***NEGATIVE***
1NC
[insert narrative]
It is time for us to break down traditional policy debate. Their methodology and
scholarship are not neutral – they actively exclude non-dominant perspectives from
the debate space – this is oppressive and educationally bankrupt
Bensimon and Marshall 03, Professor of Educational Policy and Administration at the
University of Southern California and Associate Professor of Education at the
University of North Carolina
(Estela Mara and Catherine, “Like It or Not: Feminist Critical Policy Analysis Matters,” The Journal of Higher Education vol. 74 no.3, June 2003,
JSTOR)//JB
Master as Expert, Master as Oppressor Anderson's critique rests on the assumption that her definition of the word "master" is everyone's definition. The meaning she ascribes to master can be
gleaned in the assertions she makes, such as, "Feminists cannot reject the master’s tools, and that it is a good thing t00; . . . in- creasing one's sensitivity to the nuances of the master's tools is
the only way to go; Bensimon and Marshall . . . follow linguistic rules that re- veal their mastery of academic ways of making meaning; . . . they [follow] established academic protocols, . . . the
‘tools of critique’ . . . they urge upon their readers are synonymous with the master's tools . . . the challenges they offer would not make sense to other members of the profession . . . if
For Anderson the meaning of "master"
is strictly academic; it has to do with expertise or command of the "linguistic rules" that signify one's
"mastery of academic ways of making meaning" that separate the masters from the apprentices and distinguish between academic insiders and nonacademics. Thus, according to Anderson, the master’s tools (i.e.. methods) are "nothing more than ways of
apprehending the world" that have been handed down to women, presumably because these are the
only ways of apprehending the world or because women academics are incapable of developing their
own ways of apprehending' the world. Joan Scott (l988) reminds us that "words, like the ideas and things they are meant to signify, have a history," And the history that Anderson
associates with the word "master" is fundamentally different from the history that moved Audre Lorde to declare, " The master’s tools will never dismantle
Bensimon and Marshall had not mastered some of the academic protocols handed down by men" (emphasis added).
the master's house ." The presumption that the master's definition is everyone's definition is precisely
the kind of reasoning that leads to analyses that are faulty, partial, and distorting. The Master’s Tools Will Never
Dismantle the Master's House was the title of a talk given by Audre Lorde on a panel, "The Personal and the Political," featured at the Second Sex Conference held in New York City on October
29, 1979. The title was intended as a criticism of white academic feminists who, in including black feminists only in those sessions that had something to do with race and leaving them out of
topics such as existentialism, the erotic, feminist theory, etc., were in fact using the "tools of a racist patriarchy . . . to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy" (Lorde, I984, p. 98). Lorde's
point was that feminist scholars have turned to the "master's tools" in order to gain acceptability and tit into the established disciplinary canons. In contrast, Lorde urges us to tum the
For the master's tools will never dismantle the
master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never
"differences" that are the mark of marginalized populations into strengths. She goes on to say,
enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still
define the master's house as their only source of support. (Lorde, 1984, p. 99). For black people the term "master" is embedded in a horrific
history of legalized injustice and violence. It connotes the control of one person over another or others based on skin color. Master is associated with the institutions of
slavery. It is also associated with masculine representations such as the "man who serves as head of a household" or a "male teacher," as for example, in Anderson's
conception of male academics handing down methods to feminist academics. Standpoint feminism helps us expand on Lorde’s use of the term master and its relevance to the project of
Feminist standpoint theorists make a case for the view from the bottom, "the slave," as
the more complete one. "The point of departure for standpoint feminist epistemology is the idea that knowledge is socially situated. It
feminist and critical policy analysis.
follows that in order to interpret and understand the situation of a particular group of people,
thought has to start from their lives. Essentially, standpoint feminist epistemology urges us to move away
from the idea of simply adding the "other" to preexisting frameworks and directs us to ground
knowledge on the particular experience of the people we want to understand" (Lorde, 1984, p. 144). Accordingly,
standpoint feminists reject the "master's" view because it is partial and distorting. It is partial because
it is derived from a vision of reality that takes into account only the reality of the dominant class or
power holders. It is distorting because it tends to normalize the experience of the "master" as the
generic experience. In contrast, Audre Lorde urges us "to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled . . . to
take our differences and make them strengths" (Lorde. 1984, p. 112). Similarly, standpoint feminists suggest that the
position of "outsider within" (Hill Collins, 1986) and "borderline" position (Anzaldua, 1987) provide a vision of the
academy and relations within it that are inverse to the master's view (Harding, l99l; Hartsock. 1983). For example, Patricia Hill
Collins argues that it is the awareness of her marginal status as the "outsider within" that provides the black female intellectual with a unique black feminist standpoint from which to analyze
life in the academy. She observes, "It is the "outsider within" who is more likely to challenge the knowledge claims of insiders, to acknowledge the discrepancy between insiders' accounts of
human behavior and her own experiences and to identify anomalies" (Fonow & Cook, 1991. p. 3). As black feminists make clear,
to accept the master's tools
could be self-destructive because it would require us to adopt theories and methods - the tools - that
historically have excluded women or devalued them. Lorde’s dictum, in the words of .loan Scott, warns us to not be "drawn into the very
assumptions of the very discourse we ought to question" (Scott, l998, p. 36). To adopt the master’s tools is to become an insider and
assimilate what we described in our work as androcentric perspectives. "But," Anderson asks, "what makes those disciplines and
their methods androcentric?" But, we wonder, why ask a question that Anderson herself so clearly answers? How else, other than androcentrism, could
we describe the presumption that academic man handed down to us the "academic protocols" that
enable our work to be understood and heard? The implication is that fitting in is contingent on
compliance with his rules.
The 1AC’s positionality towards women is psychologically damaging and spills over
into broader exclusion – women are expected to conform to masculine norms to
overcome structural biases against feminine expression and must perform
exceptionally just to be acknowledged – passivity makes every one of us complicit in
this system of violence
Griffin and Raider 89
(J. Cinder and Holly Jane, Women in High School Debate, Wake Forest Symposiums, Fall 1989,
http://groups.wfu.edu/debate/MiscSites/DRGArticles/Griffin&Raider1989PunishmentPar.htm)//JB
given its competitive nature, quest for excellence, and skewed gender composition, debate
offers a micro-model of the business and academic worlds. There are implications for female
representation and treatment in these societal roles as debaters tend to become leaders in both the business and academic worlds. As the
perceptions of women ingrained through debate experience are translated into society at large
through leadership positions, the implications for under-representation of women in debate takes on
greater significance. This article addresses several of the reasons behind female participation rates at the high school level and offers a few solutions to the problem. All
things being equal, one would assume roughly equal numbers of male and female participants in high school
debate. Debate, unlike athletics, does not require physical skills which might restrict the participation of women. Additionally, debate is academically
oriented and women tend to select extracurricular activities that are more academic in nature than
men.3 Based on these assumptions, one would expect proportional representation of the genders in the activity. Why then, are there four times more
men in debate than women?4 Several explanations exist that begin to account for the low rate of female participation in debate. Fewer females
enter the activity at the outset. Although organizational and procedural tactics used in high school debate may account for low initial rates of participation, a variety
Additionally,
of social and structural phenomena, not necessarily caused by the debate community also account for these rates. Ultimately, the disproportionate attrition rate of female debaters results in
the male dominated composition of the activity. There are more disincentives for women to participate in debate than for men. While entry rates for women and man may in some cases be
the total number of women who participate for four years is significantly lower than the
corresponding number of men. This rate of attrition is due to factors that can be explained largely by
an examination of the debate community itself. Socially inculcated values contribute to low rates of female entry in high school debate. Gender bias
and its relation to debate has been studied by Manchester and Freidly. They conclude, "[m]ales are adhering to sex-role stereotypes and sexrole expectations when they participate in debate because it is perceived as a masculine' activity.
Female debate participants experience more gender-related barriers because they are not adhering to
sex-role stereotypes and sex-role expectations.5 In short, 'nice girls' do not compete against or with men,
are not assertive, and are not expected to engage in policy discourse, particularly relating to military issues. Rather, "nice girls"
roughly equal,
should be cheerleaders, join foreign language clubs, or perhaps participate in student government. It should be noted that many of these attitudes are indoctrinated at birth and cannot be
Structural barriers
endemic to the forensics community dissuade female ninth graders from entering the activity.6 Recruitment
directly attributed to the debate community. However, there are many activity specific elements that discourage female participation in high school debate.
procedures and initial exposure may unintentionally create a first impression of the activity as dominated by men. By and large, it is a male debater or a male debate coach that will discuss the
activity with new students for the first time. Additionally, most debate coaches are men. This reinforces a socially proven norm to prospective debaters, that debate is an activity controlled by
men. This male exposure contributes to a second barrier to participation. Parents are more likely to let a son go on an overnight than they are a daughter, particularly when the coach is male
While entry barriers are formidable,
female attrition rates affect the number of women in the activity most significantly.7 Rates of attrition are largely
and the squad is mostly male. This may be a concern even when the coach is a trusted member of the community.
related to the level of success. Given the time and money commitment involved in debate, if one is not winning one quits debating. The problem is isolating the factors that contribute to the
Even if equal numbers of males and females enter at the novice level, the female
perception of debate as a whole is not based on the gender proportions of her immediate peer group.
Rather, she looks to the composition of debaters across divisions. This may be easily understood if one considers the traditional structures of novice debate. Often it is the
varsity debate team, composed mostly of males, who coach and judge novice. Novices also learn how to debate by
watching debates. Thus, the role models will be those individuals already involved in the activity and entrenched
in its values. The importance of female role models and mentors should not be underestimated. There is a
early failure of women debaters.
proven correlation between the number of female participants and the number of female coaches and judges.8 The presence of female mentors and role models may not only help attract
women to the activity, but will significantly temper the attrition rate of female debaters. Novice, female debaters have few role models and, consequently, are more likely to drop out than
their male counterparts; resulting in an unending cycle of female attrition in high school debate. Pragmatically, there are certain cost benefit criteria that coaches on the high school level,
given the constraints of a budget, must consider. Coaches with teams dominated by males may be reluctant to recruit females due to traveling and housing considerations. Thus, even if a
Once a female has "proven" herself, the
willingness to expend team resources on her increases, assuming she overcomes the initial obstacles.
Perceptually, women lack the levels of confidence present in males; their expectations of success are
lower, and the pressures placed upon them are higher. As a result of socialization, women lack confidence in their public speaking skills. This
coupled with the lack of role models leads female debaters to view themselves as tokens and outsiders in the activity
very early. This self perception as token "females" creates a performance pressure.9 For example, if it is assumed that a
female debater is not as competent as her male counterpart there is additional pressure on the female to overcome the (not necessarily overt) expectation that she will be inadequate. For
many persons this stress is so counterproductive that it interferes with one's judgement, and ultimately the predication
that the token will be inadequate may become a fulfilled prophecy. Thus, in some situations performances failure is linked to
female decides to join the team, her travel opportunities may be more limited than those of the males on the team.
performance pressure, and not the objective validity of the female debater's inabilities. This performance pressure does not require the explicit low expectations of the dominant group, but
This phenomena of performance pressure is especially prevalent on
specific topics in high school debate, for example military issues. It is usually presumed that a female does not have a good grasp of military issues. Therefore, a female
debater must debate not only as well as her male counterparts, but feels a need to command an even
greater level of expertise in this area. Performance pressure effects selection of events and argument preference as well.11 In general ' women are not
results as a consequence of simply being unique.10
encouraged to discuss military and political issues. Women prefer social and theoretical arguments to military issues, and this is reflected in women's choices of debate arguments. On the
collegiate level, more women participate in CEDA debate as compared to NDT debate.12 On the high school level the ratio of male to female participants in individual events activities is nearly
one to one.13 Therefore, even if a female is not discouraged from entering debate itself, she will not remain in the activity for long because the argument discourse either does not interest her
or she is actively discouraged from becoming fluent in it. The overall rate of attrition of women in debate and their decision not to enter college debate after high school may also be related to
more noticeable and determinable sexism in the debate community. Sexism is a word that has not been used thus far. Given the charged nature of this issue we have opted to focus discussion
on less "sensitive" or "more objective" measures. However, as women in debate who have interviewed and surveyed other women in debate, there are several general statements we can
Often, two women debating
together are referred to as "the girls." Many female debaters observe that male debaters when
referring to a female competitor's argument, frequently say, "on his argument. . .." Also observed, are
references to female debaters as honey or chicks. Other lingo of the community supports this conclusion. Arguing military issues is "manly."
Debating straight up is "going balls up." Aggressive females are either bitchy or manly. The effect of this type of behavior on female attrition is difficult
make regarding this issue. High school debate coaches, tournaments, and even trophies herald policy debate as "two man" debate.
to measure. At its core
, this kind of overt sexism makes young debaters uncomfortable. It is offensive and
intolerable. Contrary to popular opinion, women do not find it funny. By the time many females have ended their debating careers offensive language has become such a part of their
daily existence that they may laugh about it. One will never know how many women are intimidated and offended to such
a degree that they leave the activity before they develop the self-confidence and level of success
necessary to overcome the inherent gender bias against them, a bias contributed to by the "old boy" tactics of the members of the
community. If the assumption that there should be an equal number of male and female debaters is
granted, reformation must begin within the existing community in order to attain this goal or the "old
boy" traditions will remain.
Don’t let them try to weigh the 1AC. A crisis focused ethic is wrong – attention to
isolated instances of warfare ignores the daily horrors of violent oppression. This is
the precondition for any war to happen
Cuomo 1996 – PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Philosophy, University of Cincinnati (Chris, Hypatia Fall 1996. Vol. 11,
Issue 3, pg 30)
In "Gender and `Postmodern' War," Robin Schott introduces some of the ways in which war
is currently best seen not as an event
but as a presence (Schott 1995). Schott argues that postmodern understandings of persons, states, and politics, as well as the high-tech
nature of much contemporary warfare and the preponderance of civil and nationalist wars, render an eventbased conception of war
inadequate, especially insofar as gender is taken into account. In this essay, I will expand upon her argument by showing that accounts of war
that only focus on events are impoverished in a number of ways, and therefore feminist consideration of the political, ethical, and ontological
dimensions of war and the possibilities for resistance demand a much more complicated approach. I take Schott's characterization of war as
presence as a point of departure, though I am not committed to the idea that the constancy of militarism, the fact of its omnipresence in
human experience, and the paucity of an event-based account of war are exclusive to contemporary postmodern or postcolonial
Theory that does not investigate or even notice the omnipresence of militarism cannot
represent or address the depth and specificity of the everyday effects of militarism on women, on
people living in occupied territories, on members of military institutions, and on the environment. These
effects are relevant to feminists in a number of ways because military practices and institutions help construct gendered and
national identity, and because they justify the destruction of natural nonhuman entities and
communities during peacetime. Lack of attention to these aspects of the business of making or
preventing military violence in an extremely technologized world results in theory that cannot
accommodate the connections among the constant presence of militarism, declared wars, and other
closely related social phenomena, such as nationalistic glorifications of motherhood, media violence,
and current ideological gravitations to military solutions for social problems. Ethical approaches that do
not attend to the ways in which warfare and military practices are woven into the very fabric of life in
twenty-first century technological states lead to crisis-based politics and analyses. For any feminism that aims to
resist oppression and create alternative social and political options, crisis-based ethics and politics are problematic because
they distract attention from the need for sustained resistance to the enmeshed, omnipresent systems
of domination and oppression that so often function as givens in most people's lives. Neglecting the
omnipresence of militarism allows the false belief that the absence of declared armed conflicts is
peace, the polar opposite of war. It is particularly easy for those whose lives are shaped by the safety of privilege, and who do not
regularly encounter the realities of militarism, to maintain this false belief. The belief that militarism is an ethical, political
concern only regarding armed conflict, creates forms of resistance to militarism that are merely
exercises in crisis control. Antiwar resistance is then mobilized when the "real" violence finally occurs,
or when the stability of privilege is directly threatened, and at that point it is difficult not to respond in
ways that make resisters drop all other political priorities. Crisis-driven attention to declarations of war
circumstances.(1)
might actually keep resisters complacent about and complicitous in the general presence of global
militarism. Seeing war as necessarily embedded in constant military presence draws attention to the
fact that horrific, state-sponsored violence is happening nearly all over, all of the time, and that it is
perpetrated by military institutions and other militaristic agents of the state. Moving away from crisisdriven politics and ontologies concerning war and military violence also enables consideration of
relationships among seemingly disparate phenomena, and therefore can shape more nuanced
theoretical and practical forms of resistance. For example, investigating the ways in which war is part of a
presence allows consideration of the relationships among the events of war and the following: how
militarism is a foundational trope in the social and political imagination; how the pervasive presence and
symbolism of soldiers/warriors/patriots shape meanings of gender; the ways in which threats of statesponsored violence are a sometimes invisible/sometimes bold agent of racism, nationalism, and
corporate interests; the fact that vast numbers of communities, cities, and nations are currently in the
midst of excruciatingly violent circumstances. It also provides a lens for considering the relationships
among the various kinds of violence that get labeled "war." Given current American obsessions with nationalism, guns,
and militias, and growing hunger for the death penalty, prisons, and a more powerful police state, one cannot underestimate the need for
philosophical and political attention to connections among phenomena like the "war on drugs," the "war on crime," and other state-funded
militaristic campaigns. I propose that the constancy of militarism and its effects on social reality be reintroduced as a crucial locus of
contemporary feminist attentions, and that feminists emphasize how wars are eruptions and manifestations of omnipresent militarism that is a
product and tool of multiply oppressive, corporate, technocratic states.(2) Feminists should be particularly interested in making this shift
because it better allows consideration of the effects of war and militarism on women, subjugated peoples, and environments. While giving
attention to the constancy of militarism in contemporary life we need not neglect the importance of addressing the specific qualities of direct,
large-scale, declared military conflicts. But the
dramatic nature of declared, large-scale conflicts should not
obfuscate the ways in which military violence pervades most societies in increasingly technologically
sophisticated ways and the significance of military institutions and everyday practices in shaping reality.
Philosophical discussions that focus only on the ethics of declaring and fighting wars miss these
connections, and also miss the ways in which even declared military conflicts are often experienced as
omnipresent horrors. These approaches also leave unquestioned tendencies to suspend or distort
moral judgement in the face of what appears to be the inevitability of war and militarism.
We advocate taking an approach of intralocality – we must deconstruct our
relationship to structures of oppression within the community as a starting-point for
effective debate to occur – my narrative is an interrogation of my positionality
towards these structures
Moore 11 (Darnell L., writer and activist whose work is informed by anti-racist, feminist, queer of
color, and anti-colonial thought and advocacy. Darnell's essays, social commentary, poetry, and
interviews have appeared in various national and international media venues, including the Feminist
Wire, Ebony magazine, and The Huffington Post, "On Location: The “I” in the Intersection,"
http://thefeministwire.com/2011/12/on-location-the-i-in-the-intersection/)
The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we
are actively committed to struggling against racial,
sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression and see as our particular ask the development of integrated analysis and practice
based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates
the conditions of our lives. As black women we see black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous
oppressions that all women of color face. -The Combahee River Collective in A Black Feminist Statement¶ Many radical movement builders are
well-versed in the theory of intersectionality. Feminists, queer theorists and activists, critical race scholars, progressive activists, and the like
owe much to our Black feminist sisters, like The Combahee River Collective, who introduced us to the reality of simultaneity–as a framework for
assessing the multitude of interlocking oppressions that impact the lives of women of color–in A Black Feminist Statement (1978). Their voices
and politics presaged Kimberlé Crenshaw’s very useful theoretical contribution of “ intersectionality ” to the feminist toolkit of political
interventions in 1989.¶ Since its inception, many have referenced the term—sometimes without attribution to the black feminist intellectual
genealogy from which it emerged—as a form of en vogue progressive parlance. In fact, it seems to be the case that it
is often
referenced in progressive circles as a counterfeit license (as in, “I understand the ways that race, sexuality, class, and
gender coalesce. I get it. I really do.”) to enter resistance work even if the person who declares to have a deep
“understanding” of the connectedness of systemic matrices of oppression, themselves, have yet to
discern and address their own complicity in the maintenance of the very oppressions they seek to
name and demolish . I am certain that I am not the only person who has heard a person use language embedded with race, class,
gender, or ability privilege follow-up with a reference to “intersectionality.”¶
My concern , then, has everything to do with the
way that the fashioning of intersectionality as a political framework can lead toward the good work of
analyzing ideological and material systems of oppression—as they function “out there ”—and away
from the great work of critical analyses of the ways in which we , ourselves, can function as actants in the
narratives of counter-resistance that we rehearse . In other words, we might be missing the opportunity
to read our complicities, our privileges, our accesses, our excesses, our excuses, our modes of
oppressing—located “in here”—as they occupy each of us .¶ Crenshaw’s theorization has provided us with a useful lens
to assess the problematics of the interrelated, interlocking apparatuses of power and privilege and their resulting epiphenomena of
powerlessness and subjugation. Many
have focused on the external dimensions of oppression and their material
results manifested in the lives of the marginalized, but might our times be asking of us to deeply
consider our own “stuff” that might instigate such oppressions?¶ What if we extended Crenshaw’s theory
of intersectionality
by invoking what we might name “intralocality”?
Borrowing from sociologists, the term “ social
location ,” which broadly speaks to one’s context , highlights one’s standpoint(s) —the social spaces where
s/he is positioned (i.e. race, class, gender, geographical, etc.). Intralocality , then, is concerned with the social
locations that foreground our knowing and experiencing of our world and our relationships to the
systems and people within our world . Intralocality is a call to theorize the self in relation to power
and privilege, powerlessness and subjugation. It is work that requires the locating of the “I” in the
intersection . And while it could be argued that such work is highly individualistic, I contend that it is at the
very level of self-in-relation-to-community where communal transformation is made possible .¶ Might
it be time to travel into the deep of our contexts? Might it be time for us—theorists/activists—to do the work
of intersectionality (macro/system-analysis) in concert with the intra-local (micro/self-focused
analysis)?¶ Intersectionality as an analysis, rightly, asks of us to examine systemic oppressions, but in these times of radical and
spontaneous insurgencies —times when we should reflect on our need to unoccupy
privilege
(where they exist)
in our own lives even as we occupy
some
those
sites of
other sites of domination — work
must be done at the level of the self-in-community. We cannot—as a progressive community—rally around
notions of “progression” and, yet, be complicit in the very homo/transphobias, racisms, sexisms, ableisms, etc.
that violently terrorize the lives of so many others. If a more loving and just community is to be
imagined and advanced , it seems to me that we would need to start at a different location than we
might’ve expected: self.
This is not just a link of omission – unintentional reification of violent assumptions are
still violent despite good intentions
Singer 89
(Joseph William, Associate Professor Boston University of Law, Duke Law Journal)
Spelman argues that the categories and forms of discourse we use, the assumptions with
which we approach the world, and the modes of analysis we employ have
important consequences in channeling our attention in particular directions . The
paradigms we adopt affect what we see and how we interpret it. They determine to
a large extent , who we listen to and what we make of what we hear. They determine
what questions we ask and the kinds of answers we seek. Investigation into such
matters is important, according to Spelman, because the seemingly neutral and innocuous
assumptions with which we approach the world may blot from our view facts we
ourselves would consider to be important. In this way, we may unconsciously recreate
or express forms of hierarchy that we intended to criticize. Self -reflection about such matters
may enable us to ferret out the political effects of seemingly neutral premises. We
should be on the lookout for ways in which our approaches to problems of
illegitimate power relations reinforce those very relations. Good intentions do not
immunize against the illegitimate exercise of power. In fact, a great impetus to the
exercise of power is the inability to recognize that one is exercising it; when this
happens, one need not worry about whether power is being used wisely. One goal
of philosophic inquiry, therefore is to understand concretely where privilege
lodges in our thought.
Put away your perms – you can’t access analyses and deconstructions of the
exclusionary practices implicit in policy analysis once those forms of scholarship have
been performed – bland statements of empathy are empty tools used to preserve the
status quo
Bensimon and Marshall 03, Professor of Educational Policy and Administration at the
University of Southern California and Associate Professor of Education at the
University of North Carolina
(Estela Mara and Catherine, “Like It or Not: Feminist Critical Policy Analysis Matters,” The Journal of Higher Education vol. 74 no.3, June 2003,
JSTOR)//JB
What is Feminist and Critical Policy Analysis? We assume that not all readers will be familiar with the book chapter that inspired Anderson’s critique. Therefore, to place this response in
context, we start off with a brief summary of the main points. Our chapter consisted of two sections. In the first we laid out the theoretical foundations underpinning feminist and critical
perspectives and provided a feminist critique of conventional policy analysis. In the second part we discussed selected higher education studies whose conceptual design, analysis and
1. Gender is a fundamental category, and policy analysis that
from a feminist critical perspective is alien to the gendering that goes on both in gender-explicit and
gender-neutral practices which may advantage men and disadvantage women, even if not intendedly.
2. Feminist critical policy analysis is gender-conscious, not gender-blind. To do away with power asymmetries
interpretive methods exemplify feminist critical policy studies. Thus, we said:
proceeds
and domination that structure relationships between men and women in the academy requires
gender-based appraisals of academic structures, practices, and policies. 3. The goal of feminist critical
policy is to transform institutions and not simply to "add" women. We rejected conventional policy studies methods as the
"master’s tools" because they are the products of disciplinary traditions that are androcentric and were not meant to include women.' and therefore they "tend primarily to reflect the
we see the project of feminist
critical analysis as being twofold: (1)To critique or deconstruct conventional theories and explanations
and reveal the gender biases (as well as racial, sexual, social class biases) inherent in commonly
accepted theories, constructs, methodologies and concepts: and (2) to conduct analysis that is feminist both in
its theoretical and methodological orientations. It involves leading policy studies with a critical awareness of how androcentrism is embedded in the
disciplines, theories of knowledge and research designs that are foundational to conventional policy analysis and which ostensibly are neutral and neutered. Accordingly, feminist
policy analysis involves the critique of knowledge gained from main- stream educational policy studies
as well as the design of feminist educational policy studies" (Bensimon & Marshall, 1997. p. 6). Feminist critical policy analysis is concerned with
the scrutiny of hidden gender bias in taken-for-granted policies and in ferreting out the disparate impact they have
on women. In contrast, the focus of conventional policy analysis is on disparate treatment, which represents the liberal interpretation of equality and fairness (Hawkesworth, 1994).
We Are Fixing, Not Complaining Our work falls in the genre of criticism : it consists of an examination of policy analysis from a feminist perspective. It is
not, as Anderson describes it, a "complaint.” A "complaint" suggests not an act of scholarship but an act of
resentment or lamentation. To characterize our work as a "complaint" is one of longstanding ways in
which men of the academy have devalued the work of academic women, and the fact that this "tool" can still be wielded in the
experiences, problems and acts of repression of a stereotypically white western masculine self" (Flax, l992, p. I96). Accordingly,
pages of an academic journal shows that the “master’s" house remains strongly in place. Anderson, in titling her essay "As if gender mattered" and suggesting that gender is an environmental
variable that one need be sensitive to only in the proper contexts, is insinuating, albeit politely, that gender does not have "independent analytical status" (Scott, l986. p. l06I), as we pro-
Gender does matter,
even when it is not articulated. In existential terms, gender, whether male or female, is part of and defines one's
identity." Anderson's criticism of feminist critical policy analysis, regardless of her attempts to position herself as an ally, is simply a restatement of "thinking as usual."
Statements Anderson makes, such as "not because I’m hostile to feminist criticism, but because I have learned so much from it"; “I am sympathetic with
their agenda for change" are in fact the evasive "tools" to stall change that threatens the status quo.
posed. For Anderson, gender is only applicable to the analyses of policies that involve women directly. But, as Judith Glazer-Raymo has observed, "
Ironically, the reasoning behind Anderson’s arguments against feminist critical policy analysis and her advocacy for a gender-based perspective that is more politically and socially suitable than
ours demonstrate exactly the appropriateness of Audre Lorde's (l984) warning:
"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's
house." Table 1 frames our ensuing arguments to show that feminist critical policy analysis is essential for eliminating the chilly postsecondary environment for women.
2NC
Framework
Every instance in which we speak out against abuses impacts the community writ
large and stops women from leaving the activity – confronting this within the round,
the principal site of oppression, is key to solvency
Ouding 92
(Jenni, University of Michigan, Women in Debate: Reflections on the Ongoing Struggle, Wake Forest Symposiums, Spring 1992,
http://groups.wfu.edu/debate/MiscSites/DRGArticles/Oudingetal1992Pollution.htm)//JB
"When men are aggressive in cross-x they look dominant; when women are aggressive, they look like
bitches." I'll never forget these words - spoken to me four years ago by a female judge after a rather heated debate.
At the time, I saw this view as an unfair double standard, yet as I reflected upon the implications of
that statement, I began to question my role and abilities as a female debater. When I graduated from high school, I was
convinced that I would never amount to anything as a college debater, and decided not to try. Fortunately, the summer after my freshman year in college, one of the members of the Michigan
debate squad convinced me to give debate a trial run. It was one of the best decisions I've ever made. I find debate to be one of the most intellectually rewarding and socially stimulating
many - if not most - female high school debaters quit debate
before college without feeling that they have ever really excelled in the activity. Though the reasons
for quitting are undoubtedly diverse-choice of schools, academic load, parental desires, etc.- I can't help feeling that the double
standard I first encountered four years ago may play a part in that decision. While I have no easy answers or advice to give to female debaters, I can only
make one plea: Don't give up. I know that being female in a male dominated activity can be difficult if not just damn
frustrating, but my personal feeling is that the only way to truly change stereotypes is to prove them wrong. This is the way I feel about debate George Bernard Shaw said it. "People
events that I've ever been involved in. Unfortunately, I know that
are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they
the circumstances under which female debaters operate are
difficult, but no one will change those circumstances unless people speak out and try to instill in the
want, and if they can't find them, they make them." I can't deny that
debate community a more tolerant atmosphere . It may mean working a little harder, giving a little more, taking a little more ... but if in
the end you can truly say that you have succeeded, believe me, the debate community will
remember you for it. As more and more women come to be remembered and recognized for their argumentation skills, attitudes will change. And some day,
though it may not be right away, that double standard that almost made me cut my debate career short will cease to
be a factor in the decision of whether or not to debate in high school or college. I hope that these essays have been
educative if not thought provoking. You may not agree with all of the views presented, but hearing each individual viewpoint at least forces us to formulate our own beliefs and challenge our
None of us can single-handedly change the world, much less the entire debate community, but
once individuals come to recognize the difficulties women face in competitive debate and
acknowledge and discuss the complaints which many female debaters harbor, perhaps then we, as a
community, will become more understanding and tolerant. Tolerance means instilling a conscience in
those who view women as lesser competitors, but tolerance breeds respect, and I think we all could
use just a little respect.
own ideas.
The debate space is a key site of analysis – competitive frameworks empower us to
have our discussion effectively and shocks listeners out of complacency
Eisenberg 2012
Stephanie Eisenberg “Speaking from the Margins: Negotiating barriers to women’s participation and success in policy debate” San Francisco
State.
debaters may experience some pushback
to some of the arguments they wish to speak about in debate, especially if they are trying to
integrating personal experiences into their argument. For example, Akila explains that debaters tend to treat each
other as if it is a race to the bottom, where the ballot is the only thing that matters. Judy notes that this norm
of the community to place emphasis on competitive success allows people to justify arguments that
are reprehensible or “not okay.” Akila highlights several examples of teams who will justify racism, sexism and imperialism as appropriate side effects of advocacies that claim to
save the lives of many people from potential nuclear war scenarios constructed through a lens of political realism. Ivana notes that externalized logic, large body
counts and phallic weapons are privileged over personal experience or “your own body.” Akila feels that debaters don’t
place an emphasis on trying to relate to one another, and feels that debate isn’t an alternative space where
students are encouraged to relate more ethically towards one another. Like Judy, Akila agrees that the
Particular types of argument choices may affect the way participants experience a debate round. For example,
atmosphere promotes an emphasis on competitive success that makes debate feel like “warfare,” a
common masculine metaphor. Akila shares: On a personal level, I spent time writing this poem to try to convey to you what being a woman of color and an
immigrant is like under this year’s topic which is immigration, but because of the way that we are taught to socialize in a sort of militarized space that is debate, that gets lost until it becomes
My narrative is just a reason we should win because it foregrounds
experiences of immigrants…that’s not a good way of understanding why people put themselves in debates. People put themselves in debates
because debate needs to be less insular; it needs to be less detached from the reality of what we talk about. While some
some sort of arsenal or some sort of weapon.
women experienced this as a barrier, others did not perceive specific arguments as inherently gendered or as a roadblock to their participation or success in debate. Even though Catherine
language choices in argumentation, and explains that she frequently hears rhetoric that
equates certain argument choices with weakness, such as comparing arguments with rape or making
comments such as “that’s gay” or other. These comparisons serve to reaffirm hegemonic masculinity,
and Catherine feels that this type of rhetoric is a distinct barrier to inclusion in debate . In order to combat some of these barriers, women
utilize argument choice itself as a tactic. Ivana, for example, frequently deploys feminist arguments in debate rounds. She notes that even though some men in the
community find it acceptable to speak more candidly about women’s bodies and sexual experiences,
it is perpetually taboo to speak about women’s bodies in debate rounds. Ivana deployed arguments related to women’s
adopts this particular perspective, she has become more aware of
menstruation as one way to engage this dichotomy she is confronted with. Thomas (2007) explains how the menstruation taboo in modern Western society is “restricting Western women
from full citizenship” (p. 76). Ivana’s decision to speak out in this public forum about women’s menstruation might be thought of as a tactic to confront this taboo while reclaiming a sense of
citizenship in the debate community or even in the round itself. By requiring both the judge to listen and the other team to engage her discussion of menstruation, she can call for a
Other women
chose to approach these tensions by using personal experience as evidence, sharing their own stories
in debate rounds. Davis (2007) argues that “women’s subjective accounts of their experiences and how they affect their
everyday practices need to be linked to a critical interrogation of the cultural discourses, institutional
arrangements, and geopolitical contexts in which these accounts are invariably embedded” (p. 133) This is
precisely what these women are doing, weaving their own narratives in with theoretical texts and political
events situated while acknowledging the particular institutional space the activity is located in. Lucille doesn’t feel that she
questioning of this simultaneous objectification and silencing of women while establishing a space for her to feel engaged and empowered by her argument.
uses tactics in debate rounds very often to overcome these barriers, however she notes that there are instances where enough was enough and she spoke about her subjectivity as a woman.
Several women noted that
being able to speak about being a female or femininity in general while also remaining
strategic and successful was an empowering tactic. Akila calls these types of tactics “little
disruptions,” or subversive instances in debate that challenge their competitors and judges to a
moment of reflexivity.
The rules of debate imposed upon us by their framework are a prison that prevents us
from exercising agency
Nagel and Nocella 13 (The End of Prisons: Reflections from the Decarceration Movementedited by
Mechthild E. Nagel, Anthony J. Nocella II)
The original working title for this volume was Prison Abolition. After discussion among the
contributors however, we changed the title to The End of Prisons. First, we wish to raise discussions
about the telos of prisons – what purpose do they have?Second, Prison abolition is strongly related to
a particular movement to end the prison industrial complex . Following Michel Foucault(1977), we
argue that prisons are also institutions such as schools, nursing homes, jails, daycare centers, parks,
zoos, reservations and marriage, just to name a few. Prisons are all around us and constructed by
those in dominant oppressive authoritarian positions. There are many types of prisons – religious
prisons, social prisons, political prisons, economic prisons, educational prisons, and, of course,
criminal prisons. Individuals leave one prison only to enter another. From daycare to school to a
nursing home, we are a nation of instutionalized prisons. Criminal prisons in the United States are not
officially referred to as such, but rather as correctional facilities. A prison, as we define it in this
volume, is an institution or system that oppresses and does not allow freedom for a particular group.
Within this definition, we include the imprisonment of non-human animals and plants , which are too
often overlooked . Michel Foucault (1977) famously said, “Is it suprising that prisons resemble
factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” (p. 288). We believe that this
volume is one of the first to extend Foucault’s logica, by making a connection between coercive
institutions and all systems of domination as forms of prisons. We argue that the conception of prison
is far reaching, always changing and adapting to the times and the socio-political environment. We
expand the concept of prison from concrete walls, barbed wire, gates and fences to many of the
institutions and systems throughout society such as schools, mental hospitals, reservations for
indigenous Americans, zoos for non-human animals, and national parks and urban cultivated green
spaces for the ecological community. United States imperialism, which promotes global domination
and capitalism, not only imprisons convicted criminals byt its people, land, non-human animals, those
that surround it (non-United States citizens) and those trapped within it (American Indians and
immigrants).
Links
PDC
The discourses and expectations of the debate space perpetuated by the 1AC force
women into positions of subjugation by demanding that they perform masculinity –
practices within the community implicate the world outside of this round
Bjork et al. 92
(Rebecca S., Lisa Dix, Lisa Hobbs, Jenni Ouding, Joy Rhyne; University of Utah, University of Utah, University of North Carolina, University of
Michigan, University of North Carolina; Symposium: Women in Debate: Reflections on the Ongoing Struggle; Wake Forest Symposiums; Spring
1992; http://groups.wfu.edu/debate/MiscSites/DRGArticles/Oudingetal1992Pollution.htm)//JB
Throughout my years of high school and intercollegiate debate, I have repeatedly heard accounts of
discrimination against women, sexual harassment, and unnecessary gossip. I have no doubt that most of the
debaters and coaches reading this article have heard about or experienced such incidents. The intent behind this
compilation is not to inform the debate community that sexism exists, but rather to present a wide variety of personal views and experiences related to the issue of women in debate. My
hope is that upon reading the following essays, men and women alike will take the time to think
about the issues presented and perhaps even discuss them with other debaters. The following accounts offer insight into
the matter of sexism in debate - what "sexism" really means and why it has become an issue well as suggestions as to how the entire debate community can begin to deal with the frustration
many women feel as they struggle to excel competitively. ---Jenni Ouding, University of Michigan REBECCA S. BJORK While reflecting on my experiences as a woman in academic debate in
preparation for this essay, I realized that I have been involved in debate for more than half of my life. I debated for four years in high school, for four years in college, and I have been coaching
intercollegiate debate for nine years. Not surprisingly, much of my identity as an individual has been shaped by these experiences in debate. I am a person who strongly believes that
debate empowers people to be committed and involved individuals in the communities in which they
live. I am a person who thrives on the intellectual stimulation involved in teaching and traveling with the brightest students on my campus. I am a person who looks forward to the
opportunities for active engagement of ideas with debaters and coaches from around the country. I am also, however, a college professor, a "feminist," and a peace activist who is increasingly
I find that I can no longer separate my
involvement in debate from the rest of who I am as an individual. Northwestern I remember listening to a lecture a few years ago
frustrated and disturbed by some of the practices I see being perpetuated and rewarded in academic debate.
given by Tom Goodnight at the University summer debate camp. Goodnight lamented what he saw as the debate community's participation in, and unthinking perpetuation of what he termed
the "death culture." He argued that the embracing of "big impact" arguments - nuclear war, environmental destruction, genocide, famine, and the like - by debaters and coaches signals a
morbid and detached fascination with such events, one that views these real human tragedies as part of a "game" in which so-called "objective and neutral" advocates actively seek to find in
their research the "impact to outweigh all other impacts"--the round-winning argument that will carry them to their goal of winning tournament X, Y, or Z. He concluded that our "use" of such
events in this way is tantamount to a celebration of them; our detached, rational discussions reinforce a detached, rational viewpoint, when emotional and moral outrage may be a more
language is not merely some
transparent tool used to transmit information, but rather is an incredibly powerful medium, the use of
which inevitably has real political and material consequences. Given this assumption, I believe that it is
important for us to examine the "discourse of debate practice:" that is, the language, discourses, and meanings that we, as a community
of debaters and coaches, unthinkingly employ in academic debate. If it is the case that the language we use has real implications for
how we view the world, how we view others, and how we act in the world, then it is imperative that
we critically examine our own discourse practices with an eye to how our language does violence to
others. I am shocked and surprised when I hear myself saying things like, "we killed them," or "take no prisoners," or "let's blow them out of the water." I am tired of the "ideal" debater
being defined as one who has mastered the art of verbal assault to the point where accusing opponents of lying, cheating, or being deliberately misleading is a sign of strength. But what I
am most tired of is how women debaters are marginalized and rendered voiceless in such a discourse community.
Women who verbally assault their opponents are labeled "bitches" because it is not socially
acceptable for women to be verbally aggressive. Women who get angry and storm out of a room
when a disappointing decision is rendered are labeled "hysterical" because, as we all know, women
are more emotional than men. I am tired of hearing comments like, "those 'girls' from school X aren't
really interested in debate; they just want to meet men." We can all point to examples (although only
a few) of women who have succeeded at the top levels of debate. But I find myself wondering how
many more women gave up because they were tired of negotiating the mine field of discrimination, sexual
harassment, and isolation they found in the debate community. As members of this community, however, we have great freedom to
appropriate response. In the last few years, my academic research has led me to be persuaded by Goodnight's unspoken assumption;
what is debate except a collection of shared understandings and explicit or
implicit rules for interaction? What I am calling for is a critical examination of how we, as individual
members of this community, characterize our activity, ourselves, and our interactions with others
through language. We must become aware of the ways in which our mostly hidden and unspoken assumptions about what "good" debate is function to exclude not only
define it in whatever ways we see fit. After all,
women, but ethnic minorities from the amazing intellectual opportunities that training in debate provides. Our nation and indeed, our planet, faces incredibly difficult challenges in the years
ahead. I believe that it is not acceptable anymore for us to go along as we always have, assuming that things will straighten themselves out. If the rioting in Los Angeles taught us anything, it is
that complacency breeds resentment and frustration.
We may not be able to change the world, but we can change our own
community, and if we fail to do so, we give up the only real power that we have.
LISA HOBBS An experience that all
policy debaters share is that of selecting or receiving a partner. There is undoubtedly a strategic function of most team pairings; coaches and debaters hope pairings will produce successful (by
that I mean winning teams). Most coaches and debaters have strong feeling about what kinds of things should be considered when pairing a team--including such things as personal
compatibility, commitment level, debate experience, intelligence, and speed. One of the considerations taken when pairings were made on my high school squad was gender, and it had a
tremendous impact on my perception of females as debaters. On my high school squad, we were advised that a team should NOT consist of two females if we wished to be as successful as
Two females might
not be viewed as credible by judges and/or might appear as "catty," "too aggressive," or "bitchy."
Two males, on the other hand, did not have to face these same concerns. The underlying message behind this pairing
philosophy seems to present female debaters with a double bind. Either females lack what it takes to be credible (e.g.,
competitiveness and confidence) because they are female, or they are branded as "too aggressive" if
they act with a certain degree of assertiveness. When females attempt to fit into a pre-existing, mold
of what a successful debater is, they are frequently cautioned to avoid appearing "bitchy." Either way, the
possible. We were told that a female needs a male to provide "balance" to a team, while a male does not need a female to provide that same "balance."
"problem" for female debaters is directly linked with the fact that they are females. Unfortunately, the message I received in high school followed me throughout my debate experience. In the
course of my seven years as a debater, I debated with both males and females. Quite honestly, I was reluctant to debate with another female; it did prove to be more difficult debating with a
When debating with a female, my partner and I were described as both "too
passive" and "bitchy," among other things. We would strike particular judges because we did not
think that women would receive a fair hearing from them. In contrast, when debating with a male (of significantly less experience than my
female than it was debating with a male.
partner), we were not described in the same ways, nor did we feel we had to strike judges. However, there were judges that we felt we must continue to strike because of my female presence.
females do need to
overcome being "female" to be successful. To a certain extent, I do believe that being a female puts you at a
disadvantage as a debater. However, I do not view being a female as something to be overcome. Males do
not have to overcome being male." Females should not have to view their gender as an obstacle to be over-come.
Instead, coaches, judges, and debaters must (re)consider how it is that they view such things as
success, credibility, aggression, and competence. We must consider the possibility (I mean the reality ) that
So at least in part, I experienced exactly what I was taught in high school. It seems that I am saying that the people I learned from in high school were right;
debate exists with that which is "male" as the norm. Additionally, we must consider what messages accompany certain "strategic" choices. In my
case, the way pairing decisions were made in my high school taught me that I was at a disadvantage before I even had a chance to debate. I do not have a remedy for what I see as some
that if an entire gender
does not "fit" into debate, we consider changing the practices of debate, not the people. JOY RHYNE Debate has
sizable inequalities that exists within the activity of debate. However, as a debate coach and former debater, I would like to offer the suggestion
been an overwhelmingly positive experience for me. That is not to say that there have not been negative aspects. I think that it is important for every woman in debate to be honest with
It is imperative that we
fight against rigidly defined gender roles in order to become full and equal participants in the debate
community--that is not to say that women must deny their femininity to be successful debaters. Instead, I
think each woman should be true to her own identity; if her femininity is an important part of her
psyche, then she should by no means feel compelled to deny it or try to hide it in exchange for
increased debate achievements. As a Southern woman, I think the pressures I felt within the debate community were great. At the beginning of my collegiate
herself. We are unfortunately the victims of sexual harassment and discrimination, but I do not believe that means we are destined to inferiority.
debate career I was not very focused on the competitive aspects of debate. My partner and I would win some debates, but what was most important to me at that time was socializing with
other debaters. I do not encourage other women in debate to adopt such an attitude, but I also do not think that women who have such an attitude should be stigmatized. I found that as one
of the few females on the debate circuit I was accepted socially by almost every other debater I met, whether they were junior-varsity participants or one of the top first-rounds. I was able to
have fun with these people and it did not seem to matter that I was often much less successful in debate than they were. In fact, I think that it was easier for them to "hang out" with me
I can recall countless occasions
when friends of mine virtually ignored me in discussions about debate rounds or issues and addressed
all of their questions to my male partner. This kind of behavior marginalized my worth as a debater. It
because I was not in direct competition with them. When I changed partners and became part of a first-round team, things changed.
always amazed me that other debaters (who were my friends) could totally ignore me as a "debater"; I was only truly recognized in a social context. I think the social side of debate is
important--some of my best friends are debaters--but every debater should have the opportunity to develop both the social and the competitive sides of debate. I do not mean to imply that
women in debate have little hope of becoming true equals to the men of debate or that they are destined to occupy only a social role and will forever remain at the peripheries of debate
feminine women face special challenges because they seem to fit the traditionally
defined gender roles of our society at large. Women are not taught to be competitive; such ambitions are
reserved for men. Argumentation itself has traditionally been associated with men because they are thought to be
success. However, I do believe that
more rational and logical than women, who are supposedly driven by their emotions. In society, these views have started to change. Women have become successful in these so-called "male
I
fundamentally disagree with those in the debate community who would urge women to become
more "masculine" in order to achieve a higher level of debate success. Giving into stereotypes will
only serve to perpetuate such myths. As a debater, I resisted such pressures, held on to my femininity, and still managed to have a successful debate
experience. I encourage other women in debate to do the same. We must fight the pressure and be true to ourselves; there is no
fundamental reason why only "masculine" women can succeed in debate. As a final note, I think that it is important for all of
us to encourage more women (and minorities as well) to participate in collegiate debate. I know that many female high school debaters decide
against debating in college because they feel the activity is too hostile to women. I think that this is a tragedy and that
areas" and I think that debate as well will increasingly come to reflect these changes. A woman can be feminine and still excel at argumentation and logical reasoning.
coaches and debaters alike should discourage such attitudes. After all, our society is sexist, but does that mean women should avoid becoming active participants and leaders? Of course not.
In the same way, women should not shy away from collegiate debate. I can honestly say that I have acquired many valuable skills through my involvement in debate. Giving up is not the
answer. Raising awareness will certainly help, but I think the key really lies with the women in debate themselves. We must decide to stay involved, encourage other women we know to
participate, and most importantly, refuse to settle for anything less than real equality and complete autonomy. LISA DIX Karen Finley, one of my favorite poets, writes with power and
knowledge of her experiences as a woman. Her poem entitled "I Was Not Expected To Be Talented" is for me a powerful expression of my feelings about being a woman in debate. The poem
goes like this ... Just smile, act pretty, open the door, and clean the toilet. You say one day at a time well, it's a slow death! Remember the homeless, the poor, the suffering. Well, I'm suffering
inside!...You know why I only feel comfortable around the collapsed, the broken, the inebriated, the helpless and the poor-'CAUSE THEY LOOK LIKE WHAT I FEEL INSIDE! They look, they look,
they look like what I feel inside! You see, I WAS NOT EXPECTED TO BE TALENTED. I am using this poem to relate to my experiences in debate as a woman. I feel that it is important for me to be
as honest as I can about my experiences, yet at the same time to relate a message that is positive for women who are entering the activity. The story I'm about to tell is a coming to terms
about my "place" in debate as a woman. I am a policy debater at the University of Utah. I did not debate in high school, although I did do some individual events. From my experience in high
school, I think individual events were sort of the "woman's place." I was not expected to be talented in debate; however, I feel that women can be VERY talented if they are just encouraged to
participate. This is the reason I am writing this paper. I believe that by subverting the notion of a "woman's place" in debate, and by being able to define our own "place" as women, more
women will be encouraged to participate in debate at the high school and collegiate levels. The first time I was aware of my "place" in debate as a woman was at a regular season tournament.
I was at the awards ceremony listening to the top twenty speaker awards; not one of them was a woman. Women were winning awards at the novice and junior levels, but for varsity women
not very many women
ever win speaker awards past the junior and novice levels. I guess I am very reluctant to accept that
novice and junior debate is the only "place" for women. I am not taking anything away from novice and junior women debaters; my argument
is that these women deserve a chance to win on the varsity level as well. Another experience that
reminded me quickly where my "place" in debate is was in a round at the beginning of last season. A male debater put his
arm around me during cross examination and said, "chill out, babe." I quickly thought to myself, "I am not your babe," but I said
nothing and immediately sat down. I felt very objectified, humiliated, and angry. By treating me as a
sex object, that male debater quickly put me in my "place." Women in debate have to deal with a double
standard. If we are not feminine enough we are thought of as "bitchy," yet if we are too feminine, we
are not taken seriously. I urge all women to hold on to both. We need to construct ourselves outside of the masculine/
to win speaker awards was out of the question. I thought to myself, at least we were winning some awards, but my coach quickly told me that
feminine dichotomy-we should be able to have a place in debate because we are talented. At the 1992 National
Debate Tournament, my partner (who is a woman) and I noticed that there were only four women teams at the tournament (76 teams total), and none of the women teams advanced to the
double octafinal round. In fact, only four women cleared at all. Not one woman won a speaker award. I am proud of those women who were in the out-rounds. I am also proud of all the
women who are in debate. It is time for women to demand a "place."
It is past time for women in debate to be considered talented. I feel
that if women are encouraged on the high school level to start and stay with debate, we will not be the minority or the marginalized. Only then can we truly get past being placed in a
subordinate position; we will be able to define our own "place" in debate on our own terms.
Women debaters are caught in a double bind in terms of presentation
Stepp ‘97 (Pamela. “Can we make intercollegiate debate more diverse?” Argumentation and
Advocacy, Spring 1997. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb6699/is_n4_v33/ai_n28698260/)
Ragins (1995) defines behavioral level barriers
as stereotypes, attitudes, and attributions that influence
behavior toward women and minorities. These behaviors include sexism, racism and homophobia, as
well as subtle unintentional behaviors that exclude and marginalize women and minority groups. There
have been several studies conducted that have found behavioral barriers in academic debate. Worthen &
Pack (1993) discovered that female debaters are indeed caught in a double bind. If a female is passive, she
perpetuates the attitude that females are poor debaters; if she is aggressive, she is apt to be labeled as
"bitchy". Research conducted on the sex bias of judges concerning male/male, male/female, and
female/female teams (Worthen & Pack 1993; Bruschke & Johnson, 1994) found that female/female teams are the
least successful.
Policy Advocacy
Law is not neutral – intersectionality is key to combat government-sanctioned
oppression
Spade 13 (Dean, Associate Professor at Seattle University School of Law – teaches Administrative Law,
Poverty Law, and Law and Social Movements, "Intersectional Resistance and Law Reform," Vol. 38, No.
4, Intersectionality: Theorizing Power, Empowering Theory (Summer 2013), pp. 1031-1055)
More than twenty years ago, Kimberle Williams Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” to describe a method of analysis that reveals the
dynamics of subjection hidden by what she called single-axis analysis and to suggest avenues for intervention and resistance that are eclipsed
by single-axis approaches. Crenshaw demonstrated that projects
aimed at conceptualizing and remedying racial or gender subordination
through a single vector end up implicitly positing the subject of that subordination as universally male, in
the case of single-axis antiracist analysis, or as universally white, in the case of single-axis feminist analysis. The
experiences of women of color become untellable ð Crenshaw 1991 Þ . Crenshaw’s articulation of intersectionality brought to legal theory a key
set of insights from women-of-color feminism and other critical intellectual traditions about the limits of “equality” and added these
understandings to the interrogations of the discrimination principle taken up in critical race theory. What does intersectional resistance look
like on the ground, and what is its relationship to law? In this essay, I examine some of the key concepts and questions that contemporary
anticolonial, antiracist, feminist resistance employs and argue that the demands emerging from it bring not only the United States but the
nation-state form itself into crisis. Understanding intersectional harm necessitates an analysis of population-level state violence as opposed to
individual discrimination that resistance movements sometimes articulate through the concept of population control.
Social
movements frequently splinter between those employing a single-axis analysis to demand civil
rights and legal equality and those employing intersectional analysis to dismantle legal and
administrative systems that perpetrate racialized-gendered violence . This essay seeks to draw connections
between some of the key methodologies of resistance utilized by intersectional scholars and movements. I am interested in how
these methodologies bring attention to the violences of legal and administrative systems that articulate
themselves as race and gender neutral but are actually sites of the gendered racialization processes that
produce the nation-state. Intersectional resistance practices aimed at dismantling population control take as their targets
systems of legal and administrative governance such as criminal punishment, immigration enforcement, environmental
regulation, child welfare, and public benefits. This resistance seeks out the root causes of despair and violence facing
intersectionally targeted populations and
in doing so
engages with the law differently than rights-
seeking projects do . Critically analyzing the promises of legal recognition and inclusion from systems
that they understand as sources of state violence and technologies of population control, intersectional resisters are
demanding the abolition of criminal punishment, immigration enforcement, and other functions and institutions that are central to the nationstate form. Such demands are profoundly perplexing to many scholars, even scholars interested in intersectionality. This essay examines
how intersectional analysis leads to the production of such demands and discusses how law reform
tactics shift, but do not disappear, when such demands emerge . In the first section of this essay, I briefly review
some of the key critiques of legal equality offered by critical scholars, especially critical race theorists. Next, I introduce the concept of
population control and highlight the importance of attention to population-level conditions and interventions in intersectional scholarship and
activism. The reproductive justice movement illustrates how an intersectional critique of single-axis politics and its demands for legal rights
leads to a focus on population-level systems that distribute harm and violence through gendered racialization processes. The
reproductivejusticemovement’s critiques of white reproductive rights frameworks — particularly the assertion that reproductive justice for
women of color requires interventions into criminalization, child welfare, environmental regulation, immigration, and other arenas of
administrative violence — illustrate how intersectional critique and activism move away from individual rights and toward a focus on
population control. Third, I take up the assertion from many critical traditions that legal
equality or rights strategies not only
fail to address the harms facing intersectionally targeted populations but also often shore up and expand
systems of violence and control . They do this in at least three ways: by mobilizing narratives of deservingness
and undeservingness, by participating in the logics and structures that undergird relations of
domination , and by becoming sites for the expansion of harmful systems and institutions. Activists and scholars
have argued that the use of criminalization to combat domestic violence and human trafficking constitutes a co-optation of feminist resistance
that expands criminal enforcement systems that target and endanger women and queers of color. This analysis illustrates the danger that
legal reforms can expand violent systems by mobilizing the rhetoric of saving women combined with
frameworks of deservingness that reify racist, ableist, antipoor, and colonial relations. I further argue that
equality and legal rights strategies can be divisive to social movements. I use three exam- ples of movement splits to
illustrate this: the divide between reproductive rights and reproductive justice, the divide between disability rights and disability justice, and
the divide between the gay and lesbian rights framework and the racial and economic justice – centered queer and trans resistance formations
that have critiqued it and created alternatives. For each of these examples, I trace how rights strategies mobilize single-axis analyses that, their
critics argue, both fail to meet the needs of constituents facing intersectional harm and reify harmful dynamics and systems. Fourth, I observe
that these critical
traditions strategically reject narratives that declare that the US legal system has broken from
the founding violences of slavery, genocide, and heteropatriarchy. Critics refute the notion that such
founding violences have been eradicated by legal equality . They instead trace the genealogies of
purportedly neutral contemporary legal and administrative systems to these foundations, arguing
that the state-making, racializing, and gendering functions of founding violences
colonialism
like enslavement and settler
continue in new forms . This analytical move exposes the fact that declarations of legal equality do not resolve such
violence and generates demands like prison abolition and an end to immigration enforcement that throw the US legal system and the nationstate form into crisis. Finally, I examine how such
intersectional resistance engages with law reform demands . I
rejecting legal equality and using a population- control framing leads to a strategy focused on
dismantling the violent capacities of racialized-gendered systems that operate under the pretense of
neutrality. I take as examples the involvement of gender- and sexuality- focused organizations in recent campaigns to stop gang injunctions
in Oakland, California, and to stop local jurisdictions from participating in the Secure Communities immigration enforcement program. These
suggest that
campaigns have law reform targets yet resist many of the traps of legal equality arguments
because they center on the material concerns of those who are perpetually cast as undeserving, because their demands aim to produce
material change in terms of life chances rather than symbolic declarations of equality, and because
sexual
justice
and freedom
they conceptualize
gender and
through the experiences of those who are intersectionally targeted by
purportedly race- and gender- neutral systems . Through these examples and arguments, I aim both to draw connections
between key intersectional methods and to illustrate what forms intersectional resistance is taking in
contemporary politics, what targets it identifies, and what demands it makes.
Policy Scholarship
Conventional policy analysis can never undo the structures of power present in
academia at large – the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house – the
rhetoric of indirectness, provisos, qualifiers, and feigned alliance only reinforce
oppression
Bensimon and Marshall 03, Professor of Educational Policy and Administration at the
University of Southern California and Associate Professor of Education at the
University of North Carolina
(Estela Mara and Catherine, “Like It or Not: Feminist Critical Policy Analysis Matters,” The Journal of Higher Education vol. 74 no.3, June 2003,
JSTOR)//JB
Haithe Anderson, in reviewing our chapter, instructs us to (1) recognize we are using the master’s tools of academic debate, and (2) back off from the demand that
feminist critical policy analysis be applied to all aspects of postsecondary education. It
is true, we are, indeed, carrying on academic
debate with academic tools; however, we do move beyond academic debate by providing a roadmap
for application to actual policy with an array of concrete examples where feminist critical policy
analysis will uncover patriarchal practices. But no, we will not accept her instruction to back off. We do not
believe the battles are won and we do not believe that being nice, talking the master’s language only,
accepting gradual loosening of patriarchal structures, is good enough. Are women leaders , of the
students or faculty, supported and viewed as fantastic leaders, if they spend more time nurturing
collaboration and empowering democratic decision making? Do women’s studies majors have lucrative and powerful careers? Can a pol- icy analyst get a
government contract if she/he asserts that all policy analysis is value laden and so let's just go ahead and admit that we want to place more value on "women's
issues" since they’ve been neglected in the past? Does
the woman scholar feel comfortable knowing that her
accomplishments are being assessed, not her breasts? Until the answers are yeses, postsecondary
institutions have not incorporated the policy implications from feminism's insights. The purpose of our
response is to elaborate on the reasons why the master's tools will never dismantle the master’s
house. We do so by discussing the opposing meanings of "master," "gender," "tools," and "the purpose of policy analysis" and showing why the
master's, i.e., conventional policy analysis, is incapable of undoing the power asymmetries that
characterize relations between male and female academics. The insurrection of subjected knowledges
represents a challenge to the authority and power of the master’s narrative. The master will not be
pleased by this. The displeasure may be disguised, as it is by Anderson, but the threat to authority and power
provokes emotional responses – antagonism, fear, disapproval, hostility – which are masked by the rhetoric of
indirectness, provisos, qualifiers, feigned alliance. Such alliances, while asserting they embrace
feminist causes, undermine our progress toward creating and validating women's knowledges and
spaces in postsecondary institutions. Instead, feminist critical policy analysis tools empower institutions to be
transformed, to be able to support thought and policy action beyond the constrained and distorted
thinking and behavior of academic and policy analysis traditions. Leaders who are serious about
transforming postsecondary education to eliminate patriarchal trappings need these tools.
AT: 1AC Impacts
[Extend Cuomo competently. Speak from the heart]
Structural violence outweighs the case – their masking of everyday atrocities and
senseless magnitude calculus must be rejected
Abu-Jamal 98 (Mumia, award-winning PA journalist, 9/19, http://www.flashpoints.net/mQuietDeadlyViolence.html)
We live, equally immersed, and to a deeper degree, in a nation that condones and ignores wide-ranging
"structural" violence, of a kind that destroys human life with a breathtaking
ruthlessness. Former Massachusetts prison official and writer, Dr. James Gilligan observes; "By `structural violence' I mean the
increased rates of death and disability suffered by those who occupy the bottom rungs
of society, as contrasted by those who are above them. Those excess deaths (or at least a demonstrably large proportion of
them) are a function of the class structure; and that structure is itself a product of society's
collective human choices, concerning how to distribute the collective wealth of the
society. These are not acts of God. I am contrasting `structural' with `behavioral violence' by which I mean the non-natural deaths and
injuries that are caused by specific behavioral actions of individuals against individuals, such as the deaths we attribute to homicide, suicide,
soldiers in warfare, capital punishment, and so on." -- (Gilligan, J., MD, Violence: Reflections On a National Epidemic (New York: Vintage,
1996), 192.) This
form of violence, not covered by any of the majoritarian, corporate, ruling-class protected media, is
invisible to us and because of its invisibility, all the more insidious. How dangerous is it -- really?
Gilligan notes: "[E]very fifteen years, on the average, as many people die because of relative poverty
as would be killed in a nuclear war that caused 232 million deaths; and every single year, two to three
times as many people die from poverty throughout the world as were killed by the Nazi
genocide of the Jews over a six-year period. This is, in effect, the equivalent of an ongoing, unending, in
fact accelerating, thermonuclear war, or genocide on the weak and poor every year of every
decade, throughout the world." [Gilligan, p. 196] Worse still, in a thoroughly capitalist society, much of that
violence became internalized, turned back on the Self, because, in a society based on the priority
of wealth, those who own nothing are taught to loathe themselves, as if something is inherently
wrong with themselves, instead of the social order that promotes this self-loathing. This intense self-hatred was often
manifested in familial violence as when the husband beats the wife, the wife smacks the son, and the kids fight each other.
This vicious, circular, and invisible violence, unacknowledged by the corporate media,
uncriticized in substandard educational systems, and un-understood by the very folks
who suffer in its grips, feeds on the spectacular and more common forms of violence
that the system makes damn sure -- that we can recognize and must react to it.
This fatal and systematic violence may be called The War on the Poor. It is found in every country,
submerged beneath the sands of history, buried, yet ever present, as omnipotent as death. In the struggles over the commons in Europe,
when the peasants struggled and lost their battles for their communal lands (a precursor to similar struggles throughout Africa and the
Americas), this violence was sanctified, by church and crown, as the "Divine Right of Kings" to the spoils of class battle. Scholars Frances FoxPiven and Richard A Cloward wrote, in The New Class War (Pantheon, 1982/1985): "They did not lose because landowners were immune to
burning and preaching and rioting. They lost because the usurpations of owners were regularly defended by the legal authority and the armed
force of the state. It was the state that imposed increased taxes or enforced the payment of increased rents, and evicted or jailed those who
could not pay the resulting debts. It was the state that made lawful the appropriation by landowners of the forests, streams, and commons,
and imposed terrifying penalties on those who persisted in claiming the old rights to these resources. It was the state that freed serfs or
emancipated sharecroppers only to leave them landless." The "Law", then, was a tool of the powerful to protect their interests, then, as now.
It was a weapon against the poor and impoverished, then, as now. It punished retail violence, while turning a blind eye to the wholesale
violence daily done by their class masters. The law was, and is, a tool of state power, utilized to protect the status quo, no matter how
oppressive that status was, or is.
Systems are essentially ways of doing things that have concretized
into tradition, and custom, without regard to the rightness of those ways. No system
that causes this kind of harm to people should be allowed to remain, based solely upon its time in
existence. Systems must serve life, or be discarded as a threat and a danger to life. Such
systems must pass away, so that their great and terrible violence passes
away with them.
Impact Cards – PDC
Communal sexist rhetoric creates an oppressive environment within debate for
women; rejection of gendered language can check back this domination and allow
women to participate
Hobbs et al No date (Jeffrey Dale Hobbs (Ph.D.. University of Kansas) is Director of Forensics and Associate Professor of
Communication at Abilene Christian University. Joder Hobbs (MA., .4bilene Christian University) ¡s Director of Forensics and instructor of
Speech Communication and Theatre at the University of Louisiana. Monroe. Jeffrey Thomas Bile (M.A.. Eastern Illinois University) is o Ph.D.
candidate in ¡he School of Interpersonal Communication a: Ohio University. Sue Lowrie (BA., Catforma State University. Chicoí ¡s an U.A.
candidate in Communication ai Pepperdine University and Assistant Coordinator for the Southern California Urban Debate League. Amando
Wilkins (MA. Emerson College) is an Instructor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University. Virginia MiLc:ead (8.4., A bi lene Christian
Umversitv is a U S. Peace Corps Volunteer, teaching at Rlpina Gardening College. Estonia. Krixiina Campos Wallace (BA.. Abilene’ Christian
University) is a Debate Coach at A bilent Christian University, “CONTEMPORARY ARGUMENTATiON AND DEBATE iNTERCOLLEGIATE DEBATE AS
INVITATIONAL RHETORIC: AN OFFERING”, NO DATE, http://cedadebate.org/cad/index.php/CAD/article/viewFile/250/234) eluth
However, due to social constructions of the institution of tournament debate, there
are still several aspects of debate (hat
hinder its being a truly invitational activity. The question of how these aspects are manifested begins
with the discussion of how patriarchy influences debate. Many scholars have addressed the question of whether or not
intercollegiate debate is patriarchal. Evidence of sexism, or patriarchal bias, is seen in the Lack of women
participating at both the competitor and coaching levels (Legue), differences in success rates between
males and females (Stepp, “A Word”; Bruschke & Johnson), the predominance of the “argument is
war” metaphor (Knutson; Frank: Crenshaw), the use of inappropriate sexual metaphors (Wilkins &
Hobbs), the double-binds presented to women, (Crenshaw; Stepp, “Diverse” : Wilkins & Hobbs), and
the presence of sexual harassment (Stepp, Simmerly, & Legue; Szwapa). Although with raised consciousness the community has
taken steps to discourage the above practices, there is still much progress to be made. Perhaps gains in equality are
coming too slowly because of the very nature of the activity itself Fredal explains: Like other
ideologies and practices of domination, patriarchy constantly must be reproduced and maintained
rhetorically. Those engaged in this maintenance rarely perceive themselves as reproducing the
cultural forms that allow patriarchy to exist. More often, cultural products are seen simply as enacting what they proclaim for
themselves: news programs simply report the news, advertisements simply sell, songs simply entertain. Rhetorical critics who
question those ostensible functions, as feminist critics do, are said to be reading too much into an
artifact or to be finding things that aren’t really there. In fact, hegemonic practices rely on this
resistance to criticism in order to maintain the appearance of naturalness that they construct. (75)
Dominance, over-emphasis on competition. and limited freedom of perspective pervade the activity
and act as barriers to the effective practice of invitational rhetoric. Tournament debaters and their coaches and
critics seem focused on domination. Methods of intimidation and domination in and out of rounds, motivated by a competitive mindset, have
been popularized by the activity. The nature of these methods ranges from techniques within the debate, to seemingly personal attacks.
Women on my team and in my community have experienced instances of sexual
harassment and assault by male members of the community and have encountered
widespread sanctioning of this behavior
Timmons and Boyer 13
(Cynthia and Bekah, women in debate: working toward a more complete picture, Rostrum Journal, Fall 2013,
http://victorybriefs.com/vbd/2014/1/women-in-debate-update-part-i)//JB
While the world of high school forensics has an enormous amount to offer its participants, it cannot escape the problems that plague the rest of society. Interpers explore social issues through
their scripts, extempers through discussion of current events, and orators through their prepared speeches.
It is time for the debate community to have
a real conversation about these issues, too. One of the most damaging problems facing women in society is the reality of sexism, sexual harassment, and
assault. Perhaps due to the enormous gender imbalance in debate, young women in the activity can sadly speak to the occurrence of these issues from a personal perspective. There
are undoubtedly a number of reasons why women lag in participation rates in high school forensics;
one of them is sexism. I began my participation in forensics in 1974 as an eighth grader. I experienced sexism the same year. Over the years, I have
faced harassment from coaches, judges, competitors, and even colleagues. As a coach, I have read
ballots written to my female students that were completely inappropriate; I once had a male colleague tell me he wanted to
judge one of my female debaters in order to ogle her ample chest. I’m not talking about gender differences in communication— I’m
talking about overt, hostile sexism. The problem continues today. This past year the issue of sexism became a topic of heated
discussion as personal narratives entered tournaments on the national circuit. The problem is not confined to the United States, either. Just
this past March, two young women debating in Scotland encountered vicious verbal abuse in a final round. They have written extensively of their experience, and the story has received
international attention. The women involved believe such behavior is on the rise from educated young men; to the degree that this is true, forensic educators have the opportunity to be on
Minimization by male colleagues is a related issue faced by
female coaches. I have had colleagues assume that my win-loss record as a coach was less because I was a female. I have had male judges on panels interrupt me as I gave a
decision. I had one male judge try to intimidate me by pushing up against me and using derogatory
language directed at me as a female. Such odious behavior is completely unacceptable and should be
called out, but the minimization can occur in more subtle ways, too—is there parity on committees,
on judge panels, on institute staffs? There is a concept known as Government Legitimacy in Debate, the idea that members of a community see institutions as
the front lines in countering such misogynist attitudes and behaviors.
being legitimate constructs representing all constituencies fairly. This should be the goal of speech and debate organizations and committees, as well.
Impact – Race
Patriarchy creates gender inequality which helps fuel racism
Millett 69 (
Kate Millett, Kate Millett, in full Katherine Murray Millett (born Sept. 14, 1934, St. Paul, Minn., U.S.), American feminist, author, and artist, an early and influential figure in the women’s liberation
movement, whose first book, Sexual Politics, began her exploration of the dynamics of power in relation to gender and sexuality.¶ Millett earned a bachelor’s degree with honours in 1956 from the University of Minnesota, where
she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Two years later she was awarded a master’s degree with first-class honours from the University of Oxford. After teaching English briefly at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro,
Millett moved to New York City to pursue a career as an artist. To support herself she taught kindergarten in Harlem. In 1961 she moved to Tokyo, where she taught English at Waseda University and also studied sculpting. By the
time she married Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura in 1965, however, Millett was back in New York City, teaching English and philosophy at Barnard College. (The couple divorced in 1985.) At the same time, she pursued a
doctorate at Columbia University, and in 1970 she was awarded a Ph.D. with distinction. Her thesis, a work combining literary analysis with sociology and anthropology, was published that same year as Sexual Politics. The book,
which defined the goals and strategies of the feminist movement, was an overnight success, transforming Millett into a public figure.¶ The celebrity came at a personal cost, as Millett revealed in a 1974 autobiographical work,
Flying, which explains the torment she suffered as a result of her views in general and of her disclosure that she was a lesbian in particular. She wrote two more autobiographical books, Sita (1977) and A.D.: A Memoir (1995). The
Basement (1979) is a factual account of a young woman’s abuse, torture, and murder at the hands of a group of teenagers led by an older woman who had been appointed her protector. Millett’s subsequent books dealt with the
political oppression in Iran after the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (Going to Iran, 1982), with her own personal experiences as a psychiatric patient (The Loony Bin Trip, 1990), with the issue of cruelty in general (The Politics
of Cruelty, 1994), and with the problems of aging, as seen through the struggles of her mother (Mother Millett, 2001).
This is from an actual book, “ Sexual Politics” Ch.
2// SC)
the presence in women of the expected traits of
minority status: group self-hatred and self-rejection, a contempt both for herself and for her fellows the result of that continual, however subtle, reiteration of her inferiority which she eventually accepts
as a fact. Another index of minority status is the fierceness with which all minority group members are judged. The double standard is
What little literature the social sciences afford us in this context confirms
applied not only in cases of sexual conduct but other contexts as well. In the relatively rare instances of female crime too: in many American
states a woman convicted of crime is awarded a longer sentence. Generally an accused woman acquires a notoriety out of proportion to her
acts and due to sensational publicity she may be tried largely for her "sex life." But so effective is her conditioning toward passivity in
patriarchy, woman is rarely extrovert enough in her maladjustment to enter upon criminality. Just
as every minority member
must either apologise for the excesses of a fellow or condemn him with a strident enthusiasm, women
are characteristically harsh, ruthless and frightened in their censure of aberration among their numbers.¶ The
gnawing suspicion which plagues any minority member, that the myths propagated about his
inferiority might after all be true often reaches remarkable proportions in the personal insecurities of women. Some find their
subordinate position so hard to bear that they repress and deny its existence. But a large number will recognise and admit their circumstances
when they are properly phrased. Of two studies which asked women if they would have preferred to be born male, one found that one fourth
of the sample admitted as much, and in another sample, one half. When one inquires of children, who have not yet developed as serviceable
techniques of evasion, what their choice might be, if they had one, the answers of female children in a large majority of cases clearly favour
The phenomenon of parents' prenatal
preference for male issue is too common to require much elaboration. In the light of the imminent possibility of parents
birth into the elite group, whereas boys overwhelmingly reject the opinion of being girls.
actually choosing the sex of their child, such a tendency is becoming the cause of some concern in scientific circles.¶ Comparisons such as
blacks and women reveal that common opinion
associates the same traits with both: inferior intelligence, an instinctual or sensual gratification, an
emotional nature both primitive and childlike, an imagined prowess in or affinity for sexuality, a
contentment with their own lot which is in accord with a proof of its appropriateness, a wily habit of
deceit, and concealment of feeling. Both groups are forced to the same accommodational tactics: an ingratiating or supplicatory
Myrdal, Hacker, and Dixon draw between the ascribed attributes of
manner invented to please, a tendency to study those points at which the dominant group are subject to influence or corruption, and an
assumed air of helplessness involving fraudulent appeals for direction through a show of ignorance. It is ironic how misogynist literature has for
centuries concentrated on just these traits, directing its fiercest enmity at feminine guile and corruption, and particularly that element of it
which is sexual, or, as such sources would have it, "wanton."
Alt Ext
We don’t have to win that the alt solves we just have to win there are problematic
assumptions in the 1AC
Warren 97 – Chair of Philosophy at Macalester College (Karen, “Fourteen Rhetoric, Rape, and
Ecowarfare in the Persian Gulf”, Ch. 14 Ecofeminism : Women, Culture, Nature, Book) */LEA
Any female member of Congress who wanted to discuss how war would affect women or the
environment would face a dizzying array of rhetorical barriers. 12 While none of these obstacles would be as blatant as eighteenth-and
nineteenth-century prohibitions against women speaking in public, the obstacles would include social beliefs about what are the appropriate roles
for men and women in times of war, the "feminine style" of rhetoric being at odds with the norms for "war talk" in
deliberative bodies, and the general denigration of issues that challenge the premises of
"power-over" political decision making. Social attitudes and beliefs that men and women are fundamentally
different create the most entrenched rhetorical obstacles that limit a woman's ability to discuss
women and the environment in congressional debates about war. For centuries, women have been
depicted as constitutionally peace loving where men are war loving.13 Men fight one another at the war's
front, but women are supposed to be passive, supportive observers on the home front. Women are supposed to
abhor war because our procreative abilities make us "closer to nature." Since men cannot give birth to another human being, they are said to be "closer to culture,"
which includes the development of munitions and other technological advances.14 In
contrast to human procreation, men "give
birth" to new social orders by creating and using sophisticated instruments of death and destruction.
As William J. Broyles put it in an article entitled "Why Men Love War," "at some terrible level [it] is the closest thing to what childbirth is for women: the initiation
into the power of life and death" (55). Carol Cohn (1987) also found a strong relationship between "giving birth" and creating atomic bombs in the language of the
defense intellectuals she studied: The
entire history of the bomb project, in fact, seems permeated with imagery
that confounds humanity's overwhelming technological power to destroy nature with the power to
create: imagery that converts men's destruction into their rebirth. Lawrence wrote of the Trinity test of the first atomic
bomb: "One felt as though he had been privileged to witness the Birth of the World." In a 1985 interview, General Bruce K. Holloway, the commander in chief of the
Strategic Air Command from 1968 to 1972, described a nuclear war as involving "a big bang, like the start of the universe." In addition to having to deal with the
illogic that equates human birth with wartime death and destruction, female members of Congress have little authority to speak about war—given longstanding
attitudes that women are to be passive and silent during these times. Women's primary roles are restricted to being patriotic supporters, grief-stricken widows or
family members, civilian casualties, or rape victims/war booty. Jean Bethke Elshtain has observed that
the expectation that women are to
fill passive roles during times of war even extends to passivity in articulating their concerns about war:
In the matter of women and war we [women] are invited to turn away. War is men's: men are the historic authors of organized violence. Yes, women have been
drawn in-and they have been required to observe, suffer, cope, mourn, honor, adore, witness, work. But men
have done the describing and
defining of war, and the women are "affected" by it: they mostly react. (1987: 164) Another limitation on women's
ability to speak authentically about war occurs because of their historic exclusion from military service and their continuing exclusion from combat positions. Since
the earliest days of this country's existence, a powerful conceptual relationship has existed between military service and ideas about citizenship (Kerber 1990). This
relationship is not unique to the United States and can be traced back to the beliefs and writings of the ancient Greeks (Segal, Kinzer and Woalfel, 1977).
Women's political ambitions have been thwarted by their inability to serve in military combat
positions, resulting in obvious difficulties in speaking about war. The women who do get elected are unquestionably
handicapped when their male colleagues use military service as an authorizing device for their political arguments. Sheila Tobias has established through historical
example that during times when heroism in warfare and leadership in politics are strongly linked, women experience great difficulties in getting elected to public
office. When military service is claimed to be a necessary precursor to public service, women lose out (Tobias, 1990). This was certainly the case during the 1988
presidential election between George Bush and Michael Dukakis. Bush repeatedly pointed to his military service as a Navy pilot to bolster his credentials for the
presidency. He ridiculed Dukakis's well-known ride in an Army tank. Bush's derision stemmed not merely from the fact that the ride was an election-time publicity
stunt but that it was obscene for Dukakis to take on the mantle and perquisites of soldiering when he had no previous military service. During the Persian Gulf War
debates, female members of Congress were negatively affected by the attitude that prior military service was the only legitimate precursor for discussing war.
Whereas their male counterparts repeatedly referred to their own military service and sacrifice, the women had to draw upon their connections to other people in
the service. For example, several of the congresswomen mentioned their male family members who were servicemen or their congressional employees who were
connected to the military. For some of the female representatives, their connection to the military was only that they were there to speak "on behalf" of their
constituents who were in the Gulf or had family members in the Gulf. 15 Elshtain claims that our society's belief that women ought always to remain in the "private
sphere" of the home limits their ability to speak authentically about war in a deliberative body like Congress:
implementation
is not for amateurs .
Politics as policy formulation and
Women, too, are well advised to keep their noses out of this complex
business unless they have learned not to think and speak "like women"-that is, like human beings
picturing decimated homes and mangled bodies when strategies for nuclear or other war fighting are
discussed. The worlds of "victims"-overwhelmingly one of women and children-and of "warriors" ...
have become nearly incommensurable universes to one another. (1987: 154)16 Had they wanted to discuss issues of
women and the environment, the female members of Congress would have faced other restrictive obstacles—attitudes about the impropriety of women speaking
in public. Prohibitions against women speaking in public have a long and well-documented history. Saint Paul's biblical edict for women to "remain silent" in church
has been taken to mean that women should remain silent in all public spaces. By the very act of standing and addressing a group of people, a female speaker claims
to have ideas worthy of an audience. She literally asserts her own authority and legitimacy In part because of this powerful self- validating and self-authorizing
action, women in the nineteenth century endured sanctions that included being criticized from the pulpit by clergy mem-bers, suffering ridicule in editorials and
cartoons, being refused in their request to rent auditoriums, having to defend themselves from claims that they were sexual deviants and monsters, having to face
angry mobs, and being repeatedly threatened with bodily harm (Campbell, 1990; Jamieson, 1988). Clearly, contemporary female members of Congress did not face
these social sanctions when speaking during the Gulf War debates. However, each woman had to contend with the belief (reflected in numbers of women elected
to the House) that the public sphere of government "belongs" to men and that she was usurping her socially defined position. Similarly, each
woman had
to face a prejudiced assumption that she was ignorant or incompetent about war simply because this
culture defines war as a quintessentially masculine activity. Like contemporary female soldiers who are accused of being
lesbians because they have violated assigned sex roles and have asserted their competence in military matters, female members of Congress risked having their
qualifications as women called into question. Having
to demonstrate their competence and authority while reassuring
audiences that they are feminine women is an age-old dichotomy for female public speakers. Current
examples of this phenomenon are provided by Geraldine Ferraro's unsuccessful run for the vice presidency (Campbell, 1988), the round of criticism Attorney
General Janet Reno received when she was nominated for her cabinet post, and the ongoing, vitriolic criticism of Hillary Clinton's public policy roles. The rhetorical
obstacles to legitimacy that female members of Congress face as public speakers are quite daunting by themselves. When the subject is as significant and deadly as
going to war, the rhetorical obstacles loom even larger for women. It is as if, in our fear and awe, we resort to our most ancient and entrenched beliefs about sex
roles. In these times, female members of Congress face their greatest rhetorical challenges.
The judge and our opponents should use intralocality as a means of interrogating their
involvement in the impacts of the 1NC – claims of progressivism simply mask
complicity
Moore 11
(Darnell L. Moore 2011, writer and activist whose work is informed by anti-racist, feminist, queer of color, and anti-colonial thought and advocacy. Darnell's essays,
social commentary, poetry, and interviews have appeared in various national and international media venues, including the Feminist Wire, Ebony magazine, and
The Huffington Post, "On Location: The “I” in the Intersection," http://thefeministwire.com/2011/12/on-location-the-i-in-the-intersection/)
we are actively committed to
the
integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact
systems of oppression are interlocking
The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that
struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression and see as our particular ask
that the major
development of
. The synthesis of
these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As black women we see black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face. -The Combahee River Collective in A Black Feminist Statement Many radical
movement builders are well-versed in the theory of intersectionality. Feminists, queer theorists and activists, critical race scholars, progressive activists, and the like owe much to our Black feminist sisters, like The Combahee River Collective, who introduced us to the reality of
simultaneity–as a framework for assessing the multitude of interlocking oppressions that impact the lives of women of color–in A Black Feminist Statement (1978). Their voices and politics presaged Kimberlé Crenshaw’s very useful theoretical contribution of
“
intersectionality
” to the feminist toolkit of political interventions in 1989. Since its inception, many have referenced the term—sometimes without attribution to the black feminist intellectual genealogy froqm which it emerged—as a form of en vogue
it is often referenced in progressive circles as counterfeit
to enter resistance work even if the person who declares to have a deep “understanding”
of the connectedness of systemic matrices of oppression, themselves, have yet to discern and address
progressive parlance. In fact, it seems to be the case that
a
license (as in, “I understand the ways that race, sexuality, class, and
gender coalesce. I get it. I really do.”)
their own complicity in the maintenance of the very oppressions they seek to name and demolish
a
political framework can lead toward the good work of analyzing ideological and material systems of
. I am
certain that I am not the only person who has heard a person use language embedded with race, class, gender, or ability privilege follow-up with a reference to “intersectionality.” My concern, then, has everything to do with the way that the fashioning of intersectionality as
oppression—as they function “out there and away from the
”—
great work of critical analyses of the
ways in which we ,
ourselves can function as actants in the narratives of counter-resistance that we rehearse
,
might be missing the opportunity to read our complicities, our privileges, our accesses,
excuses
. In other words,
our excesses,
we
our
located “in here”—as they occupy each of us .
Many have focused on the external dimensions of oppression
and their material results manifested in the lives of the marginalized, but
the
social spaces where s/he is positioned
Intralocality is concerned with social
, our modes of oppressing—
Crenshaw’s theorization has provided us with a useful lens to assess the problematics of the interrelated,
interlocking apparatuses of power and privilege and their resulting epiphenomena of powerlessness and subjugation.
might our times be asking of us to deeply consider our own “stuff” that might
instigate such oppressions? What if we extended Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality by invoking what we might name “intralocality”? Borrowing from sociologists, the term “social location,” which broadly speaks to one’s context, highlights one’s standpoint(s)—
(i.e. race, class, gender, geographical, etc.).
, then,
the
locations that foreground our knowing and experiencing of our world and our relationships to the
systems and people within our world .
Intralocality is a call to theorize the self in relation to power and privilege, powerlessness and subjugation.
It is work that requires
the
locating the “I” in the intersection
Might it be time to travel into the deep of our contexts? Might it be time for us
to do the
work of intersectionality macro/system-analysis) in concert with the intra-local (micro/self-focused
analysis)?
when we should reflect on our need
of
. And while it could be argued that such work is highly individualistic, I contend that it is at the very level of self-in-relation-to-community where communal transformation is made
possible.
—theorists/activists—
(
Intersectionality as an analysis, rightly, asks of us to examine systemic oppressions, but in these times of radical and spontaneous insurgencies—times
to unoccupy
those
sites of privilege
(where they exist)
in our own lives even as we occupy
some
other sites of
domination work must be done at the level of the self-in-community. We cannot
rally
around
progression yet, be complicit in the very homo/transphobias, racisms, sexisms, ableisms,
that
terrorize the lives of many others If a more loving and just community is to be imagined
—
notions of “
violently
—as a progressive community—
” and,
so
.
and advanced , it seems to me we would need to start at a different location than we might’ve
that
expected: self.
etc.
AT: Narratives Bad
Modes of personal expression goo
Collins 90 (Patricia Hill Collins, Distinguished University Professor of Sociology at the University of
Maryland, College Park, Former head of the Department of African American Studies at the University of
Cincinnati, and the past President of the American Sociological Association Council, Black Feminist
Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, p. 62-65)
A second component of the ethic of caring concerns the appropriateness of emotions in dialogues. Emotion indicates that a speaker believes in
the validity of an argument. Consider Ntozake Shange’s description of one of the goals of her work:
"Our [Western] society allows
people to be absolutely neurotic and totally out of touch with their feelings and everyone else’s feelings,
and yet be very respectable. This, to me, is a travesty I’m trying to change the idea of seeing
emotions and intellect as distinct faculties." The Black women’s blues tradition’s history of personal
expressiveness heals this either/or dichotomous rift separating emotion and intellect. For example,
in her rendition of "Strange Fruit," Billie Holiday’s lyrics blend seamlessly with the emotion of her delivery to render a trenchant social
commentary on southern lynching. Without emotion, Aretha Franklin’s cry for "respect" would be virtually meaningless. A third component of
the ethic of caring involves developing the capacity for empathy. Harriet Jones, a 16-year-old Black woman, explains to her interviewer why she
chose to open up to him: "Some things in my life are so hard for me to bear, and it makes me feel better to know that you feel sorry about
those things and would change them if you could." Without her belief in his empathy, she found it difficult to talk. Black women writers often
explore the growth of empathy as part of an ethic of caring. For example, the growing respect that the Black slave woman Dessa and the white
woman Rufel gain for one another in Sherley Anne William’s Dessa Rose stems from their increased understanding of each other’s positions.
After watching Rufel fight off the advances of a white man, Dessa lay awake thinking: "The white woman was subject to the same ravishment as
me; this the thought that kept me awake. I hadn’t knowed white mens could use a white woman like that, just take her by force same as they
could with us." As a result of her newfound empathy, Dessa observed, "it was like we had a secret between us." These components of the ethic
of caring: the value placed on individual expressiveness, the appropriateness of emotions, and the capacity for empathy-pervade AfricanAmerican culture. One of the best examples of the interactive nature of the importance of dialogue and the ethic of caring in assessing
knowledge claims occurs in the use of the call-and-response discourse mode in traditional Black church services. In such services both the
minister and the congregation routinely use voice rhythm and vocal inflection to convey meaning. The sound of what is being said is just as
is nearly impossible to
filter out the strictly linguistic-cognitive abstract meaning from the sociocultural
psychoemotive meaning. While the ideas presented by a speaker must have validity (i.e., agree with the general body of
important as the words themselves in what is, in a sense, a dialogue of reason and emotion. As a result it
knowledge shared by the Black congregation), the group also appraises the way knowledge claims are presented. There
is growing
evidence that the ethic of caring may be part of women’s experience as well. Certain dimensions of women’s ways
of knowing bear striking resemblance to Afrocentric expressions of the ethic of caring. Belenky et al. point out that two contrasting
epistemological orientations characterize knowing: one an epistemology of separation based on
impersonal procedures for establishing truth and the other, an epistemology of connection in which
truth emerges through care. While these ways of knowing are not gender specific, disproportionate numbers of women rely on
connected knowing. The emphasis placed on expressiveness and emotion in African-American communities bears marked resemblance to
feminist perspectives on the importance of personality in connected knowing. Separate knowers try to subtract the personality of an individual
from his or her ideas because they see personality as biasing those ideas. In contrast, connected knowers see personality as adding to an
individual’s ideas and feel that the personality of each group member enriches a group’s understanding. The significance of individual
uniqueness, personal expressiveness, and empathy in African-American communities thus resembles the importance that some feminist
analyses place on women’s "inner voice." The convergence of Afrocentric and feminist values in the ethic of caring seems particularly acute.
White women may have access to a women’s tradition valuing emotion and expressiveness, but few Eurocentric institutions except the family
validate this way of knowing. In contrast, Black women have long had the support of the Black church, an institution with deep roots in the
African past and a philosophy that accepts and encourages expressiveness and an ethic of caring. Black men share in this Afrocentric tradition.
But they must
resolve the contradictions that confront them in searching for Afrocentric models of masculinity in
the face of abstract, unemotional notions of masculinity imposed on them. The differences among race/gender groups thus
hinge on differences
in their access to institutional supports valuing one type of knowing over another .
Although Black women may be denigrated within white-male-controlled academic institutions, other institutions, such as Black families and
churches, which encourage the expression of Black female power, seem to do so, in part, by way of their support for an Afrocentric feminist
epistemology. The Ethic of Personal Accountability An
ethic of personal accountability is the final dimension of an
alternative epistemology . Not only must individuals develop their knowledge claims through
dialogue and present them in a style proving their concern for their ideas , but people are expected
to be accountable for their knowledge claims . Zilpha Elaw’s description of slavery reflects this notion that every idea has an
owner and that the owner’s identity matters: "Oh, the abominations of slavery! ... Every case of slavery, however lenient its infliction and
mitigated its atrocities, indicates an oppressor, the oppressed, and oppression." For Elaw abstract definitions of slavery mesh with the concrete
identities of its perpetrators and its victims. African-Americans consider it essential for individuals to have personal positions on issues and
assume full responsibility for arguing their validity.
Assessments of an individual’s knowledge claims simultaneously
evaluate an individual’s character, values, and ethics . African-Americans reject the Eurocentric,
masculinist belief that probing into an individual’s personal viewpoint is outside the
boundaries of discussion . Rather, all views expressed and actions taken are thought to derive from a
central set of core beliefs that cannot be other than personal . "Does Aretha really believe that Black women should
get ‘respect, or is she just mouthing the words?" is a valid question in an Afrocentric feminist epistemology. Knowledge
claims
made by individuals respected for their moral and ethical connections to their ideas will carry
more weight
than those offered by less respected figures. An example drawn from an undergraduate course composed entirely of Black
women which I taught might help to clarify the uniqueness of this portion of the knowledge validation process. During one class discussion I
asked the students to evaluate a prominent Black male scholar’s analysis of Black feminism. Instead of severing the scholar from his context in
order to dissect the rationality of his thesis, my students demanded facts about the author’s personal biography. They were especially
interested in concrete details of his life, such as his relationships with Black women, his marital status, and his social class background. By
requesting data on dimensions of his personal life routinely excluded in positivist approaches to
knowledge validation, they invoked concrete experience as a criterion of meaning. They used this
information to assess whether he really cared about his topic and drew on this ethic of caring in advancing their knowledge claims about his
work. Furthermore, they refused to evaluate the rationality of his written ideas without some indication of his personal credibility as an ethical
human being. The entire exchange could only have occurred as a dialogue among members of a class that had established a solid enough
community to employ an alternative epistemology in assessing knowledge claims. The ethic of personal accountability is clearly an Afrocentric
value, but is it feminist as well? While limited by its attention to middle-class, white women, Carol Gilligan’s work suggests that there is a
female model for moral development whereby women are more inclined to link morality to responsibility, relationships, and the ability to
maintain social ties. If this is the case, then African-American women again experience a convergence of values from Afrocentric and female
institutions. The use of an Afrocentric feminist epistemology in traditional Black church services illustrates the interactive nature of all four
dimensions and also serves as a metaphor for the distinguishing features of an Afrocentric feminist way of knowing. The services represent
more than dialogues between the rationality used in examining bible texts and stories and the emotion inherent in the use of reason for this
purpose. The rationale for such dialogues involves the task of examining concrete experiences for the presence of an ethic of caring. Neither
emotion nor ethics is subordinated to reason. Instead, emotion, ethics, and reason are used as
interconnected , essential components in assessing knowledge claims. In an Afrocentric feminist epistemology,
values lie at the heart of the knowledge validation process such that inquiry always has an ethical aim. Alternative knowledge
claims in and of themselves are rarely threatening to conventional knowledge. Such claims are routinely ignored,
discredited, or simply absorbed and marginalized in existing paradigms, Much more threatening is the
challenge that alternative epistemologies offer to he basic process used by the powerful to legitimate their knowledge claims.
If the
epistemology used to validate knowledge comes into question, then all prior knowledge claims
validated under the dominant model become suspect . An alternative epistemology
challenges all certified
knowledge and opens up the question of whether what has been taken to be true can stand the test of alternative ways of validating truth. The
existence of a self-defined Black women’s standpoint using an Afrocentric feminist epistemology
calls into question the content
of what currently passes as truth and simultaneously challenges the process of arriving at the truth.
We are an act of terrorism against the system which attempts to maintain a universal
hegemonic order. Any attempt to erase us from the debate space produces worse
forms of terrorist action.
And, link turn – we have been forced into a position of rebellion by the monolith of
oppressive control that is traditional policy debate
Baudrillard 2001 (Jean Baudrillard, “The Spirit of Terrorism,” Le Monde, 11/2/2001, trans. Rachel
Bloul, http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/articles/the-spirit-of-terrorism/)
Moral
condemnation and the sacred union against terrorism are equal to the prodigious jubilation
engendered by witnessing this global superpower being destroyed; better, by seeing it more or less
self-destroying, even suiciding spectacularly. Though it is (this superpower) that has, through its unbearable power,
engendered all that violence brewing around the world, and therefore this terrorist imagination which -- unknowingly -- inhabits us all. That
All the speeches and commentaries betray a gigantic abreaction to the event itself and to the fascination that it exerts.
we have dreamed of this event, that everybody without exception has dreamt of it, because
everybody must dream of the destruction of any power hegemonic to that degree, - this is unacceptable
for Western moral conscience, but it is still a fact , and one which is justly measured by the pathetic
violence of all those discourses which attempt to erase it. It is almost they who did it, but we who
wanted it. If one does not take that into account, the event lost all symbolic dimension to become a
pure accident, an act purely arbitrary, the murderous fantasy of a few fanatics, who would need only to
be suppressed. But we know very well that this is not so. Thus all those delirious, counter-phobic
exorcisms: because evil is there, everywhere as an obscure object of desire. Without this deep
complicity, the event would not have had such repercussions, and without doubt, terrorists know that
in their symbolic strategy they can count on this unavowable complicity. This goes much further than
hatred for the dominant global power from the disinherited and the exploited, those who fell on the
wrong side of global order. That malignant desire is in the very heart of those who share (this order's)
benefits. An allergy to all definitive order, to all definitive power is happily universal, and the two
towers of the World Trade Center embodied perfectly, in their very double-ness (literally twin-ness), this
definitive order. No need for a death wish or desire for self-destruction, not even for perverse effects.
It is very logically, and inexorably, that the (literally: "rise to power of power") exacerbates a will to
destroy it. And power is complicit with its own destruction. When the two towers collapsed, one could
feel that they answered the suicide of the kamikazes by their own suicide. It has been said: "God cannot
declare war on Itself". Well, It can. The West, in its God-like position (of divine power, and absolute
moral legitimacy) becomes suicidal, and declares war on itself. Numerous disaster movies are witness to
this phantasm, which they obviously exorcise through images and submerge under special effects. But
the universal attraction these movies exert, as pornography does, shows how (this phantasm's)
realization is always close at hand -- the impulse to deny any system being all the stronger if such system
is close to perfection or absolute supremacy. It is even probable that the terrorists (like the experts!) did
not anticipate the collapse of the Twin Towers, which was, far more than (the attack of) the Pentagon,
the deepest symbolic shock. The symbolic collapse of a whole system is due to an unforeseen
complicity, as if, by collapsing (themselves), by suiciding, the towers had entered the game to
complete the event. In a way, it is the entire system that, by its internal fragility, helps the initial action.
The more the system is globally concentrated to constitute ultimately only one network, the more it
becomes vulnerable at a single point (already one little Filipino hacker has succeeded, with his laptop,
to launch the I love you virus that wrecked entire networks). Here, eighteen (dix-huit in the text)
kamikazes, through the absolute arm that is death multiplied by technological efficiency, start a global
catastrophic process. When the situation is thus monopolized by global power, when one deals with
this formidable condensation of all functions through technocratic machinery and absolute
ideological hegemony (pensee unique), what other way is there, than a terrorist reversal of the
situation (literally 'transfer of situation': am I too influenced by early translation as 'reversal'?)? It is the
system itself that has created the objective conditions for this brutal distortion. By taking all the cards
to itself, it forces the Other to change the rules of the game. And the new rules are ferocious, because
the stakes are ferocious. To a system whose excess of power creates an unsolvable challenge,
terrorists respond by a definitive act that is also unanswerable (in the text: which cannot be part of the
exchange circuit). Terrorism is an act that reintroduces an irreducible singularity in a generalized
exchange system. Any singularity (whether species, individual or culture), which has paid with its death
for the setting up of a global circuit dominated by a single power, is avenged today by this terrorist
situational transfer.
AT: Perm
The alt necessarily demands new forms of policy analysis – we’ll specifically outline
the five steps necessary to access critical feminist policy analysis here – alt solvency
demands a complete commitment to our method. The perm’s halfhearted attempt to
reshape scholarship is an “add women and stir” approach that inevitably fails to
access the alt
Bensimon and Marshall 03, Professor of Educational Policy and Administration at the
University of Southern California and Associate Professor of Education at the
University of North Carolina
(Estela Mara and Catherine, “Like It or Not: Feminist Critical Policy Analysis Matters,” The Journal of Higher Education vol. 74 no.3, June 2003,
JSTOR)//JB
The Feminist Preoccupation: How to Make Policy Analysis Accountable to Critical Feminism Earlier we said that the master's preoccupation is how to absorb fem- inism into policy analysis. In
the feminist preoccupation is the inverse, "How to make policy analysis accountable to critical
feminism." The difference between the feminist and the master is that they are motivated by different interests. The master’s interest is to maintain
policies and practices intact. For example, Anderson applauds "the number of academic texts that claim feminism as a subject heading" (p. 5), but who is reading
them? Is feminist critical policy analysis a topic in the policy analysis canon of public administration,
higher education, and policy analysis and planning curricula? Do governments ask for studies, and do university presidents pay big bucks
contrast,
to bring in feminist critical policy consultants? Do even the readers of this higher education journal feel compelled to get "up to speed" on such tools and perspectives? When the answers are
any well-trained and credible policy analyst will know to: 1. Recognize
that past policies constructed in arenas where the discourse was conducted without feminist critique
are flawed and conduct policy archeology (Scheurich, 1994) to search how and by whom policies were framed as they were, thus facilitating re-fram- mg; 2. Re-construct
policy arenas and discourses, knowing the need to engage and even champion the needs and voices of
people heretofore excluded, or included in token ways; 3. Include feminist questions as they scrutinize
decision premises, language, and labels while constantly asking, "what do feminisms tell me to critique?" 4. Employ alternative
yeses, policy analysis can assist institutional change. Then,
methodologies (e.g., narrative and oral history) to uncover the intricacies of meaning systems in
individual and collective stories both to expose the emotional and personal results of exclusions but also to
create alternative visions that transcend boundaries "to shape the formation of culturally appropriate social and educational policy" (Gonzalez,
1998, p. 99); 5. Search for the historically created and embedded traditions, social regularities, and
practices that inhibit women's access, comfort, and success; 6. Take an advocacy stance, knowing
that policy analysts are change agents, carriers of insurrectionist strategies and subjugated
knowledges that will be subjected to discourses of derision by powerful forces benehting from the status quo. Anderson worries that policy analysis is a tool of managers,
planners, and leaders and is not always seen as an academic discipline. As a result, she believes policy analysts must serve those leaders, must
take as given the questions as framed for them. But taking such a servant position is exactly why
policy analysis gets no respect. And deeper feminist questions will never come up if we accept Anderson’s
recommendation that we recommend step-by-step change. Quoting Anderson, who quotes Gill and Saunders, "Policy analysis in higher education requires an
understanding of the higher education environment" (p. 16), we say "of course!" But instead of then concluding, as she does, that we must tread carefully in that environment, we assert that
the policy questions must mount major challenges to that very environment!
We are not seeking policy recommendations of the "add
women and stir" ilk, nor are we seeking simplistic affirmative action. We want policy analyses that
rearrange gendered power relations , not ones that simply create our inclusion in institutions that
have not been rearranged. We advocate policy analysis that creates a new discourse about gender-one that can facilitate transformation of the academy and "envision
what is not yet" (Wallace, 2002). In sum, in our chapter laying out the need for feminist critical policy analysis, we are, indeed, building upon academic traditions, traditions of critique and
playing only the master’s tools’
games will leave us spinning our wheels, playing a game that was structured for white males and that
has culturally embedded tools for keeping it, basically, that way. Until the questions are asked differently, until we
construct policy analyses with overt intentions to create gender consciousness, to expose the limits of gender-neutral
practices, to expose the asymmetric gender power relations, certain women will not be welcome in academia.
And, finally, no, Anderson and readers should not fear that we want to "invert the old logic of the academic
hierarchy and exclude men" (p. 19). However, we are saying that until we use our feminist theory and language of
debate, and now we continue using these master's tools. However, we place our work in power and politics feminisms to show that
critique as grounding to command forceful critique of continuing cultural exclusions, the only women
who will be comfortable in academia are those who expend some of their workplace energies to be pleasing
(as women) to men. Anderson wants us to "hold the attention of those [who] are already predisposed to tum the other way when the word feminism enters the
conversation" (p. 24), Sure, that is called strategic feminism and recognizes that feminists are challengers from the fringes, trying to get the hegemonic center to listen. Austin and Leland’s
(1991) study of academic women lends perspective here. In the 1940s and 1950s, women academics were "predecessors," often sole women in their profession, often sacrificing personal lives
for their careers. Later, the "instigators” took leadership in the 1960s and 1970s, mentoring and eventually broadening women’s issues to change academic life, to rid itself of bastions of
patriarchy in the canon and in the structures, e.g., of sports, student life, tenure clocks, and so forth. Now,
the "inheritors" do not always know how
tenuous and vulnerable the changes are. Anderson sounds like an inheritor as she dis- cusses whether feminist critical policy analysis is needed.
She implies that feminists should acknowledge that, because our books get published and purchased by libraries, we should be grateful and we should
rest assured that there are changes that, gradually, are changing the culture. But too many "inheritor"
women academics today think the problems are solved, that their fellowships, invitations to conferences, and publications demonstrate that
sexism is gone. Don't they notice that their salaries are lower than those of their male colleagues? Don’t they notice that their tenure review tiles have to be more perfect than those of their
Don’t they notice that if they do not act as men think women should act they are shunned?
We, Bensimon and Marshall, as instigators, know the full force of resistance to women in the academy and we also know how
vulnerable our positions are.
male counterparts?
Accept anxiety in the face of an inability to effect political change – this uncertainty is
unsettling but any other paradigm is nothing more than a false sense of security
Robyn WIEGMAN Women’s Studies & Literature @ Duke ’12 Object Lessons p. 81-85//Wake LW
I V. And When Gender Fails ... If the language of the political I have been using throughout this chapter turns repeatedly to the generic figures
of justice and social transformation, this should not be read as evidence that I lack opinions about what would constitute their contemporary
realization. Nor is it a reflection of the paucity of agendas that reside within the identity field of study that has chiefly organized this chapter's
concerns. My
task has been to explore the disciplinary force and affective power of the commitment to
political commitment by paying attention to the political as a generic discourse and to the hegemony of the belief that underlies it.37
The terms I have used to do this political desire, field imaginary, field formation, progress narrative, and critical realism-have been aimed at
deciphering the conundrums that ensue when the political aspiration to enact justice is a field's self-authorizing disciplinary identity and
definitive disciplinary rule. Readers
who contend that this itinerary abandons real politics will be missing my
point even as they inadvertently confirm it, as one of the primary effects of the disciplinarity that I am
tracking here is the demand it exacts on practitioners to deliver just such an accusation: that in the
absence of the performance of a decisive political claim there can be no political commitments at allor only bad ones.38 It is the interpellative force of this accusation and the shame that it both covets
and induces that is central to the field's ongoing subject construction . Over time, the threat of the
accusation can be so fully ingested that the critic responds to it without it ever being spoken,
providing her own political rationales and agenda-setting conclusions as the means to cultivate
legitimacy and authority as a practitioner in the field. Such authority, let's be clear, is as intoxicating as it is
rewarding, and not just on the grounds of critical capital alone. The ingestion of the disciplinary structure has enormous
psychic benefits precisely because of the promise it both makes and helps us hold dear, which is that
our relationship to objects and analytics of study, along with critical practice as a whole, can be made
commensurate with the political commitments we take them to bear. Hence the field-securing necessity of the very
pedagogical lesson this chapter has been tracking, where categories, not critical agencies, are said to fail, and new objects
and analytics become the valued terrain for sustaining the progress that underwrites the field
imaginary's political dispensation to begin with . The problem at the heart of the progress narrative of
gender is not, then, about gender per se nor the belief that gender is now used to defend: that the justice-achieving future we want lives in
critical practice, if only its generative relations and epistemological priorities can be properly conceived. Instead, my point has been that the
a symptom of the disciplinary apparatus that requires it , which is calculated to overcome the
anxiety that not only incites but endlessly nags it-the anxiety raised by the suspicion that what needs to be changed
may be beyond our control. To acknowledge this anxiety is not to say that critical practice has no
political implications, or that nothing can be done in the face of the emergency of the present, or that
the desire for agency of any kind is fantastical in the most negative sense. But it is to suggest that the disciplinary structure
is as compensatory as it is ideational, in part because the temporality of historical transformation it must inhabit is both unwieldy
and unpredictable. Think here of the differences in historical weight, affect, and transformative appeal
between community activisms; revolutionary movements; state-based reform; and organized political
participation and then place each of these alongside the threats of recuperation; the evisceration of
democratic political forms; and the reduction of citizen sovereignty. These and other forms of
transformation and interruption stand in stark contrast to the profound belief that disciplinarity engenders: that
progress narrative is
know ing will lead to knowing what to do . Linda Zerilli, among others, has challenged the idea that the domain of knowledge
can be so prioritized, demonstrating how some of the most profound social normativities are inhabited not where knowledge practices
explicate the nuances of their operations but in the reflexes, habits, and the ongoing discernments that feminist critics often quite succinctly
understand but cannot undo.39 Her example concerns the gap between our own rather pointed critical knowing of the socially constructed
nature of sex and gender and the feminist critic's inhabitations of everyday life in which the categories of men and women are experienced in
all their fictional realness. But there are a host of other examples to bear out the point that while ignorance can be a form of privilege, its
opposite-critical
thinking and the knowing it promises to lead us to-may not finally be able to settle the
relation between political aspiration and the agency it hopes to cultivate and command. The void at
the heart of the language of "the political," "social change," and "justice" is an effect not of indecision
or imprecision, then, but of the complex temporality that structures the field imaginary: where on the one hand the
disciplinary commitment to the political is borne in the historical configuration of the present while being bound, on the other hand, to the
scene of the future in which the projection of the materialization of justice is forced to live. In this temporal glitch between the
inadequate but overwhelming present and the necessity of a future that will evince change, the field
imaginary performs and projects, as well as deflects, the anxiety of agency that underwrites it. The familiar
debate glossed as theory versus practice is one inflection of the anxiety being highlighted here . While
often called a divide, the theory/practice formulation is a dependent relation, more circular than divisional
as each "side" repeatedly stresses the incapacities of agency invested in the other. So, for instance, practice is
the realist check on theory and its passionate forays into modes of thinking and analysis that love to hone what is more abstract than concrete,
more ideational than real, more symptomatic than apparent while theory presses against the insistence for instrumentalized knowledge and
destinations of critical thought that can materialize, with expediency, the political desire that motivates it- all this even as the language of
theory comes steeped in its own idiom of instrumental function whenever it wagers itself as an analogue for politics as a whole. To
take up
one side or other of the divide is to reiterate the hopeful belief that agency lives somewhere close by
and that with just the right instrument-call it a strategy, an object of study, or an analytic- we can
intentionally grasp it. In parsing the theory/practice divide in this way, I am trying to foreground the power of the
disciplinary rule that displaces the stakes of the debate by eliding the anxiety of agency that underlies
it with the agential projections of critical practice-and further to make clear that the conundrums of disciplinarity
and the ideational animations of critique cannot be settled by a rhetorical insistence on critical itineraries alone, whether
linked to theory or practice or wrapped in the language of community, public knowledge, policy, or actionoriented research. This is because the theory/practice divide is a symptom of the anxiety of agency it evokes and cites, not an
acknowledgment of, let alone an engagement with, it. While the repetition of the debate can certainly buttress the hope that
what matters is which itinerary of critical practice we choose, it also relieves the field from arriving into the dilemma of
our own limited agency , a limit that is not new but recurrent and part of both the complexity and difficulty of
demanding to know how to use knowledge to exact justice from the contemporary world. This is not to say
that the compensatory resolutions of the disciplinary pedagogies we learn are false or even that they are insufficient, but rather that there is
more at stake than we have dared to think about the disciplinarity through which the object
investments of critical practice are now performed. In the opening foray that this chapter delivers into Object Lessons as a
its and
whole, the problem that I am naming is simply this: that being made by the world we seek to change is always at odds with the disciplinary
demand to make critical practice the means and the measure of our capacity to do so.
Their starting point and discourse are problematic – don’t let them sever these
Wells and Wirth 97 – Vagina Warrior and Legendary Feminist News Artist and Iowa State Professor
of Ecology (Betty and Danielle, Eighteen Remediating Development through an Ecofeminist Lens,” Ch. 18
Ecofeminism : Women, Culture, Nature, edited by Karen J Warren, Book) */LEA
Ecological feminism, an emerging minority tradition and praxis within Western philosophy, is a world view with potential to
positively influence the course of development. To Jim Cheney (1987), concerns for the environment and women's concerns may be
parallel, bound up with one another, perhaps even one and the same, since both women and the environment have been treated with ambivalence and disrespect
by the dominant culture. Ecological feminism is a feminism 1 which attempts to bring about a world and a world view that are not based on socioeconomic and
conceptual structures of domination (Warren and Cheney, 1991). According to Karen J. Warren (1989), oppressive conceptual frameworks share at least the
following characteristics: 1. Value hierarchies—(up­down) thinking; ranking diversity. 2. Value dualisms—a set of paired disjuncts in which one disjunct is valued
more than the other. Examples: male/female where males are always valued more; nature/culture where human culture is valued more. 3. A logic of domination—
where differences justify oppression. While there are many varieties of ecofeminism, "all ecofeminists agree that the wrongful and inter-connected dominations of
women and nature exist and must be eliminated" (Warren, 1991, 1). Warren (1989) also provides a useful schematic for conceptualizing ecological feminism. The
intersecting and complementary spheres of feminism, indigenous knowledge, and appropriate science, development, and technology create an ecofeminist
development rationale which takes seriously epistemic privilege, women's issues, and technologies which work in partnership with natural systems. Science and
technology are needed to solve environmental problems. Ecofeminism not only welcomes appropriate science and technology but, as an ecological feminism,
requires the inclusion of appropriate insights and data of scientific ecology (Warren and Cheney, 1991, 190-93). However, as a feminism,
ecofeminism
also insists that data about the historical and in-terconnected exploitations of nature and women and
other oppressed peoples (including their perspectives) be recognized
and brought to bear in solutions. Ecological feminism and the
science of ecology are engaged in complementary, mutually supportive projects; ecological feminism opposes the practice of one without the other. Integrating a
feminist perspective requires identifying gender-centered biases in theory, methods of empirical inquiry, and practice and making appropriate corrections or
substitutions (Levy, 1988, 143). Gender bias enters during the selection of research topics, extends to the specification of variables and domain assumptions that
Men have traditionally
defined knowledge and constructed reality by virtue of having their theories accepted as legitimate
(Smith, 1974; Spender, 1983; Gray, 1992). The male-dominated scientific enterprise has limited inquiry to the study of
what males do and what men value and dismissed as trivial scholarship by women and about women
(Levy, 1988, 143). As we come to understand theoretical constructs as social products which reflect the
scientific training and the personal biases of their creators, we must question whether the social and
symbolic worlds of women can be understood using the theories and methods that explain the social
relations of males (Levy, 1988,146).
form the theoretical constructs, and continues throughout research operations and the application of the research results.
***AFFIRMATIVE***
Alt Fails (Spillover)
There exists an intrinsic antagonism in debate – on one side, debate is always shaped
by strategy, winning, and debate theory. The other side is the desire to influence a
larger public. The K’s desire to change the debate community is always shaped by the
norms of debate. Your alt will never be receptive to the larger public. We should view
outside of the academy as more important than our debate spaces
Welsh 12 Scott Department of Communication Appalachian State University (“Coming to Terms with
the Antagonism between Rhetorical Reflection and Political Agency”, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 45,
No. 1, 2012, Jstor)
Giroux’s concluding words, in which scholars reclaim the promises of a truly global democratic future,
echo Ono and Sloop’s construction of scholarship as the politically embedded pursuit of utopia,
McKerrow’s academic emancipation of the oppressed, McGee’s social surgery, Hartnett’s social justice
scholar, and Fuller’s agent of justice. Each aims to unify the competing elements within the scholarly
subject position—scholarly reflection and political agency—by reducing the former to the latter.
Žižek’s advice is to consider how such attempts are always doomed to frustration, not because ideals
are hard to live up to but because of the impossibility of resolving the antagonism central to the
scholarly subject position. The titles “public intellectual” and “critical rhetorician” attest to the
fundamental tension. “Public” and “rhetorician” both represent the aspiration to political
engagement, while “critical” and “intellectual” set the scholar apart from noncritical, nonintellectual
public rhetoric. However, rather than allowing the contingently articulated terms to exist in a state of
paradoxical tension, these authors imagine an organic, unavoidable, necessary unity. The scholar is, in
one moment, wholly public and wholly intellectual, wholly critical and wholly rhetorical, wholly
scholar and wholly citizen—an impossible unity, characteristic of the sublime, in which the
antagonism vanishes (2005, 147). Yet, as Žižek predicts, the sublime is the impossible. The frustration
producing gap between the unity of the ideological sublime and conflicted experience quickly begins
to put pressure on the ideology. This is born out in the shift from the exhilarated tone accompanying
the birth of critical rhetoric (and its liberation of rhetoric scholarship from the incoherent and
untenable demands of scientific objectivity) to a dispirited accounting for the difficulty of actually
embodying the imagined unity of scholarly reflection and political agency. Simonson, for example,
draws attention to the gap, noting how, twenty years later, it is hard to resist the feeling that “the bulk
of our academic publishing is utterly inconsequential.” His hope is that a true connection between
scholarly reflection and political agency may be possible outside of academia (2010, 95). Fuller
approaches this conclusion when he says that the preferred path to filling universities with agents of
justice is through “scaling back the qualifications needed for tenure-stream posts from the doctorate to
the master’s degree,” a way of addressing the antagonism that amounts to setting half of it afloat (2006,
154). Hartnett is especially interesting because while he also insists on the existence of the gap,
dismissing “many” of his “colleagues” as merely dispensing “politically vacuous truisms” or, worse, as
serving as “tools of the state” and “humanities-based journals” as “impenetrably dense” and filled with
“jargon-riddled nonsense,” he evinces a considerable impatience with the audiences he must engage as
a social justice scholar (2010, 69, 74–75). In addition to reducing those populating the mass media to a
cabal of “rotten corporate hucksters,” Hartnett rejects vernacular criticisms of his activism as “ranting
and raving by fools,” and chafes at becoming “a target for yahoos of all stripes” (87, 84). In other words,
the gap is not only recognized on the academic side of the ledger but appears on the public side as well;
the public (in the vernacular sense of the word) does not yield to the desire of the social justice
scholar. Or, as Žižek puts it, referencing Lacan, “You never look at me from the place in which I see
you” (1991, 126). More telling still, Hartnett’s main examples of social justice scholars are either retired
or located outside of academia (2010, 86). As Simonson suggests, and Hartnett implicitly concedes, it
may well be that it really is only outside the academy that there can be immediate, material, political
consequences.
Our argument is particularly true to the 1NC – using debate for political purposes
trades off with producing tools useful for the public.
Welsh 12 Scott Department of Communication Appalachian State University (“Coming to Terms with
the Antagonism between Rhetorical Reflection and Political Agency”, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 45,
No. 1, 2012, Jstor)
What does it mean to say rhetoric scholarship should be relevant to democratic practice? A prevailing
answer to this question insists that rhetoric scholars are participants in the democratic contest for
power just like all other citizens, no more and no less. Drawing on the work of Slavoj Žižek, the
argument of this essay is that reducing scholarship to a mode of political agency not only produces an
increasingly uninhabitable academic identity but also draws our attention away from producing
results of rhetorical inquiry designed to be useful to citizens in democracy. Clinging to the idea that
academic practice is a mode of political action produces a fantastic blindness to the antagonism
between scholarly reflection and political agency that structures academic purpose. While empirical
barriers to the production of rhetorical resources suitable for democratic appropriation undoubtedly
exist, ignoring the self-frustrating character of academic desire is no less of an impediment to the
production of democratically consequential rhetoric scholarship.
Our goal as rhetorical scholars should be the exploration and production of
inventional resources suitable for the larger public, otherwise we get lost in TOO-EASY
ASSURANCES that what we are doing here – in the debate space – is necessary and
sufficient
Welsh 12 Scott Department of Communication Appalachian State University (“Coming to Terms with
the Antagonism between Rhetorical Reflection and Political Agency”, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 45,
No. 1, 2012, Jstor)
The challenge is to resist synthetically resolving these antagonisms, whether in confirming or
disconfirming ways. Rather, as Žižek might suggest, the aim should be to “come to terms” with these
antagonisms by articulating academic identities less invested in reparative fantasies that imagine a
material resolution of them (1989, 3, 5, 133; 2005, 242–43). Accounts that fail to come to terms with
the impossibility of closure and continue to invest in such fantasies yield either indignant calls for
activism or too-easy assurance of the potential consequence of one’s work , neither of which is well
suited to scholar­citizen engagement. Coming to terms with these antagonisms, I ultimately argue, is
aided by a reconsideration of a number of Jürgen Habermas’s (1973, 1970) early works on the
relationship between theory and practice and C. Wright Mills’s (2000) account of the relationship
between scholarly reflection and political agency in The Sociological Imagination. Turning to
Giambattista Vico, Habermas shows us how to keep the antagonisms clearly in view, even though he
does not suggest a vision of scholarship that might allow academics to deliberately respond to the
antagonism between scholarship and political agency. It is Mills, rather, through his concept of
academics working in support of the sociological imagination, who suggests how academics might do
just that. Directly and indirectly returning, in a sense, to classical rhetorical roots, each challenges
rhetoric scholars to emphasize, as the aim of rhetoric scholarship, the exploration and production of
inventional resources suitable for appropriation by citizen-actors. Such a construction of the
relationship between academics and politics locates political agency and the situated pursuit of
practical wisdom in democratic publics without absolving scholars of responsibility to them.
The question of institutional support is key to expanding wider base for change and
caring for other communities – radical exposures fail
Ruggero 9 E. Colin, The New School for Social Research in New York, Center for Energy and
Environmental Policy, University of Delaware, Radical Green Populism: Climate Change, Social Change
and the Power of Everyday Practices, 11-11, http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/e-colin-ruggeroradical-green-populism-climate-change-social-change-and-the-power-of-everyday-p
Radicals must carefully deliberate the development of alternative social institutions and intellectual
resources for subversion and, ultimately, change. What will they look like? Self-managed energy
systems, car and bicycle shares, farming collectives, green technology design firms, recycling and
composting operations, construction and refitting operations...the needs are broad and the
possibilities are endless, but each must be carefully considered . What institutions and resources
might prove most valuable over the long term? What institutions and resources can help strengthen
radical communities? What institutions and resources would other communities be best served by , a
particularly important question in the process of broadening the cultural-social unity of a wide social
base for change.
1AR XT – Can’t Change Debate
Their speech act doesn’t spill over to change anything but their own minds –
a. Structural constraints
Atchison and Panetta 9 – *Director of Debate at Wake Forest University and **Director of Debate
at the University of Georgia (Jarrod, and Edward, “Intercollegiate Debate and Speech Communication:
Issues for the Future,” The Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, Lunsford, Andrea, ed., 2009, p. 317334)
The first problem that we isolate is the difficulty of any individual debate to generate community
change. Although any debate has the potential to create problems for the community (videotapes of
objectionable behavior, etc.), rarely doesany one debate have the power to create community-wide change. We
attribute thisineffectiveness tothe structural problems inherent in individual debates and the collective
forgetfulness of the debate community. The structural problems stem from the current tournament format that
has remained relatively consistent for the past 30 years. Debaters engage in preliminary debates in rooms that
are rarely populated by anyone other than the judge. Judges are instructed to vote for the team that does the
best debating, but the ballot is rarely seen by anyone outside the tabulation room. Given the limited number
of debates in which a judge actually writes meaningful comments, there is little documentation of whatactually
transpiredduring the debate round. During the period when judges interact with the debaters, there are often external
pressures (filing evidence, preparing for the next debate, etc.) that restrict the ability of anyoneoutside the debate to
pay attention to the judges’ justification for their decision. Elimination debates do not provide for a much
better audience because debates still occur simul- taneously, and travel schedules dictate that most of the
participants have left by the later elimination rounds. It is difficult for anyone to substantiate the claim that
asking a judge to vote to solve a community problem in an individual debate with so few participants is
the best strategy for addressing important problems.
b. Competition
Atchison and Panetta 9 – *Director of Debate at Trinity University and **Director of Debate at the
University of Georgia (Jarrod, and Edward, “Intercollegiate Debate and Speech Communication: Issues
for the Future,” The Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, Lunsford, Andrea, ed., 2009, p. 317-334)
The debate community has become more self-reflexive and increasingly invested in attempting to address the problems that have plagued the
community from the start. The degrees to which things are considered problems and the appropriateness of different solutions to the problems
have been hotly contested, but some fundamental issues, such as diversity and accessibility, have received considerable attention in recent
years. This section will address the “debate as activism” perspective that argues that the appropriate site for addressing community problems is
individual debates. In contrast to the “debate as innovation” perspective, which assumes that the activity is an isolated game with educational
benefits, proponents of the “debate as activism” perspective argue that individual debates have the potential to create change in the debate
community and society at large. If the first approach assumed that debate was completely insulated, this perspective assumes that there is no
substantive insulation between individual debates and the community at large. From our perspective, using
individual debates to
create community change is an insufficient strategy for three reasons. First, individual debates are, for the most
part, insulated from the community at large. Second, individual debates limit the conversation to the
immediate participants and the judge, excluding many important contributors to the debate community. Third,
locating the discussion within theconfines of a competition diminishes theadditional potential for
collaboration, consensus, and coalition building.
1ar XT Inclusion Fails
Inclusion in the debate space is a empty act of tolerance that ensures that nothing
really changes
Zizek 8—Institute for Social Sciences, Ljubljana (Slavoj, The Prospects of Radical Politics Today, Int’l
Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 5;1)
ellipses in orig
Let us take two predominant topics of to day's American radical academia: postcolonial and queer (gay) studies. The problem of postcolonialism is undoubtedly crucial; however,
postcolonial studies" tend to translate it into the multiculturalist problematic of the colonized
minorities' "right to narrate" their victimizing experience, of the power mechanisms which repress
"
"otherness," so that, at the end of the day, we learn that the root of postcolonial exploitation is our
intolerance toward the Other, and, furthermore, that this intolerance itself is rooted in our intolerance toward the "Stranger
in Ourselves," in our inability to confront what we repressed in and of ourselves. The politicoeconomic struggle is thus imperceptibly transformed into a pseudo-psychoanalytic drama of the
subject unable to confront its inner traumas ... The true corruption of American academia is not primarily financial, it is
not only that they are able to buy many European critical intellectuals (myself included – up to a point), but
conceptual : notions of "European" critical theory are imperceptibly translated into the benign universe of Cultural Studies chic. ¶ My personal experience is that practically
all of the "radical" academics silently count on the long-term stability of the American capitalist
model, with the secure tenured position as their ultimate professional goal (a surprising number of them even play on the stock market). If there is a thing they are
gen-uinely horrified of, it is a radical shattering of the (relatively) safe life environ-ment of the
"symbolic classes" in the developed Western societies. Their excessive Politically Correct zeal when
dealing with sexism, racism, Third World sweatshops, etc., is thus ultimately a defense against their own innermost
identi-fication, a kind of compulsive ritual whose hidden logic is: " Let's talk as much as possible about
the necessity of a radical change to make sure that nothing will really change! " Symptomatic here is the journal October:
when you ask one of the editors to what the title refers, they will half-confidentially signal that it is, of course, that October – in this way, one can indulge in the jargonistic analyses of modern
art, with the hidden assurance that one is somehow retaining the link with the radical revolutionary past ... With regard to this radical chic, the first gesture toward Third Way ideologists and
pseudo-radical
academic Leftists who adopt toward the Third Way the attitude of utter disdain , while their own
practitioners should be that of praise: they at least play their game straight and are honest in their acceptance of global capitalist coordinates, in contrast to the
radi-cality ultimately amounts to an empty gesture which obligates no one to any-thing determinate .¶
II. From Human to Animal Rights ¶ We live in the "postmodern" era in which truth- claims as such are dismissed as an expression of hidden power mechanisms – as the reborn pseudoNietzscheans like to emphasize, truth is a lie which is most efficient in asserting our will to power. The very question "Is it true?" apropos of some statement is supplanted by another question:
What we get instead of the universal truth is a multitude of
perspectives, or, as it is fashionable to put it today, of "narratives" – not only of literature, but also of politics, religion, science, they are all different narratives,
stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the ultimate goal of ethics is to guarantee the neutral space
"Under what power con-ditions can this statement be uttered?"
in which this multitude of narratives can peacefully coexist , in which everyone, from ethnic to sexual
minorities, will have the right and possibility to tell his/her story. The two philosophers of today's global capitalism are the two great
Left-liberal "progres-sives," Richard Rorty and Peter Singer – honest in their respective stances. Rorty defines the basic coordinates: the fundamental dimension of a human being is the ability
to suffer, to experience pain and humiliation – consequently, since humans are symbolic animals, the fundamental right is the right to nar-rate one's experience of suffering and humiliation.2
Singer then provides the Darwinian background.3
1AR XT – Anti-Politics
Shifting to their politics is a way to dodge fundamental collective debates with the
hegemonic forces that underwrite oppression – training an incapacity to engage with
institutional power sets activism up to fail against the organized forces of political
control – the aff is a modern day Nero who fiddles the night away as Rome burns
down around him
Chandler 7 – Researcher @ Centre for the Study of Democracy, Chandler. 2007. Centre for the Study
of Democracy, Westminster, Area, Vol. 39, No. 1, p. 118-119
This disjunction between the human/ethical/global causes of post-territorial political activism and the
capacity to 'make a difference' is what makes these individuated claims immediately abstract and
metaphysical – there is no specific demand or programme or attempt to build a collective project .
This is the politics of symbolism. The rise of symbolic activism is highlighted in the increasingly popular
framework of 'raising awareness'– here there is no longer even a formal connection between ethical
activity and intended outcomes (Pupavac 2006). Raising awareness about issues has replaced even the
pretense of taking responsibility for engaging with the world – the act is ethical in-itself . Probably the
most high profile example of awareness raising is the shift from Live Aid, which at least attempted to
measure its consequences in fund-raising terms, to Live 8 whose goal was solely that of raising an
'awareness of poverty'. The struggle for 'awareness' makes it clear that the focus of symbolic politics is
the individual and their desire to elaborate upon their identity – to make us aware of their 'awareness',
rather than to engage us in an instrumental project of changing or engaging with the outside world. It
would appear that in freeing politics from the constraints of territorial political community there is a
danger that political activity is freed from any constraints of social mediation (see further, Chandler
2004a). Without being forced to test and hone our arguments , or even to clearly articulate them, we
can rest on the radical 'incommunicability' of our personal identities and claims – you are 'either with
us or against us'; engaging with those who disagree is no longer possible or even desirable. It is this lack
of desire to engage which most distinguishes the unmediated activism of post-territorial political actors
from the old politics of territorial communities, founded on struggles of collective interests (Chandler
2004b). The clearest example is old representational politics – this forced engagement in order to win
the votes of people necessary for political parties to assume political power. Individuals with a belief in a
collective programme knocked on strangers' doors and were willing to engage with them, not on the
basis of personal feelings but on what they understood were their potential shared interests. Few
people would engage in this type of campaigning today; engaging with people who do not share our
views, in an attempt to change their minds, is increasingly anathema and most people would rather
share their individual vulnerabilities or express their identities in protest than attempt to argue with a
peer. This paper is not intended to be a nostalgic paean to the old world of collective subjects and
national interests or a call for a revival of territorial state-based politics or even to reject global
aspirations: quite the reverse. Today, politics has been 'freed' from the constraints of territorial
political community – governments without coherent policy programmes do not face the constraints
of failure or the constraints of the electorate in any meaningful way; activists, without any collective
opposition to relate to, are free to choose their causes and ethical identities; protest, from Al Qaeda, to
anti-war demonstrations, to the riots in France, is inchoate and atomized. When attempts are made to
formally organize opposition , the ephemeral and incoherent character of protest is immediately
apparent .
Ballot Commodification
The claim that oppression should be the basis for winning a debate round
commodifies the ballot. It is is not a tool of emancipation, but rather a tool of
revenge---it serves as a palliative that denies their investment in oppression as a
means by which to claim the power of victory
Enns 12—Professor of Philosophy at McMaster University (Dianne, The Violence of Victimhood, 28-30)
Guilt and Ressentiment We need to think carefully about what is at stake here. Why is this perspective appealing, and what are its effects? At
first glance, the argument appears simple: white, privileged women, in their theoretical and practical interventions, must take into account the
experiences and conceptual work of women who are less fortunate and less powerful, have fewer resources, and are therefore more subject to
systemic oppression. The lesson of feminism's mistakes in the civil rights era is that this “mainstream” group must not speak for other women.
But such a view must be interrogated. Its effects, as I have argued, include a veneration of the other, moral currency for the victim, and an
insidious competition for victimhood. We will see in later chapters that these effects are also common in situations of conflict where the stakes
are much higher. ¶ We witness here a twofold appeal: otherness
discourse in feminism appeals both to the guilt of the
privileged and to the resentment, or ressentiment, of the other. Suleri's allusion to “embarrassed privilege” exposes the
operation of guilt in the misunderstanding that often divides Western feminists from women in the developing world, or white women from
women of color. The
guilt of those who feel themselves deeply implicated in and responsible for imperialism
merely reinforces an imperialist benevolence , polarizes us unambiguously by locking us into the
categories of victim and perpetrator , and blinds us to the power and agency of the other. Many fail
to see that it is embarrassing and insulting for those identified as victimized others not to be subjected
to the same critical intervention and held to the same demands of moral and political responsibility.
Though we are by no means equal in power and ability, wealth and advantage, we are all collectively
responsible for the world we inhabit in common. The condition of victimhood does not absolve one of moral responsibility. I
will return to this point repeatedly throughout this book.¶ Mohanty's perspective ignores the possibility that one can
become attached to one's subordinated status , which introduces the concept of ressentiment, the focus of
much recent interest in the injury caused by racism and colonization. Nietzsche describes ressentiment as the overwhelming sentiment of
“slave morality,” the revolt that begins when ressentiment itself
becomes creative and gives birth to values. 19 The
sufferer in this schema seeks out a cause for his suffering—“ a guilty agent who is susceptible to suffering”— someone on whom
he can vent his affects and so procure the anesthesia necessary to ease the pain of injury. The motivation
behind ressentiment, according to Nietzsche, is the desire “to deaden, by means of a more violent emotion of any kind, a tormenting, secret
pain that is becoming unendurable, and to drive it out of consciousness at least for the moment: for that one requires an affect, as savage an
affect as possible, and, in order to excite that, any pretext at all.” 20 In its contemporary manifestation, Wendy Brown argues that
ressentiment acts as the “ righteous critique of power from the perspective of the injured ,” which “delimits
a specific site of blame for suffering by constituting sovereign subjects and events as responsible for the ‘injury’ of social subordination.”
Identities are fixed in an economy of perpetrator and victim , in which revenge, rather than power or
emancipation, is sought for the injured, making the perpetrator hurt as the sufferer does. 21¶ 30¶ Such a concept is useful for
understanding why an ethics of absolute responsibility to the other appeals to the victimized. Brown remarks that, for Nietzsche, the source of
the triumph of a morality rooted in ressentiment is the denial that it has any access to power or
contains a will to power . Politicized identities arise as both product of and reaction to this condition;
the reaction is a substitute for action — an “imaginary revenge,” Nietzsche calls it. Suffering then becomes a social
virtue at the same time that the sufferer attempts to displace his suffering onto another. The identity created
by ressentiment, Brown explains, becomes invested in its own subjection not only through its discovery of
someone to blame, and a new recognition and revaluation of that subjection, but also through the satisfaction of
revenge . 22¶ The outcome of feminism's attraction to theories of difference and otherness is thus deeply contentious. First, we witness
the further reification reification of the very oppositions in question and a simple reversal of the focus
from the same to the other. This observation is not new and has been made by many critics of feminism, but it seems to have made
no serious impact on mainstream feminist scholarship or teaching practices in women's studies programs. Second, in the eagerness to rectify
the mistakes of “white, middle-class, liberal, western” feminism, the
other has been uncritically exalted, which has led in
turn to simplistic designations of marginal, “othered” status and, ultimately, a competition for victimhood. Ultimately, this
approach has led to a new moral code in which ethics is equated with the responsibility of the privileged Western woman, while moral
immunity is granted to the victimized other. Ranjana Khanna describes this operation aptly when she writes that in the field of transnational
feminism, the
reification of the other has produced “ separate ethical universes ” in which the privileged
experience paralyzing guilt and the neocolonized, crippling resentment . The only “overarching
imperative” is that one does not comment on another's ethical context. An ethical response turns out
to be a nonresponse . 23 Let us turn now to an exploration of this third outcome.
Narratives Bad
Trading autobiographical narrative for the ballot commodifies one’s identity and has
limited impact on the culture that one attempt’s to reform – when autobiographical
narrative “wins,” it subverts its own most radical intentions by becoming an exemplar
of the very culture under indictment
Coughlin 95—associate Professor of Law, Vanderbilt Law School. (Anne, REGULATING THE SELF:
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PERFORMANCES IN OUTSIDER SCHOLARSHIP, 81 Va. L. Rev. 1229)
Although Williams is quick to detect insensitivity and bigotry in remarks made by strangers, colleagues, and
friends, her taste for irony fails her when it comes to reflection on her relationship with her readers and
the material benefits that her autobiographical performances have earned for her. n196 Perhaps Williams should
be more inclined to thank, rather than reprimand, her editors for behaving as readers of autobiography invariably do. When we examine this
literary faux pas - the incongruity between Williams's condemnation of her editors and the professional benefits their publication secured her we detect yet another contradiction between the outsiders' use of autobiography and their desire to transform culture radically. Lejeune's
characterization of autobiography as a "contract" reminds us that
autobiography is a lucrative commodity . In our culture,
members of the reading public avidly
consume personal stories , n197 which surely explains why first-rate law journals and
academic presses have been eager to market outsider narratives. No matter how unruly the self that it records, an
autobiographical performance transforms that self into a form of "property in a moneyed economy"
n198 and
into a valuable intellectual
[*1283]
asset in an academy
that requires its members to publish. n199
Accordingly, we
must be skeptical of the assertion that the outsiders' splendid publication record is itself
sufficient evidence of the success of their endeavor . n200
Certainly, publication of a best seller may transform its author's life, with the resulting commercial success and academic renown. n201 As one
critic of autobiography puts it, "failures do not get published." n202 While
writing a successful autobiography may be
momentous for the individual author, this success has a limited impact on culture . Indeed, the
transformation of outsider authors into "success stories" subverts outsiders' radical intentions by
constituting them as exemplary participants within contemporary culture , willing to market even themselves to
literary and academic consumers. n203
What good does this transformation do for outsiders who are less
fortunate and less articulate than middle-class law professors? n204 Although they style themselves cultural
critics, the
[*1284]
storytellers generally do not reflect on the meaning of their own commercial
success, nor ponder its entanglement with the cultural values they claim to resist . Rather, for the most part,
they seem content simply to take advantage of the peculiarly American license, identified by Professor Sacvan Bercovitch, " to
have your dissent and make it too ." n205
Even if their best intention is to resist the liberal subject, autobiography is understood
by its consuming audience as the assertion of the classic autonomous subject – this
subverts the political potential of performance by rendering one’s experience legible
to the terms of liberalism. This recreates the violence of liberalism that is the root of
Western conquest
Coughlin 95—associate Professor of Law, Vanderbilt Law School. (Anne, REGULATING THE SELF:
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PERFORMANCES IN OUTSIDER SCHOLARSHIP, 81 Va. L. Rev. 1229)
The outsider narratives do not reflect on another feature of autobiographical discourse that is perhaps the most significant obstacle to their
goal to bring to law an understanding of the human self that will supersede the liberal individual. Contrary to the outsiders' claim that their
personalized discourse infuses law with their distinctive experiences and political perspectives, numerous historians and critics of
autobiography have insisted that those
who participate in autobiographical discourse speak not in a different
voice, but in a common voice that reflects their membership in a culture devoted to liberal values .
n206 As Sacvan Bercovitch puts it, American cultural ideals, including specifically the mythic connection between the "heroic individual ... [and]
the values of free enterprise," are "epitomized in autobiography." n207 In his seminal essay on the subject, Professor Georges Gusdorf makes
an observation that seems like a prescient warning to outsiders who would appropriate autobiography as their voice. He remarks that the
practice of writing about one's own self reflects a belief in the autonomous individual , which is "peculiar to
Western man, a
concern that has been of good use in his systematic conquest of the [*1285] universe and that
he has communicated to men of other cultures; but those men will thereby have been annexed by a sort of intellectual colonizing to a
mentality that was not their own." n208 Similarly, Albert Stone, a critic of American autobiography, argues that autobiographical
performances celebrate the Western ideal of individualism, "which places the self at the center of its
world." n209 Stone begins to elucidate the prescriptive character of autobiographical discourse as he notes with wonder "the tenacious
social ideal whose persistence is all the more significant when found repeated in personal histories of Afro-Americans, immigrants, penitentiary
prisoners, and others whose claims to full individuality have often been denied by our society." n210¶
Precisely because it appeals
to readers' fascination with the self-sufficiency, resiliency and uniqueness of the totemic individual privileged by
liberal political theory , there is a risk that autobiographical discourse is a fallible, even co-opted,
instrument for the social reforms envisioned by the outsiders . By affirming the myths of individual success in our
culture, autobiography reproduces the [*1286] political, economic, social and psychological structures that attend such success. n211 In this
light, the outsider autobiographies unwittingly deflect attention from collective social responsibility and thwart the development of collective
solutions for the eradication of racist and sexist harms. Although we may suspect in some cases that the author's own sense of self was shaped
by a community whose values oppose those of liberal individualism, her decision to register her experience in autobiographical discourse will
have a significant effect on the self she reproduces. n212 Her story will solicit the public's attention to the life of one individual, and it will
privilege her individual desires and rights above the needs and obligations of a collectivity.¶ Moreover, literary theorists have remarked the
tendency of autobiographical discourse to override radical authorial intention.
Even where the autobiographer self-
consciously determines to resist liberal ideology and represents her life story as the occasion to announce an alternative
political theory, "the
relentless individualism of the genre subordinates " her political critique . n213 Inevitably, at
least within American culture, the personal narrative engrosses the readers' imagination. Fascinated by the travails and triumphs of the
developing autobiographical self, readers
tend to construe the text's political and social observations only as
another aspect of the author's personality .¶ Paradoxically, although autobiography is the product of a culture that cultivates
human individuality, the genre seems to make available only a limited number of autobiographical protagonists. n214 Many theorists have
noticed that when an author assumes the task of defining her own, unique subjectivity, she invariably reproduces herself as a character with
whom culture already is well-acquainted. n215 While a variety of forces coerce the autobiographer [*1287] to conform to culturally sanctioned
human models, n216 the pressures exerted by the literary market surely play a significant role. The
autobiographer who desires a
material benefit from her performance must adopt a persona that is intelligible , if not enticing, to her
audience. n217 As I will illustrate in the sections that follow, the outsider narratives capitalize on , rather than subvert ,
autobiographical protagonists that serve
the values of liberalism .
1AR XT – Ontology
Identity arguments are only ever implicit explanations of the constitutive effects of
the social order, never a manifestation of some metaphysical status. Experience does
not create us; we constitute experience and identity in concert with others.
Knowledge of experience is therefore not the province of the individual; instead, we
can only know identity through the shared practices that make communities the locus
of knowledge production
Bhambra 10—U Warwick—AND—Victoria Margree—School of Humanities, U Brighton (Identity
Politics and the Need for a ‘Tomorrow’,
http://www.academia.edu/471824/Identity_Politics_and_the_Need_for_a_Tomorrow_)
We suggest that alternative models of identity and community are required from those put forward by essentialist theories, and that these are
offered by the work of two theorists, Satya Mohanty and Lynn Hankinson Nelson. Mohanty’s ([1993] 2000) post-positivist, realist theorisation
of identity suggests a way through the impasses of essentialism, while avoiding the excesses of the postmodernism that Bramen, among others,
derides as a proposed alternative to identity politics. For Mohanty ([1993] 2000), identities
must be understood as theoretical
that enable subjects to read the world in particular ways; as such, substantial claims about identity are, in
fact, implicit explanations of the social world and its constitutive relations of power . Experience – that from
which identity is usually thought to derive– is not something that simply occurs, or announces its meaning and significance in a
self-evident fashion: rather, experience is always a work of interpretation that is collectively produced (Scott 1991).
Mohanty’s work resonates with that of Nelson (1993), who similarly insists upon the communal nature of meaning of knowledge-making.
Rejecting both foundationalist views of knowledge and the postmodern alternative which announces the “death of the subject” and the
impossibility of epistemology, Nelson argues instead that, it
is not individuals who are the agents of epistemology,
but communities . Since it is not possible for an individual to know something that another individual could not also (possibly) know, it
must be that the ability to make sense of the world proceeds from shared conceptual frameworks and practices. Thus, it is the community that
is the generator and repository of knowledge. Bringing Mohanty’s work on identity as theoretical construction together with Nelson’s work on
epistemological communities therefore suggests that, “identity” is one of the knowledges that is produced and enabled for and by individuals in
the context of the communities within which they exist. The post-positivist reformulation of “experience” is necessary here as it privileges
understandings that emerge through the processing of experience in the context of negotiated premises about the world, over experience itself
producing self-evident knowledge (self-evident, however, only to the one who has “had” the experience). This
distinction is crucial
for, if it is not the experience of, for example, sexual discrimination that “makes” one a feminist, but rather, the
paradigm through which one attempts to understand acts of sexual discrimination, then it is not
necessary to have actually had the experience oneself in order to make the identification “feminist”. If
being a “feminist” is not a given fact of a particular social (and/or biological) location – that is, being designated “female” – but is, in Mohanty’s
terms, an “achievement” – that is, something worked towards through a process of analysis and interpretation – then two implications follow.
First, that not all women are feminists. Second, that feminism is something that is “achievable” by men. 3 While it
is accepted that
experiences are not merely theoretical or conceptual constructs which can be transferred from one person to another
with transparency, we think that there is something politically self-defeating about insisting that one
can only understand an experience (or then comment upon it) if one has actually had the experience
oneself. As Rege (1998) argues, to privilege knowledge claims on the basis of direct experience , or then on
claims of authenticity , can lead to a narrow identity politics that limits the emancipatory potential of
the movements or organisations making such claims. Further, if it is not possible to understand an experience
one has not had, then what point is there in listening to each other ? Following Said, such a view seems to
authorise privileged groups to ignore the discourses of disadvantaged ones , or, we would add, to place
exclusive responsibility for addressing injustice with the oppressed themselves . Indeed, as Rege suggests,
reluctance to speak about the experience of others has led to an assumption on the part of some white feminists that “confronting racism is the
sole responsibility of black feminists”, just as today “issues of caste become the sole responsibility of the dalit women’s organisations” (Rege
1998). Her argument for a dalit feminist standpoint, then, is not made in terms solely of the experiences of dalit women, but rather a call for
others to “educate themselves about the histories, the preferred social relations and utopias and the struggles of the marginalised” (Rege
1998). This, she argues, allows
struggle, but
“their cause” to become “our cause”, not as a form of appropriation of “their”
through the transformation of subjectivities that enables a recognition that “ their”
struggle is also “our” struggle. Following Rege, we suggest that social processes can facilitate the understanding of experiences,
thus making those experiences the possible object of analysis and action for all,
while recognising that they are not equally
available or powerful for all subjects . 4 Understandings of identity as given and essential, then, we suggest,
need to give way to understandings which accept them as socially constructed and contingent on the work
of particular , overlapping, epistemological communities that agree that this or that is a viable and recognised identity. Such
an understanding avoids what Bramen identifies as the postmodern excesses of “post-racial” theory, where in
this “world without borders (“racism is real, but race is not”) one can be anything one wants to be: a black kid in Harlem can be
Croatian-American, if that is what he chooses, and a white kid from Iowa can be Korean-American”(2002: 6). Unconstrained choice is not
possible to the extent that, as Nelson (1993) argues, the concept of the epistemological community requires any individual knowledge claim to
sustain itself in relation to standards of evaluation that already exist and that are social. Any claim to identity, then, would have to be
recognised by particular communities as valid in order to be successful. This further shifts the discussion beyond the limitations of essentialist
accounts of identity by recognising that the communities that confer
identity are constituted through their shared
epistemological frameworks and not necessarily by shared characteristics of their members
conceived of as irreducible . 5 Hence, the epistemological community that enables us to identify our-selves as feminists
is one that is built up out of a broadly agreed upon paradigm for interpreting the world and the relations between the sexes: it is not one that is
premised upon possessing the physical attribute of being a woman or upon sharing the same experiences. Since at least the 1970s, a key aspect
of black and/or postcolonial feminism has been to identify the problems associated with such assumptions (see, for discussion, Rege 1998,
2000). We believe that it is the identification of injustice which calls forth action and thus allows for the construction of healthy solidarities. 6
While it is accepted that there may be important differences between those who recognise the injustice of
disadvantage while being, in some respects, its beneficiary (for example, men, white people, brahmins), and
those who recognise the injustice from the position of being at its effect (women, ethnic minorities, dalits), we
would privilege the importance of a shared political commitment to equality as the basis for
negotiating such differences . Our argument here is that thinking through identity claims from the basis of understanding them as
epistemological communities militates against exclusionary politics (and its associated problems) since the emphasis comes to be on
participation in a shared epistemological and political project as opposed to notions of fixed characteristics – the
focus is on the
activities individuals participate in rather than the characteristics they are deemed to possess .
Identity is thus defined further as a function of activity located in particular social locations (understood
as the complex of objective forces that influence the conditions in which one lives) rather than of nature or origin (Mohanty
1995:109-10). As such, the communities that enable identity should not be conceived of as “imagined” since they are produced by very real
actions, practices and projects.