Queering Cuba Aff Addendum
Impacts
Homonationalism
Sexuality is abused by the US— creates othering, paranoia, and homonationalism
Diaz et al 8 (Robert Diaz, 1. David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz, eds. “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?”
special issue, Social Text 23, nos. 3–4 (2005): 1. [End Page 540] 2. Martin F. Manalansan IV, Global Divas: Gay Filipinos in the Diaspora (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2003); and Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: South Asian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2005). 3. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 2003). 4. Rey
Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and The Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 2–3. 5. See Lawrence vs. Texas, U.S.
LEXIS 5013 (2003). [End Page 541], Transnational Queer Theory and Unfolding Terrorisms, Summer 2008, BS)
Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblage: Homonationalism in Queer Times is a refreshing and much-needed addition to this recent queer scholarship.
Like Manalansan and Gopinath, Puar studies “queer diasporas” and their multiple performance practices. Expanding on Duggan’s work, she
maps out moments of queer normalization and inclusion within U.S. dominant culture. What is most salient about this book, however, is that it
focuses on the ways in which sexuality
aids in policing appropriate forms of U.S. citizenship and diasporic
identity during the current “war on terror.” The author examines a collection of examples ranging from South Park episodes,
to photographs from Abu Ghraib, to the Lawrence vs. Texas ruling that struck down the Texas sodomy law by arguing that consensual sex was
protected as “private.” Using these examples, she creates a complex theoretical approach to analyzing the ways in which sexuality
has
been mobilized by the United States after September 11th in order to demonstrate the country’s
“exceptionalism.” Puar takes aim at “exceptionalism” because it allows the United States to set itself apart
from other more “barbaric” (i.e., nonsecular, Islamic, and “fundamentalist”) nation-states and
cultures. She argues that exceptionalism also helps [End Page 534] to produce a continual state of paranoia that
justifies the complex methodologies needed to “fight” the war on terror. Her argument is essential for critics
looking for a way to better understand the linkages between sexuality and antiterrorism. Puar suggests that exceptionalism serves as
a strategic and effective means of furthering violence against postcolonial populations by legitimizing
secularism as the key ethical standard of communities in the global north. It is precisely these
secularist values that make the United States more “progressive,” and what arguably makes the
country’s population more deserving of biopolitical preservation than ethnic and religious minorities
within and outside its borders. Significantly, Puar shows how queer politics can be fueled by regulatory rather than liberatory
purposes. In her introduction (“Homonationalism and Biopolitics”), Puar notes that government policies around terrorism and
academics writing about these policies produce a version of queerness that abjects racial and national
minorities. They do so by acquiescing to what Rey Chow defines as the “ascendancy of whiteness,” or the mobilizing of
cultural difference to serve the racially dominant population in the United States. Key to this abjecting
process is the valorization of secularism I mentioned. Puar sees the heightening of secularism as indicative of
“homonationalistic” impulses motivated by antiterrorism. She defines “homonationalism” as a form of
sexual normalization that accepts particular forms of homosexuality in order to foster American
empire: “[T]his brand of homosexuality operates as a regulatory script not only of normative gayness,
queerness, or homosexuality, but also of racial and national norms that reinforce these subjects” (2).
Although the critique of structures of state power such as the military is unsurprising, what is refreshing about Puar’s beginning is that it also
takes aim at a particular strand of queer theory that reiterates a fetishization of queer exceptionality
as always already liberatory or always already based on a transgressive difference. This fetishization in the
end elides the many ways that queer populations are also separated by multiple allegiances. Thus, aside from an automatic assumption of
“queer” as nonnormative, Puar asks how might this term be further complicated by historicizing queerness within a U.S. context? She argues
that layered
racial and national affiliations are most legible at moments when the nation-state needs to
mark some bodies as terrorist to make these subjects susceptible to methods of surveillance and
control. Homonationalism is exceedingly present as the nation starts to deploy more networked
technologies of policing justified by international attempts to thwart terrorism.
Solvency
US Key
US key to stopping queer negativity—increased trade and tourism allows for our
influences to bring about change in Latin America
Reding ‘3 (M.A., Department of Politics, Princeton University,M.P.A., Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs,
Princeton University, B.A., magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, Middlebury College, Sexual Orientation and Human Rights in the Americas,
December 2003, BS)
Despite the inherent conservatism of Latin American culture, change
is nevertheless emerging from international
contact in the context of globalization. Increased trade, tourism , the internet, and satellite television
are bringing to bear an infusion of European and North American influences, particularly from the United
States and from Spain. Not surprisingly, that influence is being felt most strongly in large metropolises – such as Mexico City, Buenos Aires,
São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro; in areas frequented by North American and European gay tourists – such as Acapulco,
Puerto Vallarta, and Cancún; and on the U.S.-Mexican border, especially in Tijuana. In all these places, a semantic change is
signaling new perspectives among youth. Anthropologist Marta Lamas describes that change among the homosexual
youth of Mexico City, where [columnist Carlos] Monsiváis finds that an overwhelming majority have reached a certain level of
acceptance of “normality” with the term gay. Monsiváis suggests that the semantic space of the word “gay”
is becoming transformed into the social space of tolerance: to become gay is to become part of an
international movement,
to go from a problematic position to an extravagant, yet “modern,” lifestyle.
Narratives
Narratives are the best way to connect to the life of the excluded.
Hammack & Cohler ‘11 (Phillip L. Hammack & Bertram J. Cohler, Hammack: Assistant Professor Department of Psychology University of California, Santa Cruz, Cohler: Ph.D.
from Harvard, and certification in Adult Psychoanalysis from the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, July 27, 2011, “Narrative, Identity, and the Politics of Exclusion: SocialChange and the Gay
and Lesbian Life Course,” http://www.academia.edu/898111/Narrative_identity_and_the_politics_of_exclusion_Social_change_and_the_gay_and_lesbian_life_course) JRW
The Politics of Storytelling: A growing movement across the social sciences has come to recognize the utility of a narrative approach to the study of
lives in context (for review, see Hammack 2008;Hammack and Pilecki2011; McLean2008). The central tenet of this approach is the idea that
humans make personal and social meaning by constructing stories that make experience sensible (Bruner
1990). That is, the sensory world is rendered comprehensible to the extent that individuals are able to
link events and perceptions in the form of a story. Through constructing narratives, individuals ascribe
meaning to their actions (Bruner 1990) and a sense of unity and coherence to their life experience (Cohler 1982;
McAdams1997). Narrative approaches are now increasingly utilized across a number of social science fields, including anthropology (e.g., Ochs and Capps2001),
sociology(e.g., Giddens1991), gerontology (e.g., Kenyon et al.2001), history (e.g., Suny2001), legal studies (e.g.,Bruner 2002), and psychology (e.g.,
McAdams2001).What
unites all of this work is the centrality accorded to language and discourse in the
framing of thought and experience (Hammack and Pilecki2011). As such, the process of narrative identity development is socially situated
(McLean et al.2007) and necessitates negotiation with dominant discourses and master narratives of identity in a given society (Fivush2010; Hammack
2008;Hammack and Cohler 2009; McLean2008). Key
to our view of narrative is thus the idea that the nature and content
of story-making is not arbitrary. Rather, it is contingent upon the structures of narrative to which
individuals are exposed (Sarbin1986). In the case of the life story, how one constructs a personal narrative is contingent upon the
“canonical forms ” (Bruner 1987) of autobiography available in a given cultural and political setting (see also Fivush2010). A growing body of
empirical research on narrative has begun to chart the contextual specificity of storytelling, and much of this work has emphasized the impact
of political, historical, and economic factors on narrative form and content (e.g., Gregg2007; Hammack 2009,2010a ,b,2011; McAdams2006).
Narratives are the best way to understand queer reaction to social advocacies.
Hammack & Cohler ‘11 (Phillip L. Hammack & Bertram J. Cohler, Hammack: Assistant Professor Department of Psychology University of California, Santa Cruz, Cohler: Ph.D.
from Harvard, and certification in Adult Psychoanalysis from the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, July 27, 2011, “Narrative, Identity, and the Politics of Exclusion: SocialChange and the Gay
and Lesbian Life Course,” http://www.academia.edu/898111/Narrative_identity_and_the_politics_of_exclusion_Social_change_and_the_gay_and_lesbian_life_course) JRW
(Sarbin1986). In the case of the life story, how one constructs a personal narrative is contingent upon the “canonical forms ” (Bruner 1987) of
autobiography available in a given cultural and political setting (see also Fivush2010). A growing body of empirical research on narrative has begun
to chart the contextual specificity of storytelling, and much of this work has emphasized the impact of political, historical, and economic factors
Narrative approaches to the study of
identity bring with them vital implications for public policy and social advocacy. Frost and Ouellette
(2004) argue that narrative and life story methods importantly reveal the meaning individuals make of
social positions and life course possibilities. They suggest that narrative data are critical because they
provide evidence that questions received assumptions about thought, feeling, and action. Psychologists, Frost and Ouellette (2004) argue, might use this evidence to advance social justice and equal rights
agendas. In sum, the narrative approach to social science research considers the way in which
individuals make meaning of the social and political surround through the construction of stories. This
process provides a critical social and psycho-logical function for coherence in time and place, and it is
characterized by confrontation of a dominant mode of story-making and storytelling (Hammack 2008). Individuon narrative form and content (e.g., Gregg2007; Hammack 2009,2010a ,b,2011; McAdams2006).
als whose thoughts, feelings, and actions do not conform toa received master narrative must construct a counter-narrative or a “ resistance ” narrative (Fivush2010)
In the case of same-sex attracted individuals, their experience of
desire and identity places them in a position of subordina-tion vis-à-vis a dominant discourse that
privileges hetero-sexuality (Foucault 1978; Rich1980). Research on the life course of same-sex attracted
individuals has increasingly come to recognize this point of counter-narration as the starting point for
narrative identity development (e.g.,Westrate and McLean2010).
that fulfills basic human needs for meaning and integrity.
Aff Answers
AT: Speaking For Others
The only way to solve their impacts is to use our language and rhetoric to reshape
authoritative structures
Mahaffey 07 (Cynthia Jo Mahaffey, Ph.D., Rhetoric and Writing, Bowling Green State University, Lesbian feminist history, lesbian/feminist rhetoric, LGBT teachers and students
in the college classroom, gay identity politics, lesbian writing, Empowerment pedagogies, lesbian teachers and marginalized student populations, 2007,
http://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/30930430/Empowerment_pedagogies.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIR6FSIMDFXPEERSA&Expires=1374824654&Signature=wjVC3zdpVCotCi
%2FhdLmPGF94thc%3D&response-content-disposition=inline,pgs 26-28, anuss)
Ellsworth (1994), writing from an educational foundations viewpoint, addresses important concerns for critical pedagogies. For example, how
does “speaking about” marginalized groups lead to “speaking for” them? (p. 105). How does that “speaking for,” in turn, affect the subject
relations between teachers and students, and the learnings that occur, both overt and covert? She uses the term “representation” to illuminate
the ways in which teacher and student subject positions are constructed through “curriculums, teaching practices, and school policies”
(Ellsworth, 1994, p.105). “Representation”—the “processes that people and social groups use to interpret and give meaning to the world, and
to the mediation of those meanings by and through language, stories, images, music, and other cultural products” (p.100)—as social
construct (rather than as essentialist) speaks to questions not only about privileged and marginalized
populations, but also to privileged and marginalized bodies of knowledge. McLaren (1996) posits the
transformative possibilities of pedagogy as a “form of social and cultural criticism” (p. 125). For McLaren (1996), the teacher’s subject
position is necessarily a politicized one: “the role of the educator [is] as an active agent of social
change” (p.125). Teachers must recognize that language practices—a central theme for those of us in composition studies—
implicate us in the oppressive discursive practices of our culture. Like hooks (1994), McLaren (1996) argues that if we
do not disrupt or challenge the ways in which these practices oppress students’ means of knowledge production, we also oppress. True
liberatory/critical (for he collapses the meanings), for McLaren (1996) is articulated through a “politics of difference,”
illuminated through dialogue (p.143).27 McLaren (1996) foregrounds the teacher’s subject position as
necessarily a politicized one, and politicized, as necessary to the transformative possibilities of
pedagogy as a “form of social and cultural criticism” (p. 125). For McLaren, “the role of the educator [is] as an active agent
of social change” (p. 125). Teachers must recognize that language practices—a central theme for those of us in composition studies—
implicate us in the oppressive discursive practices of our culture. If we do not disrupt or challenge the
ways in which these practices oppress students’ means of knowledge production, we also oppress. True
liberatory education, for McLaren, is articulated through a “politics of difference,” illuminated through
dialogue (p. 143). Giroux (1997) posits that schools are sites of contested power and ideology, which a critical
pedagogy should articulate and transform. He cites the work of Mikhail Bahktin (1981) and Paulo Freire (1970) as the
theoretical basis for a model “in which the notions of struggles, student voice and critical dialogue are central to
the goal of developing an emancipatory pedagogy” (132). Giroux (1997) also collapses these definitions. Subject
positions of both teacher and students are directly related to and mediated by the way language is
infected with power relations. Giroux would have us investigate how the power relations which oppress in our society are reflected
in our school practices (“discourse of production”), develop “critique capable of analyzing cultural forms as they are produced and used in
specific classrooms” (“discourse of textual analysis”), and examine how both students and teachers make meaning in our historical/cultural
contexts (“the discourse of lived cultures”) (1997, pp.134-140). Malinowitz (1995) critiques the empowerment pedagogy first espoused by
Freire: For people who are relatively powerless in society—such as workers, people of 28 color, and women—there can be a contradiction in
the idea that writing is a tool of empowerment (p. 679). Malinowitz argues that a writing process pedagogy, which does not seek to articulate
with students how inequitable power relations in our culture are reflected in our educational practices (and vice versa), does not empower.
Class differences between students and teachers often underscore this gap, particularly because these differences are not addressed in the
classroom setting. If there is no connection made between students as writers and students as people, with real lives, we teach writing
processes that put students in danger in the “outside” world, because we do not recognize the political implications of our pedagogy.
Necessary to making those connections, for Malinowitz, is the teacher’s relinquishing of authority, for “using
language to reshape authoritative structures in the world” (p. 682).
Only through speaking for others can one stop oppression- it is our very position of
privilege that necessitates our action
Silva 8 (Rogerio Silvestre da Silva, Master in Language and English from Universidade de Santa Catarina, FROM LOCAL TO GLOBAL: THE
TRAJECTORY OF DIONNE BRAND’S POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT, May 2008,
https://repositorio.ufsc.br/bitstream/handle/123456789/103219/252105.pdf?sequence=1, pgs 27-29, anuss)
By addressing many of society’s marginalized groups, particularly black people, and women, Brand’s appeal is far reaching. After all, her
discourse reflects her personal role in the history of diaspora, and deals with the post-colonial
situation of living in a world where being black are still not essentially an optimistic state. The poet affirms
that: I’m sick of writing history I’m sick of scribbling dates of particular tortures I’m feeling the boot/[…] I’m sick of hearing chuckles/ at my
discomfort/ I’m sick of doing literary work with north americans…(“For Stuart” 65). All the discomfort faced by the poet’s racialized position in
society corroborates at some point her immobilization—for instance, her sickness of “doing literary work/ with north americans.” This
observation of Brand’s political trajectory reveals her doublevoiced discourse, by tracing an extended
relation of identity—a confrontation between different cultures: Afro-American, Caribbean and Canadian cultures. This ambiguity
corroborates the complex act of dealing with the use of a language and its conventions by white discourse.
Brand’s voice invokes the black tradition which reminds us of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s concept of signifyin(g) 9 which refers to “things which are
never made explicit” (83)—a strategy of black figurative language use”(84). In No Language is Neutral, for instance Brand continues to write
about her experience in Grenada. In the section “Return,” the poet offers a tribute to Phyllis Coard, Minister of Women’s Affairs in the People’s
Revolutionary Government of Grenada. She writes: Phyllis, quite here, I hear from not even from your own hand in a note but from some
stranger how dragger it from a prison wall…(8)Phyllis, quite here, I hear how you so thin now, but still strong your voice refusing departures and
soldiers cursing…(9) Girl, how come is quite here I hear from you, sitting in these rooms, resenting this messenger, out here, I listen through an
upstart castigate…(10). Brand’s
necessity to be located ‘here’ in the Caribbean territory seems to
demonstrate the latent position to hear the different stories of oppressed people on the island. Phyllis
appears as a proper example: a woman who refuses “departures and soldiers cursing.” The portrait of otherness in the poem is
patterned after the imperialist’s power’s gaze. Brand’s statement reminds us of Linda Martin Alcoff’s “The Problem of
Speaking for Others” (1991) which focuses on the speaker’s location, by asking “if [Brand does not] speak for those less
privileged than [herself, is she] abandoning [her] political responsibility to speak out against
oppression, a responsibility incurred by the very fact of [her] privilege?’(100). Alcoff’s request is problematic due to
the fact that Brand does not flee from her origin and engagé position. She speaks for those less privileged than herself in a
position which she can give voice to the subaltern who “cannot fight it with dignity” (from “October 25th,
1983” 42).
AT: Lesbian K
Essentialism bad, it’s what allows heteronormativity and doesn’t recognize the fluidity
of sexuality
Ellison ’96 (Marvin Mahan. Erotic Justice: A Liberating Ethic of Sexuality, 1996. Pg. 33-34// LVL)
Sexual essentialism defines sex as a natural force, a fixed and unchanging essence that exists prior to
and independent of sociocultural arrangements. Sex is a property belonging to individuals. It resides
in their hormones, their psyches, or their genetic structures. Sex is "what comes naturally." Biological
imperatives determine the "normal" course of things, what feels right, and what fits natural
mandates. From an essentialist viewpoint, "sexuality has no history and no significant social
determinants."6 After all, essentialism asks, isn't sexuality what is most natural about humans and
least susceptible to change? Essentialists posit that when all goes according to plan, biological mandates
give rise to a natural expression of sexual desire. In keeping with such naturalistic assumptions,
heterosexuality is seen as natural and normal because it fits nature's anatomical design for malefemale sexual intercourse and because it has a biologically functional purpose in reproducing the
species. By this same logic, homosexuality is unnatural and abnormal. A troubling sleight of hand
takes place, however, in some subtle shifts in language from "natural" to "normal" and the implied
"normatire." As sociologist Michael Kimmel suggests, "That which is normativeconstructed and enforced by
society through socialization of the young and through social sanctions against deviantsbegins to appear as
normal, that which is designed by nature."7 The normative and the normal, however, in a statistical sense, are not
necessarily the same. The normative, a product of moral discernment and deliberation, reflects a communal
valuing of what is good, right, and fitting. Normative judgments, including those made about sexuality, are subject
to challenge and revision. What is may be far off from what ought to be. Essentialism falsely assumes that
sexuality is the same for everyone, everywhere. Sexuality, however, is a more complex reality, more
fluid and more amenable to cultural molding. In some cultures, people refrain from sex during the daytime
while in other cultures sex is prohibited at night. Some societies are not at all concerned about when sex takes
place but rather about where. Inside the house may be acceptable as long as it is not near the food supply, or sex
may be permitted only outdoors. Kissing is customary behavior in our culture, but some indigenous peoples in
South America consider mouth-to-mouth kissing an offensive, even barbaric practice. 8 Therefore, what sexuality
looks like and signifies varies from culture to culture. "Far from being the most natural element in social life, the
most resistant to cultural moulding," Weeks argues, "[sexuality] is perhaps one of the most susceptible to
organization."9
Gender realism imagines the world in white terms. Nothing is universally woman, and
saying something is so marginalizes women.
Mikkola ‘6 (Mari: Philosophy Department, University of Stirling, U.K. “Elizabeth Spelman, Gender Realism, and
Women,” Hypatia, 21.4, 2006.//LVL)
Uncle Theo holds a realist view of pebbles: he thinks that individual pebbles share the very same universal feature
of pebblehood that makes individual pebbles (as opposed to, say, sand). Feminist theorists (on Spelman's view)
hold a parallel realist view of gender: individual women share the very same universal feature of
womanness that makes individual women (as opposed to, say, men). Women qua women, then, have in
common the very same feature of womanness found in all and only women. Spelman went on to
argue that no such universal exists and thus that gender realism (of any kind) must be false. Spelman
maintained first that the gender realist view, which she took much of feminist theory to hold, had resulted
from white middle-class Western feminists falsely theorizing gender and gender oppression from the
perspective of "white solipsism," the tendency to "think, imagine, and speak as if whiteness describes the
world" (Adrienne Rich, quoted in Harris 1993, 356). As Spelman explained: If . . . I believe that the woman in
every woman is a woman just like me, and if I also assume that there is no difference between [End
Page 80] being white and being a woman, then seeing another woman 'as a woman' will involve seeing
her as fundamentally like the woman I am. In other words, the womanness underneath the Black
woman's skin is a white woman's, and deep down inside the Latina woman is an Anglo woman
waiting to burst through an obscuring cultural shroud. (1990, 13) In Spelman's view, white Western
middle-class feminists have assumed that women all share some single feature and have theorized
this feature as the one they possess. In doing so, they inadvertently created a notion of womanness
where the common nature underneath the distorting cultural conditions is "white, middle-class,
heterosexual, Christian, and able-bodied" (Minow 1993, 339). Furthermore, this false notion of womanness,
Spelman claimed, was "being passed off as a metaphysical truth" (1990, 186) thereby privileging some women
while marginalizing others. White middle-class Western feminists simply did not understand the importance of
race and class and by focusing on women merely as women (ignoring race and class differences) they
"conflate[d] the condition of one group of women with the condition of all" (1990, 3).
What makes a woman a woman is different for all women. All parts of our identities
make up who we are and can’t be separated out into things like a universal notion of
woman.
Mikkola ‘6 (Mari: Philosophy Department, University of Stirling, U.K. “Elizabeth Spelman, Gender Realism, and
Women,” Hypatia, 21.4, 2006.//LVL)
Spelman's discussion of white solipsism pointed to a further mistaken assumption that she believed feminist
theorists held: what makes one woman a woman is the same as what makes another woman a
woman. On the contrary, she claimed, "gender is constructed and defined in conjunction with elements
of identity such as race, class, ethnicity, and nationality" (1990, 175). As a result, what makes it true that
two women are women is not that they share some common nature we can separate from other
aspects of their identities: What makes it true that Angela and I are women is not some 'woman' substance that
is the same in each of us and interchangeable between us. Selves are not made up of separable units of
identity strung together to constitute a whole person. It is not as if there is a goddess somewhere who
made lots of little identical 'woman' units and then, in order to spruce up the world a bit for herself, decided to put
some of those units in black bodies, some in white bodies, some in the bodies of kitchen maids in seventeenth
century France, some in the bodies of English, Israeli, and Indian prime ministers. (1990, 158) Spelman argued that
those committed to gender realism had falsely assumed a woman's womanness is a neatly
distinguishable part of her identity separable from all other aspects of the woman's identity (such as
her racial, cultural, and class identities). This was because, Spelman thought, the realist picture of
gender falsely entails that all women qua women share the very same feature of womanness
regardless of any other features they possess (such as those invoked [End Page 81] by racial and class
identities). A woman's womanness (on this realist view) will remain unaffected by her race and class.
AT: Give Back The Land
Perm solves- Recognizing and allowing for the inclusion of queers or Two-Spirit people
functions primarily as a form of decolonization
Plaut and Kirk 12 (Shayna Plaut, doctoral candidate in Education Studies at the University of British Columbia, received her MA from
the University of Chicago and her BA from Antioch College, David Kirk, Ph.D., Sociology, University of Chicago, Associate Professor in the
Department of Sociology , Reclaiming the traditional role of TwoSpirited people in post-secondary and
community education, September 2012,
https://circle.ubc.ca/bitstream/handle/2429/43292/Plaut_S_et_al_Diversity_Inclusive.pdf?sequence=16, anuss)
Traditionally, Indigenous
communities sought harmony within the community in order to function. But
harmony did not mean homogeneity, it meant everyone had a role, everyone provided and everyone
was dependent. This ideal of harmony serves as the foundation for modern day understandings of “balance” including the components
necessary to ensure 10 successful health and education. This can be seen in the structure of certain governance practices such as those
explored by Jeanette Armstrong (2008) in her explanation of how decisions are made, for the good of all and with a special ear towards the
“minority voice” in Okanagan society. This can also be seen in Chief Noeliane Villebrun’s (2006) teachings of the importance of difference and
the embracing of change. Those
who were “different” were often seen as gifts simply because they could see
a variety of perspectives. Many people who work as academics, activists and advocates of TwoSpirited people point to this cultural foundation as an epistemological justification for the inclusion of
Two-Spirited people within traditional Indigenous cultural frameworks. (Lang,1997; Red Earth,1997) The acceptance, if not reverence,
of Two-Spirited people “fits” within the greater vision of how a healthy (read: balanced) society is supposed to function. Historically,
Two-Spirited people were responsible for particular social functions in their communities: Some of our
Elders teach us that Two-Spirited people have a special place in our communities. We believe that
Two-Spirited people have specific duties and responsibilities to perform. These include counseling, healing, being
pipe carriers, caring for children, visionaries and conducting oneself in accordance to our belief which states, ‘to respect all life.’ (Lang pp. 100103). 6 This point was further explored and supported by Marcel DuBois’ (2008) piece in, “We are Part of a Tradition,” Communities often
assign power to that which does not conform to the conventional. The
unconventional is often imbued with negative
power i.e.: sin, pollution, and taboo. In this way, cultures deal with the mysterious by removing them
from the unexplainable. The misunderstood is often viewed as a threat. However, some cultures deal
with the mysterious by removing them from the realm of threat and to sanctify them . The berdaches [sic]
role as a mediator was also between the physical and the spiritual. Aboriginal cultures 6 According to Elder Sandra Laframboise (personal
communication, November 5, 2009), two spirited people often had the role of caring for orphaned children in the community (specifically
referring to the Burrard Reserve) this point is also made by Leonard George (Tsleil-Waututh Nation) on the following clip: took what Western
cultures view as negative and made it positive. Aboriginal
people correctly perceived that Two-Spirited people have
spiritual powers and unique skills and insights. Whereas in Western culture such people have been
stigmatized and their powers wasted. (We are Part of a Tradition, 2008, p 26) From nations as geographically disparate as Zuni
to Crow to Shoni are descriptions of TwoSpirit individuals having strong mystical powers. In one account, raiding soldiers of a
rival tribe begin to attack a group of foraging women when they perceive that one of the women, is a
Two-Spirit. The invaders halt their attack and retreat after the Two-Spirit counters them with a stick,
“recognizing that the Two-Spirit will have great power which they will not be able to over-come.”
(Williams pp 31-43; We are Part of Tradition, 2008) By telling these stories, including the well known story of Running Eagle (Piegan) and
Woman Chief (Crow), it is evident that people who were publically recognized as Two Spirits “were legitimate on many levels in and among
their peoples and respected in their roles as such. It cannot be underestimated how important that (being accepted) was.” (Two-Spirit Women,
2008). This
process of Re-defining and Re-claiming the presence of Two-Spirited people and then
ReWriting this historically is a form of De-naturalizing and De-normalizing homophobia. Recognizing
the role of Two-Spirited people is a form of De-colonizing. An example of the fluidity of the roles, gender, identity of
Two-Spirited people, Lang (1997) explains “the mere fact that a male wears women’s clothing does not say
something about his behaviour, his gender status, or even his choice of partner…” (Lang, p. 89) Cross dressing
of Two-Spirited people was not always an indication of cross acting (taking on other gender roles and social status within the group). Often a
child’s gender was determined early on, depending on their inclination toward either masculine or
feminine activities. If a child was intersexed, it was often the child’s predisposition that determined
which (or both) genders were cultivated.7 Puberty often served as the “outing” – when various rituals were observed and other
forms of publicly disclosing gender, but as noted in Williams and Roscoe, there were also people who would continue to enact multiple genders
throughout their life.
Churchill’s alternative is one that ends in violence. However, this argument is a false
one. There are ways to create nonviolent coercion like the affirmative that allow for us
to stop these acts of tyranny and oppression in a more effective way without breeding
resentment
Feldheim 8 (Andrew is a professor of philosophy at Princeton University, “Reply to Ward Churchill”,
http://dspace.sunyconnect.suny.edu/handle/1951/43952)
In “Pacifism as Pathology: Notes on an American Psuedopraxis,” Ward Churchill condemns nonviolent
resistance as ineffectual unless accompanied by either violent resistance or the threat of such
violence. In his words, “The essential contradiction inherent to pacifist praxis is that, for survival itself,
any nonviolent confrontation of state power must ultimately depend either on the state refraining from
unleashing some real measure of its potential violence, or the active presence of some counterbalancing
violence of precisely the sort pacifism professes to reject as a political option” (Churchill, 1998, p. 44).
His contention is that all nonviolent resistance must necessarily result in one of two outcomes: “1.) To
render themselves perpetually ineffectual (and consequently unthreatening) in the face of state power.
In which case they will likely be largely ignored by the status quo and self-eliminating in terms of
revolutionary potential; or 2.) to make themselves a clear and apparent danger to the state, in which
case they are subject to physical liquidation by the status quo and are self-eliminating in terms of
revolutionary potential” (Churchill, 1998, p. 44). In other words, he claims that nonviolent resistance is
either ineffective or extinguished before becoming effective. I believe that Mr. Churchill has based his
argument on a false dichotomy. Between the extremes of the impotent and the vanquished lie those
movements, many of them nonviolent, who have achieved varying degrees of success on behalf of the
disenfranchised and oppressed. The purpose of this paper is to prove the viability of this largely
nonviolent middle ground and to highlight the flaws in Churchill’s argument. My argument will consist
of four parts. The first will propose an alternative to violent action in the form of nonviolent coercion.
The second will show how Gene Sharp (2002) makes use of such nonviolent methods to construct a
strategy designed to systematically undermine and, in some cases, disintegrate, tyrannical regimes.
The third highlights some of the reasons why violent resistance may be less effective than its
nonviolent counterpart. The fourth and final part shows that Mr. Churchill’s contentions, while
containing some elements of truth, have serious structural flaws that may cause one to question the
strength of his conclusions. Churchill seems to confuse nonviolent action with inaction. This is clearly
not the case. As Kurt Schock makes clear, “[N]onviolent action is active- it involves activity in the
collective pursuit of social or political objectives - and it is non-violent - it does not involve physical
force or the threat of physical force against human beings” (Schock, 2005, p. 705). And herein lies the
only limitation. All other forms of coercion, except physical violence, remain as viable options for the
nonviolent proponent of social change. As will be outlined in the next section, the concerted application
of economic and social pressure against repressive political systems can be of enormous value in
achieving a greater share of justice for the oppressed, without resorting to physical violence or the
threat of such violence.
Engaging Native Philosophy with queer theory helps stop the heteronormative framing
of their communities as well-only a permutation solves the root cause of violence in the
native American society as well
Smith 10 (Andrea Smith teaches in media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside, “Queer Theory and Native Studies:
The Heteronormativity of Settler colonialism”, https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v016/16.12.smith.html#back)
The Native studies and queer theorist Chris Finley challenges Native studies scholars to integrate queer
theory into their work. She notes that while some scholars discuss the status of gender nonnormative
peoples within precolonial Native communities, virtually no scholars engage queer theory. This absence
contributes to a heteronormative framing of Native communities. "It is time to bring 'sexy back' to
Native Studies and quit pretending we are boring, pure and Victorian," Finley writes. "We are alive,
we are sexy, and some Natives are queer."1 Furthermore, she notes, while there are emerging feminist
and decolonizing analyses within Native studies that point to the gendered nature of colonialism, it is
necessary to extend this analysis to examine how colonialism also queers Native peoples. Thus her
charge goes beyond representing queer peoples within Native studies (an important project) and calls
on all scholars to queer the analytics of settler colonialism. Qwo-Li Driskill (this issue) further calls for
developing a "two-spirit" critique that remains in conversation with, while also critically interrogating,
queer and queer of color critique.
Queer theory has made a critical intervention in LGBT studies by moving past simple identity politics
to interrogate the logics of heteronormativity. According to Michael Warner, "The preference for
'queer' represents, among other things, an aggressive impulse of generalization; it rejects a
minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation in favor of a more thorough
resistance to regimes of the normal."2 Native studies, however, has frequently intersected more with
LGBT studies than with queer theory in that it has tended to focus on the status of "two spirit"
peoples within Native communities.3 While this scholarship [End Page 41] is critically important, I argue
that Native studies additionally has more to contribute to queer studies by unsettling settler colonialism.
At the same time, while queer theory does focus on normalizing logics, even those engaged in queer of
color critique generally neglect the normalizing logics of settler colonialism, particularly within the U.S.
context. Queer theory and Native studies often do not intersect because Native studies is generally
ethnographically entrapped within the project of studying Natives. In her groundbreaking work
Toward a Global Idea of Race, Denise Ferreira da Silva argues that the Western subject is fundamentally
constituted through race.4 Through her exhaustive account of Enlightenment theory, Silva demonstrates
that the post-Enlightenment version of the subject as self-determined exists by situating itself against
"affectable others" who are subject to natural conditions as well as to the self-determined power of the
Western subject. The central anxiety with which the Western subject struggles is that it is, in fact, not
self-determining. The Western subject differentiates itself from conditions of "affectability" by
separating from affectable others —this separation being a fundamentally racial one. The Western
subject is universal, while the racialized subject is particular, but aspires to be universal.
The affirmative is a prerequisite-heteronormativity is the root cause of violence and
oppression. The silencing of queers in Cuba shows the negative effects of colonialism
and engaging in our method of counterfactual reading has the potential to challenge
these norms of society elsewhere like in the native American culture
Smith 10 (Andrea Smith teaches in media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside, “Queer Theory and Native Studies:
The Heteronormativity of Settler colonialism”, https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v016/16.12.smith.html#back)
Queer theory provides a helpful starting point for enabling Native studies to escape its position of
ethnographic entrapment within the academy. As Warner contends: "Nervous over the prospect of a
well-sanctioned and compartmentalized academic version of 'lesbian and gay studies,' people want to
make theory queer, not just have theory about queers. For both academics and activists, 'queer' gets a
critical edge by defining itself against the normal rather than the heterosexual, and normal includes
normal business in the academy."12 A queering of Native studies might mean that it would move
beyond studying Native communities through the lens of religious studies, anthropology, history, or
other normalizing disciplines. Native studies would also provide the framework for interrogating and
analyzing both normalizing logics within disciplinary formations as well as academic institutions
themselves. Thus Native studies can be informed by queer theory's turn toward subjectless critique.13
As the coeditors of the Social Text special issue "What's Queer about Queer Studies Now?" state: "What
might be called the 'subjectless' critique of queer studies disallows any positing of a proper subject of or
object for the field by insisting that queer has no fixed political referent. . . . A subjectless critique
establishes . . . a focus on a 'wide field of normalization' as the site of social violence."14 A subjectless
critique can help Native studies (as well as ethnic studies) escape the ethnographic entrapment by which
Native peoples are rendered simply as objects of intellectual study and instead can foreground settler
colonialism as a key logic that governs the United States today. A subjectless critique helps demonstrate
that Native studies is an intellectual project that has broad applicability not only for Native peoples but
for everyone. It also requires us to challenge the normalizing logics of academia rather than simply
articulate a politics of indigenous inclusion within the colonial academy.
Without criticizing the biopolitical control over queers in Cuba first, we can’t solve the
impacts of the K (reword this tag maybe?)
Smith 10 (Andrea Smith teaches in media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside, “Queer Theory and Native Studies:
The Heteronormativity of Settler colonialism”, https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v016/16.12.smith.html#back)
As Jasbir Puar notes, this articulation of queerness as "freedom from norms" actually relies on a
genocidal logic of biopower that separates those who should live from those who must die.33 That is,
for the queer subject to live under Edelman's analysis, it must be freed from genealogical, primitivist
subjects who are hopelessly tied to reproductive futures. This impulse is similar to Warner's
juxtaposition of a transgressive queer subject with the racialized subject trapped within identity and
ethnic organization. Puar terms this tendency a "sexual exceptionalism" that mirrors U.S.
exceptionalism, in which a white queer subject reinscribes a U.S. homonormativity by positioning
himself/herself in an imperialist relationship to those ethnic subjects deemed unable to transgress.
"Queerness has its own exceptionalist desires: exceptionalism is a founding impulse. . . . 'Freedom from
norms' resonates with liberal humanism's authorization of the fully self-possessed speaking subject,
untethered by hegemony or false consciousness, enabled by the life/stylization offerings of capitalism,
rationally choosing modern individualism over the ensnaring bonds of family."34 If we build on Silva's
previously described analysis, we can see that the Native queer or the queer of color then becomes
situated at the "horizon of death" within a "no futures" queer theory: such individuals must free
themselves from their Native identity and community to become fully self-determined subjects. They
must forgo national self-determination for individual self-determination; they cannot have both.
Racialized subjects trapped within primitive and pathological communities must give way to modern
queer subjects. Puar's analysis of biopower suggests that modern white queer subjects can live only if
racialized subjects trapped in primitive and unenlightened cultures pass away. For instance, some
LGBT organizations (as well as feminist organizations) supported the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan
because the bombing would supposedly free queer people from the Taliban. Apparently, throwing
bombs on people frees them. But of course, it was not actually queer people in Afghanistan who were
the real subject of liberation —rather, modern queer subjects in the United States could live only if a
sexually savage Afghanistan were eliminated. To quote Puar: "Queerness as automatically and
inherently transgressive enacts specific forms of disciplining and control, erecting celebratory queer
liberal subjects folded into life (queerness as subject) against the sexually pathological and defiant
populations targeted for death (queerness as population)."35 Meanwhile, as Puar, Silva, and Povinelli
imply, the white queer subject, despite its disavowals, is firmly rooted in a past, present, and future
structured by the logics of white supremacy —it is as much complicit in, as it is transgressive of, the
status quo. Rather than disavow traditions and futures, it may be more politically efficacious to
engage them critically.
The affirmative is the first step in trying to defeat heteronormativity in every instance
Morgensen 10 (Scott is an ethnographer and historian of social movement, “Settler HomonationaliSm theorizing Settler Colonialism
within Queer modernities”,http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/spaces-between-us)
What would it mean for U.S. queers to confront their settler formation? What would resistance to
settler homonationalism look like? While I cannot foresee an end to these questions, I begin with the
deceptively simple argument that queers must denaturalize settler colonialism in all its forms. Queers
naturalize settler colonial- ism whenever conquest and the displacement of Native peoples are ignored
or appear inevitable. They also do so whenever they produce sexuality and gender from the desires of
settler subjects for a home on Native land and relationship to Native histories and culture. Settler
colonialism thus must be challenged not only in social and political spaces but also in the definition or
experience of subjectiv- ity. For instance, non-Natives may think that as queer subjects, they inherit
ties to Native histories of gender or sexual diversity that grant them a kind of kinship with Native
peoples. Identifying this way, non-Native queers may think that the terrors of sexual colonization
visited on Native peoples were caused by persons unrelated to them or that those same violences
were visited on themselves, either of which may obscure their specific non-Native relation to Native
peoples and settler colo- nialism. At its extreme, non-Native queer longing for Native histories of
sexuality or gender can seem to invite alliance when it performs a racial or national “passing” that
appropriates Native culture in order to indigenize non-Native queers. Native queer and Two-Spirit
activists critique such practices, including offers of alliance that try to absorb them or Native histories
into non-Native politics. While Two-Spirit activists have sought recognition in U.S. queer spaces, they
have done so less to join them than to hold them responsible to the distinctions of Native histories,
which remind non-Natives that colonization continues to shape contem- porary life.
Queering sexuality is successfully creating an open space for us to discuss other
discourses and relationships
Morgensen 10 (Scott is an ethnographer and historian of social movement, “Settler HomonationaliSm theorizing Settler Colonialism
within Queer modernities”,http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/spaces-between-us)
Queer scholarship on race and sexuality has been effective at marking colonial relations and discourses
and inviting the study of settlement. Scholars reveal that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, sexual sciences and civil institutions distinguished primitive from civilized sexuality in order to
define queer margins for sexual normality. Eithne Luibhéid and Roderick Fer- guson explain how Asian
immigrants and conquered Mexicans after the mid- nineteenth century, and African Americans during
slavery and the Jim Crow society, were produced as racial and sexual populations for national
regulation.42 Queers of color in such contexts were targeted for control, but as emblems of entire racial
populations to be queered as the primitive margins of national whiteness and its civilizational
sexuality.43 In turn, Jennifer Terry and George Chauncey, among others, explain how sexual sciences
classified perversions by document- ing white subjects as degenerates who had regressed to prior stages
of racial evo- lution.44 In early activism, white sexual minorities reversed discourse on sexual primitivity
in order to embrace it as a nature deserving recognition by modern citizenship. In the United States,
Harry Hay organized the Mattachine Society by referencing stories of berdache as the primitive nature
of sexual minorities and as a primitive model of acceptance that modern societies could emulate —
themes that were sustained in homophile and gay and lesbian civil rights activism.45
Aff solves the K
Morgensen 10 (Scott is an ethnographer and historian of social movement, “Settler HomonationaliSm theorizing Settler Colonialism
within Queer modernities”,http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/spaces-between-us)
Feminist and queer criticism in Native studies already explains terror as key to the sexual colonization
of Native peoples.7 Andrea Smith argues that “it has been through sexual violence and through the
imposition of European gender rela- tionships on Native communities that Europeans were able to
colonize Native peo- ples,” in a process that included marking Native people “by their sexual perversity” as queer to colonial regimes.8 Bethany Schneider affirms that “Indian hating and queer hating
form a powerful pair of pistons in the history of white coloniza- tion of the Americas.”9 In part, Native
peoples were marked as queer by projecting fears of sodomy on them that justified terrorizing
violence.10 At the same time, diverse modes of embodiment and desire in Native societies challenged
colonial beliefs about sexual nature and were targeted for control. As Smith argues, given that “U.S.
empire has always been reified by enforced heterosexuality and binary gender systems” while many
Native societies “had multiple genders and people did not fit rigidly into particular gender categories .
. . it is not surprising that the first peoples targeted for destruction in Native communities were those
who did not neatly fit into western gender categories.”11 And, as Schneider concludes, “the tendency or
tactic of Europeans to see sodomy everywhere in the so-called New World enabled a devastating twofisted excuse for murderous violence and a complicated homoerotics of genocide.”12 Such readings of
histories of terror- izing violence in Native studies are joined by arguments about how forms of violence acted as modes of social control in the new colonial moral order. Schneider notes that Mark
Rifkin’s work shows how “policies aimed at assimilating Indi- ans through the destruction of kinship
structures figured Indian cultures as other than heteronormative in order to reinvent and assimilate
them as straight, private- property-owning, married citizens.”13 Rifkin pursues this claim by arguing that
scholars investigate
Queer activism allows for inclusion and the best form of decolonization- any resistance
is shaped by colonialism, only the affirmative can avoid this through queer theory
Smith 13 (Andrea Smith, an intellectual, feminist, and anti-violence activist. Smith's work focuses on issues of violence against women of
color and their communities, specifically Native American women, formerly an assistant professor of American Culture and Women's Studies at
the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Smith is currently an associate professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at
the University of California, Riverside, Review of: Spaces Between Us: Queer settler colonialism and indigenous decolonization, Summer 2013,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_history/v014/14.2.smith.html, anuss)
As Morgensen notes, it
would be unfair to assume that the queer activists implicated in Native
appropriation are simply die-hard colonialists who have no concern at all for Native peoples. First, many
of these groups have in fact worked with Native activists and have changed their politics and practice
based on this engagement. Second, argues Morgensen, Native queer activists have also redeployed these
representations within queer circles for their own purposes. For instance, in his recounting of the evolution of the term
"two spirit," Morgensen argues that the colonial construct of the "berdache" as a transhistorical, transtribal
figure of indigenous non-heterornormativity did provide a place for some Native queer activists to
question heternormativity within contemporary Native communities brought about by Christian
colonization. However, Native activists redeployed this concept through the term "two-spirit." It could be argued that this term is as
equally essentializing and pantribal as is the term "berdache." But, contends Morgensen, the purpose of this term is not to locate a prehistorical
figure. Rather it
is a political identifier within the contemporary Native communities that recognizes the
impact of settler colonialism on Indigenous sexualities and refuses the requirement to locate pure,
pre-colonial Native sexual/gender identities. It is an "indigenous epistemology that methodologically
performs decolonization " (83). Furthermore, by not representing these groups as completely non-relational to contemporary Native
communities, Morgensen suggests that it becomes possible to imagine new relationships. While he does not elaborate on what
these relationships might be, he suggests that they may be based on 1) settler subjectivities
questioning their entitlement to land within Native studies; and 2) engagement with Native critical
theorists who question the heteronormative logics of nation-state forms of belonging and imagine
different forms of belonging they do not rely on land commodification. "In the space that opens up
when non-Natives release attachments to place, while Native people contest how place might be
known or controlled, a possibility of allied work for decolonization grows" (227). Within his discussion of settler
sexualities, Morgensen notes that analyses of settler colonialism must be complicated by analyses of White supremacy. He points to critics such
as Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright who contend that categorizing all non-Native peoples as settlers generally erases colonialism's
relationship to White supremacy. Morgensen engages this relationship to some extent. That is, he notes that queer activists desire racial
inclusivity with Native peoples. However, he argues that calls
for diversity rely on the assumption that the community
"possesses a multiracial integrity that racism only interrupts" (109). Further, the framework of racial
diversity tends to presume the givenness of settler colonialism by relegating Native peoples to the
status of racial minorities who should be "included" in the body politic. Morgensen also critiques the work of
non-Native queer scholars of color (in particular Gloria Anzaldua) for often relying on the same primitivizing notions of Indigeniety as do White
queer scholars and activists. At the same time, Morgensen states that this
project is not to answer the question "who is
the settler" but to focus on the social processes that produce settler subjectivities. In this regard, it
would be helpful to also analyze how Native peoples have also been shaped by settler subjectivities.
Perhaps in his effort to center Native theorists as those who make critical interventions in denaturalizing settler colonialism, he does not
critique their work to the extent that he does other scholars and activists. This can
have the effect of inadvertently
refocusing the book back on the question of who is the settler and who is the privileged Native
speaker who is seemingly unimpacted by settler colonialism. Yet, it is clear that Morgensen is engaging Native scholars
and activists who are doing internal critiques of Native peoples' investment in heteronormative settlement, such as Taiaiake Alfred, Jennifer
Denetdale, Glen Coulthard, Chris Finley, Qwo-Li Driskill and many others. He further states that the
Native theorists whom he
regards as liberatory are those who "denaturalize settler heteropatrarichy... while investing Native
decolonization in feminist and queer social change" (26). Thus presumably Morgensen's framework could also be applied
within Native studies and activist circles because his work implies that all of our resistance struggles are not simply marred
by White supremacy and settler colonialism, they are fundamentally shaped by them.
Negative
Case
Identity Politics Bad
Identity politics necessitate exclusion
Brown, 1993 (Wendy, Professor of Political Science at University California, “Wounded Attachments” Political Theory, Vol. 21, No. 3,
August 1993, JSTOR, BS)
Contemporary politicized identity contests the terms of liberal discourse insofar as it challenges liberalism's universal "we" as a strategic fiction
of historically hegemonic groups and asserts liberalism's "I" as social-both relational and constructed by power-rather than contingent, private,
or autarkic. Yet it reiterates the terms of liberal discourse insofar as it posits a sovereign and unified "I" that is disenfranchised by an exclusive
"we." Indeed, I have suggested that politicized
identity emerges and obtains its unifying coherence through the
politicization of exclusion from an ostensible universal, as a protest against exclusion, a protest
premised on the fiction of an inclusive/universal community, a protest that reinstalls the humanist
ideal-and a specific white, middle-class, masculinist expression of this ideal-insofar as it premises itself
on exclusion from it. Put the other way around, politicized identities generated out of liberal, disciplinary
societies, insofar as they are premised on exclusion from a universal ideal, require that ideal, as well
as their exclusion from it, for their own perpetuity as identities. 3 Politicized identity is also potentially reiterative of
regulatory, disciplinary society in its configuration of a disciplinary subject. It is both produced by and potentially accelerates the production of
that aspect of disciplinary society that "ceaselessly characterizes, classifies, and specializes," that works through "surveillance, continuous
registration, perpetual assessment, and through a social machinery "that is both immense and minute." 14 A recent example from the world of
local politics makes clear politicized identity's imbrication in disciplinary power, as well as the way in which, as Foucault reminds us, disciplinary
power "infiltrates" rather than replaces liberal juridical modalities.'5 Last year, the
city council of my town reviewed an
ordinance, devised and promulgated by a broad coalition of identity-based political groups, which
aimed to ban discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations on the basis of
"sexual orientation, trans-sexuality, age, height, weight, personal appearance, physical characteristics,
race, color, creed, religion, national origin, ancestry, disability, marital status, sex or gender."'6 Here is
a perfect instance of the universal juridical idea of liberalism and the normalizing principle of
disciplinary regimes conjoined and taken up within the discourse of politicized identity. This
ordinance-variously called the "purple hair ordinance" or the "ugly ordinance" by national news
media-aims to count every difference as no difference, as part of a seamless whole, but also to count
every potentially subversive rejection of culturally enforced norms as themselves normal, as
normalizable, and as normativizable through law. Indeed, through the definitional, procedural, and remedies section of this
ordinance (e.g., "sexual orientation shall mean known or assumed homosexuality, heterosexuality, or bisexuality"), persons are reduced
to observable social attributes and practices; these are defined empirically, positivistically, as if their
existence were intrinsic and factual, rather than effects of discursive and institutional power; and these
positivist definitions of persons as their attributes and practices are written into law, ensuring that persons describable according to them will
now become regulated through them. Bentham couldn't have done it better. Indeed, here is a perfect instance of how the language of
unfreedom, how articulation in language, in the context of liberal and disciplinary discourse, becomes a vehicle of subordination through
individualization, normalization, and regulation, even as it strives to produce visibility and acceptance. Here, also, is a perfect instance of the
way in which differences
that are the effects of social power are neutralized through their articulation as
attributes and their circulation through liberal administrative discourse: what do we make of a document that
renders as juridical equivalents the denial of employment to an African American, an obese man, and a white middle-class youth festooned
with tattoos and fuschia hair?
Capitalism K
Link - Identity Politics
Identity Politics and Gender Movements Only Strengthen the System and Turn the
Focus Away From Class Struggle
Herod 4 James Herod, 2004, Getting Free, Section 5, “Strategies That Have Failed”,
http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/GetFre/05.htm AKS
The so-called New Social Movements, based on gender, racial, sexual, or ethnic identities, cannot destroy
capitalism. They haven’t even tried. Except for a tiny fringe of radicals in each of them, they have been trying to get into the
system, not overthrow it. This is true for women, black, homosexual, and ethnic (including �native�) identities, as well as all the other identities —
old people, the handicapped, welfare mothers, and so forth. Nothing has derailed the anti-capitalist struggle during the past quarter century so thoroughly as have
these movements. Sometimes it seems that identity politics is all that is left of the left.
Identity politics has simply swamped class
politics . The mainstream versions of these movements (the ones fighting to get into the system rather than overthrow it) have
given capitalists a chance to do a little fine tooling, by eliminating tensions here and there, and by including token representatives of the
excluded groups. Many of the demands of these movements can be easily accommodated. Capitalists can live with boards of directors
exhibiting ethnic, gender, and racial diversity, as long as all the board members are pro-capitalist. Capitalists can easily accept a rainbow
cabinet as long as the cabinet is pushing the corporate agenda. So mainstream identity politics has not threatened capitalism
at all . These have been liberal movements, and have sought only to reform the system, not abolish it.
The radical wings of the new social movements however are rather more subversive. These militants realized that it was necessary to attack the whole social order
in order to uproot racism and sexism — problems which could not be overcome under capitalism, since they are an integral part of capitalism .
There is no
denying the evils of racism, sexism, and nationalism, which are major structural supports to ruling
class control. These militants have done whatever they could to highlight, analyze, and ameliorate these evils. Unfortunately, for the most part, their voices
have been lost in all the clamor for admittance to the system by the majorities in their movements. There have been gains of course. The women's movement has
forever changed the world's consciousness about gender. Unpaid housework has been recognized as a key ingredient in the wage-slave system. Reproduction, as
well as production, has been included in our analysis of the system. Identity
politics in general has underscored just how many
people are excluded, and exposed gaps in previous revolutionary strategies. Also, the demand for real racial and
gender equality is itself inherently revolutionary, in that the demand cannot be met by capitalists, given that racial and gender discrimination are two of the key
structural mechanisms for keeping the wage bill low, and thus making profits possible. Nevertheless, I'm convinced that unless we can return to class politics, and
integrate the fights for gender, racial, sexual, and age equality into the class struggle, we will continue to flounder.
A focus on identity politics is bad—takes energy away from the fight against capitalism
Zizek 99 (Slavoj, Ph.D., Senior researcher @ Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, October 28,
http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/VLE/DATA/CSEARCH/MODULES/CS/2006/03/0184/_.htm, BS)
And, mutatis mutandis, the
same goes for today’s capitalist who still clings to some particular cultural
heritage, identifying it as the secret source of his success—Japanese executives participating in tea
ceremonies or obeying the bushido code—of for the inverse case of the Western journalist in search of the particular secret of
the Japanese success: this very reference to a particular cultural formula is a screen for the universal
anonymity of Capital. The true horror does not reside in the particular content hidden beneath the
universality of global Capital, but rather in the fact that Capital is effectively an anonymous global
machine blindly running its course, that there is effectively no particular secret agent who animates it.
The horror is not the (particular living) ghost in the (dead universal) machine, but the (dead universal) machine in the very heart of each
(particular living) ghost. The conclusion to be drawn is thus that the problematic of multiculturalism—they hybrid coexistence of diverse
cultural life-worlds—that imposes itself today is the form of appearance of its opposite, of the massive presence of capitalism as universal
world system: it bears witness to the unprecedented homogenization of the contemporary world. It is effectively as if, since
the horizon
of social imagination no longer allows us to entertain the idea of an eventual demise of capitalism—
since, as we might put it, everybody silently accepts that capitalism is here to stay—critical energy has found a substitute
outlet in fighting for cultural differences, which leave the basic homogeneity of the capitalist world
system intact. So we are fighting our PC battles for the rights of ethnic minorities, of gays and
lesbians, of different lifestyles and so on, while capitalism pursues its triumphant march—and today’s
critical theory, in the guise of ‘cultural studies’, is doing the ultimate service to the unrestrained
development of capitalism by actively participating in the ideological effort to render its massive
presence invisible: in a typical postmodern ‘cultural criticism’, the very mention of capitalism as world system tends to give rise to the
accusation of ;essentialism’, ‘fundamentalism’ and other crimes.
Link – Queer Theory
Queer theory succeeds in promoting the very goals of global capitalism that work against the
formation of communities or provide the means to destroy those that already exist
Kirsch 6 (Max, PhD Florida Atlantic University, “Queer Theory, Late Capitalism and Internalized Homophobia,” Journal of Homosexuality,
Harrington Park Press, Vol. 52, No. ½, 2006, pp. 19-45) JRW
Jameson has proposed that the concept of alienation in late capitalism has been replaced with fragmentation
(1991, p.14). Fragmentation highlights the it also becomes more abstract: What we must now ask ourselves is whether it is precisely this
semi-autonomy of the cultural sphere that has been destroyed by the logic of late capitalism. Yet to argue that culture is today no longer
endowed with the relative autonomy is once enjoyed as one level among others in earlier moments of capitalism (let alone in precapitalist
societies) is not necessarily to imply its disappearance or extinction. Quite the contrary; we must go on to affirm that the autonomous
sphere of culture throughout the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life–from economic value and state power to
practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself–can be said to have become ‘cultural’ in some original and yet untheorized sense.
This proposition is, however, substantially quite consistent with the previous diagnosis of a society of the image or simulacrum and a
transformation of the “real” into so many pseudoevents. (Jameson, 1991, p. 48) The fragmentation of social life repeats itself
in the proposal that sexuality and gender are separate and autonomous from bureaucratic state
organization. If, as in Jameson’s terms, differences can be equated, then this should not pose a problem for the mobilization of
resistance to inequality. However, as postmodernist and poststructuralist writers assume a position that this
equation is impossible and undesirable, then the dominant modes of power will prevail without analysis or
opposition. The danger, of course, is that while we concentrate on decentering identity, we succeed in promoting
the very goals of global capitalism that work against the formation of communities or provide the means to
destroy those that already exist, and with them, any hope for political action. For those who are not included in
traditional sources of community building–in particular, kinship based groupings–the building of an “affectional community . . . must be as
much a part of our political movement as are campaigns for civil rights” (Weeks, 1985, p. 176). This building of communities
requires identification. If we cannot recognize traits that form the bases of our relationships with others, how then can communities
be built? The preoccupation of Lyotard and Foucault, as examples, with the overwhelming power of “master
narratives,” posits a conclusion that emphasizes individual resistance and that ironically, ends up reinforcing
the “narrative” itself.
Queer social movement derail anticapitalist movements and empower capitalism
Herod ‘7 (James, Columbia U graduate and political activist, “Getting Free” Pg. 33) JRW
The so-called new
social movements, based on gender, racial, sexual, or ethnic identities, cannot destroy
capitalism. In general, they haven’t even tried. Except for a tiny fringe of radicals in each of them, they have been attempting
to get into the system, not overthrow it. This is true for women, blacks, homosexuals, and ethnic (including
Anative) groups, as well as many other identities old people, people with disabilities, mothers on welfare, and so forth. Nothing has
derailed the anticapitalist struggle during the past quarter century so thoroughly as have these
movements. Sometimes it seems that identity politics is all that remains of the left. Identity politics
has simply swamped class politics. The mainstream versions of these movements (the ones fighting to
get into the system rather than overthrow it) have given capitalists a chance to do a little fine-tuning
by eliminating tensions here and there, and by including token representatives of the excluded
groups. Many of the demands of these movements can be easily accommodated. Capitalists can live with boards of directors exhibiting
ethnic, gender, and racial diversity as long as all the board members are procapitalist. Capitalists can easily accept a rainbow
cabinet as long as the cabinet is pushing the corporate agenda. So mainstream identity politics has not
threatened capitalism at all. The radical wings of the new social movements, however, are rather more subversive. These militants
realized that it was necessary to attack the whole social order in order to uproot racism and sexism problems that could not be overcome under
capitalism since they are an integral part of it. There is no denying the evils of racism, sexism, and nationalism, which are major structural
supports to ruling-class control. These militants have done whatever they could to highlight, analyze, and ameliorate these evils. Unfortunately,
for the most part, their voices have been lost in all the clamor for admittance to the system by the majorities in their own movements.
Queerness has become a commodity of capitalism and Aff promotion of queerness
makes the ballot a commodity making us slip farther into the thought of capitalism.
Case ‘94 (Sue-Ellen, Professor and Chair of Critical Studies in the Theater Department of UCLA, “The Domain-Matrix”, p. 36-38) JRW
Lesbian feminism presumed that capitalism was a patriarchal form of economic practice, deployed against women. Therefore, lesbian feminist events and
businesses were organized collectively in order to avoid replicating patriarchal structures in commerce among women. The majority of the collectives had closed
down by the late 1980s. If the East bloc fell to a successful take-over by global capitalism, lesbian food collectives, bookstore collectives, living collectives, and
theater collectives fell to traditional capitalist practices. The subject was multiple—not in its singular oscillation among multiple positions, but in its very
composition across different individuals. The identity "lesbian feminist" was one that groups sought to produce. As
socialism waned,
postmodern individualism gained ground. Sexual practice was thus extracted from its association with
other social and economic practices. By the 1990s, "postmodern lesbian" or queer articles trace the
way in which capitalist projects have appropriated such abandoned territories for their own uses. For
example, Sasha Torres's sense of the "prime time les-bian," and Danae Clark's "Commodity
Lesbianism" describe how the media and market make use of the "sign" lesbians to sell their
products. While I would contend that this commodification of what were once collective practices and market uses of the term "lesbian" is the
result of the queer retreat, some of the postmodern protectors would, as Robyn Wiegman has done,
fault identity politics for it, arguing that "it is along the modernist axis of self-assertion and visibility
that both a lesbian consumer market and a marketed commodity repeatedly named lesbian has been
achieved'' (10). Yet, in the face of such high capitalist aggressivity, these authors can offer only
celebrations of commodification or, as noted in the section "Queer Performativity," isolated strategies
of subversion. In particular, "subversive shopping" has been formulated as an apt action within the
commodified realm. It is difficult to perceive, finally, what is subversive in buying the version of the
sign "lesbian" that ad campaigns have developed. (For a fuller description of the structures of commodification of "lesbian," see
"Slipping into Subculture" and "`Subversive' Shopping" in "Bringing Home the Meat.") Thus, the critique of the commodified lesbian,
severed from any program for change—in isolation—actually promotes commodification. The evacuation of
the outside referent has effectively coupled the body and the materialist critique only to give them over to, as Reinelt has pointed out, the hegemonic practices that
endure in the codes. The new "queer dyke" thus appears as commodity fetishist—the dildoed dyke who makes of herself an ad as politics. What remains is mapping
the exact route of the retreat through deconstructive critiques. Meanwhile, the collusion with global capitalist uses of such strategies, as noted by Hennessy above,
or of national agendas, still remains untested. As
the critique withdraws from notions of communities or subcultures
into the sign "lesbian" slipping among market strategies, it often becomes what it seeks to critique.
From the beginning arguments around "performativity" and "queer" on through the matrix, we can begin to perceive a critical axis forming along the abandonment
of the term "lesbian" for "queer," in its class operations, and in its imperialist uses, along with the evacuation of the body, as a subject-suspect. Within the
poststructuralist critique of those two terms, textualization and inscription are deployed to cleanse "lesbian" and "body" of their material(ist) accretions. "Queer
performativity" thus runs the "race into theory" away from the site of material interventions. Sagri Dhairyam, in "Racing the Lesbian, Dodging White Critics," states
the case succinctly: The
rubric of queer theory, which couples sexuality and theory and collapses lesbian and
gay sexualities, tends to effect a slippage of body into mind: the monstrously feminized body's sensual
evocations of smell, fluid, and hidden vaginal spaces with which the name resonates are cleansed,
desexualized into a "queerness" where the body yields to intellect, and a spectrum of sexualities
again denies the lesbian center stage. (30)
Link – Difference
Constantly wanting the “New” and the “Strange” promotes the hostility of capitalism.
Frank and Weiland ‘97 (Thomas and Matt, “Why Johnny Can’t Dissent,” Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from The Baffler, The
Baffler Literary Magazine, W. W. Norton & Company http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/f/frank-dissent.html) JRW
Nobody wants you to think they're serious today, least of all Time Warner. On the contrary: the Culture Trust is now our leader in the
Ginsbergian search for kicks upon kicks. Corporate America is not an oppressor but a sponsor of fun, provider of lifestyle accoutrements,
facilitator of carnival, our slang-speaking partner in the quest for that ever-more apocalyptic orgasm. The countercultural
idea has
become capitalist orthodoxy, its hunger for transgression upon transgression now perfectly suited to
an economic-cultural regime that runs on ever-faster cyclings of the new; its taste for self-fulfillment
and its intolerance for the confines of tradition now permitting vast latitude in consuming practices
and lifestyle experimentation. Consumerism is no longer about "conformity" but about "difference."
Advertising teaches us not in the ways of puritanical self-denial (a bizarre notion on the face of it), but in orgiastic, never-ending self-fulfillment.
It counsels not rigid adherence to the tastes of the herd but vigilant and constantly updated individualism. We consume not to fit in, but to
prove, on the surface at least, that we are rock `n' roll rebels, each one of us as rule-breaking and hierarchy-defying as our heroes of the 60s,
who now pitch cars, shoes, and beer.
This imperative of endless difference is today the genius at the heart of
American capitalism, an eternal fleeing from "sameness" that satiates our thirst for the New with such
achievements of civilization as the infinite brands of identical cola, the myriad colors and irrepressible variety of the cigarette rack at 7-Eleven.
As existential rebellion has become a more or less official style of Information Age capitalism, so has
the countercultural notion of a static, repressive Establishment grown hopelessly obsolete. However
the basic impulses of the countercultural idea may have disturbed a nation lost in Cold War darkness,
they are today in fundamental agreement with the basic tenets of Information Age business theory.
So close are they, in fact, that it has become difficult to understand the countercultural idea as
anything more than the self-justifying ideology of the new bourgeoisie that has arisen since the 1960s,
the cultural means by which this group has proven itself ever so much better skilled than its slowmoving, security-minded forebears at adapting to the accelerated, always-changing consumerism of
today. The anointed cultural opponents of capitalism are now capitalism's ideologues. The two come together in perfect synchronization in a
figure like Camille Paglia, whose ravings are grounded in the absolutely noncontroversial ideas of the golden sixties. According to Paglia,
American business is still exactly what it was believed to have been in that beloved decade, that is, "puritanical and desensualized." Its great
opponents are, of course, liberated figures like "the beatniks," Bob Dylan, and the Beatles. Culture is, quite simply, a binary battle between the
repressive Apollonian order of capitalism and the Dionysian impulses of the counterculture. Rebellion makes no sense without repression; we
must remain forever convinced of capitalism's fundamental hostility to pleasure in order to consume
capitalism's rebel products as avidly as we do. It comes as little surprise when, after criticizing the "Apollonian capitalist machine" (in her
book, Vamps & Tramps), Paglia applauds American mass culture (in Utne Reader), the preeminent product of that "capitalist machine," as a
"third great eruption" of a Dionysian "paganism." For her, as for most other designated dissidents, there is no contradiction between replaying
the standard critique of capitalist conformity and repressiveness and then endorsing its rebel products--for Paglia the car culture and Madonna-as the obvious solution: the Culture Trust offers both Establishment and Resistance in one convenient package. The only question that remains
is why Paglia has not yet landed an endorsement contract from a soda pop or automobile manufacturer.
Root Cause
Capitalism and Division of Labor Are the Root Cause of Violence against Queers
Hennessy 2k Rosemary Hennessy is a Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Study of
Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice University. She has been a part of the faculty at Rice since 2006,
2000, Published by Routledge, “Profit and Pleasure”, pg 182-183 AKS
At one point in Rubin’s retelling of the castration story she briefly acknowledges the interface between kinship and other realms of social
production when she asserts that kinship
alliances and child care are governed by a sexual division of labor
reinforced by the institution of heterosexuality. In considering the seeming arbitrariness of this arrangement, she
comments, If the sexual division of labor were such that adults of both sexes cared for children equally, primary object choice would be
bisexual. If heterosexuality were not obligatory, this early love would not have to be suppressed and the penis would not be overvalued. (1975,
199) If these causal connections now seem overly reductive, they are nonetheless important for the way they acknowledge that the
production of sexual identity and desire even within kinship alliances is necessarily shaped by the
political economy of labor. This glancing recognition that the formation of sexual object choice in the family is
mediated by the satisfaction of human needs through the division of labor recasts Freud’s psychoanalytic story of
identification and desire as well as Lévi-Strauss’s notion of kinship. In Rubin’s brief re narration , sexual object choice and gender
identification do not originate in erotogenic drives, perceptions of lack drawn from genital
comparisons, or a phallocentric symbolic order. Rather, in their specific and complex relation to the
division of labor
and the satisfaction of needs, sex affective production and kinship alliances are founded in a system of social relations
that both includes and exceeds symbolic exchange.5 While Rubin’s insight here suggests that the historicity of desire and kin does in fact
exceed the universalized family romance on which psychoanalysis is premised, her conclusion that if “adults of both sexes cared for children
equally, primary object choice would be bisexual” unwittingly reiterates the myth of the monadic family unit. Changing the sexual division of
labor within the family would not necessarily dispel obligatory heterosexuality, especially if the sexual division of labor outside the family were
not also transformed. The
production of identity and desire in the family is profoundly affected by the
impact of the gendered economy of labor on child care as well as the production of desire in other institutions— in the media
especially, but also in schools, churches, the law, and cultural practices in general—all of which infiltrate the organization of sexual desire in the
domestic arena.6 Reengendering the labor of child care would counter the dominant paradigms of mothering and family, and these differences
would undoubtedly register in the structures of feeling, desire, and identity that shape individual histories, but this change would not cancel out
or even necessarily revise compulsory heterosexuality or the valuation of the phallus in an individual’s social world “outside” the family if such a
discrete “outside” can even be said to exist.
Capitalism and Sexual Identity go Hand in Hand
Hennessy 2k Rosemary Hennessy is a Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Study of
Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice University. She has been a part of the faculty at Rice since 2006,
2000, Published by Routledge, “Profit and Pleasure”, 187-188 AKS
One of the tools that Rubin and others found was the structuralism and post-structuralism of thinkers like Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, and Lacan. In
hindsight, she sees “Traffic” “as a neo-Marxist, proto-pomo exercise written on the cusp of a transition between dominant paradigms, both in
progressive intellectual thought and in general” (66). This is true. But in setting out to compensate for marxism’s “weak grasp of sex and
gender” (1994, 66), she threw away some of its most valuable insights. As I have indicated in the previous chapters, there
are many
reasons why historical materialism’s class analysis is not only still pertinent but urgent for our time
precisely because gender, sexuality, and sexual identity are so integrated into the cultural and
political and economic dimensions of late capitalism. It is interesting to note that in her 1994 commentary Rubin has said
that she finds the current neglect of Marx “a tragedy,” that “the failure to engage important issues of Marxist thought
has weakened social and political analysis,” and that she hopes to see a revival of interest in his work (1994, 90). It is hard to
know quite what she means by this when her representation of historical materialism and marxist feminism have painted both as such
make use of historical
materialism as a frame for explaining how capitalism bears down on people’s lives, and to extend that
analysis to the ways sexuality and gender, political oppression, citizenship, sensuality, social
reproduction in the broad sense, and everyday experience feature in them. To be fair, Rubin’s contention that the marxist wings of
theoretical dead ends. As I see it, the point is not to revive interest in Marx’s work for its own sake but to
the left didn’t take women’s concerns and feminist concepts seriously is accurate. But of course it was precisely these problems that pushed the
marxist feminists with whom Rubin was aligned to develop their critical engagements with marxism in order to really further materialist critique
of capital. However, by 1984 Rubin had abandoned the possibility of advancing this groundbreaking work to analysis of sexuality. And in order
to take this turn she has to represent both marxism and feminism as knowledges that generalize by subsuming all social relations to one facet
of social life. She concludes that both feminism and marxism are inadequate for analysis of sexuality because in the same way that feminism
generalizes from gender, marxism generalizes from class.9 As she puts it, marxism was “fashioned to handle very specific areas of social
activity”— class relations under capitalism— and it wrongly extends this local interest into a general theory (1984, 308). It is hard to see how
under capitalism class is a local interest, although this misreading is consistent with the general direction of localizing class—as well as gender,
sex, and race—that would redefine the U.S. left in the eighties as a rainbow of identity politics. Given this reorientation in her thinking, it is not
surprising that Rubin’s retraction of “The Traffic in Women” as “surely not an adequate formulation for sexuality in Western industrial
societies” (1984, 307) does not engage critically at all with the socialist feminist frame of that essay. She simply replaces it with Foucault’s
assertion that “a system of sexuality has emerged out of earlier kinship forms and has acquired significant autonomy” (1984, 307). As a result,
her thinking on sex is somewhat more coherent, as the tension between a theory grounded in social production and one founded on cultural
exchange is resolved in favor of symbolic exchange. But while she (unlike Foucault) is willing to admit a repressive state into the matrix of
power relations that organize and police sexuality, capitalism and the exploitation of labor are entirely dropped out. Understanding sexuality as
a regulatory system consisting of a differential and normative set of practices seals sexuality squarely in the domain of habits and expectations,
subsumed within the “historical and moral element” of social production. As Rubin’s own earlier work asserts, limiting analysis of sexuality to
ideological norms (even when they are seen to be policed through the state) cuts off the political economy of sex from the political economy of
labor. However, theorizing
sexuality as strictly normative in this way makes it difficult if not impossible to
address how the emergence of new forms of sexuality from the nineteenth through the late twentieth
century might be related to other aspects of social production in the capitalist world system.
Give Back the Land
Link - Back in Time
Colonialism in the past replicates itself in the present- nations like Cuba that were
born from the ideological separation from the mother country through revolution
represent the continuation of the colonial ideology of the motherland
Moufawad-Paul 13 (J. Moufawad-Paul, Professor of Philosophy at York University, Sublimated Colonialism: The Persistence of
Actually Existing Settler-Colonialism, pgs 196-198, March 2013,
http://www.davidpublishing.com/davidpublishing/Upfile/4/2/2013/2013040205685381.pdf, anuss)
These nations born from colonial secession, though, eventually stopped conceiving of their identity as
colonial, despite the massacres of native populations and slave-run economies. This type of settlercolonialism, typified originally in history by secession, is what I have defined as sublimated colonialism:
when the colony-motherland arrangement has been discarded, the concrete colonial relationship of
colonizer-colonized is pushed beneath an ideology of postcolonial secessionism. The historical event of
secession set the tone for all future colonialisms, ushering in a new colonial arrangement, essentially the same as the old but also formally
different. Any
settler-colonialism established post-secession, then, would be a type of sublimated
colonialism. The motherland ideology that defined the colonies of the Columbus Epoch, however, was
retained in a sublimated form by the post-colony/motherland nations where settler-colonialism still
persists. No longer possessing a geographical homeland beyond the colony, in sublimated colonialism the mother country is the
colonial country itself now conceived as the “motherland” of the colonizers. “In order that he may
subsist as a colonialist,” Memmi claimed, “it is necessary that the mother country eternally remain a mother
country” (1991, 62). And the mother country can eternally remain the mother country because the colony has transformed itself into its
own motherland: “land of the free and the home of the brave,” asserts the American national anthem; the
Canadian national anthem claims Canada as “our home and native land.” The colonialist becomes a
rabid patriot as the colony becomes a sovereign nation; ideologies of divine right and manifest destiny
are mobilized again to hide the colonizer’s true face behind the mask of pseudo-nativism. This ideology of
motherland is intrinsic to all remaining colonialisms. Moreover, Memmi, in his description of the colony-motherland relationship, describes how
the colonizer assigns the motherland a mythic grandeur, idealizing it so as “to merit his confidence, to reflect on him that image of itself which
he desires” (1991, 59). The colonizer, after all, partly justifies his or her existence as colonizer with a civilizing mission––in making the colonized
country correspond to the values of the motherland. Therefore, the motherland will remain “beyond the horizon and allows the existence and
behaviour of the colonialist to be made worthwhile. If he should go home, it would lose its sublime nature, and he would THE PERSISTENCE OF
ACTUALLY EXISTING SETTLER-COLONIALISM 197 cease to be a superior man…. Restored to its true status, it would vanish and would at the
same time destroy the super-humanity of the colonialist” (Memmi 1991, 60-61). This idealization
of the motherland, though,
still exists in the current phase of settler-colonialism, albeit in a different form. The current form of
motherland worship takes a completely sublime motherland as its object. Sublimated colonialism is when the
colony’s motherland cannot easily lose its “sublime nature” if this motherland also occupies an
imaginary space. The sublime motherland, at the centre of capitalism, can be understood as the
ideology of eurocentrism in which “European culture reconstructs itself around a myth that creates an
opposition between an alleged European geographical continuity” and non-European cultures (Amin 1989, 10-11).
Actually existing settler-colonialism, then, justifies itself through this ideology. Today’s most powerful sublimated colonial states view
themselves as part of the hegemony of European history. Other non-eurocentric sublimated colonialisms (Turkey’s internal Kurdish colonies, for
example) possess similar mythologized notions of the motherland. This aggrandized historical space provides historical justification for the
maintenance of the colonial reality. The
motherland has become the whole of history and colonialism is
maintained by this history. Such an ideological use of history and culture is mobilized to hammer into
the native’s head that the colonized land is now the motherland of the colonizer. Although Fanon did not write
of this sublimated motherland ideology, he did understand how colonialism controlled and distorted history in order to denigrate the colonized:
Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of
all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and
distorts, disfigures, and destroys it…. The effect consciously sought by colonialism was to drive into
the natives’ heads the idea that if the settlers were to leave, they would at once fall back into
barbarism, degradation, and bestiality. (1963, 210-11) When the motherland becomes the colony, however, and the settlers
perceive themselves as natives, then there is no need to “drive into the natives’ heads” any notion of leaving. The past has been claimed by the
settler and now points to the advent of colonialism as the advent of history. At the
same time, however, racial ideology
continues to function in the colonized space through numerous laws and institutions meant to keep
this space colonial. There are reserves and bantustans, as well as governmental bodies designed to manage the “Indian problem.” The
fact that the settlers now perceive themselves as the true natives is simply a culmination of colonial racist ideology. That is, the historical
process of colonialism has produced an ideology of settlement where the settler no longer possesses a connection with an external
motherland. Thus,
the result of the motherland’s transformation into the colony and, simultaneously, into
a mythic space, is a sublimated colonial present and a reified colonial past. Colonialism just happened
and was historically inevitable, we are taught, despite the fact that there are still numerous countries
whose colonial past defines the current colonial present. These countries are still partially “characterized
by the dichotomy which [colonialism] imposes upon the whole people”––the colonizer and the
colonized (Fanon 1963, 45-46). Furthermore, the current epoch of colonialism needs to be understood as intertwined with the global
capitalism. The modern colonial project was a predominately European venture that covered the period between 1492 and 1800, and it was
this project that provided the material for industrialism and prepared the world for a capitalist market. But just as the proto-capitalist impulses
of mercantilism were not the same as capitalism proper, these modern colonial ventures need to be distinguished from today’s actually existing
colonialism that is part of actually existing capitalism. Colonialism has both affected capitalism and been affected by capitalism; the two are
fundamentally connected. 198 THE PERSISTENCE OF ACTUALLY EXISTING SETTLER-COLONIALISM The ascendant settler-colonialism in the
current capitalist world order, what I have called sublimated colonialism, should be understood as a dialectical transformation of colonialism––
both different from and the same as the old colony-motherland type of colonialism that defined the Columbus Epoch. Now we have the
(George) Washington Epoch. And there is, I believe, a theoretical importance in making this distinction just as there is a parallel importance in
making a distinction between mercantilism and capitalism. This importance lies in being able to understand the characteristics specific to this
type of settler-colonialism. First
and foremost, as should be evident from its reconceptualization of the
motherland, sublimated colonialism refuses to see itself as colonialism. “Colonial times” are
something that happened in the past; a manifest destiny claims that colonialism no longer exists. As
Ward Churchill puts it: “One of the slipperiest––and in some ways most self-serving––confusions can be
found in the propensity of many recent theorists to simply declare colonialism to be over, irrespective
of its ongoing forms of existence. That which no longer exists, of course, need be neither prioritized
nor confronted” (2003, 444, n. 56).
Link - Queer Theory
Colonialism is a biopolitical extension of the U.S. Empire and creates a
homonationalism that marks queers as separate subjects for racial and sexual
exclusion and death- colonialism is the key reason for how modern sexuality functions
both now and in the past
Morgensen 10 (Scott Lauria Morgensen, assistant professor in the Department of Gender Studies at Queen's University, where he
teaches critical race studies, indigenous studies, queer studies, and feminist methods, Settler Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler Colonialism
within Queer Modernities, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v016/16.1-2.morgensen.html, GLQ: A Journal of
Lesbian and Gay Studies Volume 16, Number 1-2, 2010, anuss)
While I argue that homonationalism
arises whenever settler colonialism is naturalized in U.S. queer
projects, tracing this process demands more than simply adding the word "settler" to the term . Puar
examines homonationalism as a formation of national sexuality linked to war and terror, and both must inform a theory of [End Page 107]
settler homonationalism. Puar argues that in
the biopolitics of U.S. empire, homonationalism makes the subjects
of queer modernities "regulatory" over queered and "terrorist" populations that are placed under
terrorizing state control. In kind, a theory of settler homonationalism must ask how in the United States,
the terrorizing sexual colonization of Native peoples produced the colonial biopolitics of modern
sexuality that conditioned queer formations past and present. My essay reinterprets historical writing on sexual
colonization and on modern queer formations to explain how these processes relationally positioned varied non-Native and Native people
within a colonial biopolitics. But this account rests, first, on linking insights in Native studies on gender and sexuality to feminist scholarship on
biopolitics in colonial studies. Feminist
and queer criticism in Native studies already explains terror as key to
the sexual colonization of Native peoples.7 Andrea Smith argues that "it has been through sexual violence and
through the imposition of European gender relationships on Native communities that Europeans were
able to colonize Native peoples," in a process that included marking Native people "by their sexual perversity" as queer to colonial
regimes.8 Bethany Schneider affirms that "Indian hating and queer hating form a powerful pair of pistons in the history of white colonization of
the Americas."9 In part, Native peoples were marked as queer by projecting fears of sodomy on them that justified terrorizing violence.10 At
the same time, diverse modes of embodiment and desire in Native societies challenged colonial
beliefs about sexual nature and were targeted for control. As Smith argues, given that "U.S. empire
has always been reified by enforced heterosexuality and binary gender systems" while many Native societies
"had multiple genders and people did not fit rigidly into particular gender categories . . . it is not surprising that the first peoples targeted for
destruction in Native communities were those who did not neatly fit into western gender categories."11 And, as Schneider concludes, "the
tendency or tactic of Europeans to see sodomy everywhere in the so-called New World enabled a
devastating two-fisted excuse for murderous violence and a complicated homoerotics of genocide."12
Such readings of histories of terrorizing violence in Native studies are joined by arguments about how forms of
violence acted as modes of social control in the new colonial moral order. Schneider notes that Mark Rifkin's work
shows how "policies aimed at assimilating Indians through the destruction of kinship structures figured Indian cultures as other than
heteronormative in order to reinvent and assimilate them as straight, private-property-owning, married citizens."13 Rifkin pursues this claim by
arguing that scholars investigate [End Page 108] (1) how a sustained engagement with American Indian histories and forms of selfrepresentation as part of a history of sexuality in the United States can aid in rethinking what constitutes heteronormativity and (2) how
queer critique of federal Indian policy as compulsory heterosexuality can contribute to an
understanding of its organizing ideological and institutional structure as well as strategies of native
opposition to it.14 Queer and feminist readings in Native studies thus explain how terrorizing violence
became normalized in colonial sexual regimes. Such work offers a productive basis for asking how
terrorizing methods produce the colonial biopolitics of modern sexuality. Theories of biopolitics and colonization
are indebted to Ann Stoler's efforts to locate Foucauldian theories of sexuality within colonial studies. Many scholars have critiqued Michel
Foucault's omission of colonialism from his work on sexuality. Stoler challenged this limit in Foucault's work by asking if the power relations he
traced in Europe related to the histories of imperial metropoles and colonial societies. She argued that they did, by marking how Foucault
addressed sexuality and race in his theories of biopower —or, in the form of government, biopolitics.15 Stoler displaced a more common
reading of Foucault's history of sexuality in queer theory, which tended to frame
European societies and their normative
whiteness as roots of modern sexuality, and to pay secondary if any attention to racial differences or
colonialism. In particular, early queer theory did not emphasize Foucault's reading of modern
sexuality as a biopolitics, by which he marked modern regimes that produce subjects of life by deploying
state racism to define them apart from populations marked for death. Foucault argued that modern
sexuality acts as a biopolitics when national institutions enhance normative sexuality as life while
regulating racial and sexual populations marked for death. Stoler argued that linking a theory of biopolitics to
colonialism shifted trajectories of queer theory that read Foucault's history of sexuality as "a history of western desire."16 In light of colonial
histories, Europe is Western only to the extent that it is metropolitan —a center of colonial empires —which means neither Europe nor
Western cultural legacies will be understood before studying their formation in colonial and settler societies. Stoler and other scholars in
colonial studies examined how racial and national formations of sexuality and gender produced the biopolitics of colonial regimes.17 As Stoler
notes, a focus
in such work on modes of reproduction accounted poorly for nonheteronormative
sexualities and genders, and still requires critically queer readings. Yet this work already shows —in concert with
[End Page 109] Foucault's work, but against limits he put on it —that modern sexuality may have arisen first in the
colonies, if not in their relation to the metropoles, rather than within the boundaries of Europe. In
light of this, by "modern sexuality" I refer to the discourses, procedures, and institutions in
metropolitan and colonial societies that distinguish and link primitive and civilized sexuality and
gender, and define racial, national, gendered, and sexual subjects and populations in biopolitical
relationship. Colonial studies of biopolitics importantly historicize sexuality in relation to Foucault's theories of modern disciplinary power.
Scholars of colonialism noted the historical transition that Foucault proposed for the history of European modes of punishment in Discipline
and Punish.18 In eighteenth-century Europe, a pre-modern right of the sovereign to mete out death in punishment, notably as public spectacle,
was complemented or superseded by modern modes of punishment based on producing populations for surveillance. Foucault
presented the panopticon in Jeremy Bentham's modern prison as an institutional image of disciplinary
power. But he argued that discipline became the normative logic of modern institutions even more
broadly and educated all modern subjects in their senses of self. In this context, Stoler explains the sexual and
gendered regimes of metropolitan and colonial societies as being based on a colonial "education of
desire." Stoler's phrase marks how colonial power historically deployed a sovereign right of death, which over
time became complementary to a disciplinary education of desire separating normative subjects of
life from subject populations. Stoler's work presents colonial biopolitics as what Foucault called a "society of normalization" —"a
society where the norm of discipline and the norm of regularization intersect" —and shows that it formed subjects of life and populations
marked for deadly regulation by educating them in their interdependent locations in colonial regimes.19 Stoler's reading of colonial biopolitics
helps illuminate how in the United States the sexual colonization of Native peoples relates to the settler sexuality that arose to control and
supplant them. While Stoler focused on historical colonies rather than settler societies, feminist and queer work in Native studies more directly
inspires study of the biopolitics of settler colonialism. Modern
sexuality arose in the United States amid the colonial
conditions of a settler society. Terrorizing violence marked Native peoples as sexually deviant
populations to be subjected to a colonial education of desire, while agents and beneficiaries of sexual
colonization became subjects of settler sexuality. Settlement and its naturalization then conditioned the emergence of
modern queer formations, including their inheritance and sustaining of colonial biopolitics in the form of settler homonationalism. [End Page
110] But what historical dynamics produced Native peoples as queered populations marked for death, and settlers as subjects of life —
including, at times, as homonationalists? Detailed accounts have yet to be written. Yet signs appear already in histories of the sexual
colonization of Native peoples that mark the trajectory suggested by Foucault, in which the spectacular violence of a sovereign right of death
was incorporated into the deadly logic of disciplinary regulation. Colonial brutality always targeted sexual transgressions to control Native
communities. But the
growth of modern biopolitics linked the discipline of individuals to that of
communities and defined Native people as racial and sexual populations for regulation. I now reread such
histories in the United States as contexts in relation to which non-Native queer formations could arise as modern inheritors of the discipline of
Native communities in a settler state.
Queering studies typically only includes middle class white men-any permutation can’t
solve because they don’t take into account the Native Americans. This is also a
solvency deficit to the affirmative
Smith 10 (Andrea Smith teaches in media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside, “Queer Theory and Native Studies:
The Heteronormativity of Settler colonialism”, https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v016/16.12.smith.html#back)
At the same time, however, Native studies also points to the limits of a "postidentity" politic or
"subjectless" critique. Sarita Echavez See, Hiram Perez, and others who do queer of color critique in
particular have argued that within the field of queer studies, this claim to be "postidentity" often
retrenches white, middle-class identity while disavowing it.15 For instance, in Fear of a Queer Planet,
Warner concedes that queer culture has been dominated by those with capital: typically, middle-class
white men. But then he argues that "the default model for all minority movements is racial or ethnic.
Thus the language of multiculturalism almost always presupposes an ethnic organization of identity,
rooted in family, [End Page 44] language, and cultural tradition. Despite its language of
postmodernism, multiculturalism tends to rely on very modern notions of authenticity, of culture as
shared meaning and the source of identity. Queer culture will not fit this bill . . . because queer politics
does not obey the member/nonmember logics of race and gender."16 He marks queer culture as freefloating, unlike race, which is marked by belonging and not-belonging. To borrow from Silva's Toward a
Global Idea, the queer (white) subject is the universal self-determining subject, the "transparent I," but
the racialized subject is the "affectable other." But if queerness is dominated by whiteness, as Warner
concedes, then it also follows a logic of belonging and not-belonging. It also relies on a shared culture
—one based on white supremacy. As Perez notes: "Queer theory, when it privileges difference over
sameness absolutely, colludes with institutionalized racism in vanishing, hence retrenching, white
privilege. It serves as the magician's assistant to whiteness's disappearing act."17 To extend Perez's
analysis, what seem to disappear within queer theory's subjectless critique are settler colonialism and
the ongoing genocide of Native peoples. The analysis that comes from queer theory (even queer of color
critique), then, rests on the presumption of the U.S. settler colonial state. Thus this essay puts Native
studies into conversation with queer theory to look at both the possibilities and limits of a postidentity
analytic.
Questioning the colonialist motivations of why societies in America have progressed
to this point comes before the affirmative
Smith 10 (Andrea Smith teaches in media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside, “Queer Theory and Native Studies:
The Heteronormativity of Settler colonialism”, https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_lesbian_and_gay_studies/v016/16.12.smith.html#back)
As many historians have noted, colonizers expected to find "Eden" in the Americas, "a place of
simplicity, innocence, harmony, love, and happiness, where the climate is balmy and fruits of nature's
bounty are found on the trees year round."41 Many of the early colonial narratives describe the
Americas as an idyllic paradise. However, as Kirkpatrick Sale argues, colonizers approached "paradise"
through their colonial and patriarchal lens. Consequently, they viewed the land and indigenous
peoples as something to be used for their own purposes; colonizers could not respect the integrity of
either the land or indigenous peoples. "The resulting tensions, then could be resolved . . . only by being
played out against . . . the natural world and natural peoples. . . . the only way the people of Christian
Europe ultimately could live with the reality of the Noble Savage in the Golden World was to transform
it progressively into the Savage Beast in the Hideous Wilderness."42 Within this colonial imaginary, the
Native is an empty signifier that provides the occasion for Europe to remake its corrupt civilization. Once
the European is remade, the Native is rendered permanently infantile or —as mostly commonly
understood —an innocent savage. She cannot mature into adult citizenship, she can only be locked
into a permanent state of infancy —degenerate into brutal savagery or disappear into "civilization."
Link - Futurity
Contrary to the queers the affirmative speaks of the Native has no future except for in
the context of genocide- we must direct our attention to the history of sovereignty but
still maintain an orientation towards the future
Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill 13 ( Maile Arvin is a PhD candidate in ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego. She is
the Charles A. Eastman dissertation fellow in Native American studies at Dartmouth for the 2012-13 academic year, Tuck is an enrolled member
of the tribal government of St. Paul Island, Alaska, Angie Morrill Angie Morrill is a PhD candidate in ethnic studies at the University of California,
San Diego., Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy, Spring 2013,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/feminist_formations/v025/25.1.arvin.html, anuss)
As our discussions of Indigenous epistemologies about land and sovereignty have demonstrated, recognizing
that Indigenous
sovereignty struggles are gendered frequently requires revising conventional concepts of sovereignty,
decolonization, and social change altogether. For us, the real promise of Native feminist theories lies
precisely in the ways that, along with recognizing the very real challenges that Indigenous peoples
face daily, these theories are simultaneously constructing what Smith (2008b) compellingly describes as "the
history of the future of sovereignty, what sovereignty could mean for Native peoples" (257). By
directing our attention toward the beautifully evocative "history of the future of sovereignty," she is
reframing futurity—a concept important to a number of disciplines, including queer studies and
performance studies—with Indigenous peoples at the center. Thus, Smith demonstrates that one of the most radical
and necessary moves toward decolonization requires imagining and enacting a future for Indigenous peoples—a future based on terms of their
own making. In a GLQ special issue titled "Sexuality, Nationality, Indigeneity," Smith (2010) specifically
elaborates on the
concept of futurity as theorized by queer theorist Lee Edelman. She notes that Edelman's book No
Future forwards a useful critique of the figure of "the Child" as the symbol of society's reproductive
future and an excuse for justifying the reproduction of the existing social order (46). Yet, Smith also
demonstrates that refusing to participate in the reproduction of society by declining to reproduce the Child is a mode of
radical activism that is only possible, desirable, and otherwise "thinkable" for certain economically
privileged white queers. She argues that [a]n indigenous critique must question the value of "no future" in
the context of genocide, where Native peoples have already been determined by settler colonialism
to have no future. If the goal of queerness is to challenge the reproduction of the social order, then
the Native child may already be queered. For instance, Colonel John Chivington, the leader of the famous massacre at Sand
Creek, charged his followers to not only kill Native adults but to mutilate their reproductive organs and to kill their children because "nits make
lice." In this context, the Native Child is not the guarantor of the reproductive future of white supremacy; it is the nit that undoes it. (48) Smith's
critique exposes the ways that radical queer theory can participate in the "ascendancy of whiteness" even when it disavows it—in Edelman's
case, because he fails to acknowledge or consider the ways that having children is a privilege that has been historically denied to many
nonwhite and nonaffluent people. Given
the pervasive violence perpetuated on Indigenous peoples through
campaigns focused on managing Indigenous reproduction and child-rearing (from boarding schools to eugenics
and forced sterilization), proposing to invest in "no future" seems not only irrelevant to Indigenous peoples,
but a rehashing of previous settler colonial tactics. [End Page 24] Smith's critique is meant to be a
generative one, insisting on making real connections between Native and queer studies for the future
of both fields and all of the peoples these fields engage. She further argues that "while both 'tradition' and
'the future' must be critically engaged, it does not follow that they can be dismissed" (ibid.). We also place
importance on ideas of Indigenous futures, which are always also interlaced with Indigenous traditions, histories, and even ghosts, in our own
theories of decolonization. Eve Tuck (2009) has written about desire-based research as a key counterpoint to damage-centered
research frameworks, which too often present Indigenous peoples as broken, arguing that "[d]esire is
involved with the not yet and, at times, the not anymore. . . . Desire is about longing, about a present
that is enriched by both the past and the future" (417). Angie Morrill (forthcoming) further writes that "[g]hosts
haunt the future with expectations," noting that we share desires with ghosts, therefore Native desire
is a kind of time machine. For Maile Arvin (forthcoming), decolonization involves regeneration, which she
defines as "desires and practices oriented by transforming settler colonial dispossession and
recreating a people-possessed (rather than an individually self-possessed) Indigenous future." In each of our approaches
toward decolonization, we do not intend to recommend to our readers one proper set of decolonial practices, but rather create spaces in which
decolonization can be deeply considered and experimented with in the specific contexts of different places. Overall, with
this challenge
to recognize Indigenous ways of knowing, we insist that it is most important to acknowledge
Indigenous concepts and epistemologies as complex, knowledgeable, and full of both history and
desire. Engaging Indigenous epistemologies, without appropriating them or viewing them merely as a
mystical metaphor, is a method of decolonization that could play a significant role in creating a future
for Indigenous peoples and Indigenous ways of knowing.
Root Cause
Indigenous culture embraces the queer body- dominant colonial culture is the root
cause of queer oppression in North America
Churchill, 2 (Ward, former professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, 2002, “Struggle
for the land: Native North American resistance to genocide, ecocide, and colonization”, p. 380, PDF)ZBris
There is no indication whatsoever that a restoration of indigenous sovereignty in Indian Country
would foster class stratification anywhere, least of all in Indian Country. In fact, all indications are that when
left to their own devices, indigenous peoples have consistently organized their societies in the most
class-free manner. Look to the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy) for an example. Look to the Muscogee (Creek)
Confederacy. Look to the confederations of the Yaqui and the Lakota, and those pursued and nearly perfected by Pontiac and Tecumseh. They
represent the very essence of enlightened egalitarianism and democracy. Every
imagined example to the contrary brought
forth by even the most arcane anthropologist can be readily offset by a couple of dozen other
illustrations along the lines of those I just mentioned.39 Would sexism be perpetuated? Ask the Haudenosaunee clan mothers, who
continue to assert political leadership in their societies through the present day. Ask Wilma Mankiller, recent head of the Cherokee Nation, a
people who were traditionally led by what were called "Beloved Women." Ask a Lakota woman-or man, for that matter-about who owned all
real property in traditional society, and what that meant in terms of parity in gender relations. Ask a traditional Navajo grandmother about her
social and political role among her people. Women in most traditional native societies not only enjoyed political, social, and economic parity
with men, but they also often held a preponderance of power in one or more of these spheres. Homophobia? Homosexuals
of both
genders were, and in many settings still are, deeply revered as special or extraordinary, and therefore
spiritually significant , within most indigenous North American cultures. The extent to which these
realities do not now pertain in native societies is exactly the extent to which Indians have been
subordinated to the mores of the invading, dominating culture. Insofar as restoration of Indian land
rights is tied directly to the reconstitution of traditional indigenous social, political, and economic
modes, one can see where this leads; the Indian arrangements of sex and sexuality accord rather well
with the aspirations of feminism and gay rights activism .40
Addressing colonialism is a priori- colonialism is the root of all other societal
oppressions
Churchill, 2 (Ward, former professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, 2002, “Struggle
for the land: Native North American resistance to genocide, ecocide, and colonization”, p. 378-379, PDF)ZBris
The usual technique for explaining this away has always been a sort of pro forma acknowledgment that Indian land rights are of course "really
important stuff" (yawn), but that one "really does not have a lot of time" to get into it (I'll buy your book, though, and keep it on my shelf even
if I never read it). Reason? Well, one
is just "overwhelmingly preoccupied" with working on "other important
issues" (meaning, what they consider to be more important things). Typically enumerated are sexism, racism,
homophobia, class inequities, militarism, the environment, or some combination. It is a pretty good evasion,
all in all. Certainly, there is no denying any of these issues their due; they are all important , obviously so. But
more important than the question of land rights? There are some serious problems of primacy and priority imbedded in the
orthodox script. To frame things clearly in this regard, let us hypothesize for a moment that all of the various non-Indian
movements concentrating on each of these issues were suddenly successful in accomplishing their
objectives. Let us imagine that the United States as a whole were somehow transformed into an entity defined by the parity of its race,
class and gender relations, its embrace of unrestricted sexual preference, its rejection of militarism in all forms and its abiding concern with
environmental protection (I know, I know, this is a sheer impossibility, but that is my point). When
all is said and done, the
society resulting from this scenario is still, first and foremost , a colonialist society, an imperialist
society in the most fundamental sense and with all that this implies. This is true because the scenario does nothing
at all to address the fact that whatever happens is on someone else's land, not only without their consent, but with an adamant disregard for
their rights to the land. Hence, all
it means is that the immigrant or invading population has rearranged its
affairs in such a way as to make itself more comfortable at the continuing expense of indigenous
people. The colonial equation remains intact and may even be reinforced by a greater degree of participation and vested interest in
maintenance of the colonial order among the settler population at large.37
Colonialism is the root cause of every evil in this world- we can’t usurp classism, we
can’t resolve racism, and we can’t fight for the rights of the queer unless we liberate
the Fourth World
Churchill 3 (Ward Churchill, American author and political activist, professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder,
Acts of Rebellion: The Ward Churchill Reader, 2003, http://cryptome.org/2013/01/aaron-swartz/Acts-of-Rebellion.pdf, pgs 243-246, anuss)
Now you tell me, how is that fundamentally different from what Bush and Clinton have been advocating? Oh,
I see. You want to
“move forward” in pursuance of another set of goals and objectives than those espoused by these
self-styled “centrists.” Alright. I’ll accept that that’s true. Let me also state that I tend to find the goals and objectives advanced by
progressives immensely preferable to anything advocated by Bush or Clinton. Fair enough? However, I must go on to observe
that the differences at issue are not fundamental. They are not, as Marx would have put it, of “the
base.” Instead, they are superstructural. They represent remedies to symptoms rather than causes. In
other words, they do not derive from a genuinely radical critique of our situation—remember, radical means to go
to the root of any phenomenon in order to understand it9 —and thus cannot offer a genuinely radical solution. This will
remain true regardless of the fervor with which progressive goals and objectives are embraced, or the
extremity with which they are pursued. Radicalism and extremism are, after all, not really synonyms. Maybe I can explain what
I’m getting at here by way of indulging in a sort of grand fantasy. Close your eyes for a moment and dream along with me
that the current progressive agenda has been realized. Never mind how, let’s just dream that it’s been
fulfilled. Things like racism, sexism, ageism, militarism, classism, and the sorts of corporatism with
which we are now afflicted have been abolished. The police have been leashed and the prisonindustrial complex dismantled. Income disparities have been eliminated across the board, decent housing
and healthcare are available to all, an amply endowed educational system is actually devoted to teaching rather than indoctrinating our
children. The
whole nine yards. Sound good? You bet. Nonetheless, there’s still a very basic—and I daresay
uncomfortable—question which must be posed: In this seemingly rosy scenario, what, exactly, happens to
the rights of native peoples? Face it, to envision the progressive transformation of “American society”
is to presuppose that “America”—that is, the United States—will continue to exist. And, self-evidently, the
existence of the United States is, as it has always been and must always be, predicated first and
foremost on denial of the right of self-determining existence to every indigenous nation within its
purported borders. Absent this denial, the very society progressives seek to transform would never
have had a landbase upon which to constitute itself in any form at all. So, it would have had no resources with
which to actualize a mode of production, and there would be no basis for arranging or rearranging the relations of production. All the
dominoes fall from there, don’t they? In effect, the progressive agenda is no less contingent upon the
continuing internal colonial domination of indigenous nations than that advanced by Bill Clinton.10
Perhaps we can agree to a truism on this score: Insofar as progressivism shares with the status quo a need to
maintain the structure of colonial dominance over native peoples, it is at base no more than a
variation on a common theme, intrinsically a part of the very order it claims to oppose. As Vine Deloria once
observed in a related connection, “these guys just keep right on circling the same old rock while calling it by different names.”11 Since, for
all its liberatory rhetoric and sentiment, even the self-sacrifice of its proponents, progressivism
replicates the bedrock relations with indigenous nations marking the present status quo, its agenda
can be seen as serving mainly to increase the degree of comfort experienced by those who benefit
from such relations. Any such outcome represents a continuation and reinforcement of the existing order, not its repeal. Progressivism is
thus one possible means of consummating that which is, not its negation.12 It’s time to stop fantasizing and confront what this consummation
might look like. To
put it bluntly, colonialism is colonialism, no matter what its trappings. You can’t end
classism in a colonial system, since the colonized by definition comprise a class lower than that of
their colonizers.13 You can’t end racism in a colonial system because the imposed “inferiority” of the
colonized must inevitably be “explained” (justified) by their colonizers through contrived
classifications of racial hierarchy.14 You can’t end sexism in a colonial system, since it functions—again by
definition—on the basis of one party imposing itself upon the other in the most intimate of dimensions
for purposes of obtaining gratification.15 If rape is violence, as feminists correctly insist,16 then so too
is the interculture analogue of rape: colonial domination. As a consequence, it is impossible to end
social violence in a colonialist system. Read Fanon and Memmi. They long ago analyzed that fact rather thoroughly and
exceedingly well.17 Better yet, read Sartre, who flatly equated colonialism with genocide.18 Then ask yourself how you maintain a
system incorporating domination and genocidal violence as integral aspects of itself without military,
police, and penal establishments? The answer is that you can’t. Go right down the list of progressive
aspirations and what you’ll discover, if you’re honest with yourself, is that none of them can really be
achieved outside the context of Fourth World liberation. So long as indigenous nations are subsumed against our will
within “broader” statist entities—and this applies as much to Canada as to the United States, as much to China as to Canada, as much to
Mexico and Brazil as to China, as much to Ghana as to any of the rest; the problem is truly global—colonialism will be alive and well.19 So
long as this is the case, all efforts at positive social transformation, no matter how “revolutionary” the
terms in which they are couched, will be self-nullifying, simply leading us right back into the groove
we’re in today. Actually, we’ll probably be worse off after each iteration since such outcomes
generate a steadily growing popular disenchantment with the idea that meaningful change can ever
be possible. This isn’t a zero-sum game we’re involved in. As Gramsci pointed out, every failure of supposed alternatives to the status quo
serves to significantly reinforce its hegemony.20 When a strategy or, more important, a way of looking at things, proves itself bankrupt or
counterproductive, it must be replaced with something more viable. Such, is the situation with progressivism, both as a method and as an
outlook. After a full century of failed revolutions and derailed social movements, it has long since reached the point where, as Sartre once
commented, it “no longer knows anything.”21 The question, then, comes down to where to look for a replacement. There are a lot of ways I
could try and answer that one. Given the emphasis I’ve already placed on the Fourth World, I suppose I could take a “New Age” approach and
say you should all go sit at the feet of the tribal elders and learn all about the native worldview. But, I’ll tell you instead that the last thing the
old people need is to be inundated beneath a wave of wannabe “tribalists” seeking “spiritual insights.”22 This is not to deny there’s a lot in the
indigenous way of seeing the world that could be usefully learned by others and put to work in the forging of new sets of relationships between
humans both as individuals and as societies, as well as between humans and the rest of nature. Such information is plainly essential. There are,
however, serious considerations as to when and how it is to be shared. As
things stand, we lack the intellectual context
which, alone, might allow a constructive transfer of knowledge to take place. For the people here, or
your counterparts throughout the progressive milieu, to run right out and try to pick up on what the
Naropa Institute likes to market under the heading of “indigenous wisdom” would be an act of
appropriation just as surely as if you were to go after Indian land. There is such a thing as intellectual property, and,
therefore, intellectual imperialism.23 The point is that the right of the Fourth World to decolonize itself exists
independently of any direct benefit this might impart to colonizing societies or any of their subparts,
progressivism included. More strongly, the right of the Fourth World to decolonization exists undiminished
even if it can be shown that this is tangibly disadvantageous to our colonizers. The principle is not especially
mysterious, having been brought to bear in Third World liberation struggles for the past half-century and more.24 Yet, where indigenous
nations are concerned, nearly everyone—Third World liberationists, not least —professes confusion concerning its applicability.25 To connect
this point to that on New Age dynamics I was making a few moments ago, it’s as if Simone de Beauvoir had demanded she be made privy to the
“folk wisdom” of the Berber elders as a quid pro quo for supporting the Algerian liberation struggle against France. But of course she didn’t. De
Beauvoir, her colleague Sartre, and a relative handful of others broke ranks with the mainstream of French progressivism—it’s worth noting
that the French communist party actually opposed the decolonization of Algeria—by embracing Algerian independence unequivocally,
unconditionally, and in its own right.26 Let’s be clear on this. De Beauvoir and Sartre did not take the position they did on the basis of altruism.
Although they gained no direct personal benefit from their stance, they did perceive an indirect advantage accruing from any success attained
by the Algerian liberationists. This came in the form of a material weakening of the French state to which they, apparently unlike French
progressivism more generally, were genuinely and seriously opposed. Converting such an externally generated weakness into something more
directly beneficial to the liberation of French domestic polity was seen as being their own task.27 De Beauvoir and Sartre displayed an
exemplary posture, one worthy of emulation by those members of colonizing societies who reject not just colonialism but the statist forms of
sociopolitical and economic organization that beget colonialism. The
transition from taking this position vis-à-vis the
Third World to taking it with respect to the Fourth seems straightforward enough. The trick is for
members of colonizing societies who wish to support Fourth World liberation struggles to figure out
how to convert the indirect advantages gained thereby into something more direct and concrete. This,
they must obviously draw from their own tradition; it cannot simply be lifted from another culture. And here is precisely where progressivism,
most especially historical materialism, which by its very nature consigns all things “primitive” to Trotsky’s “dustbin of history,” proves itself
worse than useless.
Impact - Silencing
Colonialism silences and marginalizes the voices of those who are viewed as the
dominated- this silencing creates a cycle of violence that manifests itself as constant
violence towards the Other
Schwab 6 (Gabrielle Schwab, Chancellor's Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Irvine. She is
also a faculty associate in the Department of Anthropology and former director of the Critical Theory Institute, Writing against Memory and
Forgetting, 2006, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/literature_and_medicine/v025/25.1schwab.html, anuss)
Human beings have always silenced violent histories. Some histories, collective and personal, are so
violent we would not be able to live our daily lives if we did not at least temporarily silence them. A
certain amount of splitting is conducive to survival. Too much silence, however, becomes haunting. Abraham and Torok link
the formation of the crypt with silencing, secrecy, and the phantomatic return of the past. While the secret is intrapsychic and
indicates an internal psychic splitting, it can be collectively deployed and shared by a people or a
nation. The collective or communal silencing of violent histories leads to the transgenerational
transmission of trauma and the specter of an involuntary repetition of cycles of violence. We know this
from history, from literature, and from trauma studies. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, for example, Hannah Arendt writes about the
"phantom world of the dark continent."5 Referring to the adventurers, gamblers, and criminals who came as luck hunters to South Africa during
the gold rush, Arendt describes them as "an inevitable residue of the capitalist system and even the representatives of an economy that
relentlessly produced a superfluity of men and capital" (189). "They were not individuals like the old adventurers," she continues, drawing on
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, "they were the shadows of events with which they had nothing to do" (189). They found the full realization
of their "phantomlike-existence" in the destruction of native life: "Native life lent these ghostlike events a seeming guarantee against all
consequences because anyhow it looked to these men like a 'mere play of shadows. A
play of shadows, the dominant race
could walk through unaffected and disregarded in the pursuit of incomprehensible aims and needs'"
(190). When European men massacred these indigenous peoples, Arendt argues, they did so without
allowing themselves to become aware of the fact that they had committed murder. Like Conrad's character
[End Page 100] Kurtz, many of these adventurers went insane. They had buried and silenced their guilt; they had buried
and silenced their humanity. But their deeds came back to haunt them in a vicious cycle of repetition.
Arendt identifies two main political devices for imperialist rule: race and bureaucracy. "Race . . . ," she
writes, "was an escape into an irresponsibility where nothing human could any longer exist, and
bureaucracy was the result of a responsibility that no man can bear for his fellow-man and no people
for another people" (207). While the genocide of indigenous peoples under colonial and imperial rule
was silenced in a defensive discourse of progressing civilization, it returned with a vengeance. Race
and bureaucracy were the two main devices used under fascism during the haunting return to the
heart of Europe of the violence against other humans developed under colonial and imperial rule. The
ghosts of colonial and imperial violence propelled the Jewish holocaust, Arendt shows. In a similar vein, in Discourse on Colonialism, Aime
Cesaire talks about the rise of Nazism in Europe as a "terrific boomerang effect."6 He argues that before the people in Europe became the
victims of Nazism, they were its accomplices, that "they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their
eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it [had] been applied only to non-European peoples" (36). Cesaire continues, "Yes, it would be
worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very
Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his
demon" (36, Cesaire's italics). This is as close as we can come to the argument that, until they face the ghosts of their own history and take
responsibility for all the histories of violence committed under their rule, Europeans encrypt the ghost of Hitler in their psychic life. Cesaire's
statement also contains an argument about what Ashis Nandy calls "isomorphic oppressions," that is, about the fact that histories of violence
create psychic deformations not only in the victims but also in the perpetrators.7 No one colonizes innocently, Cesaire asserts, and no one
colonizes with impunity either. One
of the psychic deformations of the perpetrator is that he turns himself into
the very thing that he projects onto and tries to destroy in the other: "[T]he colonizer, who in order to
ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to
treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. It is this result, this boomerang
effect of colonization that I wanted to point [End Page 101] out" (41, Cesaire's italics).8 What Cesaire calls the "boomerang
effect" emerges from a dialectics of isomorphic oppression that as a rule remains largely unacknowledged and relegated to the cultural
unconscious. Together with the ghost effect that emerges from the silencing of traumatic memories, this boomerang effect increases the
danger of the repetition and ghostly return of violent histories. What do we have to offset such a vicious circle of violent returns? Many victims
emphasize testimony, witnessing, mourning, and reparation. Many theories, including psychoanalysis, concur with this assumption. Let me
therefore turn to the telling and writing of traumatic histories and their relationship to mourning and reparation. What is silenced and what can
be said about histories of violence and trauma? To
counter silence, the victims of history have produced an
abundance of literature of witnessing, testimonials, and memoirs. At the same time, we have a whole
body of theories that claim trauma's unrepresentability. There are forms of violence—holocaust,
genocide, torture, and rape—that are considered beyond representation. Yet, they also call for speech, testimony,
and witnessing. This is an irresolvable paradox at the core of traumatic writing. How then do we write what resists representation? We know
that traumatic amnesia can generate other prohibitions on thought and emotion that are fundamentally opposed to narrative and storytelling.
And yet we also know that telling and witnessing are necessary for healing trauma. We need, then, a theory of traumatic narrative that deals
with the paradox of telling what cannot be told and/or has been silenced. Returning to Abraham and Torok's theory of the crypt and
cryptographic speech, we may begin to outline a framework for looking at traumatic narrative. Their basic premise is that, unless it is worked
through and integrated, trauma will be passed on to the next generation. If this happens, the next generation will inherit the psychic substance
of the previous generation and display symptoms that do not emerge from individual experience but from a parent's, relative's, or community's
psychic conflicts, traumata, or secrets. This process is experienced as if an individual were haunted by the ghosts, that is, the unfinished
business, of a previous generation. People tend to bury violent or shameful histories. They
create psychic crypts meant to stay
sealed off from the self, interior tombs for the ghosts of the past. Crypts engender silence. However,
untold or unspeakable secrets, unfelt or denied pain, concealed shame, covered-up crimes or violent
histories continue to affect and disrupt the lives of those involved in them and often their
descendants as well. Silencing these violent and [End Page 102] shameful histories casts them outside the
continuity of psychic life but, unintegrated and unassimilated, they eat away at this continuity from
within. Lives become shadow lives, simulacra of a hollowed-out normality. In this way, the buried ghosts of the past come to haunt language
from within, always threatening to destroy its communicative and expressive function. as well.
Impact - Extinction
Without decolonization and rejection of colonialism we risk extinction- if we don’t
learn from our past we are doomed to destruction
Mendoza 13 (S. Lily Mendoza, PhD., Arizona State University, Associate Professor of Culture and Communication at Oakland University,
Savage representations in the discourse of modernity: Liberal ideology and the impossibility of nativist longing, 2013,
https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/viewFile/18685/16233, pgs 16-18, anuss)
I can only, in the space I have left, give an intimation of the anarcho-primitivist18 recuperation of a radically different vision of life, ironically
closer to that of the European explorers’ earlier candid narrations. In this alternative body of work (e.g., Gowdy, 1998; Jensen, 2004a, 2004b,
2006; Quinn, 1995; Sahlins, 1998; Shepard, 1973/1998, 1982/1998, 1998, 2002; 2003; Wells, 2010; Zerzan, 2005) there
is an emerging
consensus re-evaluating the hunter- 18 Again there is no way to come up with a completely innocuous
term for the perspective being put forward here. “Anarcho-primitivism,” however, is a term that has
come into use to designate a scholarly turn towards the evidence of pre-civilizational peoples and
lifestyles in its bearing for a critique of the violence and unsustainability of modern civilization.
Interestingly, any affirming re-evaluation of precivilizational lifeways tends to be quickly met with the charge of “romanticism,” thereby
precluding any reasoned examination of the evidence pointing to the possibility of its potential desirability; hence, the reason for this essay’s
title, on the “impossibility of nativist longing.” It goes
without saying that most modern subjects live a hugely
inflated romance with industrial civilization notwithstanding its clear destructiveness.gatherer way of life as
perhaps the “original affluent society” (Sahlins, 1998), averaging three to five hours a day of what in our civilized culture we would call “work,”
living on a subsistence economy premised on a logic of abundance (versus scarcity) based on renewable “flows” or naturally-occurring (and
renewable) resources in nature instead of “fixed assets” (e.g., fossil fuels), and observing an ethic of leisure, gender equality, generosity, limited
(not rapacious) competition, and communal interdependence and reciprocity with other beings in nature that allowed pre-modern human
beings to survive on the planet for hundreds of thousands of years without endangering its delicate balance. Conversely, the
turn to
settled agriculture and surplus production19 that enabled exponential growth in human population,
hierarchy, and the accumulation of wealth is now increasingly being seen as perhaps a wrong turn in
our human history, producing all kinds of unforeseen consequences. Foremost of these is eventual
scarcity,20 along with the necessity of building complex social organizations that have bred violent hierarchies and competition, wars,
famines, and massive ecological disruptions. Today, we face a crisis of such magnitude that it resists full
imagination by any of us in terms of all its fallout and potential consequences. It is said that we are
the only creatures on the planet whose singular achievement is that of bringing our species to the
brink of extinction (either by a nuclear holocaust or a total ecological collapse). Modern civilization’s romance with the
ideals of “progress,” “development,” and limitless extraction and production in service of a globalized
economy run amuck is now bumping up against all kinds of limits set from the beginning (if largely ignored)
by a finite planet. We are told we need new paradigms that will pull us back from the precipice of self-destruction caused by our addiction to
growth and the cult of progress, and by our unbridled expansion and virtual takeover of the planet to the exclusion of all other beings in nature.
In the encounter with primitive peoples, Parekh remarks that Europeans acted toward non-European ways of life with contempt, thinking that
they had nothing to learn from a critical dialogue with them, and making no effort to understand them for who they were. This contempt for
the lifeways of hunter-gatherer peoples (and, for that matter, for all things wild and free, i.e., undomesticated) continues today not only in
state and corporate policy aimed at exterminating or assimilating Indigenous peoples, but also in a massive disinformation campaign in
academic and popular discourses aimed at representing their way of life as something no rational human being can ever desire, value, or even
remotely long for. But perhaps now, in the emerging crises, we are witnessing a kind of turning of the tables, in which ancestry and
environment will once again have their say. The impossibility of going back to hunter-gatherer ways on a global scale is only matched by the
evident impossibility of going forward with our modern ways into cataclysm. Caught in
a conundrum of our own making, the
issue, for those of us who take the task of decolonization seriously, is at least a matter of grasping
that we have lived very differently for most of our history and are thus not doomed to destruction,
except if we insist stupidly that our deep past and deep ecology have nothing to teach us. If we cannot
listen and learn, however, their ancient summons could well become our last word.
Impact - Imperial War
If we do not take responsibility for the history of genocide we doom ourselves to the
construction of a more violent imperialist state that will end in permanent war
Street 4 (Paul Street, PhD in US History from Binghamton University, American journalist, author, historian, and political commentator,
Those Who Deny the Crimes of the Past, http://www.thereitis.org/those-who-deny-the-crimes-of-the-past/, 5-11-04, anuss)
Seen against, and as part of, the vast historical canvass of U.S. racist-imperial slaughter, the monumental US crimes in Southeast Asia that John
Kerry hinted at in his 1971 testimony are part of a larger story that renders self-delusional many Americans’ notion that their nation-state is
some sort of great exceptional moral and ethical city on the global hill. It is
especially important to appreciate the
significance of the vicious, often explicitly genocidal “homeland” assaults on native-Americans, which
set foundational racist and national-narcissist patterns for subsequent U.S. global butchery,
disproportionately directed at non-European people of color. The deletion of the real story of the so-called “battle of
Washita” from the official Seventh Cavalry history given to the perpetrators of the No Gun Ri
massacre is revealing. Denial about Washita and Sand Creek (and so on) encouraged US savagery at
Wounded Knee, the denial of which encouraged US savagery in the Philippines, the denial of which
encouraged US savagery in Korea, the denial of which encouraged US savagery in Vietnam, the denial
of which (and all before) has recently encouraged US savagery in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s a vicious
circle of recurrent violence, well known to mental health practitioners who deal with countless victims of domestic violence living in
the dark shadows of the imperial homeland’s crippling, stunted, and indeed itself occupied social and political order. Power-mad US
forces deploying the latest genocidal war tools, some suggestively named after native tribes that
white North American “pioneers” tried to wipe off the face of the earth (ie, “Apache,” “Blackhawk,”
and “Comanche” helicopters) are walking in bloody footsteps that trace back across centuries, oceans,
forests and plains to the leveled villages, shattered corpses, and stolen resources of those who Roosevelt
acknowledged as America’s “original inhabitants.” Racist imperial carnage and its denial , like charity,
begin at home. Those who deny the crimes of the past are likely to repeat their offenses in the future
as long as they retain the means and motive to do so. It is folly, however, for any nation to think that it can stand above
the judgments of history, uniquely free of terrible consequences for what Ward Churchill calls “imperial arrogance and criminality.” Every
new U.S. murder of innocents abroad breeds untold numbers of anti-imperial resistance fighters,
ready to die and eager to use the latest available technologies and techniques to kill representatives –
even just ordinary citizens – of what they see as an American Predator state. This along with much else will help precipitate an inevitable return
of US power to the grounds of earth and history. As
it accelerates, the U.S. will face a fateful choice, full of
potentially grave or liberating consequences for the fate of humanity and the earth. It will accept its
fall with relief and gratitude, asking for forgiveness, and making true reparation at home and abroad,
consistent with an honest appraisal of what Churchill, himself of native-American (Keetoowah Cherokee) ancestry, calls “the
realities of [its] national history and the responsibilities that history has bequeathed”: goodbye American
Exceptionalism and Woodrow Wilson’s guns. Or Americans and the world will face the likely alternative of
permanent imperial war and the construction of an ever-more imposing U.S. fortress state,
perpetuated by Orwellian denial and savage intentional historical ignorance. This savage barbarism of
dialectically inseparable empire and inequality will be defended in the last wagon-train instance by
missiles and bombs loaded with radioactive materials wrenched from lands once freely roamed by an
immeasurably more civilized people than those who came to destroy.
Alt – Give Back The Land
Giving back the land initiates a reconstruction of social standards and addresses the
root cause of oppressions
Churchill, 2 (Ward, former professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, 2002, “Struggle
for the land: Native North American resistance to genocide, ecocide, and colonization”, p. 382-383, PDF)ZBris
Not only is it perfectly reasonable to assert that a restoration of native control over unceded lands within the
United States would do nothing to perpetuate such problems as sexism and classism, but the
reconstitution of indigenous social standards that this would entail stands to free the affected
portions of North America from such maladies altogether. Moreover, it can be said that the process should have a
tangible impact in terms of diminishing such things elsewhere. The principle is this: Sexism, racism, and all the rest arose here
as a concomitant to the emergence and consolidation of the eurocentric nation-state form of
sociopolitical and economic organization. Everything the state does, everything it can do, is entirely contingent upon its
maintaining internal cohesion, a cohesion signified above all by its pretended territorial integrity, its ongoing domination of Indian Country.
Given this, it
seems obvious that the literal dismemberment of the nation-state necessary for Indian land
recovery correspondingly reduces the ability of the state to sustain the imposition of objectionable
policies within itself. It follows that realization of indigenous land rights serves to undermine or destroy the ability
of the status quo to continue imposing a racist, sexist, classist, homophobic, militaristic order upon
non-Indians.
Alt - Anarch@indigenism
We must reject the affirmative in favor of an anarch@indigenism that allows for the
inclusion of indigenous peoples, and queers through an avoidance of the state
structure
Lasky 11 (Jacqueline Lasky currently teaches Women’s Studies at the University of Hawai’i at Mänoa. She earned her Ph.D. in Political
Science from the University of Hawai'i at Mänoa, Indigenism, Anarchism, Feminism: An Emerging Framework for Exploring Post-Imperial
Futures, 2011, http://affinitiesjournal.org/affinities/index.php/affinities/article/view/72/231#_edn2, anuss)
What is anarch@indigenism, this intersectionality of indigenism, anarchism and feminism? Well, that depends… Anarch@indigenism is
different in different places, at different times, as seen by different people. It is relational. It is also
plural, multiple, contingent, transient, indeterminate and thoroughly unfixed. Yet it is also grounded.
Anarch@indigenism is grounded in the earth, grounded in bodies, grounded in memories (good and bad), and
grounded in spirits and dreams. Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos states it well in this self-description: Marcos is gay in San
Francisco, black in South America, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in
the streets of San Cristobal, a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec, a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10
p.m., a peasant without land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student, and, of course, a Zapatista in the
mountains.[5] Marcos
is articulating a resistant and resilient agency of the marginalized and subjugated
vis-à-vis oppressive power, which transverses places and times. Moreover, this collective personhood
of being-in-relation is at the crux of any working definition of anarch@indigenism. One’s sense of self
is not divorced from one’s relations with others (known and unknown), relations within systems of power
and the embedded struggles of life, relations with the land and natural elements (including spiritual realities),
relations with one’s histories and genealogies, and relations developed through one’s understanding
of others’ histories and genealogies.[6] What does this have to do with global politics and transnational relations?
Subcomandante Marcos again provides a telling answer: when asked his age he replies “518 years old,” making him a child at the time of
Christopher Columbus’s first ‘landing.’[7] The resistant
and resilient agency of anarcha@indigenists, while having
a genealogy predating 1492, comes of age in the violences attending European Conquest. International
relations as we know it, as a field of theory and practice, also comes of age during these early centuries of modernity. Attempting to
make sense of these colonial encounters and imperial violences, western political science has been
premised on the ‘nation’ as a rational and realizable entity. Yet, unimaginable death and irrational
devastation in the name of ‘nation’—particularly in the form of the state—suggests that this entity is (or should
be!) unrealizable. For many reasons that vary in their particularities, the essentialized ‘nation’ is often
an insufficient container in which to place all that is relational, multiple, transient and grounded. So, if
the ‘nation’ is an unrealizable entity, where does that leave us?[8] What if we focus on the ‘relations’ and not the
‘national’ part of international relations? It is, after all, relational tensions that first give rise to
colonialism and imperialism. Antony Anghie demonstrates that western international relations, embodied in international law, did
not originate in Europe to deal with each other; rather, it was produced through initial colonial encounters and ensuing imperial relations
between the Spanish and the Indians. He focuses on the works of Francisco de Vitoria, a sixteenth-century Spanish theologian and jurist, who
“is an extremely complex figure; a brave champion of Indian rights in his own time, he may also be seen as an apologist for imperialism whose
works are all the more insidious precisely because they justify conquest in terms of humanity and liberality” (Anghie 1999: 103). Anghie argues
that the west’s fundamental “sovereignty doctrine emerges through [Vitoria’s] attempts to address the problem of cultural difference” (90) and
the discursive production of a new framework of universal law to deal with the novel problems of encounter between two different cultural
systems.[9] Of course this framework is rooted within Vitoria’s Spanish cultural norms, and: [o]nce this framework is established, [Vitoria]
demonstrates that the Indians are in violation of universal natural law. Indians are included within the system only to be disciplined. [Moreover,
his concepts and arguments] are still regularly employed in contemporary international relations in the supposedly postimperial world (102).
The point here is that relations of conquest—European justifications for extinguishing ‘Other’/Native
cultures—are embryonic to the development of traditional imaginings of western political science.
Therefore we must contend with these imperial pasts and presents as we explore post-imperial
futures. In Indian-Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World, Jack Weatherford documents how the innumerable
contributions of the Native peoples of ‘New World’ were appropriated by the ‘Old World,’ all the while they were being killed and subjugated in
the course of this appropriation: The most consistent theme in the descriptions penned about the New World was amazement at the Indians’
personal liberty, in particular their freedom from rulers and from social classes based on ownership of property. For the first time the French
and the British became aware of the possibility of living in social harmony and prosperity without the rule of a king ‘Enlightened’ writers such as
Sir Thomas Moore, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin and others were all heavily indebted to Native sociopolitical practices in the
Americas, which embodied freedom, liberty, reciprocity and egalitarianism unfamiliar to Europeans. French ethnographer, (Louis Armand de
Lom d’Arce) Baron de Lahontan, in “describ[ing] this political situation, revived the Greek-derived word ‘anarchy,’ using it in the literal sense
meaning ‘no ruler.’ Lahontan
found an orderly society but one lacking a formal government that compelled
such order” (Weatherford 1988: 123).[10] Instead of notions of private property, and all its attendant vices
(accumulation, exploitation, etc.), indigenous practices were based upon personal autonomy and
collective use of resources (Arthur 2007). Nonhierarchical relations were the norm, wherein authority was
not exercised through force (be it parental authority over children or chiefly authority over the people) but through
exemplary conduct, oratory skill, and according to traditional protocols (Alfred 1999; Barsh 1986; Deloria and Lytle
1984 [1998]; Sioui 1992). Taiaiake Alfred elaborates: Collective self-determination depends on the conscious
coordination of individual powers of self-determination. The governance process consists in the
structured interplay of three kinds of power: individual power, persuasive power, and the power of
tradition. These power relations are channeled into forms of decision-making and dispute resolution grounded in the recognition that
beyond the individual there exists a natural community of interest: the extended family. Thus in almost all indigenous cultures,
the foundational order of government is the clan. And almost all indigenous systems are predicated
on a collective decision-making process organized around the clan (1999: 26). Within these indigenous
societies, this ‘anarchy’ was particularly acute concerning the parity between men and women (in public
and in private), the openness and diversity of sexuality, and the liberties enjoyed by all genders To the
Europeans, these indigenous practices were not only bewildering but also highly contentious in being almost diametrical opposite to European
societies. Within
the indigenous world view, coexistence among different groups was not only not
contentious but it was often desirable, and Native practices of treaty making attest to indigenous
willingness and ability to live and thrive amid differences [11]
Alt - Undo
The alternative is to reject the affirmative as an undoing of the past and the state
structures it reifies- only this can destabilize the state and allow for a rise of Fourth
World nations
Churchill 3 (Ward Churchill, American author and political activist, professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder,
Acts of Rebellion: The Ward Churchill Reader, 2003, http://cryptome.org/2013/01/aaron-swartz/Acts-of-Rebellion.pdf, pgs 243-246, anuss)
Fortunately, an alternative is conveniently at hand. It will be found in what is usually referred to as
the “Foucauldian method,” actually an approach to historical interpretation and resulting praxis developed by Nietzsche during the
1870s and adapted by Michel Foucault a century later.29 Without getting bogged down in a lot of theory, let’s just say the method
stands historical materialism squarely on its head. Rather than interrogating institutions and other
phenomena in such a way as to explain how they can/must “carry us forward into the future,” the
Nietzschean cum Foucauldian approach is to define what is objectionable in a given institution and then trace
is “lineage” backwards in time to discover how it went wrong and, thus, how it can be “fixed.”30 In
effect, where Lenin asked, “What is to be done?,” Foucault asks, “What is to be undone?”31 I can hear
mental gears grinding out there: “This guy can’t possibly mean we should all ‘go back to the past!’” Well, yes
and no. The method I’ve suggested is not to try and effect a kind of across the board rollback. It’s to
determine with some exactitude which historical factors have led to objectionable contemporary
outcomes and undo them. You might say that Foucault provided a kind of analytical filter which allows you to pick, choose, and
prioritize what needs working on. What I’ve called for are lines of action that materially erode the power
concentrated in centralized entities like the state, major corporations, and financial institutions, things
like that. The ways of going at this, at least initially, really aren’t so alien. Consumer boycotts are a useful tool, especially when combined with
the creation of co-ops and collectives producing wares to offset reliance upon corporate manufacturers in the future. Barter systems, labor
exchanges, a whole infrastructure allowing people to opt out of the ex isting system in varying degrees can be created. Something of the sort
was beginning to emerge in the U.S. during the late 1960s, as it had in the ’30s.32 Most of
all, it’s imperative to remember
that the first element of oppositional power projection lies in refusal. That means, in the context at
hand, that we must rid ourselves of the progressive notion that we can “get laws passed” to fix things.
You can hardly set out to undermine the authority of the state while endeavoring to put still more
legislation, any kind of legislation, on the books. The only legitimate form of activity in the legislative arena is
to pursue repeal of the tremendous weight of laws, ordinances, rules, and regulations that already
exist. Meanwhile, at least some of them can be nullified by our conscious and deliberate refusal to comply with them. You’ve got to break
“The Law”—whose law?—to get anywhere at all. To cop a line from Bob Dylan back in the days when he still had something to say, “To live
outside the law, you must be honest.” The flip side of the coin is that if you choose to “live inside the law you must be dishonest.” Worse, you
end up being the moral equivalent of a “Good German.” Not a very lofty stature, that. Let me put it to you this way. If I
were to say that
our mutual goal is ultimately to achieve “freedom,” everyone here would immediately agree. But then
we’d become mired in some long philosophical debate about what we mean by that, because
freedom is typically presented as a sort of abstract concept. Well, it’s not really so abstract, and most
assuredly not “intangible.” In fact, I think it can be quantified and measured. Try this: Freedom may be defined as
absence of regulation. The more regulated you are, the less free, and vice versa. 246 ACTS OF REBELLION I’m
not sure at this point that it matters much which laws you defy, there’s such a vast proliferation to choose from, and in some ways any of them
will do for purposes of initiating a process of transforming the prevailing individual and mass psychologies from that of “going along” to that of
refusal. Use your imagination, pick a point of departure, it doesn’t matter how small or in what connection, and get on with it. Once a particular
bit of “unruliness” takes hold, it can be used as the fulcrum for prying open the next level, and so on. This is what Marcuse meant when he said
that false consciousness is always breached at some “infinitesimally small spot,” but that any such breach might serve as an “Archimedean
point for a broader emancipation.”33 Can application of this principle actually produce results at higher levels? You bet. Look at Prohibition, the
Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, to find an example. It was rescinded for one reason and one reason only: People refused to
obey. It didn’t matter what penalties the state assigned to violating it, or what quantity of resources were pumped into the apparatus of
enforcement, Prohibition was met with a curiously ubiquitous “culture of resistance” in all quarters of American society. Eventually,
was determined by those who make such decisions that attempts to enforce it were becoming so
socially disruptive as to destabilize the state itself, and so the law was withdrawn. 34 The so-called
it
“War on Drugs” currently being waged by the state offers the prospect of a similar outcome over the
long run, albeit at a statutory rather than constitutional level, particularly if we were astute enough to
try and translate the rather substantial resistance to it into a coherent opposition politics.35 The Black
Panther Party’s strategy of focusing its recruitment on “lumpen proletarians”—street gang members,
in plain English—made a lot of sense and is another idea that might be usefully resuscitated.36 The
primary purpose of everything we do must be to make this society increasingly unmanageable. That’s
key. The more unmanageable the society becomes, the more of its resources the state must expend in
efforts to maintain order “at home.” The more this is true, the less the state’s capacity to project itself outwardly, both
geographically and temporally. Eventually, a point of stasis will be reached, and, in a system such as this one,
anchored as it is in the notion of perpetual growth, this amounts to a sort of “Doomsday Scenario”
because, from there, things start moving in the other direction—“falling apart,” as it were—and that
creates the conditions of flux in which alternative social forms can really begin to take root and flourish. This is kind of a crude sketch, but its
easy enough to follow. And, you know what? The rewards of following it don’t have to be deferred until the aftermath of a cataclysmic
“revolutionary moment” or, worse, the progressive actualization of some fardistant Bernsteinian utopia (which would only turn out to be
dystopic, anyway).37 No, in the sense that every rule and regulation rejected represents a tangibly liberating experience, the rewards begin
immediately and just keep on getting better. You will in effect feel freer right from the get-go. Alright, let’s follow things out a bit further. The
more disrupted, disorganized, and destabilized the system becomes, the less its ability to expand,
extend, or even maintain itself. The greater the degree to which this is so, the greater the likelihood
that Fourth World nations struggling to free ourselves from systemic domination will succeed. And the
more frequently we of the Fourth World succeed, the less the ability of the system to utilize our
resources in the process of dominating you.
Alt - Occupy
Occupation is the only way to reassert indigenous sovereignty- it is the only means for
removing the power from the current empire and resuming a previous form along
different lines
Thompson 13 (AK Thompson, served on the Editorial Committee of "Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action.", Toronto-based
writer and activist, writer of Black bloc, white riot: Anti-globalisation and the geneaology of dissent, 2-1-13, “Occupation” Between Conquest
and Liberation http://politicsandprotest.ws.gc.cuny.edu/files/2012/07/PPW-1-Thompson1.pdf, pgs 7-9, anuss)
And so, while I can understand the strategic importance of name change initiatives like those that activists sought to carry out within the
occupy movement, and while I concur that foregrounding anti-colonial struggles is important at a time when many
movement
participants remain unaware of the central role played by primitive accumulation in the constitution
and reproduction of capitalist rule,8 I worry that the manner in which these efforts have been carried
out thus far has produced a kind of analytic confusion that may be deleterious to subsequent
movement development. In order to address this problem, I want to revisit a moment in which Indigenous activists in the
United States actively used “occupation” as a political weapon in their struggle against colonial
conquest. Specifically, I want to consider the 1969-1971 occupation of Alcatraz Island by the SanFrancisco-based group Indians of All Tribes. In order to convey this story, I will hew closely to the published account provided
by movement participant Adam Fortunate Eagle in his autobiographical history of the event (1992). Following this case study (and following
logically from it), I will take a closer look at “occupation”
as a political concept in order to demonstrate that it is in
fact impossible to conceive of any politics—whether of conquest or of liberation—that does not take
occupation as one of its central attributes. In advancing this case, it’s not my goal to exonerate the Occupy movement or to
dismiss the efforts of those who struggled to guide it in the direction of a more resolutely anticolonial politics. Nor is it my goal to propose that
the case of Alcatraz is in some sense unique.9 What I do want to do, however, is to highlight how the
language we use to describe
our political reality directly affects how we conceive of our struggles. In the case or a word like
“occupation,” which we associate strongly with oppressors, we sometimes have difficulty imagining
how it might be applied in a positive way to our own practice. Nevertheless, such terms remain useful in clarifying
what’s required of us in order to win.Almost immediately, it becomes evident that the positive content of the abstract but
necessary injunction to “decolonize” is in fact—occupation. This is because all struggles around
productive relations and, at their limit, the relation to the land are the fundament of all politics. It’s
therefore not surprising that, in the opening salvo to “Since Predator Came,” Ward Churchill described the Indigenous inhabitants of North
America as “having continuously occupied the continent for at least 50,000 years.” Reasserting
Indigenous sovereignty (e.g.
decolonization) therefore means ending one occupation and resuming another along different lines,
with a different “we,” and for different ends. Between 1969 and 1971, several hundred Indigenous activists occupied Alcatraz
Island on a rotating basis. As Adam Fortunate Eagle recounts, their bid was not only to have their treaty rights recognized but also to create a
new kind of Indigenous society based on new associations and new practices. The legal struggle with the State was thus leveraged to facilitate a
political struggle in the most fundamental sense: determine who we are, determine what territory we operate within, and determine what
social relations will obtain therein. Carried out by the cross-nation coalition Indians of All Tribes, the occupation was inspired by a stunt pulled
five years earlier by a much smaller group of Sioux activists who staged a “takeover” of the island in 1964. Citing a treaty from 1868, which
stated that the Sioux were entitled to repossess lands used by the United States for bases and other purposes once these installations had been
declared “surplus,” the activists’ stunt—though it lasted less than a day, and though it was ultimately dismissed as being without legal merit—
nevertheless underscored the centrality of territory and people to politics. These
lessons were learned through
“takeover”—a kind of premature but pedagogically useful form of micro-sovereign contestation that
effectively illuminated the terrain of politics. The lesson resonated. As Fortunate Eagle recounts, “Alcatraz was a
powerful symbol.” Nevertheless, the significance of 1969’s occupation owed to the fact that the organizers also thought the island had “enough
facilities to give it some real potential.” In other words,
their objective was not simply to hold the space (whether
symbolically, as their Sioux predecessors had done, or concretely, by just being there) but to produce
something with and within it: As Fortunate Eagle recounts, the hope was that the island’s territorial and
infrastructural potential could be used to “galvanize the urban Indian community and reach out to the
Indians on the reservation” (1992: 39). In this way, the action’s political character became clear: sovereign
claims to the island would be used to bring together fragmented Indigenous populations that could
subsequently be used to seize territory and determine the social relations—including the productive
relations—that might obtain therein. On this basis, the planning began: We developed our ideas of the practical,
historical, and political reasons why Alcatraz should become Indian, and what exactly we would do
with it. All of ourthoughts were later incorporated into proclamations made at the takeover . (1992: 39)
Reflecting on his experience as an active participant in the movement more than 20 years later, Fortunate Eagle makes some wry observations
about the apparent homology between the actions of Indians of All Tribes and the colonial conquest of the Americas. “I
guess the roots
of the occupation were first framed when Columbus set foot on an island in the Caribbean,” he proclaimed.
Moreover, “I think if the Indians of that island had made as much fuss as the government of the United
States did about the island of Alcatraz, we wouldn’t have had the problems that forced us to invade.”
This insight leads to a stunning conclusion: “Maybe we Indians could learn something about holding onto our land and making guests feel
unwelcome.” Yet perhaps we did learn something from what happened after Columbus landed on that island, because, in a way, the same also
happened out on “the Rock.” Nobody really expected us to be that persistent, and certainly no one expected us to stay very long. (1992: 14)
Despite being a member of the “local native communities” referred to by the Occupy Oakland People of Color Caucus in the preamble to their
motion, the “echo” of “colonial domination” in the terms “occupy” and “occupation” was, for Fortunate Eagle, a valuable political discovery.
How else are we to understand the fact that he goes on to describe the activists that landed on Alcatraz as “the occupying force” and to refer to
their arrival as “the takeover” (1992: 54).
Alt - Divine Violence
Divine violence deconstructs the existing state to create the space for one whose
foundations are not based upon inherent violence
Meylahn 13 (Johann Albrecht Meylahn, Professor of Theology at the University of Pretoria, Divine violence as auto-deconstruction: The
Christ-event as an Act of transversing the Neo-Liberal fantasy, 2013, http://www.zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/viewFile/399/480, pgs
2-3, anuss)
Revolutionary violence might begin as divine violence, as Žižek argues, but eventually this divine violence is
transformed into mythic state-founding violence. Žižek uses examples that would shock most liberal hearts, for
example Hugo Chávez who in 2008 subordinated the judicial sphere to his executive powers (Žižek
2008:469), or Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s condoning of Pere Lebrun (necklacing) (Žižek 2008:478). What makes these acts of violence
perhaps initially divine violence is that they are violent reactions or outbursts to the excessive
structural violence of the current socio-economic-political system. In other words, these outbursts are
expressions of the excess violence of the system. Yet these outbursts of excessive violence are transformed into mythic
violence of state-founding violence as soon as they become a means to an end: the possibility of a new state. What is often not
perceived in the typical liberal condemnation of these acts of violence is the excessive structural
violence they are responding to, such as daily police brutality towards the poor and the structural
economic violence that traps people in vicious cycles of poverty. Žižek argues that this is the parallax lesson of terror
(2008:469), that there is no meta-language with which to discuss violence and or ethics because there is no bird’s eye view. The moment
you condemn the violence of the angry mob you are condoning the violence of the system. The
problem is that in the history of revolutionary movements this angry violence of the mob against the
excessive violence of the system turns into the mythic founding violence of a new system , but which ends
up being similar to the one the violence first erupted against2 . The term ‘divine violence’ conjures up the images of justified violence as in
various theories of just war or even holy war – war/violence in the name of some or other noble cause. However, divine violence has nothing to
do with the ideology of just war and with trying to find a form of violence that is more acceptable, more justifiable or more noble. Divine
violence is not about finding some kind of balance between structural (lawmaintaining status-quo maintaining)
violence and revolutionary (new law/state founding) recurring cycle of victim and avenger”(Buck-Morss 2009:144) 2
Žižek unpacks this phenomenon by referring to the terror (violence of Lenin’s revolution) which later developed into the mythic violence of
Stalin’s state-founding (2008:472). 2violence and trying to propagate some or other just war theory, or necessary violence theory. Divine
violence, as law/state-destroying violence, is exactly that: it seeks to destroy the state and the law
that brings about the structural (law/state maintaining) violence and keeps people in vicious cycles of
poverty and captivity, and it is violent as it destroys this law/state/system, but without this violence
being a means to a particular end such as a new alternative law/state/system. The problem with many of the
violent revolutions mentioned above is not that they were unjust but that they were blocked, as they never really challenged the system but
only replaced the actors in the system. Žižek therefore argues that Gandhi was more violent than Hitler (Žižek 2008:475) as Gandhi,
with
his passive resistance, truly undermined the British colonial system whilst Hitler and Stalin never
actually changed anything but only replaced those in power. Gandhi’s passive resistance undermined
the functioning of the state apparatus and thus fundamentally threatened to destroy the system by
undermining the power that the system had over its subjects by exposing its violent foundation.
Benjamin (1996) describes the ultimate criminal as the one who does not only challenge the existing laws, as
such a criminal can be judged and condemned by those very laws that s/he challenges, but the one who
challenges the very foundations (mythic foundations – law/state-founding foundations), exposing the violence
inherent in those very foundations, and thereby destroys the very authority and legitimization of the
law. This kind of violence can be described as divine violence . It does not act in the name of a higher law, but it
deconstructs the very foundations of the existing law/state, exposing the founding myth by revealing
the inherent violence in the law/state.
Lesbian K
Paternalism
Paternalism stems from a lack of total power - it takes away the ability for people to
make their own decisions and moral choices for "their own good"
Sharma 7 (Kriti Sharma, quoting analysis based on Sarah Hoagland's "Lesbian Ethics", Sarah Hoagland is a Professor of Philosophy and
Women's Studies at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, a Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at Northeastern Illinois
University in Chicago, 3/7/07, "Moral Revolution", http://southernersonnewground.wordpress.com/2007/03/12/thoughts-on-moralrevolution/lesbian-ethics-bookletpdf/)GNL
Though most of us may reject the value of “power-over” by agreeing that might does NOT make right,
we’re more susceptible to a more subtle form of “power-over”: paternalism. Paternalism means
taking over for others, intervening their lives “for their own good”. “We tend to believe that to be
effective in a situation, we must control it; that to be good, or sisters, to another, we must end her pain and make everything
all right; that this is what being powerful means. In the process we discourage her ability to make
choices, to respond within the limits of the situation she faces…As a result, we undermine her moral
agency.” We can also start to lose respect for those who we are “taking over” for, those who we are
acting on behalf of. Paternalism also means that we can condescend to another by accepting what she says just because they says it;
this is depriving her of agency – it means that we are not taking her seriously.55 It makes sense that we should want to have power in our lives
so that we can have some control of our circumstances. We
understandably wish to protect who and what we love.
Having lived under oppression, when we come to political consciousness, we are just learning that we
are not powerless, that we are strong and able to make a difference. But our lack of total power can frighten us – it
can remind us of the feelings of powerlessness we experience under oppression. Under oppression, we have been convinced
of our ineffectiveness, and we become afraid that if we cannot control everything, we cannot control
anything. The feelings and the behavior are understandable. The question is, are they helpful to us? Do they help us
resist oppression? Do they help us connect with others so that we can collectively resist oppression and live the lives we want? “When we
regard power as an ability to control things and it turns out that we can’t control a situation, we are left facing our own apparent
powerlessness. Often
we will step back as if we’d failed and assume blame (guilt) for the entire situation
as if we had created it; alternatively, we will turn our back on the situation or otherwise deny that
there is a real, continuing problem.” Also, when our movement is faced with situations it can’t control, we can start to think that
the movement is completely powerless, and therefore we may start to develop contempt and disgust for the movement and for each other.
Attending as an alternative to paternalism We don’t have to intervene in or control painful situations
for others, thus interrupting their process and undermining their agency. Instead we can attend to
others in such a way that they are strengthened an empowered. Attending “empowers [another] in that it enables
her to gather and focus her own strength. Such attending is often what we do when we share joy…By attending one who is in pain, I can help
steady her. When
she is off-center and in crisis, I can help stabilize her nerves and fluctuations, perhaps
acting as a beacon or a magnet. When we attend each other, we can create between ourselves an
enabling, adepting power.” “The point of attending a friend is not that she can better control herself or her own situation, but that
she can better act in the situation. The point concerns her ability to go on, to make decisions as a moral agent,
as an agent who makes choices, who creates value.” Attending is about steadying each other,
witnessing each other, breaking our isolation (that’s how, when the dominant society ignores or
denies our experiences, we remember that we’re not crazy!) It is, importantly, about offering support
and suggestions, but leaving choices to the one we attend. This is what we do when we support (attend to) a
survivor.555555 Sometimes people want/need privacy. 2. We need to protect ourselves when we attend to others so that we don’t absorb
their energy, but we understand it. 3. If attending means taking on another’s pain, and in particular, becoming a target of their misplaced anger,
we are not empowering anyone (neither ourselves nor the one we attend) for we are not taking ourselves or the other seriously. 4. We
always have the choice to withdraw our attention from a situation when it threatens to dissolve into a
coercive relationship.55
People choose freely until they are oppressed or coerced - paternalistic mindsets lead
to both of these
Sharma 7 (Kriti Sharma, quoting analysis based on Sarah Hoagland's "Lesbian Ethics", Sarah Hoagland is a Professor of Philosophy and
Women's Studies at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, a Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at Northeastern Illinois
University in Chicago, 3/7/07, "Moral Revolution", http://southernersonnewground.wordpress.com/2007/03/12/thoughts-on-moralrevolution/lesbian-ethics-bookletpdf/)GNL
In traditional anglo-european ethics, we are said to have chosen something freely unless we were (a)
ignorant or (b) coerced into something. However, ignorance can’t always function as an excuse
because there are certain things we are expected to know for the well-being of ourselves and others.
“As Cherrie Moraga exploded: ‘What each of us needs to do about what don’t know is to go look for it.’ The degree to which this
challenge has been met has depended on a number of factors: the general openness and sensitivity
(even without understanding) of the community to the particular issue, the risk involved for those
describing immediate experiences, the degree of vulnerability of community lesbians concerning the
issue, and the degree of ignorance still prevalent in the community about the issue.” “As Marilyn Frye notes,
‘one need only hear the active verb ‘to ignore’ in the word ‘ignorance’” to appreciate that ignorance is not a passive state….In fact, over
time we come to realize that much ignorance is the result of ignoring.” “A central part of working out
of oppression involves diversint ourselves of ignorance and its effects. This process can be traumatic:
aside from facing things we fear, in divesting ourselves of our ignorance we will make mistakes with
each other; and by the very setup, the situation is not one that involves being excused for our
mistakes. That these mistakes are made in ignorance separates us from those who do such things with full understanding of what they are
doing. But our mistakes still result in harm to others. So56565656565656565656 we’re in a difficult position. Nevertheless, the
process of such mistakes is part of what moves us on toward lesser ignorance, toward dealing with
the issues, and thus toward more informed choices. We don’t divest ourselves of our ignorance by
hiding or by refusing to engage in order to avoid mistakes. Thus, the other side of deciding that ignorance is not an
excuse is the idea of going on and engaging despite the fact that we will make mistakes.” As for coercion, it is cleared to many
of us that we are coerced into making certain choices every day. Marilyn Frye’s definition of coercion
involves (a) the idea that oppressors manipulate situations such that the options of the oppressed are
constrained, so that the oppressed are forced to constantly “choose” the lesser of two evils, and (b)
coercion involves getting the oppressed to contribute our efforts towards the maintenance of the
current hierarchy. “In other words, oppression functions, not just by those in power limiting our options, but by those in power
successfully getting us to contribute our efforts toward that maintenance of those oppressive conditions.” Even in coercive circumstances,
however, we are agents. It’s not that useful to say that the oppressed are not to blame for our choices under oppression, because we still have
to survive, live our lives, and continue to make more choices under oppression. “Oppression
is not a matter of excuse, but
rather a dimension within which we make our choices.” A more useful question than “are we to be
praised or blamed for our actions?” is “how are we to keep ourselves from being de-moralized?” That is,
we’re living under oppression, being manipulated, being coerced into things. How do we maintain the ability to make choices and to perceive
ourselves as people who are able to make choices? How do we not give up? How do we keep from turning against the very things we value?
“By
ceasing to participate in the dominant belief system—particularly in the lie that we have any
acceptable choice in certain situations—we may be able to resist de-moralization and go on to realize,
to create, the values which will undermine oppression.”
Alt – Separatism
Withdrawal from the system is key
Hoagland 95 (Sarah Lucia Hoagland, a Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago,
Temple University Press, Feminism and Community, "Separating from Heterosexuality", Chapter 17, http://books.google.com/books?id=63JU6N2THYC&pg=PA273&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false)GNL
Significantly, just as traditional ethics does not recognize moral revolution, so it does not acknowledge separation as an option for moral
agents.
Withdrawal or separation is not perceived as an option when the game played appears to be the
only game in town and so is taken for reality. In a sense the game is reality, but its continued
existence is not a matter of fact so much as a matter of agreement. The game is an agreement in value which players
breathe life into. And this suggests that participation in the system at some level — support, reform,
rebellion - must be an unquestioned norm and hence not itself perceived as a choice.‘ Consider, again, that
shelters for women who have been beaten by their husbands lose funding if shelter workers are suspected of encouraging those seeking refuge
to withdraw or separate from the particular batterer or from marriage or from heterosexuality in general. Ethical
considerations
forced on most women whom men beat involve how to maintain the family unit, how to work with
their husband‘s problems, how to restore his "dignity," how to help the children adjust- in short, how
to go on as a (heterosexual) woman. Such judgments hold in place the feminine, in this case feminine
virtue, and the function of such judgments is not to encourage the integrity of the individual in her
choices. It is rather to maintain the social order and specific relationships and avenues of hierarchy within it. I want to suggest that it is
crucial to acknowledge withdrawal, separatism, as an option if we are to engage in moral revolution. Separation is a central option
both as a political strategy and as a consideration in individual relationships. We may withdraw from
a particular situation when it threatens to dissolve into a relationship of dominance and
subordination. And we may withdraw from a system of dominance and subordination in order to engage in moral revolution. To
withdraw from a system, a conceptual framework, or a particular situation is to refuse to act according to its rules. A system can only
function if there are participants. A king can direct his domain only if most everyone else
acknowledges him as king, if the couriers carry his messages.‘ If the messengers dump their messages
and go on to some- thing else, not only is the king‘s communication interrupted, so is his status, for
the couriers are no longer focused on him and are therefore declaring themselves no longer couriers . If
enough couriers lay down their messages, the king will not be able to amass sufficient power to force those messengers to again focus on him.
When we separate, when we withdraw from someone's game plan, the game becomes meaningless,
at least to some extent, ceasing to exist for lack of acknowledgment. Of course if a tree falls in the forest, there are
sound waves, whether or not there are human or other animal ears. Or whether there are any other sorts of mechanisms in addition to the
king‘s own ears to detect them. But if the listeners, the messengers, have withdrawn, then the sound waves can’t he translated or even
acknowledged. Thus the messages of the king in a certain respect make no sense, and in certain respect have ceased to exists. So has the king …
a king. Separation
is a legitimate moral and political choice. (I mean by saying it is legitimate that it has a
political and moral function.) That is, to engage in a situation or a system in order to try to change it is
one choice. To withdraw from it, particularly in order to tender it meaning- less, is another choice. Within a given situation or
at a given moment there are often good reasons for either choice. Further, both choices involve
considerable risk; neither one comes with guarantees: while directly challenging something can
validate it, withdrawing may allow it to continue essentially unhampered. What is significant to me is that the
choice to separate is not acknowledged as a legitimate ethical choice. There are considerable prohibitions in all quarters against withdrawal.
Alt – Symbolic Castration
Castration causes incompleteness- this aff supports the idea of symbolic castration
Larvalsubjects 1/15/07 (http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2007/01/15/symboliccastration/)
There are periods where I find that everything I’m doing suddenly collapses. Or rather, it’s not that anything collapses, but rather it’s as if all my
drive suddenly disappears and the things that hitherto held my fascination become dark and grey, pallid, as if they no longer hold the allure of
promise they once had. That’s the way it is with desire, I think… Desire renders a portion of the world luminous to the exclusion of everything
else, elevating some single element or series of elements to a stand-in for everything else, and when desire loses its force it’s as if the entire
world collapses and I’m like one of those zombies from a b-film just shuffling along without any particular interesting in anything. Indeed, this
might be a particularly apt metaphor, as these zombie always seem to desire the brains and flesh of the living, of those still animated with
desire, as if, like cannibals, they might consume the desires animating others to kick start their own desire. Is the evaporation of my desire the
result of being on vacation for too long and thereby not having the requisite antagonism and sense that my enjoyment has been stolen to
animate me? Is it that I’ve had too many successes lately and therefore experience myself in the midst of a malaise? What is particularly
frustrating about the evaporation of desire is that the desire to write insists. For the blessed Lars of Spurious, the question is always one of how
to continue to write, and he has gone so far as to conceive a writing that is not driven by content but a content driven by writing. Yet what of
this desire to write in the first place, this oppressive sense that I am somehow violating some duty if I don’t write? Is this not the phenomenon
of phallus or symbolic castration? As
Zizek puts it, the status of possibility, while different from that actuality, is thus not simply deficient
with regard to it. Possibility as such exerts actual effects which disappear as soon as it ‘actualizes’ itself.
Such a ‘short-circuit’ between possibility and actuality is at work in the Lacanian notion of ‘symbolic
castration’: the so-called ‘castration-anxiety’ cannot be reduced to the psychological fact that, upon
perceiving the absence of the penis in woman, man becomes afraid that ‘he also might lose it.’
‘Castration anxiety’ rather designates the precise moment at which the possibility of castration takes
precedence over its actuality, i.e., the moment at which the very possibility of castration, its mere threat, produces actual effects in
our psychic economy. This threat as it were ‘castrates’ us, branding us with an irreducible loss. (Tarrying With the
Negative, 159) In this context Zizek is speaking specifically of the manner in which power functions . What
is important where power is concerned is the threat of force and not the exercise itself. That is, a
certain potentiality is seen as pervading intersubjective relations– the potentiality of violence –and
this potentiality leads to transformations at the level of actuality or how we act. However, generalizing the
notion of symbolic castration or the phallic function, then, it can be said that symbolic castration is that moment
where possibility enters the world, where the world becomes haunted by incompleteness, and this
incompleteness compels us to produce regardless of whether there is any need to produce. Over and
above the need to communicate something, over and above the aim of “padding my CV”, or intervening in some situation, there is the insistent
call to write even where there is nothing and no reason to write. And even though there is no concrete call to write anything, even though
there is nothing to be accomplished in writing, even though there is nothing to be said, I nonetheless feel as if I am failing in some crucial way
when I’m not writing, that something in the world is fundamentally incomplete. Why should writing function as such an aim in itself? And why
must I feel so wretched when I have nothing to write?
AT: Gender Realism
No kidding, every one experiences womanness differently, its still possible to have
features of being a woman in common. Only identity politics links to this objection
anyways.
Mikkola ‘6 (Mari: Philosophy Department, University of Stirling, U.K. “Elizabeth Spelman, Gender Realism, and
Women,” Hypatia, 21.4, 2006.//LVL)
This points to another reason for why the separability objection does not provide a good reason to reject gender
realism per se. Spelman's argument for the inseparability of gender from race and class is made in terms of
women's experiences—how women experience their gender. Now, it seems true that women experience
their gender very differently from one another and that numerous different ways to experience
womanness exist. But this does not count against a realist view of gender for two reasons: First, even
if women qua women have the very same feature of womanness in common, the claim that they
experience this differently from one another could hold. The two claims—that women share the same
feature of womanness and that they experience this feature differently from one another—are perfectly
compatible. Imagine three different observers who have perceptual experiences of the same object, say, of a
rectangular block. Imagine further that these observers are positioned such that they all observe the object from
different angles. Now, it seems that all three observers are going to have very different perceptual experiences of
the object. (They may even be positioned such that none of them perceives the object as rectangular.)
Nevertheless, they all have a perceptual experience of the very same object and the fact that they have observed
the object in different ways does not entail that the object in all cases was not the same object. To claim that the
observers have a perceptual experience of the rectangular block in common and that they all perceptually
experience this block differently from one another is perfectly fine—the two claims are compatible with one
another. In a similar fashion, it is perfectly possible that women experience their womanness differently from one
another although these experiences are of the same feature. The second reason why differences in
experiences of womanness (and in experiences of women's gendered identities) may differ without this
counting against a realist view of gender is that womanness might not be something that could be
experienced in the way Spelman's discussion seems to assume. I have in mind here positions such as the one
Haslanger has recently argued for; a way to understand womanness whereby gender is not an identity of
individuals that designates something about individuals' psychology or sense of self. For Haslanger, rather,
womanness designates a particular social position one[End Page 86] occupies within broad social
structures and relations where one is sex-marked for a certain sort of treatment that is oppressive or
subordinating: "Gender categories are defined in terms of how one is socially positioned . . . [they] are defined
hierarchically within a broader complex of oppressive relations; one group (viz., women) is socially positioned as
subordinate to the other (viz., men), [and] [s]exual difference functions as the physical marker to distinguish the
two groups, and is used in the justification of viewing and treating the members of each group differently" (2000,
38). Women can experience their social positions in any number of different ways and their social
positions may affect and shape their identities or senses of selves as women in numerous different
ways. Nonetheless, Haslanger's position is gender realist and she maintains that women have a feature in
common that makes them women: they are all socially positioned as subordinate or oppressed where
this social positioning is sex-marked. If Spelman's separability objection is to count against gender
realism, womanness must be conceived of as an identity or a psychological orientation of some kind.
This has the consequence that any theory of gender that takes womanness to be something other
than this (such as Haslanger's conception of womanness as a social position), already avoids Spelman's
separability objection. In other words, any realist theory of gender that avoids defining womanness as
an identity of individuals avoids this objection.
Wimmin oppressed in the patriarchal world are not just those who identify as
wimmin- it also relates to those who identify as men but are perceived as lessor or
more womanly
Real 2012 (Julian Real. “Who Gets to define “women-only space”? People WITH male privilege or people
WITHOUT male privilege?” People of Color Organize. 2012.
http://peopleofcolor.tumblr.com/post/15029267647/who-gets-to-define-women-only-space-peoplewith-male)kw
This whole Western assault on women/wimmin-only space by people who are behaving in the most
GLARINGLY pro-patriarchal ways is, in the view of this blogger, socially conservative and oppressive
and controlling to women-raised-as-girls. I see it that way based on what women/wimmin tell me. And
based on what I see happening to radical feminism, lesbian feminism, and wimmin-only spaces in the
last fifteen years. They are under social assault, as they always have been. But now there’s a new
contingent of people (liberals who are pro-trans), who are making liberal arguments for why it is
women-raised-as-girls ought not have spaces that are only for women-raised-as-girls. How ISN’T that
male domination at work? In what ways isn’t that a function and expression of male domination?
Does radical feminism, lesbian feminism, and women’s liberation get supported in spaces where men
and male-privileged people are allowed? Not in my experience, with few exceptions. Male supremacy
and male dominance never take a holiday, unlike the super-privileged men who possess the social
power to name other people’s realities. This erosion of wimmin-only space is, far more often than not,
in my view, a man-infestation of male supremacy. I radically support women’s autonomy and
independence from men, interpersonally; I stand with women and wimmin who desire and demand
wimmin-only spaces and community. Anyone who defends men’s power and privileges to encroach on
women’s and girls’ lives is behaving in an anti-woman way, in my view. More power to any woman
raised as a girl who wants to create woman/wimmin-only spaces that are exclusively for womenraised-as-girls—or for “women" as she defines the terms—not as male-privileged people define them.
More power to radical lesbian feminists who want or demand radical lesbian feminist-only spaces, as
the radical lesbian-feminists define their terms. This is not an oppressor-group, anywhere in the world.
Male privileged people rule globally, if not universally. And people raised as boys were raised with male
privileges; some boys, in growing into adulthood, have lost some of those privileges, or never acquired
some of them, because they were socially perceived as a girl, “acting like a girl", or because they are
perceived as being a woman. But males, of whatever gender identity, can and do learn male privileges
and practice male entitlements without feeling either like a boy or like a man. I’ve seen womanidentified trans people use male privilege and entitlements, and power, over and against lesbian
feminists. And I stand with women-raised-as-girls who are lesbian and feminist when this happens.