More saved comments, this time from Dreamwidth, LiveJournal, and Tor.com:
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firecat, who posted in response to someone else who had said that fatness was a kind of disability, using a model of disability as a thing society imposes rather than an attribute of the person/body in question:
The other reason I don't think this one works is that it's missing some important points about discrimination and bodies: in the culture I live in, an African-American person has a devalued, non-normative body, and people are stopped from doing things because of assumptions and prejudices about those bodies. There are senses in which being female, in many places, is having a devalued and non-normative body.
Not all discrimination fits that model: there are religious prejudices that don't map closely only ethnic/racial ones, for example. But given that none of us are beings of pure thought—we are all experiencing the world as, or in, bodies—so much does that I don't think this is a useful equivalence (or assertion of a subset relationship): "fatness is a disability" doesn't imply "all disabled people are fat". Yes, some fat people are disabled. Some women are disabled. Some African-Americans are disabled. Or, if you prefer, some disabled people are fat, some are African-American (or of other non-white groups), some are women, some are in more than one of these groups.
That said, I think there might be value in looking at the ways that some discriminated-against groups, identities, or behaviors are more volatile than others. Fat is more like disability than like some other sometimes-stigmatized identities in this regard, I think. Most people think of gender as binary. Religion is a yes/no for a variety of properties: a person is considered to be, or not be, Jewish or Catholic or Buddhist or Muslim or…. While that gets into "Is s/he really a Christian?" sort of questions, those are more likely to be about what qualifies a person as a member of a group than about the idea that someone could be partially Christian, while "partially disabled" is a fairly common idea, and people talk about increasing or decreasing disability. Race is an ambiguous one here, because race as a cultural thing is different from ancestry, and those differences and entanglements produce different answers at different times and places. We're expected to be willing/able to define ourselves briefly in terms of sexual orientation: even people who accept that there are more answers than lesbian/gay and straight may become uncomfortable with complicated answers that try to include something like the real-world variety of a person's experiences.
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apostle_of_eris, whose response to my link in the LJ Wiscon community to my post about the panel on intersectionality between feminism and other forms of activism was a claim that "As feminism is immediately implicit in anarchism, so is 'intersectionality'. They don't need to be established":
I am deeply suspicious of anyone whose response to "here are some complicated issues" is "my system solves them all without even having to think about it."
That's separate from the apparently not-so-obvious fact that even the best-intentioned people won't address issues they don't notice (such as able-bodied activists not noticing that meeting spaces aren't wheelchair-accessible, or thinking they don't need to provide closed captioning or ASL translation because nobody has ever asked for it), and that almost everyone (she wrote optimistically) is capable of overlooking privilege when they're the ones who have it. Feminism may be immediately implicit in anarchism, but that doesn't make it explicit, and it doesn't mean anarchists (especially anarchist men) will pay attention to feminist issues.
In response to a friend who is getting rude reactions to her recent religious conversion:
I figure you already know that, being an atheist, I think you're wrong about the nature of the universe. I also figure I'm unlikely to produce an argument on the subject that you haven't already heard. I disagree with you: that doesn't mean I think you're stupid or ignorant.
(Based on further comments in the same thread, it looks as though our differences may be partly epistemological.)
Over on tor.com, Jo Walton asked why people choose to read several novels simultaneously (when there aren't practical constraints like not being able to fit a hardcover in one's bag). My thought, at the instant:
I think it's partly (largely?) a matter of mood: sometimes I want something emotionally lighter than others; sometimes I want a more complex book, sometimes I want something more plot-driven, or more about character or exploring invented universes, or something where I'll pay more attention to the words; sometimes I'm up for more complexity than others. And rereading feels different from reading something for the first time (unless it's something that I know, vaguely, that I read in high school, but remember nothing about it), so that's another axis. Or I may be partway through a mystery novel and want to take a break with a different genre.
A friend of mine was worn out and thinking about a possible project in terms of of how it might be useful for future jobs. I said:
People talk about planning ahead, but when it becomes cannibalizing your actual present self for the sake of vague future possibilities, it's time to stop and plan for here and now. Don't wear yourself out so badly that there's nobody left to have that future.
Comment to
firecat, who posted in response to someone else who had said that fatness was a kind of disability, using a model of disability as a thing society imposes rather than an attribute of the person/body in question:The other reason I don't think this one works is that it's missing some important points about discrimination and bodies: in the culture I live in, an African-American person has a devalued, non-normative body, and people are stopped from doing things because of assumptions and prejudices about those bodies. There are senses in which being female, in many places, is having a devalued and non-normative body.
Not all discrimination fits that model: there are religious prejudices that don't map closely only ethnic/racial ones, for example. But given that none of us are beings of pure thought—we are all experiencing the world as, or in, bodies—so much does that I don't think this is a useful equivalence (or assertion of a subset relationship): "fatness is a disability" doesn't imply "all disabled people are fat". Yes, some fat people are disabled. Some women are disabled. Some African-Americans are disabled. Or, if you prefer, some disabled people are fat, some are African-American (or of other non-white groups), some are women, some are in more than one of these groups.
That said, I think there might be value in looking at the ways that some discriminated-against groups, identities, or behaviors are more volatile than others. Fat is more like disability than like some other sometimes-stigmatized identities in this regard, I think. Most people think of gender as binary. Religion is a yes/no for a variety of properties: a person is considered to be, or not be, Jewish or Catholic or Buddhist or Muslim or…. While that gets into "Is s/he really a Christian?" sort of questions, those are more likely to be about what qualifies a person as a member of a group than about the idea that someone could be partially Christian, while "partially disabled" is a fairly common idea, and people talk about increasing or decreasing disability. Race is an ambiguous one here, because race as a cultural thing is different from ancestry, and those differences and entanglements produce different answers at different times and places. We're expected to be willing/able to define ourselves briefly in terms of sexual orientation: even people who accept that there are more answers than lesbian/gay and straight may become uncomfortable with complicated answers that try to include something like the real-world variety of a person's experiences.
Comment to
apostle_of_eris, whose response to my link in the LJ Wiscon community to my post about the panel on intersectionality between feminism and other forms of activism was a claim that "As feminism is immediately implicit in anarchism, so is 'intersectionality'. They don't need to be established":I am deeply suspicious of anyone whose response to "here are some complicated issues" is "my system solves them all without even having to think about it."
That's separate from the apparently not-so-obvious fact that even the best-intentioned people won't address issues they don't notice (such as able-bodied activists not noticing that meeting spaces aren't wheelchair-accessible, or thinking they don't need to provide closed captioning or ASL translation because nobody has ever asked for it), and that almost everyone (she wrote optimistically) is capable of overlooking privilege when they're the ones who have it. Feminism may be immediately implicit in anarchism, but that doesn't make it explicit, and it doesn't mean anarchists (especially anarchist men) will pay attention to feminist issues.
In response to a friend who is getting rude reactions to her recent religious conversion:
I figure you already know that, being an atheist, I think you're wrong about the nature of the universe. I also figure I'm unlikely to produce an argument on the subject that you haven't already heard. I disagree with you: that doesn't mean I think you're stupid or ignorant.
(Based on further comments in the same thread, it looks as though our differences may be partly epistemological.)
Over on tor.com, Jo Walton asked why people choose to read several novels simultaneously (when there aren't practical constraints like not being able to fit a hardcover in one's bag). My thought, at the instant:
I think it's partly (largely?) a matter of mood: sometimes I want something emotionally lighter than others; sometimes I want a more complex book, sometimes I want something more plot-driven, or more about character or exploring invented universes, or something where I'll pay more attention to the words; sometimes I'm up for more complexity than others. And rereading feels different from reading something for the first time (unless it's something that I know, vaguely, that I read in high school, but remember nothing about it), so that's another axis. Or I may be partway through a mystery novel and want to take a break with a different genre.
A friend of mine was worn out and thinking about a possible project in terms of of how it might be useful for future jobs. I said:
People talk about planning ahead, but when it becomes cannibalizing your actual present self for the sake of vague future possibilities, it's time to stop and plan for here and now. Don't wear yourself out so badly that there's nobody left to have that future.
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