The next installment of racialised stupidity: travel warnings have been declared for, uh, Sydney.

One of the people arrested at the weekend for going to Maroubra with 25-litre drum of petrol, materials to make petrol bombs, commando-style military belts and Kevlar helmets has been released on bail.

Meanwhile one of the two people ‘of middle-eastern appearance’ arrested for getting on a bus to Bondi, with a bottle of petrol and what appears to be a trotskyist flier, has been refused bail. But his friend was released — and now NSW Premier Iemma wants to tighten bail conditions. Presumably this is so that the Australian and so on can’t accuse the NSW government of being soft on ‘terrorists’ — or kids sniffing petrol.

Did anyone go to the rallies on the weekend? In Melbourne there was a rally on Friday, which had originally been organised to protest civil liberties and anti-terror laws. I didn’t go, but people who were there said it seemed slightly unfocused and the connections between the government’s whipping up of hatred through anti-terror laws and the riots weren’t really made.

On Sunday in Melbourne there was a picnic to celebrate peace, love and unity, organised by someone who has been active in lots of independent media stuff in both Melbourne and Sydney. The organiser has been writing about the picnic in her livejournal, which I won’t link to, because I am going to be rude about her — ze recounts talking to a student union representative about the subject matter of speeches, and how ze told the rep she wouldn’t be able to talk about the war on terror, or anything except ‘peace, love, unity’. Ze said the rep looked quite shocked. Don’t let the reality of violence get in the way of hippie desires to be all lovey-dovey and pretend we’re all friends. Don’t talk about anything to do with ‘politics’. Don’t talk about the outside… Just “be a friend, not afraid.” It seems in keeping with the general sentiment of the event that the website quotes our nation’s glorious anthem: “For those who’ve come across the seas, we’ve boundless plains to share.” Which pretty much re-institutes all the nationalist crap positioning white colonisers as ‘welcoming’, beneficient, and most importantly, in possession of the land. Again, would it be rude to mention that these boundless plains came into ‘our’ possession through driving the original, indigenous occupants off, through various bloody methods?

Thank you, thank you, thank you to the fairy godperson who contributed money to my surgery fund. I don’t recognise your name, and am sort of inclined to think it’s some totally random Paypal accounting error — but maybe not! I really, really appreciate it. (And those other few cashed up readers, may I kindly direct you to the little button on the right?)

And while I’m at it, thanks to Sabdha and Cristi for the care package last week. It feels a bit weird, cuz there are things happening under the surface of his text — what would I need a care package for? Suffice to say, I did, and sunflowers, cake, borscht ingredients et al hit the spot so damn much. I feel really lucky at the moment, surrounded by such a fine posse of friends.

This week has been totally weird. On one hand, I’ve been thinking and writing and talking a lot about Cronulla, sharing in the communal (and not so communal) sense of anger and depression.

And on the other hand, things are really looking up for me. I found a psychiatrist who will write a letter stating that I’m ready for top surgery. Today my credit report came in the mail, and although I’d expected it to list numerous debts I’d washed down the memory-hole, the only amount owing is some old $70.00 phonebill. So it looks within the realm of probability that I’ll get the student loan I’m applying for to cover the costs.

This all means that surgery is GO on February 13th, just under two months away. I’m really fucking happy, but kind of distractable. And busy. Between now and February, I need to finish a chapter, revise an article for publication, finish two essays and save around $1500 at the research factory. And take the time to deal with all the, well, emotional effects of this huge milestone. And read lots and lots and lots of top surgery journals. And catch myself thinking hyperactive adolescent trannyboy shit like, “My surgeon is god!!1!” and “This is teh best late Christmas present I ever had!!!!” and “My chest will be so HOTT!!!!” And stuff.

Aieeeeeeeeeeee. Perversely, I’m really fucking excited about it all. Excited enough to get up and do a little dance. All things considered, this year has gone really well. Fingers crossed for next year.

I’ve been trying to make sense of the events in Sydney all day, and figure out how it interpellates me, affectively. I think this is how.

On the Archive, A. talks about camping at Lakes Entrance last year. On the first day of the trip, she punctured her foot on a fence buried in the sand. It was really intense, a lot of blood, a lot of pain, and a stupidly long walk back to the campsite and phone. This was when we didn’t have a car, hence the long walk through the dunes, the beach carpark, down the road and back to the camping-ground.

Of all the tourists, beach-goers, local fisherpeople and surfers that passed us, no-one stopped to help. Thre were individuals, families and carloads. To a person, they all looked, looked away, and walked on by. I remember thinking that maybe we looked particularly ‘weird’ or ‘out of it’, or maybe that other visual differences were preventing aid. (Two ambiguously gendered bodies with their arms around each other, one obviously close to fainintg, are are more confronting and difficult than one.) But I don’t think that’s what was happening. Those people looked at our shabby clothes, and the colour of A’s skin, and decided we were up to no good. They made a decision based, maybe, on the high population of Kooris around Lakes, given the presence of the Lake Tyers Aboriginal Trust (an ex-mission), and their purported tendency to walk around town sniffing petrol and passing out. They may also have made a decision based on the fact that many Greek, Italian and Arabic families go to Lakes Entrance for beach holidays, and there’s a general local disapproval of such even as the locals reap the benefits of ‘diversity’, ie a cafe with good coffee.
(more…)

How safe do you feel today? Do you feel safe enough to go to the beach? Would you like to play soccer on the beach? Maybe you shouldn’t go today.

There’s a moment when the world cracks open and all the invisible wires holding it in place become visible. Cronulla is one of those moments. I’m so glad I live in Coburg today. Coburg where the locals are supposedly talking about taking over, the suburb Kim Beazley might have mentioned after Lakemba when he suggested that lockdowns of whole suburbs might be necessary to stem the ‘terrorist threat’. Coburg where the owners of the local Turkish restaurant give us free turkish delight and dolmades whenever we get eat there, where the manager sits outside and smokes with deep, guarded melancholia as if he knew this would happen, and when you talk to him, you end up swapping stories about how much capitalism sucks. Thank the fucking gods for Coburg.

The nearest beach from Coburg is Williamstown, the singular bastion of Melbourne’s western suburbs seaside wealth, where the kids and their cars congregate on a hot summer night and the beats flow. Here again Williamstown differentiates itself from any other beach in Melbourne, because on any day you’ll find far less white people there than not.

Someone I know walks his dog at Williamstown Beach, and I’ve heard him complain about the loud music, heard him say he doesn’t feel comfortable there. I think I’ve even heard him say he hates the way the chicks wear hijab even in the water. This boy is a ‘leftist’ and a ‘feminist’ and ‘pro-queer’ and ‘pro-trans’ and all the other approved positions you could think of. He’s kind of scrawny; maybe he’s just afraid of copping some shit. And on the other hand, maybe he’s complicit. Because it’s not about the masculinity and the cars, it’s about race. He’s scared because he’s in the minority.

I think it’s worth condemning the nazified assholes who took part in the riots in Cronulla yesterday, those 5000 “Aussies” with their hands held high in fascist salute. But for me, this just reveals the racism deep in the whole of idea of ‘Australia’. No beach in Australia is without racism or its shadow; the absence of difference — the whitification — of country surf beaches; even the cosmopolitan yuppie beaches of St Kilda and Brighton where good middle-class behaviour obscures the subtle mobilisations of ‘ownership’ feelings. This means that in dealing with it, even supposedly good leftist folks who would ‘never be racist’ need to really think hard about our/their reactions, the way ‘we’ frame a response.

It makes me fucking angry that one of the first blogosphere responses to Cronulla was effectively to efface the workings of racialisation and flatten out the effects of this event by claiming that “fat bastards don’t go to the beach either ;) ‘beach body’ is not just racialised!” (The first comment, not the actual post.) This is total bullshit. Why don’t we talk about fat people feeling weird on beaches when there are pogroms being organised against them? There’s a fucking HUGE difference between feeling the constant threat of racialising violence on a beach because of the politics of skin colour, and feeling vulnerable about your body because you don’t like it. (Which, hello, is not limited to ‘fat people’ — it’s probably pretty universal.)

Angry angry angry.

polaroid boy polaroid girl
you’re so white and you’re so cute
polaroid girl polaroid boy
you’re so white and you’re so cute

we don’t need no water, we don’t need no water
we don’t need no water let the motherfucker burn
we don’t need no water, we don’t need no water
we don’t need no water let the motherfucker burn

I meant to rant about this weeks ago, but forgot until a timely Barbelith thread on queer/trans coalitional politics reminded me. Recently I received email spam announcing the launch of a ‘landmark transgender equality campaign’, a joint project of the US-based lobby group the Human Rights Campaign, and the US-based National Centre for Transgender Equality. Here’s an excerpt from the accompanying article:

“The more Americans know and understand each other, the more united we are as a nation,” said HRC President Joe Solmonese. “Our new education campaign underscores that employees, many of whom provide vital national security positions, are being denied the opportunity to do their jobs purely because of who they are. Most Americans want a federal law to end discrimination. But no law exists. We’re working on Capitol Hill and across the country to build support for that law, a law we unequivocally support.”

And some more:

“I’m so proud to be a part of this campaign,” said Diane Schroer, a 25-year Army Special Forces officer who was offered but then denied a counter-terrorism job when she told her future employers she was transgender. Schroer’s story is featured in the Nov. 3 Roll Call ad. “I had the same skills in counter-terrorism the day they denied me the job that I did the day they offered it. When it comes to keeping Americans safe, discrimination can’t be a part of the equation.”

Lookee. Queer and transpeople want to protect national security, too! Why let Dubya, Donald and Wolfie have all the fun?

It doesn’t surprise me, but watch the queer and trans lobby groups relinquish left politics to pitch their campaigns in the rhetoric of terrorised nationalism. The Human Rights Campaign, by the way, is one of the most assimilationist queer advocacy orgs in the US. Until recently, they were responsible for selling out gender-variant peoples’ interests by removing gender identity from workplace anti-discrimination bills, just so that ‘gay and lesbian’ focused laws can get up. They’ve only just realised that this is no longer a popular move, and they’re now publicising how ‘trans-friendly’ they are.

Talk about using the rhetorical tools of fascism and far-right-wing panic to shore up a claim for rights! I’m sorry, but I would never support an anti-discrimination claim for someone who’s been prevented from working in counter-terrorism.

Especially for A: a review of Homecoming, featuring zombie US soldiers killed in Iraq who stagger out of their military coffins to wreak revenge on the Prez by… um… voting.

(For real? Why don’t they converge on the White house groaning, ‘Brains…..’ Because Bush don’t have any to feed upon?)

Speaking of contradictions, over-rulings and reorganisations, I think that’s what my thesis is doing right now. As always. Since yesterday, I have a New Plan. It makes structural sense, now. In a kindasorta chronological way, with the requisite caveats claiming that all this chronological epochal shit is dodgy unless related to material changes, that the changes are always inconsistently distributed through space/time and that the idea is possibly stupid, but anyhow.

However, it just took me an hour, four computers, three printers (one with a paper jam), two photocopying cards and some library helpdesk assistance to print out the new plan. Not a great start.

Yesterday a carload of us drove to Monash to hear Fredric Jameson talk about representing globalisation. Someone I know referred to Jameson as ‘Mr Base Superstructure Man’ recently — it’s been some time since I read any Jameson, and I sorta thought it was a joke. But no. Jameson’s path into representing ‘globalisation’ was the slew of left, independent documentaries like Life and Debt or The Take, and similar indy feature films like Michael Winterbottom’s In This World. He wanted to show how they sometimes succeed and often fail to render globalisation’s contradictions: relations of production, distribution, consumption which can’t be rendered on a map, are not simply speedier and less normative trade routes like the Silk Road, but are constantly contradicting, reorganising and over-ruling themselves.

Jameson’s question was how ‘we’ can adequately represent collectivity in this contradictory soup. One problem, he suggested, is that paranoia is ubiquitous, no longer appearing as an individualised phenomenon — “Everyone is talking about me” — but ‘realistic’ and to do with collectivities (he said collectivities, but I would say abstractions, maybe) — “nothing has anything to do with me.” The result of such paranoia is cynical reason and situation Peter Sloterdijk wrote about where everyone knows what is happening, information about the disaster is freely available, and yet everyone feels totally powerless, cynical, shrug and get on with it.

At this point he brought up Traffik — the ‘better’, ‘truer’ UK miniseries on which the Soderberg film was based (I guess Jameson doesn’t like Hollywood much.) This was where he made the best point — if an obvious one — that criminal or illegitimate activities express the contradictions of globalisation much more effectively than legal ones: fake designer clothes and cigarettes, drugs, pirated media, and of course the ‘traffic of people’ (his phrase): prostitution, undocumented migration, et cetera. I thought at this point he might have gestured to why that is, or at least troubled the distinction between ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ globalisation by discussing the changing orders of sovereignty, borders, capital, biopolitics…. But no such luck. Instead, he finished by calling for the need to grasp “the simultaneities of space” via a dialectical movement — between base, superstructure; economics, culture — through documentaries or films that feature everything in the circulation of capital happening at the same time. That’s the solution to cynicism, he reckons: collectivity via (representations of) simultaneity.

On one level it’s really great to hear an old-school Marxist like Jameson speak. On another level I find the indulgence of that perspective frustrating. He didn’t engage with the fact that capitalism infects more than ‘economics’ or ‘culture’, that it reproduces itself through us, with us, with resistance, inside the ‘little people’ — that n fract, we reproduce ourselves through IT — just as much as through the strategies of corporate management. He wasn’t asking questions about the production, circulation, consumption of these indy doco’s, and he wasn’t asking how other artforms, particularly stuff happening under the rubric of ‘new media’, have at times tried to eschew the politics of representation in order to act materially — I’m thinking of projects like Lowdrone here.

Mostly, though, I was frustratd by his use of the term’ globalisation’, as if it was obviously coterminous with global capital. This is where the limitations of that view become most glaring. In question-time someone asked about Seattle and the ‘anti-globalisation movement’, if that wasn’t cause for hope. (Sorry, A., it appears that the ‘anti-globalisation movement’ is still accepted usage, rather than ‘counter-capitalist’ or something else, despite the obvious contradictions in the slogan, “Our struggle is as global as capital.”) He said the anti-globalisation movement was cause for hope, but that with this war and everything, people have been distracted. That’s all he could say about the war: that it was a distraction. Not that the war is the same war fought on a different front; that the war is still happening precisely because of a resistance to capital and imperialism now pitched as ‘insurgency’, ’sedition’, ‘terrorism’.

Sorry, no blog posts. I’m writing. Actually writing. And sorting out Very Important Things requiring many telephone conversations.

But for those who could do with some succour, some succour in the night, here’s a plug for Jessica Hopper who writes in her head everywhere, like me. Why can’t someone invent a brain recorder? It would be so much less hassle. You could just upload every so often.

Just this, via this great blog, via A.:

Supposedly amendments have been made to the sedition legislation excepting “any person who publishes, in good faith, any report or comment on a matter of public interest” from being charged. The relevant terms for argument being, I suspect, ‘good faith’ and ‘public interest’. Whose faith? Which public?

Every day I feel a little bit more Weimarish. If this is not already a word, it should be. Speaking of Weimar, in the comments Jay mentioned the ARC debacle and its treatment at PreFix, which I reckon needs some attention… (more…)