On top of that, if it ain’t wilderness, it ain’t our fight, which I find very frustrating…there is no politics in my workplace that are outside the status quo - comfortably in opposition - in the same way the government is always comfortably in power (whoever you vote for, the gvt always wins and all that)…

Having said that there were some interesting critiques that showed me a mirror on our org (actually, that’s a fallacy - it should read “the org that pays my wage”) in the oct new internationalist…

I am intrigued…thanks for the reference

Thanks very much for this. I tried to get that book out the library but someone else’s got it. I’ll have to wait.

In the meantime - all of this is very interesting. The stuff I can most comment on (oh, before I forget, I’d love to hear more about this group which you’re part of, it sounds cool) are the bits on nonprofits and community being bound up with producing capital/value. I think bigger nonprofits - at least those big enough to have employees - are for profit (in the sense of capital — surplus value as profit that is extracted, re-invested and accumulated). It’s a very specific industry with its own idiosyncracies (and variance from sector to sector, firm to firm and so on) of course, but I don’t think that changes the for-profit-ness.

It’d be interesting to compare nonprofits with other industries that produce less tangible (but often still measurable) products - like media companies, management consultants, law firms, etc - to see if there are any similar dynamics. It’d also be interesting to compare nonprofits with theories of state capitalism (as states are other actors sometimes taken to be noncapitalist). I wish I had the time and the energy to do that myself.

take care,
Nate

Some things I’ve been reading after a long weekend away from the computer:
Going Somewhere? has a post about nonprofits, underground networks vs. formalized communities, and Miranda Joseph’s book Against the Romance of Community, which so…

I’m very curious about your submission, and looking forward to reading it. I have an allergy to theory, and your writing has been an accessible entrance into theoretical thinking.

Maybe the migration analogy works because it contains a petitioner/arbiter relationship. Depending on whether you understand that condition as it relates to emigration and gender, this analogy either unpacks cisgender privilege or cements it.

At the moment I’m attempting to figure out why, precisely, the migration metaphor seems to work so well and is so powerful. Is mobility/migration/movement over-determined because of the conditions of modernity or postmodernity? Is it about how subjects need to be constituted in order to be recognisable by the state? (Because ‘assimilation’ obviously works on lots of levels, not least because of the homogeneity of the ‘ideal’ subject…) I’m remembering all the writing in the late 90’s that posited ‘gay and lesbian’ identities as evidence of ‘the ethnicity model’, modelled on ethnic difference, and I wonder if maybe the same thing is happening with trans/migration stuff.

This really belongs in the long discussion and para-discussion on immigration metaphors and trans identity, but I’m finishing the essay for Self-organizing men, and I’m wondering what you think of this bit, last paragraph in particular. I admit that it was surprisingly easy to slip into this analogy.

>>Now that I pass consistently as male, I am being mediated through another kind of silence, a silence designed to deal with transsexuality rather than gendervariance. Now that it’s clear that I mean to present as male, the people around me are as willing to smooth over my unmanly mistakes as they were to ignore my deficient performance as a woman. I’m a little soft, a little shy, a little weird, a little effeminate, but a nice boy.

Transpeople depend on this silence to function in a transphobic society. Traditionally speaking, our aim is to pass, that is, to escape notice: to walk down the street and meet nothing but silence. We are supposed to want to seem as much like ordinary men and women as possible; when we are openly, obviously transsexual, we have failed. On top of the myriad physical and behavioral cues we are required to adopt in order to become passable, we enter into a contract with the rest of the polite straight world to smooth over the facts of our existence that cannot be hidden. We agree to present ourselves as men and women, and they agree to treat us as men and women.

The silence is based on an assimilationist ethos, an unequal compromise: I give up the history that grounds me, and you give up the purity that supports you. I become as much like you as possible, and you pretend that you want us on the same side of the line. You grant me a portion of your birthright, but I agree that it’s yours to give. I make your life comfortable, and you make mine possible.