The Opuscular Outpost

The 'Roosters vs women' question - why is it a choice?

American politics is not my field and America not my country, so the technicalities of this one are lost on me. Apologies for any resulting inaccuracies or owt.

Anyway, this issue is being posited in the feminist communities as 'putting chickens before women', so i knew it was only a matter of time before the anti-animal-rights folks would start on it. And they have.

So obviously as a feminist (against domestic violence) and an animal rights activist (against cockfighting) this is kind of strange territory for me. If it had just been a straightforward case of a lawmaker being a misogynist dickhead, i'd have jumped straight in with the rage this has produced. Likewise if the law he had passed had been some totally trivial one about, i dunno, restricting the re-painting of cars or something. (ask a new, junior MP if you want to know the extent of weirdness that goes through the legislatory process) But, of course, a ban on cockfighting is something that pleases me immensely whatever the circumstances, so i'm not about to go 'omg omg how tf can he do that!?!?!, am i? Even if the 'how can he not do that?!?! aspect is also something i agree with wholeheartedly, because of course domestic violence needs to be put a stop to. And much as i'm no fan of having a government, they might as well pull their weight on something useful instead of worrying about the poor ickle corporations being threatened by nasty scary protesters.

The thing is, i honestly don't see it as a choice. As far as i know, he could have approved both bills. But it is being portrayed as a choice, chickens or women, and he took the 'trivial' option. Like he's an arsehole for (supposedly, we'll see what he does if there aren't votes in it) bothering about animals, rather than just, well, being an arsehole because he is one. I've seen too many Ms threads disintegrate into 'all animal activists are misogynists! You have to care about either women or animals! etc', in which those of us who don't see it as 'either/or' are written off as trolls. Then of course you get some ar activist somewhere reading stuff like that and feeling just as negative about feminism. So two good ideas become, to some people, mutually exclusive, which is sad because imo both should be more popular than they are.

And of course this ignores the connection between violence against humans and against animals. In any abusive household where there are animals, you can pretty much guarantee that the animals are being abused too. There are cases of women not leaving abusive partners because they don't want to leave their pet; husbands threatening to kill the cat or dog to get their wife to return; and of course the fact that some people are just generally violent regardless of the target. One of the most dedicated animal rights people i know works for Women's Aid. The social worker who brought the concept of the non-accidental injury to the UK has been an animal rights activist for longer than i've been alive and is still protesting in her eighties. (don't tell her i said the last bit though) And you can guarantee that cockfighters are waaay more likely to be DV perpetrators than animal rights activists are, and more tolerant than us of having one in their ranks. Come on, you've seen cockfights staged to raise money for Refuge? Yeah, right.

So anyway, it's a fucked up world where it comes down to a choice between one sort of compassion or another, or even where it is assumed to be an either/or choice. No violence should be acceptable, outside of self-defence (count defence against the state in that, or don't, as you wish folks), regardless of the target. Compassion shouldn't be a zero-sum game.

While i'm logged in, i might as well cross-post the abstract i submitted for a conference. Wish it luck!

‘No Vote, no voice’ – no longer?
Re-theorising social movements in a post-representation society

From the 1960s onwards, a body of literature evolved to explain the ‘new social movements’ which came into being in dramatic ways during this period. Such movements were apparently unlike anything ever seen before, and as such necessitated a re-thinking of the existing theories surrounding citizenship and political participation. However, I will argue that today’s ‘anti-globalisation movement’ may in turn have confounded these theories; in doing so, I aim to advance an alternative influenced by both traditional anarchist theory and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of rhizomatic resistance.

Three main assumptions will be challenged here. In traditional social movements theory, as put forward by Tarrow and Diani, a key concept is representation by the state and by social movements. The effectiveness of social movements, likewise, has generally been measured in terms of their impact on the behaviour of state institutions. In addition, social movements have been seen as something outside civil society, acting upon the public consciousness. I will argue, using the so-called ‘anti-globalisation’ movement as an example, that these assumptions are no longer valid.

Firstly, the concept of representation has arguably been supplanted by that of agency as the key word describing today’s anti-structural protest movements. From its early days – the run-up to the mass action/‘riot’ of June 18 1999 is often taken as a starting-point for this type of movement – the focus has been on ‘DIY’ politics and ‘people power’: here, individuals are enabled to mobilise themselves, rather than being mobilised as part of a ‘mass’. The vanguardist model favoured by traditional communists cannot be applied in this case. It is here where the rhizome becomes important: as an organism with no single ‘root’ or linear structure, it provides a viable metaphor for this anarchic ‘movement of movements’.

Secondly, the impact on the state is no longer a reliable measure of the effectiveness of social movements. To begin with, today’s movement is based around global networks, focussing on supra-national bodies (of finance, for example, or governance) rather than national governments. The significance of direct, official impact for the movements themselves has also reduced – how, therefore, can it be used to judge their efficacy? Instead, these movements aim to have the sort of low-level grassroots effect sometimes referred to as ‘the revolution of everyday life’ (Vaneigm 1967) – again, the focus is on mobilising individuals to effect change in their own contexts.

Thirdly, as might be implied from the previous arguments, the ‘anti-globalisation’ movement should not be perceived as a separate entity from those involved or in whose ‘everyday life’ the ‘revolution’ is felt. Its effects are maybe best described as being in rather than on the grass roots of civil society, stemming from within the public consciousness rather than feeding (or being fed) in from outside. Here, arguably, is a form of political action for a post-representation society, rejecting linear and vertical structures of influence (and, by implication, the Marxist/Leninist concept of the vanguard) and opting instead for horizontal networks of autonomous affinity groups linked together by solidarity.

The theories which have previously explained social movements must, therefore, be deconstructed and adapted to the new developments in political action: in particular, the attachment to concepts such as representation, structure and leadership need to be questioned.