Reading Marx’s Capital as a feminist: the personal is political

When I started reading Capital I didn’t expect it to give me insight into my oppression as a woman. But it has. Bear with me.

One of the ways that women are oppressed in capitalism is by the displacement and fracturing of our human selves and labor into the realm excluded from capitalism and on which it depends, the ‘reproduction of human beings and their labor power’, and our relationship to capitalist economy itself through whatever it is we exchange for money. In David Harvey’s lectures, which I am following as an accompaniment to my reading of the book itself, he indicates that Marx considered the reproduction of human beings to be part of nature, and like other natural processes on which any economy depends, it is acknowledged without being addressed in terms of reciprocity. (I am thinking of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s view of human reciprocity with nature, as set out in Braiding Sweetgrass.)

It is not correct to equate the reproduction of human beings with natural processes. Women can and do choose when and how to bring life into the world. The labor that women undergo and perform to give birth and breastfeed, and men’s relationship to this labor of women and the economies of exchange between men and women with respect to the raising of children and their relationship to production of any kind, is human labor and part of human economy. I am not sure if Engels’ work on this question fully addresses this.

For some women, for heterosexual women and those forced into heterosexual relations, in conditions of patriarchy, exchange of our sexual and reproductive labor power for money or the means of subsistence is a sad fact that led feminists to understand that patriarchal marriage equates to prostitution.

For women, the paradigm of exchange of labor in capitalist economy is prostitution/marriage, i.e. exchanging sexual and/or reproductive labor power as such. That is what capitalism sees women in particular as being ‘good for’. A ‘working woman’ has the connotation of a prostitute, and women are shamed for putting ourselves on the market while it is only the conditions of capitalism and patriarchy that force women into this position, whether as a laborer on an assembly line, a secretary, in prostitution or marriage.

The notion of labor as something one can have a sense of one’s own worth in relation to, a sense of skill and pride and competence, and which can also be the basis for negotiating its exchange value for money – whether to an employer, a patron, a donor, a client, a buyer for one’s products – is denied to women by being equated with sexual humiliation. Women are both channeled into sexual self-advertising of our bodies and servility as the only ‘things’ we have worth anything to exchange, and shamed away from developing self-respect and self-worth in relation to our labor that we perform in any area of life, taking our labor seriously as the creation of value, since for women, ‘value’ is equated with the objectification of ourselves and cannot be the effect of an activity we engage in as subjects.

Women who resist prostitution and marriage, who resist objectification, may still find it hard to relate to the capitalist economy. I can say this was true for me, and maybe other women have different experiences.

I think it has something to do also with the notion of labor as a commodity under capitalism. We exchange labor for money, and David Harvey comments that it is recognized as a problem that Marx flattens out the differences between specific kinds of labor in his conception of average socially-necessary labor as the definition of value. But in reality, people in all kinds of work do not think of their labor as something merely average, alienated, a commodity as unskilled power that they must exchange for money as means of subsistence. People take pride in their work as nurses, mechanics, typists, bartenders, seamstresses, janitors, and they put some of themselves into it, there is something in work that remains unalienated despite its commodification.

I thought about this listening to the album The Changer and The Changed by Cris Williamson, a classic of 70s lesbian feminism. In concert, Cris still plays a couple of those songs but not others, and I found myself wondering why. I imagined that she might feel too distant in her life and feelings now from some of the more personal songs on that album, and thought about the concretization of her music in that form and how listeners relate to it. It’s not only that the music has a different use-value for her than for any other listener, but that she retains a link to it through her labor that no one else has. A violin maker still cares what happens to the instruments he makes and how they are being used; a mechanic may be interested in how her tinkering held up; the food we eat holds the specific labor of those who cultivated it, harvested it, packed it, brought it to market.

In my work on the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, another person who was involved commented to me, ‘your DNA is in that treaty’. There is still work I’m doing to draw out its inner logic that draws on and extends that labor I put into it, there are things I know the workings of or can relate to intuitively even if I can’t articulate, like the violin maker or mechanic or gardener who can see something of the power in how the product or effect of their labor is expressing itself and adjust or draw out further or simply celebrate.

In some economies, songs remain the property of an individual or collective; songs may be sacred and cannot be sung except by the owner; or they can be sold by being taught to another person to sing. Commodification of songs as social property exchanged for money in the concretized form of recordings of the singer’s voice and words, de-personalizes them and could be experienced as alienating for the creator if she would rather retire them from circulation.

We cannot go back to pre-capitalist personal exchanges, though gift economies and barter and other kinds of cooperative economy such as community currencies and mutual aid are important still in many of our lives and communities. But I think that grappling with the relationship between the specificity and personal quality of any labor, and our ability to contemplate its worth based on our own assessment of quality and social value and negotiate any exchange from that standpoint, is important especially for women in thinking about capitalism, our aversion to the capitalist value system, and how to transform it.

It is not enough to talk about participatory democracy in the economic and political spheres, workplace democracy and socialization of political decision-making. It is also not enough to talk about women’s sexual and reproductive autonomy and the implication of this principle for upending capitalism and its patriarchal foundation. That is all necessary but the intersection between the two in women’s lives, in terms of women’s relationship to the capitalist market economy as laborers – our relationship as women to labor that is not sexed or gendered per se (songwriting, violin making, janitorial work, mechanics, nursing, law, etc.), as well as a new visioning of the meaning of women’s sexed and gendered reproductive labor as human labor – is critical for understanding ourselves in the world we live in and moving in it now, as well as to envisioning what we want to fight for, and how.

Radical Feminism and Dialectics

1. I start out with a feeling of anger and vulnerability.  As a Jewish dyke, I inherit the fear of pogroms, the knowledge of being hunted and needing to be vigilant, needing to be prepared for when the welcome wears out.  Making a home in the whirlwind. Growing up in a non-religious family while attending a yeshiva, in a family struggling economically among those more well-off, I also know this feeling of hesitating at the door, not sure of knowing the right thing to do to be accepted.  (Unwrapping a Hostess twinkie package and not knowing it’s not kosher, for example.  Or however people wash dishes in their own houses.)
2. In 2019, the welcome mat is being pulled away from Jews in more and more places in the world.  The attack on a community center by 50 neo-Nazis in Hungary, chills me most somehow despite it being violence against property and not people.  This is not a rogue shooting, it’s a message by an organized political force.  The neo-Nazis are organized in the US also, and they represent part of a far right political spectrum that Donald Trump has brought full scale into national politics and government:  a coalition of Christian fundamentalists whose primary agenda is subjugation of women through denial of sexual and reproductive autonomy, and enforcement of sex stereotypes and heterosexuality against lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgender people; white nationalists whose agenda is exclusion and ultimately genocide of black and brown people whose very existence is viewed as a threat to white supremacy (and Jews who are demonized as the masterminds of liberal and leftist agendas for equality); and predatory capitalists whose aim is evisceration of any remnant of the social safety net and any expectation that government is responsible for the well being of all its people, in essence dismantling of the social contract, problematic as it has always been due to its nature as a compromise that sacrifices power for protection.
3. Into this scenario comes the intra-left struggle around gender identity.  Transgender people came to the forefront after lesbians and gay men won the emblematic right of marriage, which positions us as social equals with heterosexuals (though without federal civil rights protection against discrimination in employment, housing and similar areas, the slogan is true that we can be married on the weekend and fired on Monday).  Transgender people similarly lack protection against employment and housing discrimination, and deserve protection.  But the transgender movement has made demands that conflict with those of lesbians, all women, and gay men.  An important part of the women’s liberation movement has been the creation of autonomous women-only spaces, services, politics, and culture – that movement itself represents (or represented) an assertion of female separatism.  We named ourselves as a political constituency based on sex, and named our oppressors as the male sex which has systematically expropriated our sexual and reproductive power and various forms of labor, and has promulgated ideologies that treat us as half-human to mobilize our intelligence and strength and half-exploitable natural resource; we fight this oppression together with the class system and racialized exploitation that it is inseparable from.  Now comes a movement that rejects the radical feminist analysis and seeks to displace it entirely from political discourse, undermining gains we have made in women’s and girls’ sports and education,  lesbian-feminist autonomous culture and politics, women’s facilities in public mixed spaces (restrooms, changing rooms, baths), domestic violence and rape crisis refuges that bring peer support and advocacy to serve women in highly vulnerable situations, the feminist women’s health movement that named our body parts and took back power to know our own bodies and take charge of our health.  This revolution is not over, and maybe its distance from any conceivable finish line prompts frustration and fatigue, while the popularization of liberal feminism as the legal possibility and existence of women in managerial positions and skilled professions allows for a large segment of the population who are generally progressive and support women’s equality in principle to think that there’s nothing more to fight for (ignoring the massive existence of rape, femicide, sexual harassment, pay gap, the continued treatment of women and of female bodies as secondary in health care and in design of goods and services, the cutting back of abortion rights and contraception that has helped to fuel a surge in religious fundamentalist influence in our political arena, an environment where gender nonconforming girls and young women are unaware of lesbian and feminist role models and the rich literature of our movements, etc. and etc.).
4. The transgender movement demands that a person’s declared sex must be treated as their actual sex, i.e. a man who feels subjectively that he is female must be socially and legally recognized as female for all purposes.  This and nothing less is said to satisfy the demand for inclusion of transgender persons in society.  And it directly conflicts with lesbians and women as actual, defined, collectivities of persons who have material existence and are entitled to voice, assert, and defend their boundaries that set them apart from males.  The transgender demand for self-declared sex amounts to a silencing of women and suppression of women’s autonomous political, social, and legal existence.  The impact on lesbian-feminist spaces and organizing has been huge and painful, as many have had to close or disperse and reform out of sight of the mainstream, thanks to boycotts, threats and intimidation, divisions among women about whether to include males who identify as female, ostracism, and physical violence.  These spaces have always existed largely out of the public eye, we protect them, they are ours and they are meant for us and not for public consumption.  They have always met with criticism, ridicule, and bemusement due to their being women’s autonomous spaces that have no place and no role to play within a liberal order that simultaneously pretends equality between men and women already exists, and depends on women’s unpaid and underpaid labor and sexual exploitation in homes and in prostitution/pornography that put women in subservience to men.  When we decry this impact of gender identity claims, it’s as if no one spoke.  As Judy Grahn wrote in another context, being outside the capitalist, patriarchal and heterosexual order means that ‘no one is there to testify.’
5. Now come radical feminists.  We’d think that in mobilizing against gender identity because of how it impacts on women including lesbians, we’d be fighting simultaneously against the left/liberal consensus on this issue that reveals their misogyny/lesbophobia, and against the right which still wants to subjugate us entirely by rolling back the gains we’ve made under liberalism.  And yes, that’s a tough row to hoe and it’s ours.  There are some feminists who have decided instead to make an alliance with religious fundamentalists, and this itself becomes part of the landscape for those of us fighting for liberation for all women – including, damn it, women of color, indigenous women, Jewish women, working class women, and lesbians who are the front-line targets of the far right coalition currently in power in the US government for reasons that are immediate and life-threatening.  How dare they put us even more at risk by confirming the left and liberals in kicking feminists out of their zone of solidarity?
6. I had written an earlier draft post discussing some of the details of the right wing alliances, but actually don’t want to give it airspace.  I will say that those women are talking out of both sides of their mouths, at one moment claiming it’s not an alliance, just sharing a platform, and the next moment organizing a joint rally and co-producing a text advising parents on how to oppose schools that introduce children to gender identity or other topics the parents might not agree with (including sexual orientation and sexuality).  Feminists who are concerned about the sterilization and body modification that is being promoted for children need to revert to the feminist women’s health movement as a grounding, talk to children and put a feminist context to the body-hatred directed at all females, while acknowledging that these individual solutions are an expression of pain and struggle and survival that are no less legitimate than those our own generations might have used.  We have to get away from using children as a prop for our political ideology, and not in any way condone or be party to the religious fundamentalists’ use of children, lesbians, or other women as a prop for their own anti-woman, anti-lesbian, anti-child’s rights authoritarianism.
7. I titled this post ‘radical feminism and dialectics’ because we see how one thing can generate its opposition.  We need to look at the forces that have emerged against us – the far right coalition in government, the gender identity movement that aims to replace feminism with queer/trans ideology, the feminist alliance with religious fundamentalists that confirms the gender identity movement’s view of feminism as reactionary – to study and understand while also acting where we see an avenue to act.  We need to study and engage with queer/trans ideology to understand especially how girls and women relate to it and its appeal to them, while also deepening our own understanding of patriarchy and of radical feminist action, if we are to re-emerge as political actors.  It may not be immediate, but if we are correct in saying that the revolution for women’s liberation is not over, the dissatisfaction of women will ultimately be on our side.

Women’s liberation, gender identity and the state

The adoption of gender identity laws* by many states, and the endorsement of such laws by organs of the United Nations, demonstrates a failure to recognize women as a political class and women’s liberation as a fundamental component of the human rights project.

The transgender or gender identity movement in itself is a civil society phenomenon that has claimed the mantle of feminism and the mantle of lesbian and gay liberation as well. But it is states who bear the responsibility for the denial of women as a political class and the ensuring violations of women’s human rights.

The women’s liberation movement fought for abolition of all forms of male dominance and exploitation of women, and recognized gender as a social and cultural elaboration of  identities for men and women that not only limited individuals’ freedoms and opportunities but also kept in place the political and economy hierarchy with men on the top and women on the bottom.  This movement, now known as radical feminism, still fights all forms of male domination and exploitation of women.  It is an international and intersectional movement, keeping in mind that to be intersectional, women have to be recognized as a political class – intersectionality does not mean the obliteration of any political class or denying that there is any common political agenda, but rather pursuing the liberation of all members of that class including where that political agenda intersects with others.

Lesbians are caught in the cross-hairs of gender identity as an attack on women as a political class, most obviously because gender identity is promoted in our name through the ‘LGBTQ’ movement, but so are women of color, disabled women and women with other identities that have to fight intersectional battles, and those who have to defend themselves individually against male violence or who fight for its eradication.  Early in the US feminist movement, lesbians were told we weren’t wanted.  We are often treated as ‘not really women’.  Women of color and disabled women are also treated as ‘not really women’ or as the ‘wrong kind of woman’.  Every woman is exposed to social control and disapproval when she steps over the line of femininity as pleasing men and dedicating one’s own will and actions to maintaining a veneer of pleasantness in the family and in society, serving the interests of all hierarchies and systems of exploitation.  It is exactly trampling these lines of femininity that women need to survive, to defend ourselves against male violence both organized and individual, and to act in the world as responsible individuals and citizens.

The gender identity movement takes part of the feminist agenda, part of the lesbian and gay agenda, and makes it the sole focus to be enforced against the other parts of those movements.  The freedom to express ourselves and cross the lines of femininity and masculinity as individuals is part of both feminism/women’s liberation and lesbian/gay liberation.  It is a beautiful thing to see this freedom of expression win greater acceptance – but it has a conservative side, as the freedom is won by appealing to the construct of gender as a set of social cues in communication, e.g. I wear lipstick and present the appearance of breasts, therefore respond to me as a woman, or I tell you my pronouns are ‘they/them’, therefore respond to me as if you are agnostic about my sex.  It’s conservative because it treats an oppressive system as merely the cumulative product of individual choices, similar to a marketplace, and merely demands that the terms on which the market operates are made more equal in terms of opportunity to choose positions irrespective of sex.  But we don’t start out equal and don’t end up equal; it’s nonsense to treat a political hierarchy and system of economic and sexual exploitation as a marketplace – to do so merely entrenches the system of male domination/exploitation/extraction of resources from women along with all its dependent and intersectional hierarchies and systems of exploitation.  In order to act against oppression we have to act collectively to change the conditions that confront us; political action is not a marketplace.

Democracy has sometimes functioned as a marketplace especially when we are talking about majority vote and campaigns that function as marketing and not as political debate or deliberation.  But the answer is to bring back political debate, deliberation and collective action – not to capitulate to an individualism that is tantamount to despair.

The state is responsible for its violation of the human rights of women, but at the same time women have a right to question the state.  Democracy is a human right of a people to self-determination and pre-exists any particular form of political organization.  Equality of the sexes is fundamental to democracy, otherwise it is not democracy but androcracy.  Having been given the right to vote by states created by men, we are playing catch-up while men continue to shape the laws and customs to their own benefit, i.e. to treat rape as an individual crime for which sympathy is doled out or withheld on a racial basis to victim or perpetrator, rather than as a systemic hate crime against women that is to be eradicated.**   ‘Democracy’ itself cannot legitimize violations of human rights; like legal capacity it is a meta-right, a right that encapsulates a status for the exercise of freedom, and as a collective right, democracy remains accountable for the relations among individuals that it endorses and for those by which it operates.

The state should be the target of women’s political action and organizing, not the gender identity movement per se.  It is the state that bears responsibility within a human rights framework, and the state which, as the form of modern political organization that is answerable to democratic demands or can be targeted for political resistance if it rejects those demands.  The best and most successful organizing is being done in response to state initiatives like the proposed reform of the Gender Recognition Act in the UK, which also benefits from a large grass-roots movement that was able to mobilize through an anonymous discussion board where women congregate to discuss political and nonpolitical issues of many kinds (MumsNet).  In the US our spheres of political action and debate are circumscribed, truncated and heavily influenced by political parties, funders and media that have created a political culture of spin and power rather than deliberation or collective action that can sustain itself independently, with some important exceptions.  We should learn from other countries and other struggles as we work intersectionally for women’s liberation.

 

*By gender identity laws I mean laws that allow men to change their legal classification to that of women, whether based on self-identification or on medical or social gatekeeping.  Self-identification laws are the most pernicious for women’s rights because they allow the greatest number of men to enter and represent the most complete denial of women as a political class, but laws that require gatekeeping are nevertheless problematic for the autonomy of the female sex to define itself.

**The Nordic model for ending prostitution, which provides support for women to exit the sex industry and penalizes sex buyers to criminalize the demand for commodified sex moves us toward a systemic approach by targeting sexual exploitation at the industrial level.

Vision of the world we want to achieve when we abolish forced psychiatry

 

Since the work on CRPD began part of the challenge re abolition of forced psychiatry has been ‘what is the positive, you can’t just be negative, against something.’  To me that made no sense, there have been plenty of abolitionist movements in history that are viewed unreservedly as positive.

Still – on legal capacity we made a clear distinction that allowed us to parse good from bad motivations in the impulse to reach out to someone who seems to be struggling.  We said that support in exercising legal capacity is a good thing, so long as it does not amount to substituting or negating the person’s own will and preferences.  That helped a lot to give people something to hold onto and envision.  People in the CRPD negotiations all kind of got the idea and started seeing supported decision-making everywhere in their everyday lives.

Abolition of forced psychiatry was itself a midway position that our movement developed to encompass people who want psychiatry and other mental health services, and people who want no part of that system.  ‘Have whatever you want so long as it’s not forced on me.’  But this doesn’t satisfy those who hear the critiques of the mental health system beyond force and want to imagine something that might be an unmitigated good and not only a grudging compromise.

I suppose many of us have been thinking and visioning all this time, and I’ve been listening and formulating also.

What I came up with, that has resonated with many people so far, is this:

-The vision is a world where we are all mutually accommodating each other’s craziness, and offering support, not control when needed-

I want

– a world, not a service or support (living in the community not as managed policy of inclusion but as mutual acceptance of diversity)

– mutual accommodation, not falsely objective ‘reasonable accommodation’ (reasonable accommodation makes sense in contexts that are hierarchical but not in communities)

– acknowledgement that we all have something to put up with in other people, and everyone has to put up with something to be around ourselves

– not said but for me implied in mutual accommodation, is that we might fight, we might conflict, but we don’t use mental illness accusations to win these conflicts

– also not said but implied is that we set limits, need to be secure enough in our world to set limits that reflect our actual needs

– this can be a learning process to keep discovering our actual needs, we are complicated

– if ‘it takes a village’ and it’s not managerial, we are going to be open to each other and care about what others in this interactive world are needing and how they are suffering

– this can’t be a demand that we appease, that’s not mutual – we do get to set limits

– but if we are offering support it’s support and not control

– control is not support

– people have a lot of love and warmth and kindness to give, and also some of us want a more forbearing approach – need to be sensitive to how to how your attempt to support is responded to

– it’s not about ‘support’ alone, it’s always about how we deal with conflicts + how we are responding to an actual need for connection and support of any kind

– restorative justice is related and linked, but for now seems a little bit separate, or else may be part of what i’m thinking is ‘implied in mutual accommodation’

*

In further discussion, there were two aspects of ‘restorative justice’ that were clarified:  one is reparations for victims of forced psychiatric interventions, and the other is a policy for changing how we think about crime and accountability.

For me reparations is the best framework to get us to the world where that vision actually exists, where we can all live in that way.

So, three components to an agenda for change:

-Abolition (of forced psychiatry, segregation and discriminatory detention, coercive paternalistic state interventions)

-Positive vision of a world we want to live in

-Reparations as the process to make it happen

This agenda is itself a vision since there is the question of which governments, when and how will put it into practice.  We are always looking for countries that might be close to something really changing, that could take that big step of the real ‘paradigm shift’.

*

When I mentioned restorative justice I was thinking of a different aspect, though they are linked – an approach to the way that society responds to acts of violence or culpable harm to any member of the community.  It’s nice to make the linkage with reparations for forced psychiatry, and we are actually going to be rather lenient on them all considered.  Even if we have some process of accountability we cannot possibly prosecute and punish everyone who has ever done forced psychiatric interventions.

And a contribution on restorative justice in the usual criminal context was provided by Fleur Beaupert, which I accept with thanks:

Fostering restorative justice principles in criminal matters in line with mutual accommodation in providing support across our lives, including by:

• Dealing with conflict and ensuring responsibility is assumed for harm caused, but also moving away as far as possible from punitive responses which replicate and exacerbate societal inequalities and oppressions.
• Making equal and non-discriminatory adjustments delinked from mental illness or incompetency determinations for anyone who can be considered as not having intended to commit an offence or having a justification for their actions.

(c) Tina Minkowitz 2018

Sexism on the left, 2

The failure of intersectionality, insofar as it fails us, is not primarily a failure of feminism.  Rather it is elevated expectations of feminism (or stricter standards applied to women’s behavior), and lowered expectations of all the other movements (or more permissive standards applied to men), that create the biggest problems.

Kimberlé Crenshaw took note of the disparate reactions by her students to similar questions of intersectionality in feminist and anti-racist movements in her article ‘Close Encounters of Three Kinds: On Teaching Dominance Feminism and Intersectionality.’  Recently I observed an example of a generic call for coalition-building issued by a white male leftist in the name of intersectionality, which completely failed to grasp the nature of intersectionality as actually illuminating what each movement misses because it ignores the issues faced by a significant part of its own constituency.  Thus, in a Counterpunch article Anthony DiMaggio fails to connect the dots that make #metoo a workers’ rights movement – surely elimination of sexual harassment would raise the status and bargaining power of women as workers! – and similarly fails to relate Black Lives Matter and similar protests against racially motivated police violence to class struggle – surely this repression, and the accompanying criminalization, is connected to maintaining a large segment of African Americans as a super-exploitable underclass.

Everyone seems to point a finger at other movements that should be intersectional – actually with the exception of feminism, which has taken on its own struggles internally now for decades, and in many spaces as a result of this painstaking work achieved some real success.

The problem becomes most acute for women now because the transgender movement has misused intersectionality so that it becomes not a call for inclusion but a demand to re-set the entire table of feminism on its own terms.  These terms are, like most other movements not led by women, dictated by men – by trans-identified-males who refer to themselves as trans women and refer to women, or females who do not identify as trans men, as cis women.  This is an extraordinary reversal of the polarities of dominant and subordinated classes, most extraordinary in that it is so widely and popularly accepted in left circles and the liberal mainstream.

A friend asked me yesterday, what was a TERF and how to understand where trans ideology comes from, why it has become such a conflagration?

I thought about it for a long time after the conversation, and these are some of the pieces:

After same-sex marriage equality was established in the US by the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision – a huge milestone – there was a vacuum in the lesbian/gay movement’s advocacy.  Although many lesbians in particular were politically and personally unenthusiastic about marriage, an institution that as we knew it enslaved women and privileged upper classes, I don’t think that anything else would have enshrined in law and public consciousness the honor and dignity of our relationships, and by extension our sexuality.  In a society where marriage remains the only way to create family between equal adult partners, and it rests on a sexual relationship, marriage equality stands in for, and opens public space for, our sexual and romantic relations to be acknowledged openly and celebrated.  We don’t all have to be married, and we can live marriage as we choose if we do marry.  We can be sexual outlaws or nonconformists, if that’s still who we are.  Marriage, I think, still creates more space for us as lesbians, gay men and bisexual women and men.

There is a connection between sexuality and personal expression, and in particular between homosexual orientation and rejection or divergence from the roles and expectations prescribed for one’s sex.  Homosexual and heterosexual are binary orientations, even bisexuality is binary in that we are dealing with two sexes.  Similarly gender is binary if we understand gender to be the sociocultural constructs related to the two sexes.  Cultural symbolism around sex does not need to be patriarchal; think of women’s autonomous spiritual practices and productions.  (I will refrain from including generally ‘goddess symbolism’ here as it can be subordinated or created through a male gaze, to serve men.)  We cannot escape the need for cultural signifiers relating to sex – there are knowledge bases available and relevant to women and not men, about our female bodies and their development and capabilities and powers, our cycles, our sexuality, our center of gravity and our energy.  Our motherhood or inability to become mothers or rejection of motherhood.  We need our language and our connections to each other around these experiences that are binary in nature within the context of society, as they are unique to women.  If we are homosexual we are these amazing female beings who bring this entire being to another female.  Men, including gay men, will have whatever binary experience they have on their side that is not necessarily about dominating or exploiting women or about entitlement to enact violence and sexual aggression (i.e. patriarchy).  Lesbians and gay men have a unique vantage point on the roles and expectations for our sex, respectively, necessarily because our sexuality is qualitatively different from heterosexuality, and we are a different kind of woman and a different kind of man.  But it goes deeper than that also; many lesbians grow up rejecting femininity and become proud butches, many gay men grow up being told they are sissies and come out to their beautiful selves.  In this gender nonconformity is the connection between lesbian/gay politics and the issue of gender expression and identity.

Transgender people who choose to express themselves in ways that violate gender binary expectations, or to live in an identity different than their sex, which may include body modification that creates a quasi-intersex body type and experience, have the right to enjoy all their human rights and not be excluded from society.  But if we really want to talk intersectionality, the gender identity movement needs to start by addressing anti-sexism, and the differential impact of gender identity and transgender identities on men and women, including those who are equally gender nonconforming and do not identify as transgender but as butch lesbians or the equivalent for gay men.  That movement needs to deal with the feminist analysis of gender as the vehicle for maintaining male supremacy and patriarchy, an analysis to which numerous lesbians contributed, and which leads women identifying with feminism to understand themselves, and all women, as by definition gender non-conforming because they resist the subservience demanded of women as part of femininity.   (Which is why we reject the name ‘cis’.)  Feminists also maintain that the distinction between transgender and non-transgender is a false binary as no one is a walking stereotype.  Even non-feminist women heft babies and diaper bags and strollers, mow the lawn and stack wood, for example.

Women are pushing back against the new political orthodoxy demanded of us in left circles and in a new male-led transgender-focused feminism.  In the UK feminists are getting mainstream airtime and media (for example, here, and news roundup with link here)  in their fight to prevent legal changes that would allow a male to receive a gender recognition certificate as a woman purely on his self-declaration.  Australian leftist journalist Caity Johnstone took note of the transgender movement’s policing of language as part of a liberal identity politics that masks authoritarianism.  In the US, we are impeded by the right-wing’s capture of the pushback against gender identity as a return to manly men and womanly women; attempts at coalition-building between feminists and right-wing women while potentially interesting are doomed to fail so long as feminists put feminism in the back seat.

Let’s have some rules for intersectionality.

1. Intersections have to go both ways.  I build bridges between lesbian/feminism and the psychiatric survivor movement.  That means I work in both of them, bringing out issues, experiences and perspectives that pertain to lesbians and other women who are survivors.  I have to say at present it is highly risky to bring lesbian/feminist ideas to the survivor movement, because of capture by transgender identity politics.  And for the moment lesbian/feminism is more open.  But in principle there has to be mutuality of engagement with the issues of a segment of each movement’s constituency that the movement is not paying attention to.
2. Intersectionality cannot require reversal of the polarities of an existing movement or cannibalizing it out of existence.  That is what the gender identity movement is doing to feminism.  We, lesbians, midwives and other feminists who are backed into a corner or simply have the chutzpah to stand up for ourselves, aren’t allowing ourselves to be eaten.

What else can you think of?

Health, women, and autonomy

The feminist women’s health movement wasn’t just about abortion and self-examination with speculums.  It was about taking the knowledge and power of health into our own hands, in all aspects of our health.  Herbal knowledge from parts of the world our ancestors came from and where we are now, other kinds of healing traditions both energetic and manipulative.  Some of us learned deeply and trained and became practitioners to treat others, some of us learned enough to apply it to ourselves, more or less well.  Not so different from the knowledge any of our mothers and grandmothers had, to be able to take care of a sick child or elder or anyone the best they knew how.  We also asserted ourselves with doctors who were mostly male and rejected the idea that they knew best because their white coat and stethoscope and degree conferred knowledge stamped with patriarchal institutional authority.  We created, or tried to create, relationships with doctors based on equality, tried to be on first-name basis or otherwise to be on formal basis equally, to be Mary and Jane/Bob, or Ms/Dr/Rev/etc. X and Dr Y, not Mary and Dr Y.  We learned about diagnostic procedures and treatments, pros and cons, and decided for ourselves, sometimes rejected western medicine for holistic medicine of some kind, other times did a combination.

Somewhere along the way things changed.  More women became doctors, and even those who were alternative practitioners – like chiropractors – wanted to be addressed as Dr Y and took on the unequal relationship calling us Mary.  Alternative practitioners created elaborate consent forms that listed everything under the sun that could conceivably go wrong with the treatment so that we absolved them preemptively of any kind of malpractice claims.  Managed care came in and even doctors who wanted to practice the art of medicine were pressured to be assembly-line workers running rote protocols according to the popular evidence-based statistical recommendations of the day.  Population-based medicine is the real meaning of evidence-based; you get what the statistics say is the best overall outcome for a whole population, however large or small that population is defined, and the doctor isn’t expected to really think much about you as a whole person; if she wants to she doesn’t really have the time.  (If she is really extraordinary, wants to serve her patients individually and keeps taking insurance because she isn’t only for rich folks, she has to work serious overtime without pay to keep up.)

The proposal for single payer health care in New York State will not do anything to eliminate these serious structural problems that plague our health care system in addition to the simple lack of access without money.  In fact that proposal if enacted will continue the prioritization of money over people, only as a public system run by the government as cheaply as possible, using the same principles as managed care to treat health as a problem at the level of populations as a whole rather than meeting individual needs.  Paying a ‘capitation rate’ to serve a certain number of patients rather than paying for the services actually used encourages statistical management of the health of the population of patients as a group – achieving a certain statistical outcome for the health center or hospital or geographical region as a whole.  It also encourages manipulative practices to steer patients towards health care decisions that the system deems desirable in prevention or screening or treatment, and the dumbing-down of informed consent practices which are also seriously undermined by their use to avoid malpractice claims which is placed above the patient’s right and need to make well-informed decisions.

The NY single payer proposal brings in an additional requirement that comes directly from managed care, the figure of a care coordinator, who is supposed to ensure that medically necessary services are made available to, and are effectively utilized by, the members.  This is at best a busybody whose calls you can ignore or whom you can direct to leave you alone if you don’t want their attention; at worst, since it would be a requirement to be enrolled with a care coordinator to receive services under the plan, it creates the infrastructure for more aggressive forms of coercion, incentive and disincentive, manipulative opt-out scenarios, being marked down as a troublemaker.

We have already lost our privacy rights thanks to HIPAA, the voluminous federal law on health care privacy that advocates long warned was anti-privacy.  It is hard to get our own records, especially the medical notes that doctors share with each other but prefer to keep hidden from patients lest we dare to read and think about their conclusions for ourselves.  We don’t know what else they keep hidden from us.

The culture of compliance, which some of us know all too well from experience or advocacy in the mental health context, is nauseatingly present and permeating health care today.  I hear of doctors who refuse to treat a patient unless she takes a certain medication that they prescribe (e.g. for high cholesterol), forcing her to lie if she wants to continue receiving treatment that she wants.  The pressure to accept flu shots and other vaccinations is strong.  Screenings and questionnaires sometimes are inordinately interested in personal behavior including such matters as ‘use of illegal drugs,’ alcohol and tobacco use, body mass index, and the ubiquitous depression screening and dementia screening that are designed to capture unsuspecting folks to be initiated into the world of prescribed and enforced psychotropic drugging, and labeled with the kinds of disabilities for which one can have their rights and freedoms taken away.

The NY single payer bill also specifically preserves the existing medicaid managed care plans, including mental health managed care which is required for people covered by medicaid who ‘receive chronic mental health services’ or are labeled as ‘severely and persistently mentally ill’.  I have tried unsuccessfully to get information from reliable sources about how this has worked in practice, but recall that at the time it was enacted there was resistance from the survivor community to this classification and its implications for keeping people tied to a service system that is managerial and essentially institutional even within the community.  (See CRPD Committee’s General Comment 5 on Article 19 and OHCHR study on living independently and being included in the community, both addressing obligations to eliminate institutional forms of care both large and small-scale.)

As I grow older – I will be 59 and eligible to join OLOC on my upcoming birthday – I worry not only about needing health care for the inevitable breakdown of my physical body.  I worry also about the risks to which our society exposes older people of having my legal capacity taken away if someone thinks I am not making good decisions.  I am an ornery and quirky person, I have a great memory for some things and a terrible memory for others, and I don’t want any of the screenings.  Who’s going to stand with me?

 

Female autonomy

My introduction to feminism was women’s liberation.  ‘Do you agree with women’s liberation?’ a friend asked me, in junior high school in 1970 or 71.  I asked what it was and she explained that it meant a woman can do anything a man can do.  I thought about it a few seconds, and said yes.  It changed my life, to have the possibility of living as a full person in the world and not being required to be ‘a wife and a mother and…”

A slogan that I embraced and still remember from that time was, ‘A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.’  It says that, contrary to the ideology that told me I had to be a wife and mother no matter what else I might become, I exist in myself and have no need of a man to be complete and for my existence to make sense.  The ideology that paired up boys and girls in elementary school, that insisted on a ‘smartest boy’ and ‘smartest girl’ in my first grade class, I could overthrow as authority once it was ridiculed as absurd.

As it turned out, the premise of female autonomy expressed in the slogan appealed to me as a lesbian – on the sexual level as well as other aspects of life.  But the premise of existential female autonomy is important for heterosexual women as well, to know themselves as existing in and for themselves, before any relationship they may have with a male partner.  On the species level, as we know, both female and male are necessary for sexual reproduction, with distinct reproductive contributions and the female partner contributing the vast majority of labor and physical substance.  Yet this fact implies nothing about the political relationship between females and males, if anything it suggests the greater dependence of males on females.  Men’s subjugation of women is not natural, it is not implied or made necessary by any biological imperative, and to attempt such justification suggests a fear of lesbianism, or at least a fear that heterosexuality is not appealing enough in itself to sufficient numbers of women for the species to continue.

If the species dies out because women are free and do not desire men or pregnancy (or because men stop desiring women or lose their potency), maybe it means that the species does not need to exist any more.  Species existence depends also on many other factors, such as climate and war, in addition to reproduction.  It is immoral to enslave any individual or group of individuals to the aim of continuation of the species.

At the individual level, everywhere we look, we do not see heterosexuality dying out, or an end to women choosing to become mothers.  Women’s bodies are powerful in birth and the choice to risk one’s own life and health to birth another human should be honored with gratitude while not obligating any woman who is not so moved.

As a girl faced with coerced heterosexuality as the only option, I learned to deny and suppress not only sexual feelings for other females but a sense of myself as autonomous with respect to the world at large.  Not being ‘naturally’ as I was expected to be, and not being free to be me, the paradigm of female service to others allowed me a kind of space to fit within a gender role.  I didn’t have to serve men; serving humanity, or anyone in need, especially women or other girls whom I was naturally drawn to, was safe.

I don’t know if all the ways I felt ‘different’ as a child and have known myself as ‘different’ throughout my life can be explained by being a lesbian.  I don’t feel fully at home in lesbian community or in any community.  I don’t accept my difference as impairment either, though I have been disabled by being treated as such.  My difference feels more than anything else, like a sense of my actual autonomous being in a way that connects me deeply to a sense of harmony with the whole.  While I need connection it is much less than I have been taught to believe is natural, either for ‘women’ or for anyone.  The connection I need is often not with other humans, it is something else.  When I need connection may be the time when I most need to be alone.

Female autonomy as a principle encompasses all these levels.  Each one of us is an actual autonomous being, and can know ourselves as such.  Sexually, we have a right to come to know ourselves and to be free to connect deeply with other females without hindrance, and/or to connect deeply with males on one’s own terms.  Socially, familially, we also have a right to choose to connect with other females without hindrance, with males on our own terms, and in mixed spaces.  I could equally say we have a right to connect with anyone we choose, without hindrance and on our own terms – as a friend commented to me – but there is a reason to differentiate as I have.

Patriarchy, the system by which males extract resources from females, hinders us from relating to other females to the exclusion of males – whether on a sexual, social, familial, organizational or political level.  And the same system deprives us of the power and freedom to control the terms on which we relate to males.  We still live under this patriarchal system despite same-sex marriage equality and limited rights to use contraception and terminate a pregnancy, limited criminalization of rape.  The smashing of female-only identities (such as lesbian, mother), spaces (festivals, showers, shelters, health care, sports, etc.), and political movements (feminism/women’s liberation) tells us it’s time to wake up again.  The second wave didn’t free us, we didn’t free ourselves, patriarchy is enmeshed with racism, colonialism, militarism, capitalism.  Individualist freedom-seeking – ok, I did not have to become a ‘wife and mother and…’ – meets its limits not only in the glass-ceiling for any kind of achievement within a public arena, in the unrelenting march of male violence of all kinds – rape, police killing, war, psychiatric assault, in the failure to create possibilities for women as public actors outside the idea of middle class careers, inaccessible to large numbers of us, and I’m sure we can go on and on.

The ultimate collective level of female autonomy would be large-scale political organization.  There are and have been in the past societies where women and men are separate halves of the political structure, where collective decision-making and responsibility are separated based on sex (e.g. see Barbara A. Mann, Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas) or where women have a separate military structure within communal, egalitarian democracy (e.g. Kurdish women as described here).  How do we get there, and is it enough?  Do we want instead to envision something like the stories of ancient Amazons who lived entirely apart from men except for times when they would meet with a counterpart male society for trade and (for heterosexuals among them) sexual relations?  Do we want lesbian-only societies that adopt girls to raise?  In any case there is a need for cooperative and respectful men if we are to live in peace and stability, whether in mutual harmony or at least free from aggression.  I think it is worthwhile to think about the implications of a principle of female autonomy for large-scale political organization, especially in light of contemporary and past societies where this structural feature seems to foster not only women’s autonomy, authority and integrity but also men’s respect for the same.

The concept and experience of autonomy is different in a cooperative economic and social context, than in a competitive and exploitative one.  When we have competition and exploitation (as modern capitalist colonialist patriarchy) those in the subjugated classes are expected to submerge their autonomy for the good of the whole, while on the contrary the individual drive of the dominant ones is lauded and even deified as an engine of dynamism and creativity.  When we flag this and call for autonomy, separatism, self-love and self-determination, the dominant groups and their acolytes try to shame us back into our place, first by appealing to cooperation as two halves of a whole, then by elevating the altruistic values they have projected onto us as a superficial ethic for everyone without changing the structure of exploitation/subjugation.

I think that this holds true for economic classes, sex classes, and race classes.  You can consider what you know of recent history and see if you agree.

What I read and observe about autonomy in a cooperative economic and social context, and what I experience in small constrained contexts within capitalist patriarchy, is freedom to be oneself while remaining connected to a whole.  A sense of place, of relationship and responsibility to others that doesn’t preclude fights and sorrows, heartbreak and rejection.  I don’t want to live in any of the lesbian or women-only communities I know of, but I am a lesbian, married, at home in my own house and land that becomes center of the four directions for my world.

I’d like to fight for and work on cooperative economics and politics in my local area but am stymied by centrist politics stifling the possibility of even a radical naming of the problems (such as calling the Democrats a corporate party, or calling attention to the different material interests of health care providers vs people taking control of our own health care and autonomy).

Forced psychiatry is the antithesis of any kind of autonomy, reaching into the body to disrupt the brain and psyche, the sense of self-organization and possibility of wholeness. Being cracked and broken one can then know oneself as wholly outside what they can do to break us, but it has othering implications, and if I can’t relate to male-defined/mixed-sex generic madness discussions or to the view of madness itself as a thing rather than the content of what we are sad about or turning ourselves inside out on, well there aren’t many places to go.  The male-violence aspect of forced psychiatry helped me to know I’m a lesbian but also chilled my relationship to all social, economic and political institutions with the fear of being prey, building and reinforcing my Jewish heritage instincts and my  caginess to appease the abusers of my childhood.  Female betrayal put me into the hands of psychiatry and kept me there until they were done with me.  This is a feminist issue and an issue that could only be talked about among women, yet even then there are no words most of the time, no ground for it to be fully heard.  No place for the twisted ugliness of abuse to be surrendered and healed, it has nowhere to go.

It’s also far in the past now.  I am not a ‘person with a psychosocial disability’ in my daily life unless my ordinary craziness is diagnosable as it is, and I care to frame my life in this way.  I’m tired and don’t need or want the identity except as a link to survivorship, ex-mental-patienthood that will never escape me and that I don’t want to hide or dismiss.  Other communities won’t fully hold me or embrace me, and neither will this one now, because of the gender identity witch-hunts finally reaching us, in the end that becomes decisive beyond any other dyke-baiting, dragon woman force of nature misogynies.

I don’t think we necessarily need separate political structures in a formal sense in order for female autonomy to be put into practice and respected.  Separate political structures can be another Noah’s Ark scenario, male leaders and female leaders as ‘smartest boy’ and ‘smartest girl’, created as an arbitrary demarcation without a consciousness of ‘women’s business’ or women’s political autonomy and liberation from men as a principle and purpose.  Respect for female autonomy can start anywhere by consciousness-raising and practice where we claim public space, public roles for the power and space we take in the world by being single mothers, business owners and skilled tradespeople, teachers, anywhere we are acting from strength and not performance, standing in our courage and linking in solidarity with other women whenever we choose to for pleasure, for resistance to male expectations and entitlement, for nurturing ourselves and each other and building our strengths.  And with men learning to back off when we bar the door, or simply prioritize women, instead of treating it as a challenge or a joke.

I’m thinking of Kate Millett, who died during the time I have been writing this blog post.  Reading Flying which I had bought from Kate and never read before, thinking of Kate’s art and her open lesbian desire in art and writing, her erudition and plain speech, how her life and charm and needs and insight touched everyone who came to know her in person or through her work, and her life like mine and any of ours an open puzzle, not solved and worked with all we have at any moment in our full hearts.

I can’t answer the questions posed by my work and advocacy about how we should ‘deal with’ each other’s pain and violence to self and the pain and violence we cause to others, all these frustrations and concerns when we are too far away in our own lives to reach each other and give everything that our sister needs.  I know that life is hard for all of us whether we identify as mad or mentally ill or not, and while my mind does shut off to some of my sisters’ pains, that’s my limitation and not an excuse to have them locked up and tortured.  I am an abolitionist, bearing witness to what I survived and trying to make reparations possible.

Cooperation is needed between women.  Maybe some things work best with a focus, like Mary Lou Singleton’s wonderful interview calling for reproductive sovereignty – ‘abortion on demand with no apology’ – and women taking back control over abortions and birth control, learning again together to do these things for ourselves outside the medical/pharmaceutical industries.  What else can we do politically, cooperatively and collectively as women to take back our sovereignty over everything that is ours?

Can we cultivate female solidarity against male violence and harassment in public places?  Not posses or roving teams, just women learning to make eye contact with other women in public, to defend each other verbally or physically – similarly to how the left is now promoting for white allies to defend people of color against racists.  I don’t want to involve men in this for now – I want it to start with women connecting with each other to name the aggression, let each other know we see, it’s real, we have each other’s backs.

To take back our sovereignty over being in public space in our female bodies, to not be objects of protection by the state or individual males.  Take back the night marches were part of this but at least in the US reportedly came to be associated with calls for better policing, which is double-edged especially for communities of color, and for crazy and disabled women.

Political class solidarity among women is different than creating women-only communities that try to be all things to all women, or at least all things to a small group of women.  For me intentional communities raise way too many red flags about trying to meet expectations, worse than marriage since no fundamental emotional connection and potentially intrusive interpretations of ‘the personal is political’ as ‘everything in your life is up for political discussion by anyone who disapproves of it.’

To link it back with some other points, I think political class solidarity may be better suited to the way we live now in modern non-indigenous communities, rather than trying to create or re-create ways of living that imitate our heritage past or contemporary indigenous people as functioning societies with internal political, economic, and cultural self-sufficiency.  For those of us who easily get ostracized if we’re not the ones in control (looking at many of us), whether as crazy or as ‘not our kind’ in one way or another, maybe having our own homes is a priority and (re-)creating the political solidarity movement of women, i.e. the women’s liberation movement, from where we are.  In-person in cities, in small towns, online.  Why not?

Why We Fight: Domination and Subjectivity

So many things rolling around in my head.  The US election throws many things into sharp relief, or is it overdramatizing.  In trying to formulate what to say about it, I think: the fight between a managerial notionally liberal-democratic ruling elite, and an insurgent patriarchal-nationalistic authoritarian tendency.  All plutocratic but the authoritarian version more nakedly so.  And, the fight against either and both of these, by a sort of body politic newly alert, and the manipulations of this fight by the ruling elite, and so on.

And I feel like the tsunami of all this roars over my own struggles that aren’t part of the dramatized situation in the media.  If we fight and no one pays attention do we exist?  Well that’s silly, many other struggles succeed outside the spotlight, they work patiently until they win.  Media isn’t what matters.

But it is a challenge to understand why all these things matter to me.

The concepts of domination and subjectivity or subjecthood are a focal point in particular for radical feminism and lesbian feminism, and for eradicating psychiatry and its collusion with all forms of abuse and hierarchy.

Domination came up in papers I was reading to comment on for publication.  I will not address the concept of domination as presented there, or my response to it, but will stress my own understanding of domination and why it persists in my mind.  Subjectivity came up in my reading of Judith Butler (see previous blog post).  It is perhaps the opposing force to domination, as described in anti-colonial and other liberatory philosophies.  Once an oppressed person understands themselves to be separate from the oppressor, to disagree, to condemn the oppressor and affirm a separate moral point of view, even if one has no power to act on it, or fears that defeat is inevitable, or when one is prepared to confront the actuality of opposing force as existing outside oneself and in opposition to one’s separate existence, a step has been taken towards liberation that may be tentative but that constitutes a basis for consolidation of power and the possibility of overthrowing an oppressive regime.

Domination on the other hand happens when an oppressed person, or people, give way in their subjectivity to the oppressor’s worldview, which is inimical to themselves not because of a cultural clash but because that worldview insists that the oppressor is superior and the oppressed person/people is/are inferior.  That worldview insists that the right way of the world is for the oppressed to serve the oppressor, to give way and conform to the oppressor’s prescriptions and comply with the oppressor’s rules.  And it insists that this is the meaning of peace and harmony, that pleasant cooperation and ability to get along and live together entails an agreement to be complicit in one’s own subordination.  Carole Pateman described this well in relation to patriarchal-capitalist marriage as the only contract permitted to women, in The Sexual Contract.  A similar structure exists in any relation of exploitation that is maintained as an institution of society or as a relationship that claims loyalty and pretends to be other than force, deception, and manipulation.  Given the embeddedness of all our relations in structures of exploitation, in patriarchal-capitalist-colonialist societies, it is inevitable that we may not always know for certain our own motivations or those of others.  Seeking connection is fraught with the possibility of exploitation and domination, yet avoiding connection can also lead to situations of exploitation and domination in any relations that emerge, including those we have with the natural world and with ourselves.

Subjectivity came up for me in reading Judith Butler because she accepts patriarchal accounts of the emergence of human consciousness, language and sexuality, as arising from men’s relations with other men regarding the sexual domination of women as a socio-economic practice, and as infantile sexual urges (yes, Freud’s Oedipus complex).  I recoiled from this as supremely nihilistic and a howling cry of pain from a woman trapped in patriarchal domination.  All you have to do is breathe, to become aware of independent consciousness.  Our awareness is not enclosed in an impenetrable structure, time and body and being continually evolve, I open my eyes and see the stars or stand still and feel the air and its dampness.  Patriarchy did not create this.  Its arrogance is to try to convince us that we can not only not escape its domination but that we do not exist outside it.  Our laughter says that we do.  Sarah’s laugh in Genesis, though presented as a foolish woman mocking the messenger of the patriarchal god, is this escape.  It is her power to conceive and the strong desire for a child to pass on her legacy that I hear in her laughter, a power that the patriarchal god pretends is his command.  That is a tactic of dominators, to pretend that they hold your own power and so if you use it you are confirming their almighty superiority.  They make it so you can’t win, so long as you are interacting with them and attempting to find common ground.

Female autonomy – yes we exist! Triumphantly, some of us are lesbians, some heterosexual women are stone clear about their separate existence from the men in their lives.  It has to do with boundaries that we negotiate from within.  When we do not let others tell us who we are or what our limitations are, but create our own space, set our own terms, not to rebel against authority, which recenters them in our thoughts and moves us further away from ourselves, but to build and nurture what nurtures us.  Pain doesn’t automatically mean oppression or abuse, we have to learn to sit with ourselves through pain and understand where we are moving and why, what limits we set and what that leaves us to do and work through and with.  Relations among women are not the same as those between women and men, but if we have experienced abuse and domination from other women we have more work to do on figuring out how we understand subjectivity, what is love and what is violence, why and how we can afford to trust.  This is not about fixing ourselves but about understanding a structural issue that is transversal in intimate relations and in social institutions.

Forced psychiatry tells us to take up the mantle of subordination that we fought against, to accept an oppressor’s definition of ourselves and our world, our limitations and our reality.  It tells us “Resistance is futile.”  More than that, it tell us all the lies the abusers told us, have real power.  They will be socially, legally, politically, and medically enforced on our bodies and minds.  We will be obliterated.  Except that we don’t die.  We are the undead, the creature that rises from the hell it was cast into and not supposed to survive, the shit-covered being that everybody can turn up their noses at.  The uninvited guest, Lilith, the thirteenth witch, she who comes in and turns everything to stone.

That’s a power and a subjectivity.  When we remember our own flesh and blood inspired/ enspirited selves, when we be the human beings we are and not their fear of us, and we are not afraid of their fear of us, we grow beyond anyone’s imagining.  Speech is power but who are we speaking to?  We need to exercise our abilities which needs to interact with the structures we’re embedded in and we need to extricate ourselves from the domination, sometimes it is as simple as saying no and other times we have to sit with pain as our entanglements or captivity keep us from moving in the direction we might want to.

The state, and capitalism.  Everybody needs freedom from domination and the means to a dignified life, food and water and bodily comfort and feeling and being secure in a place called home.  Money or other ways to get the things, and have things done, you need to survive and live well.  Relatedness, loving kind-heartedness and ok-ness, being enough without a rat-race.  Ethics, sacrificing when necessary to preserve the whole of what you love.  Standing Rock exemplifies these values for all of us and challenges us to be there for our own lives and the future of coming generations and the planet.

And me, in my corner of the world, I may remain disconnected from where the calls to action are coming from to resist fascism and neoliberalism, maybe it is those struggles that will have to catch up with me.  I fear in many ways that not only the US situation but forces at play in the world and in the international human rights movement are threatening a tsunami that will obliterate my hopes for eradicating forced psychiatry and state domination in the form of legal capacity restrictions.

If legal capacity is a fiction of the state, the problem is not that it inherently means domination so that we have to move to a system of interdependence to avoid domination.*  Or rather, it is not that the underlying value of mutual respect for personal autonomy means domination.  Legal capacity as independence is domination because it abstracts some human beings from their matrix of dependent exploitation of others and constitutes them as superior and as the originators or source of spirit, mind and consciousness, while those they exploit are constituted as material and split from their own consciousness, or strongly lobbied and gaslighted and threatened to adhere to the hierarchical worldview that places them as subordinates and dissociate from themselves.  Dependence is then an attitude of subordination, a role of appeasement in a game of keep-away where those who control the means of subsistence demand loyalty and self-abnegation as the price for giving up any part of what they have, which they do in order to maintain control.  It is not necessary that depending on others for basic needs creates this kind of relationship; mutuality is always possible and is interdependent with respect for boundaries determined from within; active attention to the seeking by the other is key to establishing such respect and this in turn needs to be supported by social structures and values that do not allow those who care for others to be isolated and exploited as managerial servants but instead promote and activate their autonomy and serve them in turn.

However the state and its laws and legal systems evolve, and however our economic systems evolve, we need to understand and promote ways of relating to one another that are fundamentally egalitarian and based in respect for mutual autonomy.  This cannot be a formality to invoke on the way to mental health law reform, procedural safeguards for paternalistic interventions, reinstitution of the neoliberal pseudodemocratic order that is based on the lie of mutual relinquishment of power to the state as holder of monopoly on legitimate violence.  That lie called the “social contract,” which is at the base of the idea of democratic legitimacy of states, is based on a male historical paradigm and the idea that authoritarianism is the answer to war (a form of male violence; individual women war-mongers in patriarchy and female war-leaders, women who defend their people, etc., and the difference between elites and foot soldiers, don’t negate that war as we know it is a practice that men do).  The Iroquois had a different answer, in which women were key peacemakers; instead of authoritarianism that created the state as holder of absolute power they created the “Great Law of Peace” that supposedly was the model for the US constitution.  If peace is superimposed on hierarchy, it is a false peace that requires continual appeasement, denial, exploitation, and creation of authoritarian narratives that keep subordinates believing that their subordination is natural, that they are inferior, that keep them ashamed of themselves.  But once we allow the chickens to come home to roost and don’t turn them away, we have at least the possibility of anchoring ourselves in wisdom and starting to magnetize ourselves in the direction of mutual respect and respect for ourselves.

I need a disclaimer, I am not supporting the dismantling of state programs for regulation of industry or wealth redistribution, or for anything else that is useful to human beings.  Rather if we believe, as many are saying that “we are seeing the ending of a 400-year-old economic system” (a meme circulating on Facebook), we ought to be thinking about and preparing for the future want for coming generations.

 

 

 

*1) The state itself is the real fiction; legal capacity is the necessary vehicle for asserting a right to respect for autonomy, or the concept that allows us to demand respect for autonomy, within a state legal system.

2) Interdependence if invoked as lip-service to justify the support paradigm with the understanding that some of us are more “interdependent” than others reinscribes domination by making it impossible to name different experiences in relation to power.  In a material sense we are all interdependent, we are all born from a mother and the human species still reproduces sexually.  We eat food and are eaten in turn when we die.  But the problem with the concept of interdependence as a solution to the opposition of independence and dependence is that it fails to distinguish consciousness and self-awareness, independence as organism seeking its own sustenance, survival, and comfort, from self-sufficiency and quasi-divine self-creation, which we may also participate in or aspire to, but which does not distinguish one person from another or constitute a basis for hierarchy, rather relating more to ego and pride.