Deconstruction is...

by Cristy C. Road

Well, I think it's true. Discuss?

Let them eat mahimahi fillets

Further to my last post on food and intersectionality, I did some googling for cookbooks, just to double check if I had to eat my words. Alas, no, although Kate's recipes will definitely go into my recipe notebook. Here's what I found in cookbook searches.

The overwhelming majority of cookbooks aimed at people with a specific named long-term condition (eg, arthritis, fatigue, fibromyalgia, autism) are not books that explain how to make cooking a simpler task, nor are they intended to expand your cooking repertoire in an easy no-fuss kind of way, but rather are intended to promote a particular kind of diet. They have titles with the word "cure" in them.

Look, I know that some elimination diets help some people manage their conditions. That's great, and I'm happy for you. What's much less cool is promoting the diet that helps you as a "cure" for everyone, unless you have a bunch of thorough double-blind studies to back you up. Plus, if we could actually cure autism, etc, with goji berries, I'm pretty sure there would be, you know, science about that.

So to the authors of these books let me say the following: thanks for playing, and I'm glad your diet helps you, but it's actually hard enough to feed myself already what with the whole frequently-feeling-too-shit-to-cook thing, without trying to cut whole food groups out of the equation.

Ok, I hear you cry, surely you could make some of these recipes even without sticking to the diet? Well maybe I could, but why should I help people who write these books to profit from promoting these diets? And anyway, the books seem to contain a number of recipes that are completely impractical in the context of my life. Here are some of the things I will not be cooking:

• Stuffed fennel. SpoonShortageFail. Life'sTooShortFail.


• Fresh salmon steaks. CostFail.


• Wild rice. CostFail.


• Escargot. CostFail.


• Fresh mahimahi fillets. CostFail. WhereDoPeopleEvenBuyThatFail.


• Shiitake mushrooms. CostFail.


• Flavoured oils. CostFail.


• Flounder. CostFail.


• Acai berries. IDon'tEvenKnowHowToPronounceItFail.


• Assorted SpoonsShortageFails caused by recipes that take ages and need multiple pots and lots of chopping.

Kaz and I spent an amused afternoon reading samples of these books out loud to each other. Kaz suggested that the SpoonFails may be caused by the assumption that everyone has someone to cook for them. If that's the case, it's a dramatic departure from the norms of cookbook-writing (which are general assumed to be helping you cook food yourself), but would be in keeping with the idea of disabled people as helpless and unable to do anything themselves. It would also be in keeping with the assumption that everyone is middle-class, and all middle-class people have A Woman to do stuff for them -- either in the form of a wife, or in the form of waged domestic help.

In other words, here's a memo someone didn't get: not everyone has personal servants, and some people might object to the keeping of women as personal servants. Disabled people are disproportionately poor and are disproportionately unable to do complicated cooking. Cooking is disproportionately allocated to women, who are also disproportionately poor.

Is the assumption that poor people with fatigue and mobility issues are going to be trailing round their local health food shops for mahimahi fillets and truffle oil? And since my local health food shop is not wheelchair accessible, am I supposed to believe that the truffle oil will cause me to throw my mobility scooter over one shoulder while I walk around the shop? Ahahahahahaha don't make me laugh so much, it hurts my costochondritic ribs.

Seriously though, why is eating food a luxury?

[Edited to add: Kaz has more on this topic.]

--IP

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

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

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

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.

Don't have answers.

(Alert: some disability theory is presupposed here. If you're struggling, give a shout in the comments.)

I've been wanting to write something about the DSM V since the draft was published back in February, at which time I noted that it was looking grim for queer folk. But every time I started to write about it, I got stuck.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM, currently on edition IV-TR), is produced by the American Psychiatric Association, and carries considerable weight in North America and Europe, although it is intended primarily for use in the USA. The World Health Organisation also has a rough parallel -- Chapter V of the International Classification of Diseases (aka, the ICD-10).

The DSM and the ICD almost go out of their way to pathologise queer people, although there is no longer any diagnosis of Homosexuality. The DSM-IV-TR and the ICD-10 do, however, pathologise trans identities (Gender Identity Disorder, Transsexualism, Dual-Role Transvestism) and asexuality (terminology varies considerably). They also pathologise a number of consenting sexual practices like fetishism, BDSM, making "obscene" telephone calls. And, because there wasn't enough heteronormative fail already, they also pathologise anxiety due to not knowing if you're gay or straight (Sexual Maturation Disorder), and having non-long-term relationships (Sexual Relationship Disorder). Notably, there is no disorder of Being An Unmitigated Heterosexist Shit Disorder, so we can safely conclude that heteronormativity is a factor here.

For some time, there has been a campaign to have Gender Identity Disorder (GID) removed from the DSM-V.

...Every time I sit down to write this post, this is as far as I get. Because at this point, I feel that I should say something about how appallingly heteronormative it is that gender identity should be pathologised.

Which is all very well, as far as it goes.

But what exactly is wrong with all the other people who are pathologised by the DSM? Is there something wrong with asexual people? With people who have non-heteronormative sex? Or people with non-sex/gender DSM diagnoses like...autism? As long as the protest chant is "trans people aren't crazy", there's an unspoken rider: "not like those other people, who are".

Moreover, since the campaign is to have GID removed from the DSM but still have (free) medical transition available as an option for people who want it, it seems to me that such a change wouldn't actually de-pathologise GID: it would replace categorisation as a mental disorder with categorisation as a physical disorder. It's not clear to me that saying "there's something wrong with trans people's bodies" is preferable to saying "there's something wrong with trans people's minds", because, well, there's nothing wrong with trans people, and that should go without saying. It seems to me that we each get to negotiate gender in the way that seems most appropriate to individual circumstances, preferences, and needs. For some people, that will mean wearing skirts. For others, trousers and leather jackets. For others, it will mean transition. But I find it deeply problematic to say that some of the people who wear skirts or trousers are "normal", and some are "crazy"; or that the people who wear skirts or trousers are "normal" and the people who transition are "crazy". If gender is a pathology, then either everyone who negotiates a gender binary is "crazy" or no one is.

It seems to me that the choice we're being asked to make is entirely wrong. Jay Sennett writes:

This constant hating on people with so-called real mental disorders has got to stop. Frankly from the perspective of a society that wants everyone to goose-step to strict gender roles, I’m surely a heretic. But our salvation will never be found in goose-stepping to the belief that they are somehow differnt from us.

[...] Given a choice between a mental health diagnosis or a medical one, I opt out. They are two sides of the same coin. They are both needed by us to obtain medical services and used by others to diagnose and medicalize and manage in a systemic way our so-called differences.

I don't have any answers. I'm not sure I agree 100% with everything Jay Sennett writes, but it seems to me that rejecting the pathologisation of gender and sexuality without rejecting the basic dichotomisation between the "crazy" and the "heteronormative" (or "non-disabled" or "non-crazy") is not going to work for us. That is, a politically workable solution may be closer to rejecting the DSM framework entirely.

(Not all the behaivours in the DSM-IV and DSM-V are ones we would want to say are fine and dandy, by the way. The DSM-V, for example includes a diagnosis for coercing sexual activity. It's not clear to me there's any political advantage to pathologising this behaviour, however. That is, the existence of bad behaviours as diagnoses may not be a reasons to keep the DSM around.)

Like I said, I don't have answers. Just lots of questions.

Thoughts?

--IP

[Crossposted at Modus Dopens.]

Bechdel testing and intersectionality

The Bechdel Test (or more accurately, the Bechdel-Wallace Test, but it's sometimes also called the Mo Movie Measure) is usually said to trace its popularity back to the comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For, by Alison Bechdel, who credits Liz Wallace for the rule itself. The original strip can be found at Alison Bechdel's blog, and I'm not sure of the copyright issues, so alas I cannot reprint it here. But you should definitely take a peak at the strip in question.

The Bechdel Test in its original comic strip form is:

The film must have:

1. At least two women in it,


2. who talk to each other,


3. about something other than a man.

There can be strengthened versions of the Bechdel Test too , so one can ammend (1) to require two women protagonists, and amend (3) to include a provision that the women must talk to each other about something other than a man or normatively feminine activities (eg housekeeping, childcare, etc). For example Juno passes the unstrengthened Test, but not a strengthened Test, because all the women in the film apart from Juno herself talk about babies, babycare, and motherhood when they are not talking about men.

The Test does not infallibly demarcate the sexist films from the non-sexist ones, but it is a useful tool to highlight the invisibility of women as protagonists who are not appendages to men, and trigger discussion of the roles women have in the general media, and within particular storylines. It's worth noting that only a tiny minority of mainstream films and TV programs pass the Test or strengthened versions of the Test, and children's films are known to fare particularly badly. Books tend to do rather better, but still not nearly as well as we might hope.

One might also want to have a Bechdel Test for demographic groups other than those that are gender-marked: one could have a Bechdel Test for race, queerness, disability, age, fatness, class, etc. It has been much remarked on in social justice circles that portrayals of members of these demographic groups tend to follow the same tired old tropes, many of which are downright harmful.

For example, a few weeks ago, I blogged over at my place about the problematic discourses of queerness that are presented in film and fiction books. In mainstream narratives, the death and hopelessness of queer people is still part of mainstream discourses about queerness, as is extreme gender dichotomisation. In mainstream novels and films about queer people, how many of them do not involve the death, often brutal, of a queer person, attributed to queerness itself? Consider Brokeback Mountain, Boys Don’t Cry, and even Queer As Folk (UK version). Angels in America is a rare exception: the death of queer characters is caused by silence and closetedness, not by queerness; and the ending is...more life.

There are similarly problematic narratives about disability, something that the team at FWD/Forward have been doing a stellar job of blogging. Disabled people in films are almost invariably presented as bitter and manipulative (House, Patty in the most recent series of Shameless), downright evil (Doctor Who's Davros), or just people whose lives are not worthwhile, as in the Grey's Anatomy case that is discussed at FWD/Forward, which involves narratives about both disability and size.

Racialicious and The Angry Black Woman have also discussed the difficulties of formulating a Bechdel Test for race. In much mainstream film/fiction, non-White people are either the Bad Guys, or their roles are restricted to stereotyped roles, or they are simply not present at all.

As feminists with a vested interest in addressing intersectionality, where does that leave us? I think the discussions that emerge from attempts to formulate Bechdel Tests for gender, race, disability, etc are useful discussions to have, because they highlight the problems with the roles that are currently allocated to people in those groups, and what less oppressive portrayals would look like.

But I wonder if part of the problem isn't that fact that we're trying to formulate these Test versions independently. That isn't a criticism of the Test, or of any of its versions. Nor is it a criticism of films/books that pass the Test(s). But few films/books pass more than one kind of Test, and if they do, it's certainly rare for them to pass more than two (The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency and Grey's Anatomy, for example, both pass a gender and race version, but no more). This means that no mainstream film or book I can think of is genuinely representative of human diversity, and I'm particularly hard pressed to think good portrayals of people who experience multiple kinds of oppression.

Thoughts?

--IP