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David Alfaro Siqueiros, 1896-1974 — “Echo of a Scream” (1937)
It appears as though we have reached a new low in “political” discourse. It’s really quite unfortunate.
This is taken from a Facebook thread, which I know is not the best forum for political debate, but on which we all probably expend more energy than we should.
I’m not saying that Saffo’s or Skanda’s rhetoric here is in any way representative of queer or identity politics as a whole, though I’m sure we’ve all had the misfortune of having to engage in conversations like these, which enlighten no one and are good maybe only for a laugh. In fact, my friend Jasmine Curcio posted this blog entry written by her friend K. Miriam from a couple years back, which is quite illuminating. She went through all this back in the 1980s. As she recorded in her brilliant reflection, “Hit me with your privilege stick!”:
It was the eighties. The atmosphere was ripe with immanent denunciations. Politics in the still-breathing lesbian community had begun to hollow out into a ritual called “name the racist (classist, homophobe etc).” Who would be next in line to confess her privilege? Once she confessed, she too could be admitted to the ranks of the righteous, entitled now to “call out” any others on their particular “isms”… She now had an Id-entity. Indeed the self became implicitly re-imaged a container-entity either filled or emptied of privilege-chips.
Anyway, the most telling moment in this particular encounter, perhaps, is when Skanda dismisses both Arya and I as “white” “straight dudes.” Okay, I can accept that I’m straight. Whatever. And sure, I’ve got a Scotch-English last name and am fairly pale, and not overly attached to my Jewish ancestry. So I’m white. But Arya is neither white nor straight. I’m fairly certain that this fact doesn’t determine his politics, too.
Who’s making the assumptions here?
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judith butler is overrated as hell. there are a million other brilliant queers out there who are much more worth reading and listening to.
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Skanda Kadirgamar and 9 others like this.
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Arya Moghadam I’ve never really been a fan of Butler’s scholarship, though her writing has perhaps gotten clearer over time. Her earlier work on gender I find almost unreadable. Arguing along the same baseless Foucaultian lines. -
Arya Moghadam Butler’s now infamous statements on Hamas and Hezbollah as somehow representing these great emancipatory forces in the Palestinian movement is quite another matter, however. To consider Hamas and Hezbollah “progressive” or “part of a global Left” is either suicidally deluded or confirms beyond the shadow of a doubt that the Left is dead.
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Arya Moghadam Ross Wolfe, I apologize for plagiarizing you, but you pretty much nailed it the first time you said it. :)
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Arya Moghadam Also, any of Hezbollah’s anti-colonialist/anti-imperialist rhetoric is infantile, because Hezbollah lacks the deep theoretical framework for anti-colonialism that Fatah-PLO had. Replacing it instead with Islamic idealism, which if they found a way to reconcile that with Marxist/socialist thought to combine them together I could fully understand, but they don’t. Hezbollah is fully religious right-wing reactionarism.(my own words)
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Ross Wolfe No worries, Arya. It’s just random stuff I wrote on Facebook. You don’t have to attribute it to me, however. Thanks for the kind words, though. -
Bash Back Queerultraviolence Judith Butler and her partner Wendy Brown are awful, awful people. During the occupations at UCSC in 2009 Wendy Brown told her students to sit down, shut up, and listen to their professors. -
Ross Wolfe Hm, do you mean Hamas? Hezbollah operates out of Southern Lebanon, and thus doesn’t vie for power against Fatah in any direct sense. Whereas Hamas, operating in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, directly competes with Fatah-PLO for votes.
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Saffo Papantonopoulou arya & ross — do you not realize how fucking annoying you two are?
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Wren Around she’s also ableist as fuuuuuuck. This is utterly unwatchable for me:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0HZaPkF6qE
Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor went for a walk and engaged in a terrific conve…See More -
Arya Moghadam Well, I said Hezbollah, but I meant the both of them. Both representing the Palestinian cause in the negative light of reaction.
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Arya Moghadam Saffo PapantonopoulouMarxists will be Marxists.
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Saffo Papantonopoulou you mean pompous assholes will be pompous assholes? yeah. i know.
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Skanda Kadirgamar Arya you clearly know jack shit about lebanese and palestinian history and thus are in no place to comment on it. honestly, whatever line your towing for platypus or any other armchair marxist publication is a waste of peoples time and possibly damaging to peoples eyesight. -
Saffo Papantonopoulou notice how i posted a status about queers and you turned this into some sort of pedantic discussion about the nuances of hezbollah’s analysis of capital. wtf. stfu nobody fucking cares.
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Ross Wolfe Honestly, condescending Marxist dismissals are better than any of this standpoint epistemological horseshit. How did Elif Batuman put it again, “persecutedness euphemized as difference”?
I have no patience for this “I-am-more-marginalized-than-thou” pissing contest. -
Ross Wolfe haha
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Saffo Papantonopoulou seriously, shut up. you have nothing of value to say.
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Ross Wolfe identity politics is the radicalism of dunces
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Saffo Papantonopoulou you will die in the revolution
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Skanda Kadirgamar it’s amazing to watch a couple of college use marxism as a tool of colonialism. back off and stop being overbearing straight dudes.
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Skanda Kadirgamar college students* also, ross it surprises me that you even claim to have politics. having a “deep analysis” isn’t the same thing as having a political position.
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Ross Wolfe How am I “using Marxism as a tool of colonialism”? Sheer unsubstantiated idiocy. And what revolution, praytell, are you talking about?
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Ross Wolfe Well I suppose that’s still an advance over considering my gender/racial/religious/etc. identity a political position. hahahaha
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Saffo Papantonopoulou i wonder if you’ll keep laughing about it when youre in a ditch on fire.
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Skanda Kadirgamar using marx in a colonial fashion: you’re invoking a 19th european thinker as a means of generalizing a historical narrative that should be, as best as possible, treated on its own terms. i’m not opposed to using a marxist framework to study a region, but as a political basis? you’ve got to be kidding. that’s just pedantic. furthermore, i’m not entirely sure your 19th century political economy really works when it comes to describing dispossession in palestine.
also ross…just keep going. you sound incredibly racist and queerphobic right now. go on. i want to see how much contempt you can actually muster. i’m not surprised that you’re actually indifferent to the oppression of people who don’t benefit from the political and social safety that you take for granted. it also strikes me that you probably won’t understand that you’re culpable in their disenfranchisement. in other words, you’re a proud white supremacist and you don’t even know it. laugh over my dead body you degenerate. -
Arya Moghadam Time and time again, Marxist rhetoric has been used as a force against colonialism and exploitation in virtually every part of the world: In India with the Naxalites, in Africa with various other groups, in Peru with the Shinning Path. Chances are Marxism will still be a rallying cry against oppression after I’m dead, and I’m quite young.
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Skanda Kadirgamar yes arya, but you aren’t one of those people using marxist rhetoric against colonialism
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Skanda Kadirgamar don’t flatter yourself
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Saffo Papantonopoulou anything can be colonial. go into an oppressed community, with the privilege of a university education, and start preaching to people the gospel of your particular political analysis, and you are a fucking colonizer. it doesnt matter if you’re trying to bring people to jesus or trying to bring them to the telos of communism. you are still a colonizer.
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Arya Moghadam How am I flattering myself? I’m talking about Marxism as a theory, a theory that in today’s globalized world applies to virtually everyone.
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Saffo Papantonopoulou it’s not about the theory. it’s about you being a pompous ass. again, my original question — do you realize how fucking annoying you are? obviously not.
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Ross Wolfe I love the accusation of “armchair Marxist,” also. As if any of the blithering pseudo-activities to which you commit yourselves come any closer to bringing about revolutionary transformation to society. Postmodern identity politics is the dead end of theoretical discourse (and supposedly “practical” actionism).
If you were actually anarchists in the sense of a Proudhon, Stirner, Bakunin, Nechaev, Kropotkin, or Malatesta I might actually have reason to take you seriously. Instead all I see is empty militant posturing, frantic attempts to stake out some sort of unimpeachably marginalized position, and complaints that boil down to the most tepid brand of liberal inclusionism and “diversity.” Sadly, multiculturalism is usually just code for “tokenism.”
Neo-anarchists, maybe. Anarchoids comes closer to the mark . Bhaskar Sunkara wasn’t too far off in his assessment of “anarcho-liberalism.” It’s all vague and impotent insurrectionism, well beyond the pale of an “infantile disorder.” It’s radical chic, the kind of shit that Nechaev (among anarchists) or Lenin (among Marxists) would laughingly dismiss as child’s play.
and here come the threats of violence! -
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Arya Moghadam Saffo, by your own words, trying to bring gay rights to a country such as Uganda which has an absolutely homophobic culture would also be colonialist.
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Saffo Papantonopoulou yes, actually it is
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Ross Wolfe lol yes, we should be like Tolstoi said and “learn how to read from the peasants” (who were mostly illiterate). Such idiotic anti-intellectualism as yours can only be leveled by an intellectual grad student studying at the New School, who boasts an undergraduate degree from Brown to boot.
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Ross Wolfe hahahaha
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Ross Wolfe This nonsense is beneath contempt. Gentlemen/women, I leave you to enjoy your barbarism in peace.
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Saffo Papantonopoulou the thing is, we don’t have to “bring” gay rights to uganda. “we” have to recognize that there always are and always have been queer/gay/nonheteronormative/nonbinary africans. it was colonialism that brought heteronormativity to the place that is today known as uganda.
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Skanda Kadirgamar ross, the fact that you took saffo seriously demonstrates that you’ve never had a genuine threat of violence leveled against you in your life. as for my politics, i have no desire. i have no desire to provide a bibliography. i can tell you that the sum total of my involvement in the “revolutionary transformation” of society doesn’t culminate in writing a pamphlet that only someone in a liberal arts college will read. i’m sorry ross, but when you talk about powerlessness you really ought to look in a mirror first.
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Saffo Papantonopoulou Ross — barbarism? really, you’ll leave us to that? you’re not going to try and civilize us by bringing us to the telos of a proper marxist sensibility? maybe you could teach me how to use a fork, too.
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Arya Moghadam Well holy shit, Ross I think we finally reached an understanding here. That Saffo Papantonopoulou is a chauvinistic, queer rights imperialist, thinking to trying to build a culture of tolerance towards gays in Uganda. It’s taking away their freedom. Much in the same way enhancing queer rights in the US is taking away the freedom of redneck, bigoted assholes.
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Ross Wolfe hahaha…I wasn’t taking Saffo seriously. Like most supposedly militant revolutionists, he’s utterly harmless.
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Skanda Kadirgamar woah, ross. you can go to hell now.
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Saffo Papantonopoulou ross, im a she.
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Arya Moghadam So after the repeated threats of violence, now it’s Ross who should be punished?
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Ross Wolfe I’m a “we.” Must we really get hung up on gender pronouns? I’m for a fully hermaphroditic humanity.
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Skanda Kadirgamar then castrate yourself ross
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Ross Wolfe first as tragedy. then as farce. then as sitcom. then as romantic comedy. then as “theater of the oppressed”
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Skanda Kadirgamar and if you’re a “we” ross then that’s perfect, in that it perfectly reflects your egocentricy
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Ross Wolfe as performed by mental midgets
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Saffo Papantonopoulou get some real problems
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Skanda Kadirgamar and by that she means not one that you need to turn to the dialectic for
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Ross Wolfe :) well it’s been real guys
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Ross Wolfe ”guys”
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Ross Wolfe heh I’m just fuckin with ya
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Arya Moghadam You guys keep talking, I’m eating popcorn watching this train wreck you call a discussion.
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Saffo Papantonopoulou keep making yourself totally irrelevant.
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Arya Moghadam Yes, Saffo is right Ross, theoretical Marxism is dead.
Anarcho/Queer-Primitivism is the wave of the future! -
Skanda Kadirgamar i mean what’s interesting to me is that the two of you keep inserting yourself into a conversation in which you have absolutely NO STAKES. that kind of chauvinistic, busy body behavior makes it look like you both have an incredibly imperialistic ethos. none of the people who actually “liked” her comment are interested in hearing you tout your interpretation of marx the savior, marx the son, marx the father, marx the holy ghost. listening to y’all is more painful than listening to jerry falwell.
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