Miscellaneous Marxist Manifest@

To my awesome readers,

    Thank you for being a part of this semester as I have learned and grown in so many ways.  This is my final post for this class (though I will try to continue posting in my post-grad life as well!), and I hope it serves to tie together some thematic strings of these reflections.  Today's post is a little different, however.  It is a "Manifest@" - a profession of my beliefs and commitment to working toward achieving the change I want to see in the world.  I wrote the following (longer than usual) document in collaboration with Monzong Cha and Lauren Kramer.  Together we comprise the "Miscellaneous Marxists," which is a nickname we acquired during the course of this class because of our mutual focus on broader systems of oppression, even in micro-scale analyses.  I hope you enjoy and, more importantly, actively engage with what we've composed.

The Miscellaneous Marxists

"our own lived experience"

    We are the Miscellaneous Marxists, a group of students who believe that the way capitalism manifests itself in our world is inherently oppressive and contributes to every issue that we have encountered throughout this course.  We are “Miscellaneous” because we each come to this collective with our own lived experience, perspective, and passion.

    This is a “Manifest@” because language reflects culture, and we want to subvert the Western inclination toward linguistic androcentrism: the mistaken belief that the male stands for the whole. When we repeat androcentric phrases, we validate androcentrism.

"everyone is welcome"

However, the power of language can also be harnessed as a vehicle for profound social change; when we reject the lexicon of androcentrism and replace it with gender-inclusive language, we deny that ideology its power. We use the “@” symbol to replace androcentrism with gender-inclusive language; in feminist Spanish-speaking circles, people replace “a” and “o” with “@” for mixed-gender groups or people who have not self-identified as a man or woman. Our use of “@” symbolizes that anyone and everyone is welcome and necessary in our struggle.

    The purpose of this manifest@ is to declare what we believe, expose the problems that feminism must confront, and propose ways of enacting change.  We identify as revised radical Marxist anti-racist feminists, and we recognize that every liberation is tied up with every other liberation.

The Manifest@

1.  The biggest issues facing women today are structural in nature.  The oppression we experience is not only individual, but also systemic and institutional.  We reject liberal feminism, which preserves oppressive patriarchal structures, simply aiming to bring women “up” to the normalized status of (a certain type of) men in society, rather than challenging hierarchy itself.  We reject choice feminism, which posits that any “choice” a woman makes is a feminist choice because it refuses to acknowledge the constraints on women’s options and avoids the fact that the personal is political.

"inextricably interconnected"

2.  All systems of oppression are inextricably interconnected and cannot be treated as isolated phenomena.  These systems include racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, ageism, classism, cis-sexism, and every other way that a group of people are privileged or disempowered because of their identity.  These oppressive structures have infiltrated every facet of our lives, even the way we speak about them.

3. In the process of our liberation, we recognize, validate, and hold to be central, the voices and experiences of trans*, lesbian, bisexual, queer, genderqueer, intersex, asexual, and other marginalized groups and individuals within the feminist community.  Their issues are our issues regardless of whether or not we belong to those categories ourselves.

4. We must free ourselves of the oppressive ideologies that have pervaded our cultures and our own minds.  To do so, we must actively decolonize and decapitalize our minds, liberating ourselves of patterns of thought and action that perpetuate the systems we will eliminate.

"continually self-reflective"

5. Our liberation will necessitate constant intentionality.  We must be continually self-reflective so that we are conscious of the implications of all we do.  There must be purpose to each of our actions, and the action must match our values to the fullest extent.  We consider our means to be equally as important as our ends, which involves perpetually cultivating and practicing mindfulness.

"Education reform is essential to liberation"

6. Education reform is essential to liberation.  This begins with access. Education, including higher education, needs to be free for all and equipped to support all students. It is immoral and unacceptable to fund schools differently based on property tax revenues or student performance rates. We must equally distribute resources, including teachers, to each school to ensure that all students have at least comparable learning environments. In addition to access, we demand that the curriculum taught in the classroom and the way this curriculum is presented validates a variety of peoples and experiences, not just white male imperialist patriarchs.

"demolish the prison-industrial complex"

7. We must demolish the prison-industrial complex and the existence of privatized prisons.  The United States has the world’s highest incarceration rate.  The system of mass incarceration is a system of racial control that traps poor people of color in second-class status for a lifetime.  Policies that encourage racial profiling need to be eliminated because they contribute to the unjust mass incarceration of people of color, and in addition, they are not grounded in fact.  Ex-felons should not have their basic rights, especially the right to vote, taken away because of their status.  

8.  Everyone has the right to live comfortably without having to worry about meeting their basic needs.  The wealthiest U.S. households need to contribute their fair share to the benefit of the rest of the population. We must tax unearned income at the same rate as earned income and return to the taxation rates effective in 1953, in which the wealthiest portion of U.S. earners paid a top tax rate of 92%. In addition to altering taxation rates, we also must reconsider the way our tax dollars are utilized.  We must employ fair redistribution practices so that the lower-income members of our society are able to live the lives they deserve.

"Healthcare is a human right"

9. Healthcare is a human right. Everyone should receive high-quality and free care, which includes not only biomedical treatment, but also preventative and overall wellness care.  We unequivocally demand reproductive rights, including the right to contraception, safe, legal abortion, prenatal care, and postnatal care, regardless of age, gender, marital status, or any other factor.  We also believe that the production and distribution of a male contraceptive pill is of vital importance to the liberation of women.

10. Corporate media limits the audible spectrum of voices and conversations heard by the broader populace.  The mainstream media is increasingly and unacceptably implicated with economic and political elites, refusing to confront those same people who hold power.  Independent media breaks down the barriers to equal representation, opening access for marginalized people to speak for and accurately represent themselves.  Dominant media conglomerates must be broken up, and the number of channels and stations that are owned by corporations must be matched by those owned by independent collectives.

"prioritize demilitarization"

11. As a collective committed to nonviolence, we demand that our communities and our nation abide by the same principle. We prioritize demilitarization of the United States because the military industrial complex squanders resources, destroys peoples and the planet, and maintains exploitative imperialist colonial practices.  We demand to cut the military budget by at least 50% and redistribute that money to fund a federal jobs program; to close overseas bases and end the corporate natural resource-driven wars, attacks, and conflicts; and to teach non-violent conflict resolution and the value of consensus-based decision-making.

"enable us to create"

12. We demand election reform in order to enable us to create the society that we want. We must eliminate the two-party stranglehold and the Electoral College, abolish the Commission on Presidential Debates, introduce an Election Day national holiday and extend the voting period over a weekend, prohibit corporate funding of any candidate or party, and amend the constitution to ban corporate personhood.

13. These points are just the beginning of the large-scale revolution for which we stand.  We have extremely large goals, and we are conscious and proud of that fact. In order to make these changes happen, we are willing to take small steps to get there (if necessary).  We will be intentionally straightforward; we will not sugar-coat our stances and experiences. We refuse to skirt around issues that need to be dealt with openly and explicitly:  we are calling out the faults of our society, and we are calling on our society to change them.

"we are calling on our society to change"

Passionate Politics, Potential Futures

    Today in class we watched the first part of a documentary called Passionate Politics about the life and works of Charlotte Bunch, an feminist activist on the international level.  Charlotte Bunch is known for her work to include lesbian issues in the feminist movement, being a strong advocate for coalition-building among different social movements, and bringing the slogan "Women's Rights are Human Rights" to the main-stage of the feminist movement and other international movements (although that quote is often attributed to Hillary Rodham Clinton).  Though I certainly wouldn't claim to be near Bunch's level, I saw a lot of similarities between her story and my story.

    In the documentary, Bunch discusses being raised in an activist household, one whose motive for service was derived from their Methodist faith.  I wouldn't call my house an "activist household," but I was definitely raised with that same sense of justice and fairness based upon my family's morals, which were more often than not faith-based.

    Through her church she was introduced to the idea of global service, and she went to college planning to be a missionary.  In that respect, Bunch and I are the same.  I knew of global service from my church and my family, and I fully intended to pursue a missionary career in which I could combine ministry, medicine, and foreign travel.  Coming into St. Olaf College, I was on the Pre-Medicine track with Biology and Spanish majors.

    In college, Bunch was exposed to the Civil Rights movement, and she was slowly radicalized.  Beginning with pray-ins at segregated churches and leading towards speeches at major rallies, Bunch became a true activist.  It wasn't until she graduated, married, and entered the workforce and graduate programs that Bunch became aware of the dire need for the Feminist movement as well.  Though I'm certainly not immersed in a social environment like that of the 1960s, there have been several things that have slowly radicalized me as a college student.  From classes that I have taken to situations I have encountered (like those I talked about in "Making a Sustainable Movement"), my time at St. Olaf has transformed me into a woman who understands much more of the realities facing the world and what I can do about them.

    After pursuing her activism in the U.S., Charlotte Bunch took on the ever-precarious effort for an international feminism.  Pursuing her initial desire to travel the world, but with a much different lens of how service ought to be, Bunch became a leading force for creating a global feminism.  Bunch worked on a macro-scale, engaging the United Nations, and on a micro-level, developing relationships by listening and learning from others.

    Next year, as I have mentioned before, I am moving to Mexico City with Young Adults in Global Mission.  As I prepare for that experience, I am channeling the ELCA's model of service:  accompaniment, which is "walking together in solidarity that is characterized by mutuality and interdependence."  Hopefully a mindset of servanthood through accompaniment will allow me to go out into the world and, like Charlotte Bunch, develop relationships of solidarity, ones that will teach me what global feminism can really look like.

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A footnote:  This is my last regular blog post of the semester; there will be an upcoming "Manifesta," but this is it for normal posting.  I hope you have enjoyed it - I sure have!

Safe Spaces and Support - Exclusively Virtual?

    For this Monday’s class we read “It Takes a (Virtual) Village:  Mothering on the Internet” by May Friedman, a graduate student writing her dissertation on “mommyblogs,” and we had a guest in class! Molly Westerman, who describes herself as “a recovering academic,” is the author of the blog First the Egg which is “a nonsexist space focused on pregnancy, birth, and helping children grow up whole and happy.”  Both Friedman and Westerman discussed some of the complexities of being a mother who blogs – from the positives to the negatives and the downright odd.  (We also read Our Love/Hate Relationship with the Term “Mommy Blogger” from The Broad Side for perspective on the language we use.)

    One of the things that struck me most about the article and the speaker (especially the speaker) was the way that these online blog communities (1) make safe spaces for certain types of people to be open about their experiences and (2) become support systems for the writers not only virtually, but concretely as well.  In her talk yesterday, Westerman presented stories that prompted each of these thoughts.

    The first of said stories was about a fellow blogger, author of Navigating the Mothership.  At first glance (and second, and third) her blog seems to be your stereotypical, prototypical "mommyblog" - a white, upper-class, heterosexual, married woman writing about her two beautiful children who somehow are always followed around by a professional photographer.  Although she is all of those things, she is also a woman who has suffered postpartum depression (PPD) after giving birth to both of her children.  According to Westerman, Navigating the Mothership has given women who experience PPD a safe space and supportive community to express and explore their feelings and experiences.  The unique venue of being a blog allows some level of anonymity in order to create that freedom.

    This unique blog situation can then grow from being a safe virtual space to concrete actions.  Westerman told us about how much her online community meant to her and how supportive they had been in her various endeavors to have children/find a job/etc.  She gave the example of mentioning that it had been a tough week, and a couple days later she received an encouraging care package from an online acquaintance with chocolate and coffee.  Similarly, Friedman talks about bloggers whose readership held baby showers for them or who raised money via PayPal to help when a spouse had died of cancer.

    Thinking about the unique position of these types of blogs ("mommyblogs" or otherwise), I wonder how and why they are able to generate support that in-person groups rarely can.  There are certainly factors of anonymity and common interests or experiences that make these virtual communities possible.  So what are the implications of that?  How can those spaces and support systems be formed so that they are more inclusive to the broader community?  Is it possible to create the same sense of a safe space and the same kind of investment in a community that is non-virtual?  Or are these features exclusively virtual?

Mikolajczyk and Me - Nebraskan Liberals

    Again, no readings this week, so today's post is going to be a continuation of my thoughts I shared back on March 1st. In my blog post that day, I reflected on the role of women in the Midwest, especially in my home-state of Nebraska. I couldn't (and still can't) quite figure out why the region of this nation that pioneered women's rights in terms of suffrage and education is now a stronghold of regressive politics that oppress women and suppress their voices.

    This week, however, I was alerted of a new development regarding progressive politics in my usually regressive state. Right now, Lincoln, Nebraska is holding its City Council elections, and Meg Mikolajczyk (Mike-o-lie-check) is a candidate. Mikolajczyk is a 27 year-old attorney who has her own firm and primarily does pro-bono work advocating for the LGBT community and low-income individuals and families. 

    As the woman who comes home and is immediately labelled as the "raging liberal" (not entirely falsely), this woman's successful campaign came as a huge surprise. I have almost never heard mention of LGBT issues in a Nebraskan political conversation, and absolutely never in a positive manner. When asked for an article in the Lincoln Journal Star to summarize her campaign message in a Tweet, she wrote: "New leadership for a growing, vibrant Lincoln," and, boy is it ever!

    Besides the fact that we will soon (23 days) share a degree in anthropology, we also take a similar stance on many issues - especially housing policy, LGBT rights, and the importance of evaluating what is best for all members of a community (not just the powerful ones). I often feel stifled and alone in my home community unless I am on the University of Nebraska - Lincoln campus, but listening to Mikolajczyk talk about issues facing Lincoln and the kind of inclusive growth she wants to see happen in it gives me hope. Maybe with more women like Mikolajczyk taking leadership roles in our communities we can start to "reassert the independence, strength, and innovation of Midwestern women." And maybe, just maybe, I won't feel so alone.