Last week, the US was all about liberating the Kurds from their oppressors. (Or, okay, being thanked for liberating the Kurds from their oppressors. Which is slightly different.)

This week, liberation will come in the form of air strikes and some ridiculous rationale about how US airstrikes are more ‘viable’ than Turkey invading Iraq. “Our risk calculus is changing.”

(That first article, though. Ads thanking the US for invading Iraq screened on Fox News and placed in the Wall Street Journal were organised in order to drum up investment in Kurdistan! You can see the cynicism dripping right off the page.)

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?

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.

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.

The last three ways that people got here via Google:

problems encountered when employees engage in multi tasking (page 18)
gay self fisting blogs (page 13)
spivak poststructuralism, marginality (page 1)

Sorry, no gay self-fisting here. But good luck, and please wear gloves.

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…)

It seems that the terrorist threat is no longer just about ’scruffy-looking men of Middle-Eastern appearance’, but also about t-shirts, especially those with Arabic script. Some ‘passengers’ are starting anti-terror vigilante groups, on the watch for any suspicious-looking activity. So, next time you’re flying, and you don’t mind when you get there, and you’d prefer not to sit next to racist fuckwits or toddlers, wear a t-shirt with a slogan in ‘foreign-looking script’. But be careful: it may blow up in your face.

The next day, I went to JFK in the morning to catch my Jet Blue plane to California. I reached Terminal 6 at around 7:15 am, issued a boarding pass, and checked all my bags in, and then walked to the security checkpoint. For the first time in my life, I was taken to a secondary search . My shoes were searched, and I was asked for my boarding pass and ID. After passing the security, I walked to check where gate 16 was, then I went to get something to eat. I got some cheese and grapes with some orange juice and I went back to Gate 16 and sat down in the boarding area enjoying my breakfast and some sunshine.

At around 8:30, two men approached me while I was checking my phone. One of them asked me if I had a minute and he showed mehis badge, I said: “sure”. We walked some few steps and stood in front of the boarding counter where I found out that they were accompanied by another person, a woman from Jet Blue.

One of the two men who approached me first, Inspector Harris, asked for my id card and boarding pass. I gave him my boarding pass and driver’s license. He said, “People are feeling offended because of your t-shirt”. I looked at my t-shirt: I was wearing my shirt which states in both Arabic and English, “We will not be silent”. You can take a look at it in this picture taken during our Jordan meetings with Iraqi MPs. I said, “I am very sorry if I offended anyone, I didnt know that this t-shirt will be offensive”. He asked me if I had any other T-shirts to put on, and I told him that I had checked in all of my bags and I asked him, “Why do you want me to take off my t-shirt? Isn’t it my constitutional right to express myself in this way?” The second man in a greenish suit interfered and said “people here in the US don’t understand these things about constitutional rights”. So I answered him “I live in the US, and I understand it is my right to wear this t-shirt.”

Then I once again asked the three of them: “How come you are asking me to change my t-shirt? Isn’t this my constitutional right to wear it? I am ready to change it if you tell me why I should. Do you have an order against Arabic t-shirts? Is there such a law against Arabic script?” so Inspector Harris answered, “You can’t wear a t-shirt with Arabic script and come to an airport. It is like wearing a t-shirt that reads “I am a robber” and going to a bank.” I said, “But the message on my t-shirt is not offensive, it just says ‘We will not be silent.’ I got this t-shirt from Washington DC. There are more than a 1000 t-shirts printed with the same slogan, you can google them or email them at wewillnotbesilent@gmail.com. It is printed in many other languages: Arabic, Farsi, Spanish, English, etc.” Inspector Harris said: “We cant make sure that your t-shirt means we will not be silent, we don’t have a translator. Maybe it means something
else”. I said: “But as you can see, the statement is in both Arabic and English”. He said “maybe it is not the same message”. So based on the fact that Jet Blue doesn’t have a translator, anything in Arabic is suspicious because maybe it’ll mean something bad!

Meanwhile, a third man walked in our direction. He stood with us without introducing himself, and he looked at inspector Harris’s notes and asks him: “is that his information?”, inspector Harris answered “yes”. The third man, Mr. Harmon, asks inspector Harris: “Can I copy this information?”, and Inspector Harris says “yes, sure.”

Inspector Harris said: “You don’t have to take of your t-shirt, just put it on inside-out.” I refused to put on my shirt inside-out. So the woman interfered and said “let’s reach a compromise. I will buy you a new t-shirt and you can put it on on top of this one”. I said “I want to keep this t-shirt on.” Both inspector Harris and Mr. Harmon said “No, we can’t let you get on that airplane with your t-shirt”. I said “I am ready to put on another t-shirt if you tell me what is the law that requires such a thing. I want to talk to your supervisor”. Inspector Harris said, “You don’t have to talk to anyone. Many people called and complained about your t-shirt. Jetblue customers were calling before you reached the checkpoint, and customers called when you were waiting here in the boarding area.”

It was then that I realized that my t-shirt was the reason why I had been taken to the secondary checking.

I asked the four people again to let me talk to any supervisor, and they refused.

The Jet Blue woman was asking me again to end this problem by just putting on a new t-shirt, and I felt threatened by Mr. Harmon’s remarks as in, “Let’s end this the nice way.”Taking in consideration what happens to other Arabs and Muslims in US airports, and realizing that I will miss my flight unless I covered the Arabic script on my t-shirt as I was told by the four agents, I asked the Jet Blue woman to buy me a t-shirt and I said, “I don’t want to miss my flight.”

She asked, what kind of t-shirts do you like. Should I get you an “I heart New York t-shirt?”. So Mr. Harmon said “No, we shouldn’t ask him to go from one extreme to another”. I asked Mr. Harmon why does he assume I hate New York if I had some Arabic script on my t-shirt, but he didn’t answer.

We only managed to catch one film at the Melbourne International Film Festival a couple of weeks ago. It was an Israeli documentary called Bubot Niyar, or “Paper Dolls”. Bubot Niyar is about a group of Filipina bakla working as domestic carers in Tel Aviv, who run a drag queen show called “Paper Dolls” in Tel Aviv’s Filipino community.

After the start of the second intifada, the Israeli government ejected most of its Palestinian workers and began to encourage increased migration from the Phillippines to fill the resulting labour shortage. Guest workers were given visas that expire automatically if a worker loses his/her job; a third tier of citizenship is already-divided Israel. The participants in Bubot Niyar all lived in Tel Aviv, and got together one night a week to perform in the local Filipino community, hang out and support each other. Most of the members of the Paper Dolls originally came to Israel around 2001; but by 2005, they had all left again, either having lost their jobs and thus been detained and deported for ‘visa infringements’, or simply found life in Israel too difficult. Bubot Niyar spans this period of four years.

Curious to find a film that brings together so many of the things I’m thinking about at the moment: the racialisation and genderedness of domestic workers; the precarity of living in a country which removes its approval of your stay if you lose your job, and the resulting paranoias about being deported. But “Bubot Niyar” also works as a documentation of negotiating the everyday hassles of being gender-variant, particularly in a situation where one does not own any space, where one’s rights are dependent on the pleasure of the boss. Chiqui works as a live-in housekeeper for a disabled elderly man in a block of flats. Unable to dress as a woman in the flat itself, she changes from ‘male drag’ to ‘female drag’ in the stairwell, keeping a look-out in case anyone catches her, stuffing her jeans and shirt in a shopping-bag before walking out into the street.

The members of the troupe are not only marked as both racially other and gender variant onstage as performers, lip-synching to pop songs, but in everyday interactions where their long hair, earrings and feminine appearances stand out. Compared to the Phillipines, where the constraints of family and community mean many bakla are unable to live as women, Israel is relatively ‘liberal’. They attract staring, double-takes, children’s questions, incredible racist/transphobic monologues, exploitation by a nightclub owner determined to make their act ‘professional’ by forcing them to wear ‘Asian themed’ kimonos and whiteface. On the way home from this same club, three Paper Dolls chat amicably with a taxi-driver. When they leave, he confides to Heymann, “They’re disgusting. They make me sick. Dirty foreigners. Sure, you go home with a nice girl, and then you find out she’s a man. You beat her up and throw her out, and then you’re the laughing-stock of your friends for weeks.” Actually, his language was worse, and I can’t even remember the filthiest racist/transphobic epithets; but it was evident that he felt drag queens were a specifically non-Israeli phenomenon, and that they endangered the purity of Israel. So much for escaping fascism.

This made the film hard to watch, but what made it worse was, at the beginning anyhow, a collusion in exploitation by the director, Tomer Heymann. Heymann is filmed interviewing the troupe, hanging out with them backstage at gigs, and by the end of filming, he says they feel like family. At the same time, he orientalises the Paper Dolls: although he himself is gay, he finds them (and films them as) doubly exotic and ’strange’, incessantly sexualised, objectified. Heymann’s introductory voiceover states that he found the drag troupe in a back street and that, half revulsed, half intrigued, he wanted to find out more about them. (Can you imagine if, say, Paris is Burning began with Jennie Livingstone making such a remark?) Throughout, Heymann needlessly challenges the participants’ identities. So when Sally, a flirtatious and out-going bakla, asserts that she’s a woman, Heymann says, “No, Sally, no, you’re half-man, half-woman! You’re not a real woman!”

Halfway through, it’s as if events overtake Heymann’s exoticist project, or force him to take the Dolls’ situation seriously. Suicide bombings take place in the migrant/Filipino distract of Tel Aviv, and despite the government’s assurances that anyone treated for injuries sustained in bombings will not be arrested, immigration police start raiding houses looking for ‘illegals’. It’s difficult to know when this began happening in the timeline of the film: if there was a point when the Israeli government decided to cracked down on the growing ‘illegal’ population, or if this was simply an ongoing condition of migrant life in Israel. Cheska, one of the participants, loses her job, meaning she’s classified as an ‘illegal’. Since walking on the street risks arrest, Cheska is confined to her flat. We see her on her balcony, where she says she likes to sit, as watching the people outside in the street makes her feel less depressed. Finally, Cheska is caught and deported. The other Paper Dolls reconsider their options. One by one, they leave: some to London, some back home to the Phillipines.

Bubot Niyar is one of those films where only the subjects make it bearable to watch; and where, despite the film’s representation of them, they manage to fuck with it enough to ’shine through’. (Forgive the torpid sentimentality of that phrase.) Or maybe it’s one of those films that, despite the intentions of its producers, manages to stumble on politics, the insane paradoxes of global capitalism and binary gender, and say something. Sally says the troupe is named Paper Dolls because they are like copies of ‘real’ women, but the toughness and strength of these people is nothing like paper. Steel, maybe.

I don’t understand how Bubot Niyar could have been eligible for an award celebrating queer cinema at the Berlin Film Festival. How to give an award to a director when he’s so self-absorbed? It’s likely that the director will always regard Bubot Niyar as an extension of his own concerns. Particularly, it emerges in a Q&A at the Berlin Film Fest, an excavation of his own racism and ignorance about migrant workers. (Sigh.) But it’s still worth seeing.

As a post-script: Worth noting also, in an ironic twist, that the Paper Dolls themselves couldn’t get tourist visas to be in Berlin for Bubot Niyar’s premiere last year. The borders are everywhere and (almost) all the time.

This has been in my drafts folder for a couple of weeks and I may as well post it, with the caveat that it’s a draft, and I had more to say, but am trying to make good on my promises.

It’s ironic that the discussion about recent interpretations of ‘mateship’ should also become a meta-discussion about snark around the blogging traps: whether friends should snark at each other, and whether, in cyberspace, we can be friends. The discussion on Glen’s blog has finally erupted into an example of the perils of ‘mateship’ itself. Under the terms of mateship, we are all supposedly friendly enough to understand each others’ jokes, even when the supposed joke is not very funny.

In the comments thread on Glen’s response to Angela, I’ve been trying to point out what I understand to be the micropolitical dimension of ‘mateship’. Responding, Glen edited his post — and mis-spelt Angela’s name. The mis-spelling was brought to his attention, whereupon he claimed it was a joke. He also said that those who might not get the joke were evidently “too attached to identity” — academese for “Can’t you take a joke?” He also said something about how lucky it was that Ange’s surname doesn’t have any weird characters because that would stuff him up even more. It’s just… well, it doesn’t feel like the Internet gets more bizarre than this. I don’t understand why Glen keeps going on about recuperating politically dodgy crap like mateship, but if he wants to waste time fdoing it that’s his business.

I have a tendency when these discussions take place to obliquely ‘poke fun’ rather than ‘try to be helpful’, and although I’m not at all sure it will help, I think this exchange finally warrants a serious excavation rather than my previous response, which was spamming, “If you can’t pronounce their name just call them mate!” I still think that refrain says it all: it’s an axiom of mateship and it reveals the moment in which mateship becomes racialised, slightly aggressive, an attempt to de-other the Other.

So I’m thinking about moments in which I’ve had the urge to call people ‘mate’ before. This is ‘mate’ as distinct from ‘matey’, which enjoyed a brief popularity in alterna-left circles around 2000. When I feel like I need to say ‘mate’, I’m usually trying to pass as as a guy. I’m usually talking to a guy, and I’m usually involved in an economic transaction of some kind. I do think ‘mate’ is specific to Australia: I’ve never heard an Aotearoan say ‘mate’, and English people usually think it’s some weird Aussie thing.

Calling someone ‘mate’ has to do with the assumption of a familiarity that is about class, and race and gender. You may refer to your friends as ‘your mates’ in Australia, but the most marked instances of ‘mateing’ someone are with people you don’t know, rather than friends. I’m going to say that this is something like the limit of ‘mate’ as a form of address, and additionally that it’s at the limit that you might identify what makes the rule a rule. The assumption of false intimacy or familiarity can only proceed, in a situation, if someone experiences a managerial disposition in relation to the other person. I mean ‘managerial’ in the sense Ghassan Hage used it in White Nation: managerial meanshaving more social power, the power to imagine managing other bodies who have less power than you — the power to institute the law (of private social exchange or national borders, whichever is at stake).

So, it’s gendered — who would call a woman ‘mate’ unless as an ironic gesture (or he thought she was a dyke?) It’s about constructing a position wherein both parties are on the ’same level’, superficially, but the politics of who gets to be familiar are all about delineating subtle class boundaries. I get to be familiar with you, but you’re still the hired help — or the folks that are only able to dispense ‘exotic’, ‘othered’ hospitality to me.

Today has been my first day off for weeks. It so happens that it’s not only Marx’s birthday, but also the anniversary of something closer to home. Lazy breakfast at 4pm and a day of doing absolutely no work, marred only by the car’s engine flooding in peak hour traffic and pouring rain. We have a new book, Writing Machines by N. Katherine Hayles. The covers are corrugated so finely and the design so detailed and lovely that I could spend hours fondling it, and am quite serious about taking it to bed with me tonight — under the pillow, for the writing to seep out and infect me…

Right now I’m catching up on a week of installments of Evidence Locker by Jill Magid. You sign up, and each day for a month (I think) you receive emails about Magid’s holiday in Liverpool. Along with the emails come segments of CCTV footage Magid requested from the Liverpool Police. The CCTV footage is all of her — walking about the city, sitting in an outdoor cafe smoking a fag and sipping tea. The footage evokes stalker films and the spectre of obsessional love, despite its ostensible purpose to ‘identify criminals’. It’s hard to know whether someone is on the other end of the cameras, directing the shots, whethre this is all just made up and Magid actually produced the work herself. (She didn’t.) One, on Day Four, stands out. From across the street, the camera picks out Magid as she walks out of a cafe. As she sits in a cheap chrome chair, pulls out her cigarettes and lights up, it focuses in on her, in deep close-up, then deeper so her red coat shines (you realise it’s vinyl, picked out to be visible) and from the side so her hair obscures her face. The perspective changes abruptly: now we’re looking from directly above. The shot zooms in, focuses on her crossed knees, pauses for a beat, pans up her body and refocuses on her face. It’s a cinematic close-up: you can see the texture of her hair, her bored experssion, watching something down the street. At this point the camera stops zooming in and you begin to notice that it’s shaking up and down slightly, waving, a barely perceptible ‘bop’ motion. It’s odd and disturbingly pornographic, as if the camera itself has a subjectivity and is in the throes of a voyeuristic wank. On watching it again I notice that the cameras shake slightly throughout the segment — perhaps it’s the wind? Nicely edited for maximum disturbing effect, I think…

Jill Magid also asked the Amsterdam Police if she could decorate some CCTV cameras with rhinestones as an art project. When they said no, she repackaged herself as System Azure, a fake corporation, and posed as the Head Security Ornamentation Professional. The Amsterdam Police were encouraged to think of it as a public relations exercise — and soon Magid was allowed to cover four cameras at Police Headquarters with rhinestones. Yay.

This should be up soon on the Long Sunday Spivak Carnival.

I’ve spent the last week trying to decide whether to, as may be expected on a ‘literary’ blog, to engage in ‘close reading’ in a philosophical/literary manner, or to get eclectic on your asses and tie some questions Spivak asks to questions I’d like people to think about more. I ended up going with the latter, and at length. But first, prefatory caveats. Part of the oddness of my response to "Scattered Speculations", I think, is that capitalism has never seemed that coherent or smooth to me. It has always seemed crazy. Now, I am not a scholar of Marx, and I lack skills in parsing the distinctions in debates about use-value, exchange-value and surplus-value unless they are explained to me very slowly. But it still seems ‘intuitive’ that capitalism runs on crisis. There’s an interview in Hatred of Capitalism where Jack Smith calls capitalism (or rather, landlordism, but he saw landlordism as an extension of capitalism) a fear ritual, completely counterintuitive: "We have to spend the rest of our time struggling against the uses we make of our money against us." This might be about antagonism rather than indeterminacy, I know, but I will come back to Jack Smith later. (I also committed to blogging against heteronormativity today, and later I’ll try to address that in regard to value.) What I get from "Scattered Speculations" is yet another insight into the precise mechanics of that insanity; and, more importantly, the role of imperialism and ‘culture’ in that mechanics. (more…)

No-one really seems worked up about this, but I think it’s worth a comment. News this week has been really…. schizoid. The evidence:

a) in Italy, Berlusconi is gone, even if he won’t admit it. They’ll be dancing in the streets but not for long, is my guess. Prodi looks like a genial, alcoholic freak.

b) The evidence against terrorist suspect Abdul Nacer Benbrika and his cohort of ‘recruits’ seems to rely on zero prof of actual intent to bomb. Benbrika was supplied with explosives to detonate in a ‘terrorist training exercise’ at Mount Disappointment by an undercover agent of the Victorian Police. In fact, it looks like the officer set up the ‘exercise’ and took Benbrika along for the ride. Which means, effectively, that the alleged ‘terrorists’ have been caught by entrapment.

Also, Abdulla Merhi was locked in his cell in only his underwear after a fight with the prison guards, who said he had to wear the civilian clothes he’d been arrested in to a hearing.

I’m slightly shocked that Indymedia and the other independent news services around aren’t really following this case. I mean, sure, the 16 detainees might well be nuts, but no evidence has yet been produced that they were planning to bomb anyone. And I’m sorry, having a conversation about wanting to kill John Howard = so ubiquitous. You could arrest me for that. What’s the story?

c) From now on, any boatloads of ‘unauthorised arrivals’, or stateless people seeking asylum, who land on the shores of mainland Australia will be placed in detention camps on Nauru, Manus Island, PNG or Christmas Island.

Having already excised most of the satellite islands in the north ffrom the ‘migration zone’, (the zone in which a person can legally seek asylum), the Howard government has noe excised the mainland too. But just for boat arrivals, mind. If you manage to get here on a plane, you may still be granted the privilege of detention in a mainland camp — if you’re the wrong colour, or whatever. In context, this move is designed to repair diplomatic ties with the Indonesian government, which is upset about the sudden flare-up of interest at protests in West Papua and the exodus of lots of West Papuans to Australia. But what an opportunity for the government. They no longer need their officials to provide excuses about asylum seekers not saying the right words to seek asylum officially, or not filling in the right forms. Automatic deportation and internment will do just fine.

d) Lots of threats to forcibly remove the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, or Camp Sovereignty, in the Melbourne King’s Domain over the last two weeks, and lots of claims that we shall not be moved. The tent embassy started as a protest against the Commonwealth Games (the ‘Stolenwealth Games’ was their slogan), but now that the tourists have left and no-one is paying attention, it’s back to normal operations: indigenous people, scram!

In the middle of the media ruckus, City of Melbourne Mayor John So visited the campsite last weekend, took part in a traditional smoking ceremony and said the following: he personally wouldn’t let the police remove them forcibly, and would the protesters like a Koori historical cultural centre to be built on the campsite? Nonetheless, the police kept making threats, and by yesterday everyone was packing up.

I really hope that the calculation at work here — premised on relinquishing the campsite, but keeping a fire alight for the few more weeks it takes to establish the site as officially sacred, and under protection, rather than forcing the issue (meaning that the cops would be likely to douse the fire, too) — is correct. I have this awful feeling that the Black GST protesters taking down the tents of their own accord means giving up something: space, and the assertion of space even under threat of arrest. Mr So said in a statement the council supported the “further recognition of culturally significant sites in Melbourne, including Kings Domain.” Which means what? Another statue and some street names, like Bunjil and Wurundjeri Way? (Not that I don’t like the Bunjil statue. It’s just a poor, stratified and slightly bleached-out substitute for people camping where they want, messily, with tents, caravans, fires and politics.)

d) Migration stuff again in the form of massive, heart-warming protests in the US this month. See here. I spent a while on Barbelith yesterday explaining why the guest-worker idea is not great, and may as well reproduce it here:

It’s maybe worth pointing out here that the ‘pro-immigration’/'anti-immigration’ distinction is not really a good one to use to frame these events. No matter how ‘anti-immigration’ conservative/neocon/racist discourses are out there, migrant labour is necessary to keep the US state running. But to get the best surplus-value from migrant labour, it’s necessary to keep migrant workers rightless — ie, under threat of deportation, working for low wages, with no security or medical benefits. The ‘informal economy’ of migrant workers actually benefits the state and corporations: it helps to keep everyone else’s wages down by constantly offering work to people who are forced to do it for less money.

So in a way, these protests are not just important because they’re about migration and opening the borders, but they’re also important insofar as they relate to the economic conditions of all workers in the US. If migrant workers had to be paid a living wage, then that ‘wedge’ enforcing substandard conditions on everyone else would disappear. The distinction between ‘migrant’ worker and ‘non-migrant’ worker would disappear. This is also why it’s worth being suspicious of a ‘guest worker’ system (which is, nonetheless, what may end up happening): as guest workers, migrant workers will have less rights, will probably be paid less money, and will still be forced into a position as the ‘wedge’ that sustains anti-migrant sentiment and keeps wages low.

This is why I’m so glad that ____ phrased it initially as a ‘new poor people’s movement’. Makes me feel all fuzzy and warm-hearted and like shouting embarrassingly Marxy* things like, ‘Solidarity, Compas!’

*Not Marxist, not Marxian, but Marxy. See? With those three crunchy consonants like breakfast cereal without milk.

Mamdouh Habib, who was released without charge from Guantanamo Bay last year, may have his freedom. But he’s still not really ‘free’. Anyone else who called the police to report a drive-by shooting would be asked to make a witness statement at the scene, right? Instead, Habib and his 15 year old were dragged to a police car, capsicum sprayed, interrogated for four hours, held overnight and released the next morning without their own clothes or shoes. The police confiscated $800 (only $40 has been returned), a mobile phone and his car — which came back from the copshop with loose panels and fingerprint powder everywhere.

(via the age)

Which is worse: three years of torture, internment and interrogation in Guantanamo Bay, or a lifetime of harrassment by stupid coppers just itching to be involved in the ‘containment’ of a REAL LIVE TERROR SUSPECT, however unnecessary?

So, an account of surgery, or an account of some things that have been censored from this blog over the last weeks and months. It’s odd, but actual chest reconstruction as it relates to transition – the part where I might talk about having doubts, second thoughts, regrets, and how a flat chest makes me more of a man, more able to pass – seems less important now than do the many confronting aspects of having major surgery per se. Yes, my tits are now quite ‘masculinely contoured’; and while for the first couple of days I was in too much pain to know if it was right, which confused me, I’m starting to forget how it felt to not be this way. It feels good. Streamlined. Even with scars yet to heal and bruises still to disappear.

The deal

Now surgery is over, I can relate how I convinced the psychiatrist to let me go through with it. In November, I went back to see the original shrink who kicked me off the gender clinic program, about whom I have been publicly, and uncharitably, honest in the past. Miraculously, she got me an appointment the day after I called (usually the wait is three months). At the appointment, we went a few rounds; then she presented me with a deal. She would write a surgery approval letter for me, in exchange for, and-I-quote-verbatim, me “writing nice things about her on the Internet.” She did not specify where I was to write such nice things or what I should say; but I was to find something positive to say about the clinic. I was also to be a better patient: submit to more tests, make more of an effort to be pliable; attend follow-up appointments et cetera. She wanted to me to see an endocrinologist, in order to check if I am actually intersexed, because in her words, “You don’t look very much like a man, do you?” She thought maybe the testosterone isn’t having any effect. She said that next time, I had to bring my concerns straight to her. To all this, I agreed. I assume she sent the right letter, because the surgeon never mentioned it; but I never found out what was in the letter. (We patients don’t get copies of anything like that; we are simply the objects of the text passed from doctor to doctor –- unless, of course, we apply for copies under Freedom of Information law.)

Yes, unprofessional. Yes, Faustian. Yes, ripe for an official complaint. Indeed: at one point during our couple of rounds, she sighed heavily and exclaimed, “I’m so sick of people making complaints about me to the Medical Practitoner’s Board!” Difficult to keep one’s face straight. Afterwards, I wrote something quasi-positive to an email list I suspect her spies read. I intended to write more, but the whole thing started to get paranoid: what was enough? Where did she intend me to speak out in her defence? Should I send her printed copies? What if it wasn’t enough, and she didn’t write the proper letter? Oh insomniac spiralling trail of paranoia. So I tried to forget about it, and hope that she trusted me. If you’re reading this, Dr X, you should never have trusted me; but a psychiatrist shouldn’t make such deals with her patients. It’s manipulative. This renders the deal void. And if I turn up to your next appointment, I’ll raise my concerns with you directly. If.

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.