creativity vs politics

while a somewhat simplistic dichotomy, i want to explore the binary of creativity vs politics

specifically, i'm thinking about the difference between a poster that argues (politically) for the "inclusion" of disabled people. or something similar; and the creative agency of disabled people. [something to do with representation?] I was thinking how much more I'd like to see billboards with poems by disabled people, like the many spoken word pieces i've read/viewed.

the political slogans that are typically on billboards are reductionistic, didactic and essentialising. poetry, by contrast, is exploratory, subtle, open. importantly, poetry is an expression of agency, whereas political slogans in many ways replace agency with representation (Marx's famous "They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented", the quote with which Said opens Orientalism).

One of the wonderful crip texts i'm reading at the moment explores some "alternative" narratives of disability, focusing on sexuality and community. Arguably, these too are about creativity, agency, desire. I think there's something critical here - politics is too often the opposite of creativity. I don't mean all politics, for the most engaging politics, in my experience, is driven by love, rage, engagement, community and creativity. but, there is something about organised politics that erases the immediacy of human subjectivity. hmmm.

ok, so i'm holding back something critical to understanding all this. my own experience is that i was involved in student politics for a few years, and in hindsight, i think it was strangling my own creativity. i think i systematically internally erased my own individual desires and ideas for some imagined consensus-derived idea of what should be. this is really hard to ariculate, and even now i am sensing an opposition to this idea from the imagined "others in the group" - which is *exactly* my point. politics in some ways is about pinning down what "should be" and i think i have spent many many years trying to discipline myself into being what i should be. i think in many ways i internalised this way more than many people involved in student politics, and i'm not arguing that this is the fault of student politics, rather, it's also to do with my own personality, a form of profound perfectionism.

anyway, i want to keep exploring this idea, because there's something here that is ringing bells inside my body, startlingly beautiful bells, resonating loudly.

my experience of political engagment has been a fusion, or perhaps a borderline, between "radical" and "down-to-earth." i mean radical in the sense of pushing deeper towards the roots of an issue, and down-to-earth, in the sense of rejecting an exclusively "radicool" agenda that is scornful of the people in my life who don't live their lives according to the radicool agenda. some would call this latter part "moderate", and certainly, the people i worked with politically were considered between the ALP and the more "radical" elements like socialists or radical queers.

student politics caused me enormous heart-ache. i wasn't able to exist in a world where everything mattered to me, but wasn't done in ways that accorded with my political visions. working with people from various political stripes, constantly having to argue my politics, endeavouring, usually unsuccessfully to persuade people of my conclusions, based on political reasoning, killed my spirit. yes, it was in a huge part my personality, a huge idealist, stubborn, opinionated, bright, defensive, argumentative, etc. but i think there's something in the nature of political organisations that kills creativity.

i burnt out. i fled to my garden and chickens and sewing and partner and local park and circus and home-cooking and home-making and general anti-socialness. i have no doubt that the massive outpouring of creativity that i am undergoing is a response to a feeling of repressed creativity during my student politics days. it's as if my creativity is never wrong, is never open to suggestion or improvement or compromise or watering down. it can be as outrageous, or beautiful, or whimsical, and HONEST as i feel like being.

anyway, returning to the idea of billboards with poems on them. the more i read about "diversity" and "stigma management" and "marginalisation", the more i am inspired by the personal acts of creation, of resistance, or self-definition as THE ANSWER to stigma and marginalisation. there's a line from a danica lani song that comes to mind here "who gives a fuck about objectivity, i want to hear your truth, sista" anything else is reductionistic.

but i'm not arguing for individualism per se. what i find really powerful is when you get a bunch of people in a room together, all putting forward their own stories and feeling the commonality. yeah, feminism consciousness raising groups, or a dyke spoken word night, or the multicultural queer conference. speaking from the personal grounds the political.

i don't really know what happens next though. i know that feminism went through a phase of consciousness raising, and then kinda moved on, formulating platitudes based on CR insights. but then they kinda froze. it's like PC stuff. political correctness is often originally grounded in personal experience, but then it ossifies.

anyway, i'll end there.

displaying diversity

so, here's a chapter.

comparing the poster children/disability charities
with
multicultural celebrations
with
Midsumma/Mardi Gras

arguably, these are the dominant ways in which each of these forms of diversity is "displayed" for public consumption.

um, does anyone else get the feeling that this is actually not "a chapter" but "a thesis"? (funny question, i know, becuase it is predicated on the assumption that anyone else is even reading this :>)

eggs again!

two of the chookens are laying eggs. one of them is laying the the laying box - where i put two fake eggs (thanks mum, again!) - i assume this is alice, cos that's where she used to lay. but one of them has been laying from her perch - i assume it's pearl cos her comb is much bigger than molly cocoa's, which means she's probably older. Anyway, these eggs smash into their droppings box. it's totally feral. am thinking that maybe i should remove their perches for a few days until they lay in the laying box. they can all sleep in the laying box (alice, betty and emma used to sleep there).

by the say, i can't believe i haven't called a chicken "daisy" yet. the next ones will be called "daisy" and "claire" - i prefer clara, but jan and i say it very differently - she says "claire-a" and i say "clar-a", so we agreed the chicken would get confused if we called her different names.

whose community?

Yooralla ad claims on behalf of disabled people "this is our community" - is an example of mainstreaming and a denial of disability community/culture!

c.f. Cheryl Marie Wade, an awesome performance artist, whose work is represented in Vital Signs: Crip culture talks back (so the name alone tells you that a crip culture is being asserted):
"My primary audience is always my community and I hope always to do work where my community can go "yeah!" But I want it to be such good work that I get places where they normally wouldn't let a gimp in. You know what I'm saying here?"

I think the erasure of disability community/culture is also an erasure of the support that disabled people give each other.

Earlier in the video, Carol Gill argues:
"I believe very firmly in disability culture and if we didn't have it, we should, because, I think, ... as a psychologist, I've looked at members of minority groups, I've worked with members of minority groups who are dealing with oppression on a daily basis who need to survive it, both physically and emotionally. And I see that what works for other minority groups is to have a recognized body of values, of symbols, including language, of rituals that bring people together."

There is a blurring of "community" and "culture".

Elsewhere in the video, Harlan Hahn argues for the existence of "disability culture" by arguing that disabled people have a food, fast-food. His evidence is his own vox pop at a conference, where everyone in the room said they go to drive-thrus because impaired mobility makes this easier than going inside a restaurant. This is, at best, tenuous, and at worst, ridiculous, patently untrue, and exclusive. I think that it does point to a commonality of experience, but I know a lot of disabled people who either (a) can't afford to eat out (the disability pension is often stretched just to cover basic life stuff, especially for those I know who have large medical/adaptive expenses) or (b) hate fast food for ethical reasons.

Gill's call for symbols and rituals bothers me, because it brings back memories for me of Lesfest (a lesbian, trans-exclusive gathering), which I attended a few years back. Lesfest had been cancelled because it had sought and been denied an exemption from equal opportunity legislation (they wanted to be allowed to exclude trans women). The gathering was held anyway, but was by-invitation-only, and secretive. I remember that on the first day, we all sat in a circle, each in turn offering symbols of our community, in an effort to prove to ourselves that we did indeed have a community. We didn't just argue a common political commitment - to an understanding of our common lesbian experience as being predicated on an experience of growing up gendered female (a reasonable basis, I think for the community's cohesion). Instead, symbols wer invoked that included hair style, colours, ways of dressing, music, etc. I remember feeling alienated at the time - I was one of only a handfull of young women there, and I had long hair, in dread-locks, with pretty colours woven through - I felt "unacceptably" feminine. In so many ways, I conform to the lesbian feminist stereotype, but yet I felt somehow unwelcome. It didn't help that I had already been policed/verbally abused for allegedly inviting a bisexual to the lesbian-only gathering. The allegation was unfounded (it was based on a misunderstanding) but did inform my whole experience of the gathering. It was interesting, because I actually respected the community's boundaries at that point in time, but because I wasn't yet a "trusted part of the community", I was suspected of disloyalty. At the time, I wrote a letter to Lesbian Network (the community's magazine, which I helped edit for a while), arguing that while I agreed with any community's right to self-define, I opposed the suspicious internal policing that inevitably arises when you police the borders (I think I drew on Hage's writings!)

In hindsight, I think I was somewhat naive - now I would argue that policing the borders is indefensible. I wish the Lesfest community had simply been clear about what we want and are interested in (e.g. lesbian feminist politics), and allowed people to self-select their involvement. My experience of transfolk is that there may have been trans people attending, in an effort to affirm their lesbian-female identity, there may not. But declare war on trans-identity and transfolk will come out in force. Trans-identity is currently incredibly defensive, which is understandable, since many trans people have to fight every day of their lives to affirm their identity.

Anyway, the lesbian community is still reeling from the "sex wars" of the 1980s, that this is all just the latest chapter in a long war. It's a war that scares me cos I am on both sides and neither. I'm scared because I can see battle lines drawn right down my own body, my own history, dividing one lover from another, one joy from another. I want no part in a defensively defined community.

On a completely different note, here's a very recent and remarkably stereotypical response from a gay man involved in Equal Love (to get same-sex relationship recognition):

"We see that the first priority is swaying the general population toward the idea of same-sex marriage by countering the arguments against, talking to community groups about the injustice and generally getting the message across that we too are "normal" tax paying citizens that don't have 2 heads and deserve consideration as well."

Wow! Um, what about those of us who are not "normal", who avoid paying taxes wherever possible or who live below the poverty line and so don't pay taxes, or whose bodies do not conform to the invoked normality (maybe not 2 heads, but how about no arms, like Mary Duffy in Vital Signs?) ... do we deserve "consideration" as well?

Tragic conference experience

i am presenting at a conference tomorrow and i just read jan my prepared talk. alas, half-way through it was blatantly obvious that my 20 minute talk was going to take at least 45 minutes. so i cut it, well we cut it together. it was tragic, difficult and kinda easy too. we started at midnight (my deadline for finishing) and cut for 12 minutes. i think cos it was the middle of the night, it was easier to be brutal (i have sleep as a reward).

it's brilliant though. i'm so proud of it.

if i hadn't read it to jan, i'm not sure how i would have coped tomorrow.

anyway, bed now. just thought i didn't want to let this pass without a blog entry!