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.

Berlin Calling

Hi, I’m new around here. Let me introduce myself: First of all I was raised as a boy, tried to become a man (impossible as it may be) and I was for plenty of reasons doomed to fail. Now I try to fail more each day, failing gladly.

An important step in really acknowledging who I am (becoming) was moving to Berlin about 9 months ago to study at Potsdam University. The “Queer Capital of Europe” really deserves that soubriquet for a huge number of reasons: Thriving LGBT-scenes – although I have to say, there are a lot of L’s and G’s having Problems with the B’s and T’s and people of colour, queer or otherwise, so go figure – and the general gender-deconstructive madness when people from all over the world with almost every (sub-)cultural background imaginable meet, mingle and just do stuff together, not necessarily in the queer squat or the posh gay club and afterwards...

Nevertheless Berlin is, and has been for quite some time a place ridden with conflicts and contradictions of one kind or another where these political and societal conflicts and contradictions became and are becoming highly visible and, especially in the past, culminated in sometimes disastrous ways. Just for the sake of the argument: Take a walk on the squeaky clean Kurfürstendamm for example - passing by Gucci, Cartier, Hermes you name it (or rather, don’t), then hop onto the next U-Bahn and chances are you’ll see a homeless person timidly asking for money or food, or if she or he is lucky, selling a homeless magazine. Chances are he or she has an open leg. Chances are one or both legs are gone. There’s probably even a German flag on the wheelchair. Mind you, I don’t mean to be funny here. Get off the train again, and you just might run into a huge anti-capitalist, anti-nationalist, anti-fascist demonstration. Or the TCSD for that matter. Same difference, politically. All the while less than a half-hour drive outside Berlin will probably take you to a town completely dominated by neo-nazis. Hell, the place I study at used to be a Konzentrationslager once. It’s quite true, but also cynical when Klaus Wowereit (the openly gay mayor of Berlin) said: “Berlin’s poor, but sexy”. Granted: He addressed Berlin’s precarious budget and tried to stress its creative and therefore economical potential, after all we live in an age when the cultural is one of the most profitable industries. However, in a city where precarity is distributed so unequally along the lines of *drumroll* race, class, gender, sexual orientation and religion that’s a terrible statement.

As much as I hate to cut this ongoing story short: Berlin can be a quite an overwhelming place and I’d like to share a bit of what is going on in this truly queer, beautifully diverse and often downright heartbreaking, infuriating place, aside from the big tourist attractions; the small everyday struggles, the big “important” ones and everything in-between in Berlin and elsewhere: Potsdam University has a lot to offer in terms of queer feminist academia. Potsdam in general has a lot to offer in terms of political activism and otherwise. Oh, and I’ll try to update you on what is going on in Poland where my mum was born. Here, Homophobia is a much larger problem than in Germany. I’ll stop ranting now and close with a short scene from a street café somewhere in the posher parts of Berlin Kreuzberg:



A Woman on a bike approaches the scene. There are two children, a boy aged three or maybe four, definitely a pre-kindergartner, blabbering permanently, and a girl, a year younger maybe just looking at the scenery that must pass by in the trailer attached to the bike. They pass by a café. MARY – not even dressed very girly this day - is drinking a coffee with her/his friends and some acquaintances. It’s somebody’s birthday. Always is.


BOY IN THE TRAILER (to MARY): Are you a man or a woman?

MARY (enthusiastically, bordering on joyful): I don’t really know, exactly! (It sounded catchier in German.)

Meanwhile, the group of three approaches the distance where you can only make out certain words. It doesn’t help that the boy still has the manner of speaking of a, well, pre-kindergartner.


BOY IN THE TRAILER: But…But…But?! Mom!?! …asked…man…woman…has to…


Everybody at the table laughs, some more heartily than others. The acquaintances seem a bit confused when they notice MARY is dead serious.

Meanwhile the woman on the bike and the two children in the trailer go on going down the street. The woman listens to what the confounded boy asks. She looks back at me and smiles knowingly. I hope. In Berlin that’s possible, at least.

visibility, in black and white.

My friend sent me this the other day. First it made me laugh. Then it made me angry. Then it made me cry. Now I'd like to know what you think.

I think it's beautiful and subversive and the last 30 seconds are very touching. I really appreciate someone appreciating how hard being invisible is. I do. Thank you. And I guess because it's about stereotypes and visibility, much of it would naturally be about appearance. But I'm not sure I'm happy with the way she paints everything in black and white, only acknowledging butch/fem expression. Or the way in which she objectifies fem bodies. Someone wearing matching underwear and 5-inch heels makes her life seem perfect? My life always tended to get a bit closer to perfection when a partner told me that matching underwear was just about the last thing on their mind. Fair enough, if that's her thing. But personally (disclaimer: I'm going to make a massive ridiculous exaggerated sweeping generalisation now, just to make my point clear) - I don't want to put up with the same pressure coming from a queer woman that one might expect from many straight men. So can I please be beautiful and kick ass and fight homophobia despite the fact that I don't confirm to that stereotype - and because I don't?