The word in question is “pig.” The replacement was “cop.” The sentence at issue refers to police impunity. And the paragraph under discussion concerns the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence.

One of the main criticisms hurled at the word was that it doesn’t comply with The McGill Daily’s Statement of Principles (SoP). The SoP is essentially an outline of the beliefs that govern and the intentions that direct the content of The Daily. It’s akin to a Radical Politics 101, wherein power – its uneven distribution, the way it shapes social relations, and how it’s reproduced – is fundamental to the way the world gets conceptualized.

Now, no one is claiming that “pig” is an innocuous term. Offensive? Big shock! Hateful? Hell yeah. Derogatory? You bet your ass. Oppressive? I don’t think so.

“Pig” has wide circulation among those who are most vulnerable to police repression, harassment, surveillance, brutality, and social and racial profiling. It also has currency in overlapping as well as more distinct groups of anarchists and anti-authoritarians. In other words, it comes from folks who have an acute understanding of the concrete ways that oppression plays out in the day-to-day.

The meanings attached to terms like “cop” generally imbue the police with respect, morality, and innocence. This connotative web reflects the interests of the elite, whose maintenance of the current order depends on the public legitimation of their institutions. The meanings attached to “pig” speak more accurately of the reality of state violence as experienced by “disposable” sections of society.

One of the most potent starting points in struggling against systems of power is to create words and deploy language in ways that validate otherwise erased and discredited thoughts, experiences, and histories. Creating knowledge – through language – that reflects the “underside” can be a key part of survival and a giant leap toward eroding the logic of subordination. As one insightful incoming Daily editor said, “Our discursive practices bespeak our ideologies.”

The SoP takes “empowering and giving a voice to individuals and communities marginalized on the basis of [systems of oppression]” to be The Daily’s beating heart. Fear of being inflammatory, alienating, or offending the liberal sensibilities of McGillians needs to be checked at the door. Choosing to silence language that stems from oppressed groups to speak about their lives is a giant fail on the “empowering people” front. We need to re-evaluate whose exclusion concerns us.

When I started reading The Daily a few years ago, it was a force to be reckoned with. The newspaper stirred shit up and the conservative trolls demolished it – as it should be. That means the paper’s doing its job. Strident and uncompromising in its politics, the paper was inspiring and in many ways incited my own radicalization. What happened? The Daily shouldn’t just hang out on the left. It should slam itself to the left so as to give others more room to breath.

Oink, oink.

Hear that sound? That’s the sound of Lisa M closing The Daily’s office door. She’s going, going, gone. Write her at radicallyreread@mcgilldaily.com.

The post Lisa OUT appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The malicious reactions of the general public and the invalidating portrayals of protesters by the mainstream media were to be expected. Yet while describing this crowd as a bunch of anarchists, vandals, left-wing thugs, criminals, hooligans, and angsty teens was meant to belittle and dismiss them, I considered this to be a fairly accurate assessment of who they were. Black-clad, punked-out, and masked, this motley crew was an encouraging one.

While perhaps more allied with these dissidents, an array of liberals, leftists, and radicals have expressed muted refinements of those same disapproving reactions. Time and again, they denounce the violence of protesters while “cleverly” pointing out the irony of protesting violently against police brutality. Begging for peaceful (read: non-violent) protest, they’re quick to dissociate themselves from the taint of militancy.

If you believe oppression exists, then you better be prepared to rethink your understandings of violence. Poverty, (neo)colonialism, racism, sexism, ableism, transphobia, and homophobia are no walk in the park. They’re coercive, dehumanizing, and brutal forms of domination. Ripping their way through our lives, they’re systematic, institutionalized, internalized, embodied, and they shape how we relate to one another. “Keep the peace!” they cry out. Peace is a farce.

Condemning the violent actions of these protesters reduces violence to a smashed window, a graffitied wall, a kick in the back, or a beer bottle to the helmet. Over-emphasizing the (supposed) depravity of these actions at once flies in the face of the realities and anger of these marginalized protesters, and distracts us from more socially sanctioned and normalized forms of violence.

How many times have you heard the “bad apple” argument used to defend police brutality? This argument positions most cops as good and the state as benevolent. What’s omitted here is that the state has a monopoly on legitimate violence. A “good” cop and a “bad” cop are trained to smack you down with the same force. And they do so with impunity. The Société de police de la ville de Montréal has killed 43 people since 1987, and not a single cop has been convicted of either voluntary or involuntary manslaughter. A call for non-violence at demos implicitly supports the concentration of force in the hands of the state.

The government carves out a special place in the political and geographic landscape for opposition to its dictates. Peaceful protests, demos, and marches galore, these are state-authorized displays of dissent. While significant in their own right, the fanatical rejection of violent actions from within their ranks panders to the wider public and appeases those in power.

Radical and uncompromising actions that directly challenge the purported integrity of the state are necessary. By widening the spectrum of what resistance can be and look like, we make room for an expansion of political and creative possibilities. Freeing us from the limits of what’s considered socially acceptable struggle, violent tactics can work to energize dissent. There’s something incredibly moving and inspiring about watching someone shoot a firecracker at the po’.

Over beers the other night a friend asked me if I agreed with these sorts of tactics. Ultimately, I think this is a misguided question. People who fight oppression have a diversity of experiences, means, and goals. As a result, how people resist will always look different. I’m extremely wary of playing the good protester versus bad protester game. Playing into the logic of divide and conquer dilutes our movements and sucks out their strength. We need solidarity now more than ever.

Lisa M’s got one column left in her. Drop her a line at radically.reread@mcgilldaily.com.

The post Fight for violence appeared first on The McGill Daily.

I think it’s time to rip off those rose-tinted glasses. Class mobility is a hard and cold fact in my family history. Growing up blue-collar meant my dad paid and worked his way through his undergraduate and professional degrees. In keeping with the white-collar-migration trend, he’s recently made the move from middle class to upper-middle class. Along the way, he made sure to pound all the skills and values into me that would guarantee my success in the race to the top. What’s more, he pays for my food, my rent, my education, my health care, my clothes, and my train tickets. I have class privilege seeping out of my pores. His wealth is my safety net and the reason I can write for The Daily.

Pumping out a column every couple of weeks for a newspaper connected to one of Canada’s most prestigious universities is a move toward gaining and consolidating class privilege. Five years of paying to read, write, think, and learn has culminated in the publishing of my opinions. Reckon that. My voice and perspectives are considered valuable enough to be put on such a platform. This has less to do with my own merit, and more to do with luck of the draw. In other words, this is privilege in action.

Cozying up to Montreal’s political scenes and the subcultures they overlap with has boggled my mind about class status. While capitalism taught me that poverty is shameful, the kids on these scenes wear it like an accessory. Discounted and stolen clothes, dumpstered food, cheap rent, squatting, and free activities are one thing. But glorifying being broke while fronting like you grew up working class or poor is another.

Treating class marginality as “hip” is reactionary politics. Despite being a by-product of dissent, it fundamentally misunderstands how power works. The ability to couple the trappings of class alterity with a hushing up of wealth stems from class privilege. This sort of phony downward mobility is not cool, let alone radical.

Messed-up manifestations aside, a lot of the beliefs that underpin the “opting-out” of one’s class positioning contain kernels of hope. The conviction that there is something wrong with the lifestyles and values of the middle, upper-middle, and owning classes is heartening. At the very least, this attitude signifies a departure from the mentality that locates the ills of capitalism in those without privilege. By signalling a move away from blaming poverty on the supposed laziness, incompetence, and stupidity of the poor, it motions us toward a critique of materialism, consumerism, the cult of upward mobility, and the hoarding of wealth.

Unfortunately, much of the appropriation of class oppression that goes down often does come from a more critical and politicized place – whether it’s feigning class solidarity by acting like you don’t have resources, trying to understand poverty by “living it,” hiding wealth out of some weird notion of respect, or fighting the devaluation of the poor simply by living “poverty” proudly. Part of what it means to have class privilege is to abstract from and dismiss the lived realities of those without it. This type of me-centric philosophy that purports to be fighting classism is dehumanizing and unproductive.

Capitalism and the class stratification it produces and depends on are wrong, immoral, bad, and every other negative modifier you can think of. Class privilege and classism are sustained by a system that sees the instability, financial insecurity, and struggles of the poor and working class as the sometimes unfortunate, but mostly justifiable, side-effect of an otherwise well-functioning economic structure. Apparently, the expendability of billions of lives around the world is a small price to pay for the top 10 per cent owning 85 per cent of the world’s wealth.

If we’re going to have any hope of opposing and fighting this deleterious system, an analysis of class privilege is vital. To start, class privilege is definitely not something you can just throw out like a chewed-up wad of gum. Approaches that treat it like it’s disposable ignore the fact that privilege has more to do with effects than with intentions. You can still be, do, and benefit from something you oppose.

Class privilege is about way more than just the money in your pocket, the clothes on your back, what you eat, or how you live. It’s about your family’s wealth: their assets, the inheritance you’re entitled to, and the income and education of your ’rents. It’s about your education, the vocabulary you use and understand, your skills, and the various safety nets that will save your ass when your downward mobility doesn’t pan out. It means being part of the dominant culture that defines what is considered normal, moral, acceptable, credible, and legitimate knowledge. It means thinking you’re naturally more intelligent, creative, and talented than the majority of people. It means being over-empowered because entire classes of people are powerless. It means thinking class privilege doesn’t exist and being able to disavow it on a whim.

In the interwoven radical and subcultural scenes, the shame projected onto poverty by mainstream society has shifted to a shame around wealth and the aping of poverty. Class oppression isn’t chic; it’s fucked up. Challenge one of capitalism’s main dictates – break the taboo that keeps class inequality hidden. Demystify and own up to your class privilege.

Lisa M writes in this space every week. Tell her what you think of downward mobility: radicallyreread@mcgilldaily.com.

The post Downwardly mobile & loving it appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Fourteen days after the massacre, upon winning gold and bronze in the men’s 200-metre race, two black Americans found themselves approaching the victory podium. Tommie Smith and John Carlos made a statement on the situation of black people in America that would chill audiences around the world. With all on eyes them, they courageously undermined Brundage’s wish for sport without politics. Each thrusting a clenched fist sheathed in a black glove into the air, the black power salute met head on with the “Star-Spangled Banner.” The black glove symbolized black America; the arc between the athletes’ arms, black American unity; their shoeless feet, black poverty; the beads around Carlos’ neck, prayers for lynched blacks; and Carlos’s unzipped jacket was a tribute to black and white blue-collar workers across the States. Within two days, Brundage had Smith and Carlos kicked out of the Olympic Village and suspended from the U.S. Olympic team.

With these events in mind, it is an act of gross appropriation that the IOC has the gall to tout itself as a “movement.” Apart from the complete depoliticization and neutralization of a term that has been used to label the work of people forwarding progressive ideas for centuries (and as shown, against the Olympics), it works to mask the violence, destruction, and corporatization that the Olympics ushers in.

The Olympic Games does not just represent itself as your run-of-the-mill movement. It is one that reaches for the stars. By so graciously placing sport at the service of humanity, it aims to promote a better and more peaceful world. Hell, according to its Charter, it even allies with organizations working in the “field of peace!” Make no mistake, though, there is no room for those silly political understandings of oppression on the Olympic stage. After all, peace and politics do not mix. If anything, politics detract from and bastardize the message of peace. Everyone knows struggling against inequality and injustice can only be done first by ignoring their existence, and second by smacking brands on the backs of athletes and throwing nations into competition.

Through the three values of excellence, friendship, and respect, the Olympic propaganda machine weaves together a story about global encounters and mutual understanding. Some of the fundamental principles of the Olympic movement include the preservation of human dignity and the nurturing of global solidarity. With an eye to the past and one to the present, I can’t help but scoff at the invocation of words like understanding, human dignity, and solidarity in association with a profit-mongering, corporate-run, colonial, imperial body like the Olympic Games.

Anti-2010 resistance and organization have crested in the past few days. Organizers point to the increased criminalization of the poor and “undesirables,” the demolition of low-income housing, the continued appropriation of and construction on unceded indigenous territory, the channeling of $1 billion toward the creation of a police state, international market expansion, and environmental destruction.

On many levels, the Tlatelolco massacre, the black power salute, and anti-2010 resistance are one and the same. They speak to the collusion of federal governments with the Olympic Games in oppressing people around the world. They expose the diversion of money and resources away from the mass of citizens and toward corporations and the elite. They reveal how governments subdue and repress dissent. They puncture thinly veiled appeals to peace with unapologetic and politicized stances. They work as movements demanding the valuing of life over profit. And finally, taken together, they stand as a true story about humanity and the potential for global solidarity.

Lisa M radically rereads this space every other week. Send her a fist-pump: radicallyreread@mcgilldaily.com.

The post Repoliticizing the Olympics appeared first on The McGill Daily.

How do you dare to simplify the world into such a naïve dichotomy as violence=inherently bad and non-violence=inherently good? It not only spits on the struggles for liberation that people engage in daily, but it degrades most of the historical and current insurgent movements of oppressed peoples around the world. Worst of all though, that binary is a convention that works to keep us complacent.

When it comes to resistance, violence is definitely not the only tool – in this context or in any others. It is a tool though. And a pretty damn effective one at that. To me, it says, “I refuse to take that shit lying down.” If that’s not powerful, I don’t know what is.

So: you better check yourself before you wreck yourself.

Lisa M
U4 Women’s Studies
Daily columnist

The post I got your non-violent response right here…. appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Meanwhile, some dude (let’s call him Dude for the sake of simplicity) had seen what I had done and didn’t take too kindly to it. So Dude started talking smack. He told me that I have “no right” to erase their house rules, about this being private property, that we live in a free country, and that everyone’s entitled to their (bullshit) opinions. Blah blah blah, enter ways to justify oppressive behaviour here. True to form, I started arguing with him.

Our dispute rapidly descended into a series of verbal cheap shots aimed by Dude at yours truly. In a matter of minutes, I learned about his contempt for women, his aversion to fat people, and his distaste for lesbians. To add insult to injury, during his diatribe, he mocked me, mimicked me, and waved a pair of drumsticks in my face. It was straight up disrespect, and it infuriated me.

This brief but heated interaction tapped into years and years of anger I had felt – still feel – toward our society’s homophobia, sexism, and fatphobia. Dude’s words and behaviour threw me back to the hordes of boys and men that I have known whose reactions toward women run the gamut from subtle disdain to sexual violence. I considered all the ways I had reacted to this sort of treatment in the past. Submitting to this disrespect had meant accepting the idea that women are inferior, worthless, stupid, and weak. It had meant internalizing the devaluation that men like this had impressed on me. Talking back when disrespected had meant being called a crazy bitch, being dismissed, getting reprimanded and punished, or being ostracized.

It’s only through laboured politicization that I have come to understand the roots of this sort of violence and the anger it generates. We grow up learning that entire groups of people are deemed less valuable and less human than others. It sucks, to the say the least. With this truism in tow, I’ve become more and more convinced that when all else is lost, all we have left is our dignity. For that reason, preserving it, defending it, and fighting for it has become central to my actions.

So how did this altercation with Dude end? I grabbed hold of his drumsticks and kicked the douchebag in the nuts. If I could do it again, the only thing I would do differently would be to kick him harder.

Militant feminist: 1. Patriarchy: 0.

Lisa M pens a column on this parchment every second week. Dignify her at radicallyreread@mcgilldaily.com.

The post In which I deconstruct the family jewels appeared first on The McGill Daily.

I was socialized to believe that the arms of the state, or – as they are more congenially called – officers of the law, are there to serve and protect. What an innocuous motto. It makes memories of hugging cops as a kindergartener flash before my eyes. Gross. But, serve and protect who? And just as importantly, what?
Last fall, a Toronto courthouse saw a majority white, middle-class jury convict a young, poor black man – whose name can’t be published because of the age of the accused – of first-degree murder. The accused and his family, after fleeing the civil war in Sierra Leone and being granted refugee status in Canada, found themselves taking up residence in a rather notorious neighbourhood called Jane and Finch.

Corporate media pretty much always depicts Jane and Finch as a hotbed of crime and violence. The combination of that portrayal with a community comprised mostly of poor and working-class people, people of colour and immigrants of colour, leaves a bad taste in my mouth. By facilitating an understanding of these communities as inherently corrupt, these representations play into the already racist imagination of our society. The creation of a culture of fear around certain “unwieldy people” and their activities allows for the sanctioning of intensified policing. And I wish it ended there.

Suggesting that a community is exclusively and inherently violent masks the systemic and structural violence that its people endure. The forces of capitalism, racism, and colonialism collide to supply the breeding grounds for the crime and interpersonal violence that does occur. Jane and Finch is not an oddity. Like countless areas across North America, it is plagued by high rates of poverty and unemployment, low incomes, high numbers of rental homes and public housing units, an inadequate educational system, and high rates of malnutrition and hunger. Not to mention the intensity of the profiling, surveillance, repression, and violence on the part of the cops. No justice? No peace.

Let’s return to the fellow convicted of murder. Predictably, he got sent to prison. To be rehabilitated. But y’know, this word “rehabilitation” gets tossed around so much in law enforcement discourse that I frequently forget its actual definition. My dictionary tells me that to rehabilitate means to “restore (someone) to health or normal life by training and therapy.” Restore to his “normal life?” Oh, I suppose they mean the poverty, racism, and police repression that set the stage for the crime in the first place. And this is going to happen through training and therapy? That’s rich. Let’s have a little review sesh of what actually goes down in prisons.

Prisons are premised on the idea that the individual, not society, is messed up. Accordingly, the prison is meant to beat the legitimacy of the status quo and all its corresponding inequalities into those who find themselves trapped within its steel walls. And beat they do. Failure to obey prison guards often ends in violence. Compounded with crappy food, shitty health services, and meagre allowances, survival often means stealing, bribing, and joining a gang – all those wonderful activities that would be considered criminal on the outside. But wait! Distrust of authority? Dissent? Grievances? Gangs? Sounds like the basis for prisoner unity and rebellion. No worries though, prison guards use the good ol’ colonial method of dividing and conquering. Turns out fuelling racism is an effective way to control people. Rehabilitation my ass.

Locking people up devastates the lives of the convicted and fucks with their home communities. Leaving prison with a shiny new criminal record, emotional and physical scars from abuse and violence, and a detachment from family and society does not a well-adjusted individual make. If they do get released, they re-enter a community that, at the time of their imprisonment, had been destabilized by the consequent theft and diversion of resources. Taking a person and money out of a community and then reintroducing them with a new criminal record that will curb their access to legal (legitimate, accredited, stable, longterm) work can only exacerbate poverty and crime.

Look at any prison statistics in Canada or the United States. The cages are disproportionately stocked with youth, poor people, people of colour, and indigenous persons. The state, the (in)justice system, and their actors exist to protect themselves, property, and those who own property. More often than not, it is the disenfranchised that are brought to justice – even though “there are no crimes that people in prison have committed that the government [and corporations have] not also committed, and at a greater scale” as Peter Gelderloos, an anarchist prison abolitionist, has said.

From the civil war in Sierra Leone, to a neglected, heavily policed, and impoverished neighbourhood in Toronto, to being locked away in a prison for “rehabilitation.” From war zone to war zone to war zone. What is the cost of freedom?

Lisa M writes in this space every other week. Dissent to her at radicallyreread@mcgilldaily.com.

The post Justice unserved appeared first on The McGill Daily.

I have an affinity for challenging queers’ (mis)conceptions of femininity. I’m over being called androgynous as a compliment, being told that people don’t see masculinity or femininity, and having my gender presentation read and treated as normative and apolitical. Meanwhile, my lips are smeared with bright pink lipstick, my ass is hanging out of my black satin skirt, and I talk queer and gender politics a mile a minute. The worst, though, is when folks arbitrarily femme it up to celebrate the boundlessness that is the gender galaxy, only to deride femininity as backward and vacant in the next breath.

Let me offer a few caveats to start. Ensuring the “natural formation” of proper femininity in girls is an ongoing societal project. It is annoying at best, and violent at worst. When something like femininity is considered to be developmentally natural in women, it follows that biological aberrations will always be possible. And they must be avoided at all costs. This expectation and enforcement of femininity can feel suffocating, unchosen, and incredibly disempowering. I’m not interested in denying the harsh ways that this can go down and play out in someone’s life. What I am interested in is thinking about the variability of folks’ experiences with femininity.

The century prior to the second-wave women’s movement saw generations of sexologists, psychoanalysts, and biomedical scientists “discovering” and “proving” the naturalness of femininity in women. Combined with the resurgence of the repressive domestic ideal of the fifties, white middle-class women began reacting to these institutionally supported and culturally expected roles with a vengeance. And they did so in droves. One of the most fundamental signs of a feminist consciousness became the enlightened recognition of femininity as inherently oppressive. Tool of the patriarchy? More like a program instituted to establish the complete colonization of women by men. The deployment of femininity as the primary and overriding target of the feminist movement hinged on a strict distinction between sex and gender. While claiming sex (femaleness) as a natural, discrete, and immutable category, they claimed gender (feminine expression, behaviour, and values) as a socially constructed and imposed phenomenon.

This claim had destructive implications and disastrous effects. And let me tell you, the reverberations are palpable. Two broad lines of thought came from the assertion of femininity as an enforced, top-down program used to keep women subordinate. On the one hand, some feminists advocated for a return to the pure, natural, and androgynous femaleness that the patriarchy had butchered and silenced. Sounds a lot like today’s cult of andro queers that snub my unapologetic femme styles. Others sought the explicit rejection of femininity in place of masculine values and behaviours that were imagined as superior and more humane. Reminds me of the bois, butches, and (trans)masculine heroes greeted by oodles of lusting respect in queer spaces. All in all, femininity was conceived of as an oppressive and elaborate mask that could, and should, be taken off – without hesitation. Blush, heels, and miniskirts? Say goodbye to your liberation.

In fighting for a liberalist bastardization of equality – where freedom for women meant being like hyperprivileged men – feminists failed to engage in the strenuous work required to empty the vat of negativity that femininity was soaked in. They reinforced it as inherently weak and inferior, its expression as artificial and confining, and lambasted it as definitively infantilizing, incapacitating, and debilitating. This failure to interrogate the cultural connotation and denigration of femininity proves to be especially problematic when “in its broadest sense, femininity refers to the behaviours, mannerisms, interests, and ways of presenting oneself that are typically associated with those who are female,” as Julia Serano defines it in her book Whipping Girl.

Insofar as a large amount of women are feminine, most women come to stand as anti-feminist victims who are affected by a false consciousness imposed by patriarchal society. Ironically, despite the women’s movement’s keen interest in empowering women, they reproduced the notion that most women are, in fact, uncritical, masochistic, and unresisting dupes. If anything, these sentiments seem quite sexist and misogynistic for a movement that claimed to fight the oppression of women.

In feminist evaluations of femininity, the invisible norm that has and continues to plague the analyses of these arbiters of oppression is the middle-class, cis-gendered, thin, and white abled body. This body cannot serve as a model upon which all experiences of, and relationships to, femininity can be productively judged. Patriarchy is not a uniform and discrete system of power. To isolate patriarchy from other systems of privilege and oppression is to efface and misunderstand the complex ways people interface with society. If misogyny is differentiated and complicated by its interaction with other systems of domination, then how can we even continue to hold onto a critique of femininity that treats it as inherently patriarchal, regressive, and apolitical?
Femininity is an incoherent and non-cohesive set of connected characteristics, behaviours, values, mannerisms, and embodiments. Many of them can be dominated by patriarchal meanings. Many of them are deeply imbued with constellations of inferiority and powerlessness. Many of them are categorically denied to those who are people of colour, working class, fat, disabled, trans, male-assigned, and/or male-identified. If this is a transgressive feminist community chock full of queers, we need to start living up to that title with something substantive.

The most salient point is this: femininity is not a stable or singular entity. If we’re going to call ourselves feminists, we need to recognize that there is always room for resistance and that everyone can engage in it. Taking on femininity when you’re not supposed to is an act of power. Embodying femininity in a culture that disparages it is an act of power. Loving femininity when you’re taught to hate it is an act of power. Doing femininity with a confrontational, take-no-shit attitude is an act of power. These actions arm femininity: they make it political, they make it critical, and they make it fucking fierce.

Lisa M writes in this space every other week. She’ll be returning after winter break. If you miss her, tell her: radicallyreread@mcgilldaily.com.

The post Femininity is fucking fierce appeared first on The McGill Daily.

While the bohemians walk around with rose-tinted glasses, activists find themselves sinking into the ground with the weight of all the fucked up shit in the world on their shoulders. At least this is how we imagine our truest and most legit heroes. This aggressively sought-out status is otherwise known as activist cred. Garnered from hyper-productivity, quantifiable outputs, trailblazing, DIY organizing, direct action, unceasing resistance, and staunch radical politics, it’s a straight up heavy burden to bear. As fun as it may be to be rad(ical) famous, this ideal is destructive, unattainable, and unsustainable to boot.

The imposition of this yardstick makes for an entire culture infected by shame, guilt, and silence. You’re either not doing enough, not doing it properly, or not doing the right thing, period. And if you’re one of the special few that actually has the time, energy, and mental capacity to even begin emulating this prototype, no one wants to hear about your woes. Remember: there are folks out there who have it way worse than you do – so quit griping. No one likes a whiny, over-emotional politico who can’t handle their workload. People are legitimately oppressed, God damnit!
Our political communities fester when attitudes like these go unchecked. The increasing concentration of anger, defensiveness, and condemnation that follows is like acid in an already putrid wound. I mean, I get the drive to ward off and weed out those perceived as uncommitted or inadequate. I really do: they can pose a threat to already deeply threatened realities and objectives. But when that leads to frowning on dependence, scoffing at calls for support, and scorning emotionality, then I am most certainly not down. Let’s not collapse the trials and tribz that come from the unhappy marriage of hard work and unattainable ideals with a drive to excise quasi-radical infiltrators.

Alright, lemme quit beating around the bush. When our own radical communities demand the subordination of our feelings, mental health, and sense of self to the work that we do, something’s amiss. Becoming enslaved to the very things we produce? Sounds oddly reminiscent of the type of alienation foundational to that tyrannical asshole, capitalism. When the only significant difference amongst people starts to become their levels of productivity and political profitability, we need some serious re-evaluation. Our inability to embody the activist ideal is not reflective of personal shortcomings, but is the product of various systems (capitalism, racism, sexism, ableism, et cetera) that tell us what is and what is not valuable, who is and who is not worthwhile.

If our bodies and minds are etched with and steeped in those normative social relations that we love to lambast as oppressive, then we’ve got some serious cleansing to do. Lemon juice and maple syrup, anyone? As long as it includes a dash of compassion. In a society that will arbitrarily chew us up and spit us out, doing the work to love ourselves, each other, and all of our efforts is a sincerely political act. By some sort of freak coincidence, we’ve ended up in the same place as our tree-hugging lifestyle-conscious, TLC-revering friends.

Lisa M is one of The Daily’s biweekly columnists. Vent your pent-up emotions to her at radicallyreread@mcgilldaily.com.

The post Activism’s negative side appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Hearing “fat” that many times in a row can be shocking. The way we silence this word, how we strenuously avoid saying it, is so profound that I can feel its dead weight in the pit of my stomach. When someone sees a person of size, “fat” hangs on the tip of their tongue, in the back of their mind. People attempt to replace the word with euphemisms, but because “fat” still hangs in the air around them, they can’t dispel its pressure. You’ve heard them all: big(ger), large(r), overweight, (kinda) chubby, curvy, heavy(-set), big-boned. Fat. This is the rhetoric of progressive folks concerned, at least in theory, with body-size oppression. It is also a sanitized version of fat-phobia. In this case, the censoring of a loaded word also indicates the failure to address the reality it describes.

When society brands greed, over-consumption, and depravity onto fat bodies, fat people become the non-consenting representatives of the ills of an “affluent” society. When fat comes to figure as something that’s wrong – with a culture, with a people, with our bodies, with our habits – it becomes something to be rectified. And when its cure – thinness – becomes a commodity, you better bet your sweet ass that “fat as object” will eclipse “fat as lived experience.” “Fat” as a thing allows it to be shaved away, diagnosed, pathologized, detested, deemed immoral and excessive. In one fell swoop, millions of people get erased and dehumanized.

Fatness is increasingly understood as a virulent epidemic plaguing North Americans. If you’re fat, you better lose weight, and if you’re thin, you better watch your weight. But why the strong focus on shrinking our bodies to fit a narrow ideal? Right, it’s that life-extending and life-improving equation: “thin equals healthy.” The well-intentioned innocence of this claim needs some doctoring with a good dose of contextualization.

Let’s talk about fat, baby.

Fat? Say goodbye to societal acceptance of horizontal stripes, tight clothes, bright colours, and baby-tees on your bod. Fat? Say hello to the disregard, discrimination, and misdiagnoses of health professionals who locate your health problems in your fat. Fat? Say hello to the same qualities being treated as incidental behaviour in thin people but as essential to your and other fat people’s characters. Fat? Say goodbye to stores that carry your size, chairs that fit your body, and planes that only charge you for one ticket. Fat? Say hello to the moralizing impositions of every-fucking-random-person-ever concerning the way you eat, dress, move about, think of yourself, and live. Fat? Say hello to being the poster child and target of a $45-billion industry that calls for the elimination of large sections of your body all in the name of “health.” Fat? Say goodbye to being thought of as normal, healthy, active, and intelligent upon first glance. Fat? Say hello to being pathologized, culturally desexualized, ridiculed, and sentenced to an early death.

The problem here is not fatness, nor is it fat people. The problem is a society steeped in fat-phobia and sizeism. It is a society that prefers to turn a profit off the “uncontainable” bodies of millions, rather than challenge the institutional, systemic, and cultural disparagement, fear, and erasure of fat people.

An oft-repeated phrase in the fat acceptance movement is “correlation does not imply causation.” Fatness and unhealthiness may be associated, but they should not be conflated. When fat stands in for unhealthy, yo-yo dieting, Weight Watchers, and weight-loss surgery follow. These “health-improving” (read: size-reducing) tactics have proven to be harmful and ineffective in the long run for the majority of people. Our focus needs to shift away from the rabid consumption of our physical, emotional, and mental energy in a wasted effort to get thin and toward the possibility of good (and bad) health at every size. To be sure, the parameters of someone’s size are largely genetically determined. Instead of scapegoating fat people, we need to turn our lens to profit motives as they manifest in and perpetuate a context of fat discrimination. There’s at least one thing that’s good about being thin: not having to deal with the heart-attack-inducing stress that comes from being fat in a fat-hating society.

Lisa M writes in this space every other week. Write her at radicallyreread@mcgilldaily.com.

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It seems that one of the most normative ways to be a contemporary do-gooder is to reach out beyond Canada’s borders to help all the “needy” folks abroad. Let’s not get confused now. The problems exist over there, not here. To be sure, there is a bottomless reservoir of poor people of colour who are sitting pretty just waiting to be rescued. And they’re all far away: Latin America, Africa, South Asia, bring it on!
Now, Western students aren’t only travelling to these far-off countries for the warm, cuddly feelings afforded by altruism. That would just be silly. So what’s in it for them? And who really seeks to benefit from their efforts?
Let’s throw some things into focus. The ability to volunteer abroad, forego an income for three months, and receive funding from the alumni of an international university bespeaks extreme privilege. Insofar as downward mobility is unlikely to be found on anyone’s to-do list, most budding capitalists have a vested interest in either maintaining their class status or strengthening it. Yes, even the ones who want to make life better for all the starving babies of colour in remote (and distant) places.

So what benefits does the great white traveller acquire in venturing to these impoverished lands? Well, there’s the whole academic credit thing. And then there’s the building-of-the-CV thing. Oh yeah, and the using of your internship as leverage for higher education thing. Sounds like a pretty sweet package for someone who’s simply trying to make the world a better place.

Profiting off of the Global South is nothing new. Back in the old days, when colonialism was an explicit system of domination, the European empire’s economic and political power was consolidated through slave labour and the extraction of resources. Honey, the rules may have changed, but the game is still the same. By wearing a mask of humanitarianism, neo-colonialism grants us the permission not only to capitalize on the struggles of people in the Third World, but to feel damn good while we’re doing it. Righteous pioneers, indeed!
The most grating part of Western students’ narratives is their confessions of culture shock. What, exactly, is shocking? That you’re a white Westerner who’s either being viewed with suspicion or is disturbingly revered? That the “real deal” defies your omniscience by failing to line up with your course packs? That you, in fact, don’t understand the language, the peoples, the politics, or the history of the region in question? That your “help” is not needed? That these grass roots organizations are productive and effectual on their own? Quelle surprise! Colonial mentalities aren’t just a relic of the 19th century.

Let’s face it, we’re at the top of the global food-chain because masses of people are at the bottom. In the famous words of Albert Memmi, “If [the European’s] living standards are high, it is because those of the colonized are low…. The more freely he breathes, the more the colonized are choked.” Channelling resources into internships to increase the opportunities, status, and wealth available to the rich is not a viable solution – even when done in a spirit of goodwill. Journeying home after a couple months in the “thicket” and patting yourself on the back does not a better world make.

Lisa M is one of The Daily’s new biweekly columnists. Follow her exploits in this space every other week. Write her at radicallyreread@mcgilldaily.com.

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This sort of argument generally assumes that some words are bad, and in order to rectify their badness, we should stop saying them. Unfortunately, not saying certain words does not lead to not thinking them or to not acting upon them. Words do not exist as inconsequential, superficial, and disconnected manifestations of our thoughts and actions. Rather, I would argue (and so would many) that they are only the tip of the iceberg.

To put it simply, ideas don’t precede language – it’s language that creates ideas. We see, hear and use words, but we forget the history and the context that underlie, inform, and enact every single one, finally to create the world in which we live.

That being said, I have a serious problem with people dismissing the anger generated by sexist or otherwise oppressive comments. True, not everyone will get pissed when you invoke ideas that imply women and femininity are inferior to men and masculinity. But if I do get indignant, don’t you dare tell me to lighten up. In a society where women and femininity are subordinate, it’s much easier to disregard sexist humour when you’re not the target. And when you call for the “free exchange of ideas (and jokes!),” what you seem to mean is, “I’m going to be as sexist as I see fit, and you’re going to take it.” This certainly isn’t new: a privileged group telling an oppressed group that oppression doesn’t exist whilst firmly reasserting it. You want to achieve “unity” through sexist humour? I wonder on whose terms that unity is going to be defined.

Lisa M
U4 Women’s Studies

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