I’ve got a bunch of posts stored up to write about things that are making me very mad right now. The Bill Henson thing, for one. — Except that people have already responded in ways that do not require repetition. To wit: archive, on the way Henson’s photographs implicate the viewer in thinking about the awkward sexuality of adolescence, and comments on the spuriousness of many critics’ desire to draw an easy distinction between art and porn; and also Stop Anne Geddes, which ought to have been done a long time ago.

On the other hand, here is something else. Mal Brough, the ex Minister for Indigenous Affairs, architect of the Northern Territory Intervention into ‘child sexual abuse’ and a prospective Queensland Liberal leader, apparently, did a press interview at his house in which he and his son put on fake Aboriginal accents and mimicked/mocked “traditional” Indigenous practices, playing didgeridoos and clap sticks. Putting on the family fun for the benefit of a journalist. As Ana points out, apparently they thought they were just having a laugh. Like blackface is a joke, or the Stolen Generations was a joke, or black deaths in custody…

Apparently, in the privacy of one’s own home, it’s more than acceptable to mock people you once talked about saving. I would like to engage in some critical discussion of this, in light of how the Intervention has passed from the headlines, and now that the panic-mongers have found a new arena in which to police sexual normativity. Under K-Rudd, the Intervention continues to spread to other indigenous communities in South Australia, as Ruth McCausland’s excellent commentary in the National Indigenous Times points out. But I’m trying to finish a chapter, so it will have to wait.

For a few moments on Wednesday, I thought maybe I was being a bit too cynical about the apology. I slept in on Wednesday morning, so missed an opportunity to engage in the national screen-mediated moment of apology. I didn’t miss everyone talking about the event, though. It seemed important on Wednesday, in social interactions, to say where you were at 9am, to voice your opinion about how great Rudd’s speech was, and to lambast Brendan Nelson for missing the point. (Awesome post on that note here.) And, yeah, if the apology makes some indigenous folks feel better about the conditions of dispossession, I’m glad. Because who wouldn’t want to to feel better?

But on the other hand, I’m wary of the mass sentiment this has provoked. It’s not new for non-indigenous people in Australia to express sorriness on Sorry Day. But it is new for this to be a government-mediated matter, where it becomes necessary to echo the terms of the Rudd apology in order to articulate one’s disgust at the past and present effects of the Stolen Generations. And the Rudd apology is still insufficient, even if it weren’t subject to the critique below. Nationalist calls to end one bad epoch and start a new good one always are. (more…)

There’s nothing “postcolonial” about the era that we live in. This week’s actions clearly illustrate that the governments of colonial settler states, like leopards, don’t change their spots, but just stalk their prey in other ways, to paraphrase a Ngati Kahungunu/Ngati Porou friend. Non-Maori have a responsibility to challenge the New Zealand government’s actions now and in the future, and if they don’t know it already, to learn the real history of not only the Tuhoe people and their territory, but also the history of colonization in Aotearoa.

From Scoop, commentary on the Aotearoan arrests by Aziz Choudry. It’s a great article, drawing parallels with Australia and Canada. Plus, it makes me chortle to see Aziz describe himself (with obvious irony) as an ‘ordinary average Kiwi bloke’…

(via the excellent Contradiction)

What. The. Fucking. Fuck.

It’s been difficult to know how to respond to the Liberals’ latest clumsy use of migration as a dog whistle. The cycle of anger followed by dull cynicism gets a bit old after you’ve rehearsed it so many times. The other day some people went to the Sofitel to respond to Kevin Andrew personally, in their own beautifully excessive surrealist fashion, giving Andrews exactly what he ‘wants’. Vegemite sandwiches all round, zinc cream, and finally, the ecstatic cry of the ‘new convert’: “I’m assimilated! I’m integrated!”

Also from Engage Media, the Authentic Austrayan Citizanshit Test:

The Australian citizenship test is:
A) played on boxing day
B) a cynical attempt by the Australian government to show they can
filter out international terrorists and not workers with low level
English
C) free with every pot and parma
D) a good idea

Australia*s first Prime Minister Edmund Barton famously said:
A) “The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to
the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman”
B) *Why must they insist on calling me Toby Tosspot!*
C) *I just don*t know about letting Queensland join*
D) *You know what I think Australia needs? Big things. Heaps and
heaps of big things * I mean I*m talking giant prawns and sheep and
bananas and rocking horses* ah ha gentlemen*

The past two hundred years of Australia*s history are:
A) a specialised narrative that if told right gets you on the ABC
board
B) an unfinished war
C) super chillaxed, like one big bar-b-que
D) not something we really need to think about

Immigration minister Kevin Andrews comments about cutting African
refugee numbers was:
A) A sensitive well measured response to the death of a young man
B) Based on the UN refugee agency advice
C) An unusual example of the Liberals using race politics in the lead
up to the election
D) Strange because we don*t let Africans into Oztralia* do we?

Apartheid was first introduced in:
A) Australia with the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the
Sale of Opium Act 1897 (Qld)
B) South Africa in 1913 with the Land Act
C) 2005 Cronulla
D) 2007 Northern Territory

The 72 Tamil and 7 Burmese Refugees currently incarcerated on Nauru
show that:
A) We have come a long way since Edmund Barton
B) We are a compassionate and flexible county,
C) It helps to be a white Zimbabwean farmer if you*re seeking asylum
in Australia
D) Anybody want some zinc cream?

PLEASE FORWARD WIDELY

At the Sylvia Rivera Law Project’s after-party following its fifth anniversary celebration last night, two members of the community were violently arrested and others were pepper sprayed by police without warning or cause. The two folks who were arrested remain in police custody and should be arraigned tomorrow. (More details of the incident can be found below in the press release.)

We ask that people show up tomorrow, Thursday, starting at 9:30am and continuing throughout the day to call for the immediate release of and the dropping of charges against the people who were arrested. The arraignment court rooms are at 100 Centre St (Directions: No. 4 or 5 train to Brooklyn Bridge Station; No. 6 train, N, R or C train to Canal Street; No. 1 train to Franklin Street; M1, M6 and M15 bus lines are nearby. 100 Centre Street is one block north of Worth Street, three blocks south of Canal Street.) Ask for directions to the arraignment rooms at the info desk when you enter.

For more information or to receive updates via email or text message, contact Jack at jack@srlp.org, who should be at court and have email access throughout the day.

PRESS RELEASE:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contacts:
Jack Aponte (jack@srlp.org)
Naomi Clark (naomi@srlp.org)

Police Brutality Strikes Fifth Anniversary of Sylvia Rivera Law Project

NEW YORK - On the night of Wednesday, September 26, officers from the 9th Precinct of the New York Police Department attacked without provocation members of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project and of its community. Two of our community members were violently arrested, and others were pepper sprayed in the face without warning or cause.

The Sylvia Rivera Law Project (www.srlp.org) is an organization that works on behalf of low-income people of color who are transgender, gender non-conforming, or intersex, providing free legal services and advocacy among many other initiatives. On Wednesday night, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project was celebrating its fifth anniversary with a celebration and fundraising event at a bar in the East Village.

A group of our community members, consisting largely of queer and transgender people of color, witnessed two officers attempting to detain a young Black man outside of the bar. Several of our community members asked the officers why they were making the arrest and using excessive force. Despite the fact that our community was on the sidewalk, gathered peacefully and not obstructing foot traffic, the NYPD chose to forcefully grab two people and arrested them. Without warning, an officer then sprayed pepper spray across the group in a wide arc, temporarily blinding many and causing vomiting and intense pain.

“This is the sort of all-too-common police violence and overreaction towards people of color that happens all the time,” said Dean Spade, founder of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. “It’s ironic that we were celebrating the work of an organization that specifically opposes state violence against marginalized communities, and we experienced a police attack at our celebration.”

“We are outraged, and demand that our community members be released and the police be held accountable for unnecessary use of excessive force and falsely arresting people,” Spade continued.

Damaris Reyes is executive director of GOLES, an organization working to preserve the Lower East Side. She commented, “I’m extremely concerned and disappointed by the 9th Precinct’s response to the situation and how it escalated into violence. This kind of aggressive behavior doesn’t do them any good in community-police relations.”

Supporters will be gathering at 100 Centre Street tomorrow, where the two community members will be arraigned. The community calls for charges to be dropped and to demand the immediate release of those arrested.

- END -

Emmy Hennings on the APEC protests in Sydney:

Despite the relentless and constant demonisation there has been no cap-in-hand pleading with the State - not from those I have organised with. The “but I’m just an ordinary person, sir” line of liberal democratic defense; the division into “good” and “bad” protestors. If some are excluded then we are all excluded. Citizenship is conferred upon some by denying it to others; we must become uncitizens. Ghosts inside capital’s machine.

I wrote a rant about APEC over the weekend, and then shelved it, because I was dismantling my computer/bedroom at the time and too busy to fill in the background that would have made my rant comprehensible. I’m glad Saturday’s protest went off without too many heads getting kicked (even though the police went sick, as expected). And I’m glad some friends who were there are safe.

But the footage I saw — people ‘marching’ in place, surrounded on all sides by lines of cops, pretty much stationary — makes me wonder what the point was. For the Stop Bush Coalition, the obvious aim was to Stop Bush. Ages ago, A. was questioning why people should fixate on killing the father as the symbolic APEC protest gesture rather than engaging with the real political situations specific to Australia’s participation in the Asia-Pacific as a region. (Uriohau has a lot to say about the latter, too.)

Anyhow, the point was to Stop Bush by mind control, apparently, since the rally organisers were convinced that displaying ‘peaceful protest’ was the most desirable strategy. Those organisers stooped to new lows to get their way. At one stage it looked like anyone diverging from that strategy of compliance might be forced into ‘peace’ by the Stop Bush Coalition’s own security force, aka the protest marshals. I guess this didn’t happen after all, but really, the question is (for those who are interested) why participate in such a managed event? If we must become uncitizens — a sentiment I agree with, totally — why try to intervene within the confining spaces of ‘democratic’ decision-making, when ‘democracy’ is already flawed, almost entirely symbolic and designed for subsumption into deal-brokering and meeting stacks? Why not leave the corral to the cows, and do something completely different?

I guess this harks back to long dead conversations within the uh ultra-left about why choose autonomous organising principles instead of forcing people to make decisions on behalf of the ‘mass’, assuming that everyone can finally come to the same agreement; why spokescouncils are not fora in which decisions are ever made on behalf of anyone; and why representational politics suck, completely. Maybe it’s time to revisit those conversations.

Meanwhile, the Chaser affinity group were on their own trip and made everyone look ineffectual — the top brass, the police state security force, the top-heavy, trot-heavy protesters. Yay for the Chaser. And yay for the rerouting of state resources into a completely pointless court case, which will be paid for on both sides, don’t forget, by the Federal Government.

So Alexander Downer signed an order back in May to change the regulations governing provision of Australian passports. It used to be that transpeople could obtain a passport designating one’s reassigned rather than ‘biological’ gender for temporary use: helpful if you were already passing as something else but hadn’t changed your birth certificate, for example, and certainly used by many people who travel overseas to obtain surgeries. Under the new regulations, transpeople can no longer obtain a passport in any gender except the one assigned at birth, until one’s birth certificate has been changed. You can obtain a Document of Identity with no gender marker instead of the birth-assigned gender, but no new gender-designated passport. Here’s the relevant bits from the Passport News in July:

On the 31st. May 2007 the Foreign Minister signed Australian Passports Amendment Determination(2007 (No. 1), which spells out that a person’s identity for passport issuing purposes comprises four pieces of information; That is name, gender place and date of birth, as recorded on the applicant’s cardinal document. This amendment particularly affects the issue of travel documents to transgender people and new policy instructions are being drafted and will be released shortly via the content Management System (CMS)

Transgender people travelling overseas for gender reassignment surgery will no longer be able to obtain a limited validity passport reflecting their intended sex. Instead, they may be issued a limited validity passport showing the gender recorded on their cardinal document, which may be replaced gratis after the gender reassignment is completed (i.e. produces a cardinal document in their assigned gender). Alternatively a limited validity Document of Identity (DOI), which does no include a gender field, may be issued, letter 10 must be given to the client explaining the limitations of the document and Letter 11, acknowledgment of receipt of the advice must be completed by the client.

Transgender clients are often supported by active advocacy groups and passport applications should be handled sensitively. Any client issues should be documented carefully. Only cases that meet the new policy may be issued a passport in the assigned gender.

Apart from how this really messes up a lot of people’s ability to travel freely without harassment or suspicion, this makes me really really angry. The regulations went through sneakily without community consultation or advice. Although the advice from anyone would be that a lot of transpeople cannot access reassigned ‘cardinal documents’ for some time, because legislation on this issue is different for each state and often really conservative, so this effectively will prevent some people from travelling at all. And I can’t really imagine that DFAT would want that kind of advice, anyhow. It’s often a lot more difficult to obtain a birth certificate than it used to be to obtain a reassigned passport, too. And some people don’t ever obtain birth certificates in a reassigned sex, or want to: which doesn’t mean that they don’t pass as something other than their ‘birth gender’ and need a travel document that reflects that.

(I’m also kind of worried about my own documents. I can’t get a birth certificate that says I’m male unless I have a whole bunch of surgeries I don’t need. And I was resisting getting a male birth certificate anyhow; I would like my identity to be incoherent and I don’t often use my birth certificate. But I applied for a male passport last year on the basis of a letter from a surgeon, and got one. Now, apparently, it’s legally invalid. Thanks a million, Alexander.)

More blogging on the subject here; Sydney trans advocacy group SAGE’s take here; sign the SAGE petition demanding that the regulations be changed back here.

We watched Babakiueria today in the class I’m tutoring in at La Trobe in Gender, Sexuality and Diversity Studies. I’m really enjoying teaching again. But how could I not, when we get to watch films like this? The first four weeks are on indigenous history and politics, interwoven with theories around racialisation, representation, ideology. There’s been a lot of talk in tutorials about the actions of the quote unquote Taskforce in the Northern Territory, alcohol bans, compulsory health checks, land grabs, uranium mining etc. I’m pleasantly surprised to find out that most of the students already feel suspicious of the government’s motives; or, better, already have a really solid understanding of what the new laws mean in terms of land control and how it fits into the temporality of electioneering, as well as mining interests.

Otherwise, the whole thing makes me feel depressed. This is what it must have felt like to be anti-racist in South Africa under F. W. de Clerk. Depression, fantasies of escape, questions about how to help resist the extraordinary effects this will have on material everyday life for indigeous people in the NT. I guess there’s one thing about this, though: it becomes very difficult to talk about dispossession as a historical, past event that we have ‘progressed’ beyond when it’s happening again, right under your very nose. I hope this radicalises some folks.

TV is driving me a bit crazy at the moment. I stopped watching for a few very busy weeks, and now that it’s raining and I’m at home more, I’m being re-exposed to the madness. To wit, a 4 Corners doco last night on Telstra call centre workers. Telstra has been steadily changing its labour practices over the last five years — making sales of new services a part of ordinary customer service work, instigating sales targets for ‘customer service’ workers, then increasing the sales targets to unrealistic heights, for example by 200% in 2005-6. Two Telstra workers have committed suicide in the past year, both suffering from depression due to work-related stress.

What was striking about the stories of these two people is that they were both so-called ‘high achievers’ at Telstra, and both became disillusioned, and finally suicidally depressed, after having apparently believed in the dream. It appears that if you have the resources to create an emotional boundary between yourself and the workplace, you can survive inevitable harassment much more easily than if you identify with your job, and the company you work for. Anyhow, it sounds like a scary place to work, Telstra. The team leaders go on training camps where they are taught to group trouble-makers into three distinct behavioural patterns: dragons, the people that actually oppose the smooth distribution of team efficiency and/or obedience, like union reps; submarines, who pose an obstacle to increased sales by ‘flying under the radar’, ie underperforming just enough not to attract attention; and savages, those recalcitrant types who don’t give a rat’s arse.

We can all go away now and work out our own individual under-performing personality type. I would totally be a submarine. In a moment of supreme pop-politics geekdom, A. pointed out astutely that all the talk of ‘flying under the radar’ on Big Brother actually references this corporate lexicon. We spent hours a few weeks ago watching Sunday night nomination while waiting for Ugly Betty to start, trying to figure out what it meant when one of the housemates nominated someone for eviction for ‘flying under the radar’. It’s like the worst Big Brother sin; every eviction, at least three or four people are nominated for it. So, mystery solved: housemates accused of ‘flying under the radar’ are not meeting their corporate duty to perform, as housemates, in the workplace that is the Big Brother house. That is, according to their peers, and/or self-appointed team leaders. Weird.

(The existence of Big Brother is enough in itself to make me want to break the television, yeah. On the other hand, Big Love Season Two just started. Who could refuse the mixed pleasure of re-acquainting oneself with Bill, the hick polygamist with a heart of gold, and his three ambivalent wives? Not forgetting Wanda the AWESOME serial poisoner.)

Sometimes you get so angry you just have to imitate David Byrne’s lamp dance.

From the Port Phillip Leader:

A PORT Phillip-based welfare group has slapped a ban on transsexuals using two of its St Kilda rooming houses.

Hanover Welfare Services has taken civil action to stop male-to-female transsexuals frequenting its women-only hostels.

It has also won the right to employ only women at the crisis housing centres in Dandenong Rd and Burnett St, where more than 250 women are accommodated each year.

The group recently won an exemption from anti-discrimination laws at the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal, entitling it to refuse care to male-to-female transsexuals seeking shelter.

The action came after a male-to-female transsexual housed at one of the women-only centres horrified other tenants by walking through the facility naked and displaying male genitalia.

Hanover chief executive Tony Keenan said the ban applied to women-only accommodation and would not extend to other services, such as drug and alcohol rehabilitation and sexual assault counselling.

“We have transsexual clients for a number of our services and we’ve long had a proud history of that,'’ he said. “But at this stage, we have some women who have suffered violently at the hands of men, so we need an exemption on a small scale.'’

Right. Because according to this logic, transwomen are really men. Transwomen are not women — not unless, according to the VCAT decision, they provide medical certification that they don’t have any ‘manparts’. I’m sure all the homeless transwoman are going to be planning their careers in crisis accommodation with such things at the top of their to-do lists. It’s a shame that women at the rooming-house were traumatised. But if someone behaves inappropriately, you deal with their individual behaviour. You don’t go getting a VCAT exemption from equal opportunity law unless you secretly believe transpeople shouldn’t be in women’s only crisis accommodation in the first place.

What makes it ten times worse is that Tony Keenan, the CEO of Hanover and the architect of this little transphobic battle, is also the Chair of the state government’s Ministerial Advisory Committee on GLBT health. This should surprise no-one: the committee has done sweet FA to directly improve the lives of transpeople, even though several very trans-friendly health workers sit on it. Yet another example of the lie that is the ‘queer community’.

Okay, I’m back. I think.

Complicating the post I wrote a couple of weeks ago about water restructions, Kernal (found via Ben) makes an important argument that environmentalism is a) a new kind of identity politics, and b) a new kind of conservatism. More broadly, that the panic circulating soforcefully at the moment in the media about global warming, drought, bushfire, dwindling water supplies and so on merely expands capitalism’s hold through fear of an apocalypse. (more…)

The other day I had coffee with a friend, and a friend of his who recently finished Honours in Cinema Studies at our [growing] esteemed institution. Cinema Studies has been rocked by controversy lately, and it’s all the fault of Jean Seberg. Apparently, some of this year’s first year Cinema Studies students were shocked at finding a picture of two men in a romantic embrace on the cover of the Cinema Studies 101 photocopied reader. They continued to be offended until it was pointed out that the ‘two men’ were actually Jean-Laul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, from A Bout de Souffle, and that what they’d been reading as homosexuality was, in fact, heterosexual love between a man and a 60’s androgynous gamine.

To be sure, Jean does look pretty boyish. Boyish enough, I think, for some queer Godard fan of yore to deliberately read her in key moments as male, turning Breathless into a story about a boy failing spectacularly to find a Daddy. You would have to explain the pregnancy somehow, but it could be done.

Anyhow, what-philistines-isn’t-that-that-hilarious! Not so much, it turns out. Some of the students were so offended that they complained to the Vice-Chancellor. So the VC had words with the Cinema Studies department, and as a result, Jean and Jean Paul were removed from the reader cover, along with the week on pornography in cinema. It looks like A Bout de Souffle itself only just managed to escape being pulled off the syllabus completely. (more…)