'Tis the season

Of food. If you're celebrating something this time of year, you're probably eating.

Chronic pain and fatigue mean that I struggle with energy for preparing square meal. Increasingly this means I make use of one-pot recipes, but sometimes the desire to eat/serve something a little bit different can mean that I spend dramatic amounts of energy and can be tired for days. So I need a new repertoire, and gradually I'm finding new dishes and combinations that work well.

I occasionally browse cookbook sections in bookshops, but generally find these are not as helpful as one might think. See, I know how to cook. The problem is not learning to cook, but thinking up dishes that meet the necessary restrictions. Moreover, most cookbooks seems to have a dramatically different idea from me of what constitutes an "easy" recipe. For example, Nigella Lawson's version of "easy" cooking, that often takes half an hour and uses several pots I'll then have to wash up, is the sort of dish I might consider on a day I was feeling particularly well, not on a day I was feeling tired and in lots of pain.

So what I need are recipes that meet the following restrictions:

• Low financial cost: No posh imported ingredients, no boneless skinless nonsense.


• Nutritional value: It's important to me that I eat a balanced range of vitamins and other nutrients because this helps in the management of my symptoms.


• Low on mental spoon-cost: This will vary from person to person, but for me it means working with foods I'm likely to have already in my kitchen (since I can't usually run out at the last minute to pick up a few ingredients). And while I do buy fresh foods regularly, recipes that rely on ingredients with a longer shelf-life are preferred (since I'm more likely to have those things on any given day). Brownie points if you can make a good meal entirely out of non-perishables. Also: if I can minimise the planning-ahead time, that's good too (so foods that have to be prepared a day in advance are right out).


• Low on physical spoon-cost: This will also vary from person to person, but for me it means minimal chopping, minimal washing up, minimal time I have to spend standing up.

So why is this a social justice issue? Well, as I've written before, the cheapest foods tend either to be low in the nutritional content I need or very high in spoon-cost. Foods that are really easy to prepare tend to be more expensive (because they include the cost of processing, chopping, skinning/boning, etc), and are often less healthy. If they are both easier to prepare and high in the nutritional content that I need, they are high in financial cost; we're talking nice cuts of lean meat and fish, whole grains, fresh fruit and vegetables -- all of these are dramatically more expensive than the less healthy options of tinned baked beans, tinned meat, etc.

And as a feminist, I also note that domestic work -- including the purchasing and preparation of food -- is disproportionately allocated to women. And when the women in question are disabled, these are the issues that arise. Oh, and did I mention? Disabled people and women are disproportionately poor.

Anyway I keep looking for new recipes that meet all of these, but the hope that I will find them in one of the cookbooks all the cool kids seem to be using is beginning to fade. As Kaz and I have often remarked, we may just need to write the book(s) ourselves.

Anyway, happy whatever-you-celebrate, or general happiness, if you do not celebrate anything this time of year. May your spoons be plentiful.

--IP

Geraldine Doyle

Geraldine Doyle died last week at the age of 86. She was the inspiration for the "Rosie the Riveter" poster which proudly proclaimed that We Can Do It. Yes, that one:

Image description: A young White woman flexing her right arm and looking determined. She is wearing a blue factory work shirt, her hair is covered in a red bandanna with white dots. There is a blue speech bubble above her head with the words "We Can Do It!".

And here's Ms Doyle in the 1940s:

Image description: a young White woman is shown leaning over what appears to be a piece of factory machinery. She is wearing a light-coloured factory work clothes, and her hair is tied up and covered with a polka-doted bandanna.

The poster was initially used to recruit women to war service during WWII, and soon became an image of the Women's Movement -- symbolising women's strength, and determination. It's one I've loved for it's positive focus on what women can, and do contribute.

Her obituary in the Washington Post contains this paragraph:

While many people profited off the "Rosie the Riveter" image, Mrs. Doyle often said she never made a penny from it because she was too busy tending to her family and "changing diapers all the time."

I hope the irony is not lost on anyone.

Raise hell, Ms Doyle.

Hat tip: Melissa McEwan at Shakesville.

--IP

Me and You

The individual is a cult of personality, an isolated incident, a dictatorship, an event, a single point. The collective is solidarity, a culture, a democracy, a continuation, a network.

Advantage cannot be given without comparatively removing it from others. One person breaking a glass ceiling does not help everyone else; it just shatters one illusion, leaving shards for everyone who stands below. Now people believe that where there used to be a ceiling, there is none. Don't be fooled; it is still there. One illusion was replaced with another, for there was never a ceiling there in the first place, and now there still is.

Struggle for power and you will find privilege, but look inside yourself and you will find a power without struggle. The difficulty is not an external one, but an internal one, to recognise the power relations that play out every day and to learn to challenge them. It is not about rising up, but about bringing down.

Society exists. We are not just people, but people in relations, a system. We will never be outside such a system, so we must always push at is edges. The revolution is not an event. It is eternal, a fight against inheritance and assumption. It is not outside but within: there is no end state to be achieved, and no inevitability about it.

Even though the struggle is internal, it is not individual. It is a shared struggle against our society, our surroundings, which permeate us and constitute us. It is a revolt against ourselves. But to revolt against your self alone is depression and dulling of the spirit. Collectively it can be joy.

To push against the chains that shackle us all is activity as brilliantly subversive as anything else we can hope to do, and if you do not enjoy it, you're doing it wrong. So: smile at the police lines, dance! When authority seeks control, laugh in its face, for it has no power over your spirit. Rejoice in your disobedience, for it is not merely insurrection but liberation!

"Grow out of it"

When I was at school, I didn't date until much later than everyone else, and I remember that this caused a certain amount of tension between me and my schoolmates. By all accounts, there was something wrong with me: I was a dyke, or I was frigid, or I was a slut who had lots of sex but was too uptight to tell anyone about it, or I had issues with men, or I wanted to date guys but they didn't want to date me.

When I said I simply wasn't interested, that was assumed to be false -- something masking the real problem. If asked whether I wanted to have a relationship or sex eventually, I shrugged, and explained that I had no strong preferences either way, which only confused people more.

Eventually, I did start to have romantic relationships, and in my adulthood that included sexual ones. I resent that that fits the stereotypical narrative of "growing out of it" or "not being ready", because that suggests that becoming sexual is something people do, naturally and inevitably, all on their own. And if that's true, then why did my peers go to so much trouble to make sure I knew, from primary school onwards, that there was something completely and utterly wrong with not wanting sexual relationships? We were in primary school when I first remember being overtly told that this was something wrong with me -- most of my peers didn't even know what sex was (I got unusually good sex ed from my parents, at quite a young age, but it's clear to me in retrospect that this wasn't true of my peers), only that sex wasn't optional once you were at the highschool prom/in college/married (highschool proms, college, and marriage obviously not being optional either).

In other words, from a very young age, we are taught The Relationship Hierarchy. Which is something like: blood ties and marriage ties trump other sorts of ties. Sexual relationships trump non sexual relationships. You have only one partner, who shall be your sexual partner and your lawfully-wedded spouse, and no other partners, and they trump all other relationships. Marriages that produce children trump non-procreating relationships, but Thou Shalt Not Be A Single Parent. "Family" and "Friends" are distinctive sets of people, and "Family" trumps "Friends". "Friends" should mean only people of the same sex, but otherwise, same sex friends trump other-sex friends. You shall be emotionally intimate only with same-sex friends, unless you are a man, and then Thou Shalt Not Have Emotions. (Please note that I think these are social norms, rather than things I agree with -- in fact I strongly oppose many of these ideas).

Well fuck that. As my co-blogger Katherine blogged, important relationships can be constituted not only through blood ties or marriage ties, but also in other ways. Katherine used the example of flatmates, who might well constitute family.

The message here is that although I happen to associate certain kinds of emotional closeness with certain kinds of people and the relationships I have with them, and I also happen to associate certain kinds of (not necessarily sexual) physical intimacy with certain people, those are things I have largely been taught to associate, according to the Relationship Hierarchy. Some of those associations or non-associations are healthy and self-protective (it is not healthy to be close to certain people in certain ways), some of them are arbitrary and deeply harmful.

And that has all sorts of reprecussions. It means that from a very young age, before children really understand what sex is, we have taught them that boys and girls cannot be friends without a sexual connection (and men and men, or women and women can never have a sexual or romantic connection). It means that we teach kids that people who are not interested in sex or romance are wrong. It means we teach kids that queer families are wrong or oxymoronic. It means we teach kids that there is a primacy to sexual relationships above friendships that goes partway to legitimising posessive behaviours in abusive partners.

And in the context of a society in which things are sold by displaying a near-naked or hawt-and-sexy woman, or a society in which street harassment is part of many women's routine experience, this is also how we teach women that they must be sexually available all the time, to men who must always want sex. It starts before we even know what sex is, and it continues, more or less forever. I remember being little, thinking that eventually I would have sex because everyone did. I remember being repulsed by the idea then, which I attributed to being primary-school age, but years later, I'm still repulsed by the idea that one ought, to think that having sex is inevitable, or think that nobody says no to sex. That's not something I anticipate "growing out of".

There are interesting things to be said about how this relates to queer feminism, sex-positive feminism, and the socialisation of children, but this post is long enough already. What I will say is this: Kaz and I have talked about queer feminism having, on the whole, very little to say about asexuality. I've worried about writing about asexuality because I don't identify as asexual, and didn't want to be talking as if I knew about other people's experiences. But part of being a political ally, and part of creating a feminism that works for me, is examining my own investment in sexuality, and how we build the hierarchies that I, and indeed everyone else, is part of, and that harm the people around me. This isn't really a post about asexuality -- but it is me starting to do the investment work.

--IP

Shout out: Spectral Amoebas

Well if this ain't wicked, I don't know what is. Kaz, Ily, and Sciatrix are bringing you a brand new shiny carnival about asexuality and the autistic spectrum. The call for participation says

A blog carnival is an event where various people write posts around a single topic and link them together at the end. The topic of this carnival is the intersection of asexuality and the autism spectrum. The scope of this project is general. Any topic that deals with the intersection of asexuality and autism fits within the aegis of the carnival. If you’re not sure, submit it anyway and we’ll figure it out.

We are asexual bloggers on the autistic spectrum who want to explore the intersection between autistic and asexual identities. The basis of this project is to have a conversation about our unique experiences being autistic and asexual without looking for a “cause”. We want to create a safe, non-judgmental space to talk about the issues that affect us. If you identify as asexual (or demisexual, or gray-a) and as on the autistic spectrum (diagnosed or not, AS, autism, PDD-NOS, NLD), you are invited to write a blog post for this project. If you are not asexual and autistic you are welcome to contribute provided you focus on the issues experienced by this particular intersection. The scope of the project is general, and open to any experiences of being autistic and asexual.

However, please keep in mind that asexuality here is to be discussed as a sexual orientation in its own right, not as discussion of the desexualization imposed on autistic people by mainstream culture.

If you want to write a post but don’t have a blog, please contact Ily at sanfranciscoemily@gmail.com or me at sciatrix@gmail.com about doing a guest post. Please have your post written by 31st January and comment on this post or send an e-mail to me or Ily about your post by then. Note that the hosts reserve the right to reject posts by anyone if they feel they do not follow the guidelines of or are not in the spirit of the carnival. The posts will be compiled on Writing From Factor X for posterity. A post with the compilation will go up here in the beginning of February. Be a part of this exciting project!
–Sciatrix, Kaz, and Ily

An edit: Possible topics include but are not restricted to coming out experiences (both asexual and autistic), relationships, gender expression, young adult experiences, treatment by medical professionals, integrating identities, or dealing with stereotypes. This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive list, only general ideas.

See? I said it was wicked!

--IP

(Tip of the fabulous hattedness: Kaz)

Just the beginning

Earlier this evening, Parliament voted to raise tuition fees to £6000-£9000 per year.

My generation has been hit with a set of really brutal cuts. The elimination of Child Trust Fund, cuts to Child Benefit, cuts to youth services and sports centers and public libraries and schools and now higher education.


I couldn't make the protests today, although I've attended many of the other protests in the last few weeks, so I was home listening to the Parliamentary debate. And what I heard was a room mostly full of non-disabled White men who themselves received world-class free educations, and they are now denying affordable accessible educations to the current generation of young people, and slashing support to women, disabled people, and poor people. I saw a group of people who have benefited hugely from the welfare state decide that children too young to vote but old enough to protest and be arrested, should not themselves receive the same support. And when one MP asked another MP whether he would be willing to pay £9,000 a year for each of his years at university, I saw him dismiss the question and mock it.

But I also heard a spirited defense of public services, or student protests and occupations, of protests against Vodafone, and criticisms of kettling from Jeremy Corbyn MP and others. We have a great deal of public support. Some of our elected representatives behaved shamefully today, and we will remember that. We will also remember that we have huge popular following, that we can win if we work together. As Adam Ramsayreminded me earlier this evening when I was struggling not to cry, Thatcher's poll tax was also approved by Parliamentary vote, and later dropped following civil unrest. We can do that again.

The campaign against cuts to public services is about more than just tuition fees and university. We've lost this round, but we'll be back. We'll keep marching, keep working, keep protesting. This is just the beginning.

--IP

People who do good work can still be bastards

Here's what we know about Julian Assange: he founded WikiLeaks, he has been arrested and charged with sexual offenses, he denies the allegations, he has been denied bail, and his work has generated extensive controversy and animosity among politicians.

Here's what I know about rape allegations: the mass media is particularly shit at impartial journalism when it's about a rape allegation, and we, the general public are also particularly shit at being impartial.

I think what WikiLeaks does is important. I think transparency in governing is important. I think protections for whistleblowers are important.

I also think that nobody is all good or all bad, and that the fact that you do good and important work does not necessarily mean that you're not a bastard. Whether Julian Assange belongs in this category I do not know, and I do not care to speculate. I refer you to the above list of things I do know about him. I note the point here because it's something that people often overlook but I thin it may be part of what is motivating the popular support of Assange against the allegations. That is, I think many people assume that if someone is nice to fluffy kittens then they must automatically be A Good Person who can do no harm. Maybe Assange is the sweetest person you could ever hope to meet, and is particularly sweet to fluffy kittens. Maybe he's a total wanker. I don't know, and what's more, I don't particularly care. What I do know and care about is that supporting transparency and whistleblowing does not require me to excuse or ignore serious allegations.

But I'm saddened to see a number of liberal and even feminist friends talking and writing about Assange and the allegations as if the allegations are obviously trumped-up, or simply unimportant, or who write about supporting WikiLeaks more vociferously and frequently when the media is full of stories about these allegations than at any other times. The people who know what really happened are Assange and the two complainants. The rest of us? We have to stick with the lists at the start of this post.

If you really care about transparency, and you really think whistleblowing is important (and I assume that you do think these things if you support WikiLeaks), your concern should be for the truth. And as you know, if you have been following WikiLeaks, the truth isn't always convenient or simple. So if you're really committed to finding out the truth, your concern should be not to shut down allegations or dismiss them, but to insist on a fair trial.

--IP

We're here, we're Queer...

...And we won't pay £9,000 a year!

Seriously though, I've been wanting to talk about the way that queer politics, interact with economic justice politics, because the connection is not really that obvious.

Most of you will have heard about the student protests across the country since 10 November, in opposition to fees and cuts to education and other public services. The National Day of Action on 24 November saw walk-outs, sit-ins, study-ins, demonstrations, and student occupations of university buildings -- about 20 universities (including 6 unconfirmed, but likely) across the UK have been occupied by students, in opposition to the cuts. 30 November will see a Scotland demonstration. What I've found encouraging has been the participation from secondary school students and sixth-formers. Many of the protests across the country have been led not by students at universities or colleges of further education, but by school pupils fighting for their future. This makes sense, since they'll be even more affected by the education cuts than current further/higher education students, but the response even from young teens has been overwhelming.

One thing I've been thinking a lot about though, is the kind of focus we put on our protest. When we march with banners and chants about education cuts, it's a great way of drawing attention to our personal investment. That's good in some ways -- it gives our protest the "human interest" that journalists love. But the downside is that what we are talking about, and what the media is talking about, is cuts to higher education -- the cuts that mostly affect people from middle class background (university hasn't been accessible to the poorest for a long time), and not, say, cuts to housing benefit.

This presents a curious dilemma. On the one hand, it's absolutely legitimate and important for people to say "I need to be able to pay rent, and put food on the table, and these cuts will stop me doing that, and for that reason I oppose them", and young people are particularly affected by cuts to education, rising debt, unemployment, etc.

On the other hand, it accentuates the problem of those who most need to be protesting not being able to, for various reason, or not being listened to.

There's a further issue though. And that's that if we accept that our tactical role is only to oppose tuition fees or higher education cuts, we've already lost, because we've already accepted the premise that education is an individual privilege, not a social good or a public investment. Education benefits everyone. Healthcare benefits everyone. Social housing benefits everyone.

Why they benefit everyone is an interesting question (but a long one, so it's another post -- or feel free to comment in the, well, the comments), but brings us onto what kind of future we, as young adults, want to grow up in. What kind of world we want to bring our children up in. These cuts aren't just for the duration of the economic crisis -- David Cameron has made that clear. These cuts will shape the coming decades -- our adulthoods.

So what I would like to see more of is discussion of the kind of society we want -- not just in terms of the minimum wage and the highest tax bracket, but what we want the structure of society to be. And this is where queer politics is relevant. I don't want a world in which some people just scrape by. I don't want a world where welfare is a social safety net. I don't want a world where some kinds of upbringing, or family units, or heteronormative lifestyles, are considered to be inherently better than others, and the stigmatised ones are financially or socially penalised. I don't want a world in which the concerns of materially-privileged teenagers heading for university are more important than the concerns of unemployed teenage single mothers on benefits. I think movements for economic justice can learn a lot from queer politics, by examining the unspoken premises in our campaigns.

In other words, what queer politics can contribute is this: what kind of lifestyles are we upholding as the ideals in a campaign for economic justice? Are we assuming that everyone comes from a two-parent two-income middle-class household and that that family is ideally placed to support them financially, practically, and emotionally?

As Queers Read This puts it:

Being queer is not about a right to privacy; it is about the freedom to be public, to just be who we are. It means everyday fighting oppression; homophobia, racism, misogyny, the bigotry of religious hypocrites and our own self-hatred.
[...] And now of course it means fighting a virus as well[...]. Being queer means leading a different sort of life. It's not about the mainstream, profit-margins, patriotism, patriarchy or being assimilated. It's not about executive directors, privilege and elitism.

Which I read as saying that queer rights movement requires not privacy, but a change in the structure of society, and structures of oppression and privilege (of which economic deprivation/privilege is one).

Or, if you prefer, we could take a different leaf from the queer politics book, and say that the similarity between the struggle for economic justice and the queer rights movement is that in both, Silence = Death.


--IP

dear united nations..

... this is not ok.

Trans Day of Remembrance

...Is today.

I never know what to say this time of year. In years past, I have sometimes struggled with thinking I need to find something deep and profound to say, something about witnessing and solidarity, something productive, something that isn't just raw anger (which is not to say I have actually found it!). But this year I just think...it's a day we remember the people who were killed because they were trans. I don't have anything wise to say, and I certainly don't have anything non-angry to say.

There are good posts up at Questioning Transphobia, and Hoyden About Town, and The Curvature.

--IP

Why I wasn't at the Fund Our Future march (but wanted to be)

If you're based in the UK, you've probably all heard about the protest for higher education funding that took place in London yesterday. I wasn't there, but some of my co-bloggers were, and I hope that they'll be able to write about what it was like to be there.

About 52,000 people, most of them students, but also a large contingent of academic and academic-related staff, marched through central London. The march was for the funding of public services, and higher education and research funding in particular; condemning tuition fees and graduate contributions, and the LibDem U-turn on student fees. There was also a large Free Education feeder march that unfortunately doesn't seem to have received much press coverage. Obviously it's the Millbank protest that's getting nearly all the coverage right now, and I'll let someone else comment on that, because I wasn't there, and my thoughts are still in a bit of a jumble. Maybe I'll do a round-up of interesting coverage later on.

So why wasn't I there? Ah. I'm glad you asked.

The "Look Ok...Feel Crap?" campaign from the Depression Alliance Scotland tweeted "Are you a student? Would you have liked to go on today's demo but didn't because of how you feel? Or did you go anyway?" Some of the replies they received on Twitter broke my heart -- students wrote back about issues with anxiety, depression, and other mental health conditions that kept them home.

In my case, it wasn't a mental health issue that kept me home, but it was a disability. I told friends who asked me that this ways because I couldn't get my mobility scooter to London (most types of public transport won't carry them). This is true, but not the whole story. It's also that when using a mobility scooter, I'm vulnerable in certain ways because I can't maneuver quickly in a crowd. This isn't a small march in Scotland -- it's a big march in London with the Metropolitan Police of kettling and head-beating fame. In a big group of people who are kettled and stressed, I could very easily get hurt. Also, my disability causes fatigue, and overnight trips on consecutive nights could cause a week or two of fatigue that would make me unable to do coursework or totally trivial things like cook food or wash clothes.

I'm not the only person who couldn't go. A great many of my friends couldn't go because their disabilities prevented them getting to London (the transport isn't accessible, and with central London packed with demo traffic, it's hard to make adjustments), or walk the whole march route even if the march had been held locally to them. Some couldn't go because they find marches too scary or anxiety-inducing or confrontational or upsetting because of mental health issues. Some couldn't go because they are scared of police officers, especially the Met, because their sociodemographic group has traditionally been targeted by the police for violence and prejudice. Some people couldn't attend because they have young children and no childcare, and were worried about their toddlers potentially being in a kettling situation (after the G20 protests, this is a reasonable worry). Some friends couldn't afford to go because they live on or below the breadline and couldn't afford the transport, or couldn't afford to miss a day of work.

(Note that many of these worries apply not only to protests, but also work. Those whose disability stops them from protesting, may also, for similar reasons, be legitimately unable to work. Those whose children's need for care means they have to stay home, might also mean that they can't work paid jobs. Those who are discriminated against by the police are likely to also be discriminated against by employers.)

When the government calls us lazy and work-shy, we have to work extra-hard to defend ourselves, and it costs energy and resources we don't have -- in my case, it might have cost me the ability to feed and clothe myself for several days. When public services are cut, we're affected in multiple ways -- not just by higher education, but also by cuts to nursery/childcare and schooling, medical services, child and family benefits, personal care, disability-specific support, housing, and the list goes on.

The people who face this kind of dual discrimination are the people who need to fight the hardest right now because they have the most to lose. They're also the people least able to fight the hardest. Often, the most effective kinds of protest are unavailable to us -- we can ask nicely, we can write to our MPs, we can sign petitions, but when asking nicely fails, we have no options left. It makes us easy targets for governments to take away our basic needs -- we can't fight back the way more privileged people can.

So to those of you who are protesting (there will be more big marches), please go and shout loud for me. If you haven't been protesting, but you think you could, please please please think about going, because those of us who really need to be there, can't.

--IP

And another thing about Remembrance Day

When I see photos of David Cameron wearing a poppy? David Cameron, whose government is cutting any last pretense we ever had at supporting veterans, and calling it "wasteful spending", and who is willing to drop some coins in a charity tin but not pay a fair slice of his income, because we all know that a few coins once a year is cheaper than tax and buys less for veterans, that David Cameron? The David Cameron who appears not to mind if veterans drop dead because they can't make the rent and bills or can't buy food because they've got no personal care and no mobility aids as a result of his public service cuts, but he's happy to take some PR credit for wearing a poppy in a not-at-all hypocritical manner?

I just want to puke.

--IP

What I'll be thinking about this Remembrance Day

For those unfamiliar with the custom: it is British tradition, in the run up to 11 November, to raise funds for the Royal British Legion's charity, the Poppy Appeal. The funds go to support wounded or disabled veterans and their families, for the rest of their lives. In 2009, the Poppy Appeal collected £35 million. Towards the end of October and first two weeks of November, most people can be seen wearing a red poppy pinned to their lapel, as a sign that they support the Poppy Appeal.

There are a number of things I find uncomfortable about the way we do Remembrance Day/Armistice Day in the UK, to do with displays of militaristic pride, at a time when we should most be thinking about how we have messed up, how we have failed to support our troops in any meaningful sense, how it is stunningly disrespectful to everyone who has died or lost someone or been injured or been sexually assaulted (let's not forget about the use of mass rape as a weapon of war) in war to turn our military past into something that patriotism requires us to be proud of. And all I can think about is the old slogan "Support our troops -- bring 'em home." I've written about some of this before.

But this year I'm also thinking about how the British public rally around wounded and disabled veterans in a way that we don't, and wouldn't, rally around others in need of similar funds and services, like, say, single mothers. It is important that we support people who need support in their daily lives, and it is undoubtedly true that society doesn't do enough for veterans. So none of this is out of any disrespect for veterans, or for the support that is provided to them.

But I can't help thinking that, if it weren't veterans, the community wouldn't respond so supportively. How do we respond to unemployed people on the dole? To single mothers? Even before this government, they were targeted by the tabloid press for scorn.

Traditionally, the justification for support for veterans is that they have served their country. And again, it's out of no disrespect for veterans, that I'm uncomfortable with that explanation. Or rather, it seems to that it shouldn't be necessary. We should support people because they need support.

Anyway, there's more than one way to serve your community. Where's the support for the now elderly or disabled people who did war service in factories? Where the support for pensioners who have spent their lives being nurses, teachers, police officers, postal workers, refuse collectors? Where's the support for disabled people who work in any number of jobs or volunteer with a number of causes, or would be able to with the right support?

There's a gendered dimension here too. It's easier to recognise some kinds of service of service than others. We disproportionately don't recognise, and don't provide support for the kinds of service that aren't paid employment. Who is disproportionately allocated unwaged community work, like, say caring for children, or elderly people, or disabled people? Women. Who not only won't receive a wage for much of the caregiving work they do for their families and communities, but are also disadvantaged when it comes to pensions and benefits if they have made fewer NI contributions (because of unwaged work), and are disproportionately judged negatively for their work. Caregiving most certainly is service to communities, but because their work isn't counted as "real" work.

I'm also thinking this year about the budget cuts. In cutting disability-related benefit spending and disability services, the ConDem government is literally taking wheelchairs from disabled people. In the case of veterans, the Poppy Appeal will go some way to making sure people still get at least some of the support that they need. But when it comes to other disabled people? Yes, there are other charities who do great work. None of them have the kind of pull on the British conscience that the Poppy Appeal has. And even the Poppy Appeal, although it does very good work, is no substitute for a strong public sector.

So when we talk about service to our country, I wish we talked more about what service means, and how much more we really have to do if we've any hope of providing properly for the people who have served this country.

--IP

New fave blog.

http://thedealwithdisability.blogspot.com

This is the blog of a highly intelligent and very physically disabled queer woman with cerebral palsy.
She mainly blogs the strange (and sometimes nice) ways in which people talk to and treat her - including a homeless man who tried to give her money, Jehovah's Witnesses trying to cure her and customer service assistants patting her on the head. ('My aide and I were looking at each other like, WTF.)

She writes in a fabulously sarcastic tone, but is also really non-judgmental about people who do treat her in a strange way. My new hero. Check it out.

good on you, joel burns.

For standing up and telling your story in a city council meeting full of people, in real time, where you knew you could not cut or edit it before it hit the internet. This just made me cry so much. In a good way.

Time of the Month Tiger

This is my new favourite website.

I feel like it adequately sums up how shit periods can be. Also - frankness is good.
Luckily I barely get periods anymore, but there was a time when I felt the world was falling out of my vagina.

"Women need abortions and I'm going to do them" - George Tiller, MD

Killed May 2009 in a hate incited murder.



Via Jezebel

Fat Talk Free Week

So apparently, it's Fat Talk Free Week. The aim is to shift towards a more constructive dialogue on body image, in order to challenge eating disorders and other harmful consequences of people being socialised to be dissatisfied with their bodies. So for Fat Talk Free Week, the idea is that you pledge not to engage in "fat talk" -- that is, in talk that reinforces the ultimately damaging idea that there is a "right" size and look. The webpage describes "fat talk" as:

Examples of fat talk may include: “I’m so fat,” “Do I look fat in this?” “I need to lose 10 pounds” and “She’s too fat to be wearing that swimsuit.” Statements that are considered fat talk don’t necessarily have to be negative; they can seem positive yet also reinforce the need to be thin – “You look great! Have you lost weight?”

This sounds just amazing, y'all. I'm totally signing up.

--IP

"The word pretty is unworthy of everything you will be / and no child of mine will be contained in five letters"

This is old-school awesome. The idea that we shouldn't have to be constrained by "pretty" always rings true, in feminism and queer politics. And, well, life in general. Sometimes poets just say things best.

(I am forever grateful to my parents, who told me that I was gorgeous but never, ever told me what that meant.)

The Apprentice: Sexism, Objectification, and Bully Boys

So here's some trad feminism, apologies for the lack of queer...

On the second week of the current series of the Apprentice (UK version) I was absolutely appalled. The contestants were asked to design a product to be used on the beach and then to sell that product to retailers. So far, so standard. But I was shocked and appalled when the person who was project managing the task on the "boys' team" (Sralan's - or should that be Lord Sugar's - words not mine) was asked to 'model' the product wearing what my mother would call 'skimpy' clothing.

And, surprise, surprise, she was the only woman on the team. It was disgusting to see them slobbering over the idea of getting her to be photographed in the clothes and describing it as 'taking one for the team' (sexual much?).

I'm surprised and shocked there hasn't been more comment on this so thought I'd fill the gap slightly by adding my views.

It is supposedly a programme promoting entrepreneurship and business - but instead it became a group of men making a highly intelligent successful businesswoman model beach clothes - and here's the wrong part - against her will. She was so clearly embarassed, telling Nick to 'look away, I don't want you to see me like this.' Also, she was project-managing the task, and she said, 'I might have other things to do... I'm supposed to be managing you all." Yet they essentially bullied her into it: 'Come on mate, take one for the team!'

I was absolutely disgusted by the men on the team's behaviour and surprised the production team or Nick didn't point out what pigs they were being. To be fair, the narration was scathing of their behaviour, but someone should have stepped in.

Here is a clip.

Allies

All the debates around the the 'It Gets Better' project have been really illuminating. The problems with telling people to wait it out are really important ones, and the 'Make It Better' project is, I think, a good response. It points towards collective action to change heterosexist society, instead of just sitting it out until you can assimilate into grown-up life; to not putting up with an oppressive situation or just fitting in as much as you can, but taking action for our own liberation.

'It Gets Better' is trying to create a sense of community, and that's really important, but taking action as a community to improve things is more important still. Sometimes, though, I think we get too focussed on our community in quite a narrow sense – other queers, who 'get it' and live in a similar way. We sometimes fall into the trap of assuming that straight people don't have a place in our fight, like feminists sometimes forget that men have a place in feminism too. But in those high schools, it's not just the job of the LGBTQ kids to band together to make things better, it's also the job of the straight kids to listen to them, to help them, to stick up for them, to not be the bully. That shouldn't even need to be said, but it seems that it does. Those kids weren't to blame for giving up, and the queer community, while it could have done better, isn't to blame either. The people to blame are the bullies and the homophobes.

I like the Gay-Straight Alliance idea that seems to be the basis for LGBTQ groups in high schools in the US. It's community building without being homogenising (although, obviously, I'd probably change the name...), and it speaks to something that, the way I see it, queer politics strives towards – unity in difference. Solidarity across imposed lines.

So, on Coming Out Day, I want to say thanks to my straight allies. These things should be rights, not privileges, and thanks should not be needed - I almost didn't write this, because it feels like acquiescing to some idea that we should be grateful for acceptance, which is obviously bullshit. But allies are exceptional in doing something that should be ordinary, and, in a similar sentiment to IP's last post, I don't take that for granted because many people can't expect it.

It was a straight-identified friend who was the first person, ever, to ask me if I had a preferred pronoun: thanks for being considerate and aware. Another straight friend spent his bank holiday Saturday in August helping out with a protest against homophobic Christians harassing Manchester Pride parade: thanks for taking action. My straight friends in college were really supportive of me being queer: thanks for making coming out so easy.

National Coming Out Day

...Is today.

For me, it's mostly a day when I remember how lucky I am. There are so many days I feel a bit tired and burned out, but not today. Today is a day when I'm proud of my family and my friends, because they're people among whom I feel safe and strong, and I don't take that for granted. I know other people don't have that.

Have a good one, whoever you are and however you identify.

--IP

More thoughts prompted by It Gets Better

The message of the It Gets Better project is largely, "hang on until you're all grown up, and then things will be better because you won't have to be around the people who are shitty to you."

Great. Except. It's not always true.

Not everyone can leave abusive environments. Some people can't, because they don't have the resources, the support from a community, the money to pick up and move (which generally requires up-front-cash, not the ability to earn cash), or because of fear of extreme violence if they attempt these things.

When someone is in this kind of situation, they are being failed by their community. We, as a community, ought to provide the resources or reduce the need for them. We ought to provide safe places for people from all kinds of backgrounds, for free. We ought to provide money and resources for people who don't have access to enough themselves. We ought to provide psychoemotional support for those who need it. And we ought not to tolerate abuse in the first place -- in schools or universities or families or anywhere else.

Renee Martin has an excellent piece up at Womanist Musings on bullying not being specific to LGBT kids. It's not just queer kids who desperately need to be told something more than "wait it out", it's also disabled kids, girls, poor kids, children of colour, and any child or teenage who is Othered or abused by their community or family.

Which brings me to another trend I'm noting. Desperation, depression, and suicidality are being framed as a very specific problem which will go away as soon as you get away from the bullies. That's lots of people's experience. But for some people, desperation and related mental health issues are longer-term. That does not mean that things don't get better and become manageable. It does mean that the message of hope needs to be more than "you can get away from the bullies" (even in cases where that message is true). It needs to be something about accessible support that will continue, for as long as you need it. Living with a long term mental-health condition does not have to mean that your life is unmanageable, that your life is tragic, etc. It does mean that you deserve support from the people around you.

But it's also true that my response to the It Gets Better project is not everyone's response, nor should it be. AnnaJCook has a great post up on the importance of context and the diversity of narratives, in which she also discusses a number of the critiques that have been made of the It Gets Better project.

There are a great many times that what I want to see is people marching and shouting "WE WILL NOT LIVE IN FEAR, AND WE WILL NOT TOLERATE ABUSE OR A LACK OF SUPPORT FOR PEOPLE WHO LIVE WITH ABUSE!" and not hear "just wait it out, and maybe the abuse will stop". But that's my reaction, because of my context, it's not everyone's. And of course, a message of hope, any message of hope, can be helpful too, sometimes. And as J Wallace notes, one advantage of the It Gets Better Project is that an awful lot of people are talking openly about feeling or having felt desperate and suicidal and how to address that, and the importance of that alone can't be underestimated. We do need, urgently, to talk about the prevalence of mental ill health and suicidal feelings among queer people, and how to best offer support, and how to promote social change. These are not orthogonal projects.


I admire what the It Gets Better project is trying to do, I really do, and a great many people have said a great many loving things from the bottom of their hearts, and more power to them. And I think we need to focus on making sure that everyone, whether queer or not, whether a child or not, has good support, and that the world keeps changing for the better.

We have our work cut out for us.


--IP

Last night

Following Katherine's lead, here's a short thing I scribbled today.

Last Night

After the suicided kids,
my heart breaks for the clarity
of the Big Bear, guiltily,
thinking how their despair
gives me the fury to
fight back.

Teen suicides

What with being USian and all, I've been hearing a lot about four very recent cases in which teenagers have committed suicide following homophobic bullying in the USA.

The columnist Dan Savage launched a project called It Gets Better. The way it works is this: you make a video for LGBT teens talking about why it gets better, and upload it to YouTube, and it's supposed to give hope to teens feel without any.

The activist S. Bear Bergman posted a response to the project:

"It Gets Better"? Swell. No disrespect to the people who have contributed video to that project in with great and loving hearts, but it's simply not enough. What about the "It Sucks Now" project?

Give your videocamera to a student; let them film what life is like for someone tagged as queer or trans or gender-nonconforming at their school. Then fill YouTube with those videos. Send them to principals, PTAs, school boards, legislators, religious leaders and let them see the physical and emotional brutality some of their students are suffering, and others are meting out. Demand to know why this behavior is tolerated, why nothing is being done for these students.

As was pointed out by someone in the comments of Bergman's thread, these are intersecting, not contradictory projects. It's absolutely true that students who experience bullying on a routine basis need hope, and need to know that they can survive this. It's also true that "wait it out" or "try to ignore it" is not enough.

I would also like to note while this project makes very clever use of widespread technology, and I note that there are major issues with intersectionality here. Transcripts and close-captions seem not to be available for the majority of videos, the majority of videos seem to be by White people, and the people who may be most isolated are those who cannot access the technology or deal with multiple prejudices. We know that people who experience multiple prejudices are more likely to experience violence and harassment.

That doesn't mean that I think the project is useless -- far from it. Anything you can do to stop the here-and-now pain is good. I also think that the longer-lasting, deeper, hope is created when we create stronger protections for students, when we stop excusing bullying, harassment, and discrimination. Things don't get better all on their own. This is a change we have to make in the world.

So here's what you can do: write to your elected representatives, wherever you live, and ask about anti-bullying legislation, and demand support for anti-bullying education for teachers and students.

Also, I like Ellen DeGeneres's take:




Transcript:

I am devasted over the death of 18-year-old Tyler Clementi. If you don't know Tyler was a bright student at Rutgers University whose life was senselessly cut short. He was outed as being gay on the internet and he killed himself. Something must be done. This month alone there have been a shocking number of news stories about teens who have been teased and bullied and then committed suicide, like 13-year-old Seth Walsh in Tehachapi, California, 13-year-old Asher Brown in Cypress, Texas, and 15-year-old Billy Lucas in Greensburg, Indiana. This needs to be a wake-up call to everyone that teenage bullying and teasing is an epidemic in this country and the death rate is climbing. One life lost in this senseless way is tragic. Four lives lost is a crisis. And these are just the stories we hear about. How many other teens have we lost, how many others are suffering in silence? Being a teenager and figuring out who you are is hard enough without someone attacking you. My heart is breaking for their families, for their friends, and for our society that continues to let this happen. These kids needed us and we have an obligation to change this. There are messages everywhere that validate this kind of bullying and taunting and we have to make it stop. We can't let intolerance and ignorance take another kid's life. And I want anyone out there who feels different and alone to know that I know how you feel. And there is help out there, and you can find support in your community. If you need someone to talk to or you want to get involved, there are some really great organisations listed on our website. Things will get easier, people's minds will change, and you should-- you should be alive to see it.

Her website, that she mentions is here, and they do indeed list contact details for US-based organisations. If you live in the UK, try the Samaritans, and if you live elsewhere, you can find a helpline from Befrienders International.

--IP

Is it safe to pee?

Most people take it for granted that the places they live, work, study, go out for a meal or a drink at, go out to for fun, will all have working toilets they can use safely. Most people have no idea what it is like not to take that for granted.

There was the time when the only toilet I could use in my department building was out of service for four months.

There were the times the lifts were out of service, and I couldn't get to the toilets in the building I had class in.

There are all the cafes and bars that are just fine if all you want is to get in the door and order a drink. In fact, you could spend all evening there. So long as you never need the loo, because it's down a flight of stairs. No lift. No toilet on the ground floor.

There were all the times I wanted to meet up with other people, or take a child in my care for a day out, and couldn't because there was no baby changing at the place we were due to go, and the kid I look after is still in nappies.

There were all the times I took a disabled kid to a park, or some other venue, and we had to leave, because the kid uses nappies, and there was no disabled changing, and the kid is too big to use fold-down baby changing stations.

Here's what I've never experienced: being harassed for using the loo. I don't know what that's like.

Here's what I do know: there are few things so soul-sucking and humiliating as explaining to your teachers, your work supervisors, and other people around you, that you cannot use the toilet in the places you live, work, study, go out to. It sucks. It really sucks. And it's disruptive to your working day, decreases your working productivity, and does a number on your mental health.

Who is most affected by a lack of accessible toilet facilities?

• Trans people. People who do not conform to the gender labels on bathroom doors, and who are forced to use the wrong toilets by institutional policy, prejudice, and fear of harassment if they use the right toilet.


• Disabled people and their caregivers. People who can't get to bathrooms that are not accessible, or who need certain facilities that many places currently do not stock. Their caregivers are also affected if their movement depends largely on that of the disabled person.


• Children and their caregivers. People who need changing facilities, and people who need to take the children with them.

If you've never experienced it, and you can't quite imagine it, try this: try not going to the toilet, ever, except in your own home. (Some people who live in student halls, for example, may not have suitable bathroom arrangements where they live, but that's advanced empathy practice). At no point during your working day, or during any outing, may you use the toilet. But try this for a limited period of time. I don't wish long term patriarchal bullshit on anyone, not even for empathy practice.

So when I'm told about projects like Safe2Pee
, it breaks my heart. But it also makes me glad to know that there are folks I can campaign with. Watch this space. Campaigns for a safer campus are coming to a toilet near you.

--IP

Queer is beautiful - why I won't let homophobia steal my identity

I identify as queer. I like it because it's so hard to define, because it encompasses both gender and sexuality, because it has so much potential to unite without constraint, and because it refuses to assimilate into an oppressive society. Bisexual felt weird because I never felt like I liked girls and I liked boys, but that I liked people regardless of gender. I also feel like neither “girl” nor “boy” adequately describe me; and once I worked out that the gender binary sucked, queer gave me a small way of rejecting it on all fronts, and a way of understanding it in a political context as well. But the word queer is a big problem for some people – for some, it has connotations of homophobia and violence. I even heard one person say that he deletes any email with queer in the title without looking at it because he is so offended by it.

Being pretty young in the grand scheme of things, I have never experienced the word being used as an insult – I think it's pretty outdated as a pejorative, at least amongst my peers. “Lesbo” was much more likely, or “gay” for my male-looking friends. Particularly “gay”, and often so casually - how often do I get really pissy with people for saying “oh, that new film was so gay”, or “I can't come out tonight, I have a deadline. GAAAAY.” One of my friends said that she uses it because it means something different now - “think of it like a whole different word, like, it could be spelt differently, g-h-a-y or something.” Obviously, I told her that while people use it to mean homosexual, it means homosexual, and that I'd thank her not to use it as a pejorative in my hearing.

And yet, people still identify as gay. Perhaps it's because queer was more common when things were more violent that it evokes stronger feelings, but if they are going to hate us, they will hate us whatever word we use, and they will use whatever word we claim. No-one is asking anyone to stop using the word gay because homophobes use it. And my use of the word queer, which means so much to me, has to be more important than the homophobe's taunt. We can't keep running from them – if we take the word back and create something beautiful with it, some of their power will be taken away.

I do appreciate that our forebears had to deal with things that we are lucky not to be able to imagine, and I have huge respect and gratitude for them. I understand, at least a little, how evocative a word might be – I maybe feel a little similar about the word lesbian. But I feel like my identity is being belittled when it is dismissed for the ways in which it has been used by others. It upsets me to be lumped in with them, and of course I don't want to evoke awful things that have happened. So I would like to ask that those who have difficulty with the word try to see past that, to the way that we are using it, right now. Talk to us. We are your siblings, and we don't want to hurt you – we just want to find a way to be ourselves, just like you.

(photo credit: Alva. Scribble credit: me)

Warning: webcomics are highly addictive and may harm your ability to do some damn work

This webcomic is distracting me terribly. It's really awesome - it's about a trans high school student, and it's matter of fact without being flippant, full of engaging characters, sometimes funny and sometimes sad.

Now, I just wish I hadn't discovered it when I'm supposed to be getting down to my dissertation. Damn it.

http://www.venusenvycomic.com/index.php

ikea germany's bi ad.

Subliminal and straightforward messages about sexuality are brought to us by tv advertisements every day (even if you don't watch tv - if it's controversial, the world wide web will let you know). Remember the slightly strange French McDonalds earlier this year? I just flew home for a week and German tv is airing a new IKEA ad that caught my eye. As was to be expected, I prefer IKEA to McDonalds. The slogan roughly translates to 'Because Florian needs to store away bigger things sometimes' and 'IKEA cupboards are even big enough for Florian's small secrets'. Because I have faith in the Swedes, I'm decidedly not offended by the young lady being labelled a 'thing'. I'm positively surprised by the campaign because usually, when ads have a punchline about someone's sexuality, it's about a gay man (I get the impression women's active sexuality doesn't feature much, understandably, as they are probably kept busy with cosmetics and probiotic yoghurt, in the name of being desirable). But here, it's about bisexuality. I don't think I've seen that before. It's a bit bittersweet because as it remains unclear whether Florian's small secret is that he's cheating on his partner or whether it's actually his sexuality. But at least it's on tv. So in the name of visibility, thank you, IKEA.

Woman

I wrote this poem after I was diagnosed with PCOS and abnormally high levels of testosterone. At the time I was also coming to terms with being bisexual. I think gender identity affects all sorts of people and this is how it has affected me.

WOMAN

So my ovaries don't work
My testosterone levels are high
And I like ladies
But I can still be a woman

Just because I like a bit of gender-bending in the morning
Or the evening
Or even the afternoon for that matter
I don't feel any less of a woman
Ready to pounce

I appreciate the male state
His physique, and I don't care if you're straight
But please let me appreciate the girls dem too

I wear dresses
Like sweet caresses
And soft caresses
And soft kisses
And loving other women

I like high heels
Cute baby seals
But I also like pussies
And I aint talking cats man

I have long hair
I like the stares
When I wear
Boobylicious shirts

But these things don't make a woman

It's not how you dress
Who you kiss
Wearing lipstick
Being with a man or a woman
Or hormones racing
Or procreating
Or gyrating
Even less dating and mating
Even less liking diamond rings
All the bling

It's about being me.

I am a woman.

hair.

Hair or no hair, how much hair, what to do with it, what is read as good or bad hair - it's a never ending story. I cut my hair off a couple of weeks ago. It's great. But it's no big deal. For me, that is.

For other people, my hair seems to be traumatic. I have no other explanation for the e-mail I received from a friend. We went to school together, we're not very close (anymore), but she definitely qualifies as a friend. She informed me that she had noticed my short hair in my fb profile picture and wanted to know why I'd done that. My long hair was so pretty, she said, it had always looked so nice. There was no need to cut it off. I should have just changed the colour, that would have been a new look, but still feminine. Seriously, that's what she said. It was the first time I'd heard from her in months. I really wasn't expecting to be policed in this way by people who have known me for most of my life. Actually, I wasn't expecting be policed in this way by anyone. What she hoped to achieve with that e-mail is also a bit of a mystery to me. Sometimes, I forget how deeply most people seem to have internalised mainstream beauty standards. I'm not sure whether to be amused or annoyed. Might settle for both.

great things to do with gaga.

I love that they even have a flashmob brass band. Made my day. Go San Francisco.

Martha Nussbaum on conscience and burqa bans

The truly excellent philosopher* Martha Nussbaum has a must-read op-ed in the NYTimes on why it is discriminatory for liberal democracies to ban the burqa and niqab (hat tip: UPenn Fword).

The piece starts a really interesting discussion of equal dignity, accommodation for religious practice, and "conscience clauses", much of which I will have to digest further before I can comment on it.

She also responds to the most common arguments for the banning of the burqa, with some really clear points, and with particularly excellent attention to women's rights.

I can't pick a section to quote because it's all so good,** so do yourself a favour, hop on over, and read.

--IP


*I love her brain. Have I said I love her brain?
**I might have mentioned that I love her brain.

Slogans

No poetry has made it onto the blog yet, so I thought I'd be brave and start the ball rolling. This one was written for the Edinburgh Uni Feminists and Literature Society joint poetry night, which had the theme of "voices". It's written to be spoken, but hopefully it works ok on the page too.

Ya basta!

Enough.

My voice was not strong enough when we marched

Me in my pushchair, ring a ring a roses round the roundabout to tell them

That nurseries should not be the first thing to go when times get hard

You say cut back we say fightback!

Maggie Maggie Maggie, OUT OUT OUT!

And we won.

I remember there were whistles to make us louder

and how my mother said, not yet

and how when the time came she was proud, proud of me

of my voice

We're here, we're queer, we will not live in fear!

and every time I raise it in slogans and songs

she's singing with the Greenham women

reclaiming the night through the decades

A strong arm makes a gude cause

Not the church and not the state, women must decide their fate!

I bought a whistle on the first big demo I went on alone

As bombs fell on Baghdad

It had a rainbow ribbon and a clear, rippling sound

Hey hey LBJ

Bush Blair CIA

Bush Blair Uncle Sam Iraq will be your Vietnam!

My voice is not just mine.

I am a point on a shining web

A convergence of people

Then and now and here and there

Oh you can't scare me I'm sticking to the union

Tin cans on string

The complexity of servers, wires, modems, screens

The nerves in a brain, too complicated to really understand

Everything that anyone has ever said to me.

Everything I have ever wanted to say.

Everything that has been said in unison.

Everything that was tiny in the silence.

The slogans that we shouted

Together, because that way

We're stronger

The times when my father used the right word

even though I wouldn't understand

And explained it so I would.

The times when words wouldn't come and a song

Said it instead. How did they know

What I couldn't say?

The times when words fall like stones from my mouth

And my friends know what they mean

And how to pick them up.

The poems that hatch like dragonflies from my lips

Because nothing else will say it

And because it has to be said.

I am still looking for the whistle,

the one which will make me heard -

A way to hold the threads,

los pueblos, unidos, jamas seran vencidos!

a way to channel this breath of mine

A rainbow ribbon to tie round my neck,

a charm and a talisman, from which to hang my dreams.

Today in Fail

Apple offers a Dashboard widget called ladyTax. What does this widget do, I hear you cry?

Well, its short gloss informs me that its purpose is to make my ladylife easier by helping me to

Easily calculate prices including taxes and determine tax amount.

You know, because my ladybrain can't do maths.

*Vomit*

--IP

Friend, this love poem is as heartfelt as any romance...

For my course on the anthropology of kinship, I had to draw a genealogical chart of my own kinship. That's basically a family tree, with triangles for men and circles for women (and I'm not even going to go into that right now...), equals signs for marriage and lines going from parents to children. Looking at it, it seemed pretty incomplete. The assumption that those lines are what make up my life – which is still, at quite a basic level, assumed in our society – would leave me floating in a sea of temporary relationships while I wait to find a permanent sexual partner and settle down. This is not to devalue the relationships that this does map - my genealogical family are still really important to me. But what about all the other relationships in my life? What about my flatmates? I see them every day, and our lives together have meaning which doesn't fit into that scheme. What about my best friend, whose importance in my life totally defies conventional description? Why should friendship be second to variations on procreation? What about the possibility that I might not get married or have children? What about the possibility that I might love more than one person at once?

The study of kinship is a really big deal for oldschool anthropologists, and it's historically based on exactly this kind of genealogical chart. When kinship first became and area of study in its own right, genealogy – who was involved in your procreation and who you're supposed to be procreating with – were used as the basic units of kinship, regardless of what culture was being considered. It obscured everything else, despite these things simply not being that important in some places. The reason for this was because it really was a big deal for the anthropologists themselves, because that's the basis of our official kinship system in Euro-American culture, and that's what they were basing their analyses on, without quite realising it. Kinship is naturalised to the point where it seems self-evident; they did not necessarily question this official kinship in their own lives, and they did not question it in terms of talking about other cultures either.

And meanwhile, outside academia, people struggle with being outside official kinship all the time. What happens if you don't fit in? The changes of the last 50 years (readily available contraception, growing acceptance of queer relationships, later marriage, the increasing possibility of not getting married at all, the greater likelihood of divorce and remarriage) showed up genealogy as not the be-all-and-end-all that we thought it was. And yet, so many important parts of life are based on it – broadly, it still forms the basis for what is recognised as an important relationship by the rest of society. It shapes the trajectory of our lives in a way which are seriously limiting, and using it to try and understand people who do kinship in different ways is limiting too.

Lots of anthropologists have gotten over it and started looking at kinship in terms of which people are seen as important to each other, and in what ways, doing their best not to make any assumptions about “biology”. Practical kinship – that is, kinship which doesn't necessarily fit with the official rhetoric of any given culture but which is important to people's everyday lives – is gaining ground as an important area of study. The general trend in anthropology is to try not to see cultures as homogenous but to see the conflicts and disagreements over things, so the different versions of kinship within any given group also get some attention.

But we're not quite there yet. Take the point that our lecturer made in the first class: kinship is seen as boring by undergraduates, she said, because we're doing the whole leaving-home thing and haven't got a family of our own yet. Obviously, when we do that, we'll “get it”. But actually, maybe the study of kinship is like it is because of this attitude – because our everyday lives are ignored and/or devalued as some kind of filling-in until we can go on to “proper” kinship. Cut to a tutorial: (me, in full flow about some point) “... and I don't believe in marriage so -” (tutor, interrupting) “well, you say that now!”. Me: jaw drops. Why on earth would we want to study kinship when the things that we could bring to it – an understanding of our own practical kinship based on our communal flats, on our lives at university, on our formations of queer kinship, on the newish idea that we might not get married or have children at all – are seen as not really valid, because those that teach it still have this view at that genealogical kinship is what it's all about, really.

It can actually be kind of hard when there's no way of validating or confirming how important these relationships are – it's difficult to validate something that there's no word for, that's seen as trivial or a stop-gap. It makes me angry that the lines that join us are considered less important just because there's no vows or procreation involved. Gay relationships are slowly gaining ground as valid, aided by the fact that they can be approximated to straight relationships, but other relationships still loose out – polyamourous relationships, friendships, relationships based on shared ideals or activism. In that context, to tell people how much they mean to me, I have to sort of triangulate my way with words that mean something like it – often kinship words. But it's never that they're metaphorically those things, or that they are in the traditional sense of the words. It's just that, there's an approximation there, and although the rest has to be said in other ways, we only have our shared language to try to articulate it out loud.

Understanding all this is important for the acceptance and validation of all kinds of kinship for ourselves, where practical relatedness is changing quicker than the official way of talking about it (as is probably the case anywhere), and anthropology, if it is going to do its job, has to understand this too. The idea that queer kinship (in the broadest sense) as important in its own right (rather than an emulation of, y'know, “proper” kinship) is aided by the idea that traditional, official ideas about kinship are just a cultural construction rather than “natural” and inevitable. Opening up to the possibilities of kinship is not only good for the basic anthropological project of fostering understanding between cultures, but also for understanding the huge possibilities of our own kinship and expanding the horizons of our own relationships. And in the end, these things are the same ideal.

Down on ASBOs

Suppose you have a justice system which allows you to stop people from doing certain activities that are not covered under any specific law, but which threaten people's safety. A kind of "Stop taking the piss, Not Necessarily Otherwise Specified" court order. Sounds pretty useful, right?

Except...can you spot the problem?

If you guessed "not covered under any specific law" you guessed right, and you get to wear the cloggs of clever.

"Stop taking the piss, Not Necessarily Otherwise Specified" orders (or ASBOs, as they are more commonly known) are social justice issues because they can be slapped on people who have not been charged with any crime. They're purpose is to restrict dodge activity that is hard to prosecute under other laws, like stalking or being disorderly (although actually, there are laws to prosecute these behaviours). But in practice they tend to be used either in cases where the behaviour is already illegal (eg, stalking, underage drinking) or where there is a good reason that the behaviour is not criminalised (like: it would be about seventeen different kinds of immoral to make it illegal).

Can you guess who is most likely to be affected by ASBO abuse? Hint: consider the latter case.

If you guessed "people who deal with societal oppression", then you get to wear the cloggs of clever and the pants of smart.

A couple of weeks ago, Kate posted about the Met "naming and shaming" sex workers on their website. Why had the Met done this? It's part of a policy of "naming and shaming" people with ASBOs. From the Guardian article:

A Met spokesman said the asbos against the Newham women had been used as a last resort because they were persistent offenders, and that decisions to publicise the identities of people issued with asbos were made on a case-by-case basis.

"Persistent offenders"? So, let's see what crimes the women had been convicted of (multiple times, from the sound of "persistent")?

Sex workers and their support groups have condemned a police operation to "out" prostitutes even when they have not been convicted of any crime.

[...]

Police took photographs of the Polish women, who were not charged.

Wait, you mean they weren't convicted of a crime? Not even charged with a crime? So in what sense are they "persistent offenders"?

Ah, well, you see, they are sex workers, which means have received money in exchange for some kind of sexual interaction. An activity which is totally legal. And which they have engaged in more than once.

(Other activities which are legal, in case you were wondering, include: surfing, drinking tea, and writing about how pissed off you are at the Met.)

On the other hand, activities which are not legal include: sex trafficking, rape, and sexual assaults.

On top of the obvious humiliation and threat to the two women involved of having their personal information broadcast to the world, the implication for other sex workers is huge. The Met in its infinite wisdom has dedicated itself to harassing sex workers, instead of being active in preventing and prosecuting violence against women and against sex workers. This policy creates fear in people who might well have been trafficked, raped, assaulted, etc, and cannot now go to the police because it seems they're more likely to get an ASBO than police support. This policy only hurts people who need police support the most.

Also: it's not just sex workers who are affected by societal biases in the use of ASBOs. The British Institute for Brain Injured Children found that more than one third of children with ASBOs have a mental disability.

Like I said: hurts people who need police support the most.

--IP

Basic guide for the sympathetic but uninitiated

This is a few lines about how to negotiate feminist and LGBTQIA issues without being offensive. It’s not meant to be patronising or anything, it’s just because a lot of people recently, in particular some of my straight male friends, have asked me what is acceptable in terms of questions to ask and topics to raise LGBTQIA people and feminists. The following are some things to remember and bear in mind.

1. Firstly and most importantly: If you don’t mean any harm by it, it’s unlikely that your friend or the person you’re talking to will be offended. We’re used to all sorts of ridiculous questions being fired at us, as well as straightforward abuse, so if you are sympathetic to their feelings, it’s pretty much safe to assume that it’ll be fine.

2. LGBTQIA stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans (an umbrella term including transvestite, transgender, transsexual, and sometimes other words too), Queer (sometimes Questioning, as in questioning one’s sexuality or questioning one’s gender), Intersex, Asexual (a person not desiring sex with someone else). If I’ve missed any out give me a shout.

3. Queer is sometimes used as a term to cover all LGBTQI people. Not everyone defines as queer, however, as they may not like the old-fashioned connotations the word has. Personally, I love the word, in the same way that I love the word ‘bitch’ used as a positive, reclaimed word. Other times queer is used in the sense of a gender identity that does not conform with heteropatriarchal ideas.

4. Heteropatriarchy is one of the things that links the LGBTQIA and feminist movements. Not all feminists are lesbians, but a lot of feminists are sympathetic because we have a shared problem – a society that, we believe, treats straight as the norm and anything else as ‘other’ and that treats the male and the stereotypically masculine as the ‘norm’ and the female, the intersexed person, the trans person, the queer, and the questioning as ‘other’. This is why gay people, trans people and feminists (for example) can quite often be found all working together. However, this is absolutely NOT to say that straight, non-TQI men have no problems – of course they do, and some of these problems might be caused by heteropatriarchy and the pressure and expectations it puts on them.

5. Feminism is a very broad movement, there isn’t a homogenous view shared by all of us. What feminists want and believe in is that women are equal to men, that they are currently treated as second-class citizens, and should be treated as such and that patriarchy should be dismantled. We have different ideas about the timescales and ways in which to solve these problems.

6. As you know, there’s an awful lot of terminology to get your head around. If you make a mistake, don’t worry. Just try again.

7. We love you. As someone sympathetic/allied to feminism, LGBTQIA issues, some combination of those, or all of those, you are putting yourself in the firing line and that is to be applauded and respected. You maybe don’t have to be an ally or a friend, but you are, and that is amazing. Thank you.