state of like-new quality.

I am stopping this for now & thanks for making it fun.

xoxo,

Kashif

(Source: kakru)

3.22.2012

When’s the last time my name could be detected on your breath? Is it like the vapor rising off a dangerous liquor? Do you ever say my name? You must abstain. I say yours, though. I say it like a prayer. It comes out a note in a bird song. I’ll take care of your name for you; don’t you worry about your name. They won’t forget how to say it, like how they did the Tetragrammaton, because I’m your Levite priest, and as long as I’m alive, I’ll take care of your name. Your name is my charge.

‘regular’ dressing

My family was having Thanksgiving dinner at the home of friends. We are vegetarians and my two kids were trying to figure out which of the two dressings on the table was the vegetarian dressing and which was the meat dressing. One of our hosts pointed to one of the dressings and said, “This is the regular dressing and the other is the vegetarian dressing.” I corrected him saying, “There is no such thing as ‘regular’ dressing. There is meat dressing and there is vegetarian dressing, but neither one of them is regular dressing.”

Charles R. Lawrence III, If He Hollers Let Him Go: Regulating Racist Speech on Campus, 1990 Duke L.J. 431, 473 (1990).

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider 110, 111 (1984).

impossible to imagine

[R]emember, we speak with multiple voices only because we have categories that describe these voices as separate from one another. Let’s think for a minute about something that is in truth impossible to imagine — that the Latina mother … was the definer of categories. She would not have to speak with multiple voices, because once she said she was, for example, Latina (or lesbian, or a woman), we would automatically know she was these other things. In fact, a whole different set of categories would exist. We cannot even begin to speculate what these categories might be because we are all still ordering our world by the categories given us by the dominant culture. We have no words and perhaps no circuits in our brains for thinking about these other categories. But suppose my Latina mother (by this shorthand, I identify what are for me her most salient qualities) was the definer. We could then leave it to those whose wholeness was not included in her described categories to say, “Wait, I need to add my voice to this. When you talk about women, why are you automatically assuming they are Latinas, lesbian, and working class? Why does woman, unmodified, have to mean that? Don’t make me fragment parts of my identity by talking about women and whites as if they were mutually exclusive categories; after all, it is possible to be a woman and be white at the same time.” And then the Latina mother could say, “Well, I appreciate what you’re saying and I think we need to take into account your differences. Perhaps we can give you ten minutes at the end of the program. And next time we’ll make sure we have a white face on the panel. But, we’re all in this together, and by putting forth your separate identity you’re making it hard for us to fight the patriarchy.”

Trina Grillo, Anti-Essentialism and Intersectionality: Tools to Dismantle the Master’s House, 10 Berkeley Women’s L.J. 16, 20-21 (1995).

(Source: secretotaku)

anti-essentialism, relativism, & human rights

A feminist approach to international human rights therefore leads in two apparently conflicting directions at once: (1) increased awareness universally of the importance of cultural and economic rights for women, including such issues as the structure of the family; and (2) increased respect for cultural difference based on an awareness of the partiality of perspective, a skepticism of universal claims of authenticity. Is the tension irreconcilable? Does a feminist commitment to resist imperialism, a commmitment born of women’s own experience of powerlessness under patriarchy, leave us without a standard by which to condemn abuses of women throughout the world?

Increasingly aware of the diversity of women’s experience, sympathizing with the claim that universalism may be barely disguised ethnocentrism, and embracing in large part a position of epistemological skepticism, feminists are faced with a dilemma. Should they move to expand human rights to encompass women’s experience as though it were monolithic or, recognizing women’s differences, reject the universality of human rights divorced from cultural context? The latter conclusion risks undermining feminist critiques of cultural practices that are deeply harmful to women. Women are economically disempowered in the name of culture. They are denied the right to be educated, to travel, to seek paid employment, to divorce. They are denied legal protection against domestic violence, including spousal murder. They are subject to painful, often dangerous surgery to ensure female chastity. Together these practices and countless others create and sustain cultures of male privilege across the globe. Feminists must therefore respond to relativist or anti-essentialist arguments and take seriously issues of cultural difference without surrendering a critical stance toward the many forms of women’s oppression.

Tracy E. Higgins, Anti-Essentialism, Relativism, and Human Rights, 19 Harv. Women’s L.J. 89, 104-05 (1996) (strong primer for tensions in global feminism from legal perspective).

“I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. “What’s new?” is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in a parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question “What is best?,” a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream […] Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for.”

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (via qu4ntity)

in defense of essentialism

For those who remain nervous about grounding a moral, philosophical, or political vision in so-called essentialist understandings of what it means to be human, I offer two additional thoughts. First, I understand that nervousness. To be human has too often been equated with the kinds of characteristics, interests, and priorities associated with being male, white, and heterosexual. When social regimes are constructed on top of this slanted and limited view of what it means to be human, those who do not fall under all three categories are vulnerable to stigmatization and subordination. But, in my opinion, the solution to the suffering and oppression that has undoubtedly emanated from racist, sexist, and homophobic understandings of what it means to be human is not to give up altogether on the concept of the human being as a source of moral and political judgments about which social arrangements and practices are fair and just. The better choice is to present and defend a more convincing and nonoppressive conception of what it means to be human and to lead a fully human life.

Second, I would urge those whose anti-essentialist proclivities are so strong that they simply cannot accept the substantive content of even the mildest and most open-ended form of human liberalism to think pragmatically. That is, I would urge them to view the concept of “the human,” even if it is entirely constituted through forces of social construction, as a politically useful tool.

Carlos A. Ball, Martha Nussbaum, Essentialism, and Human Sexuality, 19 Colum. J. Gender & L. 3, 18 (2010).