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September 10, 2007

The Economy of the Colonial Encounter

Posted by WildlyParenthetical under Australia, borders, children, colonialism, indigeneity, politics, privilege, property, race, racism, Schlunke, whiteness
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FOR the course I’m tutoring this semester, we’re reading Bluff Rock: Autobiography of a Massacre by Katrina Schlunke. It’s an engagement with the stories woven around Bluff Rock, a big granite outcrop in the New England, an area of New South Wales where Schlunke grew up. At the heart is a concern with the engagement between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people around and as part of ‘settlement,’ most particularly the massacre(s) of Aboriginal people that occurred as part of this process. It is, in the end, a thoroughly fictocritical account, a non-fiction novel. Christos Tsiolkas (who wrote Dead Europe and Loaded, later made into a movie called Head On) offers glowing praise:

Bluff Rock is analytical and wise, by which I mean the scholarship and research is rigorous but also committed to the historian’s task of making argument lucid and understandable. The book is also impassioned and honest, by which I mean it is driven by the ethical obligation to explore racist interpretations of the pas tin order to illuminate how racism functions in the words, actions and psyches of our present.

Katrina Schlunke’s book achieves what many of us hope from cultural theory, that through an investigation of language, words and culture, we come to a questioning of history, politics and the treacherous relationship between memory and myth. Her objective terrain is the contested arena of racist war in Australia, but her terrain is also how our ways of seeing race, colonialism, being white and being Aborigine have been formed by cultural forms and expressions that have made us repress signs of both violence and resistance in the landscape.

It’s an interesting book, a beautiful challenge to the deathly whiteness of Keith Windschuttle’s attempts at ‘Australian history,’ valuable also because it demonstrates that an awareness of one’s own whiteness permits a new and different way of doing history, one which need not conclude in guilty paralysis, nor reiterate innocence in the face of destruction.

An excerpt:

The saved child

Coming on them on the side of a deep precipice, the avenging party attacked them and wiped them out, with the exception of one small piccaninny. The little chap ran to Bill Bates and clung to his legs and was spared. William Bates kept and reared him (the boy). He was always grateful and useful to him in after years.

The Aborigines withdrew to higher ground until they found themselves between a precipice and their pursuers. The entire group, women and children were driven over the edge—with the exception of one small boy, the only survivor. This boy, incidentally, was brought up very successfully by one of the white men involved. They developed a strong feeling of devotion to each other.

This was also a story I was told in Tenterfield. The story was that the child grew up, and when dead, was buried at the foot of the Bluff. One might see the grave; I found nothing. William Bates’ son says nothing about having an adopted Aboriginal brother. Campbell (the author of the second quote above, which is from his thesis) acknowledges no source for his statement; it could well have been the collected oral histories from the Tenterfield Historical Society records (as in the first quote above). There is no supporting objective evidence in the shape of graves or in the shape of adults who have come forward to tell of their unusual upbringing, but the story keeps on being told and written. Campbell’s confident assertion—in a thesis, no less—even makes it official history. But if it is not true, why would people invent or believe such a tale? What does this story do?

First, it individualises morality. While a group was chasing and killing, when one child appealed to one of these killers, he ‘saved’ the child. This same man, we assume, could not and did not wish to stop killing all the others, but he did save one child. It wants to tell us that these men were not entirely monsters; that they also had a fundamental humanity. That close up, when appealed to directly, one man’s choice was to save a child. But could we call this ‘humanity’? Is this how the sensibility that led to the more systematic Stolen Generations began? When an Aboriginal child was told it was lucky to have been ‘saved’, stolen up from death, ‘rescued’ from ‘wild blacks’ to become ‘grateful’ and ‘useful’, ‘devoted’ and successfully ‘brought up‘? But if one child could be saved, why not all of the group? One can begin to see why the Romantic imagination strained within colonialism. The innocent child saved but the rest killed—why? The sentiment attached to children frayed and played itself out alongside the raw and unromantic slaughter.

Children were also involved in other massacres. About two hours from Bluff Rock is Myall Creek, where in 1838 (six years before Irby et al. carried out their ‘punishment’ [in the massacre described above]) Kilmeister et al. were slaughtering a group of children, women and men. Some of the perpetrators, all current or ex-convicts, were eventually hanged amongst general outrage that any white man should died for killing Indigenous Australians. They were not found guilty at their first trail, which was for killing an Aboriginal known as ‘Daddy’, but in their second trial they were found guilty on five counts of th e’murder of an Aboriginal Black Child who name was to the Attorney-General unknown.’ This child had been identified by its rib bones, a jaw bone and some teeth. In Tales of Old Times: Early Australian Incident and Adventure (1903), Chomley records Anderson (the hutkeeper) saying about the group on Myall Creek that:

There was a little child at the back of the hut when they were tying this party; and when the blacks and party were going away, this little child as I thought, was going to follow the party with its mother, but I took hold of it and put it into the hut and stopped it from going.

However, in his first sworn statement about the event, Anderson says the following:

All the black at the station were taken away except Davy and his brother Billy, two Black gins a pickininny [a little boy] and two little boys who saved themselves when the horsemen were coming up by jumping into the creek. The Men left a black Gin with me saying she was a good looking Gin. They gave another to Davy. The little child came from behind the hut when they were taking the blacks away as I thought to follow them. I put him into the hut and shut the door—they did not come back after him.

One of the reasons, then, that Anderson (and Davy) didn’t act to stop the larger slaughter was that they were given women to do with what they wished. It could also be said therefore that Kilmeister ‘saved’ two Aboriginal women—but they were saved only to be raped? used? by others. There was another woman ‘saved’ from this massacre by another man. She was the mother of Charly, a small boy (noted for his ‘familiar and friendly way’) whom Davy had tried to save—but ‘he would go along with mammy’. Charly was killed, but his mother, according to other evidence, was picked out by John Blake, who kept her, saved her, for ‘future use’. Like putting pennies in the bank—this woman was ‘saved’ as only the most brutal white economic metaphor can imply. The colonial rationality of economy. Did this lone woman, the mother of at least one of the suggested ten to twelve children killed, imagine that she was saved in any other sense? Was death by slaughter something worse in her psychology and cosmology than knowing all her group had been beheaded, stabbed, burnt? Would it have been better than being taken away from ehr country, used by Blake and perhaps others? Did she think she was saved? Might there also have been Aboriginal women taken from others of the massacres carried out around Tenterfield? And were children also used sexually and economically? What did Bates, of ‘The Bluff Rock Massacre’, intend for his ‘saved’ child? Was the child of Bluff Rock saved because a dead child had hanged the others who had massacred at Myall Creek? Had the word come back from the Sydney—not only don’t tell anyone about killing Aboriginal people, but particularly don’t tell of killing children?

The child of ‘The Bluff Rock Massacre’ had seen (we assume) his closest relations and friends ‘wiped out’, but he ran toward the legs of one of these shooters and was ‘spared’. This little boy ran across and made his physical presence felt to a man holding a gun. The little boy clung to the man’s legs and hte man couldn’t shoot. At that moment the man could have thrown the boy aside and shot him, but at that moemnt he didn’t. And so the story goes that this unnamed boy was always ‘grateful and useful’—he had been saved up for later, careful, use. He didn’t send those who massacred to be hanged.

In the early years of carrying to and from the coast the blacks would occasionally raid the teams. When Bates’ teams were threatened, this boy would help to defend them and would persuade the wild blacks not to attack, so that his [Bates’] loads were never raided.

And so the saved becomes the saviour on a regular basis. (pp. 104-108)

 

August 31, 2007

Supplementing Foucault

Posted by WildlyParenthetical under Alcoff, biopolitics, body, body politic, borders, Difference, disability, Foucault, race, racism, Suffering, whiteness
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HOW much would he hate that, huh?? Well, no, not really, but I think the idea of applying a vaguely Derridean concept to the Grond Moister of Genealogy might be somewhat insulting. Still… if Hacking’s happy to do it, then me too! me too! (not that I claim any originality in this move.)

I’m in the midst of writing a paper, and this is bad procrastination before I get back into it. Nonetheless, I feel badly for a) no posting and b) no posting of anything actually… actual. You kids deserve more that frou-frouha. And thus: some of my minor conclusions for this paper. Nothing new, really, if you know my work, but nonetheless, I figure most of you don’t (what with my… what’s the opposite of stellar?… extraordinarily earthy publications record!).

Between biopolitics and anatamopolitics (the management of the population and the disciplining of individual bodies), Foucault’s biopower provides a rich analytical framework for denaturalising the function of medicine and locating its role in the political sphere of a normalising society. Yet for all of his understanding of how bodies are disciplined, he fails to interrogate in any detail the political and fundamentally normalising structure of contemporary phenomenological experience. Alcoff’s work has permitted us an understanding of the way that racism—so key to contemporary power/knowledge (I’ve discussed this earlier; Foucault positions racism as a technique for fragmenting the population into superrace and subrace, and thus as not simply attaching to what we might otherwise, in more everyday use, call ‘race’ but I think to a range of other ‘attributes’ including homosexuality and disability)—functions not only at the level of institutions, managing a fragmented population, or the attempt to discipline bodies to the sustaining of the ‘supperace’ and through the whittling away of (sometimes the attributes of) the ‘subrace’. It occurs and is reiterated through racialised ways of being in the world, which shape not only the interraction between people, but embodied perceptions which gain their veracity by appearing to be neutral observations of what really is.

These perceptions, then, are actually whole body experiences of the world, making it clear that the bodily reactions that may accompany racist (in Foucault’s broad sense) ‘observations’, on the part of those (un)marked as ‘super-racial’ (read white, heterosexual, cisgendered, able-bodied, male)—reactions which may include anxiety, nausea, fear and anger—are not reactions that ‘come after’ the perception, but are bound up with and constitutive of it. This demonstrates that phenomenological experience, however slippery and uncertain it is, provides a rich source for analysis of the function of power. Given the centrality of suffering to medicine’s legitimacy and function in our normalising society, the place of this phenomenological experience within the techniques of biopower needs to be considered.

Actually this isn’t the conclusion so much as the argument that gets us to considering suffering as (deep breath, potential further loss of anonymity) a somatechnic—a technique of biopower that invests embodied experience (which, no, I don’t take as separate from ‘cognitive’ experience*) alongside the well-established techniques of population-management and individual bodily discipline. If you’re all very good (or careful, or good at it) I might post some of my stuff trying to explicate the role of suffering in the circulation of power and the normalising of the ‘subracial’.

PS Do any of my (critical race, especially) readers have a response to Foucault’s configuration of racism as something that attaches more generally to the fragmenting of the population (into, I think, the normal ‘superrace’ and the abnormal ‘subrace’)? I don’t think he’s claiming that these all function in the same way, and thus that he’s trying to ‘flatten-out’ different forms of discrimination, and besides, I think there’s something significant to the fact that Nazism (which he takes as an example) wasn’t just about positioning Jews as ‘subrace’ but a whole range of other forms of ‘difference,’ including other minority races, those with disabilities and homosexuals, a configuration I think we continue to live with. I also think that characterising the fragmentation of the population that biopower enacts as racism helps us to see that race (in the narrower, more contemporary-usage sense) isn’t a neutral and naturally occurring ‘observation of the fact’. Nonetheless, I occasionally have anxieties that I’m reproducing a problematic conflation… thoughts?

*actually I suspect that I should write something soon on why I think the distinction between ‘cognitive’ or ‘rational’ or ‘conscious’ and ‘bodily’ is, well, a problematic, Cartesian-left-over piece o’ crap (which, I should add with a nod to NP, doesn’t make it any less efficacious in contemporary self-perception (and beyond.))

 

August 29, 2007

Guilt and Innocence IV

Posted by WildlyParenthetical under Australia, body politic, borders, indigeneity, property, race, racism, whiteness
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READ it. Where lies the guilt again, and how does it adhere? How to compass this kind of taking advantage of the APEC laws…?

Forgive brevity/superficiality. Mind-grapples wearied by teaching and slow-burned horror (these domestic ones, and the wondrously rendered brutal ones of Dead Europe.) I hope for sharpness again soon.

 

August 22, 2007

Moving Pictures III: This is England

Posted by WildlyParenthetical under borders, class, community, race, racism, whiteness
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ONCE more, with feeling:

Warned…

Something spoilery this way comes…

Warned!

Back off, buddy, lest you learn that which you seek not.

Warned.

This is England: so you probably know from the outset that a movie about how a kid gets caught up in a skinhead gang in England is probably not going to be the cheeriest of fil-ums! Surprisingly, then, there’s a real sense of humour about this movie, and because it pulls no punches, really, about the hideousness of what goes on, the humour feels sincere and adequate to the situation, rather than undermining it (yes, I’m referencing this). The movie is semi-autobiographical, based on director Shane Meadows’ teenage dalliance with skinheads. And it is this, I think, which enables the evocation of the extraordinary situatedness of his story, which is what makes the movie successful.

We start with 12 year old Shaun, who is being teased at school (it’s casual clothes day, that source of pain for all those poorer than their context, I think!) for wearing flares. It’s pretty solidly the eighties, and there’s many enjoyable moments just checking out the gear some of them get around in (I’m just a little too young to have participated!) He retorts, and the jibe’s good enough that his antagonist goes for the throat: his dad was killed in the Faulklands, and not so long ago. This is important, as it seems to be a source of loneliness and the ‘in’ for the racism. The day doesn’t get any better, and he’s heading home through an underpass looking mope-y when Woody and his mates say hello. They’re friendly to him, in a fairly believable way: vaguely condescending because they’re older, but sincere enough in their interest in him. Woody’s the head of this group of I think five, and there’s ‘Tubs,’ who is worried that little Shaun’s going to take his place in the gang, there’s Milky (Jamaican heritage which becomes important, obviously, later), ‘Pukey’ and another kid whose name I can’t quite remember… Gadget, maybe? Woody talks Shaun into sticking around, defends him against Tubs and they share a beer with him.

The scenes in which Meadows sets up the binding ties of these friendships are extraordinarily evocative, both wild-edged and tender. From rampaging through an empty set of flats destroying things to the group hug (complete with Woody’s “alright, whose hand was that on my arse?”), to setting him up with ‘Smell’, and of course the gradual, not straightforwardly friendly inclusion of him in the gang, signified in his looks: Shaun tries to get Docs (they’re too big for him), the girls shave his head, roll up his jeans and Woody gives him a Ben Sherman shirt and enviable red braces. And he’s part of the gang. It feels like it rings true, capturing the euphoria of belonging, and the sharp willfulness of Yoof.

It’s the arrival of Combo that throws this warm squabbly little space into chaos. It looks like Combo, sizeably older than the rest, took the fall for something Woody did once, and was sent to jail for three years. He’s just out, and he arrives spouting angry racism. He’s an aggressive man, and angry, though Meadows doesn’t go for the easy two dimensions here either, as he has moments of uncertainty and warmth in amongst the nutso aggression. He’s going to recruit from amongst Woody’s skinhead-more-in-looks-than-acts gang for his ‘troops.’ (There’s some interesting stuff about the history of skinheads that Meadows is trying to get across in demonstrating these two modes of skinheadedness, but I’ll leave you to read about that on the ‘this is england’ site.) When Woody refuses to go along with what Combo’s saying, Combo tries to make him out a hypocrite for not standing up for Milky when Combo was being racist. Woody apologises to Milky and they leave, along with Lolo (Woody’s girl, though this is a wee bit more complicated, as we’ll see). They try to take Shaun with them, but he’ll have none of it—Combo’s connected his father’s death with his racist politics, and Shaun believes that the way to avenge his dad is to join up. What follows involves graffiti, new clothes, new tatts, bullying and intimidating immigrants (kids and adults) with machetes, no less, and attending a National Front meeting (this is, I gather, about the point historically when they started recruiting from amongst skinhead gangs). Pukey gets chucked out for questioning Combo: ‘did you really believe all that shit?’ There’s a scene where Shaun goes into the local milk bar (is that too Victorian a phrase? I don’t know what the Brits call ’em: you know, the local store, the deli in Adelaidean, I think the corner store in Sydnish!) and demands from the Indian (?) owner cigarettes, booze and sweets, which of course he’s refused. Shaun refuses to leave, and the owner winds up trying to haul him out. Combo arrives and (my gut clenched horribly at this) pulls out a machete. He menaces the owner, they steal a whole load of stuff. It’s scary stuff. But in the midst of all this, while Combo’s underlying aggression comes through, so does his warmth to Shaun, who he sees as a younger version of himself. He promises to always be there for Shaun, and even (interestingly, given the hard-edged masculinity at stake here) promises to ‘cry’ with him, if he needs to… clearly heady stuff for a lonely kid without a dad!

The big moment in the film follows Combo’s unsuccessful attempt to get with Lolo, who he slept with in ‘the best night of my life’ whilst she, 16, was completely pissed. He tells her that he’s spent the three years in jail remembering that night; she says she’s spent that time trying to forget it. He’s angry, and goes off seeking Milky. When he finds him, though, he’s friendly, looking for weed. Milky gets some for him, and they all go back to Combo’s place, where there’s a rather endearing moment of them all getting cheerful and Shaun’s laughing his head off. At this point Combo asks Milky various questions about his background; his family and ‘their’ music. It seems friendly for a good long time, and then abruptly, with Milky (and us) reaching the sickening conclusion that he was lured here for precisely this reason, Combo uncoils and beats him up in a fairly brutal fashion. The rest run off, but Shaun hides in the bathroom, hearing Combo ‘come to himself’/realise what exactly he’s done, and sob and get angry again, and sob some more. Shaun’s loyalty forces him back into the room with Combo, who is both beside himself and trying to pull himself together for Shaun’s sake (after all, he’s just a lil kid!) and to get Milky to the hospital. The sweetness of the space is gone for Shaun, and in a (slightly kitschy but forgivable) symbolic moment, he throws the St George’s cross into the sea (which personally I want to know how he did because it’s damn hard to throw cloth anywhere!).

I’m sorry to recount the story like this, without much real consideration of the political issues at stake, but I actually think it’s a deeply political movie precisely because it is so engaged in evoking a particular time, place and social setting. I don’t think it falls for cliches of racism (though it might have been good to have spent a bit more time with Milky, for example, given that he’s really the only fully-developed character who is marked as raced), so that although Combo’s a bit of a monster, he’s not purely awful, and he’s clearly felt disenfranchised for much of his life. That said, the politics of the time (Thatcher’s) do clearly and often explicitly shape how they feel about the world. It does feel a little bit of a shame that there’s no explicit counter to Combo’s racism, especially given that between Woody standing up to a guy who he owes for taking the fall for him, and Pukey standing up to Combo once it’s clear the man is more than capable of violence a the drop of a hat, both would seem to have reasonably solid views about how and why Combo’s wrong (though perhaps Meadows felt it might have been too moralistic to do this, which it could have been…) Nonetheless, I think it’s interesting to see how deeply local, deeply specific this story is, even as, doubtless, stories like it occurred across the UK at about this time. The anger and distrust which seem to characterise many of these Yoof is beautifully set alongside their warmth and generosity to each other without it being ‘underlying heart-of-gold’-y. In the end, it testifies to a time, a place and a people, permitting the depiction of the politics to arise out of that rather than the other way around. So few movies manage to bind together specificity and national politics like this that I would recommend it for that alone…

 

August 19, 2007

Moving Pictures I: Lucky Miles

Posted by WildlyParenthetical under Australia, borders, immigration, politics, privilege, race, whiteness
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LUCKY Miles, Sicko and This is England. Three movies: my thoughts. Spoilers galore, sweet thangs, so if you’re planning to see any of them and are phobic like me, consider yourself warned.

Warned.

They are coming!

Warned.

Warned.

Lucky Miles: When I saw the trailer for this movie, I was intrigued. An Australian movie that didn’t fall into the terrible and terribly depressing ‘comedy’ category, but without diving straight into the ‘so sober no one even laughs’ category; what an astonishingly unique concept! Given that I am in love with the Whedonesque style of humour-in-the-dark, it seemed promising. Not just that, but an Australian movie that wasn’t primarily about white people with brownish ones thrown in just for contrast. One which tangled with the dreaded ‘boat people’ without simply demonising them; a rare occurrence in the current climate. So yes, intrigued.

It’s the tale of a bunch of people, some Iraqi, some Cambodian, dumped on the West Australian coastline. Soon the Indonesian crew of the boat that delivered them to the middle of nowhere find themselves swimming for shore after their boat burns and sinks. Most of the Cambodian group are picked up in next to no time; ditto for the Iraqis. One of the Cambodians, Arun, one of the Iraqis, Youssif, and one of the Indonesian boat crew, Ramelan, find each other in the midst of the scrubby desert and together—with many squabbles and risky lack of water—aim for any kind of civilisation whatsoever.

Is it funny? Yes. There’s little doubt about that: it intends it, and sometimes it achieves it. There’s three Army reservists in the area, for example, who drive around randomly looking for the three asylum seekers, and their combination of semi-trained professional officiousness and matter-of-fact casualness made me smile. But there are a number of things which are depicted as humourous (at least if the audience I was watching with were any judges, and I suspect they were pretty close to the ‘ideal’ viewers the filmmakers envisaged) which I was really troubled by. I think the problem I had with the things that were made funny was that they seemed to depend upon covering-over the precarity of the position all of the asylum seekers were in: it’s not humour-in-the-dark so much as look-away-from-the-dark-and-this-situation-looks-hilarious! It might be vaguely amusing that when the Iraqis and Cambodians reach the top of the dune from the beach they were dumped on, the road the Indonesian captain promised would have a Perth-bound bus coming soon in fact doesn’t exist; or it could be a frightening depiction of the extraordinarily vulnerable position asylum seekers are placed in because they have to rely upon those who might not (be able to) really care about them so very much. The risk of not having enough water, for example, might have been continually raised as an issue, but the effects of dehydration were minimised so that it could be amusing that one character is reduced to using a plastic shopping bag as a water container. Or when Youssif’s desperation is articulated as eloquent and proud anger at Arun and Ramelan, it becomes amusing because it’s characterised as an over-reaction, relying, then, on obscuring the fact that they are actually incredibly vulnerable: out in the middle of nowhere, with little water and food and little possibility of a) getting out, b) being found and c) actually being granted asylum if/when they are.

It’s not that the precariousness of their position is altogether disappeared: peeling lips, exhaustion, the dangers of being shoeless and so on are kinda depicted. But none of these is permitted the weight of mortality which actually characterise it: Arun and Youssif come across Ramelan, who has collapsed from dehydration, but after a quick drink, he’s up and ready to ‘lead’ them to Perth. At one point Ramelan is attacked by a goanna, which leaps up onto his back; the shot is in silhouette against the top of a hill, and we see him jump around trying to shake it off, but that’s about it: there’s no consequence, except for his later (hi!lar!i!ous!) description of ‘the devil’ who attacked him to his companions—he’s not bitten or scratched, at least not that we see or that he complains of. I’m not even sure that goannas do such things, though this film is supposed to be based on true stories, so perhaps I’m just not knowledgeable enough. Perhaps even more oddly is that in all the trekking around that they do, they never encounter snakes, and none of them falls and badly hurts themselves. I mean, they’re pretty noisy so theoretically that might have scared snakes away, I guess, but Ramelan’s wearing thongs the whole time and there are moments when they’re scrambling down scree-y hillsides etc, so to me it felt like a fairly selective depiction of the risk of the Australian environment to those unaccustomed to negotiating it. Moments when Perth, as it turns out, is not just over the next hill slip by without much of a consideration of the fact that without a real sense of the distances they’re working with, they can’t even plan their water rationing properly. And all of this seemed to conceal their vulnerability—that these people are risking death to come to Australia—mostly to make it funny. For Australians. Hm. Ugh. Am I being too harsh?

More troubling than all this is that the movie ends when the three Army reservists find the three friends and the captain of the Indonesian boat who has caught up with the three. Arun, who has been trying desperately to get to Perth to find his father, has been avoiding the Army who rounded up the rest of the Cambodian group, yet he seems to have forgotten his concerns about that by this point; Youssif cites the relevant passages of the UN Convention on Refugees. The reservists are kind of bemusedly amiable about this (educated) claim to refugee status, but there’s certainly nothing which hints towards the fact that whilst the three may have escaped their vulnerability at the hands of an unfamiliar environment, they remain, in the end, probably equally albeit more predictably vulnerable at the hands of a fairly hostile government. Given the concern to actually depict the situation of asylum seekers, this absence feels significant: the vulnerability which leads to the humour is OK, it seems to suggest, because it arises from the ignorance and naivety of the three ‘foreigners’; this obscures both the fact that that vulnerability is also a product of a particularly stingy and problematic immigration policy, and that ‘the authorities’ and the policies surrounding the treatment of asylum seekers are such that ‘being found’ may also be a threat to them.

Interestingly on this point, the movie is set a while ago—1990. Is this an attempt to avoid having to depict the effects of the policy of mandatory detention, introduced in 1992? If so, then this functions in two ways: it both attempts to ‘humanise’ (ugh!) the usually (in our media) faceless ‘mass’ of refugees without appearing ‘political,’ (the accusation of which is of course a key technique for dismissing particular (read: non-right-wing) stories in the current Australian discursive space) perhaps thereby getting around this particular difficulty and encouraging sympathy in those who might not otherwise feel it—a position I disagree with, though also am sympathetic to. Yet this move also depoliticises the issue, enabling a distance between our three heroes and the current system, between refugees and the precarity they live with; and thus it fails to draw attention to the fact that the three heroes are both more vulnerable than they are depicted to be, and probably less vulnerable than current asylum seekers, not to mention the fact that under current circumstances the amiability of their interactions with the representatives of governmental authority—the Army reservists—is unlikely to still occur. To leave this out feels like the filmmakers not only pulled their own teeth to some extent, but may have produced the grounds by which the ‘stories’ may simply be dismissed as tales that matter not.

In the end, I was unhappy with it: however much I liked parts of the story, the covering-over of the vulnerability made me feel awkward about finding some stuff humourous (though I’m perfectly willing to accept that that may be partly white guilt; I do have a tendency to be uncertain about how happy I am to be amused about, say, stuff to do with race which I haven’t thought through the politics of… though that said, this isn’t always the case—I don’t have to agree with the politics of some stuff to find it funny, but if I find the politics offensively dodgy it gets in the way of me finding things amusing, and so I wonder if my instincts are actually reasonably political in this regard. Euh. Complex. In other words, perhaps it was just that this crossed a line into offensive for me, and my discomfit with it arose from that.) By the same token, my thoughts on it remain uncertain and unformed, so if you have a different response, tell me about it in comments: I think part of me wants to ‘rescue’ this film because it’s such a rare creature, being an Australian movie about refugees.

 

August 18, 2007

Grief

Posted by WildlyParenthetical under Australia, children, indigeneity, privilege, property, race, Suffering, whiteness
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FURY AND LOSS.

I can’t think of much to say about the fact that the Senate has passed the legislation permitting the ‘intervention’ in the Northern Territory. It sickens and angers me, and I feel like I can’t capture the multitude of ways it is wrong in any way adequately, least of all in words.

Still. How can it be that political dialogue in this country has reached the point that the moment when indigenous land rights are being utterly undermined, the only response the discursive space of the media will permit is that it is ‘misguided’. Misguided? Yes, if you believe that child sex abuse is actually the target. If not, it’s a precision missile. A racist—oh, no, sorry, so long as *whites* are saying it’s for their benefit, it escapes (the legality) of that label because what *whites* intend is all that is—precision missile.

Tangentially, but relatedly, I was deeply grateful to a man I thought I’d never be grateful to, yesterday: Cameron Stewart took me for the law course that nearly killed me—property law which was seriously the most tediously boring course I’ve done (and which makes me sad, now, because property’s so fascinating!) But at the seminar [pdf] I attended yesterday, in response to Catherine Waldby’s great paper on the commercialisation of biomaterials, Stewart roundly and—this was part of what astonished me, actually—passionately lambasted the government and the courts for their failure to rethink, to reconsider, to reorganise our conception of property, and worse, to fail to recognise the injustices that are being committed in the name of that failure. He spoke at length about the conservatism of Mabo, and the way that that has permitted the gradual undermining of native title; and he decried the astonishing lack of public interrogation of this latest erasure. The conversation that was prompted I’ll post some stuff on later, because it too was interesting, but his swift demonstration of the ways that the rights of indigenous people, of ‘donors’ of organs to biotech companies, and so on are undermined in the name of a deeply conservative notion of property (that conservatism a substantial disavowal of its rather fluid history, I might add!) was inspired and inspiring. I had feared that the day would pass without reference to indigenous rights at all, and this seemed wrong. Then I got home last night, and discovered what had transpired…

… and grief. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. My heart hurts; and the grief and suffering of those involved slips swiftly beyond my imagining.

 

July 20, 2007

Othello and the Flu

Posted by WildlyParenthetical under class, race, Shakespeare
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DUE to my littlest sister being in town, I haven’t had much time to blog. Playing at tour guide actually takes a reasonable amount of time. But I’ve managed to make myself really rather sick (it’s really cold in Sydney right now) so we’re playing at home today. We saw ‘Othello’ at the Opera House last night. Lil sis is studying drama in Adelaide, so I figured this was a good plan, and as it turned out, it was. I find Othello an intriguing play because race plays out in it so strongly and yet often in ways quite different to the ways it would now. It’s completely tragic, and even though Iago, the biggest baddie ever writ, so they say, is caught in the end, the horror he’s caused makes the idea of even his death seem not enough of a punishment. (Indeed, Othello says something about this at the end: that he doesn’t want to kill him because he wants him to live with it. Unfortunately for Othello, Iago really doesn’t seem to mind…)

Othello is, in the play’s terms, a Moor. Though this figure is clearly racialised, it’s not altogether clear which threads of historical racialisation it picks up on: the ‘Sparknotes’ synopsis I read before I went (not trusting my Shakespearean ear to carry me alone) says that the usual contemporary understanding of ‘Moor’ as the Islamic Arabian people from northern Africa who invaded Spain is probably more specific than in Shakespeare’s time. In the version we saw, Othello was played by Wayne Blair, an indigenous actor recognisable from a fair few Australian TV shows (and the film Mullet), amongst a range of other plays and performances. It was an intriguing choice (Marion Potts is a pretty famous director), as was the way Blair played him: the physicality he brought to the stage was different to the others. Even the steps he took across the stage expressed it; he raised his leg higher, and put each foot down with such slow deliberateness it seemed like he was pushing down through the air from about 8 inches above the floor. This cautiousness was combined with abrupt shifts in direction, sudden turns towards and away from other characters. Whilst at first it was a little jarring (probably combined with the fact that one of the minor characters was played by a stand-in who carried his script onstage!), I think it was intended to express something of the uncertain place Othello holds in his context.

Othello is a general in the Venetian war against the Turks (who are threatening to take over Cyprus and then, of course, the rest of the Christian world), and as such he is respected and trusted. He’s an open, likeable man, and seems to trust to the goodness of human nature, at least up until Iago plays his game. Yet his status is clearly a tenuous position, and the continual marking of Othello as only mostly civilised, with an underlying viscerality and passion demonstrates this. Blair’s movements on stage expressed this ambiguity.

Iago, played by Marcus Graham, who has a long list of TV and film performances and managed the character with extraordinary ease, is one of the few almost incomprehensibly evil characters in the Shakespeare I know. The only motive he seems to have, really, is hatred; it’s unclear whether he really just hates everyone and so is keen to see them hurt, or absolutely abhors Othello, and counts whatever means towards the end of undoing Othello as a-OK. I suspect, though, that it is partly Othello’s race which makes Iago’s motivations more believable. Simply evil characters are difficult to believe, if they gain little from their evil; but with Othello marked as racialised, Iago’s hatred gains an uncomfortable veracity, a ‘justification’ that’s never really pointed out clearly.

But the nastiness of Iago lies in the fact that he appears, the whole time, to be on everyone’s side. When Cassio loses his position as Othello’s second (through Iago’s concealed intervention), Iago recommends that he approach the sympathetic Desdamona, Othello’s wife. When Roderigo loses Desdamona, who he loves, to Othello, Iago appears helpful, sympathetic. Even Iago’s interactions with Othello are painfully generous, only ever looking out for his general. It’s the worst kind of treachery to watch, because you can see how utterly believable and loyal Iago manages to appear to each and every pawn in his game. The fact that almost all of them wind up dead reminds of how lacking the supposed ‘protection’ of law-based justice is; his arrest is emotionally and ethically unsatisfying, because he has manipulated the loyalty and passion of Desdamona, Emilia, Roderigo and even Othello to such awful ends. Is it racism that motivates this? I think that, as concealed as it is, it is equal to the task; and Iago’s arrest then feels like law protecting its own, rather than the law intervening to counter aggression.

Race and class, though, are played out together in interesting ways. Iago is clearly—all the way down to the messy way he wears his uniform and his free movements (at least when he’s alone)—of a different class to Cassio and Othello. This is drawn attention to most explicitly by Emilia, Iago’s wife and Desdamona’s maid. Desdamona, chafing at the accusations Othello is leveling against her, says that she would not cheat on her husband, “not for all the world!” Emilia responds with deceptive cheerfulness that she would absolutely cheat, “if it would make of my husband a monarch.” Desdamona is horrified, in a proper upper-class way, but Emilia is pragmatic. Later, after Iago’s plot is exposed, though, she refuses to shut up as he tells her to and in passionate despair admits how he had manipulated her to undo Othello’s marriage and position. He kills her, though it’s unclear if this is for disloyalty to him (and loyalty to (her position as maid to?) Desdamona) or just… well, just to add another body to the count now that he’s been arrested. At the beginning of the play, too, Iago voices his disapproval of Othello picking Cassio over him for promotion, suggesting that Cassio is far too bookish, and has little experience in the field. And thus Cassio’s class enabled his promotion. It would seem, then, that while part of Iago’s hatred of Othello is premised upon race, this cannot be unbound from a sense of class resentment: despite his race, Othello has achieved a status Iago longs for and is denied based on class. Or perhaps more strongly: I wonder how much Iago’s hatred of Othello arises because Othello accepts his status, and despite the difficulties he faces being marked as other, upholds the class system. Perhaps, in Iago’s eyes, he has few excuses for lacking awareness of the privilege and possibilities of his position…

 

July 15, 2007

Private law

Posted by WildlyParenthetical under class, Difference, Diprose, disability, Ethics, feminism, gift, Normalcy, politics, privilege, race, whiteness
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I REMEMBER the day I typed ‘privilege’ into etymonline like it was yesterday. I don’t know why I love etymologies so much, but I think it’s because they’re so very telling sometimes: the origins of the word seem so often to reveal a function of the word usually covered over by current definitions and usages; a kind of que(e)r(y)ing. Privilege, as it turns out, means ‘law applying to one person,’ or, more clearly, ‘individual law.’ This had me incredibly excited, because this is, in lots of ways, the way that privilege actually works. Or, better, how it feels: it’s pretty clear that privilege doesn’t simply apply to a single person—institutions, discourse, customs, interpersonal relations, language and even, I would argue, embodiment, all function together (though rarely fully coherently, as Foucault is at pains to demonstrate) to maintain the privilege of particular groups. But one of the strongest fantasies that mark privilege is the illusion that the subject is wholly self-sufficient. The law of the individual.

The claim of self-sufficient individuality is incredibly powerful, in a huge variety of ways. As Butler, following Foucault and Derrida, demonstrates that in claiming that the subject is ‘before the law,’ the law itself maintains a two-fold fantasy: that all subjects are equal before the law, and that the law is only the product of the people—and is certainly not that which produces the subjects it addresses (give Althusser a wave, kids!) By repeatedly (and repetitively, it has to be said!) claiming the primacy of the individual, the law (in the most general as well as specific senses) retains its unquestionable status, its authority. But it goes further than this, and here I’m going to be drawing on Rosalyn Diprose’s work in Corporeal Generosity a fair bit, though not explicitly.

This kind of radical individuality permits the denial of the fact that I only am because there are others (though this isn’t just a Levinasian point). The possibility of being able to say ‘I,’ of being (even capable of it) is premised on the peculiar culture we live in. (I think I remember Deleuze saying somewhere that we always assume that the ‘edge’ of ‘my’ ‘body’ marks my individuality, but that this is merely a function of the culture (he doesn’t say culture) in which we are currently living. It gave me that heady, fevered sensation I always get when reading Deleuze; a little like too much wasabi for the mind :-)). But more than this, ‘I’ doesn’t make sense except in a context. And this context, of course, is filled with others. As numerous scholars have pointed out (from the obscure texts of Lacan (I’m sorry, but that’s how I remember him!) to Levinas to Merleau-Ponty to Irigaray), it is only because others are different from me that I ever get a sense of myself, that I ever become a subject, that I ever say ‘I’. This isn’t just a cognitive belief, but something we embody; it informs all the ways that we are in the world (at least lots of the time, however shaky my ‘I’ might be).

In this way, it is the generous gift of difference that enables me to be. (See also the Merleau-Ponty post.) And this is not just a thing that happens at some point early in life, after which all is settled (take that, psychoanalysis!) Rather, it is perpetually in process, and must remain so. In addition, the distinction between me and other(s) is the basis upon which language can be and happen, that all meaning is built. It is the basis upon which community—which might appear and often functions as if it is all about sameness (commonness, unity)—can exist.

Privilege, then, this private law, this law of the individual, enables and indeed necessitates the denial of these gifts, the forgetting of them, as Diprose puts it. It is only in refusing to accept that I am who I am only because others are other, in denying this relation, that I can claim self-sufficient individuality, that site of privilege shaped by privilege. This, Diprose says, is theft. This theft, in the end, is privilege: the ability to claim that I am who I am alone, without others: that I am white all on my own (as if I didn’t need racialised others for ‘white’ to make sense), that I am male all on my own (as if I didn’t need women to be my mirror), that I am normal (as if this did not rely upon others being deemed abnormal), that I am able-bodied (as if this were not a claim made possible only because others are not), that I am unambiguously sexed (as if that didn’t depend on intersexed and trans people to mean anything at all), that I am straight all on my own (without the defining queerness)…

I am only because of others, a huge variety of generous others. *This,* in response to FiD’s question over at the lovely Thinking Girl’s blog on a Kevin aka Thin Black Duke of Slant Truth post, is why *I* am personally interested and yes, invested, in ‘battles’ that may not be my ‘own’. Privilege doesn’t just affect an individual; it squashes and reduces others and their difference into being nothing more than a mirror that reproduces that privilege (which in the end gives all of us fewer ways to be not to mention lots more paranoia and hurt). We see the nasty effects of that kind of thinking happening in Oz right now. So I know how white privilege squashes difference and causes sufferng; just like I know more how male privilege does the same; alongside the privilege of being unambiguously sexed, (temporarily) able-bodied, normal, middle-class, straight… the list goes on (and of course, I’m not even getting into the ‘intersections’ of these marks (though Ian Barnard’s piece ‘Queer Race’ troubles some traditions of intersectionality on this point. (Sorry, can’t seem to find ref! It might be from his book of that title, but I was almost sure it was a 1999 article…)). Some of these privileges are ones I hold, and I know that the continuation of that privilege and the attendant disadvantage to a whole mass of other people which is the condition of its possibility, is dependent upon (amongst lotsa other things) the privileged not being aware of their privilege; i.e., not being aware of difference. Forgetting the generosity of others, not least the difference that allows them to be. Assuming that they are, actually, simply self-sufficient individuals naturally accorded the benefits they bear which they don’t recognise as such, because they’re supposedly just the result of the natural way for individuals to be: if you’re white, you naturally get money and recognition and acceptance; if you’re straight, you naturally get the protection of the state for your relationships and kids. And so on. You get the idea.

So I try to be aware of the privilege I bear, as white, able-bodied, unambiguously sexed (most days ;-)) middle-class and vaugely normal, because I know that it regularly functions to reproduce hegemonic formations of subjectivity—both my own, those of others like me, and worst of all, those not. I try to remember that it is only because of the generosity of others that I can be, speak, write, shower, love, read, laugh, walk down the street, feel, touch, cry, blog. Others are, therefore I am… Therein lies my ‘personal reasons’ for wanting to be politically ‘involved’ in working against homogenisation—against racialisation, for example, and for the ‘rights’ (for want of a way way better, less liberal, term) of POC, amongst very very many others. I am only because others are generous. My denial of that fact is not just theft, not just ungenerous; that is privilege.

 

July 11, 2007

Complex Marks of Privilege

Posted by WildlyParenthetical under class, community, Difference, education, politics, race, whiteness
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BEEN kicking around some thoughts about high school in light of the 10-year reunion upcoming… I guess with ten years distance, the angst’s a bit less than it has been, and I’ve got some more tools to grapple with it. This post is about class and race at my high school, so it’s doing that horrible crossing from biography to what I hope might be a critical engagement; but I haven’t put pen to paper about this stuff at all yet, so bear with me if it’s a bit raw/self-indulgent. I hate that in autobiographical stuff, but like it when it’s done well. Old high school angst’s not all gone, but it was interesting to catch up with a friend of mine in Adelaide—let’s call her Christina. She had finally recognised her experience at school as one of ‘ostracism,’ at least potentially. That is, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to use such a word… but I think she’s keen on the whole ‘think positive’ framing, which unfortunately but regularly involves the attempt to refuse to recognise what is, in the end, discriminations and disadvantages of various kinds. There’s a whole other set of posts in that—the disenfranchisement of those already disadvantaged (in some way) that occurs through the (often Christian-informed, as in her case) pop-psych ‘seeing the best in things’; and of course its complex concurrent usage by those privileged to externalise the sources of their unhappiness (presumably because they often fail to query their own understanding and experience—if they’re unhappy, the problem lies out there).

First, some background. I went to a private Anglican girls school in Adelaide—let’s call it PAGS for short. Adelaide is an odd town: it seems small, but has a population of 1.2 or so million. It’s a very suburban place, with a small CBD given the population. And it really does (or has) had the ‘Five Families’ who constitute a kind of rich old establishment. One of those families is the ‘Polites,’ which I don’t feel worried about putting up because if anyone’s been to Adelaide, they’ve probably noticed how that name is stuck on the side of dozens of building, especially in the CBD. Yup, deeply propertied. These five families tend to conserve the parochialism of Adelaide: it’s hard to break into social groups as new arrivals, which we were (I moved from Melbourne to Adelaide when I was 12). It also encourages the bracketing off of racialised groups around the city. PAGS was the school that most of the daughters of the five families went to, while Saint’s boys school, incredibly rich (something like 6 ovals, for fuck’s sake, in walking distance of the CBD!!) had the boys. This meant that Saints and PAGS did things like dancing classes and drama performances together.

Like most private schools, PAGS was hideously expensive. My parents were only able to afford to send me because my dad’s an Anglican priest (and in recognition of the low ‘stipend’ priests get, the school offered I think a 1/4 off the fees) and because I was bright enough to get a partial bursary. I was a scholarship kid, along with a number of those who wound up in the same ‘group’ with me. Christina had a music scholarship for the last three years of high school; and she pointed to this as part of the ostracisation she experienced . There’s no doubt that scholarship kids were already in question. Christina and I, for example, were both very poor—at least by comparison.

Okay, let’s give some detail on this ‘comparison’ business. We were a bit poor while I was growing up, but not horribly so. In fact, we were pretty privileged, in my estimation. We always had somewhere to live (and vicarages are not known for being small or mean places which is just as well given that I’m the eldest of 4!). We always had enough food to eat. (I have a distinct memory from when I was about 9 or so, of asking for seconds or more food or something, and dad looking worried and saying to mum, “We might need to start saying no,” and mum shaking her head and saying, “Oh, surely it won’t come to that.” Which it didn’t. But that conversation certainly had a big impact on me. In true eldest sister fashion, I got furious at my brother’s continual insistence on the most expensive piece of clothing (on one of our very rare shopping trips) and his unwillingness to compromise; I still remember the weary hurt in mum’s eyes as she told him they couldn’t afford it). We lived in hand-me-downs (I think the first clothes bought new for me (apart from shoes) were from Target at age 13) which were relatively prolific given the whole living-in-a-parish thing. We went on holidays (to the holiday houses which I didn’t understand at the time were actually very different to what other people meant when they said they had ‘holiday houses’: my parents bought an old church in the middle of nowhere for $2000 when they first married, which had no electricity or running water and had been used as a cattle and grain shed and we slowly slowly fixed it up; and the second place, on the Mornington Peninsula, was a shell of a house, so we spent holidays laying insulation, walls and ceilings, electricity, plumbing, tiles, building benches, finding second-hand sinks, toilets, showers, wood, and putting them in etc. It took a while before I realised that when other kids from school went on holiday, they tended to spend it doing *only* leisure stuff, not bathing in water heated on the stove, using long- and sometimes very short-drop loos and working! But I totally loved those holidays). So… poor, but hardly poverty-stricken. On income, we still came in under the official ‘poverty line,’ but we did really well most of the time. My parents both had tertiary educations, and our family put a premium on education (probably because my dad loved study and it had been part of my mum’s ‘escape’ from her fairly dysfunctional working-class family. They both got PhDs about five years ago.) Living in parishes in inner-ish Melbourne meant that I was always aware of that fact: people regularly came asking for help, food, money, shelter and so on; churches are like that.

(Teehee… I remember when I was about 4 or 5 a woman came from the nearby high-rises to visit my mum (probably to sort out what kinds of assistance were available to her and her family) and brought a couple of kids. One was close to my age, and told me such terrible stories about how she had no toys at all and I had so many and was just so lucky until I offered her one of my own and we fell into a pattern of her taking a toy each time she visited. I remember feeling guilty, like I was doing something wrong, even though I really wanted her to have toys to play with because not having them would be so bad. It took a while, but I think the kid’s mother noticed eventually… I don’t remember whether we got them back. Remembering it makes me grin, though.)

So up until high school, I hadn’t really thought of myself as being poor. Suddenly I was a scholarship kid at a school full of rich kids—and they were rich. Phew. Second-hand uniforms were signs of poverty; and these were horrible but well-made skirts, jumpers, blazers, dresses, which lent themselves to re-use. I remember being really aware of how much the whole thing cost mum and dad, so that I went through a stage in I think year 9 where I paid for lots of school stuff like pencils, protractors, compasses, bus tickets out of my (really pretty small) allowance so that it wouldn’t come up on the bill. (Mum found out and said in a slightly sad way, “Oh, WP, just let us worry about that!”)

Christina recounted to me the moment when she realised just how rich some of them were: on the way from school to a sports thing, a fellow classmate suggested they drop in at her house to have a drink. “And we walked in, and it was like walking into Vogue magazine. Seriously. And her mum was all like ‘oh, hello girls!'” I can imagine this scene incredibly vividly. Christina said that she spent a lot of time at school wanting all of that stuff. It was utterly out of her league: her family were just far too poor, and her mum, an ex-Catholic Born-Again Italian migrant, both insisted that Christina go to PAGS and refused to allow her daughter to participate in the ‘excesses’ of the culture that surrounded it.

I wasn’t really aware of it at the time, but class had a huge impact on the ways that my year cohered and failed to cohere. The rich kids saw each other outside of school all the time, and already knew the Saints boys of about our age from families socialising together. My ‘group’ saw each other as well, but there weren’t really huge parties funded by parents to attend. Christina described the way she declined a few birthday invitations and they just stopped coming. She turned them down because she didn’t know what she would wear, and her mum wouldn’t have let her wear what she wanted, anyway. This had evidently been a huge and hard thing for her to negotiate.

I, on the other hand, was dubbed a ‘square.’ This wasn’t just a mark of being bright—though I did well at school—but being poor and bright. Others got the marks I had and better, but weren’t marked in such a way because a) I was sneaking in under scholarship and b) other’s good marks were set against the background of weekend and evening socialising, doubtless complete with amusing D&Ms (Deep and Meaningfuls), fun bouts of silly drunkenness, secrets, boys and other things that tend to bind people together, that I wasn’t a part of (at least partly) because I was too poor. Too poor to have clothes that might let me fit in (demonstrated on ‘casual’ days), too poor to buy proper presents for birthdays, too poor to have developed the right sensibility at parties: to behave as middle-class people should, to know what to talk about, to flirt properly and to be open and approving of whatever guys were there. (Most of the guys at parties I went to were so fucking boring and proper (mostly boys from Saints and other boys schools) I couldn’t actually find them attractive once they started talking. I went out with one of them in year 9, a disastrous experience which ended because he showed off by telling a man on the street who was campaigning against politicians’ ‘golden handshakes’ that politicians deserved all the money they could get. I recall being uncomfortably disgusted at having kissed such a right-winger! :-))

I tried for a while to break into that space, but it was intimidating, not least because many of the richer girls had established friendship groups not just through their parents but by attending PAGS primary school. My response to being dubbed a ‘square’—with what looks like a frightening lack of survival skills in retrospect!—was one of scared disdain: the emphasis my parents placed on knowing stuff and learning (all very aspirationally middle-class values), and my determination to be ‘who I was’ (yup, ultra-liberal lefty at school. I grew out of (bits of) it) meant that I had grounds to refuse to take on the idea I shouldn’t be so bright, that I should apologise for or attempt to hide it. It was hard, in lots of ways, but I was trying to maintain the idea that I should be and be able to be myself. Interestingly, this wasn’t really combined with arrogance (which it easily could have been): the disdain was limited to their assessment of me. This thinking meant I could challenge teachers when I thought they were talking crap (which happened quite a bit), not least because I felt like I had some responsibility to do so. (My chem teacher, for example, described some particular bonds between molecules as “imagine there’s a beautiful woman in the middle of a room. All the men will be equally attracted to her.” Laughing contribution from class: “what if one of them’s gay?” Response: “Well, that’s not natural, it doesn’t happen in nature. Cue WP’s entrance to the conversation (which went on for about an hour after class with him quoting the bible at me, the Christadelphian nut erm… believer…)). I was still reasonably friendly and open, if a bit shy (in year 12 I became a kind of surrogate counsellor). I stuck to my dad’s principle that everyone’s good at something, which meant that while I wasn’t willing to pretend not to be bright, I remained pretty generous, helping people (as in, anyone who asked) with homework, explaining stuff in class and so on.
I was fortunate—privileged, really, by having a family that valued ‘intelligence’—that I had other things going on which allowed me some of these strategies for rethinking, at least compared to Christina who angsted over her exclusion without grounds to reject it (even for herself), but it meant that I kinda accepted ostracism as a payoff. It took talking to her to help me understand how much these things were a function of the way class worked at PAGS.

Just one more note about class here: PAGS shaped me in lots of really pretty visible ways. Quite aside from the education I got there, it affected the way I speak, the way I stand, the way I tend to conduct myself. I learnt very quickly as a scholarship kid that appearing confident was one way to escape the nastier kinds of teasing (and part of how I proved to myself that I wasn’t letting their assessment of me as a ‘square’ get to me). This has stuck with me, so that much of the time when I’m most uncertain, feeling most out of place, I appear most confident, most solidly middle-class, most easily at home. Most people mark me as simply and utterly middle class, and in a lot of ways I really really am. My concerns about possibly being seen as refusing to mark the privilege of my own position (i.e., being self-indulgent) almost made me not write this post, though, and there’s something significant in that as well.

My awareness of privilege and class didn’t just come from my tertiary education. PAGS made me both really really aware of the ways that class works (albeit implicitly), and made me develop the tools that both allow me to appear but not feel privileged, at home in all situations etc (which really does have marked benefits: I interview well, for a really obvious example). But in lots of ways, that doesn’t undo all the marks of the ambiguities of class. Someone once asked me—trying to prove to me my own privilege—whether there had ever been a social situation I had been in where I hadn’t know how to behave. My god, yes! One example amongst thousands: the family of a boyfriend in first year uni were so bloody upper middle class, and I revealed over and again my—well, whatever class I ‘truly’ am, so that his mother particularly disapproved of me, thought I was rude and in no way good enough for her son. But with the tracks of PAGS all over me, lots of the time I cover. It’s a kind of passing, I think, passing as properly middle class; one which I have numerous moments of failing, and means I usually feel like an imposter. Being self-aware like this is, I think, one of the curses and clearest marks of non-privilege or maybe sometimes just critical self-awareness; its absence one of the strongest marks of privilege. Intriguingly, though, all this also means that I’m also hyper aware of how middle-class I appear, and how intimidating that can be, and so I feel awkward in working class settings or around working class people, hyper aware of the class of my comportment, my dress, my speech; I never was a part of those spaces and ways of socialising (as an teen) either, because the school I was at was so upper-class. It’s a complex little system.

I also promised some consideration of race at PAGS. Being white, I was much less aware of this than many of my friends probably are, and so I don’t have many recollections of the specificities of its operation. It really wasn’t something we talked about most of the time. I recall sitting at lunch in the year 12 common room with a friend of mine (call her Rose) talking about racism, race and ethnicity (I was reading Heart of Darkness by Conrad, so that’s probably why). Then I said, “Wow, look at where all the people who… look different are sitting…” In our year, there were only a few girls marked as recognisably of a racialised heritage: a couple of Asians, an Indian, the Christinas (Italian and Greek), a Fijian… and they all sat in ‘our’ group, the ‘out’ group, the group of scholarship kids and relative poverty. The school itself never demonstrated any awareness of class, race or religious difference (except via the scholarship ‘merit’ system) and this meant that none of the white, rich girls ever questioned their situations, and none of them ever thought they ought to. When I recounted this story, Christina told me that she was teased about her facial hair at some point at school, that this was part of what contributed to her feeling ostracised (or not, given she didn’t like the term). I don’t think she’d really thought about the race aspect of it that explicitly before then… and it makes me think about the way that the choices of curriculum, for example, are so utterly marked by the maintenance of privilege. The things I know now could have the potential to really change the ways that these differences function in schools. It wouldn’t have to be the geek-fest joke that “no one is square in space…” to get around ‘square’ capturing the dovetailing of brights and poverty.

Perhaps I’m a bit hopeful, but if we’d been explicitly taught about the ways that race and whiteness, class and gender shape not just people out there (we were taught that because we had an education, we could be scientists! lawyers! doctors! whatever we wanted to be! though of course this was in amongst all else, bound up with a heteronormative imagining of a life-plan that would inevitably make us all wives and mothers (because that’s truly successful)), but us, and the ways we operate, the unmarkedness of whiteness and upper-middle-class-ness wouldn’t have so shaped our year. That is, given that the only real critical analysis happened in history (I adored my history teacher), we never really turned any of that self-awareness and critical engagement on ourselves, and so those who benefited were never really aware of that, and who were excluded had few if any ways to think it. (Cue perfect opening for crappy pop-psych ‘it’s the ‘tude that matters, so think positive!’ covering-up of privilege and disadvantage).

In lots of ways my angsting over whether or not to attend the reunion is shaped by my awareness of these concerns: the tick-list, I don’t doubt, will be class-based and hegemonic: 1) married, 2) kids, 3) house, 4) well-respected, well-paying permanent job, and maybe 5) education (though given the anti-intellectualist distrust of conservatives, anything beyond a bachelors, which most of my class probably have, is likely not to fly). If I did pass on 5), though, it’ll only be as a confirmation of my high-school ‘square’ness, and I’m not happy about that given that part of the reason I wound up in Cultural Studies was that I love the unpacking of stuff taken for granted, especially knowledge. Cultural Studies isn’t square! (Actually, I don’t entirely believe that, but it’s a damn sight less square than most of the rest of ‘knowledge’.) Besides, that confirmation’ll mean I don’t get to tell anyone that rather than sticking with a conservative ‘square’ place, I’m teaching undergrads about male ‘receptive anal eroticism’ (bless dat Catherine Waldby character!) or that my thesis looks at self-demand amputation (“I… you… what?!”), intersex corrective surgery (“heh,” splutter into wine glass) and other things they probably haven’t heard of… and really, going back into that space with all this thought about class and race and stuff, I wonder if I could leave feeling okay with not shocking or at least troubling (some of) them out of/with (some of) their comfortable, privileged ways… (though part of me worries this is just a vindictive, resentful leftover from being an adolescent… then again, does that make it bad? :-))

 

June 21, 2007

Guilt and Innocence II

Posted by WildlyParenthetical under Australia, body, body politic, indigeneity, race, whiteness
[3] Comments 

SO apparently when Crikey links to you (for something which was really pretty ordinary, I have to say!), it blows all stats out of the water! Half of me is deeply grateful (hi to all those who’ve come by to say hi from crikey) and half of me knows that the little graph wordpress.com gives me each day is going to look a lot sadder from now on coz the scale’s been messed with. Still… I’m grateful.

I’m actually (when I’m not marking) just starting to read Derrida’s Given Time, which I know, should already be read before now. But expect some posts full of excerpts soon. The concept of the gift is kinda key to my thesis, so it’ll make for interesting reading, methinks, and hooks in rather nicely to the idea I and others have been kicking around of bodies and body politics being formed through contract…or are they? And I might even be able to find something to say about temporality! (I’m crossing fingers, because that’s chapter 4!).

But for today, I’m just going to feel a little horrible; my gut curls around itself and the lines between my brows won’t ease. Nor should they. As it turns out, the title of my last post was a little too accurate, as s0metim3s pointed out in the comments. Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley was yesterday (I think) acquitted not just of manslaughter but even of the assault of Mulrunji Doomadgee on Palm Island in 2004. He died of internal bleeding caused because his liver was split in half by his spine being shoved through it. Yet another death in custody that remains legally OK’d. I can’t think of much to say about it, really, except to point you here for some clear observations of the patterning of guilt and innocence, and to just repeat that there’s something truly hideous about the way that the innocence of ‘Australia/ns’ is earned and reiterated in and through death.

 

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