An unconference and a conference and a link

[rax]

I'm speaking two places this month, and I encourage you to come to one or both if you want to hear me and some other people natter on about theory. The first one is this Saturday, and it's at KinkForAll Boston [0] which will be at BU from 10:30 to... 4? 5? The webpage describes it as "an ad-hoc unconference on sexuality for anyone and everyone, drawing participants from an astounding range of both sexuality-related and other communities. Anyone with the desire to learn or with something to contribute is welcome and invited to participate." It's basically based on BarCamp, which I've always thought was interesting --- which does something similar with tech people instead of sexuality people. I'm going to give a talk called "Why Gender Theory Matters To Your Sex Life;" I'll be cribbing some from Riki Wilchins's Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer and then disagreeing voraciously. Sadly I don't think I'll have finished Covering by then... If this sounds interesting, you should come! And talk about your relevant research or experience!

September 26th I'll be on a panel called "Race and Gender in Technology" at the MIT Women's and Gender Studies 25th Anniversary Conference, "Futures of Race and Gender." I'll be responding to Elizabeth Roberts (the anthropologist, not the RI Lt. Governor [1]) and I am very much looking forward to it. I'm pretty sure it is open attendance, but I can confirm that It is open to the public; if you're into issues of race and gender, and I know a lot of you are, I very much encourage you to sit in. The other two presentations are "Mentoring Women: Four Generations of Women Scientists at MIT" and "Genetic Testing: Gender, Race and Medicine." Ooooh, do I have opinions on the second one! I am looking forward to hearing what the panelists have to say. :) The room is 32-141 which I think I can translate into a handy-dandy link for people not familiar with the MIT campus. [2]

I hope to see some of you at one or both of these! If not, I should have writeups after they're done.

Oh and I promised a link! It's depressing, but David Neuwert's articles about Eliminationism in America are really, really worth reading. I don't know much about him or his politics other than these articles, but they seem very solid to me, research and citation-wise. He also reminded me to spend one of my Amazon gift certificates on Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism by James W. Loewen. You can read the first chapter in PDF format; if you haven't heard of this concept before, you should really click that link sometime you are ready for the sad-making. (Someone on my friends list posted this a while ago and I went OH MY GOD WHAT but then didn't buy the book. Remedying that now!)

And back to work.

[0] Despite having the word "Kink" in the title, it is at least in theory not primarily about BDSM; I hope that actually works out, because I'm interested primarily in things other than BDSM. There was apparently lots of stupid mailing list wankery about the name; I'm just showing up to talk and to listen. (There are lots of places I can go to hear people talk endlessly about BDSM, including "the Diesel, by accident." There are many fewer where I can hear about "an astounding range of ... sexuality-related and other communities.")

[1] I don't think I need to say anything snarky about Wikipedia's Elizabeth Roberts disambiguation page. I think it snarks itself.

[2] I actually had to look it up, because I don't think of that as "building 32," I think of it as "the architectural atrocity."

Comments

[zdenka]

I was reading the Eliminationism article with interest until I got to this sentence: they all reflect the strands of the hard-wired right-wing desire to eliminate, by violent means if necessary, anyone deemed the Other, or the Enemy.

At that point I stopped and did a double-take. If the author had left out the phrase "right-wing," it would have been a perfectly reasonable sentence. I tried to keep reading anyway, but he wandered off into Republican-bashing. I was all the more disappointed because he had been making some interesting and valid points about American politics and history. However, anyone who demonizes one segment of the political spectrum and can't see the beam in his own eye is not going to have much credibility with me.

[rax.livejournal.com]

I think that's an entirely legitimate criticism of Neiwert and the most interesting things in his pieces are historical. I didn't read him as demonizing, but of course I'm not going to, he's on my side; I should take a different perspective and read through a couple of the essays after lunch, thank you.

I do find myself unsure what to do with the fact that I see this eliminationist rhetoric coming much more from the right than from the left; the left has sleazy, bad, frustrating rhetoric but I've almost never seen it be about killing anyone. Maybe I'm blind to it, I don't know. I certainly don't think that all or most right-wing people, or Republican people, or whatever are eliminationist; but when Neiwert's able to compile this alarming list (http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/03/eliminationism-in-america-appendix.html) of quotes including fairly prominent pundits and elected representatives on the far right, it's hard not to see a correlation. (I don't particularly care about the random bloggers --- it's the internet, it has stupid people on it --- but the people who hold elected office or have audiences in the millions really make me twitch.)

Do you (or does anyone else reading this) have any idea how to handle this situation effectively and thoughtfully? I feel like I'm making harmful generalizations if I say "Well this eliminationist trend is a right-wing thing," but I feel like I'm not being realistic if I try to divorce eliminationism and political stance...

[rax.livejournal.com]

OK, now that I am looking for it, I'm also seeing direct threats of violence in "liberal" blogville: commenters on Pam's House Blend on Caster Semenya (http://www.pamshouseblend.com/showComment.do;jsessionid=9F892166C75553F562C754B69B9E87E3?commentId=168052). Not eliminationist, but still not OK.

[zdenka]

*nod* Yeah. Sad but not surprised.

[rax.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised... not that someone would say it, but that it hasn't been deleted yet; I expect it would have been if it had suggested the same should be done to Semenya. It's possible it will still end up deleted later; here's a logged image (http://autumnfox.akrasiac.org/pamshate.png) just in case, so that the discussion will make sense. If it's OK in one direction and not the other, that's pretty twitchy.

I've certainly been uncomfortable about people on "my side" using violent language in this way in other debates before. I don't know where the lines are or should be, but I know that it makes me very uncomfortable.

[sprrwhwk.livejournal.com]

That line bothered me too.

This site chronicles a number of threats against Bush (http://www.zombietime.com/zomblog/?p=621), which are also Not Okay. The qualitative difference I'm seeing is that, except in a small number of cases (chronicled in the middle -- search for Kerry) the stature of the people saying these things is low. It's not Rachel Maddow or Al Franken or Barney Frank saying these things, it's random nobodies on the street. They're also targeted against a single person -- Bush -- and not an entire group. My search string "liberal death threats against conservatives -obama" is turning up nothing, which actually surprises me. I think there's a valid argument to be made that the level of eliminationist rhetoric in liberal public conduct is significantly less than the level of eliminationist rhetoric in conservative public conduct.

That said, I agree that insisting that that eliminationist impulse is fundamental to conservativism in general or the Republican party in particular is perilous, if only because it gives power to the eliminationists in those groups at the expense of the non-eliminationists. If we want the party to change its public stance, we need to give it room in which to do so.

[zdenka]

The thing that makes me uncomfortable is when liberal authors or bloggers lump together all "right-wing/conservative/Republican" viewpoints, especially while focusing on the horrific ones. (I'm actually kind of uncomfortable with the Left/Right model of politics anyway, but that would be a digression). And when people start being alarmed because Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter has said thus-and-such . . . I mean, it's valid to be upset and even alarmed sometimes, because I guess a lot of people do listen to them. But I don't. I never have. I don't pay much attention to them, really. Limbaugh and Coulter are not my people, they don't speak for me, I have no way of controlling what they say, and I don't consider them particularly on my side. So . . . I'm not quite sure where I'm going with that, but . . . something. Maybe, if your model doesn't have a way to distinguish between me and Rush Limbaugh, it is insufficiently fine-tuned?

The things I want most are for people to 1) be more specific and accurate about the group that is doing the things they don't like, 2) when compiling a list of all the nasty stuff the "other side" is doing, sincerely ask if "your side" is doing or has done it too, and 3) avoid saying things like "no reasonable/ethical person could possible think XYZ!" or "anyone who thinks ZYX must be stupid or brainwashed or hypocrites or in the pay of evil corporate llamas!" Because people are people, and if thousands of people believe something, it might be worth taking more time to think about why.

Point #1 applies to you, #1 and 2 apply to the author, and #3 is my usual rant and can probably be ignored in this context. :-)

Looking over the page you linked to, there are some quotations that are shocking and upsetting. There are others that I simply can't take seriously in this context, because I've seen liberal pundits or commentators saying the exact same things in reverse.

My impression (overgeneralizing wildly for a moment) is that conservatives tend to use more rhetoric of violence and liberals tend to be more about the speech suppression/mind control. I don't know how true that is. It's worth looking into, and it's worth talking about. My problem is that Neiwert is jumbling together the significant and the trivial, and he's making a list of Bad Things in conservative rhetoric without even looking at liberal rhetoric for comparison, which makes it hard for me to take him entirely seriously. (I also dislike reading stuff written by people who hate me as part of an undifferentiated group, because it makes my stomach hurt, and I only have so many spoons. I imagine you know the feeling.)

Sorry for this being kinda jumbled -- I wanted to respond quickly, but I'll come back again once I've had a chance to think about it some more and set my thoughts in better order.

[rax.livejournal.com]

(I'm actually kind of uncomfortable with the Left/Right model of politics anyway, but that would be a digression)

It's a false dichotomy for sure, although I'm not always sure how to even object to it without playing into it.

I guess part of my problem here, though in many ways I agree with you, is that I'm not certain it's inaccurate or unspecific to say "Certain prominent right-wing-identifying and Republican-identifying pundits are calling, often in code and sometimes explicitly, for the elimination of various groups of people, in a way I find extremely extremely creepy, and have not seen on other sides of these debates." I don't think Limbaugh or Coulter speaks for you or is on your side --- if I thought you shared all of their opinions, to be frank, I would not talk to you. :) (And I expect you would do the same with me if you thought I shared all opinions with $LIBERAL_NUTBAG_HERE. [0] At some point there is not enough common ground to have a reasonable conversation about anything except weather and the Red Sox.) I do think "be[ing] specific and accurate" is important; I'm not doing a good job of being coherent about my problems in doing so right now, so I'm going to come back and try later.

My problem is that Neiwert is jumbling together the significant and the trivial

This is sort of a minor point, but I think he makes a compelling argument that some of the things that look trivial are actually significant because they encode identical messages to the clearly significant. I don't think he succeeds at this for everything; I'm not sure how he could have better handled it in the essays but it's definitely worth considering.

I also dislike reading stuff written by people who hate me as part of an undifferentiated group, because it makes my stomach hurt, and I only have so many spoons. I imagine you know the feeling.

This is absolutely fair.

[0] It's arguably telling that I can't name one off the top of my head. Whether it's telling that "the 'conservative' nutbags get way more screen time, airtime, and mindshare," or telling that I have a blindness here, probably depends on your perspective. I expect it's some of both.

[iainuki.livejournal.com]

[0] It's arguably telling that I can't name one off the top of my head. Whether it's telling that "the 'conservative' nutbags get way more screen time, airtime, and mindshare," or telling that I have a blindness here, probably depends on your perspective. I expect it's some of both.

I would put forward an alternative hypothesis: while it is easy enough to cite extreme and ridiculous liberal views akin to the extreme and ridiculous conservative views, in general the Democratic part of the politicial spectrum is not quite as defined by personalities as the Republican part of the political spectrum. I don't know why; it may just be historical contingency. Michael Moore is my canonical example of a liberal nutbag, FWIW.

[rax.livejournal.com]

Oh right Michael Moore! I've somehow managed to avoid actually watching any of his stuff, but I've certainly heard him cited as being in that position.