Posts Tagged ‘Subaltern’

Prop. 8 and Straight White (Male) Politics

// November 12th, 2008 // No Comments » // All things LGBT, Racism

What is up with the Keith Olbermann video doing the rounds? You would think someone delivered a sermon or message from Jesus the way people are raving about it on Digg.

Why does it take a straight, white male ally to talk about ‘gay marriage’ in a compassionate way to generate attention? And why on earth is the Courage Campaign so excited that it is still spamming my email with it?

The failure of the No on 8 is directly attributed to these ‘missionary-type’ politics and Frank Schubert (I am no fan of this guy) appropriately labeled it ‘lily white, liberal’ politics. Of course, what he did not expect is the rage and furor from all segments of society that is sparking the current grassroots Repeal H8 campaign. Make no mistake — the backlash against No on 8 has little to do with pale/off/lily ‘white liberal politics’ and everything to do with people angry over the dismantling of civil rights in California.

From Daily News comes an affirmation that we need to put the ‘pride’ back in ‘out and proud’ and assume leadership of our issues:

The movement’s leaders “were very timid. They were too soft,” said Robin Tyler, a lesbian comic who created a series of celebrity public service announcements with the slogan “Stop the Hate, No on 8″ that were rejected because they were deemed too negative. “We were lightweights on our side.”

No offense to Keith — Thanks for using your bully pulpit to express your support for the No on 8 movement and condemn those that voted for the ballot measure.

I am sure the friends of the subaltern mean well but let the subaltern speak.

P.S. Did Keith forget that Rachel Maddows is openly gay?

The Invisibles that Made the Beijing Games – Dark Side of the Olympics

// August 19th, 2008 // 6 Comments » // Gender, Human Rights, Immigration, Nationalism, Political Theory

I mentioned earlier that the computer-generated 55-second video footage of giant fireworks on film at the Opening Ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was pure simulacrum–with no relation to ‘reality.’ It turns out that there was more “staging” than meets the eye at the 2008 Beijing games.

First, a 9-year old lip-synced the song “Ode to the Motherland” because the original singer was not considered pretty enough.

Then, we had reports of a pre-recorded “live” fireworks display as aforementioned.

Chinese officials also admitted to deploying cheer squads (legions of spectators wearing matching yellow shirts) to ‘create’ atmosphere and hide the empty seats. (Why were there empty seats at this major world spectacle? We will come back to this point soon).

Now Beijing officials are admitting that children dressed in different ethnic costumes in China who carried the Chinese flag were not actually from those ethnic groups.

And all the while, the CCP has cracked down on Olympics piracy–the sale of ‘inauthentic’ Olympic gear. In order to move away from the perception of China as a “low class pirating country” according to CNN,

On April 26, World Intellectual Property Day, cities across China demonstrated the country’s commitment to quashing piracy by staging public exhibitions and destroying pirated goods.

This is the essence of hyper-reality, the fake crackdowns on pirated goods (the brand names also representative of nothing) to allude to a China that is indeed unreal; it does not exist.

Maybe these reports do not bother average viewers who understand that they are consuming images that are not necessarily representative of reality.  And this post is by no means condemning China for “faking” the Olympics–that would be far too juvenile and hypocritical and I will leave that to the Orientalists and hate-mongers.

In ‘postmodern’ society, the simulated copy has preceded the real and while I am not asserting like Jean Baudrillard did that “the real no longer exists,” I do hold that the mass profusion of images for consumption–the systemic act of the manipulation of signs–play a major role in masking and convoluting our perceptions of reality.

The most disturbing part of the Olympic spectacle does not have to do with the 55 second CGI, lip-synching or child actors; it has little to do with the spectacularly grand banquet of scrolls, drums, processions, songs and dances that were supposed to reflect 5000 years of Chinese civilization. This hyper-reality and idealized transposition blanketed the ‘real’ people of China, the people that would ideally occupy those empty seats, the ones in rural areas who would never even see the games but have their land taken away in an attempt to create the facade, those that toiled behind the scenes to make these Olympics a success, the ‘undesirables’ that China was all too eager to eliminate from the screens before the games begun even while appearing to extoll the values of its own historical laboring past and present during the staged simulation.

The migrant laborers that toiled hard with little-to-no legal and health protections, and built the Bird’s Nest are nowhere to be seen. They came, they built, and they left knowing that they would never have access to the amazing sites that they have put together, that the world may never recognize their amazing feats and reward them with medals. After all, we are glued to our screens watching and applauding people running, swimming, cycling and jumping for medals, sponsorships, and fame. But the true achievers are the migrant workers, the unsung heroes who made these games possible.
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Deportation Delayed for Arthur Mkoyan

// June 11th, 2008 // No Comments » // Immigration

It really wouldn't come down to this last minute gamble, if Congress had demonstrated some leadership and enacted the DREAM Act.

Arthur Mkoyan and his family are no longer being deported thanks to Senator Feinstein who filed a private bill on their behalf. Yet, their immigration hurdles are far from over.

Rubin Navarette Jr. does not seem thrilled with all the hue and cry over Arthur Mkoyan's deportation. This is part of what he wrote in the SF Chronicle:

 

I wonder why more of them – including Tancredo – aren't making a fuss over Arthur Mkoyan. The fact is, Apodaca didn't get nearly the amount of public sympathy that Mkoyan has received up to now. Why the double standard? I believe it's because, while Mkoyan may not have a leg to stand on legally, he at least has the benefit of not being Mexican. Much of the immigration debate is fueled by a fear of a changing culture, competing languages, an altered landscape, and what loopy Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist calls the "colonization" of the United States by Mexican immigrants. Arthur Mkoyan isn't considered a party to any of that. For some people, that makes all the difference. And, in some respects, that's the saddest thing about this story.

No, the saddest thing about this story is reporters trying to play racial exclusionary politics with it. Whether or not Arthur Mkoyan received more sympathy based on his non-Mexican national heritage can be debated later at some conference or symposium. Now is not the time.

When we, the DREAM Act students, try to garner support for Arthur Mkoyan or other students like Tope Awe or Meynardo Garcia facing deportation, their racial or ethnic identity is not a motivating factor in our cause.

Navarette Jr. should consider letting the subaltern speak instead of drawing conclusions about experiences where he is an 'outsider-looking-in.' It is up to the individual undocumented youth students to decide whether they believe racial politics is a factor in protests and efforts to stay their deportation.

Right now, I am more concerned about Arthur and his ability to stay in the United States, where he belongs. If he is getting "special attention," I would rather take advantage of it to promote our cause and prevent his deportation, instead of sitting on the sidelines making divisive comments and pondering about why his case is so special.

Ultimately, I believe we are all special and deserve to stay in the United States if we have beaten the odds and graduated from high school in the least. Lets not play racial politics with the lives of undocumented students.

 

This does not mean I advocate marginalizing or stifling out a very important element of the immigration debate, which is race and the otherizing of difference. I just do not believe in writing an article about deporting a DREAMER (no matter how tongue-in-cheek) to prove a point about systemic racism. We can do both–we can recognize the biases in the system while trying to protect our students–regardless of certain social/political characteristics–from deportation.

What can happen with the Private bill?

After it passes the scrutiny of the House and Senate, the private bill would be referred to the Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security, and Claims. If it passes that test, than the private bill would be put on a private calendar  for floor consideration where it would face more hurdles.

Needless to say, private bills have an extremely low success rate. Only 151 have been approved in the past 12 years and none in the past 3 years.

We wish Arthur Mkoyan and family all the best in their efforts. 

Learn more about private bills here.

Click here to request that our next President takes action on the DREAM Act, which would grant conditional residency to undocumented students like Arthur Mkoyan so that they can pursue higher education in the United States. 

Documenting my thought processes – Guidelines for research

// June 5th, 2008 // 3 Comments » // Discourse Studies

After finishing a review for a journal, I am still in an academic mode. I thought I would share my thought processes here. These are mere guidelines I use when researching, writing or trying to understand all sorts of phenomenon.  I suppose it is an insight into how my brain works

  • Don’t make claims without warrants.
  • NEVER fall for dualities and binary modes of thinking i.e. black/white, either/or. As a longer example, juxtaposing the gathering of women in a patriarchal space to secular liberal feminism does not mean we stop questioning oppression no matter how narrow the space. We don’t need to submit to either non-liberal contestable agency or First World secular feminism.
  • Get rid of certainty of knowledge and any broad generalized claims to truth – questions are better than statements. DECONSTRUCT AWAY!
  • What? Who? – I.E. What is criminalized? Who is the incarcerating regime? Keep your units of analysis clear.
  • LET THE SUBALTERN SPEAK – It is not the place of a secular, liberal and privileged scholar (albeit outsider) to tackle and analyze unfamiliar structures and discourses. Lets not assign agency to people who do not see themselves as agents, situating them in movements that they don’t consciously identify with.
  • Don’t obsess over categories, labels, boxes
  • Sympathize with the becoming, not the being
  • Never ignore the specific social and historical configuration within which the research is situated.
  • Keep this at the back of your mind – Ideas and assumptions do not exist outside the material conditions of life. Go to the root of the matter if you need to.
  • Don’t ignore the importance of minor acts and inconspicuous transformations – they may be the start of something more. Footnote them if possible.
  • Value narratives and experiences. Don’t shy away from feeling and emotions. They are oftentimes more powerful than empirical evidence.
  • Aim for discontinuities and ruptures in meta-narratives
  • Make notes of contradictions
  • Keep in mind: agency/structure without the binaries. It is a reproductive and cyclical process.
  • Do not disregard the importance of space – Colonial globality? Autonomous space? Hate-free zone? Sanctuary-sphere? Nuclear-free zone? — What space do we inhabit?
  • Never approach an issue in a uni-dimensional manner. It is not just nationalism, not just sexism, not just racism or classism  i.e. the gendered impacts of a globalization that has disparate impact on the rich/poor/ethnic minorities of developed, developing and underdeveloping countries. Try and see the broader linkages between ISMs, systemic patterns if possible while always being careful of meta-narratives.
  • Be a tragic-comic — Humor helps.
  • Question/Critique everything, including the self.

If history is indeed written by victors…

// May 13th, 2008 // No Comments » // All things LGBT

I take great inspiration from this quote by Jennifer Beals at an NAACP event a few years ago:

“It has been said, ‘History is written by the victors.’ I take this to mean we can make ourselves victorious by writing, and then rewriting our own stories. In a country and culture so dominated by media, by the manipulation of words and stories, telling the tales of people whose stories historically have not been told is a radical act and I believe an act that can change the world and help rewrite history. Imagine if all of our stories were told?”

Yesterday, Ilene Chaiken, producer, writer and director of the L Word wrote something she called a rant about how when the L word is over next year, we would again be relegated back into the closet. Once again, we would hop from channel to channel trying to find some representation or other of our lives, some acknowledgment of our existence. She pretty much ends with a call to action:

And for those of us in the LGBT community, I say, if history is indeed written by the victors, let’s make ourselves victorious by writing our own history… and directing it and producing it and starring in it.

I hardly have any skills in screenwriting, much less acting. My artistic skills are also sorely lacking though I can always use Photoshop. But I think I am trying to say, in my own way, how much I believe in writing our own stories, in controlling (or trying to) our own destinies. So day after day, I blog away, sometimes about exceedingly important social issues, other times about my own addictions and obsessions, but I know that I have a space, a niche on my blog. And it does reach out to some people.

Today I told a reporter interviewing me about the pro-migrant santuary sphere what purpose or objective we were trying to achieve and I told him that as an individual I am trying to change the discourse of the immigration debate; to move beyond “illegal is illegal.” Because, seriously, besides redundant, it really doesn’t do anything to reform our broken system. But I am not too bent on convincing the Minutemen (or the Neo-Nazis and whatever anti-gay groups are called)–it is the mainstream American, the working class person that we hope to win over.

I sometimes feel a sense of betrayal to some or other aspect of my identity–it cannot be helped. I cannot possibly represent every social identity that is expected of me and neither can I vouch to speak for anyone else but myself. As an immigrant who has seen some really dark days of immigration to this country, I have been part of a movement of undocumented students, to get my dear friends to start blogs, to take back the discourse in the debate over our future. My MA thesis was mostly about a country that we left behind but a culture that we have held onto. It pains me at times to read bad news about Fiji, but I trudge on. My gayness probably shames the Indian community (that I avoid like the plague) but its my pride and empowerment, no matter how silly it might sound to be proud of your sexual orientation–after all, it cannot be helped. But I indulge myself even though I am still too shy to go to Pride or other LGBT social events to which I am invited (or maybe just a homebody)!

I don’t know what sort of history I am supposed to write or be a part of at the end of the day but I know that I don’t want to give anyone the pen or paper to write my story for me. Sometimes I feel daunted by a huge responsibility, like a wounded soldier in a war for which I did not sign up; I just want to disappear into oblivion for a few days. Other times, I write for myself out of total self-absorption (maybe like right now)! I don’t know if JB would consider my incessant blogging about our stories, our lives, our troubles as a radical act. I suppose the net has created a space for the subaltern to speak in–and the subaltern is speaking out.

This is probably one of my shout-outs to my dear friends in the pro-migrant sanctuary sphere for promoting a sense of belonging, to my idols Jennifer Beals and Laurel Holloman and the entire cast/crew of the L word for helping us form a community and something to hang onto, to my professors for guiding me towards the light, and to everyone reading for encouraging me to carry on. We may call this my rant. Si, se puede.