buried under heaviness. There is actually a film from 1971 with this name - Sunday Bloody Sunday - which is about a love triangle and tells the story of a young bisexual designer and his simultaneous relationships with a recruitment consultant and a Jewish doctor.
And aren’t you going back to visit Beijing again soon?
Yes I’m going back for a couple of weeks next month to do a one night event as part of a project called Homeshop: Olympics 2008. The idea is to create a street party for the losers of the games, like literally to celebrate the athletes who don’t win. Chinese culture has this complex with the concept of losing face. It’s always about the people that succeed, the winners, and they don’t talk about the losers, even if they are not really losers but they just didn’t gain first place. This is reflected in every part of Chinese society and it makes people act in ways that are not very honest, because they don’t want to lose face. It’s a part of Chinese culture that I really didn’t like, so I feel totally inspired to create this kind of small public/private intrusion during the games and come together with a lot of local and non-local people who are there at that time to celebrate the losers, the unusual and the brave people. I will dj and invite some other musicians (including a Chinese samba band), show a relevant screening and have fun with the local people in the neighbourhood who cannot go to see the games, because it’s mainly an event for the privileged ones. We’ll start quite early in the evening so that police are less likely to stop the party - during the day they won’t care so much because they’ll be busy with the official Olympic events. But I am also curious to see how all the interactions around and reactions to a celebration of losers like this will be...
You must be looking forward to being able to speak mandarin again. How's your German going?
Hehe. I was at this open air party last Sunday, talking German to a girl and she immediately said, “wow you have an accent”…so let’s say I can understand and speak it, but I’m not hiding where I come from. I think the accent will disappear after a while, although I don’t mind it really - I keep it a bit in every language I speak. I am not a perfectionist in languages. The aim for me is not to be a linguist, but to communicate with people.

tibetan pop

2008-01-30T04:14:00.000-08:00

this was playing on TVs in approximately every third shop in Lhasa in 2007

year of contrasting landscapes

2007-12-17T03:07:00.000-08:00

i hate helen garner

2007-01-16T14:04:00.000-08:00

published in the alternative law journal 2006 (31(1)) but with a bad typo

Joe Cinque, a young engineer from Newcastle, died on 26 October 1996 after having his coffee laced with Rohypnol and then being injected with a massive dose of heroin by his girlfriend, Anu Singh, in their rented Canberra unit. Singh, a final year law student at ANU, drugged her boyfriend after the couple had hosted a dinner party where a number of the guests had been told of her intention to kill herself and take Cinque with her. In particular Singh’s best friend, fellow law student Madhavi Rao, knew of Singh’s plan. Both Singh and Rao were charged with murder. Although originally both women were to be tried together before a jury, they were eventually tried separately by judge alone (ACT Supreme Court Justice Crispin). Rao was acquitted outright, while Singh was found guilty of manslaughter on the basis of diminished responsibility, and sentenced to ten years. She was released on parol last year, shortly before the release of Helen Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation: A True Story of Death, Grief and the Law.

Like The First Stone, this book is an emotive account of Garner’s personal involvement in and perspective of the main events. Unlike The First Stone however, this book does not purport to be an objective account of those events. The title alone shows the book’s bias, and Garner is candid about her desire, in the wake of the collapse of her third marriage, “to look at women who were accused of murder…to find out if anything made them different from me; whether I could trust myself to keep the lid on the vengeful, punitive force that was in me”. Joe Cinque’s Consolation is on one level a lament for Joe Cinque; it is also a soul-searching exercise for Helen Garner, a questioning of the boundary between mental illness and “evil”, and an analysis of and comment on “women who kill”. Garner focuses on Singh’s “deeply feminine gestures” and “womanly roundness”; asserts that all women fear “the infant, vain, frantic, destructive, out of control” force inside them; compares her own “primitive female hostility” to Singh’s, remembering when she treated a boyfriend “so cruelly and hurtfully that he hit me across the face…I knew I’d driven him to it”; distrusts “the pretty doctor” who gives a medical explanation for Singh’s behaviour; and stresses that “the devil is not ugly”. Garner generalises and trivialises the experiences of women who kill, suggesting that their otherwise inexplicable behaviour can be understood by viewing them as having succumbed to the “vengeful, punitive force” that is “in everyone”. In doing so, Garner severely misrepresents the overwhelming majority of women who kill only after suffering years of domestic violence. Garner’s gender politics aside, we must ask ourselves as a society why we are so intrigued and outraged by the (unquestionably tragic) event of a woman unlawfully killing her boyfriend, when the significantly more common (yet surely also unquestionably tragic) event of a man unlawfully killing his girlfriend or wife raises little public interest.

Garner’s highly personalised writing style makes for a gripping narrative and a significant departure from the usual “objective” formality of analyses and critiques of law. Garner actually bears witness to the tragedy which she felt Singh’s trial to be – she attends court, observes witnesses in and out of the courtroom, visits Singh’s and Cinque’s parents at their homes, sees for herself Canberra’s late 90s heroin culture, and has afternoon tea with Justice Crispin. By standing so close to the main events and by openly giving an account of her own issues in relation to those events, Garner captures the essence of courtroom injustice on a level that academic and policy critiques simply cannot. She raises questions about legal procedure, about mental illness and criminal responsibility, and ultimately about the purpose of law itself – whose definition of justice does it deliver? Garner is shocked and indignant at the aggression of cross-examination, empathising with the (Crown) witnesses’ frustration at having their stories distorted. She questions the role of psychiatric expert evidence in criminal law. Anu Singh’s trial was characterised by a large amount of expert psychiatric and psychological evidence, the weight of which supported a finding that Singh had a borderline personality disorder, and a long-running eating disorder – conditions capable of satisfying the “abnormality of mind” requirement for diminished responsibility. Garner asks “does psychological sophistication over-ride a sense that some actions are just plain bad?” and “What is `simple wickedness’? Does such a thing exist? Was there ever such a thing, or did it die with the arrival of psychiatry?” She questions how psychiatrists paid by the defendant’s parents can be regarded as credible witnesses, suggesting the court should instead appoint its own psychiatrists to give evidence.

Many of Garner’s ideas for a different method of determining the mental health of defendants have actually been operating in the Queensland Mental Health Court since February 2002. Constituted by a Supreme Court judge and two government-appointed “assisting psychiatrists”, the court is not bound by the rules of evidence; no party bears the onus of proof, and matters are decided on the civil standard. Whether the Mental Health Court has led to an improvement in the delivery of justice is a question requiring research and debate, but its continually increasing workload suggest that this non-adversarial court is operating successfully. However with its two psychiatrists positioned on the bench, its elite class of witnesses (almost exclusively psychiatrists and some psychologists) and its departure from general criminal procedure, it also leans towards the trial by psychiatry Garner fears is absolving “simple wickedness” and “just plain bad” behaviour. Whether the Cinques’ grief or Garner’s indignance would have been relieved had Anu Singh been referred to such a court is also doubtful. Of course Garner does not acknowledge the existence of an Australian Mental Health Court alternative, nor indeed does she deal, on anything but a purely descriptive level, with any of the practicalities of or rationales behind the mainstream legal procedures that she finds so offensive.

By departing from the “objective truth” discourses of science and law which are generally used to canvass issues of criminal responsibility and legal procedure, Joe Cinque’s Consolation manages to articulate the feelings of loss and sorrow of those close to the victim, and to thereby provide a sense of justice that the legal system simply cannot. The book is thus an effective lament for a young man who died. However this book is not just a lament for Joe Cinque; it is also a story about Helen Garner, and it makes a bitter, unbalanced comment on women. As someone who is acutely aware of the astounding number of men who do harm to women and get away with it, and of the role law plays in continually allowing that gendered harm to happen, I find Garner’s decision to once again write a bestseller about a good man, a bad woman, and the law that let her get away with it, irresponsible and infuriating. But Garner may, of course, write what she pleases. What is of concern from a socio-legal perspective is society’s eagerness to share her view – to be outraged by the behaviour of a young, educated woman and the legal process that seemed to favour her, and to use the morally untouchable topic of a young man’s death to justify a deeper and broader distaste for young women today.