new proposed title

My new proposed title is:

Defending the Other or Confronting Normality?

I'm enjoying the double-meaning of "confronting" - both the verbal sense of challenging, and the adjectival sense of difficulty, struggle. This latter sense is pretty much what I'm advocating - a constant process of challenging dominant, homogenising, Othering processes that devalue diversity, including "progressive" discourses that try to normalise and tame the Other, instead, I advocate pushing the boundaries to acknowledge the breadth of human diversity.

In my more confrontational moments, I consider taking on the more stigmatised aspects of each of the categories I'm analysing, for example taking on S/m or "bug chasing" behaviour within queer culture, or "radical" Islamist clerics, or anti-social personality disorder. Although many mouth the rhetoric of tolerance, everyone draws lines, finding certain practices/identities abhorrent. I think that we often choose to put our heads in the sand, pretending that queers are all very respectable, Muslims are docile, and people with mental illnesses are pitiable. I suspect that the word "radical" (as opposed to moderate) often serves to delineate acceptable from not. Which amuses me, because my history in radical feminism - and my affiliation with radical environmentalism - means that I appreciate radical thought for how it sees itself, as taking ideas to their logical conclusion, with full integrity. To use the word "radical" as a simple perjorative is deeply misguided.

Anyway, this post is going off track (that's why i blog after all, to be able to weave along whatever track takes my fancy) ...

the stranger

so jan has given me feedback about my running title - "defending the other" and she thinks it sounds like i'm defending the other, hence losing its critical gist. i think she has a point. what about "defenders of the other"?

in other news, i participated in a theatre workshop on the weekend "the art of change", through rmit community advocacy unit. it was fun and i learnt a lot. the theme is "otherness." two ideas that were raised for me were that of the stranger. i liked the way that framed the other. the relationship one has with the stranger is telling. does one mistreat them? does one try to understand them? does one only offer them hospitality if they conform to your own values? how long does one stay a stranger? there's quite a lot of literature on middle-eastern cultural values on hospitality and the stranger. (i use the phrase "middle-eastern" due to profound ignorance of the spread of these values, i'm not sure if they are muslim, regional, or what).

the other idea is that of absence from public discourse. it's one of those things that needs to be named to be noticed. who is absent? not just who is present but treated with hostility, but whose existence is silenced. this is relevant in terms of the presence of lebanese people in australia for over a century, but their absence in the "story" of australian history; also in the absence of disabled people from public spaces, an absence which i think is referenced in the Yooralla poster, when it asks the rhetorical question "why Yooralla week?" and answers itself with "Because this is our community." this seems to me to be an act of claiming space by a group that is specifically invisible. Finally, it's also relevant in the discursive silencing of diversity that happens in so many ways. for example, in the use of "we" to refer to an exclusive group, but without naming that exclusivity. for example, when anyone talks about how "we" should treat a marginalised group, they are invisiblising the presence of those people in the group already. my experience of progressive groups has been that those of us who are in a position of privilege, but are aware of the desirability of participation by those who are not in that position, so often ignore the presence of those people in our groups already. for example, in a feminist collective that i was involved in, a women who was not a woman of colour (she is jewish and identifies as "not-white-enough", but definitely not as a woman of colour) bemoaned the absence of women of colour in the group, despite the presence of close friends in the group who are women of colour. i think there's something about a profound stranger-ing of the Other, by which i mean that once you know someone personally, they are no longer deemed to be a member of the class of Others. so, utterances like "i can't stand gays, i mean i have this gay friend dan, and he's lovely, but you know, he's different, he's not like those other gays" make perfect sense.

PhD topic (in progress)

My PhD topic, at the moment, is:

"Defending the Other"

looking at the various ways in which various Others (specifically queers, Muslims and Arabs, and people with mental illnesses) are defended in public discourse.