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Illusions of Identity: resisting (beyond) identity politics

An interdisciplinary graduate conference hosted by the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism, University of Western Ontario, Canada

October 14-15, 2006

With the limits of contemporary leftist social movements becoming increasingly apparent, and in the face of advanced capitalism’s relentless appropriation of revolutionary discourses and the rise of the moral right in North America, we feel an urgent need to contribute to the ongoing efforts to rethink identity politics. We imagine this conference as an opportunity to work through and disseminate new frameworks for thinking social movement and resistance. As such, we intend to bring together students and activists whose works traverse disciplinary boundaries in an attempt to articulate some of the possibilities and pitfalls of identity categories (gender, race, nationality, class, sexuality, ability, etc.). Coming from the point of view that the much-contested division between theory and activism is a false one, our aim is that this conference will constitute a site for the proliferation of new conceptual frameworks that will be taken up, and hopefully transformed, by our fellow activists/academics.

We are seeking papers and panels troubling, re-articulating, and creating theoretical frameworks addressing identity politics in areas including, but not limited to:

• race and the racialization of identity categories;

• First Nations and the nation-state;

• indigenous identities;

• feminist theories;

• queer theories and queeries;

• gay/lesbian/bi/trans/two-spirit identities;

• trans/figurations of identity;

• (dis)abilities and identities;

• capitalism and identity/critiques of capitalism;

• class-based identities and critiques;

• nationalisms and national identities;

• thinking coalition-building and other political maneuvers;

• the appropriation and containment of resistance;

• global strategies and local tactics;

• ‘old’ thinkers, ‘new’ readings;

• the politics of theoretical practice;

• trans/gressions, incoherences, destabilizations;

• identities and legalities (e.g. identity-based rights claims);

• law as constraint/law as possibility

• the politics of citizenship

Please send abstracts of 250-300 words by August 15, 2006 to: illusionsofidentity@gmail.com

(Please include your academic or activist affiliation in your proposal.)

Do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

Yours truly,

Conference organizers

I get mad, and then I stop being mad for a minute, and then I get mad again, and then I slow down and then I'm mad.

Last nights Lebanon-Palestine Solidarity meeting was amazing. Its so great to be organising with people who have heretofore never been political in the activist capacity. To organise and to guide others in what it means to be an organiser is a new experience. It feels good to pass along skills and ideas. To share. It feels hopeful.

Went to Illuminares last night. Bleh. As soon as the mini-donut trucks roll in, you know the "community" event has lost its whole vibe. What happened to the Public Dreams Society? When did they go so...soft? Oh right, when they signed on for the Olympics. Sellouts!

I again realised last night that i am WAAAAAAAAAAAY too negative. I need to be a more happy, posi, cheery person. Aww fuck it.

I did get to ride in an abandoned go cart down 10th avenue at 1am with half-drunk total strangers. So there's something to be positive about.

Here is something else...my darling Rueben's wedding:

Down the aisle


The vows:


One boy pinned!


From boys to MENS:



OH MY GOD I LOVE THOSE TWO!


I know I am being sappy, but I'm PMSing so I give myself permission. So there.

The worst environmental disaster in the Medditerreanean ever, claim Lebanese officials. An Israeli rocket hits a fuel tanker, leaving this beautiful beach behind.



After the attack on the Jewish Federation yesterday, I am very scared for the world. For Jews and Muslims and people of colour and everyone.
Now claims of anti-semitism in the movement opposing Israeli aggression will have more of a foundation. But it was just one man. Just one. Last night i watched the news and held my breath, hoping hoping hoping that it wasn't who I knew it would be.
They said he was a "Muslim-American" as if Muslim is a nationality like "Ukrainian" or "Latvian".
They said he walked into the Jewish Federation offices with a gun and said "I am a Muslim-American and I am angry at Israel" and then he started shooting.
Sorry. That sounds like bullshit. I mean, what he said sounds like bullshit. Its so scripted. Its bullshit.

I am not going to deny anti-semitism exists. I won't even deny that it sometimes exists within our movement. It does, but it si not the overarching ideology. Not even close.
It exists. Sure. So does sexism and racism and homophobia and classism.
But I will not allow one incident of anti-semitism - the odd, few, isolated cases of anti-semitism - allow me or anyone else to bow down to racism.

We do not confront anti-semitism with racism.
We do not comfort ourselves with the extension of hatred.

(or, well, "we" do. But I won't. please.)

SO, because I am bored and ought to be working but am not, instead I will blog. But for once in recent days, I will not blog about what is happening in the world.

Rather here are some photos from Rueben's wedding. Unfortunately the only ones I have been able to acquire thus far are of me. More of Rubie and Glen coming soon.


Rob, Nicole and I

Rob and I

Anyone remember this quote from Nietzche:

"Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy's staying alive"

Oh Israel. If there were ever a clearer case for war crimes being committed, I have yet to see it.

You claim this is about wanting to remain a state. If Israel wants to remain, you say, we must fight. But the end result of this can only be your ultimate demise. The world will back you no longer.

Yesterday you said the world had given you the thumbs up to continue. Today enraged EU members said that that was a "gross misunderstanding". Your PR machine is incredible. You lie and we believe it. Or at least we did.

The tide is turning Israel. Be careful.

I may be one of the few on the left, or involved in the movements that I am, that believes Israel ought to have the right to exist. Without Israel many people would be stateless. Without the creation of Israel, many European Jews would have faced unrelentent anti-semitism in their countries. Without any support or aid from the governments of their own countries, many European Jews were essentially forced to take up residence in a homeland where they would be safe. In the land Britain handed down to them.
(side q: does britian = g_d?)

But as Rabbi Lerner has said, when the Europeans landed in Palestine, on the backs of the Palestinians, instead of thanking them a sense of fear left over from the hellish cauldron they had just left took over, and more injustice followed, this time perpetrated by the new residents of the land now called Israel.

Israel, I fear for your survival. America can only help you for so long. Then what? The world is turning, Israel. You have to help yourself.

And unrepentent destruction of a sovereign neighbour is no way to help yourself, unless you are seeking a Dr. Jack Kevorkian to aid you in assisted suicide.

Against Civilised Warfare

Nothing has done more to corrupt humanity than the attempt to civilise warfare. Just War Theory is an utter perversion of the moral sense, a doctrine of literally mediaeval barbarism, invented by clerics to regulate wars between Christian kings.

 Its finest moral discrimination to date is that it's legitimate to kill a munitions worker on his way to work, but a crime to kill him on his way home. It tells us that to aim a bomb at an enemy soldier and kill a hundred civilians is - if the necessity is there - legitimate collateral damage, but to deliberately aim one bullet at one enemy civilian is murder.

 In its pedantic, casuistic jesuitry it still stinks of the cringing, quibbling fusspots who invented it, and retains too its usefulness to a useless and barbaric ruling class. It does nothing whatsoever to restrain their behaviour. Its only function is to befuddle those who oppose, protest and fight them. It justifies every horrific, predictable consequence of imperialist assault as an unintended consequence, and condemns every horrific, predictable consequence of resistance to that assault as an intended consequence.

"Their" violence against civilians is mass murder, "ours" is collateral damage. When John Bolton stands up in the UN and says that there is no moral equivalence between the deaths of civilians in Israel and in Lebanon, because in the one case the civilians are deliberately targeted and in the other they are not, it is to this iniquitous doctrine that he appeals.

So does Israel itself:

Israel regrets the loss of innocent lives. Israel does not target civilians, yet is forced to take decisive action against Hizbullah, a ruthless terrorist organization which has over 12,000 missiles pointing towards its cities. Israel, like any other country, must protect its citizens, and has no choice but to remove this grave threat to the lives of millions of innocent civilians. Had Hizbullah not established such a missile force, Israel would have no need to take action, and had Hizbullah chosen to set up its arsenal away from populated areas, no civilians would have been hurt when Israel does what it obviously must do. The responsibility for the tragic situation lies solely with the Hizbullah.
Information and Internet Department
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Jerusalem

The point here is this: The doctrine itself is false.
Its preaching should be regarded as a crime against humanity.
We are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of our wilful acts.

These include the consequences of restraint, of pity, of not hurting the enemy in any way you can.

They also include the consequences of attempting to make war an accepted part of civilised life, which is to institutionalise war and thus to perpetuate it.

War is not civilized, but a regression to the state of nature, and in the state of nature there is no sin. In the state of nature there are, however, necessary and unnecessary evils, and in that respect we still have to make judgements. 'All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient.' If I were to criticise Hizbollah's rocketing of Israel, which in the present circumstances I will not, it would only be on the grounds of its futility, if that could be shown.

A terror campaign lead by a legitimate government and supported and supplied by the most powerful nation in the world is the stuff of nightmares. While it can be argues to have occurred before numerous times,  I didn't imagine that I would see just such a campaign again so soon.

It makes no difference that it's being done by an air force. Terrorism is not a matter of altitude.

The argument that Israel has a right to self-defence but that its present actions are disproportionate leads nowhere. Sometimes disproportionate response is exactly right, and for the state of Israel disproportionate response will always seem right. What is wrong is the existence of a state that can exist in no other way. Its only hope of survival, spelled out clearly enough by Jabotinsky, is to reduce the millions of people it has wronged to utter despair:

Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement.
That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of 'Palestine' into the 'Land of Israel'. [...] As long as there is a spark of hope that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these hopes, not for any kind of sweet words or tasty morsels, because they are not a rabble but a nation, perhaps somewhat tattered, but still living. A living people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions only when there is no hope left.

Israel's assault on Lebanon is rooted in that same precept, and in Israel's past assaults on the Palestinians in Lebanon and on their Lebanese allies.

Protest this SATURDAY.
http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/2006_07_01_kenmacleod_archive.html#115343180929571649

For discussions of Judaism in opposition to the current Israeli government and the policies of extremism, hatred, war, violence and oppression, check out the very learned Rabbi Michael Lerner or the progressive Renewal Judaism website Tikkun.org

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               ALTERNATIVE VOICES:
        END THE SIEGE ON GAZA AND LEBANON
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FRIDAY JULY 28 AT 6 PM
SFU HARBOUR CENTER DOWNTOWN, 515 WEST HASTINGS (corner Seymour)

Featuring Lebanese, Palestinian, and solidarity voices who will be
presenting on the urgent and alternative perspectives on Lebanon and
Palestine amidst escalating Israeli agression.

Join us for speakers, photo displays, and multimedia presentations by:
* Warif Abu-Laila
* Samer Daibess
* Jon Elmer
* Reem Alnuweiri
* Moussa Noureddine
* Musa Muhaidly

Stop Israeli War Crimes!
End the Siege on Lebanon and Gaza!

Organized by: Lebanese Information Centre- BC, Adala, Lebanese Canadian
Cultural House, Al-awda – Palestine Right of Return Coalition, and
supported by a wide range of social justice groups.

For more information please contact:
Email solidarity.lebpal@gmail.com or Call 778-858-5831

For updated information check:
http://tadamon.resist.ca/
http://electroniclebanon.net
http://beirut.indymedia.org/

Its so hard not to get hate-filled.
Its so hard to remain hopeful and inspired and to press on.
Today in the laundromat CNN made me cry. CNN, never a balanced news source, priviledged the stories of Lebanese civilians injured over Israeli casualties. Possibly a first? The damage to Lebanese children is unbelieveable. The damage is irreversible. The damage will have reprocussions in the years to come.

I get so filled with hate when I see what I see. I don't want to be. I can't be. But I feel so enraged at the government of Israel that for a split second I feel intense, unrelenting, unremittant hate.

Cross Country Checkup, the radio show for the nation's right, had a caller yesterday who referred to the fleeing Lebanese as cowards, saying that in '82 Israeli ex-pats from around the world returned to the east to fight for their country. Now the "cowardly Lebanese" flee. As if removing your children from a slaughter, from terrorism, from a near genocide is cowardly.

Israel slaughters the Lebanese and conservative Canadians, never threatened in their sweet little lives, suffering at most the indignity of waiting a little too long in the line to fillup their hulking SUV, call those who flee the bombardment and the atrocities "cowards." I know one coward who I'd like to see planted in the middle of a war zone right now.

But I'm trying not to hate. Hate is so destructive and wastes my energy. I am trying but it is so hard. There is so much to hate in the world.

I try.

Its funny to look at that picture today and remember that it was less than a week ago and I was wearing a long sleeve shirt at night. Its so hot now. Sweltering, even.

I love the heat. I love it. I sleep so hard and deep in the heat. I've been turning the fan on at night to blow a breeze across my sweaty back.

Today was the rally at the art gallery. The big one. tomorrow I will post photos that I will again steal from my comrade Krisztina. It was an amazing rally. It was very fulfilling. Did I mention I love Mike Krebs? What a great guy. What a fantastically dedicated activist. Blows my mind.

Anyway, the community presence at the rally today was massive. It was inspiring. I felt so not alone, it was wonderful. We stood at the art gallery steps - the front side - for an hour. The sun beat down, it burned our skins and ignited passions. We marched. We faced only one angry woman who fingered us from the sidelines. A car drove by, red, decorated with paint inthe colours of the Lebanese flag. It read "End the Israeli Occupation". 6 years of freedom and 24 of peace and we revist the same tired slogans again. But the car was rad.

After the rally and the March Ryan and I bought cool (not cold, the beer fridge was broken) beers at the Liquor Store on Alberni and rode into Stanley Park, to Third Beach. It was hot. Tremendously hot. it was 530 by the time we got to the beach and it was still tremendously hot. We dove into the water - clean, blue green water. So clean and blue green that I could see my feet at the bottom! The trees waved in the light breeze, the tankers idled in the bay, the party boats partied past. It was an absolutely perfect summer evening in Vancouver. I could not, ever, imagine living in another Canadian city by choice. Where else can you get all this? ahhh but how long will it last?

Anyway, it was perfect. We went to Kishu for ridiculously cheap sushi at 9 and the to the Cambie where we argued with a neo-yuppie in a Ghostbusters T-shirt and a serious attitude about how you treat the poor, addicted and disenfranchised. I didn't even bother pulling out the Marx on him. He was a waste of my breath and a waste of his skin.

Rode and walked home with Ryan (did I mention I love Ryan? What a guy) and then stopped for a beer with my new friend Nick.

I feel better. I don't feel good, necessarily, but I feel ready again to fight. I think I needed to have that meltdown today. I think I needed to cry and cry and cry uncontrollably (on the phone, to my mom, who is ever so understanding), because it released that pent up frusteration from me a little bit. I'm ready to go on.

Jeffery Hayes, I love you so much. Thanks for saying that I inspire you. YOU my darling, inspire me.

Speaking of inspiration. I am a little bummed tonite to be going to bed alone. It sure would be nice to have someone here. I feel inspired. Which leads me to the question...why am I alone? What is wrong with the people in this world?!? Endless, eternal question.
Good night.

So, on the one hand I am torn.

Today at 3pm at the art gallery is the rally demanding an end to the aggression on Lebanon. At 2pm there is a march for Darfur. Funny how we've all forgotten about Africa yet again.

The world is endlessly devastating and frusterating.

I am torn. I helped organise today's rally re: Lebanon, but how can I focus on Lebanon when Africa is continually ignored and Sudan continues to be a locus of genocide?

How can I be a responsible citizen in this world? Its near impossible.

I opened the New York Times today to read that the US is speeding up delivery of precision guided missiles to Israel.  I am so depressed that I have been crying all morning. I feel so hopeless that I don't know what to do. I want to give up.