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!

Motherwork and Republican Motherhood

     This Monday’s reading was the article “Racially Conscious Mothering in the ‘Colorblind’ Century:  Implications for African American Motherwork” by Camille Wilson Cooper, an associate professor in Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations Department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.  In the article, Cooper elaborates upon the struggles and strategies many African American women employ as they raise children in the United States today.  Going off of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s term “color-blind racism” in his book “Racism Without Racists,” Cooper explores how the newly conceptualized racial order impacts African American mothers’ childrearing.  Ultimately, Cooper comes up with the category “motherwork” – racially conscious mothering that seeks to empower children through a meaningful racial identity in a society that systematically degrades and oppresses people of color.

     As I read Cooper’s work, I found myself comparing her concept of “motherwork” to an earlier concept of “republican motherhood.”  We read about "republican motherhood" in the article "Muslim Motherhood: Tradition in Changing Contexts" by Gail Murphy-Geiss, a professor of sociology and feminist and gender studies at Colorado College.  Overall, the "Muslim Motherhood" article was terrible - full of over-generalizations, Orientalist judgments, and sweeping claims with no self-reflexive analysis - however, the idea of "republican motherhood" was intriguing.  Murphy-Geiss explains that throughout history mothers have been expected to raise a certain type of child for the common good.  In her analysis, she claims that as Muslim women become mothers in the increasingly globalized world, they are "rethinking what it means to be Muslim in non-Muslim contexts" and instilling that knowledge into their children in order to maintain a meaningful identity.

     When comparing motherwork to republican motherhood, it is evident that mothers from oppressed groups constantly have to act as "freedom fighters in addition to being bearers of culture, identity and love" (Cooper) because the dominant culture surrounding them and their families despises, negates, denigrates, and/or ignores their existence and value.  For this reason, Cooper concludes that "racially conscious mothering remains an important form of political resistance."

     While I agree with her, I wonder a few things:

Why mothers - not parents, fathers, families?

What is the experience of children who are told in the home that their race, ethnicity, nationality, and religion are important and valuable but encounter strong messages in the public sphere that counteract their racially conscious upbringing?

When will we, or will we ever, live in a society that doesn't necessitate this type of activist childrearing?

Will women of color, and other marginalized groups, always have to defend their children from attacks on their very identity?

Cross-Racial Surrogacy and Reproductive Exploitation

     Monday's reading, "Brown Bodies, White Eggs:  The Politics of Cross-Racial Gestational Surrogacy" by Laura Harrison, a doctoral candidate in gender studies at Indiana University, elaborated upon the racial implications of surrogacy.  Now, because gestational surrogacy uses sperm and egg that do not belong to the woman bearing the child, women of color can give birth to 'white' babies.  Harrison argues that despite the increasing potential and popularity of gestational surrogacy, the public discussion of the trend has not adequately handled the racial implications of such technology.

     In her analysis, Harrison reveals the racialized discourse and implications of such reproductive developments through a critical historical, legal, and anti-racist feminist lens.  Women of color, especially African American women in the US, have historically been exploited for their reproductive capacities by wealthy whites - for production of slave labor, nursing white infants, raising white children, and, now, birthing white babies.  Because gestational surrogacy involves a monetary exchange, Harrison categorizes cross-racial surrogacy as an alternate manifestation of the same reproductive exploitation.

     Evidencing the lack of conversation about these issues, I only found one example of racial theorizing about gestational surrogacy in my outside research - a blog post on the Feminist Law Professors website which read:

"One could envision a dystopian future in which financially-needy Black women, who disproportionately comprise the ranks of this country’s poor, are hired to give birth to the babies of rich White couples...It would reiterate the Black woman’s body as a laboring one (on multiple levels) while doing nothing to eradicate discourses in which the poor Black woman figures as an incompetent mother. That is, the Black woman would be empowered to produce children, yet remain disempowered to raise them."

     Although both Harrison and the post quoted above agree about the nature of this dystopic exploitation of women of color, Harrison posits it as a present reality.  She identifies a pattern of cross-racial gestational surrogacy and its problematic consequences, and she labels it the "outsourcing of gestation."  This outsourcing can be international, but is also symbolic - brown bodies carry babies for white folk once again.