K OF DEBATE

CASE- K OF PATRIARCHY IN DEBATE

1AC- FEM K OF DEBATE

1AC
Our narrative is not an isolated accident, patriarchy in the
debate space is one that threatens safety in debateUncovering the dominance of hegemonic masculinity,
privilege and sexism in debate is an important starting
point in the masculine dominated world that sexualizes,
demonizes and shames feminine performers. What is seen
as a white privilege to be protected by white men only
reinforces us as the victim
Meredith 13 [ Rebecca Meredith, debater at Kings College Cambridge, The-Fword Blog, "What does a woman know, anyway?": sexism in debating, 3/6/13
http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2013/03/what_does_a_wom ]
This is a guest post by Rebecca Meredith. Rebecca is a 3rd year politics and international relations student at King's College
Cambridge. She was ranked the 3rd best debater in Europe at the European University Debating Championships 2012, and was part
of the 4th top team in the world at the World University Debating Championships 2013. In the past three days I have received
hundreds of emails, from the Philippines, from South Africa, from America and the UK, saying: "I am a young, intelligent woman
who debates, and I have been a victim of misogyny." I have been debating since I was 14. At school it was a hobby, good for the CV;
at university it allowed me to travel the world; and on Saturday it thrust me into one of the most unpleasant incidents of my life . A

friend and I opened the final of the Glasgow University Union (GUU) Ancients debating competition. Like
the other six individuals in that final, we had won enough of five rounds of debates to reach it. Unlike them, we were booed,
heckled with "Shame, woman" and exposed to sexual comments about our appearance. This was
unrelated to the content of our speeches. None of the others faced this. The difference between us? We are female and they are
male. During the debate, some male students, including former GUU committee members and an ex-president,

asked "What qualifications does a woman possibly have to be here?" "What does a woman know,
anyway?" Afterward, one shouted "Get that woman out of my chamber!" as my debating partner passed. A female student
who objected was told not to be a "frigid bitch". Another challenged perpetrators afterward:
tournament organisers and GUU committee members begged her not to "cause trouble".
Confronting one heckler and the committee, I was told that this behaviour was "to be expected",
"par for the course". I asked whether they would accept similar treatment of racial minority speakers. "They would be booed too, but
we don't have them here." The committee accepted we were booed because we were women, but refused to take
action. The GUU has been accused of misogyny before. Some members hold an annual celebratory dinner in honour of men who
voted against admitting women in the 1980s. At a Union pub quiz I heard the question, "How many men voted against letting
women into the GUU?" met with a torrent of applause from male students. There are lovely people at GUU. Some individuals
apologised personally. But students there told us that the men concerned often shouted "whore" and "slut" at

female students. A former committee member stated that she had "battered wife syndrome", reaching the top by accepting and
ignoring misogyny. One said, "Things will never change here, they are too powerful ." I don't mind if crowds
heckle or express disapproval of my arguments. But I refuse to accept that by virtue of being a woman, I
should be abused in a way men are not. Women should not have to accept being overtly
sexualised or targeted as "par for the course" in a university which is supposed to represent
learning and equality. This incident is not isolated. We aren't complaining for fun. Many from
Glasgow University report abandoning debating as a fresher because of misogyny. One heard
committee members singing about rape. Debaters across the world share similar stories. One
was told to wear a shorter skirt to win debates; others were told that male speakers sound
"persuasive", but women's voices sound hysterical. I myself have been told to defer to my male
partner since "men are more convincing". I created an online survey for debaters worldwide to anonymously report
misogyny. Within six hours, we had over 150 reports of women facing sexual harassment, derogatory comments and abuse. We will
compile a report with ideas for practical change within debating to combat misogyny. To be clear, debating is usually friendly and
inclusive; many world-class university speakers are women. But some unions still face institutional sexism, where

women must accept sexism to stay involved and gender-based abuse is normalised . The national
media has invented details without speaking to us. One daily tabloid claimed we were reduced to tears in the chamber, another that
we were upset because the boys called us ugly. None of this is accurate. Our attempt to create change has morphed into a story about

two stereotypically weak women who cried when boys were mean to them. Commenters attacked us as "wrapped in cotton wool" and
"clearly not good enough debaters to deal with it". But debating shouldn't involve shouting over sexist abuse

from men who believe your gender makes you an inherently inferior speake r. It's not an equal
art if men have a free platform to speak and are judged on argument, while women are
sexualised, abused and judged on gender. Responses from social media shocked me: my Facebook profile was
shared by male GUU members, while university social websites placed pictures of me, taken from the internet, in their "hotties"
section. Several Glasgow student societies have disaffiliated from the GUU. The Cambridge Union has promised not to send
debaters there until sexism is dealt with. A petition to hold the members to account was set up by a Glasgow student, receiving over
3,000 signatures. In response, the GUU has promised to look into the incident and work on its pervasive culture of misogyny. I hope
they do. They owe it to many bright young women who contacted me to say they left debating because of

treatment they faced there. Above all, I hope that the hobby I enjoy learns that GUU is not isolated, but
that latent misogyny which says that the male rhetorician is inherently more persuasive, or that
girls must only win debates because of who they have sex with, must be tackled. Women debate
and deal with hecklers just as well as men. But we shouldn't have to ignore sexism to get ahead.
We shouldn't be booed for our gender or see ourselves turned into crying damsels when we
speak out. Please argue with me; leave comments challenging me; but do not refuse to listen simply because I am a woman.
Image shows a wooden carving over the door of a debating chamber, with the words "DEBATING CHAMBER". Shared courtesy of
Gavin Reynolds under a Creative Commons licence.

Blatant sexism is cis male overrepresentation in policy

debate. Feminine performing debaters experience sexism
in and outside of the debate round that result in genderrelated barriers. We are not only sexualized and victimized
but their particular ways of knowing are excluded from the
debate community. Our visibility is key to success in the
business and academic world as well as fostering role
models for other younger female debaters.
Griffin and Raider 89 [J. Cinder Griffen & Holly Jane Raider, Women in High School
Debate, 1989,
http://groups.wfu.edu/debate/MiscSites/DRGArticles/Griffin&Raider1989PunishmentPar.htm
]
'I don't usually vote for girl debaters because debate really is a boy's activity. I am surprised by your ability to
handle these issues.' This is virtually a verbatim quote received by one of the authors on a ballot
during her senior year in high school. A woman wrote the ballot. In recent years there has been some effort to isolate

the factors that limit the participation of women in collegiate debate.2 These studies are superfluous if the factors regarding
participation of females at the high school level are not understood. Unfortunately, no such formal research attempt has been made
to explain the reasons underlying the thoughts that contribute to the opening quote. The issue of participation of other minority
groups in debate is a topic beyond the scope of our discussion. The virtual non-existence of minorities is a deeply disturbing issue
and deserves further investigation. Understanding gender and minority selection of debate as an activity in high school level is useful
in explaining those selection factors at the collegiate level. One finds few college debaters who were not exposed to the activity in
high school. Furthermore, it is unlikely that a female who has not experienced some competition and success in the activity while in
high school will remain, very much less begin, debating in college. Additionally, given its competitive nature, quest for

excellence, and skewed gender composition, debate offers a micro-model of the business and
academic worlds. There are implications for female representation and treatment in these
societal roles as debaters tend to become leaders in both the business and academic worlds. As the
perceptions of women ingrained through debate experience are translated into society at large
through leadership positions, the implications for under-representation of women in debate
takes on greater significance. This article addresses several of the reasons behind female participation rates at the high
school level and offers a few solutions to the problem. All things being equal, one would assume roughly equal numbers of male and
female participants in high school debate. Debate, unlike athletics, does not require physical skills which might restrict the
participation of women. Additionally, debate is academically oriented and women tend to select extracurricular activities , that are
more academic in nature than men.3 Based on these assumptions, one would expect proportional representation of the genders in
the activity. Why then, are there four times more men in debate than women ?4 Several explanations exist

that begin to account for the low rate of female participation in debate. Fewer females enter the activity at the outset. Although
organizational and procedural tactics used in high school debate may account for low initial rates of participation, a variety of social
and structural phenomena, not necessarily caused by the debate community also account for these rates. Ultimately, the

disproportionate attrition rate of female debaters results in the male dominated composition of
the activity. There are more disincentives for women to participate in debate than for men. While entry rates for women and
man may in some cases be roughly equal, the total number of women who participate for four years is significantly lower than the
corresponding number of men. This rate of attrition is due to factors that can be explained largely by an

examination of the debate community itself. Socially inculcated values contribute to low rates of
female entry in high school debate. Gender bias and its relation to debate has been studied by
Manchester and Freidly. They conclude, "[m]ales are adhering to sex-role stereotypes and sexrole expectations when they participate in debate because it is perceived as a masculine' activity .
Female debate participants experience more gender-related barriers because they are not
adhering to sex-role stereotypes and sex-role expectations.5 In short, 'nice girls' do not compete
against or with men, are not assertive, and are not expected to engage in policy discourse,
particularly relating to military issues. Rather, "nice girls" should be cheerleaders, join foreign
language clubs, or perhaps participate in student government. However, there are many activity
specific elements that discourage female participation in high school debate. Structural barriers
endemic to the forensics community dissuade female ninth graders from entering the activity .6
Recruitment procedures and initial exposure may unintentionally create a first impression of the
activity as dominated by men. By and large, it is a male debater or a male debate coach that will discuss the activity with
new students for the first time. Additionally, most debate coaches are men. This reinforces a socially proven
norm to prospective debaters, that debate is an activity controlled by men . This male exposure
contributes to a second barrier to participation. Parents are more likely to let a son go on an overnight than they are a daughter,
particularly when the coach is male and the squad is mostly male. This may be a concern even when the coach is a trusted member of
the community. While entry barriers are formidable, female attrition rates effect the number of

women in the activity most significantly.7 Rates of attrition are largely related to the level of
success. Given the time and money commitment involved in debate, if one is not winning one quits debating. The problem is
isolating the factors that contribute to the early failure of women debaters. Even if equal numbers of males and females enter at the
novice level, the female perception of debate as a whole is not based on the gender proportions of her immediate peer group. Rather,
she looks to the composition of debaters across divisions. This may be easily understood if one considers the traditional structures of
novice debate. Often it is the varsity debate team, composed mostly of males, who coach and judge novice. Novices also learn how to
debate by watching debates. Thus, the role models will be those individuals already involved in the activity and entrenched in its
values. The importance of female role models and mentors should not be underestimated. There is a proven correlation between the
number of female participants and the number of female coaches and judges.8 The presence of female mentors and

role models may not only help attract women to the activity, but will significantly temper the
attrition rate of female debaters. Novice, female debaters have few role models and,
consequently, are more likely to drop out than their male counterparts; resulting in an unending
cycle of female attrition in high school debate. Pragmatically, there are certain cost benefit criteria that coaches on
the high school level, given the constraints of a budget, must consider. Coaches with teams dominated by males may be reluctant to
recruit females due to traveling and housing considerations. Thus, even if a female decides to join the team, her

travel opportunities may be more limited than those of the males on the team. Once a female has
"proven" herself, the willingness to expend team resources on her increases, assuming she
overcomes the initial obstacles.

The debate community places feminine performing

subjects in a double-bind they are continually degraded,
judged and excluded because of their material bodies yet
we are not allowed to discuss these everyday experiences
of violence in debate. The phallic structure emphasizes
logics that result in feminine exclusion from debate
Eisenberg 12 [Stephanie Esienberg Speaking from the Margins: Negotiating
barriers to womens participation and success in policy debate San Francisco

State.]
Particular types of argument

choices may affect the way participants experience a debate round . For
may experience some pushback to some of the arguments they wish to speak
about in debate, especially if they are trying to integrating personal experiences into their
argument. For example, Akila explains that debaters tend to treat each other as if it is a race to the bottom, where the ballot is the
only thing that matters. Judy notes that this norm of the community to place emphasis on competitive success
allows people to justify arguments that are reprehensible or not okay. Akila highlights several examples
of teams who will justify racism, sexism and imperialism as appropriate side effects of advocacies
that claim to save the lives of many people from potential nuclear war scenarios constructed
through a lens of political realism. Ivana notes that externalized logic, large body counts and phallic
weapons are privileged over personal experience or your own body. Akila feels that debaters dont
place an emphasis on trying to relate to one another, and feels that debate isnt an alternative
space where students are encouraged to relate more ethically towards one another. Like Judy,
Akila agrees that the atmosphere promotes an emphasis on competitive success that makes
debate feel like warfare, a common masculine metaphor. Akila shares: On a personal level, I spent time
writing this poem to try to convey to you what being a woman of color and an immigrant is like
under this years topic which is immigration, but because of the way that we are taught to
socialize in a sort of militarized space that is debate, that gets lost until it becomes some sort of
arsenal or some sort of weapon. My narrative is just a reason we should win because it foregrounds experiences of
example, debaters

immigrantsthats not a good way of understanding why people put themselves in debates. People

put themselves in
debates because debate needs to be less insular; it needs to be less detached from the reality of what we
talk about. While some women experienced this as a barrier, others did not perceive specific arguments as inherently gendered or
as a roadblock to their participation or success in debate. Even though Catherine adopts this particular perspective, she has become
more aware of language choices in argumentation, and explains that she frequently hears rhetoric that equates

certain argument choices with weakness, such as comparing arguments with rape or making
comments such as thats gay or other. These comparisons serve to reaffirm hegemonic
masculinity, and Catherine feels that this type of rhetoric is a distinct barrier to inclusion in debate. In
order to combat some of these barriers, women utilize argument choice itself as a tactic . Ivana, for
example, frequently deploys feminist arguments in debate rounds. She notes that even though some men in the community find it
acceptable to speak more candidly about womens bodies and sexual experiences, it is perpetually taboo to speak about womens
bodies in debate rounds. Ivana deployed arguments related to womens menstruation as one way to engage this dichotomy she is
confronted with. Thomas (2007) explains how the menstruation taboo in modern Western society is restricting Western women
from full citizenship (p. 76). Ivanas decision to speak out in this public forum about womens menstruation might be thought of as
a tactic to confront this taboo while reclaiming a sense of citizenship in the debate community or even in the round itself. By

requiring both the judge to listen and the other team to engage her discussion of menstruation,
she can call for a questioning of this simultaneous objectification and silencing of women while
establishing a space for her to feel engaged and empowered by her argument . Other women
chose to approach these tensions by using personal experience as evidence, sharing their own
stories in debate rounds. Davis (2007) argues that womens subjective accounts of their experiences
and how they affect their everyday practices need to be linked to a critical interrogation of the
cultural discourses, institutional arrangements, and geopolitical contexts in which these
accounts are invariably embedded (p. 133) This is precisely what these women are doing, weaving their own narratives
in with theoretical texts and political events situated while acknowledging the particular institutional space the activity is located in
Lucille doesnt feel that she uses tactics in debate rounds very often to overcome these barriers, however she notes that there are
instances where enough was enough and she spoke about her subjectivity as a woman . Several women noted that being
.

able to speak about being a female or femininity in general while also remaining strategic and
successful was an empowering tactic. Akila calls these types of tactics little disruptions, or
subversive instances in debate.

Education is not neutral but rather a mode to

communicate social norms and enforce bodies into
particular roles feminism in academia is a danger
to these oppressive norms
Fahs and Bertagni 13 [(Breanne Fahs, Department of Women and Gender Studies,
Arizona State University, Jennifer Bertagni, Arizona State University, Up from SCUM: Radical
Feminist Pedagogies and Consciousness-Raising in the Classroom, Radical Pedagogy, 2013,
http://www.radicalpedagogy.org/radicalpedagogy/Up_from_SCUM__Radical_Feminist_Pedagog
ies_and_Consciousness-Raising_in_the_Classroom.html ]

Many scholars that utilize critical and feminist pedagogies have critiqued the
traditional model of education as one that creates a learning environment centered
on a grading system, memorization, and an authoritarian teacher and submissive
student relationship. Embedded within this model, power imbalances are
perpetrated without much consideration for how such imbalanced power dynamics
affect student learning. Critics of traditional pedagogy argue that it overrelies upon
what Paolo Freire describes as banking, where students become passive receptacles that teachers
supposedly fill with information (Beckman, 1990; Freire, 1970; hooks, 1994; Larson, 2006). Both critical and
feminist theorists argue that knowledge is socially constructed and that schools
perpetuate certain value systems via beliefs, attitudes, and priorities set forth in the
classroom. Pedagogical practices are therefore not neutral, but rather, modes of
communicating dominance, social norms, and ideologies about social identities like
race, class, and gender (Leistyna, Woodrum, & Sherblom, 1999; McLaren, 1998). Though feminist
pedagogy and critical theory share similar criteria and goals for educating students, feminist pedagogy focuses
specifically on womens lives and experiences as a starting point for creating and learning about epistemology in
the womens studies classroom (Beckman, 1990; Larson, 2006). Feminist pedagogies insist upon a continual
examination of the way gender affects lived experience, policy, and cultural norms, particularly by exploring and
unpacking the unexamined dynamics of gender and power (Crabtree & Sapp, 2003; Stake, 2006). Crabtree and

feminist pedagogy as a set of classroom practices, teaching

strategies, approaches to content, and relationships grounded in critical
pedagogical and feminist theory (p. 131). Feminist pedagogy challenges the teacherstudent relationship and the students relationship to knowledge (Stake, 2001). Jayne Stake
Sapp (2003) describe

and Francis Hoffman (2000; 2006) qualitatively measured womens studies professors pedagogical practices and

used: 1)participatory learning: student

participation by expressing their personal experiences in the classroom;
2)development of critical thinking/ open-mindedness: strengthening of critical
thinking skills, where students engaged in critical thinking about the topics in
lecture, rather than accepting information or debanking; 3)validation of personal
experience/ development of confidence: encouraging students to see the
connection between assigned readings and their own life experiences and 4)
development of political/social understanding: helping students to conceptualize
connections between readings, their societal context, and their role in engaging
actively in social change. Therefore, feminist pedagogy enables students to critically examine the microcosmic
found the following four categories most commonly

implications of macrocosmic and hegemonic cultural policies and to decipher how those belief systems affect them on the personal
level (Stake, 2006). In addition to the aforementioned tenets of feminist pedagogy, womens studies professors often strive to practice egalitarian power dynamics in the classroom, as
well as to encourage egalitarian attitudes in general (Crabtree & Sapp, 2003; hooks, 1994;

Stake, 2006). This creates a supportive atmosphere where

Opinions inconsistent
with feminism expressed in the classroom can serve as platform for critical analysis
and debate, with students deconstructing comments construed as sexist, racist,
heterosexist, etc. while maintaining the democratic structure of the classroom
students respect everyones right to comment and critically evaluate their world.

(Kimmel & Worrell, 1997). Womens studies classes have demonstrated the capacity to heighten students
awareness of gender inequality; increase confidence and sense of empowerment; develop less conventional beliefs
about gender and create greater practices of egalitarianism.

Enhanced confidence, empowerment,

and critical thinking skills students developed in womens studies classes predicted
feminist and political activism later on (Stake & Hoffman, 2001; 2007). No current studies have
interrogated the intersections between radical politics and feminist pedagogy.

This drive to preserve a political sphere based in

solely masculinity causes environmental
destruction, conflict, hierarchies, and militarism
Birkeland 93 (Janis Birkeland, Professor of Sustainable Development,
Auckland University, 1993, Ecofeminism: Linking Theory and Practice,
Temple University Press, DS)
What, then, are the implications of the androcentric premise? I have ex- plained elsewhere how this Patriarchal construction of
reality is implicated in the behaviors and attitudes that environmentalists cite as
underlying causes of the modern crisis: competitive individualism, human
chauvinism, instrumentalism, hierarchy, parochialism, and the addiction to power.29
But perhaps more important is that the androcentric premise prevents our questioning the necessity of power relationships per sc. That is, ostensibly

gender-neutral theories protect the power structure by concealing the ideological

basis of exploitative relationships. Militarism, colonialism, racism, classism, sexism, capitalism, and other pathological "isms"
of modernity obtain legitimacy from the assumption that power relations and hierarchy are inevitably a part of human Society due to Man's "inherent

, if Mankind is by nature autonomous, aggressive, and competitiv e (that is,

then psychological and physical coercion or hierarchical structures are
necessary to manage con- flict and maintain social order . Likewise, cooperative relationships, such as those
found among women or tribal cultures, are by definition unrealistic and Utopian. In authoritarian approaches, this essentialist
conception of Man has been used to justify hierarchical authority, rules, and the
apparatus to enforce them. In more liberal approaches, these same qualities are sometimes revered, even if distrusted. Liberal
theory holds that Man's competitive, aggressive instincts should be allowed free rein
to pursue His individual interests to the benefit of Society: a social construction of
Man that justifies capitalism. In short, the dominant political ideologies, both pluralist and centralist, share the same masculine
archetype as representing humanity, although it is used to justify different means of distributing power. Now, if power relations stem
from pre-political or universal truths about human nature, the basis of power
relations is removed from the realm of political and social debate. We cannot
challenge the legitimating basis of the power structure because we think it cannot
be otherwise. Thus, since power relationships are preordained, militarism can be
justified as unavoidable or necessary, regardless of its patent irrationality. Likewise, if humans
nature." In other words
"masculine"),

will always compete for a greater share of resources, then the "rational" response to the environmental crisis would seem to be dog-cat- dog survivalism.
This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy in which nature and community simply cannot survive. Ecofeminists have mounted a challenge to this Patriarchal
essentialism, or the idea that so-called "masculine" traits are the essence of human nature and that power structures are a necessary concomitant of
human sci- ety. First, of course, it would seem from human beings' relative physical weakness that human evolution must have depended on cooperation

Second, if women arc fully human, then it cannot be ar-gued that humans
are innately aggressive, given the Patriarchal conception of women as passive. And
in its early stages.

even if it is conceded, for argument's sake, that the power drive is intrinsic to all humans, the majority of humans, women, have largely been socialized to
suppress it, so men can be too. As Sallch has pointed out,

an alternative model to Man exists, but has been

backgrounded.50
Thus we affirm an engagement hegemonic masculinity in debate creates violence
through a radical injection of feminism into the debate space
This narrative resistance should not continue to only happen behind closed doors.
Rather the strategic use of public spaces and rhetoric remapping the 1AC employs
is necessary for illuminating patriarchal myths that justify and normalize violence
against feminine performing subjects
Laware 4 [ Margaret L. Laware, assistant professor in the Department of
English and Speech Communication at Iowa State University, Circling the Missilzs

and Staining Them Red: Feminist Rhetorical Invention and Strategies of Resistance
at the Women's Peace Camp at Greenham Common, NWSA Journal 16.3 (2004) 184,
http://muse.jhu.edu.go.libproxy.wakehealth.edu/journals/nwsa_journal/v016/16.3law
are.html]
Further by turning to a discussion of feminist coding strategies, this section
illuminates how a space where "womanly culture is evolving" can become a
dynamic space of political and social critique.According to the feminist rhetorical
theorist Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, the key form of rhetorical invention that women have
used to insert themselves into public discourse is subversion. Subversion enables
women both to create a space for articulating their experiences and concerns, and it
also underscores the means and myths used to oppress them as women. As Campbell
explains, this type of invention "exploits the past; . . . it is parasitic, it adapts,
reframes, juxtaposes, associates, satirizes, reverses, ridicules, and appropriates
dominant discourse, using and misusing every means by which meanings are
corrupted and contested" (1998, 112). Inventive women, according to Campbell, use
dominant discourses to further their own ends, incorporating their own meanings
and achieving [End Page 24] their rhetorical and social goals by blending forms and
styles. Feminist rhetorical invention sometimes makes use of the contradictions
inherent in socially prescribed gender roles and the discourses which surround
them. As a result, inventive women have often "raised consciousness by revealing changing social constructions
of gender" (121). Feminist rhetorical invention is therefore resourceful and challenging ; it
reflects the intelligence, historical awareness, and artfulness of women rhetors. In addition, it opens
possibilities for future invention by speaking to an ever widening audience, appealing to human
concerns, and enabling other women to see their potential roles as rhetors. Campbell's discussion of feminist
rhetorical invention focuses on discursive forms and traditional forumswritten
texts and public speeches by individual rhetorsbut to understand feminist
rhetorical invention in a peace encampment, a THEORY of feminist rhetorical
invention needs to account for material and embodied forms of rhetoric . Further, such
rhetoric needs to be understood as collectively constructed, dependent on integrating various perspectives,

Mary Daly and Barbara Biesecker suggest ways to

incorporate women's bodies and collectively shared symbolic associations with
women's bodies as a source of rhetorical invention . As Campbell and others have
shown, historically, women's voices have been silenced and women have had little
access to the rhetorical spaces that would allow them opportunities to participate in
public deliberation and contribute to the development of public discourse . Mary Daly
characterizes this silencing: "Women have had the power of naming stolen from us" (1978,
8). Regaining a space where women can be "heard and heeded" (Campbell 1998, 12)
requires an ability to take back those powers of "naming." Subversion requires
collective acts of subtlety and daring. As Barbara Biesecker indicates in her
provocative rhetorical reading of Helene Cixous's "The Laugh of the Medusa,"
women can become effective rhetorical subjects by "'stealing' back and recoding
particular signs within a phallocentric system," most especially the sign of "woman"
itself (1992, 93). As Cixous and Biesecker suggest, women have even lost control over
the meanings and associations connected with their own bodies: viewing
themselves, their own bodies, through a patriarchal lens, women see "the uncanny
stranger on display" (93). One aspect of feminist rhetorical invention, therefore, requires a
symbolic re-inhabiting of women's own bodies, using those symbols associated with
women's bodies to empower rather than to oppress . As Biesecker explains, woman's body
in Cixous's theory operates as metaphor, becomes a conduit to the unconscious, "a
simultaneously, in one protest event or action.

resource of invention for counter-hegemonic rhetoric that (quoting from Cixous) 'will
break open partitions, classes and rhetorics, regulations and codes. '" (93-4). Therefore,
the act of re-appropriating those symbols associated with women's bodies is a way
to resist the social [End Page 25]
Inserting feminist pedagogy in debate now is ley- feminine performing objects
continue to leave and or face violence in this hegemonic masculine space- debate is
key to call into questions the violence we perpetuate in the community and key to
activism and change- this is a prereq to any model of debate
Mohanty 03 [Chandra Talpade, Prof of Women's Studies at Hamilton College, Core Faculty at
Union Institute and U of Cincinnati, Feminism Without Borders, 194-195]
In any case, "scholarship" - feminist, Marxist, postcolonial, or Third World--is not the only site
for the production of knowledge about Third World women/peoples. The very same questions
(as those suggested in relation to scholarship) can be raised in relation to our teaching and
learning practices in the classroom, as well as the discursive and managerial practices of U.S.
colleges and universities. Feminists writing about race and racism have had a lot to say about
scholarship, but perhaps our pedagogical and institutional practices and their relation to
scholarship have not been examined with quite the same care and attention. Radical educators
have long argued that the academy and the classroom itself are not mere sites of instruction.
They are also political and cultural sites that represent accommodations and contestations over
knowledge by differently empowered social constituencies. Thus teachers and students produce,
reinforce, recreate, resist, and transform ideas about race, gender, and difference in the
classroom. Also, the academic institutions in which we are located create similar paradigms,
cannons, and voices that embody and transcribe race and gender. It is this frame of institutional
and pedagogical practice that I examine in this chapter. Specifically, I analyze the operation and
management of discourses of race and difference in two educational sites: the women's studies
classroom and the workshops on "diversity" for upper-level (largely white) administrators. The
links between these two educational sites lie in the (often active) creation of discourses of
"difference." In other words, I suggest that educational practices as they are shaped and
reshaped at these sites cannot be analyzed as merely transmitting already codified ideas of
difference. These practices often produce, codify, and even rewrite histories of race and
colonialism in the name of difference. Chapter 7 discussed the corporatization of the academy
and the production of privatized citizenship. Here I begin the analysis from a different place,
with a brief discussion of the academy as the site of political struggle and radical transformation.
Knowledge and Location in the U.S. Academy A number of educators, Paulo Freire among them,
have argued that education represents both a struggle for meaning and a struggle over power
relations. Thus, education becomes a central terrain where power and politics operate out of the
lived culture of individuals and groups situated in asymmetrical social and political spaces. This
way of understanding the academy entails a critique of education as the mere accumulation of
disciplinary knowledges that can be exchanged on the world market for upward mobility. There
are much larger questions at stake in the academy these days, not the least of which are
questions of self- and collective knowledge of marginal peoples and the recovery of alternative,
oppositional histories of domination and struggle. Here, disciplinary parameters matter less
than questions of power, history, and self-identity. For knowledge, the very act of knowing, is
related to the power of self-definition. This definition of knowledge is central to the pedagogical
projects of fields such as women's studies, black studies, and ethnic studies. By their very
location in the academy, fields such as women's studies are grounded in definitions of
difference, difference that attempts to resist incorporation and appropriation by providing a
space for historically silenced peoples to construct knowledge. These knowledges have always
been fundamentally oppositional, while running the risk of accommodation and assimilation
and consequent depoliticization in the academy. It is only in the late twentieth century, on the

heels of domestic and global oppositional political movements, that the boundaries dividing
knowledge into its traditional disciplines have been shaken loose, and new, often heretical,
knowledges have emerged, modifying the structures of knowledge and power as we have
inherited them. In other words, new analytic spaces have been opened up in the academy,
spaces that make possible thinking of knowledge as praxis, of knowledge as embodying the very
seeds of transformation and change. The appropriation of these analytic spaces and the
challenge of radical educational practice are thus to involve the development of critical
knowledges (what women's, black, and ethnic studies attempt) and, simultaneously, to critique
knowledge itself.

Debate lacks an argumentation that is actively upset at

the level of inequality in this activity. If we ignore our
own implications on others through masculine political
discussions, we will never understand the true impacts
of the law, let alone debate about them. Our method of
disruption is unique, it includes feminine voices by
separating from the oppressor, questioning policy and
debate at its core
Lesage 85 (Julia. Professor at University of Oregon. Women's Rage from Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg (Champaign IL: University of
Illinois Press, 1988) from Jump Cut, No. 31 (1985).)
Feminism by itself is not the motor of change. Class, anti-imperialist, and antiracist struggles
demand our participation. Yet how, specifically, does women's consciousness change? How do women move into action? How does change occur? What political strategies should
feminists pursue? How, in our political work, can we constantly challenge sexual inequality when the very social construction of gender oppresses women? In 1981 I visited Nicaragua with the goal of finding out
how and why change occurred there so quickly in women's lives. "The revolution has given us everything," I was told. "Before the revolution we were totally devalued. We weren't supposed to have a vision beyond
home and children." In fact, many Nicaraguan women first achieved a fully human identity within the revolution. Now they are its most enthusiastic supporters. For example, they form over 50 percent of the
popular militias, the mainstay of Nicaragua's defense against United States-sponsored invasions from Honduras and Costa Rica. In the block committees, they have virtually eliminated wife and child abuse. Yet in
Nicaragua we still see maids, the double standard sexually, dissatisfaction in marriage, and inadequate childcare. Furthermore, all the women I talked to defined their participation in the revolution in terms of an
extremely idealized notion of motherhood and could not understand the choice not to reproduce. I bring up this example of Nicaragua because Nicaraguan women are very conscious of the power of their own
revolutionary example. They know they have been influenced by the Vietnamese and Cuban revolutions and are very much shaping how Salvadoran women militants are looking at women's role in the Salvadoran
revolution. Because of the urgency and violence of the situation, unity between men and women was and is necessary for their survival, but the women also want to combat, in an organized and self-conscious way,
specific aspects of male supremacy in the workplace, politics, and daily life. Both here and in Nicaragua, women's daily conversation is about the politics of daily life. They talk to each other often, complaining
about men and about managing the domestic sphere. Women's talk also encompasses complaints about poor and unstable work conditions, and about the onerous double day. However, here in the United States
that conversation usually circulates pessimistically, if supportively, around the same themes and may even serve to reconfirm women's stasis within these unpleasant situations. Here such conversation offers little

feminists have used this preexisting social form--women's

conversation in the domestic sphere--to create consciousness-raising groups. But to what degree
is consciousness raising sufficient to change women's behavior, including our self-conception and
our own colonized minds? We do not live in a revolutionary situation in the United States. There is no leftist political organization here providing leadership and a cohesive strategy, and in particular the
struggle against women's oppression is not genuinely integrated into leftist activity and theory. Within such a context, women need to
work on another, intermediate level, both to shape our revolutionary consciousness and to empower us to act on our own strategic demands. That is, we need to promote selfconscious, collectively supported, and politically clear articulations of our anger and rage. Furthermore, we must understand the different structures
sense of social change; yet in our recent political history,

behind different women's rage. Black women rage against poverty and racism at the same time that they rage against sexism. Lesbians rage against heterosexual privilege, including their denial of civil rights.
Nicaraguan women rage against invasions and the aggressive intentions of the United States. If, in our political work, we know this anger and the structures that generate it, we can more genuinely encounter each
other and more extensively acknowledge each other's needs, class position, and specific form of oppression. If we do not understand the unique social conditions shaping our sisters' rage, we run the risk of
divisiveness, of fragmenting our potential solidarity. Such mutual understanding of the different structures behind different women's anger is the precondition of our finding a way to work together toward
common goals. I think a lot about the phenomenon of the colonized mind. Everything that I am and want has been shaped within a social process marked by male dominance and female submission. How can
women come to understand and collectively attack this sexist social order? We all face, and in various ways incorporate into ourselves, sexist representations, sexist modes of thought. Institutionally, such
representations are propagated throughout culture, law, medicine, education, and so on. All families come up against and are socially measured by sexist concepts of what is "natural"--that is, the "natural" roles of
mother, children, or the family as a whole. Of particular concern to me is the fact that I have lived with a man for fifteen years while I acutely understand the degree to which heterosexuality itself is socially
constructed as sexist. That is, I love someone who has more social privilege than me, and he has that privilege because he is male. As an institution, heterosexuality projects relations of dominance and submission,
and it leads to the consequent devaluation of women because of their sex. The institution of heterosexuality is the central shaping factor of many different social practices at many different levels--which range, for
example, from the dependence of the mass media on manipulating sexuality to the division of labor, the split between the public and private spheres, and the relations of production under capitalism. Most
painfully for women, heterosexuality is a major, a social and psychological mode of organizing, generating, focusing, and institutionalizing desire, both men's and women's. Literally, I am wedded to my own
oppression. Furthermore, the very body of woman is not her own--it has been constructed by medicine, the law, visual culture, fashion, her mother, her household tasks, her reproductive capacity, and what TiGrace Atkinson has called "the institution of sexual intercourse." When I look in the mirror, I see my flaws; I evaluate the show I put on to others. How do I break through representations of the female body and
gain a more just representation of my body for and of myself? My social interactions are shaped by nonverbal conventions which we all have learned unconsciously and which are, as it were, the glue of social life.
As Nancy Henley describes it in Body Politics, women's nonverbal language is characterized by shrinking, by taking up as little space as possible. Woman is accessible to be touched. When she speaks in a mixed
group, she is likely to be interrupted or not really listened to seriously, or she may be thought of as merely emotional. And it is clear that not only does the voyeuristic male look shape most film practice, but this

male gaze, with all its power, has a social analog in the way eye contact functions to control and threaten women in public space,
where women's freedom is constrained by the threat of rape. We need to articulate these levels of oppression so as to arrive at a collective, shared awareness of these aspects of women's lives. We also need to
understand how we can and already do break through barriers between us. In our personal relations, we often overcome inequalities between us and establish intimacy. Originally, within the women's movement
we approached the task of coming together both personally and politically through the strategy of the consciousness-raising group, where to articulate our experience as women itself became a collective,
transformative experience. But these groups were often composed mostly of middle-class women, sometimes predominantly young, straight, single, and white. Now we need to think more clearly and theoretically
about strategies for negotiating the very real power differences between us. It is not so impossible. Parents do this with children, and vice versa; lovers deal with inequalities all the time. The aged want to be in
communion with the young, and third-world women have constantly extended themselves to their white sisters. However, when women come together in spite of power differences among them, they feel anxiety
and perhaps openly express previously suppressed hostility. Most likely, such a coming together happens when women work together intensively on a mutual project so that there is time for trust to be established.
Yet as we seek mutually to articulate the oppression that constrains us, we have found few conceptual or social structures through which we might authentically express our rage.

Women's anger

is pervasive, as pervasive as our oppression, but it frequently lurks underground. If we added up all of women's depression--all our compulsive smiling, egotending, and sacrifice; all our psychosomatic illness, and all our passivity-- we could gauge our rage's unarticulated, negative force. In the sphere of cultural
production there are few dominant ideological forms that allow us even to think "women's rage." As ideological constructs, these forms end up
containing women.

NARRATIVE KEY
Narratives are uniquely key to understanding social location in debate and
creating the epistemic conditions necessary for social change

GREGORY & ALIMAHOMED 2k1 (Josh & Kasim, professors

of Comm @ CAL ST FULLERTON -; EMPOWERING NARRATIVES;
Narrative Voice and the Urban Debater: An Investigation into
Empowerment; paper submitted to the Urban Debate League
Panel at the Western States Communication Association
Conference, Coeur d Alene, Idaho February 23-27,
http://communications.fullerton.edu/forensics/SCUDL.htm Ousaff
Moqueet )

The first step in orienting to the narratives of everyday life in this way is to listen to
what people say. Not necessarily to retell it in exactly those terms, but to enquire
into how it would be possible for them to say that. What kinds of assumptions in
what types of possible world could produce those accounts? Clegg, 1993, p.31).
This inquiry offers the ability to gain an insight into others existence and
epistemological understandings. The ability to conceptualize or empathize with
ones stories creates a convergence between two different perspectives. This
convergence is directly related to the unifying power of the narrative as well as
providing a legitimate means for the disenfranchised voice to be heard. Mumby
(1993) illustrates how the duality of narrative structures create a social
understanding as well as set up an epistemological device of meaning in which
social awareness is created: Narrative is a socially symbolic act in the double sense
that (a) it takes on meaning only in social context and (b) it plays a role in the
construction of that social context as a cite of meaning in which social actors are
implicated. However, there is no simple isomorphism between narrative (or any
other symbolic form) and the social realm. In different ways, each of the chapters
belies the notion that the narrative functions monolithically to create a stable,
structured, social order. Indeed, one of the prevailing themes across the chapters is
the extent to which social order is tenuous, precarious, and open to negotiation in
various ways. In this sense, society is characterized by an ongoing struggle over
meaning (p. 5). The implication of these two factors on intercollegiate debate point
to how the narrative not only relies on the social context for meaning, but aids in
the construction of that context. Debate is a unique forum to meet Mumbys
socially symbolic act. Debate offers a unique social context in that the majority of
audience members are intellectually versed on the social context of a particular
narrative (due to debate research). The public advocacy emphasis of academic
debate also allows for a cite of meaning and the adversarial positions in a debate
round allow a team to implicate a judge or another team by virtue of their position.
It is in these mock situations that debaters are implicated as social actors, and thus
are moved to action by virtue of close engagement with anothers story. In factors
of debate the concepts of theory and practice are inexorably intertwined. When
these two competing ideologies can be combined creates a holistic insight into the
human psyche. Insight gained from this holistic understanding is created by stories
(or narratives) that define human experience. The ability to construct a compelling
story can have a dramatic impact on the social epistemology, which creates a co-

constructed knowledge framework. Scholars have posited that: Stories are among
the most universal means of representing human events. In addition to suggesting
an interpretation for a social happening, a well-crafted narrative can motivate the
belief and action of outsiders toward the actors and events caught up in its plot. A
key question about stories, as with other situations-defining symbolic forms like
metaphors, theories, and ideologies is whether they introduce new and constructive
insights into social life (Bennett & Edelman, 1985, p. 156). This form of meaning
production and the persuasive potential of identification established by the
narrative can be a powerful force upon the debate community or even society. The
process of which an individuals interacts with a narrative and then how a
community reacts to the narrative is better explained by White (1987) who states:
Narrative is revealed to be particularly effective system of discursive meaning
production by which individuals can be taught to live a distinctively imaginary
relation to the real conditions of existence, that is to say, an unreal but meaningful
relation to the social formations in which they are indentured to live out their lives
and realize their destinies and social subjects. To conceive of a narrative discourse
in this way permits us to account for its universality as a cultural fact and for the
interest that dominant social groups have not only in controlling what will pass for
the authoritative myth of a given cultural formation but also in assuring the belief
that social reality itself can be both lived and realistically comprehended as a story
(p. 187) The entrance of this new form of information processing seems uncertain.
Thus, the final analysis looks to the debate community in particular and provides
some investigation as to how the persuasiveness of the narrative could interact with
the conventions and norms of the debate community.

This violence can only continue because it has

been normalized. These systems mandate that we
separate ourselves from that difference and try
and conform to the universal. The narrative is the
best way to expose violence within this space.
Eisenberg 12

Stephanie Eisenberg Speaking from the Margins: Negotiating barriers to womens

participation and success in policy debate San Francisco State, 2012

Particular types of argument choices may affect the way participants

experience a debate round. For example, debaters may experience some
pushback to some of the arguments they wish to speak about in debate,
especially if they are trying to integrating personal experiences into
their argument. For example, Akila explains that debaters tend to treat each other as if it is a race to the
bottom, where the ballot is the only thing that matters. Judy notes that this norm of the community
to place emphasis on competitive success allows people to justify
arguments that are reprehensible or not okay. Akila highlights several examples of
teams who will justify racism, sexism and imperialism as appropriate side effects of advocacies that claim to save
the lives of many people from potential nuclear war scenarios constructed through a lens of political realism. Ivana

externalized logic, large body counts and phallic weapons are

privileged over personal experience or your own body. Akila feels that
debaters dont place an emphasis on trying to relate to one another,
and feels that debate isnt an alternative space where students are
notes that

encouraged to relate more ethically towards one another. Like Judy, Akila agrees
that the atmosphere promotes an emphasis on competitive success that makes debate feel like warfare, a
common masculine metaphor. Akila shares: On a personal level, I spent time writing this poem to try to convey to
you what being a woman of color and an immigrant is like under this years topic which is immigration, but because
of the way that we are taught to socialize in a sort of militarized space that is debate, that gets lost until it becomes
some sort of arsenal or some sort of weapon. My narrative is just a reason we should win because it foregrounds
experiences of immigrantsthats not a good way of understanding why people put themselves in debates.

People put themselves in debates because debate needs to be less

insular; it needs to be less detached from the reality of what we talk
about. While some women experienced this as a barrier, others did not perceive specific arguments as
inherently gendered or as a roadblock to their participation or success in debate. Even though Catherine
adopts this particular perspective, she has become more aware of language choices in
argumentation, and explains that she frequently hears rhetoric that
equates certain argument choices with weakness, such as comparing
arguments with rape or making comments such as thats gay or
other. These comparisons serve to reaffirm hegemonic masculinity , and
Catherine feels that this type of rhetoric is a distinct barrier to inclusion in
debate. In order to combat some of these barriers, women utilize argument choice itself as a tactic. Ivana, for
example, frequently deploys feminist arguments in debate rounds. She notes that even though some
men in the community find it acceptable to speak more candidly about
womens bodies and sexual experiences, it is perpetually taboo to
speak about womens bodies in debate rounds. Ivana deployed arguments related to
womens menstruation as one way to engage this dichotomy she is confronted with. Thomas (2007)
explains how the menstruation taboo in modern Western society is restricting Western women from full citizenship
(p. 76). Ivanas decision to speak out in this public forum about womens menstruation might be thought of as a
tactic to confront this taboo while reclaiming a sense of citizenship in the debate community or even in the round

By requiring both the judge to listen and the other team to engage
her discussion of menstruation, she can call for a questioning of this
simultaneous objectification and silencing of women while establishing
a space for her to feel engaged and empowered by her argument. Other
itself.

women chose to approach these tensions by using personal experience as evidence, sharing their own stories in

womens subjective accounts of their

experiences and how they affect their everyday practices need to be
linked to a critical interrogation of the cultural discourses, institutional
arrangements, and geopolitical contexts in which these accounts are
invariably embedded (p. 133) This is precisely what these women are doing, weaving their own
debate rounds. Davis (2007) argues that

narratives in with theoretical texts and political events situated while acknowledging the particular institutional
space the activity is located in. Lucille doesnt feel that she uses tactics in debate rounds very often to overcome
these barriers, however she notes that there are instances where enough was enough and she spoke about her

Several women noted that being able to speak about

being a female or femininity in general while also remaining strategic
and successful was an empowering tactic. Akila calls these types of tactics
little disruptions, or subversive instances in debate that challenge their competitors
and judges to a moment of reflexivity.
subjectivity as a woman.

AT Essentialism
Their essentialism argument misreads our criticism
gender is a social construction which is enforced
contingently
Sjoberg 09,(Asst Prof of Poli Sci at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University;Laura Security Studies
18.2 informaworld)

gender is not the equivalent of

membership in biological sex classes. Instead, gender is a system of symbolic
meaning that creates social hierarchies based on perceived associations with
masculine and feminine characteristics. As Lauren Wilcox explains, gender symbolism
describes the way in which masculine/feminine are assigned to various dichotomies
that organize Western thought where both men and women tend to place a higher
value on the term which is associated with masculinity.23 Gendered social
hierarchy, then, is at once a social construction and a structural feature of social
and political life that profoundly shapes our place in, and view of, the world. 24
This is not to say that all people, or even all women, experience gender in the same
ways. While genders are lived by people throughout the world, it would be unrepresentative to
characterize a 'gendered experience' as if there were something measurable that all
men or all women shared in life experience. 25 Each person lives gender in a different culture,
body, language, and identity. Therefore, there is not one gendered experience of global politics,
but many. By extension, there is not one gender-based perspective on ir or
international security, but many. Still, as a structural feature of social and political
life, gender is a set of discourses that represent, construct, change, and enforce
social meaning.26 Feminism, then, is neither just about women, nor the addition
of women to male-stream constructions; it is about transforming ways of being and
knowing as gendered discourses are understood and transformed .
In order to understand feminist work in ir, it is important to note that

the feminized subject does not only constitute

those that are female-bodied but those that have
been marked by hegemonic discourses as lesser
when they fall out of the conventional norms of
gender performativity.
Butler 90 (Judith Butlerreceived a B.A. in philosophy from Bennington College in
1978 and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 1984. Butler has taught at
Wesleyan and Johns Hopkins universities, and is currently professor of rhetoric and
comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley.Gender Trouble:
Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge New York and London, 1990,
DA: 23 October 2013, mK)
On the other hand, Simone de Beauvoir suggests in The Second Sex that one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one.12 For Beauvoir, gender is constructed, but implied in
her formulation is an agent, a cogito, who somehow takes on or appropriates that gender and could, in principle, take on some other gender. Is gender as variable and volitional as

Beauvoir is clear that one

becomes a woman, but always under a cultural compulsion to become one. And
clearly, the compulsion does not come from sex. There is nothing in her account
that guarantees that the one who becomes a woman is necessarily female. If the
body is a situation,13 as she claims, there is no recourse to a body that has not
always already been interpreted by cultural meanings; hence, sex could not qualify
as a prediscursive anatomical facticity. Indeed, sex, by definition, will be shown to have been gender all along.14 The controversy over
Beauvoirs account seems to suggest? Can construc- tion in such a case be reduced to a form of choice?

As a consequence, one
might reasonably suspect that some common linguistic restriction on thought both
forms and limits the terms of the debate. Within those terms, the body appears as
a passive medium on which cultural meanings are inscribed or as the instrument
through which an appropriative and interpretive will determines a cultural meaning
for itself. In either case, the body is fig- ured as a mere instrument or medium for which a set of cultural mean- ings are only externally related. But the body is itself a
construction, as are the myriad bodies that constitute the domain of gendered sub- jects . Bodies cannot be said to have a
signifiable existence prior to the mark of their gender; the question then emerges:
To what extent does the body come into being in and through the mark(s) of
gender? How do we reconceive the body no longer as a passive medium or
instrument awaiting the enlivening capacity of a distinctly immaterial will? 15
Whether gender or sex is fixed or free is a function of a discourse which, it will be
suggested, seeks to set certain limits to analysis or to safeguard certain tenets of
humanism as presuppositional to any analy- sis of gender. The locus of intractability,
whether in sex or gender or in the very meaning of construction, provides a
clue to what cul- tural possibilities can and cannot become mobilized through any
further analysis. The limits of the discursive analysis of gender presuppose and
preempt the possibilities of imaginable and realizable gender con- figurations within
culture. This is not to say that any and all gendered possibilities are open, but that
the boundaries of analysis suggest the limits of a discursively conditioned
experience. These limits are always set within the terms of a hegemonic cultural
discourse predicated on binary structures that appear as the language of universal
rationality. Constraint is thus built into what that language constitutes as the imag- inable domain of gender.
the meaning of construction appears to founder on the conventional philosophical polarity between free will and determinism.

AT Feminism Bad
Feminism prevents state violence and eliminates
gendered hierarchies
Tickner 01

(J. Ann is a feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a professor at the School of
International Relations, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.[1] Her books include Gendering World Politics:
Issues and Approaches in the Post-Cold War Era (Columbia University, 2001), Gender in International Relations:
Feminist Perspectives on Achieving International Security (Columbia University, 1992) Gendering World Politics:
Issues and Approaches in the Post-Cold War Era May http://www.ciaonet.org/book/tia01/index.html [AK])
It is this lack of connection that motivates many of the issues raised in this book. While I have attempted to site
feminist perspectives within the discipline, it will become clear from the topics addressed that IR feminists
frequently make different assumptions about the world, ask different questions, and use different methodologies to
answer them. Having reflected on reasons for these disconnections, as well as the misunderstandings over the
potential usefulness of feminist approaches raised by some of the questions above, I believe that they lie in the fact
that feminist IR scholars see different realities and draw on different epistemologies from conventional IR theorists.

IR has traditionally analyzed security issues either from a structural

at the level of the state and its decision makers, feminists focus on how
world politics can contribute to the insecurity of individuals, particularly marginalized and
disempowered populations. They examine whether the valorization of characteristics associated with a
For example, whereas
perspective or

dominant form of masculinity influences the foreign policies of states. They also examine whether the privileging of

the realist school in IR may contribute to the reproduction of

conflict-prone, power-maximizing behaviors.11 Whereas IR theorists focus on the causes
and termination of wars, feminists are as concerned with what happens during wars
as well as with their causes and endings. Rather than seeing military capability as an
assurance against outside threats to the state , militaries are seen as frequently
antithetical to individual security, particularly to the security of women and other vulnerable groups.
Moreover, feminists are concerned that continual stress on the need for defense helps to
legitimate a kind of militarized social order that overvalorizes the use of state violence for
domestic and international purposes. Conventional IPE has typically focused on issues such as the
economic behavior of the most powerful states, hegemony, and the potential for building
international institutions in an anarchic system populated by self-interested actors ;
these same attributes by

within a shared state-centric framework, neorealists and neoliberals debate the possibilities and limitations of

Feminists more often focus on

economic inequality, marginalized populations, the growing feminization of poverty
and economic justice, particularly in the context of North/South relations. Whereas IR has generally taken a
top-down approach focused on the great powers, feminist IR often begins its analysis at the local
level, with individuals embedded in social structures. While IR has been concerned with explaining the
behavior and interaction of states and markets in an anarchic international environment, feminist IR,
with its intellectual roots in feminist theory more generally, is seeking to understand the various ways in
which unequal gender structures constrain womens, as well as some mens, life chances and to
prescribe ways in which these hierarchical social relations might be eliminated .
cooperation using the notion of absolute versus relative gains.12

AT Intersectionality
Our argument is not that gender is the only issue,
of course its not! Our analysis reveals the
intersections of oppression that allow for correct
action
Alexander, professor of transnational relations, 13 [Ronni, 3/27, Kobe University,
Militarization and Identity on Guahan/Guam: Exploring intersections of indigeneity,
gender and security, http://www2.kobe-u.ac.jp/~alexroni/TR
%202013%20readings/2013_2/Militarization%20and%20Identity%20on
%20Guam_Alexander.pdf, 7/3/14, BS]

Over the past twenty years, there has been a lively debate within and outside of IR about the meaning and focus of
the intersectional approach. 5 Much of this work has aspired to demonstrate the complexities of marginalization by
looking at the ways in which categories can at the same time empower particular groups and make other groups

Intersectionality also demonstrates how, as Collins suggests,

our own thoughts and actions uphold someone elses subordination (Collins 2000:287).
Using axes of inequality such as race, class, and gender, McCall has shown how
social relations and processes impact and shape social experiences . She suggests three
categories of complexity: anticategorical, intracategorical, and intercategorical, emphasizing the importance
of the latter because it calls for scholars to, provisionally adopt existing analytical
categories to document relationships of inequality among social groups and
changing configurations of inequality along multiple and conflicting dimensions
(McCall 2005:1773). Looking at Guahan/Guam from an intercategorical perspective along
axes of gender and nationality can reveal the ways race/indigeneity is devalorized
and hidden by a racialized category of citizenship , e.g. American on the one hand and notions of
the noble savage and pure indigeneity on the other. It also highlights the tensions between CHamoru
social relations based on interdependence, family and harmony and Western notions centering on
and/or the diversity within them invisible.

individual merit, private property, and gendered public/private spaces. In this regard, one might question whether
even critical theory is able to overcome the notion that there is a particular individual entity which is silently
presupposed when we use the concept of identity (Papadopoulos 2008:140). Can American concepts of the self as
an independent individual co-exist with CHamoru understandings of the self as part of an interconnected and
interdependent web of extended family? How do they play out when they are contained within one body?

AT: Util
Utilitarianism justifies a logic domination by ranking outcomes
in terms of what is most beneficial for the masculine dominant
while ignoring the magnitude of risk and interconnectedness
for nature and the feminine other.
Plumwood, Australian Research Council Fellow at the
University of Sydney, environmental activist and philosopher,
author, 02
(Val, 11-3-02, Routledge, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason,
http://www.lightforcenetwork.com/sites/default/files/Environmental%20Culture%20The%20Ecological%20Crisis
%20of%20Reason%20-%20Val%20Plumwood.pdf, accessed 7-5-14, YLP)
Singer's Minimalism is also a political position urging minimal departure from prevailing liberal, humanistic and
Enlightenment assumptions and from the present system of economic rationality."" But surely an ecological society
will require more than minimal departures from these systems, none of which have been innocent bystanders in the
development of the rational machinery which is bringing the stripping of the planet for the benefit of a small elite of

Utilitarianism reproduces many elements of

rationalism, including the adoption of universal, abstract mathematicallyexpressible formulae for decision, in the best universalist/Impersonalist tradition.
Also in the rationalist tradition is the content of the Utilitarian formula, with its
maximisations (always damaging), illusory precision, its intellectualist reduction of ethics
to a matter of rational calculation and quantification, and its corresponding
reduction of the important dimensions of decision to aspects of life supposedly
susceptible to these rational manipulations . And as we have seen, awareness, the chief ground of
humans to a high point of rational refinement. Singer's

ethical consideration, is one, but only one, possible variation on reason or mind, although one that modernism can
tie to preferences and hence to agency and property ownership. The most serious objection to my mind however is

any ecological or animal ethics based on Singer's Utilitarianism is committed to

a massive program of ranking, quantification and comparison between beings and
species - a program which, as I argue in the next chapter, is unworkable, ethically
repugnant, and built on a problematic reading of equality. Theoretically, ranking
comparisons and tradeoffs between beings are insisted upon by Utilitarianism at
virtually every level. This emphasis on ranking does not encourage the kind of
thinking that aims for mutual, negotiated outcomes, but rather ones that sanction a
sacrificial order determined on the basis of greater approximations to the human.
that

AT: Resentment
Resentment is sometimes a necessary response to
patriarchy Nietzsche interpretation of
ressentiment forces women to remain complacent
Stringer 2014 Dr. Rebecca Stringer is a Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies at
University of Otago. Knowing Victims: Feminism, Agency and Victim Politics in
Neoliberal Times. Women and Psychology. Routledge (New York, New York).
Singer (L I 9831 1 998) situates Nietzsche within a long tradition of thought which
caricatures womans anger in order to delegitimate it (p. 178) and argues that the
gendered theme of ressentiment in Nietzsches philosophy operates as an
apologetics of male dominance. Nietzsche treats resentment, hostility and
vengefulness as entirely unoccasioned (p, 176) quintessentially feminine instincts
character traits, rather than effects of domination and deduces from this
womens weakness, thus their suitability to a position of social inferiority. Nietzsche
mistakes survival tactics for instincts (p. 177): resentment, hostility and
vengefulness are responses to social inferiority, not signs of its naturalness. Singer
argues: The refusal of women to accept this situation [patriarchal dominance] is a
sign of their strength. So long as women are kept secondary and inferior they have
no good reason not to resent their predicament. Nietzsches demand that women
abandon that attitude is an impossible and self-serving demand. (p. 179) As Singer
points out, feminism is first situated as a politics of ressentiment by Nietzsche
himself. Rather than see feminism as a bid to move beyond the circumstances that
breed resentment, Nietzsche sees feminism as an expression of feminine
resentment that assumes the form of intra-female vengeance: [Nietzsche argues]
that any effort by women to transcend their situation is in fact only a retrospective
movement of resentment. Any effort toward emancipation by women is transformed
by this analysis into a gesture of vengeance by abortive women against their
fertile and well-adjusted sisters. (p. 175) Against Nietzsche, Singer argues that
resentment is not quintessentially feminine but is instead occasioned by patriarchal
social relations; and Singer situates resentment not simply as a burden of
oppression hut as a sign of strength and of the ability to challenge the
configurations of power that occasion resentment.

AT: violence declining

Violence hasnt decreased it has SHIFTED
Pilisuk 1 [Marc, Professor at the Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center in San Francisco and Professor Emeritus at
the University of California, GLOBALISM AND STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE, in Peace, Conflict, and Violence: Peace Psychology for the 21
st Century, Christie, D. J., Wagner, R. V., & Winter, D. A. (Eds.), http://academic.marion.ohio-state.edu/dchristie/Peace
%20Psychology%20Book_files/Chapter%2013%20-%20Globalism%20%26%20Structural%20Violence%20(Pilisuk).pdf]

The global market has created winners and losers, a polarization of income greater than at any
time since records have been kept. In 1997, the worlds 477 billionaires (up from 358 the year before) had combined
earnings greater than the poorer half of the entire worlds population (Korten, 1999). Corporate growth
increased 11 percent, and CEOs from the major corporations in-5 creased their incomes by 50 percent. Of the 100 largest economies
in the world, 51 are now corporations rather than nation-states (Hacker, 1997; Korten, 1995). Between 1950 and 1997, the world
economy grew six-fold, to a total of $29 trillion. Yet each year, twelve million children under five years of age die33,000 per day
the overwhelming majority from preventable illnesses. An equal number survive with permanent disabilities that could have been
prevented (U.N. Development Programme, 1997). Wealthy nations like the United States are not immune from
devastating economic polarization. In 1996, the top 5 percent of U.S. households collected 21.4 percent of the national income, the
highest level ever recorded. The income of the lowest 20 percent decreased by 11 percent (Hacker, 1997; U.S. Census, 1997a). In
that time period, approximately 20 million Americans did not have enough to eata 50 percent rise since 1985 (U.S. Census,
1997b). Twenty-one million people used food banks or soup kitchens, but 70,000 people were turned away when supplies ran out
(Alaimo, Briefel, Frongillo, & Olson, 1988; Lamison-White, 1997). Close to 2 million people become homeless each year (Fagan,

Poverty inflicts psychological scars as

well; it is an experience of scarcity amidst affluence. For many reasons, such as those discussed by Opotow (this volume),
1998). Limited material resources are not the only plight of poor people.

poverty produces the scorn of others and the internalized scorn of oneself. Indigence is not just about money, roads, or TVs, but also
about the power to determine how local resources will be used to give meaning to lives. The power of global corporations in local
communities forces people to depend on benefits from afar. Projected images of the good life help reduce different cultural values

world is dividing into a

small group of 6 haves and a growing group of paupers. This division of wealth inflicts a level of
structural violence that kills many more persons than have died by all direct acts of
violence and by war.
to the one global value of money. Meanwhile, money becomes concentrated in fewer hands. The

[CONTINUED]
GLOBALIZATIONS STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE ON WOMENS HEALTH

Wherever the global economy expands into poor areas and replaces the means for local livelihood, HIV
spreads among poor women (Daily, Farmer, Rhatigan, Katz, & Furin, 1995). Lacking decent legal employment, the
women become involved with drug traffickers and prostitution. Prostitution is an outgrowth of structural
violence. The United Nations estimates that in 1997, there were 57 million women and child prostitutes.
Thirty thousand hospitality girls are registered in the Philippines, but the actual number of prostitutes is about 75,000 (Rosenfeld,
1997). Originally, these prostitutes served two large American military bases, welcomed in the Philippines under the dictatorial
regime of Ferdinand Marcos. After Marcos was forced from power, Subic Air Force Base was turned into a free-trade zone, bringing in
150 large corporations (Barry, 1995; Rosenfeld, 1997). The AsiaPacific Economic Forum considered the Philippines the best place for
investment among ten Asian Pacific countries. The benefits, however, have not reached the women, who continue to sell their

Ukraine has surpassed Thailand as the

center of the global business in trafficking women . Young European women are in demand, and the
bodies even with the increased risk of HIV infection. Meanwhile, the

Ukraine, economically devastated by its entrance into the global economy, has provided the supply. Thirty applicants compete for
every job in the Ukraine. The average salary today is less than thirty dollars a month, but only11 half that in the small towns where
criminal gangs recruit women with promises of employment in other countries (Specter, 1998). In Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan

the livelihood choices open to poor women are restricted. The HIV
epidemic is spreading rapidly among poor women of color . The incidence is high wherever the global
Africa, and U.S. cities,

economy replaces the means for local livelihood (Daily et al., 1995). The increase is combined with minimal access to treatment,
which is also limited by the low tax base needed to lure global capital.

AT: violence declining (pinker)

Pinkers method is flawed it masks the uneven geographies of
violence.
Gray 2011 John, Emeritus Professor of European Thought @ London School of Economics Delusions of
peace 9-21

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/09/john-gray-steven-pinker-violence-review/

In much the same way that rich societies exported their pollution to developing
countries, the societies of the highly-developed world exported their conflicts . They

were at war with one another the entire timenot only in Indo-China but in other parts of Asia, the Middle East,
Africa and Latin America. The Korean war, the Chinese invasion of Tibet, British counter-insurgency warfare in
Malaya and Kenya, the abortive Franco-British invasion of Suez, the Angolan civil war, decades of civil war in the
Congo and Guatemala, the Six Day War, the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the
Iran-Iraq war and the Soviet-Afghan warthese are only some of the armed conflicts through which the great
powers pursued their rivalries while avoiding direct war with each other. When the end of the Cold War removed the

war did not end. It continued in the first Gulf war, the Balkan wars,
Chechnya, the Iraq war and in Afghanistan and Kashmir, among other conflicts. Taken together
these conflicts add up to a formidable sum of violence. For Pinker they are minor,
peripheral and hardly worth mentioning. The real story, for him, is the outbreak of peace in advanced
Soviet Union from the scene,

societies, a shift that augurs an unprecedented transformation in human affairs.

[CONTINUES]
it is easy for liberal humanists to pass
over the respects in which civilisation has retreated. Pinker is no exception. Just as he
writes off mass killing in developing countries as evidence of backwardness without
enquiring whether it might be linked in some way to peace in the developed world, he celebrates
recivilisation in America without much concern for those who pay the price of the
recivilising process. Focusing on large, ill-defined cultural changesa decline of the values of respectability
No doubt we have become less violent in some ways. But

and self-control in the 1960s, for example, which he tells us resulted from the influence of the counterculturehis
analysis has a tabloid flavour, not improved by his repeated recourse to not always very illuminating statistics. One
set of numbers does stand out, however. By the early 1990s Americans had gotten sick of the muggers, vandals
and drive-by shootings. The result is clear: Today

more than two million Americans are in jail,

the highest incarceration rate on the planet. This works out to three-quarters of a percent of the
entire population and a much larger percentage of young men, especially African Americans. (Again the italics are

The astonishing numbers of black young men in jail in the US is due to the
disproportionate impact on black people of the decivilising process , notably the high
Pinkers.)

rate of black children born out of wedlock and what Pinker sees as the resulting potential for violence in families

While massive imprisonment has not

reversed this trend, it removes the most crime-prone individuals from the streets,
incapacitating them. Americas experiment in mass incarceration is, apparently, an
integral part of the recivilising process . The vast growth of the American penal state, reaching a size
(black or white) that lack the civilising influence of women.

not achieved in any other country, does not immediately present itself as an advance in civilisation. A large part of
the rise in the prison population has to do with Americas repressive policies on drugs, which Pinker endorses when
he observes: A regime that trawls for drug users or other petty delinquents will net a certain number of violent
people as a by-catch, further thinning the ranks of the violent people who remain on the streets. While it may be
counter-productive in regard to its stated goal of controlling drugs use, it seems Americas prohibitionist regime
offers a useful means of banging up troublesome people. The possibility that mass incarceration of young males

Highly uneven access to

education, disappearing low-skill jobs, cuts in welfare and greatly increased
economic inequality are also disregarded, even though these factors go a long way in explaining
may be in some way linked with family breakdown is not considered.

why there are so many poor blacks and so few affluent whites in prison in America today. Talking to the vacuum
cleaner salesman and part-time British agent James Wormold in Graham Greenes Our Man in Havana, the Cuban
secret policeman Captain Segura refers to the torturable class: those, chiefly the poor, who expect to be tortured
and who (according to Segura) accept the fact. The poor in America may not fall exactly into this categoryeven if

there is certainly
an imprisonable class in the U nited S tates, largely composed of people that Pinker
some of the practices to which they are subject in US prisons are not far from torture. But

describes as decivilised, and once they have been defined in this way there is a kind of logic in
consigning this category of human beings to the custody of Americas barbaric
justice system.

!-PATRIARCHY
Patriarchy leads to war, prolif, environmental
destruction, and eventually extinction
Warren and Cady 94Warren is the Chair of the Philosophy Department at Macalester College and Cady is Professor
of Philosophy at Hamline University (Karen and Duane, Feminism and Peace: Seeing Connections, p. 16, JSTOR,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3810167.pdf)
Operationalized, the evidence of patriarchy as a dysfunctional system is found in the behaviors to which it gives rise, (c), and the
unmanageability, (d), which results. For example, in the United States, current estimates are that one out of every

three or four women will be raped by someone she knows; globally, rape, sexual harassment,
spouse-beating, and sado-masochistic pornography are examples of behaviors practiced,
sanctioned, or tolerated within patriarchy. In the realm of environmentally destructive behaviors, strip-mining,
factory farming, and pollution of the air, water, and soil are instances of behaviors maintained
and sanctioned within patriarchy. They, too, rest on the faulty beliefs that it is okay to "rape the
earth," that it is "man's God-given right" to have dominion (that is, domination) over the earth ,
that nature has only instrumental value, that environmental destruction is the acceptable price we pay for "progress."And the
presumption of warism, that war is a natural, righteous, and ordinary way to impose dominion on a people or nation, goes hand in
hand with patriarchy and leads to dysfunctional behaviors of nations and ultimately to international unmanageability. Much of

the current" unmanageability" of contemporary life in patriarchal societies , (d), is then viewed
as a consequence of a patriarchal preoccupation with activities, events, and experiences that
reflect historically male-gender identified beliefs, values, attitudes, and assumptions. Included
among these real-life consequences are precisely those concerns with nuclear proliferation,
war, environmental destruction, and violence toward women , which many feminists
see as the logical outgrowth of patriarchal thinking. In fact, it is often only through observing these dysfunctional

behaviors-the symptoms of dysfunctionality that one can truly see that and how patriarchy serves to maintain and perpetuate them.
When patriarchy is understood as a dysfunctional system, this "unmanageability" can be seen for what it is-as a predictable and thus
logical consequence of patriarchy.'1 The theme that global environmental crises, war, and violence generally are predictable and
logical consequences of sexism and patriarchal culture is pervasive in ecofeminist literature (see Russell 1989, 2). Ecofeminist
Charlene Spretnak, for instance, argues that "militarism and warfare are continual features of a patriarchal

society because they reflect and instill patriarchal values and fulfill needs of such a system .

Acknowledging the context of patriarchal conceptualizations that feed militarism is a first step toward reducing their impact and
preserving life on Earth" (Spretnak 1989, 54). Stated in terms of the foregoing model of patriarchy as a dysfunctional social system,
the claims by Spretnak and other feminists take on a clearer meaning : Patriarchal conceptual frameworks

legitimate impaired thinking (about women, national and regional conflict, the environment)
which is manifested in behaviors which, if continued, will make life on earth difficult, if
not impossible. It is a stark message, but it is plausible. Its plausibility lies in understanding the conceptual roots of various
woman-nature-peace connections in regional, national, and global contexts.

S-ABJECTIONS
Performing abjection is an effective political
strategy to disrupt the systems of domination
which attempt to surveil and securitize the
feminine body
Lockford 4 (Lisa Lockford, Professor of Acting, Voice and Performance Studies,
Bowling Green State University, 2004 Performing Femininity: Rewriting Gender
Identity, DS)
The strategic use of self-abnegation in performance for political or subversive ends
has been used by various women in a variety of performances and performative
contexts. This strategy is particularly evident in womens performance art. Karen Finley smearing

canned yams across her bare buttocks, Annie Sprinkle offering up her cervix for scrutiny by audience while her bad
points are marked and remarked upon are images that challenge traditional notions of decency, propriety, and
standards for appropriate performance content. They simultaneously level a range of feminist cultural critique.

These, and other startling images like them, remain charged with an abiding currency not
only as they linger in the minds of viewers, but also as they perpetuate a wealth of
contested critical discourse in their aftermath . Performance art resists categorization
and therefore exceeds documentation and definition as Jeanie Forte argues (Womens
Performance Art, 217; cf. Phelan, Unmarked, 146). Nevertheless, scholars continue to use a
variety of terms with which to catalogue transgressive representations in womens
performance art: Elinor Fuchs has considered the obscene body, Catherine Schuler
and Jill Dolan the pornographic body, Joanna Frueh the erotic body, Shannon
Bell the prostitute body, Peggy Phelan the unmarked body, and Rebecca
Schneider the explicit body. The evocative terminology used by these and other critics and scholars
attempts to capture the recurrence in womens performance art of both psychic and physical exposure and the

tendency to transgress neat modernist distinctions between public and private

spheres. Rather than denoting discrete descriptive categories, these bodies mark the meaning of
a given performance across a range of overlapping critical foci. Some critics seek to
identify performative strategiesoften with clearly identifiable performative
behaviors deliberately and consciously employed by the performer. Other focus on the
emotional and political responses. For art historian and performance artist Joanna Frueh, for example, the erotic
informs both her critical work on the page as well as her performance work on the stage. I am exploring here what I
call the abject body. I use the notion of the abject as a lens with which to view the performances I describe in these
pages. Like the performance artists I cite above, my performances critique and resist cultural standards and their
ideological mandates. Yet, as Marvin Carlson notes ,

one characteristic common to many

performances that are critical and subversive, what he calls resistant
performances, is how such performances play a dangerous game . . . as a double
agent (Performance, 173), for they are both complicitous with and critical of reigning in
both these ways and therefore my performances require that you think twice about
them. Furthermore, insofar as performing abjection is subversive, it is also, paradoxically, a
strategy that potentially produces a refusal of abjection ; it subverts by negating the
social and cultural sanctions and punishments that audiences in their initial
response might feel compelled to impose. The abject in my performancesthose
enactments that produce repulsion in my spectators or alienation for meis the site
of critical focus for this project. How the abject can function as a performative
strategy or as a spectatorial position reveals the potentially subversice power of the
abject body. The abject, through its strategic deployment and visceral response,
brings into relief both performer and spectator agency . I mark the differences between these
two positions and the agency specific to each by employing the term abjection for the general concept, the
phrase performing abjection for the performative strategy, and the term abjectification for what audience

members do in response to their exposure to what they consider to be an abject body. Toward a Definition of the
Abject Body Julia Kristeva explores the experience of abjection in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Kristeva
principally rests her argument upon the notion of abjection as a composite of judgment and affect (10). While for
Kristeva the abject is clearly a state of being, abjection is the active reaction summoned in the individual in

that attaining abject status is

not something one would willingly seek (Powers of Horror, 209); thus, abjection occurs as a
response to the unwitting and/or unalterable abject status of the other . For Kristeva,
abjection is the process by which the self delineates itself from the radically
excluded and therefore abject other (Powers of Horror, 2). To render something, or some other, abject
is the fitting response to that which is defiled. Yet, beyond being defiled, the abject transgresses.
The abject transgresses the boundaries of the clean, the pure, and the proper (Powers
of Horror, 85); it transgresses the distinctions between the sacred and profane; it
disturbs identity, system, order (Powers of Horror, 4). Moreover, the abject is above all ambiguity
(Powers of Horror, 9). In short, the abject is that which is both clean and dirty, that which is
both sacred and profane, that which breaks borders and is yet held tightly within
them. Furthermore, according to Kristeva, if someone personifies abjection . . . it is a woman, any woman, the
woman as a whole (Powers of Horror, 85). For women are, among other things, ambiguous:
whether capable of child-bearing or not, as embodiments of the maternal they are
sacred; whether post-menopausal or not, as being whose blood is known to flow out over the borders of their
response to abject others and abject objects. Accordingly Kristeva argues

bodies, they are profane. The abject breaks the law and women break the Law of the Father simply by being

Thus, the abject body is radically excluded, a transgressor of borders and law,
unclean, unclear, and most aptly personified by women. It is against this
background of womens always already abject status that my performances are
engaged. Despite Kristevas caveat that no person would willingly do so, many feminist performers do
women.

deliberately embody abjection as a means of furthering their varied critical feminist agendas. The performances I

self-abjection enacted as a strategy for

cultural or contextual critique. Moreover, each performance transgresses explicit or
implicit borders purposefully while generating criticism for the ambiguity of their
messages. The various performances I describe throughout this work enable me to distinguish different uses of
discuss in the following chapters employ some form of

abjection as a performative strategy, to identify the ways spectators abjectify a performing other, and also to
suggest the range of performances for which the concept of the abject body may apply.

S-MICROAGGRESSIONS
Only by performativity addressing
microaggressions can we solve broader power
relations
Kulynych 97 (Jessica J. Kulynych, Assistant Professor of Political Science at
Winthrop University, 1997, Performing Politics: Foucault, Habermas, and
Postmodern Participation, Polity, DS)
Participation as resistance compels us to expand the category of political
participation. Whereas traditional studies of participation delimit political
participation from other "social" activities, once participation is defined as
resistance this distinction is no longer tenable. Bonnie Honig suggests that
performative action is an event, an agonistic disruption of the ordinary sequence of
things, a site of resistance of the irresistible, a challenge to the normalizing rules
that seek to constitute, govern, and control various behaviors . And, [thus,] we might be in a
position to identify sites of political action in a much broader array of constations, ranging from the self-evident

We might then
be in a position to act-in the private realm." A performative concept of participation
as resistance explodes the distinction between public and private, between the
political and the apolitical. As Foucault explains, what was formerly considered
apolitical, or social rather than political, is revealed as the foundation of
technologies of state control. Contests over identity and everyday social life are not
merely additions to the realm of the political, but actually create the very character
of those things traditionally considered political . The state itself is "superstructural in relation to a
truths of God, nature, technology and capital to those of identity, of gender, race and ethnicity.

whole series of power networks that invest the body, sexuality, the family, kinship, knowledge, technology and so

contestations at the micro-level, over the intricacies of everyday life,

that provide the raw material for global domination, and the key to disrupting global
strategies of domination. Therefore, the location of political participation extends
way beyond the formal apparatus of government, or the formal organization of the
workplace, to the intimacy of daily actions and iterations. A performative
understanding of political participation demands recognition of a broader array of
actors and actions as well. Performative participation is manifest in any activity that
resists the technological and bureaucratic construction of privatized client-citizens,
or reveals the contingency of contemporary identities. Political action, understood in this
forth."72 Thus it is

sense, does not have to be intentional, rational, and planned; it may be accidental, impulsive, and spontaneous. It
is the disruptive potential, the surprising effect, rather than the intent of an action that determines its status as
participation. Consequently, studies of participation must concern themselves not just with those activities we
intentionally take part in and easily recognize as political participation, but also with those accidental, unplanned,
and often unrecognized instances of political participation. If resistance is a matter of bringing back into view things
that have become self-evident, then we must be prepared to recognize that consciousness of the contingency of
norms and identities is an achievement that happens through action and not prior to action. Performative
participation is manifest in any action, conscious or unconscious, spontaneous or organized, that resists the
normalizing, regularizing, and subjectifying confines of contemporary disciplinary regimes. Such a concept of
political participation allows us to see action where it was previously invisible. So where Gaventa, in his famous
study of Appalachian miners, sees quiescence in "anger [that is] poignantly expressed about the loss of homeplace,
the contamination of streams, the drain of wealth, or the destruction from the strip mining all around ... [but is only]

a
concept of performative resistance sees tactics and strategies that resist not only
the global strategies of economic domination, but also the construction of apathetic,
quiescent citizens. When power is such that it can create quiescence, then the definition of political
individually expressed and shows little apparent translation into organized protest or collective action,""

participation must include those forms of political action that disrupt and counter quiescence. A concept of political
participation that recognizes participation in sporadically expressed grievances, and an "adherence to traditional
values" by citizens faced with the "penetration of dominant social values," is capable of seeing not only how power

precludes action but also how power relationships are "not altogether successful in shaping universal
acquiescence." "

CASE- K OF ANTI-BLACKNESS IN
DEBATE

1AC K OF ANTIBLACKNESS IN DEBATE

How many more times are we going to be faced with a racially violent
incident that then gets downplayed, backpedaled, and the narrative
manipulated to make the black students who were attacked look like they
were instead the attackers? I happen to love debate and think this activity
can be incredibly beneficial for kids to participate in. But I refuse to sit on
the sidelines as a spectator to events like this while at the same time try
and ethically rationalize being a coach to debaters of color. I just can't.
Not enough people are ever willing to speak up. Everyone who is now
doubting this incident needs to take a long hard look in the mirror and
asks themselves why it's so hard for them to believe something black
coaches and students have been saying over and over and over and over
again.
- Sarah Rozhenko
The inequalities Black debaters face are continually ignored.
Resistance Debate 12 (Rashad, Lawyer/Winner of CEDA/Coach at Bx Law,
Shanara Rose, Professor of African American Studies at U of Pit, Jillian Marty, Former
Towson Coach,/Former Debater, Amber Kelsie, Former Member of the IMPACT
Coalition, works along Dr. Brinkley at U of Pit, An Open Letter to Sarah Spring, TR,
http://resistanceanddebate.wordpress.com/2012/11/12/an-open-letter-to-sarahspring/)

Lack of community discussion is neither random nor power-neutral. We have

tried to have discussions. These discussions have been regularly derailedin
wrong forum arguments, in the demand for evidence, in the unfair
burdens placed on the aggrieved as a pre-requisite for engagement. Read
the last ten years of these discussions on edebate archives: Ede Warner on
edebate and move forward to Rashad Evans diversity discussion from 2010
to Deven Cooper to Amber Kelsies discussion on CEDA Forums and the NDT
CEDA Traditions page. We have been talking for over a decade, we have
been reaching out for years, we have been listening to the liberal, moderate
refrain of we agree with your goals but not with your method. We will no
longer wait for the community to respond, to relinquish privilege, to engage
in authentic discussion, since largely the community seems incapable of
producing a consensus for responding to what we all agree is blatant
structural inequity. It seems that meta-debates/discussions about debate are
generally met with denial, hostility andmore oftensilence. This silence is
in fact a focused silence. It is not people in the Resistance Facebook group
that comprise these silent figuresit is (as has been described) the old boys
club. We have been quite vocaland we believe that it is this very
vocalness (and the development of a diversity of tactics in response to status
quo stalling tactics) that has provoked response when response was given.
Whiteness surrounds black debaters. Acknowledging the prejudice
present in the debate space is the only way to solve.
Peterson 14|UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE DEBATING RACE, RACE-ING
DEBATE: AN EXTENDED ETHNOGRAPHIC CASE STUDY OF BLACK

INTELLECTUAL INSURGENCY IN U.S. INTERCOLLEGIATE DEBATE

DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the
degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY TR in Sociology by David Kent Peterson)

One such unique intervention occurred at the annual competition at the University
of Kentucky in Lexington, KY. On the first night of the competition Tyron, one of the
team members from Oklahoma whose last name is Campbell, had a discussion with
a black male janitor of the hotel in which the tournament was being held. The name
of the hotel was Campbell House, and Tyron was told by the janitor that the house
was formerly a plantation that was turned into a hotel. The architecture of the hotel
resembled an old-style Kentucky plantation and several black debaters discussed
feeling uncomfortable, both for just being in Lexington Kentucky and particularly for
staying at a hotel that resembled a plantation. To hear that the hotel actually was a
plantation intensified these feelings. In each of their debates, Jared and Tyron
discussed their feelings about staying at a hotel that resembled, and once was, a
slave plantation. They related these feelings to their frustration of constantly
debating in white university spaces where virtually all competitions are held. This is
an example of the ways in which the students would draw upon local conditions or
circumstances to attempt to highlight the larger plight of black students in the
debate activity
Black debaters have become vocal, but backlash still occurs. Discussion is key to a
free debate space.
Kraft 14 [Independent journalist covering health, culture, sustainability and tech
from San Francisco, Hacking traditional College Debates White Privilege Problem,
The Atlantic, TR,April 16th, 2014]

It used to be that if you went to a college-level debate tournament, the

students youd see would be bookish future lawyers from elite universities,
most of them white. In matching navy blazers, theyd recite academic
arguments for and against various government policies. It was tame,
predictable, and, frankly, boring. No more. These days, an increasingly
diverse group of participants has transformed debate competitions,
mounting challenges to traditional form and content by incorporating
personal experience, performance, and radical politics. These alternativestyle debaters have achieved success, too, taking top honors at national
collegiate tournaments over the past few years. But this transformation has
also sparked a difficult, often painful controversy for a community that
prides itself on handling volatile topics. On March 24, 2014 at the Cross
Examination Debate Association (CEDA) Championships at Indiana
University, two Towson University students, Ameena Ruffin and Korey
Johnson, became the first African-American women to win a national college
debate tournament, for which the resolution asked whether the U.S.
presidents war powers should be restricted. Rather than address the
resolution straight on, Ruffin and Johnson, along with other teams of AfricanAmericans, attacked its premise. The more pressing issue, they argued, is
how the U.S. government is at war with poor black communities. In the final
round, Ruffin and Johnson squared off against Rashid Campbell and George
Lee from the University of Oklahoma, two highly accomplished AfricanAmerican debaters with distinctive dreadlocks and dashikis. Over four hours,

the two teams engaged in a heated discussion of concepts like nigga

authenticity and performed hip-hop and spoken-word poetry in the
traditional timed format. At one point during Lees rebuttal, the clock ran out
but he refused to yield the floor. Fuck the time! he yelled. His partner
Campbell, who won the top speaker award at the National Debate
Tournament two weeks later, had been unfairly targeted by the police at the
debate venue just days before, and cited this experience as evidence for his
case against the governments treatment of poor African-Americans. This
year wasn't the first time this had happened. In the 2013 championship, two
men from Emporia State University, Ryan Walsh and Elijah Smith, employed
a similar style and became the first African-Americans to win two national
debate tournaments. Many of their arguments, based on personal memoir
and rap music, completely ignored the stated resolution, and instead
asserted that the framework of collegiate debate has historically privileged
straight, white, middle-class students. Tournament participants from all
backgrounds say they have found some of these debate strategies offensive.
Even so, the new style has received mainstream acceptance, sympathy, and
awards. Joe Leeson Schatz, Director of Speech and Debate at Binghamton
University, is encouraged by the changes in debate style and community.
Finally, theres a recognition in the academic space that the way argument
has taken place in the past privileges certain types of people over others,
he said. Arguments dont necessarily have to be backed up by professors or
written papers. They can come from lived experience. But other teams who
have prepared for a traditional policy debate are frustrated when they
encounter a meta-debate, or an alternative stylistic approach in competition.
These teams say that the pedagogical goals of policy debate are not being
metand are even being undermined. Aaron Hardy, who coaches debate at
Northwestern University, is concerned about where the field is headed. We
end up with a large percentage of debates being devoted to arguing about
the rules, rather than anything substantive, he wrote on a CEDA message
board last fall. Critics of the new approach allege that students dont
necessarily have to develop high-level research skills or marshal evidence
from published scholarship. They also might not need to have the intellectual
acuity required for arguing both sides of a resolution. These skillstogether
with a non-confrontational presentation styleare considered crucial for
success in fields like law and business. Hardy and others are also
disappointed with what they perceive as a lack of civility and decorum at
recent competitions, and believe that the alternative-style debaters have
contributed to this environment. Judges have been very angry, coaches
have screamed and yelled. People have given profanity-laced tirades, thrown
furniture, and both sides of the ideological divide have used racial slurs, he
said. To counter this trend, Hardy and his allies want to create a policy only
space in which traditional standards for debate will be enforced. However,
this is nearly impossible to do within the two major debate associations,
CEDA and the National Debate Tournament (NDT), as they are governed by
participants and have few conduct enforcement mechanisms. For instance,

while CEDA and NDTs institutional anti-harassment policy would normally

prohibit the term nigga as it was used at the recent Indiana University
tournament finals, none of the judges penalized the competitors that used it .
In fact, those debaters took home prizes. 14 schools expressed interest in
sending debaters to Hardys proposed alternative tournament, scheduled to
occur last month. But after word got out that a group of mostly white teams
from elite universities were trying to form their own league, Hardy and his
supporters were widely attacked on Facebook and other online forums.
Ultimately the competition didnt happen, purportedly because of logistical
issues with the hotel venue. Nonetheless, Hardy wrote in an email that a
toxic climate has precluded even strong supporters of policy debate from
publicly attach[ing] their name to anything that might get them called racist
or worse. "The debate community is broken, but there is nothing wrong with
that." Korey Johnson, the reigning CEDA champion from Towson University,
was one of the students who took offense the alternative tournament.
Segregating debate is a bad move, she said.* With the increase in
minority participation came a range of different types of argument and
perspectives, not just from the people who are in debate, but the kind of
scholarship we bring in. Her debate partner Ameena Ruffin agreed: For
them to tell us that we cant bring our personal experience, it would literally
be impossible. Not just for black peopleit is true of everyone. We are
always biased by who we are in any argument. Liberal law professors have
been making this point for decades. Various proceduresregardless of
whether we're talking about debate formats or lawhave the ability to hide
the subjective experiences that shape these seemingly objective and
rational rules, said UC Hastings Law School professor Osagie Obasogie,
who teaches critical race theory. This is the power of racial subordination:
making the viewpoint of the dominant group seem like the only true reality.
Hardy disagrees. Having minimal rules is not something that reflects a
middle-class white bias, he said. I think it is wildly reductionist to say that
black people cant understand debate unless there is rap in itit sells short
their potential. He said he is committed to increasing economic and racial
diversity in debate and has set up a nonprofit organization to fundraise for
minority scholarships. According to Joe Leeson Schatz, one of the unstated
reasons for trying to set up policy-only debates is that once-dominant debate
teams from colleges like Harvard and Northwestern are no longer winning
the national competitions. It is now much easier for smaller programs to be
successful, he said. You dont have to be from a high budget program; all
you need to win is just a couple of smart students. Schatz believes that the
changes in college debate are widening the playing field and attracting more
students from all backgrounds. Paul Mabrey, a communications lecturer at
James Madison University and CEDA vice president, is organizing a
conference for this coming June that will address the college debate diversity
problem. The debate community is broken, he declared, but there is
nothing wrong with that. We talk about a post-racial America, but we
shouldnt elide our real differences, we should talk about how to work across

and work with these differences. One thing is clear: In a community

accustomed to hashing out every possible argument, this particular debate
will continue. The uncontested benefit of the debate format is that everyone
receives equal time to speak, something that drew many minority students
to debate in the first place, said Korey Johnson. No matter how people feel
about my argument, they have to listen to me for all of my speeches,
everything I have to say, they cant make me stop speaking, she said.
Discussion is key to create a positive community- Resistance debate
proves.
Resistance Debate 12 [Rashad, Lawyer/Winner of CEDA/Coach at Bx Law,
Shanara Rose, Professor of African American Studies at U of Pit, Jillian Marty, Former
Towson Coach,/Former Debater, Amber Kelsie, Former Member of the IMPACT
Coalition, works along Dr. Brinkley at U of Pit, An Open Letter to Sarah Spring, TR,
http://resistanceanddebate.wordpress.com/2012/11/12/an-open-letter-to-sarahspring/]
Often it is a rare place where the K v K or Performance v Performance debate can be
considered in its practical and ethical implications. It is precisely the kind of

place for open discussion that Sarah Spring calls forthe kind of place where
discussion that needs to take place often does. But those discussions also do
not stop there. Discussions that begin in the group are often taken to wider
groups within the debate community to broaden the discussion and yet they
are often derailed and then we must retreat and regroup, review our
strategies, discuss potential options, and seek advice. Note that the example
of the active and lively debate about the hotel architecture at the Clay
mentioned in Sarahs post, was hashed out for months on the resistance
page before many of us began to speak publicly about the issue. It was
through that vibrant debate in the Resistance Facebook group that produced
the very conditions for the open discussion you mention. The Resistance
Facebook page is a response to the increasing ghettoization of some bodies
and some discursive forms in debatenot the other way around. The fact
that the existence of the group was what was critiqued rather than the
necessity of the group is deeply troubling to us. It is unclear what the bright
line is between group discussions or backchannels or facebook groups and
a discussion group (articulated as closed backroom discussion which is by
the way, homophobic) which produces disenfranchized discussion As far as
we can tell, Sarah Spring is upset that she has not been able to see what
mischief the slaves are hatching in the slave quarters on the plantation.
The Resistance Facebook group has a wide range of members. It includes
current debaters, former debaters, coaches, judges, high school students,

academics (with no relationship to debate), radical community activists. All

members of the group are granted administrative access once they are admitted, so people
request admission through the relationships they have cultivated with already existing
members. If someone has not been invited to the group, it is because they lack authentic
relationships with any of the membersperhaps the perceived secrecy of the group could be
better understood as a symptom of the lack of social relations you have with a wide group of
differently situated people. The argument here is likened to the question, why are all the
black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?an argument meant to imply that it is the
burden of the black students to make friends with the whites, and that the whites cannot be
faulted for choosing to maintain distance. There are a number of issues that marginalized
members of the community simply do not know about. For example, many of us did not
discover the existence of Sarahs post until the last round of the evening, although we have
since learned that people have been talking about it (not to us) throughout the day. If you
are excluding yourself from usvia MPJ, on the quad, in the hallway, at the hotelthen you
should hold yourself accountable, not us. We are not secret. We are not hiding. We are just
invisible to you.

Even when black debaters succeed they are met with hostility and acts
that resemble the civil rights movement. Black people speaking up in
white spaces are key to a collaborative community. Cooper 14 [Brittney
Cooper is a contributing writer at Salon, and teaches Women's and Gender Studies
and Africana Studies at Rutgers TR, I was hurt: How white elite racism invaded a
college debate championship June 3rd, 2014]

In March of this year, Korey Johnson and Ameena Ruffin, college students at
Towson University, became the first African-American women to win the
Cross-Examination Debate Association college championship. Crossexamination debate, also known as policy debate, is a notoriously elite, white
academic sport. Unfortunately, Johnsons and Ruffins auspicious victory has
been marred by right-wing trolls in the debate community and well-meaning
white liberals, too, who have mischaracterized and minimized their victory,
attributing their win to white liberal guilt, rather than meritorious
performance. The Council of Conservative Citizens, a contemporary iteration
of the racist White Citizens Councils of eras past, penned an article called
Black female debate team wins national tournament to make up for white
privilege. The Council of Conservative Citizens appears on the Southern
Poverty Law Centers list of racist hate groups. The Daily Caller accused the

far left judges who voted for these women of destroying college debate
clubs via false accusations of racism. I shared news of Ameenas and Koreys
championship in my social networks with special pride because this coming
fall will mark my 20th anniversary as part of the policy debate community. I
made the debate team as a precocious 13 year-old high school student, and
have remained a part of that community in one form or another as debater,
coach, debate camp instructor and tournament judge, for the last two
decades. Other than the influence of my fourth grade teacher, I give no other
academic experience more credit for informing how I think, write, research
and communicate. But when I debated in high school in Louisiana in the
1990s, my debate partner and I were the only all-Black girl debate team that
I ever encountered, and one of only a handful of all-Black teams we ever
encountered at either the state or national level. The rise of the Urban
Debate League movement in the late 1980s helped to diversify debate at
both the high school and college level by providing debate instruction and
attendance at camps and tournaments for free or for significantly reduced
costs. I have worked with three such leagues in Baltimore, Atlanta and
Washington, D.C. Korey and Ameena learned to debate in the Baltimore
Urban Debate League, many years after my tenure as a volunteer there. The
increasing racial diversity of college debate is directly attributable to the
work of these leagues, but of course the presence of more Black folks in any
space also fundamentally challenges the ground upon which business
proceeds. Black students have not only excelled at traditional debate, but
they have invented new modes of competitive forensics, including a more
performative style of debate that incorporates rap music, poetry and
personal anecdotes. Pioneered in college debate programs like that at the
University of Louisville, this more performative style of debate has
productively disrupted the traditionalist forms of debate centered on
spouting, at the highest rates of speed, copious amounts of academic
literature in order to prove a point. When I spoke with Korey by phone about
this piece, she was hesitant to characterize her and Ameenas style in a
singular way, since they tend to incorporate both traditional elements like
the reading of arguments published in academic journals and books with
newer elements like poetry. Korey told me, The word traditional, the word
performative, the word k-debater (which refers to critique or kritik
debaters, who argue more philosophical rather than policy positions) will

never actually capture what we are trying to do here. That resistance to

labels, and ambivalence about the violence labels perform, are hallmarks
of the speech of young thinkers, searching to find their way in the world.
However, as my own scholarly research about Black female public
intellectuals in the 19th and 20th centuries indicates, we live in a world that
still struggles to see Black women as serious thinkers and intellectuals who
have something to contribute to our national grappling with social problems.
Frequently for young Black women thinkers, particularly those who invoke a
clear Black feminist perspective, there is a resistance to donning a stance of
detached objectivity. Korey asked me rhetorically, How can we talk about
policy if we dont know [the] social location of the people? When I watch
Ameenas and Koreys final round (video here), in which they are debating
against two young Black men from the University of Oklahoma, I am struck
by the courage of their propositions. This years topic, as are the topics for
every year, is situated right at the heart of both national and global political
conversations. It reads: Resolved: The United States Federal Government
should substantially increase statutory and/or judicial restrictions on the war
powers authority of the President of the United States in one or more of the
following areas: targeted killing, indefinite detention, offensive cyber
operations, or introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities. In the
final round, the Oklahoma team, who took the affirmative side, offered a
performative argument that war powers should not be waged against
niggas. Using the colloquial form of the n-word, they sought to disrupt the
very assumptions of the resolution, by placing the relationship between race
and U.S. militarism front and center. The intrinsic moxie and audacity of this
kind of argument exposes the flaws in traditional forms of debate
performativity. In part, they demonstrate that an investment in cool,
detached, dispassionate forms of speech about political matters of such
import could in their own way be considered pathological and imperialist.
Using a range of academic work, Johnson and Ruffin offered a counter
argument that we should not present scenes of suffering within the
academy because the academic machine will become a spectator that
merely feeds its libido by consuming pain narrations. Furthermore, Johnson
writes, we said that when we tell narrations of pain and suffering to black
youth as a means of survival, this inhibits their political imagination because
they can only envision similar violences happen[ing] to them. So heres the

thing: I am not litigating here whether Ameena and Korey are right, although
I do find their arguments compelling. Pushing for alternative ways for Black
people to exist and thrive in hyper-militarist regimes is important political
work, work that both final round teams are engaged in. Still, this is a
conversation about how it is the case that in the face of such clearly
sophisticated argumentation from two second-year college students, those
on the right could then conclude that they won the debate out of white
liberal guilt. To mischaracterize and diminish their accomplishment is the
height of white elitist racism, and it is deeply rooted in an anxiety about the
ways that Black people and Black forms of knowledge production
fundamentally shift the terms of political discussion. In addition to
hyperemotional rants from middle-aged white men and dishonest journalistic
coverage from right-wing sites, some white members of the debate
community have even gone so far as to try to start a new, segregated
policy-only debate league. Jessica Carew Kraft notes in a piece at The
Atlantic that one of the effects of these new forms of debate is that
traditionally dominant teams from elite universities like Harvard and
Northwestern are now routinely unseated by teams from smaller colleges,
with smaller budgets. After a strident backlash within the debate community,
this attempt at race and class-based segregation thankfully failed. Korey
noted that the initial move sounded like something straight out of the Civil
Rights Movement. And she is right. The move to segregate debate, not on
the explicit basis of race, but on the basis of supposedly race-neutral ideas
about style and substance is part and parcel of a larger more insidious
national backlash against integrated education. Not only has the Supreme
Court suggested implicitly through its gutting of affirmative action that the
success of these programs means federal oversight is no longer mandated
and vigilance about ameliorating racial inequality is no longer required, but
Nikole Hannah-Jones also lays out quite profoundly the ways that the white
middle class have responded to decades of federally mandated integration
by pulling their children out of successful public schools and enrolling them
in elite private schools. The thinking seems to be that when programs to
reduce racially disparate impacts actually work, then its time to kill them.
Ameena and Korey are being targeted because they mastered the rules of
the debate world and then broke the rules masterfully. In a world where
many of their college counterparts believe the myth of meritocracy, it is

incredibly important to point to incidents like this to demonstrate that even

when African-American college students are meritorious, their qualifications
are challenged, and accomplishments maligned. Frequently, Black success is
met with white temper tantrums and passive aggressive attempts to
resituate power through calls for a return to tradition. It is not coincidental
that this backlash has reached a crescendo over the last two years when
African-American debaters won the championship both times and when, in
the case of the 2014 tournament, both the semifinal and final rounds
featured all-Black debate teams, using both traditional and performative
methods of debate. Rather than seeing these recent successes as evidence
of successful integration of a traditionally exclusionary sport, sponsors of
elite programs now advocate for a return to exclusionary practices. Although
Korey and Ameena won their championship by challenging their opponents
not to engage in copious narrations of Black suffering, it bears noting that
racism hurts. When I asked Korey how she felt about all the negative
attention she received, in classic strong Black woman fashion she told me,
Haters gon hate. That is of course true. But then, as she grappled with the
material reality of anti-Blackness, another truth set in. I was hurt, she
told me, because I had that little bit of bad faith, by which she meant, a
little bit of awareness that there were going to be people not happy about
her victory. We did so much to be here, she said and then recounted the
two months she spent preparing an argument by reading doctoral
dissertations and academic journals, to find the perfect set of arguments to
wage in response to one team, her final round opponents from Oklahoma.
Incivility now dominates U.S. public culture. But the critiques that these
Black debaters make about the falsity of civil discourse, about the ways that
calls to civility mask fundamental relations of power and acts of violence, is
deeply in the center of our national conversations in this moment about how
we engage in every space from politics to social media. Though the styles
and arguments these debaters bring to the table absolutely disturb the
peace, the reality is that Black people who speak up in white spaces are an
intrinsic disruption to the status quo. We should recognize and applaud the
courage of these young thinkers who boldly step into inhospitable spaces
and speak truth to power. Our nation certainly needs more people like them.

In order to achieve a space free of biased and full of love, we must create
a discussion of the otherness that is the black body.

Gumbs 10

[Alexis Pauline, queer black feminist, PhD in English and African American studies from Duke
University, founder of Brilliance Remastered, co-founder of Mobile Homecoming Project, We can learn to mother
ourselves: The Queer Survival of Black Feminism, Duke University, TR, English Department, Vol 1, intro ]

This is a passage worth examining for its complexity, its openings and the questions
it teaches us for the present. On a first reading we notice that Jordan is continuing
her earlier argument that the social body is not supportive of the growth of Black
people. She goes on to suggest that this social system, made evocative of a natural
environment of growth through her use of the word body, seeks to create
something 2 June Jordan. Problems of Language in a Democratic State in On Call:
Political Essays. Boston: South End Press, 1985, 27. 3 It is the status of
reproductivity in Glissants articulation of the concept forced poetics that causes
me to interevene. See Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Degalear Magalama: A Blue Airmail
Letter in MaComere Volume 8. 4 June Jordan. Nobody Mean More to Me Than You:
And the Future Life of Willie Jordan in On Call: Political Essays. Boston: South End
Press, 1985, 123. 264 unnatural, clones, and worse, clones of strangers, neither
our mothers nor our fathers. One reading of this question, probably the one that
the author intended, would suggest that it would be more natural for Black
children to become clones of their actual parents and not their culturally insensitive
teachers. This would be supported by her reference in the same paragraph to the
community intelligence provided by Black English as an endangered species
which goes extinct along with our own proud, and singular identity.5 Jordans
articulation of Black English here is consistent with both Glissants articulation of
Natural Poetics and Brathwaites examples of Nation Language, but Jordans
classroom deployment of Black English is a different type of community
intelligence altogether. If we reread Jordans multiply negative passage about not
being supported to become anything other (or not) those who are neither our
mothers nor our fathers we can see a connection more nuanced than the perceived
binary between the natural cultural production of Black communities and the racist
social oppression that impedes this natural cultural production that matches more
closely the position from which Jordan spoke, as a teacher and poet called to
respond to racist oppression from within institutions designed to perpetuate its
normalcy. Jordans use of clones, reveals an interstice within which we can glimpse
the politics of reproduction that this project seeks to disrupt. Society seeks, but fails,
to make Black students into clones of their white teachers. Societys racism
succeeds when it uses this failed project of racist literacy to force young Black
people into the dehumanized conditions that Black people have survived before
them. In this sense the literacy project is successful on its own terms. It 5 ibid 265
reproduces oppression, and makes it seem natural. Jordans discussion of clones
suggests that reproduction is not natural, but rather social. Racist social institutions
reproduce the absence of family sustainability for Black people. Jordans argument,
within this forced poetical situation, rests on the supposed existence of mother and
fathers who are actually empowered to support the maturity of young people, a
condition that the statement itself laments. An alternative system of community
support for young Black people, managed by older Black people is not an accessible
past that Jordan can return to, nor an endangered species to breed in captivity, but
rather a public to generate, a utopist project in the making in Jordans practice. In
order to understand the system of survival and intergenerational production that
Jordan sought to initiate by teaching a critical Black English, we need a diasporic

context.. The Black English that Jordan situates in the urban African American
context is not the language spoken at home by her Jamaican parents, aunts and
uncles. Jordan cannot reproduce this language by cloning her parents in her own
mouth. Though Jordan broke down standard English in the poetry and prose she
dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr., Phillis Wheatley6 and even her own parents, she
never wrote these poems in what she defined as Black English. To understand the
function of Black English in Jordans classroom, we need to recognize it as
diasporic classroom, demographically and in vision a space wherein communication
between Black people is a poetics of relationship that privileges the ontological
potential of that relationship, more than the specific dialect spoken by some
particular Black community in a particular geographic location. Jordan was not
attempting to teach students fluency in a particular 6 Analysis of Jordans poems
about each of these figures appears in Chapter 4. 266 dialect, but rather to validate
a deviant approach to American Standardized English, that reflected a critique of
the economic and social logics implied and enforced through American Standard
English. Through context, and by definition, the Black English in Jordans classroom
was not stable, in fact, one of the defining logics of Black English for Jordan was the
dominance of the present tense and the responsiveness of the language to its
continued criminalization in relationship to the standard. One could understand
Jordans lessons as fugitive language, lessons in how to create a language practice
among a migrant student population, in the midst of a process of achieving
educational mobility and on the run from disciplining logic of the university system.
Poetry, would be another name for that language practice, a practice that honors
the otherness of the student population while also holding out the possibility of
another future world for them to participate in. Jordan reaches forward in this
gesture towards the otherness of her students. The presence of her students
inspires Jordans participation in Black English
The debate space acts as the social world and embodies whiteness.
Framework and typical policy structures exclude black bodies themselves
and their attempt at communication.
Peterson 14 [UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE DEBATING RACE, RACE-ING
DEBATE: AN EXTENDED ETHNOGRAPHIC CASE STUDY OF BLACK INTELLECTUAL
INSURGENCY IN U.S. INTERCOLLEGIATE DEBATE DISSERTATION submitted in partial
satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY TR in
Sociology by David Kent Peterson]
Corey and Kevin argued that the contemporary social world, and the United States
in particular, can best be characterized by practices of white supremacy. To
support this assertion, they read passages from an array of critical race theorists
(Charles Mills, Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado) and black feminist scholars (bell hooks,
Patricia Hill Collins) and played clips of music and poetry, in a break from the
established norm of relying solely on written academic literature, from AfricanAmerican artists such as Lauryn Hill, Nas, and Tupac Shakur. They argued further
that the intercollegiate competitive debating activity functions to perpetuate white
supremacy. To support this assertion they cited the demographic predominance of
white males in the activity and, more importantly (to them), their own feelings of
exclusion and the operation of white normativity and white aesthetics at the
heart the debate activitys institutional culture. Kevin explained, The debate
community, in terms of its norms and procedures and tradition, endorses
epistemologically white European ideas of the world as the best way to engage in

political contestation and this then obscures other approaches to developing ideas
about knowledge that can be beneficial for people outside of the traditional white
male heterosexual framework. TU refused to engage in a traditional debate about
US government policy and demanded instead that their white opponents critically
interrogate whiteness and white supremacy. They proposed a framework for debate
according to which their opponents should be selected the winner only on the
condition that they could convincingly articulate how their approach to debate, and
their desired framework for debate, accounted for and confronted white supremacy.
Kevin explains that, We accused the debate community of the crime of commission
with white supremacy in terms of the type of scholarship thats being produced.
Because white supremacy is the status quo, by not deploying any political analysis
that takes this into consideration will then act to extend the invisibility and
pervasiveness of white supremacy. Towson argued they should be selected the
winner if they could demonstrate that their opponents failed to meet this burden.
This proposed framework invited a debate about the nature of white supremacy in
the post-civil rights era, the extent of its influence, and the significance of its social
consequences. Ideally, Corey and Kevin hoped the debate activity could be a space
where debates could be had concerning both the nature of social power and
privilege as well as the most appropriate and effective methods of resistance.

!The act of speaking up is hard, but silence allows for the continuation of
whiteness.
Polson 12 (Dana Roe Polson, PhD in Language Literacy and Culture, UMBC,

Baltimore city public and public charter schools high school teacher,
Longing for Theory: Performance Debate in Action Dissertain directed by
Dr. Christine Mallinson, TR Assistant Professor, Language, Literacy, and
Culture pp. 20-21)
The practice of performance debate is so difficult, in part, because it breaks some of
many silences we construct around issues of power. Sometimes speaking your piece
means not just saying whats on ones mind, but breaking silences constructed to
protect the powerful from recognition. Bailey (1998) points out that silence about
privilege is itself a function of privilege and it has a chilling effect on political
discourse (p. 16).Whiteness, for example, is un-marked, normed, and therefore
invisible and silent. Continuing to keep quiet about whiteness continues the
privilege. The practice of speaking out, then, is not the joining of an in-progress
conversation, or the addition of an alternative voice in some way. Instead, there is
an overwhelming silence that has to be broached in order to do the practice. Even
in schools where students of such marginalized social location are the majority, the
misrecognition and the avoidance hold, and these things are rarely discussed. How
are these metaphorical, conceptual silences seen in debate practice? How are they
perpetuated? Aaron, a high school student at the time of the interview, believed
that students, in general, stay silent about the social issues they are experiencing.
He attributed this issue to the conventional vision of poverty as evidence of
deviance: I think when youre dealing with the population like urban city kids, a lot
of times we stay silent about a lot of it, really heavy issues.I think probably why a
lot of people dont like talking about social issues in this school is because they
probably live in those certain issues.poverty is also seen as this notion of lacking
something. Youre lacking money, in this case, your youre lacking some type of
moral or ethical backgrounds... [many people] look down upon poverty seeing
that as being bum, poor, you know, like, you know, being deviant, trying to always
get over on somebody.... (Aaron, interview, p. 10-12) Poverty is therefore a marker
of lack, and poverty is taken to be evidence of, at best, laziness or lack of ambition,
and at worst, deviance and moral or ethical deficiency. This implicit moral judgment
of bum, poor...deviant, made by people who have resources, silences people who
lack them. Thus silenced, they are unable to explore a structural position that might
look at their poverty in a different, more empowering way. As Freire tells us
regarding oppression: we must first critically recognize its causes. Aaron also saw
the debate community at large as ignoring the socio-economic conditions of
debaters (ibid). This ignoring could be seen, for example, in the kinds of debate
resolutions that are chosen yearly,23 which often relate to foreign affairs or, in the
case of the 2012 resolution, space exploration. Aaron saw the debaters silence
compounded by the debate worlds complicity

The white male bias rules policy debate only discussing and kritiking the
space allows for a removal of that whiteness.
Polson 12 (Dana Roe Polson, PhD in Language Literacy and Culture, UMBC,

Baltimore city public and public charter schools high school teacher,
Longing for Theory: Performance Debate in Action Dissertain directed by
Dr. Christine Mallinson, TR Assistant Professor, Language, Literacy, and
Culture pp. 20-21)
Loges point about retention of African American students may have an influence on
debate participation. Rogers (1997) noted that rates of participation in debate had
remained virtually unchanged since Loges 1990 study and suggested that white
male bias on the part of the community that makes up most of the judging pool was
a major reason for this gap. Rogers collected a total of 113 surveys based on the
question, Why do you think that women and minorities are both less likely to
participate and less likely to succeed in CEDA debate? (Rogers, 1997, p. 2). Rogers
noted that white males in his survey most often believed that the majority of
women and minority competitors were deficient in the skills necessary for
success...due to some cultural flaw linked to emotion, cognitive process and/or,
specifically in the case of minorities, verbal ability (ibid). Women and minorities
responded by saying that the white men had a white male bias that [looked] for
and [rewarded] argumentation styles that mirror their perceptions of what good
debate should be (ibid). Rogers study showed strong evidence for the existence of
such a bias among white male debate community members. Dominant critics see
significant differences [amongst white males and women and ethnic minority group
members]. [The dominant critics] reported positive perceptions of the subgrouping
Males in both the Logic and Emotion behavioral topoi, while they expressed
negative perceptions for Females and Minorities in both categories (Rogers, 1997,
p. 14). 133 Hill believes that low rates of wins (such as might result from judging
bias described by Rogers) also contribute to low rates of participation for African
Americans. The consequences of not adhering to the mainstream forensics models
more often than not results in losses and/or low rankings. Since winning in
competition is one of the primary extrinsic motivations for African Americans in
forensics, frequent losses can lead to a decrease in motivation and an eventual exit
from the activity (Hill, 1997, p. 229). Hill describes the choice African American
debaters must make between the norms and practices of African American culture
and those written and unwritten demands of debate competition [that are] very
similar to those of the mainstream culture, [including] autonomy, specific
communication styles, message choice, and certain cognitive styles (ibid). Hill says
that African Americans are socialized to maintain the integrity of the culture at all
costs in various ways, including possibly contradicting mainstream culture or by
promoting the value of African American culture. For African Americans who coexist
in mainstream and African American culture, Hill suggests that there are many
tensions and quotes a study participant associating the academic demands of
forensics competition with whiteness: [African Americans] see the academic
demands so affiliated with white superiority and authority, kind of being under
control. Its a demeaning kind of thing where they relate the academic portion of it
to an academic system that has for so long deliberately kept them out and made

things unreachable, made things more difficult for others. [Looking at academic
forensics, they would say] Oh! This is just another White mans game thing, theres
really nothing in it for me to really sink my intellectual teeth into.... Im still going to
have to play the White 134 mans game in forensics as I do in the outside world.
Why bother...when its like that shit Im trying to escape? (Hill, 1997, pp. 228229)
Silence recreates whiteness
Peterson 14 [UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE DEBATING RACE, RACE-ING DEBATE:
AN EXTENDED ETHNOGRAPHIC CASE STUDY OF BLACK INTELLECTUAL INSURGENCY
IN U.S. INTERCOLLEGIATE DEBATE DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the
requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Sociology by David Kent
Peterson]
Post-civil rights American society, despite its expanded commerce in bodies, has
seen a historical retreat from critical confrontation over questions of racial power
even as the catalogue of criticism and complaint has become more extensive and
detailed. Pauline Johnson (2006) argues, following Du Bois, that progress must be
conceptualized, not in terms of demographic representation, but rather in the
accumulation of insight into social problems and by the capacity to deal with these
problems at higher levels of abstraction. However, in the contemporary moment,
the discourse of the public sphere has moved away from the structural scale of
abstraction toward the individual and domestic scale (Berlant 1997). The public has
become generally more averse to structural and institutional analysis of broad social
problems and is more likely to avoid contentious, public-spirited issues (Eliasoph
1998; Putnam 2000). This is particularly pronounced concerning questions of racial
power. Critical discourses that breach the imposed silence on racial matters and
gesture toward the persistent significance of race at a level of abstraction higher
than that of the individual bigot is met with, not only outrage and frustration, but
also with a sophisticated discursive arsenal of denial, minimization, and evasion.
The scale of abstraction on which racial questions are considered has been steadily
ratcheted down to the manageable individual realm wherein racists can be
separated from non-racists and good-whites can be separated from the bad. In this
way, post-civil rights American society has not solved the problem of the colorline,
but rather has congratulated itself for ridding itself of the question of the colorline.
The consequence is that racial power has become more unintelligible and
unspeakable than perhaps ever before (Martinot 2010; Wilderson 2010).
Unintelligibility, argues Steve Martinot (2010), does not make a problem go
away; indeed, it enhances a social problems tenacity, while its tenacity enhances
its unintelligibility (10). This dissertation attempts to contribute to an
understanding of how this epistemological segregation is maintained by inhabiting a

specific context wherein black intellectuals are demanding that their inclusion into
previously white institutional space accompany a critical confrontation with and
reevaluation of dominant institutional norms. Specifically, I explore what can be
considered a black intellectual insurgency within the predominantly white space
of U.S. intercollegiate policy debate that seeks to subvert dominant intellectual
practice and create and augment infrastructures for black intellectual activity
(West 1985; 118). In the past decade, increasing numbers of black students have
entered the debate activity and insisted that whiteness be identified, named and
confronted and that (anti-)blackness become a central object of thought and
research. The present study seeks to address the related questions of: 1) how black
undergraduate students struggle to develop communicative methods to articulate
the increasingly inarticulable manifestation of racial exclusion in the face of the
discursive repertoire so effective at shutting down such discourse; and, 2) how
white debate participants negotiate these efforts and mobilize to secure institutional
coherence in the face of sustained critical challenge that raises the level of
abstraction on questions of racial power .

White debaters arent forced to confront the discrimination that the

debate space produces. Comfortability and freedom are ideologies
that are not accessible to the black community.
Peterson 14 [UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE DEBATING RACE, RACEING DEBATE: AN EXTENDED ETHNOGRAPHIC CASE STUDY OF BLACK
INTELLECTUAL INSURGENCY IN U.S. INTERCOLLEGIATE DEBATE
DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the
degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY TR in Sociology by David Kent Peterson]
In describing these efforts as focused primarily on multiculturalism and diversity, I
do not suggest that they were not confrontational and disruptive to the debate
activity. There were confrontational and radical elements of these positions though
they often subordinated this aspect of their performance to a politics of
multiculturalism. In describing her purpose for approaching debate in the way she
does, Tara explained, I would like to think that by the time my debate career was
over that I was able to change some opinions. And so part of my approach was
definitely wanting to change the landscape, the atmosphere, and just straight up
the representational numbers of black female bodies that exist inside of the debate
activity. But the other side of that and what I started to notice as I got older was
that you cant change the world and you cant fix everything. So, if anything, I
wanted my presence in the activity to be felt. So if I cant change your mind, for the
next two hours Im gonna pick you off, and make you talk about something that you
would never have had to talk about otherwise. So many people dont want to talk
about the perspectives and ideas of the people that are excluded from this
activity, they dont wanna talk about their privilege, they wanna avoid
those conversations at all costs. when theyre outside of the debate space
living in their more affluent and more secluded lives, in their ivory tower

universities, theyre never forced to dialogue with someone like me. So

more than changing your mind, I want to piss you off, I wanted to make
you feel what I feel when I walk around these debate competitions. And
so my goal was twofold, it was, one, to introduce ideas to people with the
hope of changing their minds and, two, after realizing that not everyone
wanted to be on that frame of mind, I just wanted to make you feel
uncomfortable, I feel that uncomfortability is good, so for two hours [the
length of the debate round] I wanted to make you think about your very
existence the same way I have to think about mine. In response to efforts
such as these, limited as they were within frames of multiculturalism, a significant
amount of the debate activity agreed to speak more slowly and dispense with the
use of jargon in an attempt to make the debate activity more inclusive. However, in
response the black students revamped and raised the stakes of the critical effort.

UDL SPECIFIC
Black debaters still face racial prejudice and are often forced to embody
the ghetto kid gone good narrative
Reid-Brinkley, 12 ["ARGUMENTATION AND ADVOCACY.TR "Argumentation and
Advocacy 49 (2012): 77-99.]

I remember one particular incident that most clearly highlighted my sense of

discomfort. I was still in college and maintaining my "poster child" relationship with
the UDL. Melissa Wade, my college debate director at Emory University, was
contacted by a production company that wanted to put together a human-interest
segment to be broadcast by a number of local news stations along the east coast. In
addition to interviewing Wade the producers also requested an interview with the
two African American students on the Emory team who had been former members
of the university's outreach program, and I was one of those students. I put on a
nice suit (one my mom picked out and paid what was, at the time, a lot of money
for her and my dad to spend) and went to the interview, conducted in the middle of
the central two-block quadrangle on the university's campus. Emory's architecture
is quite beautiful. The quad '-vas almost two blocks of open green space where
students played Frisbee, studied while sunbathing, or attended class on a beautiful
spring day. The quad is bound on all sides by clean, light-marble buildings.
Everything is incredibly bright and fresh, gleaming in the Georgia sunshine. The
interview went well, the reporter asking about my debate career and the UDL
program. The interviewer thanked me for my time and I went on my way. A few
weeks later, my debate coach called me into her office for a chat. It seemed that
the producers would like to interview me again, this time while touring the inner-city
community where I had grown up and the high school I had attended. I wanted to
know why they had made that request before I made a decision. The producer
agreed to call me within a few days. With that time to think about the request, I
began to visualize what the edited version of the piece would look like. They would
show my interview on campus and contrast the image of the university's economic
privilege with the "darker" image of my inner-city community It was the "ghetto kid
gone good" narrative that had already begun to make me uncomfortable. The
producer finally called and I expressed my concern about their need to contrast my
economic (and racial) background to that of my college environment as a means of
sensationalizing my story. I simply wondered why my achievements, which were the
focus of the interview, could not stand on merit alone. The producer was completely
clueless and after going in circles with her for 20 minutes, I realized we were not
going to get anywhere. At the end of our conversation, she stated "But, I don't
understand, I mean you did go to school there." I told her that I would not be
granting them a second interview and terminated the conversation. The
representation of successful UDL students is of human-interest appeal. It contrasts
with the dominant narrative that constructs inner-city children of color as deviant
and intellectually inferior. Yet, the representation of success is extremely restrictive,
requiring the embodiment and enactment of the "ghetto" at-risk youth narrative to
produce the transformative discourse of exceptionalism read tokenism. The
repetition of the dangerous urban youth of color character as the most used
representation of UDL students suggests an inability of news media to tell the
success stories of inner-city students of color outside this frame. The texture ami
complexity of the lives of UDL students is lost within the constraints of a pre-

determined frame that restricts these students to the scripts made available to
them in a society bound by the ontological standard of whiteness at the intersection
ofthe material privileges associated with economic wealth. As a 20-year-old, I lacked
the vocabulary to fully articulate my discomfort with the scripts made available to
me. What I intuitively understood to be happening was ignored by the news
producer and by every other media representative I encountered. I am an "outsider
within," to use Patricia Hill Collins's (1998) term, one "who no longer belong[s] to
any one group" (p. 5). I occupy a borderland space between various communities,
including the academy, the UDL, college debate, and the black community in which
I was raised, where all or part of my subjectivity can be rejected or vilified at any
moment. It is within this liminal space that I engage in an oppositional reading of
the discourses surrounding UDL students in news media representation. Such an
oppositional reading recognizes and engages the dominant, or suggested, reading
offered within a field of signification (Hall, 1997). Rather than offering an alternative
or more positive reading in opposition to the suggested read, I seek to highlight the
modalities by which racialized representation reproduces itself.
The narratives of UDL black debaters are scripted. The medias portrayal
of black debaters is inherently racist and a depiction of white privilege.
Reid-Brinkley, 12 ["ARGUMENTATION AND ADVOCACY.TR "Argumentation and
Advocacy 49 (2012): 77-99.]

As Jackson points out, scripting is not a static, monolithic process of one-size fits all
meaning-making; rather, it is possible that subversive scripts can be generated for
and by audiences. Dominant media frames suggest scripts for the audience to use
in interpreting narratives about the ubiquity of inner-city decay, black violence, and
nihilism. Such representations prime audiences to adopt the redemptive scripts
deployed to describe triumphal UDL participants. Yet, as I have demonstrated, in
order to embrace the redemptive script, the audience must also accept associated
scripts that mark inner-city black youths as deviant, violent, and culturally
dysfunctional. There is always the potential that the audience will read against the
normative ltames news media offer to them; however, that does not belie the fact
that there is likely a suggested reading of the frame (During, 2003). In other words,
this article can make no determination of how audiences actually read the news
representation of UDLs, but it does suggest that the news framing practices suggest
particular readings based on prior representations of deviance and criminality in
inner-city communities of color. Is it not possible to construct a human-interest story
about the UDLs that simply focuses on the achievement of smart students? Why is it
necessary to paint the students as potentially destructive in order to demonstiate
the significance of their story? Journalists could frame UDL students through the
drama of competition, the highs and lows of winning and losing, intellectual grudge
matches, the stress on the coaches as they respond to their debaters' successes
and failures, the hard work and frustration as students grapple with foreign
concepts, or the amazing depth of discussion about the significant political issues of
our time. Stories could even mention the hardships when one lacks the economic
advantages and resources that increase the likelihood of competitive success, but it
is not necessary to demonize black families, black youths, and black culture to do
so. At the very least, a diversity of representations of black mothers/fathers and
urban minority communities would disrupt the normative frame of poverty, race,
and deviance. Not all UDL students come from broken homes, with absentee dads
(most likely in prison) and drug-addicted mothers. The scripts offered may not be

deterministic, but the strength of the poverty and urban decay frames greatly limits
the scripts made available to black youths.
The narrative is written for us, affirming the medias racial bias, but that
doesnt mean we except those conditions.
Reid-Brinkley, 12 ["ARGUMENTATION AND ADVOCACY.TR "Argumentation and
Advocacy 49 (2012): 77-99.]

Earlier in this essay, I drew on Karen Houppert's (2007) article, "Finding Their
Voices," in the Washington Post to discuss the framing of familial dysfunction.
Houppert, profiling Baltimore Urban Debate League student Ignacio "Iggie" Evans,
asks personal questions about Evans's family background. Houppert notes that
while Evans was initially reticent about sharing his story, she persisted and
eventually convinced her interview subject to reveal sensitive information about his
personal background. Three years after the original interview in August 2007,
Houppert (2010) published a follow up article entitied "Whatever Happened To .. .
the Baltimore high school debater?" Evans, at the time of the article's publication,
was in his junior year of college at Towson University and along with his debate
partner was well on his way to being a formidable competitor on the national
college policy debate circuit. Houppert's (2010) second article begins with a
summary of what believes to be the relevant information from the first article. Still
misspelling his name, she reported: Iggy was a kid who had a lot of strikes against
him. He never knew his biological dad. His mom struggled with drug addiction, and
he landed in foster care. He attended Baltimore's Frederick Douglass High School,
one of four failing Baltimore schools slated for takeover under the No Child Left
Behind Act. His odds of success were poor. Here we have a reproduction of the
familial dysfunction and failing community/school frames, which is followed by the
narrative of exceptionalism that identifies debate as Evans's savior: But Iggy, an
argumentative kid, found a way to channel his contrariness through the wildly
popular Baltimore Urban Debate League, a program chat teaches the fundamentals
of democracy-as well as critical thinking, basic literacy and research skills-to
underprivileged students. {Houppert, 2010, para. 3) The repetition of the narrative
frames associated with black youths, in this example, demonstrates the difficulty
these students will have in any attempt to escape this narrative's social
intelligibility. The narrative frame may be quite difficult to overcome because of its
intelligibility to audiences trained to process the classed and racialized redemptive
narrative. Yet, the final paragraph of the Houppert (2010) follow up article on Evans
may offer a glimpse at potential tactics students and supporters might use to
respond to the context of the frame when engaging with media representatives:
Meanwhile, he continues to question what it means to be a black man in America
today, personally and politically. Though Towscn is only a half-mile north of the
Baltimore city limits, Iggy's sense of displacement is profound. "My biggest
challenge is being able to authentically perform who I am in these spaces," Iggy
says. "At the very least, debate has taught me to relentlessly defend my position as
a black man and to understand my community's needs." |para. 8) Evans does not
speak to the obstacles he faced as a young man; it is Houppert who summarizes
that part of the initial story. Evans focuses the discussion away from the racialized
poverty frame that positions blackness and urban communities as spaces from
which to escape, to his community as a place to direct the resources made available
to him through debate training and a college education. Rather than demonize his
community, Evans indicates both a love and support for the very community that

Houppert has characterized as nothing but deviant with dilapidated school systems
and failing students. The Houppert/ Evans example, while demonstrating the
strength of the frame, simultaneously indicates that students can engage the frame,
attempting to create alternative scripts to those that are normally intelligible. Given
the audience for this journal, I think the readership might be more interested in a
discussion of the potential responses available for UDL students and supporters to
this normative media frame, rather than a focus on what the media might do to
resolve this problem. I attempt to offer some possible tactics and strategies for
engaging the news media given the prevalence of the frame. First, UDL students
should be trained to interact with journalists. Anyone who has worked with UDL
students knows that they are often incredibly intelligent and quite sensitive to and
reflexive about issues of representation. Thus, investing time in training UDL
advocates, teachers, and coaches in media tactics, in order to educate the students,
may be a significant tool in supporting student agency in the shaping of their
representation. Students can learn to pivot the dominant frame. Knowing that the
exists and how it functions may offer students the opportunity to interact with the
frame, engaging in oppositional discourse designed to disrupt the normative scripts
made available within the racialized poverty frame. Second, UDL administrators and
teachers might consider broaching the subject of the normative frames used in a
majority of news representation of the UDL with journalists interested in featuring
the program's students. Those journalists who are unwilling to reject or, at the very
least, interrogate the racialized poverty frame should potentially be denied access
to the students. All interactions between journalists and students could be recorded
by a UDL representative, likely a good common practice as a means of protecting
the interests of the students given their ages. In addition, those recordings could be
used to further engage media outlets in conversations about what narratives
journalists have chosen to focus their attention upon versus what may have been
said in the actual interview. Lastly, administrators and teachers might turn to
minority and alternative news press outlets as options for more complex
representations of the UDL and its students. Future research into UDL
representation should evaluate the framing and scripting techniques of these
alternative presses. The suggestions I offer, however, must be considered within the
context of a dominant narrative that will be difficult, if not impossible, to replace
through individual and even institutional acts of agency. The issue here is one of the
intelligibility of representations and the scripting of racialized narratives on the
corporeal bodies of those coded as black in the social imagination.
Black debaters still face racial prejudice and are often forced to embody
the ghetto kid gone good narrative.
Reid-Brinkley, 12 ["ARGUMENTATION AND ADVOCACY.TR "Argumentation and
Advocacy 49 (2012): 77-99.]

I remember one particular incident that most clearly highlighted my sense of

discomfort. I was still in college and maintaining my "poster child" relationship with
the UDL. Melissa Wade, my college debate director at Emory University, was
contacted by a production company that wanted to put together a human-interest
segment to be broadcast by a number of local news stations along the east coast. In
addition to interviewing Wade the producers also requested an interview with the
two African American students on the Emory team who had been former members
of the university's outreach program, and I was one of those students. I put on a
nice suit (one my mom picked out and paid what was, at the time, a lot of money

for her and my dad to spend) and went to the interview, conducted in the middle of
the central two-block quadrangle on the university's campus. Emory's architecture
is quite beautiful. The quad '-vas almost two blocks of open green space where
students played Frisbee, studied while sunbathing, or attended class on a beautiful
spring day. The quad is bound on all sides by clean, light-marble buildings.
Everything is incredibly bright and fresh, gleaming in the Georgia sunshine. The
interview went well, the reporter asking about my debate career and the UDL
program. The interviewer thanked me for my time and I went on my way. A few
weeks later, my debate coach called me into her office for a chat. It seemed that
the producers would like to interview me again, this time while touring the inner-city
community where I had grown up and the high school I had attended. I wanted to
know why they had made that request before I made a decision. The producer
agreed to call me within a few days. With that time to think about the request, I
began to visualize what the edited version of the piece would look like. They would
show my interview on campus and contrast the image of the university's economic
privilege with the "darker" image of my inner-city community It was the "ghetto kid
gone good" narrative that had already begun to make me uncomfortable. The
producer finally called and I expressed my concern about their need to contrast my
economic (and racial) background to that of my college environment as a means of
sensationalizing my story. I simply wondered why my achievements, which were the
focus of the interview, could not stand on merit alone. The producer was completely
clueless and after going in circles with her for 20 minutes, I realized we were not
going to get anywhere. At the end of our conversation, she stated "But, I don't
understand, I mean you did go to school there." I told her that I would not be
granting them a second interview and terminated the conversation. The
representation of successful UDL students is of human-interest appeal. It contrasts
with the dominant narrative that constructs inner-city children of color as deviant
and intellectually inferior. Yet, the representation of success is extremely restrictive,
requiring the embodiment and enactment of the "ghetto" at-risk youth narrative to
produce the transformative discourse of exceptionalism read tokenism. The
repetition of the dangerous urban youth of color character as the most used
representation of UDL students suggests an inability of news media to tell the
success stories of inner-city students of color outside this frame. The texture ami
complexity of the lives of UDL students is lost within the constraints of a predetermined frame that restricts these students to the scripts made available to
them in a society bound by the ontological standard of whiteness at the intersection
ofthe material privileges associated with economic wealth. As a 20-year-old, I lacked
the vocabulary to fully articulate my discomfort with the scripts made available to
me. What I intuitively understood to be happening was ignored by the news
producer and by every other media representative I encountered. I am an "outsider
within," to use Patricia Hill Collins's (1998) term, one "who no longer belong[s] to
any one group" (p. 5). I occupy a borderland space between various communities,
including the academy, the UDL, college debate, and the black community in which
I was raised, where all or part of my subjectivity can be rejected or vilified at any
moment. It is within this liminal space that I engage in an oppositional reading of
the discourses surrounding UDL students in news media representation. Such an
oppositional reading recognizes and engages the dominant, or suggested, reading
offered within a field of signification (Hall, 1997). Rather than offering an alternative
or more positive reading in opposition to the suggested read, I seek to highlight the
modalities by which racialized representation reproduces itself.

NARRATIVES GOOD
Narratives are counter-hegemonic device that disrupts racial objectivity
Carbado 3[Devon W., Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law, Constitutional Criminal
Procedure, Constitutional Law, Critical Race Theory, and Criminal Adjudication. The Yale Law
Journal, Vol. 112, No. 7 (May, 2003), pp. 1757-1828 http://www.jstor.org/stable/3657500]
First, narrative performs an epistemological function. It provides knowledge about
the nature of discrimination from the perspective of those who experience it. But
why narrative and why not statistical analysis? After all, statistical analysis (assuming a large
enough data set) has the benefits of identifying a general phenomenon that is verifiable by third
parties.126 And certainly there is nothing about the use of narrative in CRT that precludes
critical race theorists from also using statistics. So why not the epistemology of statistics rather
than (or in addition to) the epistemology of narrative? The answer may be that narrative does
something that statistical analysis does not: It focuses on the specific and provides detail.
Statistical analyses do the reverse. When an outsider is trying to describe an experience to
someone who cannot readily relate to it, an insider, narrative provides the detail that can help
the insider empathize and relate to the experience. To employ the language of Clifford Geertz,
"We see the lives of others through lenses of our own grinding."'27 Narrative helps to situate
whites in the "grinding" of racial subordination. A second payoff from using narrative relates to
the idea of truth. Narrative is a means by which one can challenge "the perfectibility,
externality, or objectivity of truth."'3' Through narrative, critical race theorists can
demonstrate the contingency and situatedness of truth. For example, the first two
essays in A New Critical Race Theory-Kimberl6 Crenshaw's contributionl32 and the
contribution of Sumi Cho and Robert Westley'33-are in dialogue about the "true" genesis of
CRT. Of course, Cho and Westley would not say that the history they excavate-which focuses on
student activism as a form of social movement that helped to form the "theory"-is true and that
the account provided by, among others, Crenshaw (which they argue focuses on the "writings
that 'formed the movement""134) is false. Nor are Cho and Westley invested in "proliferate[ing]
competing genesis stories."'35 But they do mean to suggest that the truth about the genesis of
CRT is bigger than Crenshaw's "superagency" approach, an approach that they say
"emphasize[s] the agency of individual scholars.""36 The juxtaposition of Crenshaw's essay
against Cho and Westley's reminds us that while most of the controversy about "truth" and CRT
arises in the context of contestations between critical race theorists and their detractors, the
question of what is true-as well as the question of how truth should be theorized-is contested
(sometimes only implicitly) within CRT as well. A third benefit of narrative is that it can
serve as a counterhegemonic device. Through narrative, people of color can
counter the dominant representations of their identities and their experiences ;
they can engage in what Margaret Montoya refers to as "discursive subversions."' 37 This is the
project in which Henry Richardson engages. He constructs a conversation between an African
president and an African American law professor. The exchange constitutes a form of discursive
subversion in that whiteness occupies a background and marginal space in the discussion. Put
differently, the conversation is not mediated by concerns about whiteness or black
respectability. The professor and the African president speak about international politics,
domestic sovereignty, and tribal conflicts. The conversation is unconstrained by racial
surveillance. They appear to be speaking not as subalterns, but as fully formed (or, at least, not
overly determined) subjects. Presumably, one of the reasons Richardson confers this sense of
freedom on the professor and the president is to raise a question about power: What happens
when black people have it? His answer seems to be that problems of division and social conflict
do not necessarily disappear. Michel Foucault's descriptive claim-that we have an ambivalent
relationship to power-becomes, in Richardson's essay, a normative one.

Narratives challenge conventional accessibility of knowledge

Chang 93 (Robert S. Seattle University Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Fred
T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality Toward an Asian American Legal Scholarship:
Critical Race Theory, Post-Structuralism, and Narrative Space California Law Review, Vol. 81,
No. 5 (Oct., 1993), pp. 1241+1243-1323 http://www.jstor.org/stable/3480919 , cayla_)
There seem to be two ways to argue the case for personal narrative.'74 The first takes place
within the rational/empirical mode.'75 In this mode, an argument will be convincing if it meets
certain standards of "impartiality, objectivity, evidential confirmation, comprehensiveness or
completeness, and explanatory power.""' Personal narrative would be offered to
challenge the current formulation of objectivity, but not the notion of objectivity
itself."'77 In this sense, personal narrative reveals bias in supposed objectivity and then
reconstructs it to include previously excluded perspectives. Some strands of feminist theory and
critical race theory have this as their goal and rely to some extent on a version of standpoint
epistemology to legitimize the use of stories of oppression. I will examine these arguments in
Part II.C.1. The second, more radical approach challenges the rational/empirical mode by
challenging the very notion of objectivity and the accessibility of knowledge. This more radical
critique is often characterized as post-modern or post-structural.'78 In challenging the
rational/empirical mode, this more radical critique also challenges the standpoint
epistemologies that might support the use of personal narrative. Since all standpoints are
equally validated (or invalidated), there is no longer any compelling reason to
privilege any viewpoint. To state it differently, my personal narrative is as relevant as your
personal narrative, and since both of them are equally relevant, they are equally
irrelevant.

CASE- K OF ABELISM IN DEBATE

1AC- ABLEISM IN DEBATE

Narrative
Continued ableist assumptions in the academic space destroys education
Hehir 07 (Thomas Hehir is Professor of Practice and Director of the School Leadership Program, Harvard Graduate School of
Education, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Educational Leadership: Confronting Ableism. Published in February, 2007.
th

Accessed July 20 , 2015. http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/feb07/vol64/num05/ConfrontingAbleism.aspx)TheFedora

Negative cultural attitudes toward disability can undermine opportunities for all students to
participate fully in school and society. When Ricky was born deaf, his parents were determined to raise him to
function in the normal world. Ricky learned to read lips and was not taught American Sign Language. He felt comfortable within
the secure world of his family, but when he entered his neighborhood school, he grew less confident as he struggled to understand
what his classmates seemed to grasp so easily. Susan, a child with dyslexia, entered kindergarten with curiosity about the world
around her, a lively imagination, and a love of picture books. Although her school provided her with individual tutoring and other
special education services, it also expected her to read grade-level texts at the same speed as her nondisabled peers. Susan fell
further and further behind. By 6th grade, she hated school and avoided reading. These two examples illustrate how society's

pervasive negative attitude about disabilitywhich I term ableismoften makes the world
unwelcoming and inaccessible for people with disabilities. An ableist perspective asserts that it is
preferable for a child to read print rather than Braille, walk rather than use a wheelchair, spell
independently rather than use a spell-checker, read written text rather than listen to a book on
tape, and hang out with nondisabled kids rather than with other disabled kids. Certainly, given a
human-made world designed with the nondisabled in mind, children with disabilities gain an advantage if they can perform like
their nondisabled peers. A physically disabled child who receives the help he or she needs to walk can move more easily in a barrierfilled environment. A child with a mild hearing loss who has been given the amplification and speech therapy he or she needs may
function well in a regular classroom. But ableist assumptions become dysfunctional when the education

and development services provided to disabled children focus on their disability to the exclusion
of all else. From an early age, many people with disabilities encounter the view that disability is
negative and tragic and that overcoming disability is the only valued result (Ferguson & Asch, 1989;
Rousso, 1984). In education, considerable evidence shows that unquestioned ableist assumptions are harming
disabled students and contributing to unequal outcomes (see Allington & McGill-Franzen, 1989; Lyon et al.,
2001). School time devoted to activities that focus on changing disability may take away
from the time needed to learn academic material. In addition, academic deficits may be
exacerbated by the ingrained prejudice against performing activities in different ways that
might be more efficient for disabled peoplesuch as reading Braille, using sign language, or
using text-to-speech software to read. The Purpose of Special Education What should the purpose of special education
be? In struggling with this issue, we can find guidance in the rich and varied narratives of people with disabilities and their families.
Noteworthy among these narratives is the work of Adrienne Asch, a professor of bioethics at Yeshiva University in New York who is
blind. In her analysis of stories that adults with disabilities told about their childhood experiences (Ferguson & Asch, 1989), Asch
identified common themes in their parents' and educators' responses to their disability . Some of the
adults

responded with excessive concern and sheltering. Others conveyed to children, through
silence or denial, that nothing was wrong. For example, one young woman with significant vision loss related that
she was given no alternative but to use her limited vision even though this restriction caused her significant academic problems.
Another common reaction was to make ill-conceived attempts to fix the disability. For example,
Harilyn Rousso, an accomplished psychotherapist with cerebral palsy, recounts, My mother was quite concerned with the
awkwardness of my walk. Not only did it periodically cause me to fall but it made me stand out, appear conspicuously different
which she feared would subject me to endless teasing and rejection. To some extent it did. She made numerous attempts over the
years of my childhood to have me go to physical therapy and to practice walking normally at home. I vehemently refused her
efforts. She could not understand why I would not walk straight. (1984, p. 9) In recalling her own upbringing and education, Asch
describes a more positive response to disability: I give my parents high marks. They did not deny that I was blind, and did not ask
me to pretend that everything about my life was fine. They rarely sheltered. They worked to help me behave and look the way others
did without giving me a sense that to be blinddifferentwas shameful. They fought for me to ensure that I lived as full and rich a
life as I could. For them, and consequently for me, my blindness was a fact, not a tragedy. It affected them but did not dominate their
lives. Nor did it dominate mine. (Ferguson & Asch, 1989, p. 118) Asch's narrative and others (Biklen, 1992) suggest that we can

best frame the purpose of special education as minimizing the impact of disability and
maximizing the opportunities for students with disabilities to participate in schooling and the

community. This framework assumes that most students with disabilities will be integrated into
general education and educated within their natural community. It is consistent with the 1997 and 2004
reauthorizations of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which requires that individualized education program
(IEP) teams address how the student will gain access to the curriculum and how the school will meet the unique needs that arise out
of the student's disability. Finally, this framework embraces the diverse needs of students with various

disabilities as well as the individual diversity found among students within each disability group.
Falling Short of the Goal Minimizing the impact of disability does not mean making misguided
attempts to cure disability but rather giving students the supports, skills, and opportunities
needed to live as full a life as possible with their disability. Maximizing access requires that school practices
recognize the right of students with disabilities to participate fully in the school community not
only in academic programs, but also in sports teams, choruses, clubs, and field trips. A look at common problems
encountered by students with low-incidence disabilities, specific learning disabilities, and
emotional disturbances illustrates that schools still have a long way to go in fulfilling the
purpose of special education. Students with Low-Incidence Disabilities In Adrienne Asch's case, minimizing the impact of
her blindness meant learning Braille, developing orientation and mobility skills, and having appropriate accommodations available
that gave her access to education. Asch also points out that because of New Jersey's enlightened policies at the time, she could live at
home and attend her local school, so she and her family were not required to disrupt their lives to receive the specialized services she
needed. Unfortunately, many students today with low-incidence disabilities like blindness and deafness are not afforded the
opportunities that Asch had in the early 1950s. Parents sometimes face the choice of sending their children to a local school that is ill
equipped to meet their needs or to a residential school with specialized services, thus disrupting normal family life. Parents should
not be forced to make this Hobson's choice. Services can be brought to blind and deaf students in typical community settings, and
most students can thrive in that environment (Wagner, Black-orby, Cameto, & Newman, 1993; Wagner & Cameto, 2004). It is up to
policymakers to ensure that such services are available. Students with Specific Learning Disabilities Because students

identified as having learning disabilities are such a large and growing portion of the school
population, we might expect that these students would be less likely to be subjected to ableist
practices. The available evidence, however, contradicts this assumption. Many students with
dyslexia and other specific learning disabilities receive inappropriate instruction that
exacerbates their disabilities. For example, instead of making taped books available to these
students, many schools require those taught in regular classrooms to handle grade-level or
higher text. Other schools do not allow students to use computers when taking exams, thus
greatly diminishing some students' ability to produce acceptable written work. The late disabilities
advocate Ed Roberts had polio as a child, which left him dependent on an iron lung. He attended school from home in the 1960s
with the assistance of a telephone link. When it was time for graduation, however, the school board planned to deny him a diploma
because he had failed to meet the physical education requirement. His parents protested, and Ed eventually graduated (Shapiro,
1994). We can hardly imagine this scenario happening today, given disability law and improved

societal attitudes. Yet similar ableist assumptions are at work when schools routinely require
students with learning disabilities to read print at grade level to gain access to the curriculum or
to meet proficiency levels on high-stakes assessments . Assuming that there is only one right
way to learnor to walk, talk, paint, read, and writeis the root of fundamental inequities.
Seriously Emotionally Disturbed Students Perhaps no group suffers from negative attitudes more than students who have
been identified as having serious emotional disturbance (SED)and no other subpopulation experiences
poorer outcomes. Students with SED drop out of school at more than double the rate of
nondisabled students. Only 15 percent pursue higher education, and approximately 50 percent
are taught in segregated settings (U.S. Department of Education, 2003; Wagner & Cameto, 2004). For large numbers of
students with serious emotional disturbance, their IEPs are more likely to include inappropriate responses to control the most
common symptom of their disabilityacting-out behaviorthan to provide the accommodations and support the students need to
be successful in education. Only 50 percent of students with SED receive mental health services, only 30 percent receive social work
services, and only 50 percent have behavior management appropriately addressed in their IEPs (Wagner & Cameto, 2004). What do
these students typically receive through special education? They are commonly placed in a special classroom

or school with other students with similar disabilities (U.S. Department of Education, 2003)often with an
uncertified teacher. Placing such students in separate classes without specific behavioral
supports, counseling, or an expert teacher is unlikely to work. Substantial evidence, indicates,
however, that providing these students with appropriate supports and mental health services can significantly
reduce disruptive behavior and improve their learning (Sugai, Sprague, Horner, & Walker, 2000). Such
supports are most effective when provided within the context of effective schoolwide discipline
approaches, such as the U.S. Department of Education's Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports program

(www.pbis.org). Schoolwide

approaches also produce safer and better-run schools for all

students. Guidelines for Special Education Decision Making The goal of minimizing the impact of disability
and maximizing opportunities to participate suggests several guidelines for serving students
with disabilities.

Ableism in the debate space excludes those with

disabilities from participation.
Zelinger 7/7 (Julie Zeilinger: a freelance author from the Barnard College class of 2015.
Mic.com: 6 Forms of Ableism We Need to Retire Immediately published July 7th, 2015.
Accessed July 24th, 2015. http://mic.com/articles/121653/6-forms-of-ableism-we-need-toretire-immediately)TheFedora
Nearly 1 in 5 people in the United States has a disability, according to a 2012 Census Bureau report. Yet
many forms of discrimination against the disability community not only persist, but are actually
largely normalized and even integrated into our culture's very understanding (or, more
accurately, disregard) of disabled people's experiences. Ableism refers to "discrimination in favor of able-bodied
people," according to the Oxford English Dictionary. But the reality of ableism extends beyond literal
discriminatory acts (intentional or not) to the way our culture views disabled people as a
concept. Ableism is also the belief that people with disabilities "need to be fixed or cannot
function as full members of society" and that having a disability is "a defect rather than a
dimension of difference," according to the authors of one 2008 Journal of Counseling & Development article on the topic,
as reported by Feminists with Disabilities. This interpretation of difference as defect is the true root of
ableist acts that cause far too many to feel marginalized, discriminated against and
ultimately devalued in this society. Here are just six forms of this behavior that, though largely normalized, need
to be retired immediately. 1. Failing to provide accessibility beyond wheelchair ramps Source: Getty Perhaps the most obvious form
of discrimination people with disabilities face is the inability to access places and services open to their able-bodied counterparts
even with laws in place to prevent such inequality. As Tumblr user The (Chronically) Illest noted, while most people think

"just [putting] wheelchair ramps everywhere" is sufficient, true accessibility accommodates all
types of disabilities not just physical disabilities that specifically bind people to wheelchairs. Accommodations can also
include "braille, seeing-eye dogs/assistant dogs, ergonomic workspaces, easy to grip tools, closed captions ... class note-takers,
recording devices for lectures" and other services and alterations. Though accessibility is certainly a matter of

convenience and equity, a lack of accessible resources can impact the very wellbeing of people
with disabilities. Individuals with disabilities have reported not being able to receive health care
because their providers' facilities weren't accessible, and one study found that women with
disabilities particularly face increased difficulty accessing reproductive health care, just to name
two examples. 2. Using ableist language Source: Getty Ableism has become undeniably naturalized in the English language.
Many people not only use words like "crazy," "insane" or "retarded" without a second thought, but many adamantly defend their use
of these terms, decrying anybody who questions their right to do so as too "politically correct" or "sensitive." But this personal
defense fails to recognize that ableist language is not about the words themselves so much as what their usage suggests the speaker
feels about the individuals they represent. "When a critique of language that makes reference to disability is not welcome, it is nearly
inevitable that, as a disabled person, I am not welcome either," Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg wrote in a 2013 Disability and
Representation article. But beyond individual feelings, ableist language can contribute to a foundation of more systemic oppression
of people with disabilities as a group. "If a culture's language is full of pejorative metaphors about a group of people," CohenRottenberg continued, that culture is more likely to view those individuals as less entitled to rights like "housing, employment,
medical care, education, access, and inclusion as people in a more favored group." 3. Able-bodied people failing to check their
privilege Source: Getty It may not seem like a big deal in the moment, but able-bodied individuals fail to

recognize the privilege of having access to every and any space accessible . As Erin Tatum
points out at Everyday Feminism, plenty of people may not directly discriminate against people
with disabilities but effectively do so by using resources allocated for them . For
example, many able-bodied people use handicapped bathroom stalls or take up space in crowded elevators, rather than taking the
stairs and leave room for people with disabilities who don't have other options, without a second thought. While these actions

may not be the product of ill will, they are evidence of the way able-bodied privilege manifests in
our society. There's a general cultural notion that "disability is something inherently negative ,"
Allie Cannington, a board member of the American Association of People with Disabilities, told Mic. " There's a level of
silencing that happens, and erasing of the disabled experience as an important
experience because able-bodied experiences are the privileged experiences in our

society."

The impact is the silencing of disabled voices and

violence against disabled persons
Zelinger 7/7 (Julie Zeilinger: a freelance author from the Barnard College class of 2015.
Mic.com: 6 Forms of Ableism We Need to Retire Immediately published July 7th, 2015.
Accessed July 24th, 2015. http://mic.com/articles/121653/6-forms-of-ableism-we-need-toretire-immediately)TheFedora
6. Assuming disability is always visible Source: Getty Though their experiences are undoubtedly
distinct from individuals with physical disabilities, people with non-apparent disabilities
certainly face ableism as well. There is pervasive stigma surrounding mental illness, for
example, and it can and often does lead to inequitable treatment, such as forced
institutionalization and medication and a lack of agency in treating one's mental health,
Cannington told Mic. But beyond being denied the autonomy of making personal choices, this form of
ableism may even cause individuals physical harm especially when compounded with race and
class. "People with psychiatric disabilities are disproportionately victims of police
brutality because of ableism," Cannington said. "It's a huge form of ableism not often named as
ableism." And mental illness is hardly the only non-apparent disability. Individuals who
experience learning disabilities, developmental intellectual disabilities and even chronic illness
may identify as disabled, for example, but because they are not predominately recognized as
such may be denied the help and resources they need. "As human beings we need to check our
privileges in regards to our abilities," Cannington concluded. "In order to harness the power and
diversity and innovation of our society, we have to realize that our minds and bodies experience
the world in very different ways. If we are able to create access and be more intentional about
how we create access, then we are doing everyone good."

Our Critical advocacy key to fight abliest structures of

policy debate- demands of the state fail
Richter 16 [Zach Richter,Communication Studies, University of California, San
Diego; M.S., Disability Studies, University of Illinois Chicago. The Disabled Persons
Struggle In Round & Beyond: Taking Back Formerly Ableist Educational Spaces in the
Post-Ada Generation, National Journal of Speech and Debate, Vol. IV: Issue III,
http://site.theforensicsfiles.com/NJSD.4-3.pdf LMcf]
My part of this dialogue has been to add, what has been lacking in discussions about disability and accessibility, a
dimension of the historical political struggle within institutions . In my analysis,

I first place disabled

people in the policy debate world in the context of a wider movement of disabled
people in the West who have been activated at least in the 1950s or 1960s, but
have proliferated and been more or less in successful in institutional ways since the
1980s. The disabled struggle in debate mimics the struggle of people like Ed Roberts who fought for educational
equity in universities. The disabled persons movement in debate is just one more node of
a spread-out disabled persons movement to end ableist segregation on an
institutional level and to point out and oppose the lesser funding received in
disability ghettos condoned by the government. The initial framing that my analysis
draws upon is the language of the social model of disability that explicitly indicts
institutional segregation for suppressing disabled public presence and disabled
accomplishment, as well doing violence regularly to disabled people of all different
types. Debate as an enterprise has been un-reflexive about the level of accessibility
at events and has only recently enjoyed several controversies beginning in debate
rounds that have challenged the systematic inaccessibility that plagues the inter-

collegiate and inter-high school leagues. This panel was organized to offer solutions, but many of my
fellow panelists have noted that some issues with debate, such as the lack of American Sign Language options, are
intractablethe

debate world has systematically and routinely refused to act on or

consider possible solutions. These issues are particularly revelatory in terms of what
Charlton describes as the hierarchy of disability that structures which types of
disabled people make it into which spaces.13 By and large, those able to access
debate are those disabled people who have had invisible disabilities, such as
learning disabilities or psychiatric issues. Disabled people impaired in other ways,
such as blind and deaf debaters, are present in lesser numbers, receding down to
developmentally disabled people who are never present in the debate world . Due to
debates existence, enveloped by a culture of high achievement, there is an implicit
expectation that debaters who are too disabled should not debate. This type of suggestion

ignores the centrality of a forensic education to the necessary self-advocacy that disabled people must undertake in
order to receive education, medical help, and often to interact with the public .

In-round advocacy has

a similarity to plying your case to a superior; this interaction with power is
very basic and is key to life within the current systems. I frame the battle for
accessibility in policy debate as part of a wider battle for accessibility in education and, wider than that, a battle for
accountability for the harms that the modern nation-state and corporation has dealt to the disabled person. In many
educational institutions of higher and preparatory learning, the communicative situation of the classroom is
organized such that order is favored over wider inclusion. The field of educational studies has been a driving
influence in disability studies because of the effort of enlightened educational thinkers, such as Doug Biklen and
others, to support alternative mediated forms of communication as well as those involved in the inclusive education

People involved in debate have long placed the activity as intended for the
elite and, as a consequence of that decision, have felt no need to include impaired
people. However, in the contemporary ideology connected to disability rights of self-advocacy, one finds a way of
movement.

being disabled that is indeed more involved in argumentation and advocacy than nondisabled existence. In the
agreement that is classroom accommodations, the education system places an onus upon the disabled person to
persuasively engage their instructors in order to receive needed access. My presentation must call upon a recent
example of organizational policies in the debate world in which the National Debate Tournament (NDT) posted an
accessibility statement that harmed both disabled and black debaters. It took significant lobbying on the part of a
wide coalition of debate people across the nation to correct the problematic language. Even then, the language of
the NDTs access statement was oriented around reacting to the possibility of inaccessibility, not to build debate in
such a way that disabled people were considered and included in their full capacity from the start and in advance.

we are offered an image of what

might be considered a crip optimism: redesigning the world for all body types,
mental, psychiatric and health statuses. This concept is preferred over the tendency for institutions
to be in a defensive posture fearing disabled response. The Americans with Disabilities Act has
been passed for 20 years but we have not seen the time of enthusiastic compliance
yet. At this time, disability activists must repeatedly threaten various
institutions with continuing demands and protests , and a few nonprofits must
support several cases. But overall there will be more cases of inaccessibility and
architectural exclusion than can be possibly compensated for. Disabled people wait
too long at the door of policymakers, for their lack of strictness and of local
businesses, developers and municipalities to increasingly build in ways that include
a wide diversity of types of bodies. The time is now for those reading this to strike
against the educational, political, social, business and all other types of
organizations that are not actively experimenting with ways of being more
accessible.
In the concept of universal design, gleaned from the work of Mace,14

SOLVENCY- DEBATE CAMP

Thus we demand these changes be made within summer
debate institutes inorder to make debate a more
accessible place.
Dhillon 16 [ Kiranjeet Kaur Dhillon, Ph.D Candidate, University of WisconsinMilwaukee, Accessibility & Debate Camps, Vol. IV: Issue III, April 2016,
http://site.theforensicsfiles.com/NJSD.4-3.pdf LMcf]
Summer high debate camps play a vital role within the debate community. Every
summer, members of the CEDA/NDT community teach high school debaters
throughout the country. In addition, members of the CEDA/NDT community run
these debate camps. Given the connection between CEDA/NDT members and
summer debate camps and that high school debaters may become or think about
becoming CEDA/NDT members after they graduate from high school, it is important
that accessibility is discussed and implemented in these spaces. Furthermore, some
may argue that the primary purpose of summer camps at intercollegiate CEDA/NDT
schools is to pay for the CEDA/NDTs school travel during the year based on what
camps earn during the summer. However, summer camps have an ethical
responsibility to ensure all spaces facilitate the health and safety of all campers. In
order to do so effectively, camps should consider the following six suggestions to
begin to move towards accessibility within summer debate camps. First, camps
should brainstorm and develop accessibility guidelines/policies. Then camps should
ensure accessibility polices are viewable (perhaps a link on a camp webpage) to
campers, their parent(s)/guardian(s), their coaches, and all summer staff. One
example of establishing published accessibility guidelines is the proposal for CEDA
hosting accessibility guidelines.12 Second, camps should include space on their
application that allows for campers to disclose their accessibility needs, if they so
chose. Furthermore, camps should also include language that informs campers that
disclosure of accessibility needs will not hinder them from being considered into
their desired summer program. Third, similar to harassment and/or diversity training
at higher education institutions, camps should require all summer debate staff to
undergo a mandatory training/meeting in accessibility resources and services. Part
of this training should inform all staff members that, while campers are provided
space on their applications to disclose any disability or accessibility needs, many
may choose not to. As a result, all staff members should be prepared to
professionally address disability and accessibility needs as they arise. Fourth, camps
should hire a staff member whose sole responsibility is to supervise and coordinate
a quiet room for campers. Supervision is important because high school debaters
are minors whom camps assume responsibility for while campers are away from
their parent(s)/guardian(s). Fifth, camps should coordinate with professional
counselors with whom campers can see and speak to. Counselors may be sought
either through a non-profit or may be associated with the university. Sixth, camps
should hire at least one accessibility coordinator who is responsible for arranging
any necessary appointments, coordination with parent(s)/guardian(s), accessibility
of food, and other accessibility concerns. Some requirements for being an
accessibility coordinator may include knowledge in mental health studies, disability
studies, and accessibility. If possible, camps should hire two accessibility
coordinators (a day accessibility coordinator and an evening accessibility

coordinator).

ACCESSIBILITY-DYSLEXIA

Normalized practices of debate such as font size,

spreading, speaking clearly, play part in making debate
less accessible for some dyslexic debaters
Nelson & Miller 16 [Natalie Nelson- M.A., Communication Studies, Joshua MillerPh.D Candidate, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; M.A., Communication Studies,
University of Nevada, Las Vegas; B.A., Social Relations & Policy, Dyslexia in
Debate National Journal of Speech and Debate, Vol. IV: Issue III, April 2016,
http://site.theforensicsfiles.com/NJSD.4-3.pdf LMcf]
This contribution to the conversion about disability, accessibility, and debate focuses on dyslexia the most
common learning disability. Dyslexia is defined as a specific learning disability that is neurobiological in
origin. It is characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition
and by poor spelling and decoding abilities.2 Dyslexic debaters may not be able to
recognize instantly or automatically as many of the words in the text as others. They
may struggle to sound out letters and words. In addition, they will stumble over words, try to
memorize the way words should look, or guess at the pronunciation of the words.
Failed attempts to identify words may result in error. Because of this, individuals with dyslexia may find
it difficult to build their word-reading abilities and this may impact reading
comprehension. As a result, certain practices in debate, such speed-reading, may be
problematic for dyslexic individuals. In this entry, we discuss how, in certain cases, speed-reading
might be inaccessible and conclude by offering a few suggestions that could increase the accessibility of debate for
dyslexic individuals. Certainly, this entry should not be read as attempting to cover all of the issues in debate in

Emphasis on speed might deter dyslexic

individuals from participating in policy debate . If dyslexic individuals do
choose to participate, they may face barriers to being able to participate fully.
According to OBrien, Mansfield, Legge, the maximum reading speed of a dyslexic
individual is less than a non-dyslexic individual. 3 Tops and colleagues concur and indicate that
regards to disability and accessibility.

dyslexia is associated with slower and more effortful reading than would be expected of someone who is not

Moreover, dyslexia is associated with phonological difficulties,5 which

means that dyslexic debaters will have more difficulty speaking clearly than nondyslexic debaters. Because dyslexic readers stumble over words, may omit words
from sentences, and fail to identify the correct words in sentences, their speaking
may be much less comprehensible than non-dyslexic readers, 6 especially at high
rates of speed. If judges value clarity, dyslexic debaters may not be able to satisfy
judge expectations. Altering the fonts, font sizes, and spacing used in evidence
might help make debate a little more accessible for dyslexic individuals. Rello and Baezadyslexic.4

Yates found that a significant correlation exists between font type and the ability for people with dyslexia to read a

According to their study, Helvetica, Courier, Arial, Verdana and Computer

Modern Unicode constitute the best fonts for people with dyslexia . Moreover, these
given text.7

researchers found that dyslexic readers can read Courier and Helvetica faster while maintaining their accuracy.

Slightly increasing the size of the font used for debate evidence also enables
dyslexic individuals to read more efficiently and accurately. 8 Furthermore, increasing spacing

between letters and words can improve the accessibility of debate for dyslexic readers. Zorzi et al. for example,
found a significant correlation between increase letter spacing and improvement in the reading speech of dyslexic
individuals.9 According to their study, the extra spacing between letters decreases the influence of crowding, which
enables quicker and more accurate letter and word recognition. In addition, according to Evett and Brown, some
dyslexics prefer to read black text on a yellow background or dark blue text on a light blue background.10 The use
of 14-point font is generally viewed as more accessible for dyslexic and visually impaired individuals than 12-point

Producing evidence with these guidelines in mind and

researching best practices for producing accessible text is a simple step that
debaters, coaches, and judges alike can follow to foster a more accessible debate
font (or smaller fonts than that).11

space.

NARRATIVES GOOD
Narratives are uniquely key to understanding social location in debate and
creating the epistemic conditions necessary for social change

GREGORY & ALIMAHOMED 2k1 (Josh & Kasim, professors

of Comm @ CAL ST FULLERTON -; EMPOWERING NARRATIVES;
Narrative Voice and the Urban Debater: An Investigation into
Empowerment; paper submitted to the Urban Debate League
Panel at the Western States Communication Association
Conference, Coeur d Alene, Idaho February 23-27,
http://communications.fullerton.edu/forensics/SCUDL.htm ]
The first step in orienting to the narratives of everyday life in this way is to listen to
what people say. Not necessarily to retell it in exactly those terms, but to enquire
into how it would be possible for them to say that. What kinds of assumptions in
what types of possible world could produce those accounts? Clegg, 1993, p.31).
This inquiry offers the ability to gain an insight into others existence and
epistemological understandings. The ability to conceptualize or empathize with
ones stories creates a convergence between two different perspectives. This
convergence is directly related to the unifying power of the narrative as well as
providing a legitimate means for the disenfranchised voice to be heard. Mumby
(1993) illustrates how the duality of narrative structures create a social
understanding as well as set up an epistemological device of meaning in which
social awareness is created: Narrative is a socially symbolic act in the double sense
that (a) it takes on meaning only in social context and (b) it plays a role in the
construction of that social context as a cite of meaning in which social actors are
implicated. However, there is no simple isomorphism between narrative (or any
other symbolic form) and the social realm. In different ways, each of the chapters
belies the notion that the narrative functions monolithically to create a stable,
structured, social order. Indeed, one of the prevailing themes across the chapters is
the extent to which social order is tenuous, precarious, and open to negotiation in
various ways. In this sense, society is characterized by an ongoing struggle over
meaning (p. 5). The implication of these two factors on intercollegiate debate point
to how the narrative not only relies on the social context for meaning, but aids in
the construction of that context. Debate is a unique forum to meet Mumbys
socially symbolic act. Debate offers a unique social context in that the majority of
audience members are intellectually versed on the social context of a particular
narrative (due to debate research). The public advocacy emphasis of academic
debate also allows for a cite of meaning and the adversarial positions in a debate
round allow a team to implicate a judge or another team by virtue of their position.
It is in these mock situations that debaters are implicated as social actors, and thus
are moved to action by virtue of close engagement with anothers story. In factors
of debate the concepts of theory and practice are inexorably intertwined. When
these two competing ideologies can be combined creates a holistic insight into the
human psyche. Insight gained from this holistic understanding is created by stories
(or narratives) that define human experience. The ability to construct a compelling
story can have a dramatic impact on the social epistemology, which creates a coconstructed knowledge framework. Scholars have posited that: Stories are among

the most universal means of representing human events. In addition to suggesting

an interpretation for a social happening, a well-crafted narrative can motivate the
belief and action of outsiders toward the actors and events caught up in its plot. A
key question about stories, as with other situations-defining symbolic forms like
metaphors, theories, and ideologies is whether they introduce new and constructive
insights into social life (Bennett & Edelman, 1985, p. 156). This form of meaning
production and the persuasive potential of identification established by the
narrative can be a powerful force upon the debate community or even society. The
process of which an individuals interacts with a narrative and then how a
community reacts to the narrative is better explained by White (1987) who states:
Narrative is revealed to be particularly effective system of discursive meaning
production by which individuals can be taught to live a distinctively imaginary
relation to the real conditions of existence, that is to say, an unreal but meaningful
relation to the social formations in which they are indentured to live out their lives
and realize their destinies and social subjects. To conceive of a narrative discourse
in this way permits us to account for its universality as a cultural fact and for the
interest that dominant social groups have not only in controlling what will pass for
the authoritative myth of a given cultural formation but also in assuring the belief
that social reality itself can be both lived and realistically comprehended as a story
(p. 187) The entrance of this new form of information processing seems uncertain.
Thus, the final analysis looks to the debate community in particular and provides
some investigation as to how the persuasiveness of the narrative could interact with
the conventions and norms of the debate community.
Narratives both engage and challenge the traditional, objective policy
framework by injecting pathos into the debate space. A ballot cast for a
narrative provides an endorsement for emotional appeal and real change
inside and outside of the debate community

GREGORY & ALIMAHOMED 2k1 (Josh & Kasim, professors

of Comm @ CAL ST FULLERTON -; EMPOWERING NARRATIVES;
Narrative Voice and the Urban Debater: An Investigation into
Empowerment; paper submitted to the Urban Debate League
Panel at the Western States Communication Association
Conference, Coeur d Alene, Idaho February 23-27, ]
Having justified that the personal narrative or story can empower the
disenfranchised individual, the next claim that must be justified is that the
introduction of narratives will aid the entire debate community. The structure of the
narrative is vastly different than the structure of more traditional affirmative cases,
disadvantages, and counterplans. This difference creates a problem of how a
narrative should be evaluated versus a disadvantage resulting in worldwide
destruction. The narrative structure does not refute this, nor does the disadvantage
outweigh the narrative. The intersection of the disadvantage and the narrative only
happens at the impact levelthe narrative is an example of how one person feels in
the vast number of individuals subjected to torture and death by case harms or
disadvantage impacts. The relationship of these structures guides them to
tangentially clash and this does not justify their exclusion from debate. The
narrative structure is a powerful persuasive device, and should be introduced

because it: 1) privileges the emotional appeal of the story over the logical structure
of links, brinks, and impacts, 2) provides a snapshot of time in which a person can
identify with true suffering as opposed to the longitudinal aspects of death tallies,
and 3) opens a rhetoric of possibility in which competitors and judges alike can
affirm or negate a resolution based off of the ability to foresee a future effected by
the narrative. The debate community has privileged traditional logical appeals over
nontraditional forms of argument. These logical appeals create easy comparisons
for critics since the arguments can be broken down into simple equations. To weigh
a disadvantage of ecological collapse versus a plan that saves fifty lives is basic
mathsurvival of the planet always outweighs fifty lives. These logical appeals are
naturally preferred over emotional appeals because there is no systematic way in
which to quantify the emotions evoked by a message. However, narrative debate
could create a different form of impact analysis at the pathos level: the emotional
appeal of the narrative could be weighed against the emotional appeal of a
disadvantage. This new type of impact analysis provides clear ground, because the
traditional disadvantage can have emotional appeal (deaths of children,
environmental destructionthese all include basic pathos appeals) and the
narrative can be weighed against this. The other advantage to this form of impact
analysis is that it becomes a forum in the debate community, judges and
competitors alike could begin to create rubrics and hierarchies that would help
explain the more powerful versus less powerful pathos appeals. The realm of the
pathos appeal has been understudied for years, and with its acceptance as a
criterion in debate, the community could lend a helping hand to facilitate a mapping
out the persuasiveness of pathos appeals. The second advantage that the narrative
provides in academic debate is that the narrative is centered on a snapshot in time:
the narrative is a glimpse into someone elses life for just a moment. In debate
rounds, competitors often prophesize the most severe impacts possible in an
attempt to get enough blood on the flow. In every debate round, billions of
human beings are killed by some proclaimed catastrophic event that a singular
policy measure evoked. By tallying deaths into the billions, debaters and judges
never really have a chance to empathize with one case of human pain and
suffering. Narratives produce an insight into the human condition and illuminate
the struggle our species endures. Compared to traditional policy arguments that
concentrate on future action to remedy current problems, the narrative forces
competitors to empathize with a particular problem that a human is experiencing
now. This empathy is lost in contemporary debate, with debaters claiming future
destruction for the planet in almost every debate round. With more narrative
debaters, we may see a resurgence of probabilistic arguments against
disadvantages, since the unlikely scenario of nuclear war might be outweighed by
the definite impact to the protagonist of the narrative (as well as the good
possibility that others have similar narratives). The narrative helps to keep it real,
and centers the debate round back to the individuals that the impacts are directly
affecting, creating a strong link between debater and the change that they are
advocating in the status quo. The final reason why narratives would help the debate
community is that they do open up a rhetoric of possibility. The Gulf war may or
may not have started (without the narrative), but after the young Kuwaiti girl spoke,
there was a call for war, and war seemed inevitable, a conclusion that traditional
forms of argument would never have established. This discourse is a prime
example of the power of the narrative, which opened a possibility that before was
not an option. The persuasive force of the narrative affects receiver and the

individual immediately begins to ponder what sort of situation would bring about
such a travesty. This thought process create new possibilities that individuals can
begin conceived even though it was unconsidered before: The need to evoke
possibilities of the human condition is central to the rhetorical enterprise,
transcending any one school or strategy. However, narrative is perhaps the
foremost means by which such possibilities are disclosed. Through storytelling,
rhetors can confront the states of awareness and intellectual beliefs of audiences;
through it they can show them previously unsuspected ways of being and acting in
the world (Kirkwood, 1992, p. 32). These new ways of acting and being are
reflections of a different rhetorical style, new faculties that should be available to
the young debater. The rhetoric of possibility that is created by having competitors
and judges alike engage the narrative calls for new creative actions that would have
normally been dismissed in the contemporary debate society. The rhetoric of
possibility is different from the rhetoric of actualitythe traditional debater creates
claims from a realist frameworkthe political disadvantage based around the
workings of government, the financial disadvantage from the workings of the stock
market, or the counterplan that tries to implement a plan through the same
traditional policy means. The narrative debater, working from a rhetoric of
possibility works from a different ideology or school of thought, though the narrative
debater would recognize these same realist conceptions, the narrative debater also
tries to guide the audience to see additional perspectives and to create more
solutions than the realist platformthe narrative debater as asks the audience to
try to work outside and around the realist framework as well. By helping people
examine possibilities, which they previously did not imagine or think they could
achieve, rhetors can free them to pursue more satisfying responses to both personal
and public needs. Hence a rhetoric of possibility can illuminate diverse kinds of
communication (Kirkwood, 1992, p.44). As of the writing of this paper, the signing of
a debate ballot has gained perlocutionary forcethe action of voting has some
concrete impact in the community (debate and otherwise). Debaters have began to
claim that the ballot can either operate in the traditional debate sense (working
from any of a multitude of debate paradigms: stock issues, cost-benefit analysis,
hypothesis-testing, etc.), or the ballot becomes an endorsement of an ideology, with
the action of signing becoming a statement to a larger community. The narrative
can operate at either level: it can be weighed in a debate round on the probability
and pathos appeal of the narration, or it can be endorsed by a judge for its
ideological power. However, the narrative can be impacted at even higher levels. A
performance that touches debaters and critics alike should be endorsed for the
mere fact that more individuals should hear it. The intellectual landscape would
support any effort or trust to exchange and create ideas. The narrative could be a
stronghold that keeps the death that debaters often claim as inevitable closer to
home.

Ableism-Education
Continued ableist assumptions in the academic space destroys education
Hehir 07 (Thomas Hehir is Professor of Practice and Director of the School Leadership Program, Harvard Graduate School of
Education, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Educational Leadership: Confronting Ableism. Published in February, 2007.
th

Accessed July 20 , 2015. http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/feb07/vol64/num05/ConfrontingAbleism.aspx)TheFedora

Negative cultural attitudes toward disability can undermine opportunities for all students to
participate fully in school and society. When Ricky was born deaf, his parents were determined to raise him to
function in the normal world. Ricky learned to read lips and was not taught American Sign Language. He felt comfortable within
the secure world of his family, but when he entered his neighborhood school, he grew less confident as he struggled to understand
what his classmates seemed to grasp so easily. Susan, a child with dyslexia, entered kindergarten with curiosity about the world
around her, a lively imagination, and a love of picture books. Although her school provided her with individual tutoring and other
special education services, it also expected her to read grade-level texts at the same speed as her nondisabled peers. Susan fell
further and further behind. By 6th grade, she hated school and avoided reading. These two examples illustrate how society's

pervasive negative attitude about disabilitywhich I term ableismoften makes the world
unwelcoming and inaccessible for people with disabilities. An ableist perspective asserts that it is
preferable for a child to read print rather than Braille, walk rather than use a wheelchair, spell
independently rather than use a spell-checker, read written text rather than listen to a book on
tape, and hang out with nondisabled kids rather than with other disabled kids. Certainly, given a
human-made world designed with the nondisabled in mind, children with disabilities gain an advantage if they can perform like
their nondisabled peers. A physically disabled child who receives the help he or she needs to walk can move more easily in a barrierfilled environment. A child with a mild hearing loss who has been given the amplification and speech therapy he or she needs may
function well in a regular classroom. But ableist assumptions become dysfunctional when the education

and development services provided to disabled children focus on their disability to the exclusion
of all else. From an early age, many people with disabilities encounter the view that disability is
negative and tragic and that overcoming disability is the only valued result (Ferguson & Asch, 1989;
Rousso, 1984). In education, considerable evidence shows that unquestioned ableist assumptions are harming
disabled students and contributing to unequal outcomes (see Allington & McGill-Franzen, 1989; Lyon et al.,
2001). School time devoted to activities that focus on changing disability may take away
from the time needed to learn academic material. In addition, academic deficits may be
exacerbated by the ingrained prejudice against performing activities in different ways that
might be more efficient for disabled peoplesuch as reading Braille, using sign language, or
using text-to-speech software to read. The Purpose of Special Education What should the purpose of special education
be? In struggling with this issue, we can find guidance in the rich and varied narratives of people with disabilities and their families.
Noteworthy among these narratives is the work of Adrienne Asch, a professor of bioethics at Yeshiva University in New York who is
blind. In her analysis of stories that adults with disabilities told about their childhood experiences (Ferguson & Asch, 1989), Asch
identified common themes in their parents' and educators' responses to their disability . Some of the
adults

responded with excessive concern and sheltering. Others conveyed to children, through
silence or denial, that nothing was wrong. For example, one young woman with significant vision loss related that
she was given no alternative but to use her limited vision even though this restriction caused her significant academic problems.
Another common reaction was to make ill-conceived attempts to fix the disability. For example,
Harilyn Rousso, an accomplished psychotherapist with cerebral palsy, recounts, My mother was quite concerned with the
awkwardness of my walk. Not only did it periodically cause me to fall but it made me stand out, appear conspicuously different
which she feared would subject me to endless teasing and rejection. To some extent it did. She made numerous attempts over the
years of my childhood to have me go to physical therapy and to practice walking normally at home. I vehemently refused her
efforts. She could not understand why I would not walk straight. (1984, p. 9) In recalling her own upbringing and education, Asch
describes a more positive response to disability: I give my parents high marks. They did not deny that I was blind, and did not ask
me to pretend that everything about my life was fine. They rarely sheltered. They worked to help me behave and look the way others
did without giving me a sense that to be blinddifferentwas shameful. They fought for me to ensure that I lived as full and rich a
life as I could. For them, and consequently for me, my blindness was a fact, not a tragedy. It affected them but did not dominate their
lives. Nor did it dominate mine. (Ferguson & Asch, 1989, p. 118) Asch's narrative and others (Biklen, 1992) suggest that we can

best frame the purpose of special education as minimizing the impact of disability and
maximizing the opportunities for students with disabilities to participate in schooling and the
community. This framework assumes that most students with disabilities will be integrated into
general education and educated within their natural community. It is consistent with the 1997 and 2004
reauthorizations of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which requires that individualized education program
(IEP) teams address how the student will gain access to the curriculum and how the school will meet the unique needs that arise out

of the student's disability. Finally, this

framework embraces the diverse needs of students with various

disabilities as well as the individual diversity found among students within each disability group.
Falling Short of the Goal Minimizing the impact of disability does not mean making misguided
attempts to cure disability but rather giving students the supports, skills, and opportunities
needed to live as full a life as possible with their disability. Maximizing access requires that school practices
recognize the right of students with disabilities to participate fully in the school community not
only in academic programs, but also in sports teams, choruses, clubs, and field trips. A look at common problems
encountered by students with low-incidence disabilities, specific learning disabilities, and
emotional disturbances illustrates that schools still have a long way to go in fulfilling the
purpose of special education. Students with Low-Incidence Disabilities In Adrienne Asch's case, minimizing the impact of
her blindness meant learning Braille, developing orientation and mobility skills, and having appropriate accommodations available
that gave her access to education. Asch also points out that because of New Jersey's enlightened policies at the time, she could live at
home and attend her local school, so she and her family were not required to disrupt their lives to receive the specialized services she
needed. Unfortunately, many students today with low-incidence disabilities like blindness and deafness are not afforded the
opportunities that Asch had in the early 1950s. Parents sometimes face the choice of sending their children to a local school that is ill
equipped to meet their needs or to a residential school with specialized services, thus disrupting normal family life. Parents should
not be forced to make this Hobson's choice. Services can be brought to blind and deaf students in typical community settings, and
most students can thrive in that environment (Wagner, Black-orby, Cameto, & Newman, 1993; Wagner & Cameto, 2004). It is up to
policymakers to ensure that such services are available. Students with Specific Learning Disabilities Because students

identified as having learning disabilities are such a large and growing portion of the school
population, we might expect that these students would be less likely to be subjected to ableist
practices. The available evidence, however, contradicts this assumption. Many students with
dyslexia and other specific learning disabilities receive inappropriate instruction that
exacerbates their disabilities. For example, instead of making taped books available to these
students, many schools require those taught in regular classrooms to handle grade-level or
higher text. Other schools do not allow students to use computers when taking exams, thus
greatly diminishing some students' ability to produce acceptable written work. The late disabilities
advocate Ed Roberts had polio as a child, which left him dependent on an iron lung. He attended school from home in the 1960s
with the assistance of a telephone link. When it was time for graduation, however, the school board planned to deny him a diploma
because he had failed to meet the physical education requirement. His parents protested, and Ed eventually graduated (Shapiro,
1994). We can hardly imagine this scenario happening today, given disability law and improved

societal attitudes. Yet similar ableist assumptions are at work when schools routinely require
students with learning disabilities to read print at grade level to gain access to the curriculum or
to meet proficiency levels on high-stakes assessments . Assuming that there is only one right
way to learnor to walk, talk, paint, read, and writeis the root of fundamental inequities.
Seriously Emotionally Disturbed Students Perhaps no group suffers from negative attitudes more than students who have
been identified as having serious emotional disturbance (SED)and no other subpopulation experiences
poorer outcomes. Students with SED drop out of school at more than double the rate of
nondisabled students. Only 15 percent pursue higher education, and approximately 50 percent
are taught in segregated settings (U.S. Department of Education, 2003; Wagner & Cameto, 2004). For large numbers of
students with serious emotional disturbance, their IEPs are more likely to include inappropriate responses to control the most
common symptom of their disabilityacting-out behaviorthan to provide the accommodations and support the students need to
be successful in education. Only 50 percent of students with SED receive mental health services, only 30 percent receive social work
services, and only 50 percent have behavior management appropriately addressed in their IEPs (Wagner & Cameto, 2004). What do
these students typically receive through special education? They are commonly placed in a special classroom

or school with other students with similar disabilities (U.S. Department of Education, 2003)often with an
uncertified teacher. Placing such students in separate classes without specific behavioral
supports, counseling, or an expert teacher is unlikely to work. Substantial evidence, indicates,
however, that providing these students with appropriate supports and mental health services can significantly
reduce disruptive behavior and improve their learning (Sugai, Sprague, Horner, & Walker, 2000). Such
supports are most effective when provided within the context of effective schoolwide discipline
approaches, such as the U.S. Department of Education's Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports program
(www.pbis.org). Schoolwide approaches also produce safer and better-run schools for all
students. Guidelines for Special Education Decision Making The goal of minimizing the impact of disability
and maximizing opportunities to participate suggests several guidelines for serving students

with disabilities.
.

!-Debate space exclusion

The impact is the silencing of disabled voices and
violence against disabled persons
Zelinger 7/7 (Julie Zeilinger: a freelance author from the Barnard College class of 2015.
Mic.com: 6 Forms of Ableism We Need to Retire Immediately published July 7th, 2015.
Accessed July 24th, 2015. http://mic.com/articles/121653/6-forms-of-ableism-we-need-toretire-immediately)TheFedora
6. Assuming disability is always visible Source: Getty Though their experiences are undoubtedly
distinct from individuals with physical disabilities, people with non-apparent disabilities
certainly face ableism as well. There is pervasive stigma surrounding mental illness, for
example, and it can and often does lead to inequitable treatment, such as forced
institutionalization and medication and a lack of agency in treating one's mental health,
Cannington told Mic. But beyond being denied the autonomy of making personal choices, this form of
ableism may even cause individuals physical harm especially when compounded with race and
class. "People with psychiatric disabilities are disproportionately victims of police
brutality because of ableism," Cannington said. "It's a huge form of ableism not often named as
ableism." And mental illness is hardly the only non-apparent disability. Individuals who
experience learning disabilities, developmental intellectual disabilities and even chronic illness
may identify as disabled, for example, but because they are not predominately recognized as
such may be denied the help and resources they need. "As human beings we need to check our
privileges in regards to our abilities," Cannington concluded. "In order to harness the power and
diversity and innovation of our society, we have to realize that our minds and bodies experience
the world in very different ways. If we are able to create access and be more intentional about
how we create access, then we are doing everyone good."

Ableism in the debate space excludes those with

disabilities from participation. Only challenging ableist
practices solves.
Zelinger 7/7 (Julie Zeilinger: a freelance author from the Barnard College class of 2015.
Mic.com: 6 Forms of Ableism We Need to Retire Immediately published July 7th, 2015.
Accessed July 24th, 2015. http://mic.com/articles/121653/6-forms-of-ableism-we-need-toretire-immediately)TheFedora
Nearly 1 in 5 people in the United States has a disability, according to a 2012 Census Bureau report. Yet
many forms of discrimination against the disability community not only persist, but are actually
largely normalized and even integrated into our culture's very understanding (or, more
accurately, disregard) of disabled people's experiences. Ableism refers to "discrimination in favor of able-bodied
people," according to the Oxford English Dictionary. But the reality of ableism extends beyond literal
discriminatory acts (intentional or not) to the way our culture views disabled people as a
concept. Ableism is also the belief that people with disabilities "need to be fixed or cannot
function as full members of society" and that having a disability is "a defect rather than a
dimension of difference," according to the authors of one 2008 Journal of Counseling & Development article on the topic,
as reported by Feminists with Disabilities. This interpretation of difference as defect is the true root of
ableist acts that cause far too many to feel marginalized, discriminated against and
ultimately devalued in this society. Here are just six forms of this behavior that, though largely normalized, need
to be retired immediately. 1. Failing to provide accessibility beyond wheelchair ramps Source: Getty Perhaps the most obvious form
of discrimination people with disabilities face is the inability to access places and services open to their able-bodied counterparts
even with laws in place to prevent such inequality. As Tumblr user The (Chronically) Illest noted, while most people think

"just [putting] wheelchair ramps everywhere" is sufficient, true accessibility accommodates all

types of disabilities not just physical disabilities that specifically bind people to wheelchairs. Accommodations can also
include "braille, seeing-eye dogs/assistant dogs, ergonomic workspaces, easy to grip tools, closed captions ... class note-takers,
recording devices for lectures" and other services and alterations. Though accessibility is certainly a matter of

convenience and equity, a lack of accessible resources can impact the very wellbeing of people
with disabilities. Individuals with disabilities have reported not being able to receive health care
because their providers' facilities weren't accessible, and one study found that women with
disabilities particularly face increased difficulty accessing reproductive health care, just to name
two examples. 2. Using ableist language Source: Getty Ableism has become undeniably naturalized in the English language.
Many people not only use words like "crazy," "insane" or "retarded" without a second thought, but many adamantly defend their use
of these terms, decrying anybody who questions their right to do so as too "politically correct" or "sensitive." But this personal
defense fails to recognize that ableist language is not about the words themselves so much as what their usage suggests the speaker
feels about the individuals they represent. "When a critique of language that makes reference to disability is not welcome, it is nearly
inevitable that, as a disabled person, I am not welcome either," Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg wrote in a 2013 Disability and
Representation article. But beyond individual feelings, ableist language can contribute to a foundation of more systemic oppression
of people with disabilities as a group. "If a culture's language is full of pejorative metaphors about a group of people," CohenRottenberg continued, that culture is more likely to view those individuals as less entitled to rights like "housing, employment,
medical care, education, access, and inclusion as people in a more favored group." 3. Able-bodied people failing to check their
privilege Source: Getty It may not seem like a big deal in the moment, but able-bodied individuals fail to

recognize the privilege of having access to every and any space accessible . As Erin Tatum
points out at Everyday Feminism, plenty of people may not directly discriminate against people
with disabilities but effectively do so by using resources allocated for them . For
example, many able-bodied people use handicapped bathroom stalls or take up space in crowded elevators, rather than taking the
stairs and leave room for people with disabilities who don't have other options, without a second thought. While these actions

may not be the product of ill will, they are evidence of the way able-bodied privilege manifests in
our society. There's a general cultural notion that "disability is something inherently negative ,"
Allie Cannington, a board member of the American Association of People with Disabilities, told Mic. " There's a level of
silencing that happens, and erasing of the disabled experience as an important
experience because able-bodied experiences are the privileged experiences in our
society."

Perpetuating ableist stigmas excludes disabled bodies

Stevens 7/24 (Danielle Stevens is co-founder and editor-in-chief of This Bridge Called Our
Health, an online healing space for women and femmes of color. For Harriet: We Must Change
the Ableist Language Surrounding Sandra Bland's Death published July 24th, 2015. Accessed
July 25th, 2015. http://www.forharriet.com/2015/07/we-must-change-ableistlanguage.html#axzz3gw69D8jc)TheFedora
The impact of stigma Ive written before about this issue but just a few highlights for you to consider: Disabled
people are worse off than their non-disabled peers in terms of finding employment and housing .
Just a couple of examples: one study found that in 2010 in the U.S., disabled people were half as likely
to have a job as their counterparts without disabilities and in 2009, the number of young autistic adults who had
a job was nearly half that of their peers with other disabilities. Ontarians with communication disabilities arent even
properly covered by legislation mandating basic rights like accessibility. Ive quoted this before but its
worth quoting again. Data proves that: Stigma leads others to avoid living, socializing, or working
with, renting to, or employing people with mental disorders especially severe disorders, such
as schizophrenia. It leads to low self-esteem, isolation, and hopelessness. It deters the public from
seeking and wanting to pay for care. Responding to stigma, people with mental health problems
internalize public attitudes and become so embarrassed or ashamed that they often conceal
symptoms and fail to seek treatment
The 1AC is key further combat ableism in debate and create an inclusive
community- without means further violence and exclusion in debate
Robinson 94 (Mary Robinson: United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Disability Awareness in Action: Are Disabled People Included?: An Exposure Document on the
Violation of Disabled People's Human Rights and the Solutions Recommended Within the UN

Standard Rules published in 1994. Accessed July 24th, 2015.)TheFedora

Human Rights and Disabled Persons The United Nations General Assembly, in 1981, adopted as the theme of the
Year of Disabled Persons the slogan "Full Participation and Equality"; this meant recognition at the highest possible
political level of the right to full participation of disabled people in the societies to which they
belong. This has since become widely accepted as the overall goal of all development efforts in the disability field. During the UN
Decade of Disabled Persons, 1983-1992, when the policies and programmes outlined in the World Programme of Action were to be
implemented, some significant developments were achieved but there was too little progress . So

the international disability community requested that the United Nations should assume a
strong leadership role and find more concrete guidelines for development. As a result the Standard
Rules were elaborated and unanimously adopted by the General Assembly in its resolution 48/96 of 20 December 1993. UN Special
Rapporteur Lindqvist stated that: "The ideas and concepts of equality and full participation for persons

with disabilities have been developed very far on paper, but not in reality. In all our countries,
in all types of living conditions, the consequences of disability interfere in the lives of disabled persons to
a degree which is not at all acceptable .... When a person is excluded from employment because
he is disabled, he is being discriminated against as a human being. If a general education
system is developed .... and disabled children are excluded, their rights are being
violated". Even though it is difficult to have precise figures, it is estimated that more than 10 per cent of the world's total
population have some type of disabling physical or mental impairment. This translates into the fact that approximately 25 per cent
of the entire population are directly affected by disability . These figures are testimony to the enormous size of

the problem and highlight the impact of disability on every society. Quantification alone is not a
sufficient basis for evaluating the actual gravity of the problem; disabled persons frequently
live in deplorable conditions, owing to the presence of physical and social barriers
which prevent their integration and full participation in the community . Millions of
children and adults worldwide are segregated and deprived of their rights and are, in effect, living on the margins.
This is unacceptable. This year of commemoration by the international community of the 50th anniversary of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, provides an opportunity to examine what has been achieved and to reflect what needs to be
accomplished in the future. The motto of the anniversary 'All Human Rights for All' expresses what we must commit ourselves to
securing in the years ahead. The provisions of the Declaration call for the respect of the rights of all human beings - recognition of
the dignity of all humans, with or without disabilities. We must all be aware that no society can enjoy full

development without proper consideration of all members and that there is no acceptable future
for a society where individuals are excluded and deprived of their rights and dignity.

FRAMEWORK

ADVOCACY KEY- ABLEISM

Critical advocacy key to fight abliest structures of policy
debate key to -demands of the state fail
Richter 16 [Zach Richter,Communication Studies, University of California, San
Diego; M.S., Disability Studies, University of Illinois Chicago. The Disabled Persons
Struggle In Round & Beyond: Taking Back Formerly Ableist Educational Spaces in the
Post-Ada Generation, National Journal of Speech and Debate, Vol. IV: Issue III,
http://site.theforensicsfiles.com/NJSD.4-3.pdf LMcf]
My part of this dialogue has been to add, what has been lacking in discussions about disability and accessibility, a
dimension of the historical political struggle within institutions . In my analysis,

I first place disabled

people in the policy debate world in the context of a wider movement of disabled
people in the West who have been activated at least in the 1950s or 1960s, but
have proliferated and been more or less in successful in institutional ways since the
1980s. The disabled struggle in debate mimics the struggle of people like Ed Roberts who fought for educational
equity in universities. The disabled persons movement in debate is just one more node of
a spread-out disabled persons movement to end ableist segregation on an
institutional level and to point out and oppose the lesser funding received in
disability ghettos condoned by the government. The initial framing that my analysis
draws upon is the language of the social model of disability that explicitly indicts
institutional segregation for suppressing disabled public presence and disabled
accomplishment, as well doing violence regularly to disabled people of all different
types. Debate as an enterprise has been un-reflexive about the level of accessibility
at events and has only recently enjoyed several controversies beginning in debate
rounds that have challenged the systematic inaccessibility that plagues the intercollegiate and inter-high school leagues. This panel was organized to offer solutions, but many of my
fellow panelists have noted that some issues with debate, such as the lack of American Sign Language options, are
intractablethe

debate world has systematically and routinely refused to act on or

consider possible solutions. These issues are particularly revelatory in terms of what
Charlton describes as the hierarchy of disability that structures which types of
disabled people make it into which spaces.13 By and large, those able to access
debate are those disabled people who have had invisible disabilities, such as
learning disabilities or psychiatric issues. Disabled people impaired in other ways,
such as blind and deaf debaters, are present in lesser numbers, receding down to
developmentally disabled people who are never present in the debate world . Due to
debates existence, enveloped by a culture of high achievement, there is an implicit
expectation that debaters who are too disabled should not debate. This type of suggestion

ignores the centrality of a forensic education to the necessary self-advocacy that disabled people must undertake in
order to receive education, medical help, and often to interact with the public .

In-round advocacy has

a similarity to plying your case to a superior; this interaction with power is
very basic and is key to life within the current systems. I frame the battle for
accessibility in policy debate as part of a wider battle for accessibility in education and, wider than that, a battle for
accountability for the harms that the modern nation-state and corporation has dealt to the disabled person. In many
educational institutions of higher and preparatory learning, the communicative situation of the classroom is
organized such that order is favored over wider inclusion. The field of educational studies has been a driving
influence in disability studies because of the effort of enlightened educational thinkers, such as Doug Biklen and
others, to support alternative mediated forms of communication as well as those involved in the inclusive education

People involved in debate have long placed the activity as intended for the
elite and, as a consequence of that decision, have felt no need to include impaired
people. However, in the contemporary ideology connected to disability rights of self-advocacy, one finds a way of
movement.

being disabled that is indeed more involved in argumentation and advocacy than nondisabled existence. In the
agreement that is classroom accommodations, the education system places an onus upon the disabled person to

persuasively engage their instructors in order to receive needed access. My presentation must call upon a recent
example of organizational policies in the debate world in which the National Debate Tournament (NDT) posted an
accessibility statement that harmed both disabled and black debaters. It took significant lobbying on the part of a
wide coalition of debate people across the nation to correct the problematic language. Even then, the language of
the NDTs access statement was oriented around reacting to the possibility of inaccessibility, not to build debate in
such a way that disabled people were considered and included in their full capacity from the start and in advance.

we are offered an image of what

might be considered a crip optimism: redesigning the world for all body types,
mental, psychiatric and health statuses. This concept is preferred over the tendency for institutions
to be in a defensive posture fearing disabled response. The Americans with Disabilities Act has
been passed for 20 years but we have not seen the time of enthusiastic compliance
yet. At this time, disability activists must repeatedly threaten various
institutions with continuing demands and protests , and a few nonprofits must
support several cases. But overall there will be more cases of inaccessibility and
architectural exclusion than can be possibly compensated for. Disabled people wait
too long at the door of policymakers, for their lack of strictness and of local
businesses, developers and municipalities to increasingly build in ways that include
a wide diversity of types of bodies. The time is now for those reading this to strike
against the educational, political, social, business and all other types of
organizations that are not actively experimenting with ways of being more
accessible.
In the concept of universal design, gleaned from the work of Mace,14

AFF EDU PREREQ- RACISM

Debates epistemology of whiteness must be challenged before other questions
Calderon 6(Dolores, University of Utah assistant professor in the Department of Education,
Culture, and Society and the Ethnic Studies Program One-Dimensionality and Whiteness USA
Policy Futures in Education, Volume 4, Number 1, 2006
http://pfe.sagepub.com/content/4/1/73.full.pdf+html , cayla_)
In the context of education, elaborating upon the work of critical pedagogues, one must focus on
the one-dimensional nature of schooling and how it serves to maintain the needs of advanced
industrial society. Breaking from critical pedagogy, though, I argue that this one-dimensional
character, the standardization movement, is a reproduction of the normative
ideology of whiteness. The reproduction of whiteness in structures serves to oppress raced,
gendered, and classed individuals and communities who deviate from the norms established by
the ideology of whiteness. Thus, in the context of education, I argue that the crucial theoretical
tools we have to challenge onedimensional education and refuse whiteness are critical race
theory and critical multicultural education. By pairing the work of Herbert Marcuse ([1964]
1991, 1969) with the work of critical race theorists I also hope to bring to the fore how whiteness
is overlooked by contemporary critical scholars of education in their works on education, which
traditionally center class-based analyses, and instead follow in the footsteps of those scholars
who bring race and racism to the forefront of their work ( Ladson-Billings, 1997; Yosso, 2002;
Sleeter & Bernal, 2003; Allen, 2004). Sleeter & Bernal (2003) argue that most of the literature
in critical pedagogy does not directly address race, ethnicity, or gender, and as such has a white
bias (2003, p. 2). Moreover, this centering of class has detrimental effects upon analyses of race
and ethnicity, and has the effect of elevating the power of largely White radical theorists over
theorists of color (2003, p. 2). Even if unintended, the power white critical theorists have to
name and theorize sites of oppression produces silences upon the epistemological validity of
the experiences of oppressed communities (2003, p. 3). Thus, critical race theory in education is
an important tool to pierce the silence of singularly class-based analyses of schooling (Yosso,
2002). Furthermore, it is through the lens of critical race theory that the important insights of
Marcuse can be rescued from silencing discourses which attempt to find the moments of
liberation in spaces that are one-dimensional. This pairing of Marcuses work and critical race
theory answers Devon W. Carbados (2002) call that a robust notion of race-centricity would, in
the context of discussions about education, make clear that educational discourses
and institutions both reflect particular conceptions of, and produce, race

COUNTER-DEFINITIONS
We represent the USFG in the resolution
Raney 10 [Gary Raney Ada County Sherriff, Ada County Sheriff Gary Raney
Response to Inquiry regarding Oathkeepers, October 25th, 2010,
http://wearechangeidaho.org/CategoryArticles.php?id=1]
First premise: They the federal government are not a distant body beyond our
control. We are a republic and we are the federal government by the power of our vote. It is
disingenuous for people to talk about the government as something foreign , like an
enemy. In my opinion, it is our general apathy as voters that, by an omission of a vote.
We represent the USFG in the resolution
Raney 10 [Gary Raney Ada County Sherriff, Ada County Sheriff Gary Raney
Response to Inquiry regarding Oathkeepers, October 25th, 2010,
http://wearechangeidaho.org/CategoryArticles.php?id=1]
First premise: They the federal government are not a distant body beyond our
control. We are a republic and we are the federal government by the power of our vote. It is
disingenuous for people to talk about the government as something foreign , like an
enemy. In my opinion, it is our general apathy as voters that, by an omission of a vote.
Resolved means to personally think about things
AHD 2k6. American Heritage Dictionary
resolved v. To cause (a person) to reach a decision.

DEBATE SPACE KEY

Debate is key, we must understand how and when the gender structure is
constructed to deconstruct it.

Risman 04 (Barbara J., rofessor of Sociology and alumni Research Distinguished Professor at North Carolina

State University. Gender as a Social Structure: Theory Wrestling with Activism, Gender and Society, Vol. 18, No. 4,
pp. 429-450) BN.

Cognitive bias is one of the mechanisms by which inequality is re-created

in everyday life. There are, however, documented mechanisms for decreasing
the salience of such bias (Bielby 2000; Reskin 2000; Ridgeway and Correll 2000). When we
consciously manipulate the status expectations attached to those in
subordinate groups, by highlighting their legitimate expertise beyond the
others in the immediate social setting, we can begin to challenge the
nonconscious hierarchy that often goes unnoticed. Similarly, although many
subordinates adapt to their situation by trading power for patronage, when they refuse to do so, interaction no
longer flows smoothly, and change may result. Surely, when wives refuse to trade power for patronage, they can
rock the boat as well as the cradle. These are only a few examples of interactive processes that can help to explain

We need to
understand when and how inequality is constructed and reproduced to
deconstruct it. I have argued before (Risman 1998) that because the gender structure so
defines the category woman as subordinate, the deconstruction of the
category itself is the best, indeed the only sure way, to end gender
subordination. There is no reason, except the transitional vertigo that will accompany the process to
the reproduction of inequality and to envision strategies for disrupting inequality.

dismantle it, that a utopian vision of a just world involves any gender structure at all. Why should we need to

We must accommodate reproductive

differences for the process of biological replacement, but there is no a
priori reason we should accept any other role differentiation simply based
on biological sex category. Before accepting any gender elaboration
around biological sex category, we ought to search suspiciously for the
possibly subtle ways such differentiation supports mens privilege. Once two
elaborate on the biological distinction between the sexes?

salient groups exist, the process of in-group and out-group distinctions and ingroup opportunity hoarding become

it
seems unlikely that any differentiation or cultural elaboration around sex
category has a purpose beyond differentiation in support of stratification.
possible. While it may be that for some competitive sports, single-sex teams are necessary, beyond that,

Feminist scholarship always wrestles with the questions of how one can use the knowledge we create in the interest
of social transformation. As feminist scholars, we must talk beyond our own borders. This kind of theoretical work
becomes meaningful if we can eventually take it public. Feminist sociology must be public sociology (Burawoy
forthcoming).We

must eventually take what we have learned from our theories

and research beyond professional journals to our students and to those
activists who seek to disrupt and so transform gender relations.Wemust
consider how the knowledge we create can help those who desire a more
egalitarian social world to refuse to do gender at all, or to do it with
rebellious reflexiveness to help transform the world around them. For those
without a sociological perspective, social change through socialization and through legislation are the easiest to

We need to shine a spotlight on the dimension of cultural

interactional expectations as it is here that work needs to begin. We must
envision.

remember, however, that much doing gender at the individual and interactional levels gives pleasure as well as
reproduces inequality, and until we find other socially acceptable means to replace that opportunity for pleasure,
we can hardly advocate for its cessation. The question of how gender elaboration has been woven culturally into
the fabric of sexual desire deserves more attention. Many of our allies believe that viva la difference is required
for sexual passion, and few would find a postgender society much of a feminist utopia if it came at the cost of
sexual play. No one wants to be part of a revolution where she or he cannot dirty dance.

DETACHMENT DA
We must understand how debate is implicated
within larger structures of domination instead of
acting like our community exists in a societal
vacuum before we can produce good policies
Reid-Brinkley 8 (Dr. Shanara,"THE HARSH REALITIES OF ACTING BLACK: HOW
AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION THROUGH
RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND STYLE," pg. 118-120)
Mitchell observes that the stance of the policymaker in debate comes with a sense of
detachment associated with the spectator posture. In other words, its participants
are able to engage in debates where they are able to distance themselves from the
events that are the subjects of debates. Debaters can throw around terms like
torture, terrorism, genocide and nuclear war without blinking. Debate simulations
can only serve to distance the debaters from real world participation in the political
contexts they debate about. As William Shanahan remarks: the topic established a relationship through
interpellation that inhered irrespective of what the particular political affinities of the debaters were. The

When we blithely call for

United States Federal Government policymaking, we are not immune to the
colonialist legacy that establishes our place on this continent. We cannot wish away
the horrific atrocities perpetrated everyday in our name simply by refusing to
acknowledge these implications (emphasis in original). The objective stance of
the policymaker is an impersonal or imperialist persona. The policymaker relies
upon acceptable forms of evidence, engaging in logical discussion, producing
rational thoughts. As Shanahan, and the Louisville debaters note, such a stance is integrally
linked to the normative, historical and contemporary practices of power that
produce and maintain varying networks of oppression . In other words, the discursive practices
of policy-oriented debate are developed within, through and from systems of power and privilege. Thus, these
practices are critically implicated in the maintenance of hegemony. So, rather than
seeing themselves as government or state actors, Jones and Green choose to
perform themselves in debate, violating the more objective stance of the
policymaker and require their opponents to do the same. Jones and Green argue
that debaters should ground their agency in what they are able to do as
individuals. Note the following statement from Green in the 2NC against Emorys Allen and Greenstein
(ranked in the sweet sixteen): And then, another main difference is that our advocacy is grounded in
our agency as individuals. Their agency is grounded in what the US federal government, what the state
should do.117 Citing Mitchell, Green argues further: We talk about, dead prez, talks about how the system
aint gone change, unless we make it change. Were talkin about what we as
individuals should do. Thats why Gordon Mitchell talked about how when we lose
our argumentative agency. When we give our agency to someone else, we begin
speaking of what the United States Federal Government should do, rather than what
we do, that cause us to be spectators. Its one of the most debilitating failures of
contemporary education. As part of their commitment to the development of agency, each of the Louisville
relationship was both political and ethical, and needed to be debated as such.

debaters engages in recognition of their privilege, in an attempt to make their social locations visible and relevant
to their rhetorical stance.

INDIVIDUAL ACTION KEY

Legislation cannot create sustainable change must individually break
privacy of violence against women
Jones 05 Helen Jones works for the Institute of Culture, Gender and the City, in
Manchester University. (Visible Rights: Watching Out for Women pg. 592-593,
http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-andsociety/article/view/3366/3329)//CC
The body is directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate
hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to
perform ceremonies, to emit signs. (Foucault, 1977:25) Our bodies may present the
uniqueness of an individual but, through being observed, monitored and controlled,
they also serve to demonstrate collective identities. Seen in this way, our bodies are projects
which may claim or subvert identity; alternatively, control over the body may be taken and identity negated. The
body, as represented within any particular culture, will reflect the values and anxieties of that culture. To use the
example of Afghanistan, the burka provides a symbol of the anxieties about the strict social boundaries that existed
between men and women. In the West there are assumed to be more relaxed boundaries. But, across the globe,
violence continues. After military conflicts have ended, women continue to endure violence. The private realm of
the home, free from surveillance and outside interference, provides the privacy necessary for domestic violence.
The World Health Organization suggests that in many countries that have suffered violent conflict, the rates of
interpersonal violence remain high even after the cessation of hostilities among other reasons because of the way
violence has become more socially acceptable (2002: 15). Even where the end of hostilities is brought by
peacekeeping forces women are not safe. The power of the military to control the peace extends to controlling the
abuse of women. Amnesty International provide examples of Kosovo where women have been trafficked into the
country for forced prostitution by the military, Somalia where a teenage girl was bought as a birthday present for a
Belgian paratrooper and reports of sexual violence committed by Italian peacekeeping forces in Mozambique
(Amnesty International, 2004:54-5). Nation states have duties under international law to respect, protect and fulfil

Governments
continue to fail to demonstrate due diligence, regardless of the mass of information
that is known. On a local level, justice systems often fail to deliver justice despite
clear evidence. Although legislation may exist to protect women in theory, social
tolerance of violence, cultural norms and a lack of political will, often combine to
nullify the law in practice. Invisible women suffer invisible violence and violators act
with impunity, because police forces are uninterested, justice systems are
expensive and are ridden with discriminatory attitudes. An example of this can be found in
womens rights: in other words, to take effective steps to stop violence against women.

Spain when, in 1995, Rita Margarete Rogerio was raped by a police officer. Despite a lower court finding it
luminously clear that she had been raped, the Supreme Court acquitted the implicated officers (Amnesty
International, 2004: 83). International scrutiny is therefore useful in holding states to account and the creation of
the International Criminal Court has increased the potential for crimes of violence against women to be addressed.
Womens rights groups recognize the limitations, not only of local level legislation, but also of international
conventions, treaties and courts to protect women from violence. Fortunately campaigning by womens rights

Violence against women exists

everywhere but it is not an inevitable feature of life for all. The power to invade the
private realm of womens bodies is not easily curtailed by scrutiny and surveillance
or by policies and legislation but campaigns are having an impact. Whether the violence is
committed in war, in terror, by governments, by peacekeepers or by husbands in
the privacy of the home, what is known is that violence against women, throughout
the globe, has become more visible, due to the challenges from women speaking
out and demanding to break the silence of privacy that underpins violence against
women. Privacy is sustained by lack of accountability at the level of the state, the
community and the individual. Only by opening each level up to scrutiny will
violence against women begin to be achieved .
activists continues to scrutinize and challenge violence against women.

Fem Pedagogy PreReq

Education is not neutral but rather a mode to
communicate social norms radical feminism in
academia is a danger to these oppressive norms
Fahs and Bertagni 13 (Breanne Fahs, Department of Women and Gender Studies,
Arizona State University, Jennifer Bertagni, Arizona State University, Up from
SCUM: Radical Feminist Pedagogies and Consciousness-Raising in the Classroom,
Radical Pedagogy, 2013,
http://www.radicalpedagogy.org/radicalpedagogy/Up_from_SCUM__Radical_Feminist_
Pedagogies_and_Consciousness-Raising_in_the_Classroom.html, DS)
Many scholars that utilize critical and feminist pedagogies have critiqued the
traditional model of education as one that creates a learning environment centered
on a grading system, memorization, and an authoritarian teacher and submissive
student relationship. Embedded within this model, power imbalances are
perpetrated without much consideration for how such imbalanced power dynamics
affect student learning. Critics of traditional pedagogy argue that it overrelies upon
what Paolo Freire describes as banking, where students become passive receptacles that teachers
supposedly fill with information (Beckman, 1990; Freire, 1970; hooks, 1994; Larson, 2006). Both critical and
feminist theorists argue that knowledge is socially constructed and that schools
perpetuate certain value systems via beliefs, attitudes, and priorities set forth in the
classroom. Pedagogical practices are therefore not neutral, but rather, modes of
communicating dominance, social norms, and ideologies about social identities like
race, class, and gender (Leistyna, Woodrum, & Sherblom, 1999; McLaren, 1998). Though feminist
pedagogy and critical theory share similar criteria and goals for educating students, feminist pedagogy focuses
specifically on womens lives and experiences as a starting point for creating and learning about epistemology in
the womens studies classroom (Beckman, 1990; Larson, 2006). Feminist pedagogies insist upon a continual
examination of the way gender affects lived experience, policy, and cultural norms, particularly by exploring and
unpacking the unexamined dynamics of gender and power (Crabtree & Sapp, 2003; Stake, 2006). Crabtree and

feminist pedagogy as a set of classroom practices, teaching

strategies, approaches to content, and relationships grounded in critical
pedagogical and feminist theory (p. 131). Feminist pedagogy challenges the teacherstudent relationship and the students relationship to knowledge (Stake, 2001). Jayne Stake
Sapp (2003) describe

and Francis Hoffman (2000; 2006) qualitatively measured womens studies professors pedagogical practices and

used: 1)participatory learning: student

participation by expressing their personal experiences in the classroom;
2)development of critical thinking/ open-mindedness: strengthening of critical
thinking skills, where students engaged in critical thinking about the topics in
lecture, rather than accepting information or debanking; 3)validation of personal
experience/ development of confidence: encouraging students to see the
connection between assigned readings and their own life experiences and 4)
development of political/social understanding: helping students to conceptualize
connections between readings, their societal context, and their role in engaging
actively in social change. Therefore, feminist pedagogy enables students to critically
examine the microcosmic implications of macrocosmic and hegemonic cultural
policies and to decipher how those belief systems affect them on the personal level
found the following four categories most commonly

(Stake, 2006). In addition to the aforementioned tenets of feminist pedagogy, womens studies professors often
strive to practice egalitarian power dynamics in the classroom, as well as to encourage egalitarian attitudes in
general (Crabtree & Sapp, 2003; hooks, 1994; Stake, 2006). This creates a supportive atmosphere where students

Opinions inconsistent with

feminism expressed in the classroom can serve as platform for critical analysis and
respect everyones right to comment and critically evaluate their world.

debate, with students deconstructing comments construed as sexist, racist,

heterosexist, etc. while maintaining the democratic structure of the classroom
(Kimmel & Worrell, 1997). Womens studies classes have demonstrated the capacity to heighten students
awareness of gender inequality; increase confidence and sense of empowerment; develop less conventional beliefs

Enhanced confidence, empowerment,

and critical thinking skills students developed in womens studies classes predicted
feminist and political activism later on (Stake & Hoffman, 2001; 2007). No current studies have
interrogated the intersections between radical politics and feminist pedagogy. The one text on radical
feminism in academia notably features a survival guide for radical feminists in
academia; Gearheart (1983) outlined tasks that enabled instructors to retain their
radical politics within the authoritative, hostile environment of the academy
(Gearheart, 1983). She explains how radical feminism inherently conflicts with the
liberal structure of university education because the academy is racist and classbiased as well as sexist and is an institution serving an exploitative economic
system. U.S. colleges and universities function according to the stratification,
values, methods, and goals of the larger society, those of white male capitalism (p.
5). Radical feminists, on the other hand, advocate for complete demolition of those
oppressive social institutions, which often comes across as more threatening and
dangerous than the liberal premises of feminism (Gearheart, 1983). As the
Gearheart text is the only text to address radical feminism in the academy, a study
that examines the potentials and pitfalls of radical feminist pedagogy is needed.
about gender and create greater practices of egalitarianism.

PEDAGOGY
Our pedagogy is key we break down current forms of knowledge
production within academic spaces that sustain gender exclusion
Tickner, prof @ USC, 01 (Ann, 2001, Gendering World Politics, p. 137, 7/6/14, CM)
One of the main goals of knowledge in conventional IR has been to develop
explanations for the political and economic behavior of states in the international
system. Defining theory as a tool, Robert Keohane has claimed that theory is a guide for cause-and-effect
relationships; it provides valuable propositions that can prove useful in specific situations. Theories are im- portant
to cope with the complexities of world politics, where reality needs to be ordered into categories and relations must
be drawn between events.19 For those who define theory in this sense, its separation from political prac- tice and,
as far as possible, from the values of the researcher are thought to be important goals .

For many feminist

theorists, however, knowledge construction is explicitly linked to emancipatory
political practice. Sandra Whitworth has claimed that contemporary feminism has its roots in social
movements; feminism is a politics of protest directed at transforming the unequal
power relationships between women and men.20 Therefore, a key goal for IR feminist theory used in this
sense is to understand how the existing social orderone many feminists believe is marked by discrimination and

For many IR
feminists, knowledge is explicitly normative; it involves postulating a better world without
oppressioncame into being and how this knowledge can be used to work toward its transformation.

oppressive social hierarchies and investigating how to move toward such a world. Christine Chin has claimed that
these emancipatory concerns suggest the need for restructSuring the ways in which we conceive and execute

that we need to move toward undoing received disciplinary and

epistemological boundaries that segregate the pursuit of knowledge. Disciplinary
boundaries, as well as the way in which we pursue knowledge, have had the effect of
marginalizing voices within the academy that strive to present a more human and,
therefore, more complex picture of social change .21 Claiming that knowledge emerges from
research problems. She suggests

political practice, many feminists do not believe in, nor see the need for, the separation between theory and
practice. Theory as practice, Zalewskis third definition of theory, means that we need to take into account many
more human activities than would be thought necessary by those who use theory as a tool. Zalewski claims that
scholars who use theory in this sense think of it as a verb, rather than a noun; as was the case with the women at
the first of the two environmental meetings discussed earlier ,

theorizing is something people do as

they go about solving practical problems of everyday life .22 Cynthia Enloe has suggested
that to understand the world better, we must take seriously the experiences of
ordinary women and men, following the trail from national and inter- national elite decisions back
to the lives of ordinary people.23 The goal of this type of practical knowledge, examples of which I have

given in each of my preceding chapters, is not the improvement of theory but of practice; explicitly rejecting the
separation between observers and observed, it is intended to yield greater understanding of peoples everyday
lives in order to improve them.24 Enloe uses theory in this sense to under- stand the 1994 Zapatista uprising in
Chiapas, Mexico, which occurred in the context of the ratification of the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement. Noting
that the Zapatistas understood the link between international trade and their own security, she outlines how
peasant farmers of Chiapas were doing what so many international commentators were not; tracing causal
connections between local political economies, state-system contradictions, and emergent interstate relationships
connections that had detrimental effects on their economic security. Enloe claims that the reason the uprising
caught almost everyone by surprise was that these people had had difficulty making their voices heard.25

Building theory from the everyday practices of ordinary people focuses on

marginalized people and sites not normally considered relevant for IR research. The
study of women is not new, but studying them from the perspective of their own
experiences so that they can understand themselves and the world is not typical for the way that
knowledge has been con- structed.26 This type of practical knowledge also helps us to understand that what
appears on the surface as normal or natural must be questioned. As Enloe tells us,

people

it takes power to keep

on what she calls bottom rungs where they cannot be heard .27 Given these different
definitions of theory with which many IR feminists are working, as well as the different goals of their research,
feminists are going to be asking questions that are quite different from those of conventional IR scholars.

POLICY MAKING BAD

Debate lacks an argumentation that is actively upset at the level of
inequality in this activity. If we ignore our own implications on others
through masculine political discussions, we will never understand the true
impacts of the law, let alone debate about them. Our method of disruption
is unique, it includes feminine voices by separating from the oppressor,
questioning policy at its core rather than its vestigial affects.
Lesage in 1985 asserts (Julia. Professor at University of Oregon. Women's
Rage from Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and
Larry Grossberg (Champaign IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988) from
Jump Cut, No. 31 (1985).)
Feminism by itself is not the motor of change. Class, anti-imperialist, and antiracist
struggles demand our participation. Yet how, specifically, does women's consciousness change? How do women move into action? How does

change occur? What political strategies should feminists pursue? How, in our political work, can we constantly challenge sexual inequality when the very social construction of gender
oppresses women? In 1981 I visited Nicaragua with the goal of finding out how and why change occurred there so quickly in women's lives. "The revolution has given us everything," I
was told. "Before the revolution we were totally devalued. We weren't supposed to have a vision beyond home and children." In fact, many Nicaraguan women first achieved a fully
human identity within the revolution. Now they are its most enthusiastic supporters. For example, they form over 50 percent of the popular militias, the mainstay of Nicaragua's defense
against United States-sponsored invasions from Honduras and Costa Rica. In the block committees, they have virtually eliminated wife and child abuse. Yet in Nicaragua we still see
maids, the double standard sexually, dissatisfaction in marriage, and inadequate childcare. Furthermore, all the women I talked to defined their participation in the revolution in terms of
an extremely idealized notion of motherhood and could not understand the choice not to reproduce. I bring up this example of Nicaragua because Nicaraguan women are very conscious
of the power of their own revolutionary example. They know they have been influenced by the Vietnamese and Cuban revolutions and are very much shaping how Salvadoran women
militants are looking at women's role in the Salvadoran revolution. Because of the urgency and violence of the situation, unity between men and women was and is necessary for their
survival, but the women also want to combat, in an organized and self-conscious way, specific aspects of male supremacy in the workplace, politics, and daily life. Both here and in
Nicaragua, women's daily conversation is about the politics of daily life. They talk to each other often, complaining about men and about managing the domestic sphere. Women's talk
also encompasses complaints about poor and unstable work conditions, and about the onerous double day. However, here in the United States that conversation usually circulates
pessimistically, if supportively, around the same themes and may even serve to reconfirm women's stasis within these unpleasant situations. Here such conversation offers little sense of

feminists have used this preexisting social form--women's

conversation in the domestic sphere--to create consciousness-raising groups. But to
what degree is consciousness raising sufficient to change women's behavior,
including our self-conception and our own colonized minds? We do not live in a revolutionary situation in the United States. There is no leftist political
organization here providing leadership and a cohesive strategy, and in particular the struggle against women's oppression is not
genuinely integrated into leftist activity and theory. Within such a context, women need to work on another, intermediate level, both to shape our revolutionary
consciousness and to empower us to act on our own strategic demands. That is, we need to promote self-conscious, collectively supported,
and politically clear articulations of our anger and rage. Furthermore, we must understand the different structures behind different
social change; yet in our recent political history,

women's rage. Black women rage against poverty and racism at the same time that they rage against sexism. Lesbians rage against heterosexual privilege, including their denial of civil
rights. Nicaraguan women rage against invasions and the aggressive intentions of the United States. If, in our political work, we know this anger and the structures that generate it, we
can more genuinely encounter each other and more extensively acknowledge each other's needs, class position, and specific form of oppression . If we do not understand the unique
social conditions shaping our sisters' rage, we run the risk of divisiveness, of fragmenting our potential solidarity. Such mutual understanding of the different structures behind different
women's anger is the precondition of our finding a way to work together toward common goals. I think a lot about the phenomenon of the colonized mind. Everything that I am and want
has been shaped within a social process marked by male dominance and female submission. How can women come to understand and collectively attack this sexist social order? We all
face, and in various ways incorporate into ourselves, sexist representations, sexist modes of thought. Institutionally, such representations are propagated throughout culture, law,
medicine, education, and so on. All families come up against and are socially measured by sexist concepts of what is "natural"--that is, the "natural" roles of mother, children, or the
family as a whole. Of particular concern to me is the fact that I have lived with a man for fifteen years while I acutely understand the degree to which heterosexuality itself is socially
constructed as sexist. That is, I love someone who has more social privilege than me, and he has that privilege because he is male. As an institution, heterosexuality projects relations of
dominance and submission, and it leads to the consequent devaluation of women because of their sex. The institution of heterosexuality is the central shaping factor of many different
social practices at many different levels--which range, for example, from the dependence of the mass media on manipulating sexuality to the division of labor, the split between the
public and private spheres, and the relations of production under capitalism. Most painfully for women, heterosexuality is a major, a social and psychological mode of organizing,
generating, focusing, and institutionalizing desire, both men's and women's. Literally, I am wedded to my own oppression. Furthermore, the very body of woman is not her own--it has
been constructed by medicine, the law, visual culture, fashion, her mother, her household tasks, her reproductive capacity, and what Ti-Grace Atkinson has called "the institution of
sexual intercourse." When I look in the mirror, I see my flaws; I evaluate the show I put on to others. How do I break through representations of the female body and gain a more just
representation of my body for and of myself? My social interactions are shaped by nonverbal conventions which we all have learned unconsciously and which are, as it were, the glue of
social life. As Nancy Henley describes it in Body Politics, women's nonverbal language is characterized by shrinking, by taking up as little space as possible. Woman is accessible to be
touched. When she speaks in a mixed group, she is likely to be interrupted or not really listened to seriously, or she may be thought of as merely emotional. And it is clear that not only

male gaze, with all its power, has a social analog in the way eye contact functions to
control and threaten women in public space, where women's freedom is constrained by the threat of rape. We need to articulate
does the voyeuristic male look shape most film practice, but this

these levels of oppression so as to arrive at a collective, shared awareness of these aspects of women's lives. We also need to understand how we can and already do break through
barriers between us. In our personal relations, we often overcome inequalities between us and establish intimacy. Originally, within the women's movement we approached the task of
coming together both personally and politically through the strategy of the consciousness-raising group, where to articulate our experience as women itself became a collective,
transformative experience. But these groups were often composed mostly of middle-class women, sometimes predominantly young, straight, single, and white. Now we need to think
more clearly and theoretically about strategies for negotiating the very real power differences between us. It is not so impossible. Parents do this with children, and vice versa; lovers
deal with inequalities all the time. The aged want to be in communion with the young, and third-world women have constantly extended themselves to their white sisters. However,
when women come together in spite of power differences among them, they feel anxiety and perhaps openly express previously suppressed hostility. Most likely, such a coming together
happens when women work together intensively on a mutual project so that there is time for trust to be established. Yet as we seek mutually to articulate the oppression that constrains

Women's anger is pervasive, as

lurks underground. If we added up all of women's depression--all our compulsive smiling, ego-tending, and
sacrifice; all our psychosomatic illness, and all our passivity-- we could gauge our rage's unarticulated, negative force. In the sphere of
cultural production there are few dominant ideological forms that allow us even to think "women's rage." As ideological constructs, these
forms end up containing women.
us, we have found few conceptual or social structures through which we might authentically express our rage.
pervasive as our oppression

, but it

frequently

PORTABLE SKILLS
Performance debate creates the best version of portable skills.
Polson 12 (Dana Roe Polson, PhD in Language Literacy and Culture, UMBC,

Baltimore city public and public charter schools high school teacher,
Longing for Theory: Performance Debate in Action Dissertain directed by
Dr. Christine Mallinson, TR Assistant Professor, Language, Literacy, and
Culture pp. 20-21)
Policy debate in Baltimore urban high schools is often all but invisible to anyone but
the practitioners. With the exception of occasional news stories and a 2003 60
Minutes segment featuring the Walbrook High School debate squad as an example
of the success of Urban Debate Leagues, urban policy debate exists in a somewhat
isolated, insular bubble. A performance debate squad, which enacts a radical praxis
that disrupts the norms of the more traditional policy debate, would therefore
similarly exist under the radar, or even more so. The rhetoric and practice of
performance debate is not aligned with the Discourse of public schooling today; it
does not fit with reform efforts emphasizing standards, merit pay, accountability.
And yet, students engaged in it are acting, in the sense of both performing and
doing, in rigorous, activist intellectual work. They are engaging in an activity that is
often described as a game, and yet by talking back, they challenge its norms and
practices in order to make it relevant to their lives as debaters and as change
agents. Further, the activity is performed with the support of a counterhegemonic
community that uses structural understandings such as those provided by Critical
Race Theory to bridge the gap between theory and real life. The practice creates
critical space for leadership development through such structural understanding
and by creating space for voice to be heard and critique to be enacted in debate.

PREREQ T/POLICY MAKING .

Were a pre-requisite to the ability to discuss the resolution only by
reorienting our discourse can we ever hope to create a non-exclusionary
politics
Beland 2009 Daniel Beland. Gender, Ideational Analysis, and Social Policy Social
Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society. Vol 16 Num 4. Pp 558581. Winter 2009
To further illustrate the role of frames in politics and policy change, let me discuss three ways in which political

frames can take the form of a public discourse used

by specific political actors to convince others that policy change is
necessary. This is what political scientist Robert H. Cox (2001) calls the social construction of the need to
actors can mobilize them. First,

reform and what politi- cal philosopher Nancy Fraser (1989) has called the politics of needs interpretation. From

discursive frames can help convince political actors and the

general public that existing policy legacies are flawed, and that reforms
should be enacted to solve perceived social and economic problems. Thus,
policy learning can feed framing processes in the sense that experts,
officials, and interest groups can publicly voice their negative
assessments of existing policies to convince other actors that the time has
come to improve or even replace them. But social learning remains analyti- cally distinct
this perspective,

from framing activities in part because learning can occur without the emergence of a public discourse about the
need to reform. An autonomous set of evaluative activities, social learning generally predates and, in only some

discursive frames help actors

make a case for policy change, and this activity generally involves a
public discussion of the meaning and performance of existing policy
legacies. Second, these frames help political actors convince other groups
and individuals to form a coalition around a concrete proposal or vision
for change. As discussed above, ideational processes partici- pate in the construction of interests and the
ranking of policy goals. In this context, particular political actors can use frames and
politi- cal discourse to influence the way other actors see their interests
and identify with shared policy goals. From this perspective, policy debates are
largely about the construction of interests, policy goals, and identities,
without which political coalitions can hardly survive. Although concrete quid pro quos
between key political actors are a major aspect of coalition building (Bonoli 2000), frames can help sell
concrete policy alternatives to the public and build a stronger coalition
around them. On one hand, politicians can speak to their base and argue that the measures they support
cases, informs framing pro- cesses (Be land 2006, 562). Overall,

are consistent with the broad ideological principles that cement their existing coalition. On the other hand,
ambiguous policy ideas and proposals can make many different actors believe that they have an interest in
supporting a complex policy alternative, which can lead to seemingly paradoxi- cal coalitions (Palier 2005). Third,
political actors can mobilize framing processes to counter criticism targeting the policy alternatives they support.
Thus, one might expand Weavers notion of blame avoidance strategies (Weaver 1986) to take on a discursive
form. For instance, officials may blame economic cycles for higher unemployment rates to con- vince the public

Policymakers can also frame

policy alternatives in a way that diverts attention away from their actual
departure from well-accepted political symbols or policy paradigms. For
that their decisions are not at the origin of this negative situation.

example, since the 1980s, Swedish politicians have referred to enduringly popular idea of social democracy to
legitimize forms of policy change that are arguably closer to neoliberalism than to traditional social democratic
ideals (Cox 2004). Blame avoidance frames such as these have a preventive component because political actors

Scholars
interested in the gender social policy nexus have long analyzed
discursive and framing processes (Tannen 1994), and their potential impact on policy change
use them to shield the policy alternatives they support from criticism (Be land 2005, 11).

(Lewis 2002). A good example of this type of scholarship is the research of Hobson and Lindholm (1997) on the
mobilization of Swedish women during the 1930s. In order to understand this mobilization, the authors bridge the

Their analysis of
womens mobilization emphasizes the role of what they call discursive
resources, a concept that acknowledges that social groups engage in
struggles over the mean- ings and the boundaries of political and social
citizenship. This includes the cultural narratives and metaphors that
social actors exploit in their public representations as well as the
contesting ideological stances that they take on dominant themes and
issues on the political agenda. (Hobson and Lindholm 1997, 479) For these two scholars,
ideational processes clearly serve as powerful framing tools in struggles
over gender and social policy change. Once again, this discussion of the
gender scholarship points to the relationship between ideational
processes and categorical inequalities, a major issue that is frequently
overlooked in the general ideational literature on policy and politics. By
pointing to this key relationship, students of gender and social policy
make a strong and original contribution to this ideational literature.
power resource approach and the sociological scholarship on social movements.

STATE FOCUS BAD

Focus on the state and policymaking reproduces domination. Discussion of
alternative modes of thinking is critical to reversing the marginalization of
women, lower classes, and nature.
Nhanenge 07 [Jytte: Master of Arts at the development studies at the University of
South Africa Ecofeminism: Towards Integrating the concerns of women,, poor
people and nature into development
http://uir.unisa.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10500/570/dissertation.pdf?sequence=1 ].
Consequently, also social scientists apply the scientific characteristics of objectivity, valuefreedom, rationality and quantifiability to social life. In this way, they assume they can
unveil universal laws about social relations, which will lead to true knowledge.
Based on this, connect social policies can be formulated. Thus, social processes are
excluded, while scientific objective facts are included . Society is assumed a static entity, where
no changes are possible. By promoting a permanent character, social science legitimizes
the existing social order, while obscuring the relations of domination and
subordination, which is keeping the existing power relations inaccessible to analysis.
The frozen order also makes it impossible to develop alternative explanations about
social reality. It prevents a historical and political understanding of reality and
denies the possibility for social transformation by human agency. The prevailing
condition is seen as an unavoidable fact. This implies that human beings are passive
and that domination is a natural force, for which no one is responsible. This permits
the state freely to implement laws and policies, which are controlling and coercive.
These are seen as being correct, because they are based on scientific facts made by
scientific expense. One result is that the state , without consulting the public, engages in a
pathological pursuit of economic growth. Governments support the capitalist ideology, which benefits the
elite only, while it is destroying nature and increasing poverty for women and lower
classes. The priority on capitalism also determines other social policies. There are consequently no
considerations for a possible conflict between the aims of the government for social
control and economic efficiency and the welfare needs of various social groups.
Without having an alternative to the existing order, people become dis-empowered .
Ultimately, the reaction is public apathy, which legitimizes authoritarian governments . Thus,
social science is an ideology, which is affirming the prevailing social, political and
economic order. (Reitzes 1993: 36-39, 4|-42). In reality, it is a contradiction to apply the
scientific method to social policy making. Any social policy change will alter social
relations and affect the relative welfare of classes of people, which makes social
decision making nonnative. Social policy is related to politics, which is an extension of ethics. Since
values and facts are different categories, one cannot apply indisputable empirical facts to social values. It is
therefore impossible to legitimize political decisions with reference to scientific knowledge. Social decision-making
is a political process. When science is applied to political and nonnative questions, it becomes an ideology, which

supports the dominant interests. Thus, the state reproduces conditions for domination . In case the
contradictions become too pronounced, and the power of the state is challenged, then the ideology becomes
violent. The consequence is totalitarianism. It is a situation where the state sets limits to what is pennissdale to
think and teach, if necessary by coercion. Conclusively social science manipulates reality to serve the vested
interests of specific social groups. 'Hue result is a dominant and violent ideology masked as science. (Reitzes l993:
32, 34, 42-45).

AT:CEDE THE POLITICAL

The K is a prior question and has ultimate policy relevance
deconstructing gender sets the necessary terms for effective politics.
Shepherd 2007 [Laura J., Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of

Birmingham, Victims, Perpetrators and Actors Revisited:1 Exploring the Potential for a Feminist
Reconceptualisation of (International) Security and (Gender) Violence, BJPIR: 2007 VOL 9, 239256]
In this article, I explore the discursive constitution of concepts of (gender) violence and (international) security in

this research is explicitly not merely theoretical, or academic

in the pejorative sense of the term.8 My interest in the concepts of international security and gender
violence is indeed motivated by a desire to see whether these concepts could be fruitfully reconceived, but the
article also considers the implications of this reconceptualisation for policy and
particular texts. However,

academic work. I wish to provide for those undertaking such work alternative concepts with which to proceed. I
identify myself as a feminist researcher, and recognise that this entails a curiosity about the concept, nature and

curiosity questions the ways in which gender is

made meaningful in social/political interactions and the practices or performances
through which gender configures boundaries of subjectivity. I espouse a feminism that
seeks to challenge conventional constructions of gendered subjectivity and political
community, while acknowledging the intellectual heritage of feminisms that seek to claim rights on behalf of a
practice of gender (Zalewski 1995, 341). This

stable subject and maintain fidelity to a regime of truth that constitutes the universal category of women (Butler

While a feminist project that does not assume a stable ontology of gender
may seem problematic, I argue, along with Judith Butler, that [t]he deconstruction of identity
is not the deconstruction of politics; rather, it establishes as political the
very terms through which identity is articulated (Butler 1999, 189). A focus on
articulation entails a further commitment to the analytical centrality of language
or, as I see it, discourse. Elizabeth Grosz argues that an integral part of feminist theory is the
willingness to tackle the question of the language available for theoretical purposes
and the constraints it places on what can be said (Grosz 1987, 479). To me, this aspect of
2004, 811).

feminist theory is definitive of my feminist politics. If men and women are the stories that have been told about
men and women (Sylvester 1994, 4), and the way that men and women both act and are acted upon, then

the language used to tell those stories and describe those actions is not just worthy
of analytical attention but can form the basis of an engaged critique. Furthermore,
an approach that recognises that there is more to the discursive constitution of
genderthe stories that are told about men and womenthan linguistic practices can enable
thinking gender differently.

AT DIALOGUE
The dialogue that they foster isnt value neutral combatting
normativity should come first
Novak and Radersma, 14
(Nick Novak, MacIver Institute Director of Communications, Kim Rdersma, Ph. D.
candidate in critical whiteness studies, 4/1/14, What Can Educators do to End
White Supremacy in the Classroom?,
http://www.maciverinstitute.com/2014/04/White-Privilege-Conf-Teacher/)

The session was facilitated by Kim Radersma, a former high school English teacher in California and Colorado.
Radersma is currently working toward her Ph. D. in critical whiteness studies at Brock University in Ontario, Canada.

teachers must fight against the oppressive structure in

education and society. She said anyone who is going into teaching and education
must be a political figure. "Teaching is a political act, and you can't choose to
be neutral. You are either a pawn used to perpetuate a system of
oppression or you are fighting against it," Radersma said during the session. "And if you
think you are neutral, you are a pawn." She said educators need to challenge the
system, otherwise they are giving in to white supremacy . Radersma also argued the first
step is realizing that all white people are carrying the signs of oppression. "Being a
Radersma argued that

white person who does anti-racist work is like being an alcoholic. I will never be recovered by my alcoholism, to use
the metaphor," Radersma said. "I

have to everyday wake up and acknowledge that I

am so deeply imbedded with racist thoughts and notions and actions in my
body that I have to choose everyday to do anti-racist work and think in an
anti-racist way." She argued that until white people admit they have a problem,
they will not be able to fight against white privilege. "We've been raised to be
good. 'I'm a good white person,' and yet to realize I carry within me these dark,
horrible thoughts and perceptions is hard to admit. And yet like the alcoholic, what's the first
step? Admitting you have a problem," she told the session attendees. Multiple educators attended the breakout
session of about 50 people and seemed very interested in how to bring the ideals of social justice and white
privilege into the classroom. One attendee, a teacher and the diversity director at his school, spoke about the
activities he is implementing and said it is important for teachers and administrators to discuss social justice with
their students. Radersma echoed his sentiment. " If

you don't want to work for equity, get

the fuck out of education," Radersma said. "If you are not serious about being an
agent of change that helps stifle the oppressive systems, go find another
job. Because you are a political figure."

AT: DELIBERATION
Deliberation is a fallacy framework uses masculine claims of
rationality to determine what knowledge is legitimate for
public debate pushing unproductive knowledge to the private
sphere There is only a risk that interruptions like the
affirmative are able to reclaim the public sphere.
Peterson in 2000
V. Spike Peterson. Rereading Public and Private: The Dichotomy that is Not One1
SAIS Review. Vol 20, Num 2. Pp 11-29. Summer-Fall 2000.
In Homer and Thucydides, the meanings of public and private are delineated
in relation to the demands of war and the moral dilemmas they pose. In
this sense, their accounts link the states external affairs to impossible
internal dilemmas. In contrast, the most familiar account of public and private,
provided by Aristotle, avoids the question of war and external affairs. Instead of a
tragic choice between competing but parallel claims to loyalty, Aristotle
resolves the dilemma by privileging the public sphere over the private.
Here, the public realm of politics constitutes the highest association, a
realm of freedom and equality, where citizens pursue the good life. This
higher realm depends upon but encompasses the private sphere, which is
characterized not by freedom but necessity, and involves not equal but
naturally hierarchical relationships. In this account, the public sphere of
free, equal, reasoning citizens is masculinized by the exclusion of women
and feminized characteristics, while the private sphere of contingency,
inequality, and emotional attachments is feminized by the relegation of
women and characteristics of femininity to it. This is the model of
public and private most frequently assumed in the Western tradition of
social and political theory. Arguably its greatest significance is in defining
the boundary and elevating the status of politics: the dichotomy
distinguishes what is deemed political and therefore what is politicized.
That which is associated with the private sphere is denied the status of
being political, hence, denied the important sense of being contingent
(not given), contestable (not fixed), and of collective interest (not simply
personal). Not only do we inherit a bounded domain of citizenship and
political power, but we also inherit a subordinated sphere of naturalized
inequality. Or so we assume. What Aristotle intended is the subject of ongoing
debate, but he is clear about the interdependence of public and private, which is
often lost in modern accounts.14 This interdependence was both emotional and
economic. The public sphere depended as much on the cultivation of virtue, love,
and emotional attachments15 as it did on the economic productivity of the oikos
(household). Hence, on the one hand, Aristotles account is more complex and less
binary than conventionally assumed. On the other, however, his characterization
does establish the hierarchy of public over private (and masculine over feminine),
and his avoidance of war and external affairs and omission of (non-oikos) market
exchanges introduce differently problematic simplifications.

AT: FAIRNESS
Portability outweighs their cries of fairness disappear when
we walk outside this room a rethinking of traditional modes
of education sticks with us for the rest of our lives
Claims of fairness, objectivity, predictability are ways to
marginalize the out group and retrench power structures
Delgado, Law Prof at U. of Colorado, 1992 [Richard, Shadowboxing: An Essay On Power, In Cornell Law Review, May]
We have cleverly built power's view of the appropriate standard of conduct into the very term fair. Thus, the stronger party is able to
have his/her way and see her/himself as principled at the same time. Imagine, for example, a man's likely reaction to the suggestion
that subjective considerations -- a woman's mood, her sense of pressure or intimidation, how she felt about the man, her
unexpressed fear of reprisals if she did not go ahead-- ought to play a part in determining whether the man is guilty of rape. Most
men find this suggestion offensive; it requires them to do something they are not accustomed to doing. "Why," they say, "I'd have to
be a mind reader before I could have sex with anybody?" "Who knows, anyway, what internal inhibitions the woman might have
been harboring?" And "what if the woman simply changed her mind later and charged me with rape?" What we never notice is that
women can "read" men's minds perfectly well. The male perspective is right out there in the world, plain as day, inscribed in culture,
song, and myth -- in all the prevailing narratives. These narratives tell us that men want and are entitled [*820] to sex, that it is a
prime function of women to give it to them, and that unless something unusual happens, the act of sex is ordinary and blameless.
We believe these things because that is the way we have constructed women, men, and "normal" sexual intercourse. Yet society
and law accept only this latter message (or something like it), and not the former, more nuanced ones, to mean refusal. Why? The
"objective" approach is not inherently better or more fair. Rather, it is accepted because it embodies the sense of the stronger party,
who centuries ago found himself in a position to dictate what permission meant. Allowing ourselves to be drawn into reflexive,
predictable arguments about administrability, fairness, stability, and ease of determination points us away from what [*821] really
counts: the way in which stronger parties have managed to inscribe their views and interests into "external" culture, so that we are
now enamored with that way of judging action. First, we read our values and preferences into the culture; then we pretend to consult
that culture meekly and humbly in order to judge our own acts.

AT LAW/REFORM GOOD
Legislation meant to protect women reinforces the structural violence
perpetuated against women
Connell 90 (R. Connell, Professor at Macquarie University in Australia, 1990, The
state, gender, and sexual politics)
The way the state embodies gender gives it cause and capacity to "do" gender . As
the central institutionalization of power the state has a considerable , though not
unlimited, capacity to regulate gender relations in the society as a whole. This issue
has been the subject of more feminist and gay discussion about the state than any
other, and the contours are becoming familiar. Again we may trace this issue across the three
substructures of labor, power, and cathexis. In terms of the gendered organization of production
and the gender division of labor, the liberal state was an "interventionist" state well before the twentieth century.
"Protective"

legislation on women's work affected women's participation in wage

labor and attempted to impose a nuclear-family model on the nhaeteenth-century
working class. State control of women's wages through wage boards, arbitration,
legislation, and decree is now a familiar theme in economic history . The state's capacity to
change its tack was shown in the shift of women into manufacturing during the world wars. A highly visible gender
politics of employment re-emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, revolving around "equal opportunity" principles and
affirmative action programs. This has carried over strongly into the international dimension of the state, with the
ILO, OECD, and UN being forums where policy and progress around women's employment are debated. At the same

there is a system of indirect control of the division of labor , as McIntosh has argued,
through welfare provision, the education system, and other machinery . 42 The state
similarly has a capacity to regulate the power relations of gender in other
institutions. The most-discussed case of this is marital violence, where regulation
involves a violation of the cultural boundary between the "public" and the "private"
spheres. Police reluctance to intervene in "domestic disputes" is familiar. In effect, feminist research indicates,
the state's non-intervention has tacitly supported domestic violence - which mainly means
husbands battering wives - up to the point where a public-realm scandal is created and
state legitimacy is at issue. At that point men as state agents will move to restrain men in households:
time

arrests may take place, legal proceedings begin, refuges are funded. The effect of this routine of management is to
construct the issue as one of a deviant minority of violent husbands, and to deflect criticism of marriage as an

Radical feminists in the 1970s used this problem of

legitimacy very effectively to get funding for the women's refuge movement , but as
Johnson observes of the Australian experience they found themselves trapped in this
construction of the issue of violence. 43 Nevertheless, the fact that the state will restrain some
institution that generates violence.

manifestations of private-sphere patriarchy is significant. Donzelot, in a widely read book on the "policing of
families" in France, suggests that

the growth of an apparatus of surveillance and regulation -

in what Anglo-Saxon writers call the welfare state - has generally undermined domestic patriarchy .
The idea is shared by some of the American right, who wish to roll back the state in order to restore women's

the state
has functioned as an alternative means of economic support for many women
disadvantaged by a patriarchal economy. "Welfare mothers" and age pensioners are not exactly a
mass base for feminism; they are nevertheless not abjectly dependent on particular men. Defending the
level of income coming to women through the state has been a key issue for
feminism since the onset of the recession of the 1970 S. 44 The state has a capacity
to regulate sexuality and has shown an active interest in doing so. There are legal
dependence on men ("traditional family life"). This view is exaggerated, but it is nevertheless true that

definitions of forbidden heterosexual relationships, for instance, laws on age of consent and on incest. Around the
prohibition of incest a to-and-fro comparable to that on domestic violence occurs. As the 1987 furor about

vigorous enforcement can create legitimacy

problems at least as severe as non-enforcement. Marital sexuality is regulated in the name of
diagnoses of incest at Cleveland in England shows,

population policy. The state in early twentieth- century Australia banned the sale of contraceptives and introduced
"baby bonus" payments in order to increase the (white) population. The state in contemporary India and China is

vigorously trying to restrain population growth. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century state repression
of men's homosexuality became heavier. The process escalated through criminalization of all male homosexual
behavior (for example, the Labouchbre Amendment in Britain in 1885) to the rounding-up of gay men into

Much of this regulation can be read as an attempt to

promote a particular form of sexuality in the conjugal family against a whole series
of tendencies in other directions. This is not a simple matter of "social reproduction" Often, as
concentration camps in Nazi Germany. 45

population policies illustrate, the state is pursuing a re-structuring of the family or of sexuality. And there is no
doubt that these policies have met a great deal of resistance. The criminalization of male homosexuality failed to
stop male homosexual behavior, though it drove it underground for a couple of generations. The public banning of
contraceptives failed to stop the early twentieth-century decline in family size, as women found other means of
regulating births. Nor are third-world governments wonderfully successful in restraining population growth at
present, while children remain an important asset in peasant society and are valued in urban culture.

Law normalizes male-centered protect males, marginalizing womens

politics and voices
Theis no date attended University of Michigan Law School and is now an
attorney/associate at Reisman Karron Greene LLP. (Adriane Theis, Liberal Privacy and Women: A
Broken Promise http://triceratops.brynmawr.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/10066/726/2006TheisA.pdf?sequence=1
pg. 55-56)//CC

Throughout the history of Anglo-American jurisprudence, the primary linguists of

law have almost exclusively been menwhite, educated, economically privileged men. Men have
shaped it, they have defined it, they have interpreted it and given it meaning
consistent with their understandings of the world and of people other than them.
As the men of law have defined law in their own image, law has excluded or
marginalized the voices and meanings of these othersBecause the men of law
have had the societal power not to have to worry too much about the competing terms
and understandings of others, they have been insulated from challenges to their
language and have thus come to see it as natural, inevitable, complete, objective
and neutral. 128 In a nutshell, this is how law became a male-centered discourse. Men had
societal power. In authoring the rules for their societies, they made rules according to their needs and
experiences since they were subject to the law. The male experience as formulated into law then went through the
historical process of being interpreted by other men until eventually, the discourse could not be identified as a
male-centered discourse, but was merely a natural reflection of society. Since excluded groups were not participants
in society, the law did not need to address their concerns. In creating a law just for themselves, men created a
system that reflected their characteristics as men. Rationality, abstraction, a preference for statistical and
empirical proofs over experiential or anecdotal evidence, and a conflict model of social life corresponds to how
these men have been socialized and educated to think, live and work.129 Because these were the life experiences
of men, they were the characteristics around which they shaped their law. Thus American constitutional law favors
rationality as the highest principle, works in abstract principles rather than in contextual experience, works in
dichotomies where a person has a right or does not, and is very adversarial where there are clear-cut winners and
losers. Over time, the law had to make these characteristics appear natural and objective so that others would
believe in the legitimacy of law. To keep its operation fair in appearance, which it must if people are to trust
resorting to the legal method for resolving competing claims, the law strives for rules that are universal, objective

Universality and neutrality hid the male-centered foundations of law.

With the appearance of objectivity, the law could be applied to groups not
previously considered when law was being written. In this way, new groups could
easily be brought under the patriarchal legal system without sacrificing the
privileging of the male point of view. This means, however, that women seeking recourse to
law are seeking recourse to a system that is hostile to their needs. The patriarchy
underlying the American legal system means that state power is not to be
understood in its own terms, but as a part of a ubiquitous system of patriarchal
power. This means that it is not a neutral tool equally available for women and men, and that it will not
and neutral.130

automatically respond to the dictates of reason or justice.

AT: Baudrilliard K

Victimization bad
1. No- link: there is a difference between how one is shaped as
a victim towards strucral violence than actually experienced
.
2.Only sharing our stories can we survive. We have felt pain
and hurt. The ones who did not make it live in our memory but
only those who are alive to tell the tale should pass on the
message.
Middleton 12 (Kianna Marie, Colorado State University. I FEEL, THEREFORE I CAN BE FREE:
BLACK WOMEN AND CHICANA QUEER NARRATIVES AS DIFFERENTIAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND
FOUNDATIONAL THEORY, pg 7-8, KC)

To speak as both Black and/or Chicana and queer is not only to validate
our existence but is also to overturn the violence done by keeping
hidden queer female bodies in all facets of life, including literature. Erasure
prevents communities from knowing their history and from knowing that
each other exist. Erasure is predicated on the idea that keeping communities
docile, hopeless, and deadsocially, politically, physically, and mentally,
will someday completely wipe out the unwanted. This thesis is my small
contribution to the body and theory

of Black and Chicana queer work. I have taken an semi-

through my own
subject position and personal experiences while connecting them to
larger cultural counternarratives, resistance struggles, and pains
(McClaurin, 2001, p. 65-67). As much as I come back to the text and experiences of
the characters and authors I analyze, I also come back to myself and then
I move forward into theory and consciousness in a cyclical fashion that
privileges all aspects of self, community (text), and theory, equally and holistically.
For example, I alleviate my trauma and pain around race and sexuality
through reading and writing the words of queer black ancestors. I prevent suppression
of feeling, of love, by ingesting other stories of pain. But this is not
masochistic. By holding and remembering pain close to the heart I know
where my power lies. Through the analysis of the selected texts, through the arduous
and repeated bleeding of images both historical and intergenerational, I
will discover moments of freedom and of survival . When Ursa Corregidora
autoethnographic approach to this

project meaning that I write and work

(Corregidora) learns to have relationships that do not hurt, she breathes life back into herself. When
Marci Cruz (What Night Brings) and her younger sister find the courage to protect their mother and

These
stories have individual breaking points; exact moments when the swirling
cries of autonomy and pain finally meld together into conscious motion.
And the characters are able to feelsomething. Audre Lorde writes in her essay Uses of Anger:
Women responding to Racism: Women of Color in america have grown up within
a symphony of anger, at being silenced, at being unchosen, at knowing
that when we survive, it is in spite of a world that takes for granted our
lack of humanness, and which hates our very existence outside of its service. And I say
insure that their

father will not abuse any of them anymore, they reclaimed their safety.

symphony rather than cacophony because we have had to learn to

orchestrate those furies so that

We have had to learn to move through them and use them for
strength and force and insight within our daily lives. Those of us who did not learn this
difficult lesson did not survive(p. 129). Lorde makes clear this delicate balance
between pain and healing, between survival and destruction. Our renewal from
trauma is our realization that change is possible. It is the creative energy that if honed
they do not tear us apart.

can transform our relationships with one another and within

ourselves. My goal here is to uncover pain and to pull free the antidotes of our
annihilation.
correctly

3. Ballots are key to ideological transgression to stop

impearlist violence and because action is inevitable perm do
both the Middleton evidence acts as a net benefit towards
our narrative
4.The aff is better than the K doing the aff solves the alt
better resolving at the question of selling suffering on the
intellectual market .
Montoya 94 (Margaret is Mascaras, trenzas, y grenas: Un/masking the self

while un/braiding latina stories and legal discourse,

http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?
handle=hein.journals/chiclat15&div=5&g_sent=1&collection=journals , p.8-11,
1994, accessed 7/28/15)//ac
Academic success traditionally has required that one exhibit the linguistic and
cognitive characteristics of the dominant culture .20 Until challenged by recent empirical research
by Chicano social scientists, retention of traditional Mexican-American culture was believed to impede successful

This "damaging-culture" model provided a

the complete assimilation of Latinos into the mainstream
culture.22 The wide-spread accept-ance of traditional assimilationist thought fueled
social and familial pressure on Latinos to abandon traditional values and lifestyles in
order to achieve educational and economic upward mobility.23 Acculturation into
the dominant culture is a concomitant of education. Virtually all Latino students with
a college-level education appear to be highly assimilated into Anglo culture. To support
their academic progress, Latinos have encouraged their children to speak English well and
have tolerated other aspects of acculturation , such as changes in friends, clothes and recreational
preferences. As they undertake the daily interactions involved in socialization, students
adopt masks of the dominant culture which manifest the negative values ascribed
to traditional Latino culture. Latina/o history is replete with stories about those who changed their names,
adjustment within mainstream American society.21
rationale for advocating

lost the Spanish language and with it any trace of a Spanish accent, or deliberately married out of the culture. In

Some Latinos, like other Outsiders, move away from their ethnic
communities and want nothing to do with those they left behind. Many others, however,
see education as the only ladder for themselves and for their community. Academic success does not
come without costs, however. Latinas/os who pursue higher education often end up
feeling doubly estranged because of the socialization process : estranged not only from their
ancestral roots but from the dominant culture as well. 5 Feeling masked because of ethnic and
racial differences is directly linked to the process of cultural assimilation, and to the
pervasive Latina/o resistance against assimilation, against being seen as
"agringada," of becoming a gringa, of being taken for something one never wanted
to become. Assimilation has become yet another mask for the Latina/o to hide
behind.26 I have a clay mask made by Mexican artisans that captures this idea but from a different perspective.
short, some did whatever

The outermost mask is a white skeleton face wearing a grimace. The second layer shows a face with an aquiline
nose and a goatee suggesting the face of the Spaniard, the colonizer of indigenous Mexico. This second mask parts
to show the face of a pensive Aztec. This clay sculpture suggests the indigenous Indian preserved behind the false
masks, the death mask, the conquistador mask. In other words, the sculpture represents all of us who have been
colonized and acculturated-who have succeeded in withholding a precious part of our past behind our constructed
public personas. Belonging to a higher economic class than that of one's family or community and affecting the

mannerisms, clothing styles or speech patterns that typify the privileged classes
can strain familial and ethnic bonds.27 Families, even those who have supported
the education and advancement of their children, can end up feeling estranged

from their children and resentful of the cultural costs involved in their academic and
economic success. Ations of vendida, "selling-out," forgetting the ethnic community,
and abandoning the family can accompany academic success.

Dualism
1.Without including the culture within discussions about
dualism built in society the dualism they critize become
inevitable
Frank 03 (Roslyn M. Frank, Professor of informational technology and
ecocriticism at the University of Iowa, Shifting Identities: The Metaphorics of
Nature-Culture Dualism in Western and Basque Models of Self,
http://www.metaphorik.de/sites/www.metaphorik.de/files/journalpdf/04_2003_frank.pdf, April 2003)
These dyads reflect the underlying hierarchical ontological ordering that structures
certain root metaphors found in Western thought (Olds 1992). It should be
emphasised that the metaphoric understandings coded into the Western model form
sets of asymmetric polarities, although with mutually reinforcing, conceptual frames.
For this reason, the culture/nature dualism sets culture above nature, while the
mind/body dualism places mind above body. Then just as the polarity of
reason/emotion can be identified with masculine/feminine, culture/nature
stands for a gendered dualism of masculine/feminine. Stated differently, the
metaphoric set of culture/mind/reason/masculine has its counterpart in
nature/body/emotion/feminine. In this sense, the dyads represent examples of
Aristotelian proportional metaphors, that is, analogies in the form of A is to B what C
is to D. Therefore, since in the case of a proportional metaphor its mapping must
always apply reciprocally to either of its co-ordinate terms, each individual component
of the dyad sets in Diagram 1 is available as a highly complex and expansive
metaphoric resource.1 Moreover, although the reciprocity holding between the dyads,
i.e., their status as proportional metaphors, is clearly culturally grounded and hence
historically bound, recognition of this fact is not easy to achieve.2 This is because of
the epistemic authority afforded to these concepts, an effect that, in turn, is derived
from the central role played by these metaphors in structuring Western thought,
epistemology, ontology, and personhood.3 In recent years increasing attention has

been paid to the development and/or recovery of conceptual frames capable

of challenging and overcoming these deeply embedded, hierarchically
organised dualities that continue to characterise Western thought. As Lakoff
and Turner have observed, the worldview known as the Great Chain [of
Being] itself is a political issue. As a chain of dominance, it can become a
chain of subjugation (Lakoff/Turner 1989: 213).4 Specifically I refer to efforts aimed
at discovering a way to move out of an ontology grounded in a logic of dualities, and
more concretely, to the difficulties posed by the deeply embedded, dyadic conceptual
frame known as mind/body, formerly soul/body, and its conceptual twin, the polarity of
culture/nature. Although many scholars have documented the evolution of these
concepts within Western thought, particularly the dyads of mind/body, male/female,
and more recently, culture/nature,5 less attention has been paid to gaining a
perspective on them from the outside. Indeed, as Descola and Plsson have noted:

Deconstructing the dualist paradigm may appear as just one more example of
the healthy self-criticism which now permeates anthropological theory. [] If
such analytical categories as economics, totemism, kinship, politics,
individualism, or even society, have been characterized as ethnocentric
constructs, why should it be any different with the disjuncture between nature
and society? The answer is that this dichotomy is not just another analytical category
belonging to the tool-kit of the social sciences; it is the key foundation of modernist
epistemology. (Descola/Plsson 1996: 12) Perhaps one of the most important and
insightful explorations of the role of the nature/culture (society) dichotomy in Western
thought is found in Latours (1993) work. Briefly stated, these dichotomous

concepts have served two major purposes in ordering Western thought. First,
they have allowed the hierarchical division of human and other(s) to function
as innate and universal, initially under the guardianship of theological
foundationalism, i.e., Gods plan and a vertically oriented cosmology, then later
simply as the Law of Nature. This transition in the model occurred during the
Enlightenment and coincided roughly with the period in which absolute monarchies
were loosing their grip on Europe. As a result, a new type of foundationalism was
required, reflected in Linneaus choice of the Great Chain of Being as the classifying
mechanism for all of nature and humankind (cf. Schiebinger 1993). Thus, in this new
type of foundationalism, social hierarchies were based, not on Gods plan, but

rather on an unchanging and universalist concept referred to as nature:

justifications of existing inequalities were based on the hierarchical order
attributed to nature and, in turn, dictated by it. Similarly, in the 18th and 19th
centuries, pre-Darwinian socioeconomic thought provided the ground for both
Darwins competition metaphor and for the same type of metaphors in the works of
Spencer and other so-called Social Darwinists. Thus, although commonly viewed as
mutually exclusive opposites, these two antithetical concepts are linked and mutually
reinforcing: the nature/culture antithesis has played a major role in Western
thought, where nature is used to justify culture, the prevailing socioeconomic
order, while at the same time, the prevailing socioeconomic order, culture, is mapped
onto this reified entity, things-in-themselves, called nature. In this conceptual
circularity lies the reason for this dyads key foundational role in modernist
epistemology (cf. again Latour 1993).
1.

Perm Do both : A dualistic approach needs to be interrogated within cultures function.

3.1ac discourse uniquely better at interrogating dualism

Ybarra 9 (Priscilla Solis Ybarra, Professor in the Department of English in University of
Texas with specialization in Chicana/o literature and Ecocriticism from Rice University,
Borderlands as a bioregion: Jovita Gonzales, Gloria Anzaldua and the 20 th Century Ecological
Revolution in the Rio Grande Valley, 2009)
According to Michael Hames-Garca, Anzaldas Borderlands/La Frontera is usually

discussed as a contribution to feminist and antiracist discussions about the

construction of the self within multiple contexts of domination and about the selfs
resistance to oppression and struggle for recognition (103). Yet if we approach the
borderlands as bioregion, we gain even more from Anzaldas landmark text . This
essay takes into account environmental writings of this dynamic region, focusing in
particular on the early twentieth-century writings of Jovita Gonzleza daughter of the same
landscape and same cultural heritage as Anzaldain order at to gain some historical
insight into this rapidly transforming area. I end by connecting Gonzlezs early-twentiethcentury writing to Anzaldas latetwentieth-century work in order to trace the latest
ecological revolution in the US-Mexico borderlands. Considering the bioregional,

ecological aspects of the US-Mexico borderlands expands our understanding of how

colonization, exploitation, and racism impact the land and its people. Scientists,
scholars, and politicians agree that we are in the midst of a global environmental
crisis in which access to resources will become increasingly limited. In a time of
crisis when human societies might cooperate and collaborate to reach a common
resolution, the opposite may occur. Increasingly limited access to clean water,
healthy food, and livable land may create a hierarchy that reproduces the
oppressions that brought this crisis. Indeed, one may argue that such a hierarchy of
environmental exploitation and race already exists; environmental injustice will
increase when resources become even scarcer. Understanding how hierarchies have
operated in the past may help prevent them in the future . Lawrence Buell speculates

that [i]f, as W. E. B. Du Bois famously remarked, the key problem of the twentieth century
has been the problem of the color line, it is not at all unlikely that the twenty-first centurys
most pressing problem will be the sustainability of earths environment (699). I extend
Buells observation: the most pressing problem of the twenty-first century may be that
racism, homophobia, and sexism continue alongsideand are exacerbated bythe
shrinking sustainability of the natural environment. My examination of how Mexican
Americans and the Rio Grande Valley experienced racial oppression and exploitation
following the US-Mexico War and into the twentieth century supports this claim. While
Anzaldas work comments on a more contemporary reading of these dynamics, South Texas
writer Jovita Gonzlez offers historical insight on current injustices and ecological imbalances
along the border.

4. The dualism within the other and the subject the K is nonunique the alternative The fetish of play with the other and its
wellbeing only reconstructs the other as exhaustible object
bringing on its mutilation means no solvency.
5. The fetishization of play is not occurring our narratives
are not play its a survival strategy .

Carnvial-Canbialism
1. The knowledge produced by the 1ac is uniquely key
because of narratives where the spaces that are
occupied are visible changed not co-opted from the
1ac .
Middleton 12 (Kianna Marie, Colorado State University. I FEEL, THEREFORE I CAN BE FREE: BLACK
WOMEN AND CHICANA QUEER NARRATIVES AS DIFFERENTIAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND FOUNDATIONAL THEORY, KC)

the academic position from which some of us have the possibility to speak
makes everything we produce extremely important because we are the select few voices
in academia (and in publishing, for example) that will be heard by mass amounts of people . We
have the ability to be incomparably honest and inspiring if we let outsiders into our
lives and our narratives; or we also have the option of continued shielding of identity
by selectively revealing what we feel can and should be shared . Black and Chicana lesbian
writers are redefining, and expanding, Blackness and Chicananess and their relationship
with sexuality through our personal narratives and fictional narratives of our creation. Leyva
writes, naming ourselves, occupying our spaces fully, creating our own language,
is essential to our continued survival, particularly in these times of increasingly violence against us
as Latinas and lesbianas (p. 432). Therefore, occupying space in this world, which was not
built for us, requires us to break silence. We must name ourselves through speech ,
through art, through writing, through every public and private avenue to make
abundantly clear that this space (any space we desire) is our space . Reina Lewis in The
Death of the Author and the Resurrection of the Dyke (1992) writes that lesbian criticism is a project of rediscovery (p. 17) therefore this too is a project of rediscovery, of situating contemporary Black and Chicana
lesbian literature in a position of not only visibility but in a position to be critically
listened to.
For example,

2. Your authors are armchair philosophers that sustain

traditional enlightenment views and do nothing for people of
color
Siskanna Naynaha, composition coordinator at Lane Community College and
teaches courses on African American and Latino literature, May 20 06, RACE OF

ANGELS: XICANISMA, POSTCOLONIAL PASSIONS, AND RHETORICS OF REACTION AND

REVOLUTION,
https://research.wsulibs.wsu.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/2376/492/s_naynaha_0503
06.pdf?sequence=1
At the turn of the twenty-first century, Laclau entered into a critical discussion with cultural theorist
Judith Butler and Slovenian psychoanalyst and theorist Slavoj iek in their collaborative Contingency,
Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues in the Left. Using the theoretical lenses provided
by Gramsci, Derrida, and Lacan , the three debate the failure of the Left in contemporary
politics and, if there has indeed been a failure, its causes. The major contribution of this work to the field of
democratic theory is the ways the authors problematize current watchwords deployed in the cultural rhetoric of US

the theorists of
so-called radical democracy tend to become bogged down in discussions of the discursivity of
democracy; what they neglect here is the material, economic realities of poor
people of color in the US and around the globe. Kalyan K. Sanyal elaborates on this
democracy such as multicultural, pluralistic, and politically correct. Ultimately, however,

critique in his Postmarxism and the Third World: A Critical Response to the Radical Democratic Agenda. By
emphasizing the discourse of the right, he argues, the radical democrats link their multiple struggles to the state
because it is the state that endows every citizen with right, and the process of realization of the right must refer to
the state rather than to any other form of collectivity . . . [but]

what are the implications of the

radical democratic agenda for the global order, economic and political? (128) In the end
Sanyal finds that the implications are devastating. The most salient is that the Third
World has to bear a large part of the cost of accommodating rights in the
[First World]. To the extent that these rights impinge on the logic of profit and accumulation, capital has a tendency

the rhetoric of
democracy in the US has grown out of a Eurocentric obsession with Western
foundations which inspire and perpetuate an obsessive possessive individualism
through constant appeals to Enlightenment era thinking and ideals. The
deployment of such rhetoric has long obscured the problems of racism,
poverty, patriarchal oppression, and heterosexism within the US, and now,
given the global expansion of US domination under the logic of late capitalism, that same rhetoric of
democracy obfuscates the historical and material realities of US colonialism and
imperialism around the world. Debates about individual rights and appropriate
procedures rage on in the US while suffering rages on in poor neighborhoods
populated disproportionately by people of color in the US and enrages the devastated
Two-Thirds World. It is a travesty that demands a sustained intervention, one that historicizes the political and
to move to greener pastures in the Third World where such rights hardly exist (128). In fact,

economic dimensions of the rhetoric of democracy in the US.

3.Our Narratives multiplicity does not equal co-option ,

but results in the best route towards attacking the issue
means the alt does not solve and K does not turn case
Currie 95(Mark is Professor of Contemporary Literature at Queen Mary University

of London, Metafiction, p.123 ISBN:0582212928, 1995, accessed 7/28/15)//ac

One can regard any text in direct discourse as a logical conjunc-tion of assertions.
The truth-value of the text is then simply a logical function of the truth or falsity of
the individual assertions taken separately: the conjunction is true if and only if each
of the propositions is true. Narrative has in fact been analyzed, espe-cially by
philosophers intent on comparing the form of the narra-tive with the form of
theories, as if it were nothing but a logical conjunction of past-referring statements;
and on such an analysis there is no problem of narrative truth. The difficulty with
the model of logical conjunction, however, is that it is not a model of narrative at all.
It is rather a model of a chronicle. Logical con-junction serves well enough as a
representation of the only order-ing relation of chronicles, which is "... and then ...
and then ... and then...." Narratives, however, contain indefinitely many ordering
relations, and indefinitely many ways of combining these relations. It is such a
combination that we mean when we speak of the coherence of a narrative, or lack
of it. It is an unsolved task of literary theory to classify the ordering relations of
narra-tive form; but whatever the classification, it should be clear that a historical
narrative claims truth not merely for each of its indi-vidual statements taken
distributively, but for the complex form of the narrative itself."
4. No-Co option : 1ac mahraj evidence indicates why the mestazje
consciousness that is produced by the 1ac is uniquely key because of how
the Eurocentric forces they describe does nothing we produced
education within the class-room setting .

5. Survival DA: the 1nc has not performed strategy against the
colonial violence against the LatinX body- where it is a starting
point where we address the ontological violence meanwhile
the alternative

Objectification
1.Your authors are armchair philosophers that sustain
traditional enlightenment views and do nothing for people of
color- where that is where the objectification did not begin
where you can not tell how we objectify lived experience
Siskanna Naynaha, composition coordinator at Lane Community College and
teaches courses on African American and Latino literature, May 20 06, RACE OF
ANGELS: XICANISMA, POSTCOLONIAL PASSIONS, AND RHETORICS OF REACTION AND
REVOLUTION,
https://research.wsulibs.wsu.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/2376/492/s_naynaha_0503
06.pdf?sequence=1
At the turn of the twenty-first century, Laclau entered into a critical discussion with cultural theorist
Judith Butler and Slovenian psychoanalyst and theorist Slavoj iek in their collaborative Contingency,
Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues in the Left. Using the theoretical lenses provided
by Gramsci, Derrida, and Lacan , the three debate the failure of the Left in contemporary
politics and, if there has indeed been a failure, its causes. The major contribution of this work to the field of
democratic theory is the ways the authors problematize current watchwords deployed in the cultural rhetoric of US

the theorists of
so-called radical democracy tend to become bogged down in discussions of the discursivity of
democracy; what they neglect here is the material, economic realities of poor
people of color in the US and around the globe. Kalyan K. Sanyal elaborates on this
democracy such as multicultural, pluralistic, and politically correct. Ultimately, however,

critique in his Postmarxism and the Third World: A Critical Response to the Radical Democratic Agenda. By
emphasizing the discourse of the right, he argues, the radical democrats link their multiple struggles to the state
because it is the state that endows every citizen with right, and the process of realization of the right must refer to

what are the implications of the

radical democratic agenda for the global order, economic and political? (128) In the end
Sanyal finds that the implications are devastating. The most salient is that the Third
World has to bear a large part of the cost of accommodating rights in the
the state rather than to any other form of collectivity . . . [but]

[First World]. To the extent that these rights impinge on the logic of profit and accumulation, capital has a tendency

the rhetoric of
democracy in the US has grown out of a Eurocentric obsession with Western
foundations which inspire and perpetuate an obsessive possessive individualism
through constant appeals to Enlightenment era thinking and ideals. The
deployment of such rhetoric has long obscured the problems of racism,
poverty, patriarchal oppression, and heterosexism within the US, and now,
given the global expansion of US domination under the logic of late capitalism, that same rhetoric of
democracy obfuscates the historical and material realities of US colonialism and
imperialism around the world. Debates about individual rights and appropriate
procedures rage on in the US while suffering rages on in poor neighborhoods
populated disproportionately by people of color in the US and enrages the devastated
Two-Thirds World. It is a travesty that demands a sustained intervention, one that historicizes the political and
to move to greener pastures in the Third World where such rights hardly exist (128). In fact,

economic dimensions of the rhetoric of democracy in the US.

2. The alternative continues symbolic violence because of

how their trap towards the system - does not trap the
system only the mestazje consciousness and ways of
thought because ideological transgression - thats
Mendoza8

Baudribae Wrong
BAUDRILLARDS CRITIQUE IS EMPIRICALLY DENIED BY THE GULF
WAR
Christopher Norris, Distinguished Research Professor in Philosophy at the University of Cardiff,
Wales, Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals, and the Gulf War, 19 92, p. 11.
How far wrong can a thinker go and still lay claim to serious attention? One useful
test-case is Jean Baudrillard, a cult figure on the current postmodernist scene, and
purveyor of some of the silliest ideas yet to gain a hearing among disciples of French
intellectual fashion. Just a couple of days before war broke out in the Gulf, one
could find Baudrillard regaling readers of The Guardian newspaper with an article
which declared that this war would never happen, existing as it did only as a
figment of mass-media simulation, war-games rhetoric or imaginary scenarios
which exceeded all the limits of real-world, factual possibility.1 Deterrence had
worked for the past forty years in the sense that war had become strictly unthinkable
except as a rhetorical phenomenon, an exchange of ever-escalating threats and counterthreats whose exorbitant character was enough to guarantee that no such event would
ever take place. What remained was a kind of endless charade, a phoney war in which the
stakes had to do with the management of so-called public opinion, itself nothing more
than a reflex response to the images, the rhetoric and PR machinery which create the
illusion of consensus support by supplying all the right answers and attitudes in advance.
There would be no war, Baudrillard solemnly opined, because talk of war had now
become a substitute for the event, the occurrence or moment of outbreak which the
term war had once signified. Quite simply, we had lost all sense of the difference or the
point of transition between a war of words, a mass-media simulation conducted
(supposedly) by way of preparing us for the real thing, and the thing itself which would
likewise take place only in the minds and imaginations of a captive TV audience,
bombarded with the same sorts of video-game imagery that had filled their screens during
the build-up campaign.

Baudrillards critique is nave and contradictory, does not

correspond with reality, and is normatively useless
James Marsh, Professor of Philosophy, Fordham University, 19 95, Critique, Action, and Liberation,
pp. 292-293
Such an account, however, is as one-sided or perhaps even more one-sided than that
of naive modernism. We note a residual idealism that does not take into account
socioeconomic realities already pointed out such as the corporate nature of media,
their role in achieving and legitimating profit, and their function of
manufacturing consent. In such a postmodernist account is a reduction of
everything to image or symbol that misses the relationship of these to realities
such as corporations seeking profit, impoverished workers in these corporations,
or peasants in Third-World countries trying to conduct elections. Postmodernism
does not adequately distinguish here between a reduction of reality to image and
a mediation of reality by image. A media idealism exists rooted in the influence
of structuralism and poststructuralism and doing insufficient justice to concrete
human experience, judgment, and free interaction in the world.4 It is also
paradoxical or contradictory to say it really is true that nothing is really true, that
everything is illusory or imaginary. Postmodemism makes judgments that
implicitly deny the reduction of reality to image. For example, Poster and
Baudrillard do want to say that we really are in a new age that is informational
and postindustrial. Again, to say that everything is imploded into media images is
akin logically to the Cartesian claim that everything is or might be a dream. What
happens is that dream or image is absolutized or generalized to the point that its
original meaning lying in its contrast to natural, human, and social reality is lost.
We can discuss Disneyland as reprehensible because we know the difference

between Disneyland and the larger, enveloping reality of Southern California and
the United States.5 We can note also that postmodernism misses the reality of the
accumulation-legitimation tension in late capitalism in general and in
communicative media in particular. This tension takes different forms in different
times. In the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, social, economic,
and political reality occasionally manifested itself in the media in such a way that
the electorate responded critically to corporate and political policies. Coverage of
the Vietnam war, for example, did help turn people against the war. In the 1980s,
by contrast, the emphasis shifted more toward accumulation in the decade
dominated by the great communicator. Even here, however, the majority
remained opposed to Reagans policies while voting for Reagan. Human and
social reality, while being influenced by and represented by the media,
transcended them and remained resistant to them.6 To the extent that
postmodernists are critical of the role media play, we can ask the question about the
normative adequacy of such a critique. Why, in the absence of normative
conceptions of rationality and freedom, should media dominance be taken as bad
rather than good? Also, the most relevant contrasting, normatively structured
alternative to the media is that of the public sphere, in which the imperatives
of free, democratic, nonmanipulable communicative action are institutionalized.
Such a public sphere has been present in western democracies since the
nineteenth century but has suffered erosion in the twentieth century as
capitalism has more and more taken over the media and commercialized them.
Even now the public sphere remains normatively binding and really operative
through institutionalizing the ideals of free, full, public expression and
discussion; ideal, legal requirements taking such forms as public service
programs, public broadcasting, and provision for alternative media; and social
movements acting and discoursing in and outside of universities in print, in
demonstrations and forms of resistance, and on media such as movies,
television, and radio.7

Turn-Disaster Porn
TURN: VIOLENCE IS INESCAPABLE. OUR VIOLENCE ENABLES
UNDERSTANDING MORE THAN IT INHIBITS. REMEMBERING AND
REPRESENTING VIOLENCE IS ESSENTIAL TO AVERT THE
DESTRUCTION OF THE OTHER. REJECT THE CRITIQUES SILENCE.
Eskin, Research Fellow and Lecturer, European Literature, Cambridge University,
Dialectical Anthropology, 24: 407-450, 1999, p. 391-6
Michael

Derrida allows nothing prior to language; since, in Derrida's s philosophy, everything is inscribed in
language, he places speech and language prior to ethics, prior to any possible ethical injunction.
Derrida's formulations owe a tremendous debt to several major epistemological shifts. of the early
twentieth century: Sapir's and Whorf's notion that language conditions thought, for example, or Lacan's
claims that both conscious and unconscious thought processes (and thus the subject) are structured by
language. Because for Derrida ethics is inscribed, along with everything else, in language, and because

for Derrida language is inherently violent in that it is always a reduction, a

totalization, he reaches the conclusion that even a Levinasian ethics cannot ever
avoid violence: "One never escapes the economy of war." The origin of this
violence inherent in discourse is the act of inscribing the other in the definitions
and terms of the same: Predication is the first violence. Since the verb to be and the predicative

act are implied in every other verb, and in every common noun, nonviolent language, in the last
analysis, would be a language of pure invocation . . .purified of all rhetoric [in Levinas' terms] . . . . Is a
language free from all rhetoric possible? Derrida answers his own question in the negative, affirming
that "there is no phrase which is indeterminate, that is, which does not pass through the violence of the
concept. Violence appears with articulation." Foucault has expressed this same sentiment, maintaining
that "We must conceive discourse as a violence we do to things, or, at all events, as a practice we
impose upon them." Naming and predication-two acts essential to language-confine
what is being described, and fix it in one's own terms. As we shall see from an
examination of Hiroshima non amour, memory works the same way, attempting to
enclose the past within determinate parameters, employing the same brand of
totalization to whose presence in language Derrida has gestured. Concern over the necessary violence
of memory as representation to the consciousness, as willed inscription in one's own terms of what is
other because past, is perhaps the most obvious point at which Derrida, Levinas, Duras, and Resnais
converge, for the impossibility of remembering an historical event as it was-of actually arriving at a
clear understanding of a past event by imaging it through memory, by re-presenting it to our
memory-is a chronic preoccupation of Hiroshima mon amour. Resnais confronted this dilemma as well
in the process of constructing Nuit et brouillard. Claiming historical authority over

Auschwitz, or giving the illusion that it is comprehensible, would only, in Resnais'

opinion, "humaniz[e] the incomprehensible terror," thereby "diminishing it,"
perhaps even romanticizing it; so, unable to describe the violence, and unwilling
to inscribe it, Resnais opted instead to document our memory of it . Resnais carries no
illusions that the past can be duplicated to any significant degree, rendered for us now as it was then.
Given the accepted generic constraints of a film, he says, " it is absolutely absurd to think

that in that space of time one can properly present the historical reality of such a
complex event. [Historical facts] were the bases for our `fiction,' points of departure rather than
ends in themselves." This explains what Leo Bersani has described as Resnais' clear favoring of the
word "imagination" over the word "memory" when referring to his own films." However, in the case of
Hiroshima mon amour, instead of filling in with imagination the details between the historical "facts,"
the film throws its hands up at any effort to "remember" or "see" the tragedy at Hiroshima. Thus,
Hiroshima mon amour, in the words of one critic, turns out "to be a film about the impossibility of
making a documentary about Hiroshima"1' or, in Armes' more broadly epistemologically oriented
phrase, "a documentary on the impossibility of comprehending." Duras reminds us of this in her
synopsis of the screenplay: "Impossible de parler de HIROSHIMA. Tout ce qu'on peut faire c'est de parler
de l'impossibilite de parler de HIROSHIMA (Impossible to speak of HIROSHIMA. All one can
do is speak of the impossibility of speaking of HIROSHIMA )." She then drives the point
home in Hiroshima mon amour's unforgettable opening sequence, as Okada incessantly reminds
Riva that she can never know Hiroshima's tragedy. Riva knows, for example, that

there were two hundred thousand dead and eighty thousand wounded, in nine
seconds; she can rattle off the names of every flower that bloomed at ground
zero two weeks after the bombing; she has been to the museum four times, seen
the pictures, watched the films. As if to accentuate the veracity of' Riva's learned data, Duras
alerts the reader in a footnote to the origin of the details, and there is hardly a more famous or

traditionally reputable source on the immediate aftermath of the bombing than John Mersey's
Hiroshima. And yet, as one critic has commented, "les images collees aux murs . . . sont incapables de
faire revivre completement la realite du fait (images pasted to walls . . . are incapabale of
completely restoring the reality of the fact)." Despite Riva's wealth of statistical
(read: historically trustworthy) data, Okada is able to refute her with confidence,
"Tu n'as rien vu a Hiroshima (You saw nothing at Hiroshima)," and the almost incantatory
continued
repetition of this phrase strengthens its punch. Duras increases the effect by reminding us that the day of the bombing of Hiroshima, while a tragedy for Okada,
coincides with Riva's liberation from her horrifying wartime experience in Nevers, France. This fact forces the question: How can Riva ever understand as a tragedy
an event that corresponded with her own emotional rebirth and reclaiming of some measure of normalcy?

Okada points out that

the entire world was celebrating while Hiroshima smouldered in ashes. This fact forces
another, similar question, one that I myself must confront on reading or watching Hiroshima mon amour : How could the Westerners in
the audience ever expect to grasp the tragedy that they originally celebrated as
the end of the war? These reminders have their own Verfremdungseffekt further alienating the audience/reader from the history of Hiroshima,
dispelling any lingering notion that historical tragedy can ever be fully comprehended . Riva's optimism is almost infectious, though, and she indeed believes
that she can master the history behind the leveling of Hiroshima . She claims to know everything, and she is once
again swiftly negated by the Japanese. She contents herself by concluding that, even if she does not know yet, ca s'apprend
The effect is even stronger on what Duras must have assumed would be a predominantly Western audience, when

(one learns)."" She is not gifted with memory, though, as Okada reminds her and thus all she can claim to know about Hiroshima is what she has "invente." This
particular verbal exchange is highlighted by the fact that it is for the first time in the text Riva's turn to use the word "rien," until this point a word uttered frequently
and only by Okada: ELLS: Je n'ai rien invente. (SHE: I invented nothing.) LUI: Tu as tout invente. (HE: You invented everything.) Proof of her inability to approach
comprehension of Hiroshima arrives in the form of a laugh, when Riva asks her lover if he was at Hiroshima the day of the bombing and he laughs as one would laugh
at a child. She shows herself further distanced from the historical event by the manner in which she sounds out the name of the city, "Hi-ro-shi-ma," as if it were-or
rather because it is-radically foreign to her. (Later, in the same manner, Okada sounds out Riva's youth, the story of which will always be unknown and
incomprehensible to him: "Jeune-a-Ne-vers [ Young-in-Nevers].") Her memory of Hiroshima, created by herself and inscribed in terms that she can understand from
photographs taken by other people, is mere "illusion," truth several times removed. She remembers, though, and almost obsessively, because she knows that it is
worse to forget

. Historical memory must be reductive,

sometimes violently so, according to a Derridean understanding of it,

one's
memory only ever serves one's own purposes: "Est-ce que to avais remarque," he asks, "que c'est toujours dans le
because it is always a form of representation and thus of predication. A less diplomatic statement made by Okada goes so far as to suggest that

meme sens que l'on remarque les chows? (Did you ever notice that one always notices things in the same way?)." We notice what suits us, in the direction and sense

However, just as language-the system of representation par

-carries in its every use the violence inherent in its reductiveness, we use it anyway,
as it enables far more than inhibits. In Levinas's formulation, not only is discourse our primary
means of relating to and maintaining the other, but the absence of it, silence, "is
the inverse of language . . . a laughter that seeks to destroy language. " Derrida accords with Levinas:
"denying discourse" is "the worst violence," "the violence of the night which
precedes or represses discourse." Despite the violence that Riva's impulse
toward memory commits against any ideal or "objective" history, absolute
forgetting is far more dangerous; by any account, remembering and representing past
violence must be seen as a necessary evil, as a sort of metaphysically violent means of
averting future real, physical violence. Still, the partial forgetting of the unforgettable tragedy is inevitable, as John Ward points out in
his treatment of Resnais' films: "With the passage of time we become so insensitive to other
people's suffering that we can lie in the disused ovens of Auschwitz and have our
photographs taken as souvenirs." Duras' text also renders disturbing images of forgetting, of loubli. Riva confesses to her own
which we prefer, and we notice it in the manner in which we can best use it.
excellence

struggle against ignorance: "mei aussi, j'ai essaye de lutter de toutes mes forces contre l'oubli . . . . Comme toi, j'ai oublie (me too, I've tried to struggle with all my
strength against forgetting . . . . Like you, I've forgotten). "During the third part of Duras' script, at the staged demonstration against nuclear armaments, Okada
seems far too preoccupied with taking Riva back to his family's house to care about the demonstration, even if it is only a performance for a film. Immediately after
explaining the appearance of the charred skin of Hiroshima's surviving children, he informs her, "Tu vas venir avec moi encore une fois (You will come with me once
again)." Remembering the bombing is quite obviously not a first priority for him. There are other grim reminders of the forgetting in the reconstruction of Hiroshima
and the importation of American culture. At one point, Riva and Okada enter a nightclub called "Casablanca" -a strange immortalization of American pop culture in a
city leveled by an American bomb less than two decades earlier. Moreover, the Japanese man who tries to converse with Riva in the Casablanca gladly (and proudly,
it seems) speaks the language of the conquerors, the bomb-droppers. The attitude on display in this scene is reminiscent of one in John Hersey's account of the
months following the bombing, in Hiroshima: [Dr. Fujiil bought [the vacant clinic] at once, moved there, and hung out a sign inscribed in English, in honor of the
conquerors: M. MUJII, M.D. MEDICAL & VENEREAL Quite recovered from his wounds, he soon built up a strong practice, and he was delighted, in the evenings, to

While there is certainly something

to be said for not bearing a grudge, the speed of the forgetting and forgiving
seems unbelievable. Memory represents historical tragedy insufficiently, in violently subjective reductions; we are never able to experience
receive members of the occupying forces, on whom he lavished whiskey and practiced English.

being there and can never know the event, can never have witnessed it firsthand. Thus, we forget. Duras' script clearly stresses both the necessity and difficulty of
remembering, but demonstrates, perhaps pessimistically, that we will veer slightly but inexorably toward l'oubli. And

once we forget,

violence will erupt again.

THE CRITIQUE IS REDUCTIVE. THEY FORECLOSE THE ESSENTIAL

ABILITY TO MOBILIZE VIOLENCE AGAINST VIOLENCE.
Michael Eskin, Research Fellow and Lecturer, European Literature, Cambridge University, Dialectical
Anthropology, 24: 407-450, 1999, p. 403-4
I have tried to demonstrate through this reading of Hiroshima mon amour that Resnais'
and Duras' text falls prey to the violence of historical memory and to the worse
violence of absolute oblivion. Strictly following a theoretical apparatus reconstructed from
the thought of Levinas and Derrida, Hiroshima mon amour seems to participate,

through the apparently deliberate reduction to race and place and event of two already
allegorical and emblematic characters, in the very violence which Resnais and Duras
set out initially to document, the most reductive of predications. The script trades in
an economy of violence, dealing out the abstractions and totalizations that are
the seed of every Holocaust, that mark every uninhabitable corner of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. This conclusion seems to me, though, far too conclusive, far too reductively
critical and discomforting, far too dependant on a great deal of interpretive faith, not
unmerited but certainly not absolute, in the debate between and formulations of Levinas
and Derrida What I am trying gingerly to say is that our reading should remain
sensitive, attentive and open enough to discover those points at which the
theoretical scaffolding may fail us, points at which a Levinasian/Derridean
reading seems to stall; I believe a conclusive dismissal of Hiroshima mon amour
as a text governed and permeated by violence is probably one such moment. I
would propose instead a different, and hopefully more useful, reading of my reading of
this well-intentioned script and film. For, while Hiroshima mon amour is certainly
guilty of the very violence it claims as its object, it is likely from this portrayal and
mobilizing of violence that the film sees its greatest anti -violent gesture; all that is
required is a return to Duras' stated desire to avoid the banal describing of
"l'horreur par l'horreur." Instead of horrifying us with horror, as she refused to
do, Duras' screenplay has shown us the humble beginnings of horror: the total
forgetting of past horrors, and the blatant inscribing of infinite Others within the
finitudes of the language of the Same. And in this, Duras and Resnais may have
succeeded, ultimately, in their declared mission to bring the horrifying tragedy of
Hiroshima back to life, to see it reborn, out of the ashes.

Alt= X social change

(2nd card is better)

Baudrillards alternative allows conservative ideological

distortion

Norris 90

[ Christopher, Distinguished Research Professor in Philosophy at the

University of Cardiff, Wales, Whats Wrong with Postmodernism, 1990, p. 190-191.
*Gender modified
Baudrillards alternative is stated clearly enough: a hyperreal henceforth
sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and
the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and the
simulated generation of difference (p. 167). It is a vision which should bring
great comfort to government advisers, PR experts, campaign managers,
opinion-pollsters, media watch-dogs, Pentagon [spokespeople] spokesmen and
others with an interest in maintaining this state of affairs. Baudrillards
imagery of orbital recurrence and the simulated generation of difference should
commend itself to advocates of a Star Wars program whose only conceivable
purpose is to escalate EastWest tensions and divert more funds to the militaryindustrial complex. There is no denying the extent to which this and similar
strategies of disinformation have set the agenda for public debate across
a range of crucial policy issues. But the fact remains (and this phrase carries
more than just a suasive or rhetorical force) that there is a difference between
what we are given to believe and what emerges from the process of
subjecting such beliefs to an informed critique of their content and modes
of propagation. This process may amount to a straightforward demand that
politicians tell the truth and be held to account for their failing to do so. Of
course there are cases like the IrangateContra affair or Thatchers role in
events leading up to the Falklands war where a correspondence-theory might
seem to break down since the facts are buried away in Cabinet papers, the evidence
concealed by some piece of high-level chicanery (Official Secrets, security
interests, reasons of state, etc.), or the documents conveniently shredded in time to
forestall investigation of their content. But there is no reason to think as with
Baudrillards decidedly Orwellian prognosis that this puts the truth forever
beyond reach, thus heralding an age of out-and-out hyperreality. For one can still
apply other criteria of truth and falsehood, among them a fairly basic coherencetheory that would point out the various lapses, inconsistencies, non-sequiturs,
downright contradictions and so forth which suffice to undermine the official version
of events. (Margaret Thatchers various statements on the Malvinas conflict
especially the sinking of the General Beigrano would provide a good example
here.)29 It may be argued that the truth-conditions will vary from one
specific context to another; that such episodes involve very different
criteria according to the kinds of evidence available; and therefore that it is
no use expecting any form of generalised theory to establish the facts of this or that
case. But this ignores the extent to which theories (and truth-claims) inform our
every act of rational appraisal, from commonsense decisions of a day-today, practical kind to the most advanced levels of speculative thought. And
it also ignores the main lesson to be learnt from Baudrillards texts: that any
politics which goes along with the current postmodernist drift will end up
by effectively endorsing and promoting

AT: NIETZSCHE K
Their argument creates the personal as inevitably inferior
recreates our impacts; emotions are an important form of
speech and creates a capacity to feel that isnt empathetic
identification but does resist the policing functions of white
academia.
Ahmed 4 (Sara, Australian and British academic working at the intersection of

feminist theory, queer theory, critical race theory and postcolonialism The Cultural
Politics of Emotion, http://books.google.com/books?
hl=en&lr=&id=QT8YAgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=Emotion+Pain+Spectacle&ots
=G1xGus-RMD&sig=WTOzM5XSx5ggYFmCKBHpZj4aW-g#v=onepage&q=Emotion
%20Pain%20Spectacle&f=false)
I have associated emotions not with individuals, and their interior states or character, nor with the quality of

emotions have often

been linked to the power of language . But they are often constructed as an
instrument: as something that we use simply to persuade or seduce others into
false belief (emotion as rhetoric, rhetoric as style without content). Such a view constructs emotion
as a possession, at the same time that it presumes that emotions are a lower form
of speech. This presumption in turn elevates reasonableness or detachment
into a better address, one that does not seek to stir up trouble . I have offered an
alternative view of emotions as operating precisely where we dont register their effects in the
determination of the relation between signs, a relation that is often concealed by the form of the
objects, but with signs and how they work on and in relation to bodies. Of course,

relation: the metonymic proximity between signs. In Chapter 4, I called this determination stickiness, examining
how signs become sticky or saturated with affect. My discussion of emotive language was not then a discussion of
a special class or genre of speech, which can be separated from other kinds of speech. Rather this model of sticky

language works as a form of power in which emotions align some

bodies with others, as well as stick different figures together, by the way they move
us. If emotions are not possessions, then the terrain of (in)justice cannot be a question of having or not having
an emotion. Interestingly, in moral and political philosophy, those who argue that emotions
are relevant to justice, often do so via a model of character and virtue. Robert C. Solomon, for example,
signs shows us how

following from a classical view of justice as virtue, and David Humes and Adam Smiths concept of moral
sentiments, argues that: Justice is first of all a function of personal character, a matter of ordinary, everyday

Justice becomes a form of feeling, which is about fellow-feeling,

a capacity to feel for others, and to sympathise with their pain (Solomon 1995:3, see also
feeling (Solomon 1995:3).

Smith 1966:10). We have already seen the risks of justice defined in terms of sympathy or compassion: justice then
becomes a sign of what I can give to others, and works to elevate some subjects over others, through the reification
of their capacity for love or fellow-feeling (see Chapters 1 and 6). But we must also challenge the view that justice
is about having the right kind of feelings, or being the right kind of subject. Justice is not about good character. Not
only does this model work to conceal the power relations at stake in defining what is good-in-itself, but it also works
to individuate, personalize and privatize the social relation of (in) justice. Character is, after all, an effect rather than

Emotions then cannot be installed as the truth of injustice, partly

as they do not simply belong to subjects.
a ground of social life.

Pain and suffering cannot be separated from political methodology their

attempt to links to the 1AC
Ahmed 4 (Sara, Australian and British academic working at the intersection of
feminist theory, queer theory, critical race theory and postcolonialism The Cultural
Politics of Emotion, http://books.google.com/books?
hl=en&lr=&id=QT8YAgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=Emotion+Pain+Spectacle&ots
=G1xGus-RMD&sig=WTOzM5XSx5ggYFmCKBHpZj4aW-g#v=onepage&q=Emotion
%20Pain%20Spectacle&f=false)
The relation between injustice and feeling bad is complicated. Lauren Berlant has argued that injustice cannot be

Although pain and injustice cannot be reduced,

they also cannot be separated: the fact of suffering, for example, has something to
do with what is wrong about systematic forms of violence, as relations of force and
harm (see Chapter 1). The effects of violence arc something to do with why violence can be judged as bad. Now,
reduced to pain, or feeling bad (Berlant 2000: 35).

this is not to say that what makes violence bad is the others suffering. To make such a claim is dangerous: it makes
the judgement of right and wrong dependent upon the existence of emotions. The reduction of judgements about
what is bad or wrong to experiences of hurt, pain or suffering would be deeply problematic. For the claim would
allow violence to be sustained in the event that the other claimed not to suffer, or that I claimed the other did not

some forms of violence remain concealed as violence, as

effects of social norms that are hidden from view. Given this, violence itself could be
justified on the grounds of the absence of consciously-felt suffering. The reduction
of injustice to emotions also justifies claims of access to the inferiority of the
feelings of others. We have probably all heard arguments that justify power relations through the claim that
suffer. We must remember that

this other is in fact not hurting, or might even be content, or happy. Indeed, I could make this claim about

emotions are not transparent and

they are not simply about a relation of the subject to itself, or even the relation of
the subject to its own history.
myself: I do not hurt, I am happy, therefore it is not wrong. But

AT RESENTMENT
Resentment is sometimes a necessary response to patriarchy Nietzsche
interpretation of ressentiment forces women to remain complacent
Stringer 2014 Dr. Rebecca Stringer is a Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies at
University of Otago. Knowing Victims: Feminism, Agency and Victim Politics in
Neoliberal Times. Women and Psychology. Routledge (New York, New York).
Singer (L I 9831 1 998) situates Nietzsche within a long tradition of thought which
caricatures womans anger in order to delegitimate it (p. 178) and argues that the
gendered theme of ressentiment in Nietzsches philosophy operates as an
apologetics of male dominance. Nietzsche treats resentment, hostility and
vengefulness as entirely unoccasioned (p, 176) quintessentially feminine instincts
character traits, rather than effects of domination and deduces from this
womens weakness, thus their suitability to a position of social inferiority. Nietzsche
mistakes survival tactics for instincts (p. 177): resentment, hostility and
vengefulness are responses to social inferiority, not signs of its naturalness. Singer
argues: The refusal of women to accept this situation [patriarchal dominance] is a
sign of their strength. So long as women are kept secondary and inferior they have
no good reason not to resent their predicament. Nietzsches demand that women
abandon that attitude is an impossible and self-serving demand. (p. 179) As Singer
points out, feminism is first situated as a politics of ressentiment by Nietzsche
himself. Rather than see feminism as a bid to move beyond the circumstances that
breed resentment, Nietzsche sees feminism as an expression of feminine
resentment that assumes the form of intra-female vengeance: [Nietzsche argues]
that any effort by women to transcend their situation is in fact only a retrospective
movement of resentment. Any effort toward emancipation by women is transformed
by this analysis into a gesture of vengeance by abortive women against their
fertile and well-adjusted sisters. (p. 175) Against Nietzsche, Singer argues that
resentment is not quintessentially feminine but is instead occasioned by patriarchal
social relations; and Singer situates resentment not simply as a burden of
oppression hut as a sign of strength and of the ability to challenge the
configurations of power that occasion resentment.

AT: CAP/MARXISM K

2AC-FEM
The negatives nostalgia for an anti-capitalism before identity politics and
post structuralism is left melancholy -- causes comparatively more
political inaction
Deana 14 [Contemporary Political Theory, 4 November 2014, Radicalism restored?
Communism and the end of left melancholia, Jonathan, School of Politics and
International Studies, University of Leeds] //khirn
The use of melancholia as an analytical category has its roots in Freudian psychoanalysis, and is to be distinguished
from the related concept of mourning. For Freud, the latter refers to the (non-pathological) process of working
through an acknowledged loss of a loved person, or of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as
ones country, liberty, an ideal, and so on (Freud, 2001, p. 243). Crucially, after a period of mourning is completed
the ego becomes free and uninhibited again (2001, p. 243) but melancholia, by contrast, is related to an object
loss that is withdrawn from consciousness (2001, p. 245), and as such it remains unacknowledged, enduring and
intransigent. A number of authors have argued that Freuds distinction between mourning and melancholia can help
capture something specific about the affects and dispositions of the academic left. Wendy Browns 1999 essay
Resisting Left Melancholy remains the standard-bearer. Drawing on Freud, Walter Benjamin and Stuart Hall, Brown
argues that the left-wing melancholic is attached more to a particular political analysis or ideal even to the failure

Left-wing
melancholy, says Brown, signifies a certain narcissism with regard to ones past
political attachments and identity that exceeds any contemporary investment in
political mobilization, alliance or transformation (1999, p. 20). But what precisely is it
that has brought about this pervasive left-wing melancholy? Browns answer is twofold. First,
she argues that the discourse of the left-wing melancholic frequently cites the turn to socalled cultural politics or identity politics in which struggles around gender, race and sexuality are
seen to have displaced the traditional focus on class as having caused a crisis and loss of
focus (1999, p. 23). The second alleged culprit in the eyes of the left-wing melancholic is the turn
to poststructuralism, discourse analysis, postmodernism, trendy literary theory got
up as political analysis (1999, p. 23). Brown argues that this pervasive structure of leftwing melancholy, despite being based on an ostensible commitment to radical
transformation, in fact engenders a conservative refusal to engage critically and
constructively with the world. Instead, the left-wing melancholic takes refuge in his or her
attachments to a lost ideal of traditional left theory and politics . The crucial
point for Brown is that the problems affecting the academic left do not as the left-wing
melancholic would have it arise from the lefts abandonment of its radical principles.
Rather, this melancholia arises from many leftists continued (often unacknowledged)
attachments to a historically specific model of anti-capitalist revolutionary social
change, whose privileged status is now called into question . Left-wing melancholia,
for Brown, is therefore bound up with a generalised refusal or inability to respond to the
challenges engendered by the changing nature of capitalism, and the
emergence of various forms of radical politics feminism, queer politics, anti-racism and so on
irreducible to historical materialist models of political transformation .3 Browns text is
notable for its lack of proper names, and as such melancholia is implicitly understood to refer to
a collective, widely shared set of investments and orientations . This aspect of left
of that ideal than to seizing possibilities for radical change in the present (Brown, 1999, p. 20).

melancholia is tackled in some detail in J.K. Gibson-Grahams (2006) analysis of the affects and emotions of the
academic left. One of Gibson-Grahams central aims is to contest an entrenched mindset in which the accepted or
correct political stance is one in which the emotional and affective dispositions of paranoia, melancholia, and

these negative affects are not located

in particular individuals, but are a structure of feeling (2006, p. 1) widely present if
not fully manifest in any person or pronouncement (2006, p. 6). Gibson-Graham suggests that
these structures of feeling reduce the academic left to political [stagnation], and
also curtail our analytical capacities: left melancholia, they argue, reflects and
moralism intermingle and self-reinforce (2006, p. 4). Crucially,

reinforces rather crude, totalising renditions of capitalism as a pervasive and largely

uncontestable socio-economic formation. Consequently, complexities within capitalism, and socio-economic
practices that diverge from or indeed actively resist capitalism, are downplayed,
overlooked and cast to the margins, precluding the production of more nuanced
framings of contemporary economic practices and social formations . The thrust of Brown
and Gibson-Grahams critical analyses of various aspects of left melancholia is not to suggest that those on the
academic left should simply cheer up, or foster more positive affective orientations for the sake of it. Rather, their

melancholia conceived as a specific kind of psychic formation different to, say, disappointment or
hampers the academic lefts ability to intervene politically, or to engage
in fruitful socio-political analysis. Consequently, Gibson-Graham and others make a persuasive
argument that an urgent task for the left is to explore how we might weaken the hold of
melancholia.
point is that
sadness

Sequencing DAFeminism is a necessary strategy for challenging

neoliberal economies of violence and dominationtheir alternative
doesnt assume the unique social condition of the Black female subject
within Neoliberalism
Dillon 12
Stephen Dillon is a Critical Social Inquiry professor at Hampshire College. His
research areas include fugitive life, race and neoliberalism. Possessed by Death:
the neoliberal-carceral state, Black feminism, and the afterlife of slavery, Radical
History Review. Issue 112. (Winter 2012).
In the closing section of the essay What of Our Past? What of Our History?
What of Our Future? Shakur seamlessly connects the past, present, and future
in an attempt to develop the psychological force needed to build a strong
black womens movement.10 This is a movement that emerged amid the
crises of global capitalism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and state
power that spanned the 1960s and 1970s. Neoliberalism is the state and
corporate response to these crises.11 Following Grace Hong, we can place
Shakurs essay within the epistemological formation women of color
feminism that arose in the 1970s and 1980s to mark the contradictions of
late-twentieth-century U.S. capitalism.12 Women of color feminism emerged
and expanded alongside the neoliberal-carceral state, and in the case of
Shakur and Angela Daviss work, from within the prison. For Hong, women of
color feminism names that which cannot be apprehended under
normative ideals or hegemonic epistemologies. By analyzing race,
gender, class, sexuality, and the state as inter- locking and colluding
mechanisms of power, women of color feminism can name the ways
multiply determined difference is simultaneously central to and yet
incessantly disavowed in the production and reproduction of capital.
As a way of knowing, women of color feminism names the repressed, the
erased, and the expunged at the very moment of their formation and
articulation.13 It engages the shadows and what is living there, naming what
has never entered the archives that constitute evidence and fact.14 For more
than 40 years, black feminists have argued that slavery is central to the
economic, political, and social present. In so doing, women of color feminism is
one epistemological formation that is able to challenge the ways that the
normal and banal are mobilized to obscure violence, terror, and death. Black
feminist scholars have worked tirelessly to make visible what often goes
unseen and unsaid, to reckon with the endings that are not over. In many

ways, Women in Prison: How We Are is a ghost story, a story of those dead to
the law, dead to the world, and living a death in life.15 It is a story that
confronts what goes unseen by virtue of its banality and thinks what is
unthought within the analytics of black nationalism, white feminism, late
liberalism, and white radicalism. Shakurs essay is about the people who
constitutively haunt a new phase in the life of global capitalism. The
imprisoned women of color in the text compose the detritus of
neoliberalism the human waste necessary to its success.16 Shakur
writes: There are no criminals here at Rikers [sic] Island Correctional
Institution for Women (New York), only victims. Most of the women (over 95
percent) are black and Puerto Rican. Many were abused as children. Most have
been abused by men and all have been abused by the system. . . . Many are
charged as accessories to crimes committed by men. The major crimes that
women here are charged with are prostitution, pick pocketing, shoplifting,
robbery, and drugs. . . . The women see stealing or hustling as necessary for
the survival of themselves and their children because jobs are scarce and
welfare is impossible to live on.17 Shakur describes the effects of this process
on the body of a woman named Spikey: She is in her late thirties. Her hands
are swollen. Enormous. There are huge, open sores on her legs. She has about
ten teeth left. And her entire body is scarred and ashen. She has been on
drugs about twenty years. Her veins have collapsed. She has fibrosis, epilepsy,
and edema. For Shakur, prison, deindustrialization, and welfare animate a
network of management and control that specifically targets black women.
Throughout the essay, Shakur describes the late-twentieth-century
postindustrial city as a place emptied of jobs, littered with abandoned
buildings, and surrounded by policing and penal technologies. Indeed, the
effects of neoliberalisms economic and policing technologies are written on
the decaying bodies of Shakurs fellow cap- tives. Yet caged bodies do not
decompose of their own volition; they are produced by the regimes of
power that detain and envelop them. For Shakur, open sores and missing
teeth are traces of powers touch, holes left by its mundane routines. Her
description of bodily disintegration captures the diffuse violence and quotidian
rou- tines of domination that order black life but that are invisible in their
banality. Ter- ror eludes detection by operating behind rational categories
naturalized by social science and the state like crime, poverty, and
pathology.18 Neoliberalisms man- agement of life and death is not just
evident in spectacles of warfare, state violence, or mass starvation. The mark
of its operation sometimes looks like swollen hands and scarred flesh.
Perm solves Their criticisms class focus trades off with more inclusive
analysis of oppression which is key to effective anti-capitalist resistance
their attempt to marginalize the incrementalism of the permutation
proves that they can never solve the multivalent nature of structuralized
violence constellated in overlapping systems of domination
Biewener 99 [Carole, Professor and Director of Gender/Cultural Studies at
Simmons College, 1999, A Postmodern Encounter: Poststructuralist Feminism and
the Decentering of Marxism, Socialist Review, Volume 27, Issue 1/2, Available
Online to Subscribing Institutions via ProQuest]
By developing such an overdeterminist class knowledge, "reformist" class struggles

may then be recognized as having transformative consequences in a gendered,

racial, or other- than-class sense and "traditional" class politics may be understood
as also gendered and racialized politics. For instance, women's participation in capitalist waged labor
has, under some circumstances, enabled them to escape or challenge patriarchal familial relations, contributing to
new notions of what it means to be a "woman." Struggles over parental leave, the social provision of child care, and
universal health insurance may enable divisions of labor that do not constitute or reinforce patriarchal gender
relations to the same extent. Extension of parental leave or family benefits to gay and lesbian couples may reform
our sexual and gendered identities in potentially new emancipatory ways. Campaigns for "comparable worth" have
aimed to revision the valuation of female-identified skills and occupations relative to male-identified ones, thereby
destabilizing and subverting gendered notions of "worth" and "value" in transformative ways. Struggles over
deindustrialization in urban areas may serve to revitalize communities of color in ways that challenge racist

what might be considered as reformist from a traditional

Marxian class standpoint may be understood as transformative and radical from a
decentered class perspective that does not privilege class exploitation nor
subordinate relations of domination, oppression, and power that are constituted by
other-than-class aspects of social life. Thus, rather than eviscerating the
potentialities of left political activity, the decentering of class enables a
multiplication and surplus of potentially transformative left political practices.
For, not only are we able to recognize the radical character of transforming otherthan-class aspects of social life, we are also able to theorize the class dimensions of
struggles over these ostensibly other-than-class issues. Marxists are thus able to
highlight the class aspect of social life in new and compelling ways . For instance, Marxists
stereotypes. In all of these instances,

may contribute to struggles over reproductive rights by showing the links between feminist concerns about gender
subordination and the rights of women and Marxists' concerns with who does the work of childcare and under what
conditions, or with who has access to reproductive technology and medical services and for what reasons. Or, in
organizing to stop the spread of HIV, Marxists may highlight the class aspects of this crisis, emphasizing the links
between joblessness and drug use or between the lack of economic development and prostitution, while also
recognizing how the racialized, gendered, and sexualized aspects of the spread of HIV reinforce and help
(re)produce these class aspects. "The

challenge for Marxists, then, is to develop the ways in

which the loss of class as a universal or hegemonic project provides new areas of
strength and vitality within Marxism, and opens new horizons for progressive
political action."37 In general, by making "class" in any Marxian sense visible, a project
is constructed whose political intentionality is, in part, to "reveal" and problematize
exploitative class relations. This is a subversive aspect of most Marxian traditions
and this subversive aspect may be established in many different ways: via projects
that pose class in hegemonic and universalizing terms, but also via projects that
understand class in a local and contextual sense .38 Usually a particular ethical dimension is
associated with this project whereby a Marxian class analysis is aimed at creating an understanding in which one of
the "rules" of the discourse is that class exploitation is "bad." Thus, in addition to theorizing or "revealing" the
character of class relations, there is also often the more-or-less explicit project of eradicating class exploitation and
of instituting communal forms of producing, appropriating, and distributing surplus labor. Yet, here we must confront
a second major challenge presented by poststructuralist feminism, that of the construction of agency and

in recognizing the contextuality and openness of subjectivity, along

with the partiality and discursive character of knowledge, we face the challenge of
emptying "class" of any a priori normative status in order to reconstruct a
contextual postmodern class politics and/or ethics that does not have recourse to an
extradiscursive "standard" by which to justify its political intentionalities, strategies,
and projects.39 In and of itself we cannot, therefore, conclude that class exploitation is "bad." Rather, from a
postmodern materialist perspective, political, social, and ethical intentionalities and
projects depend upon the particular context within which we are situated.
Therefore, we must consider and theorize the constituent aspects of class processes
in order to ground a class politics. This perspective, therefore, does not mean that it
is impossible to embrace a politics committed to furthering nonexploitative class
processes or relations, but that such a politics must be continually constructed and
enabled, rather than presumed, imposed, or universalized .
subjectivity. For,

Marxism operates from a starting point that ignores sexual difference and
footnotes any feminist struggle
Hartmann, 2006 - Heidi Hartmann is a feminist economist and the founder of the
Institute for Women's Policy Research, a scientific research organization formed to
meet the need for women-centered, public policy research, The Unhappy Marriage
of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union, HEIDI I. HARTMANN,
United States 1945- . Economist. Founding Director of the Institute for Women's
Policy Research (1987). Capitalism and Women's Work in the Home, 1900-1930
(1976), Women's Work, Aden's Work: Sex Segregation on the Job (1981),
Comparable Worth: New Directions for Research (1985), Women, Work, and Poverty:
Woman-Centered Research for Policy Change (2006).
The "marriage" of marxism and feminism has been like the marriage
husband and wife depicted in English common law: marxism and feminism
are one, and that one is Marxism. Recent attempts to integrate marxism
and feminism are unsatisfactory to us as feminists because they subsume
the feminist struggle into the "larger" struggle against capi tal. To continue
our simile further, either we need a healthier marriage or we need a divorce. The
inequalities in this marriage, like most social phenomena, are no accident. Many
marxists typically argue that feminism is at best less important than class
conflict and at worst divisive of the working class. This political stance
produces an analysis that absorbs feminism into the class struggle.
Moreover, the analytic power of marxism with respect to capital has
obscured its limitations with respect to sexism. We will argue here that while
marxist analysis provides essential insight into the laws of historical development,
and those of capital in particular, the categories of marxism are sex-blind.
Only a specifically feminist analysis reveals the systemic character of
relations between men and women. Yet feminist analysis by itself is inadequate
because it has been blind to history and insufficiency materialist. Both Marxist
analysis, particularly its historical and materialist method, and feminist
analysis, especially the identification of patriarchy as a social and
historical structure, must be drawn upon if we are to understand the
development of western capitalist societies and the predicament of
women within them. In this essay we suggest a new direction for marxist feminist
analysis. I MARXISM AND THE WOMAN QUESTION The woman question has never
been the "feminist question." The feminist question is directed at the causes
of sexual inequality between women and men, of male dominance over
women. Most marxist analyses of women's position take as their question
the relationship of women to the economic system, rather than that of
women to men, apparently assuming the latter will be explained in their
discussion of the former. Marxist analysis of the woman question has taken
three main forms. All see women's oppression .in our connection (or lack of it)
to production, Defining women as part of the working class, these
analyses consistently subsume women's relation to men under worker's
relation to capital. First, early marxists, including Marx, Engels, Kautsky, and
Lenin, saw capitalism drawing, all women into the wage labor force, and saw this
process destroying the sexual division, of labor. Second, contemporary marxists
have incorporated, women into an analysis of evervdav life in capitalism. In this
view, all aspects of our lives are seen to reproduce the capitalist system and we are

all workers in the system. And third,, marxist feminists have focused on housework
and its relation to capital, some arguing that housework produces surplus value and
that houseworkers work directly for capitalists. . . . While the approach of the early
marxists ignored housework and stressed women's labor force participation, the two
more recent approaches emphasize housework to such an extent they ignore
women's current role in the labor market. Nevertheless, all three attempt to
include women in the category working class and to understand women's
oppression as another aspect of class oppression. In doing so all give short
shrift to the object of feminist analysis, the relations between women and
men. While our "problems" have been elegantly analyzed, they have been
misunderstood. The focus of Marxist analysis has been class relations; the object
of marxist analysis has been understanding the laws of motion of capitalist society.
While we believe marxist methodology can be used to formulate feminist strategy,
these marxist feminist approaches discussed above clearly do not do so; their
marxism clearly dominates their feminism. Marxism enables us to understand many
aspects of capitalist societies: the structure of production, the generation of a
particular occupational structure, and the nature of the dominant ideology. Marx's
theory of the development of capitalism is a theory of the development of
"empty places." Marx predicted, for example, the growth of the proletariat and the
demise of the petit bourgeoisie. More precisely and in more detail, Braverman
among others has explained the creation of the "places" clerical worker and service
worker in advanced capitalist societies.2 Just as capital creates these places
indifferent to the individuals who fill them, the cat egories of marxist
analysis, class, reserve army of labor, wage laborer, ////////do not explain
why particular people, fill particular places. They give no clues about why
women are subordinate to men inside and outside the family and why it is
not the other way around. Marxist categories, like capital itself, are sexblind. The categories of Marxism cannot tell us who will fill the empty
places. Marxist analysis of the woman question has suffered from this
basic problem.
No root cause of capitalism
Larrivee 10 PF ECONOMICS AT MOUNT ST MARYS UNIVERSITY MASTERS FROM
THE HARVARD KENNEDY SCHOOL AND PHD IN ECONOMICS FROM WISCONSIN, 10
[JOHN, A FRAMEWORK FOR THE MORAL ANALYSIS OF MARKETS, 10/1,
http://www.teacheconomicfreedom.org/files/larrivee-paper-1.pdf]
The Second Focal Point: Moral, Social, and Cultural Issues of Capitalism Logical errors abound in critical commentary
on capitalism. Some critics observe a problem and conclude: I see X in our society.
We have a capitalist economy. Therefore capitalism causes X. They draw their conclusion by looking
at a phenomenon as it appears only in one system. Others merely follow a host of popular theories according to which capitalism is particularly bad. 6

The solution to such flawed reasoning is to be comprehensive, to look at the good

and bad, in market and non-market systems. Thus the following section considers a number of issuesgreed, selfishness and human
relationships, honesty and truth, alienation and work satisfaction, moral decay, and religious participationthat have often been
associated with capitalism, but have also been problematic in other systems and usually in more
extreme form. I conclude with some evidence for the view that markets foster (at least some) virtues rather than undermining them. My
purpose is not to smear communism or to make the simplistic argument that capitalism isnt so bad because other systems have problems too. The
critical point is that certain people thought various social ills resulted from
capitalism, and on this basis they took action to establish alternative economic
systems to solve the problems they had identified. That they failed to solve the
problems , and in fact exacerbated them while also creating new problems, implies
that capitalism itself wasnt the cause of the problems in the first place , at least not to the

degree

No root cause of capitalism

Larrivee 10 PF ECONOMICS AT MOUNT ST MARYS UNIVERSITY MASTERS FROM
THE HARVARD KENNEDY SCHOOL AND PHD IN ECONOMICS FROM WISCONSIN, 10
[JOHN, A FRAMEWORK FOR THE MORAL ANALYSIS OF MARKETS, 10/1,
http://www.teacheconomicfreedom.org/files/larrivee-paper-1.pdf]
The Second Focal Point: Moral, Social, and Cultural Issues of Capitalism Logical errors abound in critical commentary
on capitalism. Some critics observe a problem and conclude: I see X in our society.
We have a capitalist economy. Therefore capitalism causes X. They draw their conclusion by looking
at a phenomenon as it appears only in one system. Others merely follow a host of popular theories according to which capitalism is particularly bad. 6

The solution to such flawed reasoning is to be comprehensive, to look at the good

and bad, in market and non-market systems. Thus the following section considers a number of issuesgreed, selfishness and human
relationships, honesty and truth, alienation and work satisfaction, moral decay, and religious participationthat have often been
associated with capitalism, but have also been problematic in other systems and usually in more
extreme form. I conclude with some evidence for the view that markets foster (at least some) virtues rather than undermining them. My
purpose is not to smear communism or to make the simplistic argument that capitalism isnt so bad because other systems have problems too. The
critical point is that certain people thought various social ills resulted from
capitalism, and on this basis they took action to establish alternative economic
systems to solve the problems they had identified. That they failed to solve the
problems , and in fact exacerbated them while also creating new problems, implies
that capitalism itself wasnt the cause of the problems in the first place , at least not to the
degree

Neoliberalism increases gender and racial equality

Bhagvati 4 (University Professor at Columbia University and Senior Fellow in
International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations [JagdishBhagwati, In
Defense of Globalization. 2004. Overview,
http://www.cfr.org/publication/6769/in_defense_of_globalization.html]
JagdishBhagwati takes conventional wisdomthat globalization is the cause of several social illsand turns it on its

Properly regulated, globalization, he says, is the most powerful force for social
good in the world. Drawing on his unparalleled knowledge of international economics, Bhagwati dismantles
the antiglobalization case. He persuasively argues that globalization often leads to greater general
prosperity in an underdeveloped nation: it can reduce child labor, increase literacy,
and enhance the economic and social standing of women. And to counter charges that
head.

globalization leads to cultural hegemony, to a bland McWorld, Bhagwati points to several examples, from
literature to movies, in which globalization has led to a spicy hybrid of cultures . Often
controversial and always compelling, Bhagwati cuts through the noise on this most contentious issue, showing that
globalization is part of the solution, not part of the problem. Anyone who wants to understand whats at stake in the
globalization wars will want to read In Defense of Globalization. The first edition of In Defense of Globalization
addressed the critiques that concerned the social implications of economic globalization. Thus,

it addressed
questions such as the impact on womens rights and equality, child labor, poverty in
the poor countries, democracy, mainstream and indigenous culture, and the
environment. Professor Bhagwati concluded that globalization was, on balance, a force for
advancing these agendas as well.Thus, whereas the critics assumed thatglobalizationlacked a
human face, itactually had a human face. He also examined in depth the ways in which policy and
institutional design could further advance these social agendas, adding more glow
to the human face.

AT: BATMAN / BALLOT / HEORISM K

2AC
Armchair DA: Your authors are armchair philosophers that sustain
traditional enlightenment views and do nothing for women or people of
color
Siskanna Naynaha, composition coordinator at Lane Community College and
teaches courses on African American and Latino literature, May 2006, RACE OF
ANGELS: XICANISMA, POSTCOLONIAL PASSIONS, AND RHETORICS OF REACTION AND
REVOLUTION,
https://research.wsulibs.wsu.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/2376/492/s_naynaha_0503
06.pdf?sequence=1
At the turn of the twenty-first century, Laclau entered into a critical discussion with cultural theorist
Judith Butler and Slovenian psychoanalyst and theorist Slavoj iek in their collaborative Contingency,
Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues in the Left. Using the theoretical lenses provided
by Gramsci, Derrida, and Lacan , the three debate the failure of the Left in contemporary
politics and, if there has indeed been a failure, its causes. The major contribution of this work to the field of
democratic theory is the ways the authors problematize current watchwords deployed in the cultural rhetoric of US

the theorists of
so-called radical democracy tend to become bogged down in discussions of the discursivity of
democracy; what they neglect here is the material, economic realities of poor
people of color in the US and around the globe. Kalyan K. Sanyal elaborates on this
democracy such as multicultural, pluralistic, and politically correct. Ultimately, however,

critique in his Postmarxism and the Third World: A Critical Response to the Radical Democratic Agenda. By
emphasizing the discourse of the right, he argues, the radical democrats link their multiple struggles to the state
because it is the state that endows every citizen with right, and the process of realization of the right must refer to

what are the implications of the

radical democratic agenda for the global order, economic and political? (128) In the end
Sanyal finds that the implications are devastating. The most salient is that the Third
World has to bear a large part of the cost of accommodating rights in the
the state rather than to any other form of collectivity . . . [but]

[First World]. To the extent that these rights impinge on the logic of profit and accumulation, capital has a tendency

the rhetoric of
democracy in the US has grown out of a Eurocentric obsession with Western
foundations which inspire and perpetuate an obsessive possessive individualism
through constant appeals to Enlightenment era thinking and ideals. The
deployment of such rhetoric has long obscured the problems of racism,
poverty, patriarchal oppression, and heterosexism within the US, and now,
given the global expansion of US domination under the logic of late capitalism, that same rhetoric of
democracy obfuscates the historical and material realities of US colonialism and
imperialism around the world. Debates about individual rights and appropriate
procedures rage on in the US while suffering rages on in poor neighborhoods
populated disproportionately by people of color in the US and enrages the devastated
Two-Thirds World. It is a travesty that demands a sustained intervention, one that historicizes the political and
to move to greener pastures in the Third World where such rights hardly exist (128). In fact,

economic dimensions of the rhetoric of democracy in the US.

AT: QUEER THEORY K

2AC
the feminized subject does not only constitute those that are femalebodied but those that have been marked by hegemonic discourses as
lesser when they fall out of the conventional norms of gender
performativity.
Butler 90 (Judith Butlerreceived a B.A. in philosophy from Bennington College in
1978 and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 1984. Butler has taught at
Wesleyan and Johns Hopkins universities, and is currently professor of rhetoric and
comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley.Gender Trouble:
Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge New York and London, 1990,
DA: 23 October 2013, mK)
On the other hand, Simone de Beauvoir suggests in The Second Sex that one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one.12 For Beauvoir, gender is constructed, but implied in
her formulation is an agent, a cogito, who somehow takes on or appropriates that gender and could, in principle, take on some other gender. Is gender as variable and volitional as

Beauvoir is clear that one

becomes a woman, but always under a cultural compulsion to become one. And
clearly, the compulsion does not come from sex. There is nothing in her account
that guarantees that the one who becomes a woman is necessarily female. If the
body is a situation,13 as she claims, there is no recourse to a body that has not
always already been interpreted by cultural meanings; hence, sex could not qualify
as a prediscursive anatomical facticity. Indeed, sex, by definition, will be shown to have been gender all along.14 The controversy over
the meaning of construction appears to founder on the conventional philosophical polarity between free will and determinism. As a consequence, one
might reasonably suspect that some common linguistic restriction on thought both
forms and limits the terms of the debate. Within those terms, the body appears as
a passive medium on which cultural meanings are inscribed or as the instrument
through which an appropriative and interpretive will determines a cultural meaning
for itself. In either case, the body is fig- ured as a mere instrument or medium for which a set of cultural mean- ings are only externally related. But the body is itself a
construction, as are the myriad bodies that constitute the domain of gendered sub- jects . Bodies cannot be said to have a
signifiable existence prior to the mark of their gender; the question then emerges:
To what extent does the body come into being in and through the mark(s) of
gender? How do we reconceive the body no longer as a passive medium or
instrument awaiting the enlivening capacity of a distinctly immaterial will? 15
Whether gender or sex is fixed or free is a function of a discourse which, it will be
suggested, seeks to set certain limits to analysis or to safeguard certain tenets of
humanism as presuppositional to any analy- sis of gender. The locus of intractability,
whether in sex or gender or in the very meaning of construction, provides a
clue to what cul- tural possibilities can and cannot become mobilized through any
further analysis. The limits of the discursive analysis of gender presuppose and
preempt the possibilities of imaginable and realizable gender con- figurations within
culture. This is not to say that any and all gendered possibilities are open, but that
the boundaries of analysis suggest the limits of a discursively conditioned
experience. These limits are always set within the terms of a hegemonic cultural
discourse predicated on binary structures that appear as the language of universal
rationality. Constraint is thus built into what that language constitutes as the imag- inable domain of gender.
Beauvoirs account seems to suggest? Can construc- tion in such a case be reduced to a form of choice?

Queer theory assumes a male identityrendering lesbians invisible.

Jeffreys 94
(Sheila, Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Melbourne, Womens Studies International Forum, The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians:
Sexuality In the Academy, Volume 17, Issue 5, p. 459-472)
The appearance of queer theory and queer studies threatens to mean the disappearance of lesbians. The developing field of

lesbian and gay

studies is dominated now by the queer impulse. Lesbian feminism is conspicuous by

its absence . Lesbian feminism starts from the understanding that the interests of lesbians and gay men are in many respects very different
because lesbians are members of the political class of women. Lesbian liberation requires , according to this analysis, the
destruction of men's power over women. In queer theory and queer studies, lesbians seem to
appear only where they can assimilate seamlessly into gay male culture and
politics. No difference is generally recognised in interests, culture, history between lesbians and gay men. The new field of the study of 'sexuality'
seems similarly to be dominated by gay male sexual politics and interests. Both areas are remarkably free of feminist influence. As I discuss here, there is
seldom any mention in queer theorising of sexuality of issues which are of concern to feminists and lesbian feminists, such as sexual violence and
pornography or any politics of sexual desire or practice, and there is no recognition of the specificity of lesbian experience. Within traditional Women's
Studies, lesbian students and teachers have long been angry at the 'lesbian-free' nature of courses and textbooks. A good example is Rosemarie Tong's
Women's Studies reader Feminist Thought (1989). Although many of the feminist theorists covered in the book are lesbians, lesbian feminism is not one of
the varieties of feminist thought included here. The index directs the reader to find lesbian feminist thought in three pages under the heading of 'Radical
feminism and sexuality' (Tong, 1989). Lesbians might well have expected to find the new lesbian and gay studies more sympathetic to their interests, but

The new lesbian and gay

studies is 'feminismfree.' By not recognising the different interests, history, culture,
experience of lesbians, lesbian and gay studies homogenises the interests of
women into those of men. It was precisely this disappearance of women's interests and experience in the malestream academic
that is only true in practice if they see themselves as a variety of gay men rather than as women.

world which caused the development of Women's Studies in the first place. It cannot therefore be an unalloyed cause for celebration in the 1990s that
lesbian and gay studies are becoming sufficiently well recognised to have a whole new journal GLQ and a first reader, The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader
(Abelove, Barale, & Halperin, 1993). Both are American in origin and content. Even a casual glance at these publications suggests that lesbians and
feminists have considerable cause for concern. It is not simply an abstract desire to right the injustice of lesbian disappearance which motivates my
concern at the way that lesbian and gay studies are going. The work of this new field does and will increasingly influence the ideas and practices of lesbian

The disappearance of
lesbians into an economically powerful commercial gay culture in the streets and
the clubs will be exacerbated by what is happening in queer theory. The editorial of the first issue
and gay culture. Academia is not hermetically sealed but reflects and influences the world outside the academy.

of GLQ celebrates its commitment to 'queer' politics. The queer perspective is not a gender-neutral one. Many lesbians, perhaps the vast majority of
lesbian feminists, feel nothing but hostility toward and alienation from the word queer and see queer politics as very specifically masculine. The editorial
tells us that the journal will approach all topics through a queer lens. "We seek to publish a journal that will bring a queer perspective to bear on any and
all topics touching on sex and sexuality" (Dinshaw & Halperin, GLQ, 1993; p. iii). We are told that the Q in the title of the journal GLQ has two meanings,
quarterly and also "the fractious, the disruptive, the irritable, the impatient, the unapologetic, the bitchy, the camp, the queer" (p. iii). This definition of the
word 'queer' should alert readers to its masculine bias. The adjectives accompanying it here refer to male gay culture. They arise from traditional notions

Camp, as we shall see, lies at the very foundation of queer theory and politics and
is inimical to women's and lesbian interests. But before looking at the problems with camp in detail, it is worth
considering another way in which this list of adjectives might not sit well with lesbian feminism. Although gay men's rebellion
against oppression might well have been so mild that it could be expressed in terms
like irritability, this has not been the way that lesbians have traditionally phrased
their rebellion. Perhaps because lesbians have a great deal more to fight, that is, the whole system of male supremacy, rage has been a more
of what is camp.

prevalent emotion than irritability. The early womanifesto of lesbian feminism, the Woman- Identified-Woman paper, expressed it thus: "A Lesbian is the
rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion" (Radicalesbians, 1988, p. 17). Irritable is how one might feel about not having garbage collected,
not about ending the rape, murder, and torture of women, including lesbians. Some queer studies writers are currently seeking to establish that 'camp' is
a fundamental part of 'queer.' There is still a controversy about what constitutes camp, with gay male critics opposing their own notions to that expressed
in the famous Susan Sontag piece and pointing out that her version is heterosexist (Miller, 1993; Sontag, 1986). Sontag saw camp as a sensibility and one
that was not necessarily queer or gay. Moe Meyer, in the volume the POLITICS and POETICS of CAMP, which is said on the blurb inside the cover to contain
essays by "some of the foremost critics working in queer theory" says that camp is "solely a queer discourse" and certainly not just a "sensibility" but "a
suppressed and denied oppositional critique embodied in the signifying practices that processually constitute queer identities" (Meyer, 1994b; p. 1).
Rather, the function of camp is the "production of queer social visibility" and the "total body of performative practices and strategies used to enact a queer
identity" (Meyer, 1994b; p. 5). So camp is defined here not just as one aspect of what it is to be queer, but as absolutely fundamental to queer identity.

Camp appears, on examination, to be based largely on a male gay notion of the feminine. As

his example of camp political tactics, Meyer uses the Black drag queen, Joan Jett Blakk, who ran as a mayoral candidate in Chicago in 1991. This man ran
as a 'Queer Nation' candidate. He is referred to by female pronouns throughout this piece, which raises some difficulties in itself for women who wish to
recognize themselves in the text. Meyer tells us that there were some objections from what he calls "assimilationist gays" who saw the drag queen
political tactic as "flippant and demeaning." The implication is that men who objected did so for conservative motives, whereas in fact they might have

For women and lesbians who have rejected femininity, the

celebration of it by a gay man is likely to be seen as insulting rather than as
something with which to identify in 'queer' solidarity. Actually, women might well want more women in
been expressing profeminist sympathies.

parliament rather than men wearing the clothing that has been culturally assigned to women.

The alts focus on queerness assumes a neutral political subject robbing

women-identified-women of material agency. Queerness becomes only
about performance regulating womens bodies to playful objects for
consumption
Goodloe, 94 (amy, Lesbian-feminism and queer theory: another battle of the
sexes, http://amygoodloe.com/papers/lesbian-feminism-and-queer-theory-anotherbattle-of-the-sexes/)

Perhaps the most scathing critique comes from Sheila Jeffreys, whose work is not always received well by non
lesbian feminist scholars because of her tendency to claim to speak for all lesbian feminists, when in fact she only
speaks for a particularly radical group. In her most recent article, The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians: Sexuality
in the Academy (1994), Jeffreys states simply, The

appearance of queer theory and queer studies

threatens to mean the disappearance of lesbians (459). Jeffreys concern, like that of so many
lesbian feminists, is that queer theory threatens to offset the advances made by feminism
by failing altogether to recognize its impact in shaping contemporary understanding of
sexuality and gender; queer theory, she argues, is feminism free (459). Despite its
supposedly counter-normative associations, Jeffreys believes the word queer has
come to signify white gay male, which renders any project associated with this signifier simply

more of the same, while masquerading as new and uniquely liberating (469). Thus, unlike Stein, whose critique

this new theoretical discourse of

deliberately reinscribing the very oppression(s) that feminists and lesbian
feminists have been fighting against for years, in order to privilege (homo)sexuality
and gay male culture as the epitome of the anti-discourse made so much of by postmodern theory.
Central to Jeffreys critique is that queer theory privileges and indeed naturalizes the masculine
in a way that runs counter to the aims and goals of most forms of feminism. The notion
of camp or drag, which Jeffreys sees as one of the key concepts of queer theory, is
built on gay male notions of performative femininity, which not only excludes
biological women but enshrines the dominant construction of masculine as the
binary opposite of feminine; a drag queens enactment of femininity for the pleasure of other men,
rather than calling into question the performative nature of all gender roles , instead
of queer theory is relatively mild in comparison, Jeffreys accuses

fixes perceived sexual difference at the core of desire, a claim early lesbian feminists were most anxious to refute.

while queer theory may claim to expand the limits of gender by

playing with the terms that constitute it by supposedly separating femininity from the female
body in the persona of a drag queen, for example it in fact fails to account for the sexism inherent
in the terms as they are constituted by the dominant culture . A man playing at being a coy,
According to Jeffreys, then,

submissive woman, for the benefit of other men, is hardly a vision of sophisticated gender analysis to most lesbian
feminists which is not to criticize drag queens in and of themselves, so much as to point out the inadequacy of

queer politics to [accept] and

[celebrate] the minority status of homosexuality. This , she believes, is a politics which
is in contradiction to lesbian feminism (469) because of its insistence on a stable,
coherent albeit counter-normative identity. She continues: Lesbian feminists do not see
themselves as being part of a transhistorical minority of 1 in 10 or 1 in 20, but as the model of
free womanhood. Rather than wanting acceptance as a minority which is defined
in opposition to an accepted and inevitable heterosexual majority , lesbian feminist
theorists seek to dismantle heterosexuality, and one strategy is the promotion of
lesbianism as a choice for women. (469) One of the supposedly progressive things about the word
queer its open and defiant stance against heteronormativity is, to critics like Jeffreys,
precisely its greatest weakness, since it presupposes the naturalness of that which it is
supposed to be in opposition against, and lesbian feminism has long insisted that no
system of sexuality is natural. Failing to see this fundamental insight of lesbian
feminism, queer theorists are unable to account the total hegemony
institutionalized heterosexuality has over all human interactions, ranging from the
regulation of marriage and reproduction to a whole host of seemingly unrelated
restrictions which prevent the self-identified queer from being free.
drag as core theoretical concept. Jeffreys also criticizes the tendency of

2AC EDELMAN/QUEER NEGATIVITY

Edelmans theory of reproductive futurism falls prey to a homonationalist
understanding of citizenship
Smith 10. Andrea Smith, feminist and American Indian activist, professor of media
and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside, Queer Studies and
Native Studies, GLQ 16:1, pg. 49, muse
As Jasbir Puar notes, this articulation of queerness as freedom from norms
actually relies on a genocidal logic of biopower that separates those who should
live from those who must die.33 That is, for the queer subject to live under
Edelmans analysis, it must be freed from genealogical, primitivist subjects who are
hopelessly tied to reproductive futures. This impulse is similar to Warners
juxtaposition of a transgressive queer subject with the racialized subject trapped
within identity and ethnic organization. Puar terms this tendency a sexual
exceptionalism that mirrors U.S. exceptionalism, in which a white queer subject
reinscribes a U.S. homonormativity by positioning himself/herself in an imperialist
relationship to those ethnic subjects deemed unable to transgress. Queerness has
its own exceptionalist desires: exceptionalism is a founding impulse. . . . Freedom
from norms resonates with liberal humanisms authorization of the fully selfpossessed speaking subject, untethered by hegemony or false consciousness,
enabled by the life/stylization offerings of capitalism, rationally choosing modern
individualism over the ensnaring bonds of family.34 If we build on Silvas
previously described analysis, we can see that the Native queer or the queer of
color then becomes situated at the horizon of death within a no futures queer
theory: such individuals must free themselves from their Native identity and community to become fully self-determined subjects. They must forgo national selfdetermination for individual self-determination; they cannot have both. Racialized
subjects trapped within primitive and pathological communities must give way to
modern queer subjects. Puars analysis of biopower suggests that modern white
queer subjects can live only if racialized subjects trapped in primitive and
unenlightened cultures pass away. For instance, some LGBT organizations (as well
as feminist organizations) supported the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan because the
bombing would supposedly free queer people from the Taliban. Apparently, throwing bombs on people frees them. But of course, it was not actually queer people in
Afghanistan who were the real subject of liberationrather, modern queer subjects
in the United States could live only if a sexually savage Afghanistan were
eliminated. To quote Puar: Queerness as automatically and inherently transgressive
enacts specific forms of disciplining and control, erecting celebratory queer liberal
subjects folded into life (queerness as subject) against the sexually patho- logical
and defiant populations targeted for death (queerness as population).35
Meanwhile, as Puar, Silva, and Povinelli imply, the white queer subject, despite its
disavowals, is firmly rooted in a past, present, and future structured by the logics of
white supremacy it is as much complicit in, as it is transgressive of, the status
quo. Rather than disavow traditions and futures, it may be more politically efficacious to engage them critically.

The blanket assertion that the future is kids stuff assumes a conception
of queerness that is exclusively white and middle-class it ignores that
the future is not at the fingertips of queers of colour or others excluded
from politics. Only embracing the future can create a world where these
people can be included.
Muoz prof/chair of performance studies @ NYU 2k9 (Jos Esteban, Cruising Utopia: The
Then and There of Queer Futurity)
The Hegelian narrative is enriched when we insert Frantz Fanons contribution to the very central philosophical
thematic of self/other and the drama of recognition. If we consider the vicissitudes of the fact of blackness, the
radical contingency that is epidermalization, the narrative fills out further and the tale of vulnerability is fleshed out.
Recognition, across antagonisms within the social such as sex, race, and still other modalities of difference, is often
more than simply a tacit admission of vulnerability. Indeed, it is often a moment of being wounded.25 In this

sense I offer The Toilet as a tale of wounded recognition. It marks and narrativizes
the frenzy of violence that characterizes our cross-identificatory recognition. The
Toilet teaches us that the practice of recognition is a brutal choreography, scored to
the discordant sounds of desire and hate. With that stated, its semidisowned ending speaks to the
sticky interface between the interracial and the queer. The interracial and the queer coanimate
each other, and that coanimation, which is not only about homosexuality but about
blackness and how the two touch across space and time, takes the form of not only
the amalgamation of movements that rate a seizure but also the fragmented
gesture that signals an endurance/support, queernesss being in, toward, and for
futurity. Utopian hermeneutics like those invoked in the project of queer futurity
consider the forward-dawning significance of
the gesture. Thus, the plays dramatic conclusion is not an end but, more nearly, an
+ Agambenian means without an end. Recognition of this order challenges theories of
antirelationality that dominate queer criticism, such as Edelmans and the Leo Bersani of
Is the Rectum a Grave? and, to a lesser degree, Homos.26 The act of accepting no future is
dependent on renouncing politics and various principles of hope that are, by
their very nature, relational. By finishing on a note not of reconciliation but of the
refusal of total repudiationa gestural enduring/supportingThe Toilet shows us
that relationality is not pretty, but the option of simply opting out of it, or describing
it as something that has never been available to us, is imaginable only if one can
frame queerness as a singular abstraction that can be subtracted and isolated from
a larger social matrix.
In No Future Edelman takes on Cornel Wests referencing of futurity in an op-ed for the

Boston Globe that he wrote with Sylvia Ann Hewitt titled A Parents Bill of Rights.27 The title is disturbingly smug
(as if biological parents of the middle class did not already have uncontested rights to their children!), and the
editorial is a neoliberal screed on behalf of the culture of the child. But Edelmans critique never considers the topic
of race that is central to the actual editorial. Wests pro-children agenda aligns with his other concerns about the
crises of African American youth.
Edelmans critique of the editorial, with which for the most part I am deeply sympathetic, is flawed insofar as it
decontextualizes Wests work from the topic that has been so central to his critical interventions: blackness .

In
the same way all queers are not the stealth-universal-white-gay- man invoked in
queer antirelational formulations, all children are not the privileged white
babies to whom contemporary society caters. Again, there is for me a lot to like
in this critique of antireproductive futurism, but in Edelmans theory it is enacted
by the active disavowal of a crisis in afrofuturism.28 Theories of queer
temporality that fail to factor in the relational relevance of race or class merely
reproduce a crypto-universal white gay subject that is weirdly atemporalwhich is
to say a subject whose time is a restricted and restricting hollowed-out present free
of the need for the challenge of imagining a futurity that exists beyond the self or
the here and now.
The question of children hangs heavily when one considers Barakas present. On August 12, 2003, one of his

daughters, Shani Baraka, and her female lover, Rayshon Holmes, were killed by the estranged husband of Wanda
Pasha, who is also one of Barakas daughters. The thirty-one- and thirty-year-old womens murders were preceded a
few months earlier by another hate crime in Newark, the killing of fifteen-year-old Sakia Gunn. Gunn was a black
transgendered youth who traveled from Hoboken to
Greenwich Village and the Christopher Street piers to hang out with other young queers of color. Baraka and his
wife, Amina, have in part dealt with the tragic loss of their daughter by turning to activism. The violent fate of their
child has alerted them to the systemic violence that faces queer people (and especially young people) of color. The
Barakas have both become ardent antiviolence activists speaking out directly on LGBT issues. Real violence has
ironically brought Baraka back to a queer world that he had renounced so many years ago. Through his tremendous
loss he has decided to further diversify his consistent commitment to activism and social justice to include what can
only be understood as queer politics.

In the world of The Toilet there are no hate crimes, no

lexicon that identifies homophobia per se, but there is the fact of an aggression
constantly on the verge of brutal actualization . The mimetic violence resonates
across time and to the scene of the loss that the author will endure decades later.
This story from real life is not meant to serve as the proof for my argument . Indeed,
the plays highly homoerotic violence is in crucial ways nothing like the misogynist
violence against women that befell the dramatists family or the transgenderphobic
violence that ended Gunns young life. I mention these tragedies because it makes one simple point.
The future is only the stuff of some kids . Racialized kids, queer kids, are
not the sovereign princes of futurity. Although Edelman does indicate that
the future of the child as futurity is different from the future of actual
children, his framing nonetheless accepts and reproduces this monolithic
figure of the child that is indeed always already white. He all but ignores the
point that other modes of particularity within the social are constitutive of
subjecthood beyond the kind of jouissance that refuses both narratological meaning
and what he understands as the fantasy of futurity. He anticipates and bristles against his future
critics with a precognitive paranoia in footnote 19 of his first chapter. He rightly predicts that some identitarian
critics (I suppose that would be me in this instance, despite my ambivalent relation to the concept of identity) would
dismiss his polemic by saying it is determined by his middle-class white gay male positionality. This attempt to
inoculate himself from those who engage his polemic does not do the job. In the final analysis, white gay male
crypto-identity politics (the restaging of whiteness as universal norm via the imaginary negation of all other

The deeper point is indeed

political, as, but certainly not more, political than Edelmans argument.
It is important not to hand over futurity to normative white reproductive
futurity. That dominant mode of futurity is indeed winning; but that is all
the more reason to call on a utopian political imagination that will enable
us to glimpse another time and place:
a not-yet where queer youths of color actually get to grow up. Utopian and willfully
idealistic practices of thought are in order if we are to resist the perils of
heteronormative pragmatism and Anglo-normative pessimism. Imagining a queer
subject who is abstracted from the sensuous intersectionalities that mark our
experience is an ineffectual way out. Such an escape via singularity is a ticket
whose price most cannot afford. The way to deal with the asymmetries and violent
frenzies that mark the present is not to forget the future. The here and now is
simply not enough. Queerness should and could be about a desire for another way
of being in both the world and time, a desire that resists mandates to accept that
which is not enough.
identities that position themselves as not white) is beside the point.

Through performances like the 1ac we can create futures within the
present
Muoz prof/chair of performance studies @ NYU 2k9 (Jos Esteban, Cruising Utopia: The
Then and There of Queer Futurity)

F UT U RI T Y CAN B E a problem. Heterosexual culture depends on a notion of the

future: as the song goes, the children are our future: But that is not the case for different
cultures of sexual dissidence. Rather than invest in a deferred future, the queer citizen-subject labors to live in a

present that is calibrated, through the protocols of state power, to sacrifice our liveness for what Lauren Berlant has
called the dead citizenship of heterosexuality. This dead citizenship is formatted, in part, through the sacrifice of

On oil dance floors, sites of public sex, various theatrical

stages, music festivals, and arenas both subterranean and aboveground, queers
live, labor, and enact queer worlds in the present. But must the future and the
present exist in this rigid binary? Can the future stop being a fantasy of
heterosexual reproduction? In this chapter I argue for the disruption of this binarized logic
and the enactment of what I call, following C. L. R. James, a future in the present.2 To
call for this notion of the future in the present is to summon a refunctioned notion of
utopia in the service of subaltern politics. Certain performances of queer citizenship
contain what I call an anticipatory illumination of a queer world, a sign of an actually
existing queer reality, a kernel of political possibility within a stultifying heterosexual
present. I gesture to sites of embodied and performed queer politics and describe
them as outposts of actually existing queer worlds. The sites I consider are sites of
mass gatherings, performances that can be understood as defiantly public and
glimpses into an ensemble of social actors performing a queer world.
the present for a fantasmatic future.

The real question is not whether negativity is good or bad its what
negativity is used for the neg just accepts negativity as the essential
queer condition the aff and perm reserve the strategic use of negativity
to cruise ahead to a queer future
Muoz prof/chair of performance studies @ NYU 2k9 (Jos Esteban, Cruising Utopia: The Then and
There of Queer Futurity)
Failure and hopelessness seem strange topics for a book about utopia and hope. Yet
I want to see the failure and bad sentiments in Dynasty Handbags work as active political
refusal. To make this point I turn to particular moment in philosopher Paolo Virnos A Grammar of the Multitudes,
which speaks of the emotional situation of the post-Fordist moment as characterized by a certain mode of
ambivalence. This ambivalence leads to bad sentiments: As Virno puts it, the emotional situation of the multitude
today is that of these bad sentiments, which include opportunism, cynicism, social integration, inexhaustible

Virno imagines the ways in which the laborer may call on

restructured opportunism and cynicism as a sort of escape or exit from late
capitalisms mandate to work and be productive. Negative sentiments such as
cynicism, opportunism, depression, and bitchiness are often seen as solipsistic,
individualistic, and anticommunal affective stances associated with an emotional
tonality of hopelessness. Yet these bad sentiments can signal the capacity to
transcend hopelessness. These sentiments associated with despondence contain
the potentiality for new modes of collectivity, belonging in difference and
dissent. The worker can potentially redirect cynicism, which may lead to a
criticality that does collapse into a postFordist standard mode of alienation.
recanting, cheerful resignation8

Virno, like other writers associated with the Italian proponents of Operaismo (workerism) and the Autonomia

Operaistas understand that capitalism is a

problem not simply because workers are exploited but also because work has
become the dominating condition of human life.9 Operaistas do not want to take
over the means of production; instead they plan on reducing it. What would it mean, on an
movement, makes an argument against work itself.

emotional level, to make work not the defining feature of our lives? How could such a procedure be carried out?

The strategy at the center of Operaismo is described as exodusa strategy of

refusal or defection. This mode of resistance as refusal or escape resonates with
many patterns of minoritarian resistance to structures of social command. Examples
could include the trope of escapology that Daphne Brooks has recently described in
her book Bodies in Dissent or various acts of illegal border crossing. Real or
symbolic escapes from chattel slavery and xenophobic immigration laws are
examples of a certain mode of exodus, which is political action that does not

automatically vector into a fixed counterdiscourse of resistance.

Cynicism, opportunism, and other bad sentiments can be responses to the current
emotional situation, which many of us interested in the project of radical politics
understand as hopelessness. Virnos reimagining of bad sentiments helps us understand them as
something the worker can use to escape. Bad sentiments can be critically redeployed and
function as refusals of social control mandates that become
transformative behaviors.
Dynasty Handbags queer failure is not an aesthetic failure but, instead, a political
refusal. It is a going off script, and the script in this instance is the mandate that
makes queer and other minoritarian cultural performers work not for themselves but
for distorted cultural hierarchy.
Queerness may be a negation of status quo norms however it can also be
used to create new norms outside of the present
Hammill assoc prof English @ SUNY buffalo 2k8 (Graham, Stupid Pleasures
Volume 19, Number 1, September 2008, Muse)
One of Snediker's most salient points (a point that deserves more attention than he
gives it) is that queer isn't best understood as deviation from social norms but
rather as a kind of singularity that emerges within the Winnicottian space of object relations. In this
account, queer is no longer opposed to norms but becomes a moment of optimistic
affirmation through which new sets of norms can be created. Snediker develops his
claims for singularity through chapters on Crane and Dickinson. Chapter One of Queer Optimism focuses on the
network of smiles in Crane's poetry, reading the figure of the smile not as a sign of ironic suffering but as a singular
affirmation of joy produced through its repetition. Snediker develops this thesis against the backdrop of Bersani's
writings on self-shattering, showing how the smile survives as a poetic artifact that endures beyond Crane's suicide.
Like the object in object relations that survives beyond the subject's attempt to destroy it, Crane's smiles are
involved in a poetics that sustains "relationality" beyond all forms of anti-relational thinking (77). Chapter Two reads
the figure of the smile in Dickinson in order to show how her repeated emphasis on pain highlights the surprising
singularity of joy-surprising for Dickinson and, perhaps, for her readers as well. Instead of reading Dickinson's
emphasis on pain as a queer performance of masochism, Snediker reads the repetition of pain as Dickinson's
attempt to isolate and understand the feeling of joy as a positive affect that is, for Dickinson herself, only minimally
understandable.

The other salient point that Snediker insists on is that this understanding of queer is
best thought through a poetic-and not a theatrical-notion of the person . In some ways,
this is Queer Optimism's most powerful insight, one that should stand as a serious
challenge to queer studies. While a theatrical notion of the person has allowed
critics to show the constructedness and naturalization of norms, it also tends to
assume a vision of politics and culture that is fundamentally anti-aesthetic. The
revelation that norms are artificial is revelatory only to the extent that one assumes
a worldview in which art and nature are firmly separated . But, as Snediker argues, a poetic
notion of the person assumes that the person is first and foremost a literary artifact

(a point that could be significantly elaborated through a reading of Barbara Johnson's account in Persons and
Things of personification in lyric and law). In Chapters Three and Four, Snediker focuses on Jack Spicer and Elizabeth
Bishop, respectively. Especially for modern poets working against T.S. Eliot's poetics of impersonality, the literary
nature of the person becomes the basis for exploring the persistent singularity at the heart of the person through
the serial nature of lyric poetry. Although Spicer explicitly espouses Eliot's poetics of impersonality, Snediker shows
that his serial poem Billy the Kid attaches singularity and repetition to the problem of the poetic person. For Bishop,
this repetition is related to love. Snediker reads submerged reference to Crane in her poetry as an attempt to
develop a logic of love based on "a particular form of incomplete or imperfect repetition" (191). In a sense, both
Spicer and Bishop explore the inner workings of the Winnicottian space of object relations and its implications for
queer identity and love through a Deleuzian sense of repetition and seriality.

AT: WILDERSON K

2AC
Perm do both- The intersection of anti-blackness and Feminism can create
spaces of study for analyzing difference and identity- the diaspora is
uniquely key to analyze modern power structures
Brah 4 [Brah, Avtar and Phoenix, Ann (2004). Aint I A Woman? Revisiting Intersectionality. Journal of
International Women's Studies, 5(3), 75-86. Available at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/jiws/vol5/iss3/8i Avtar Brah is a
Reader in the Faculty of Continuing Education, Birkbeck, University of London; Ann Phoenix is a Professor in the
Faculty of Social Sciences, Open University] //duff

Feminist theories of the 1970s and 1980 were informed by conceptual repertoires drawn
largely from modernist theoretical and philosophical traditions of European Enlightenment such as liberalism
and Marxism. The postmodernist critique of these perspectives, including their claims to universal
applicability, had precursors, within anticolonial, antiracist , and feminist critical practice. Postmodern
theoretical approaches found sporadic expression in Anglophone feminist works from the late 1970s. But, during the
1990s they became a significant influence, in particular their poststructuralist variant. The work of scholars who
found poststructuralist insights productive traversed theoretical ground that ranged from discourse theory,
deconstruction, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and postcolonial criticism. Contrary to analysis where process may be
reified and understood as personified in some essential way in the bodies of individuals, different feminisms could
now be viewed as representing historically contingent relationships, contesting fields of discourses, and sites of
multiple subject positions. The concept of agency was substantially reconfigured, especially through
poststructuralist appropriations of psychoanalysis. New theories of subjectivity attempted to take account of
psychic and emotional life without recourse to the idea of an inner/outer divide. Whilst all this intellectual flux led to
a reassessment of the notion of experiential authenticity, highlighting the limitations of identity politics, the
debate also demonstrated that experience itself could not become a redundant category. Indeed, it remains crucial
in analysis as a signifying practice at the heart of the way we make sense of the world symbolically and
narratively. Overall,

critical but productive conversations with poststructuralism have resulted

in new theories for refashioning the analysis of difference (Butler, 1990; Grewal and Kaplan
1994; Weedon 1996; Spivak, 1999). One distinctive strand of this work is concerned with the potential of combining
strengths of modern theory with postmodern insights. This approach has taken several forms. Some

developments, especially in the field of literary criticism have led to postcolonial studies with
their particular emphasis upon the insight that both the metropolis and the
colony were deeply altered by the colonial process and that these articulating
histories have a mutually constitutive role in the present . Postcolonial feminist studies
foreground processes underlying colonial and postcolonial discourses of gender. Frequently, such work uses
poststructuralist frameworks, especially Foucauldian discourse analysis or Derridean deconstruction. Some scholars
have attempted to combine poststructualist approaches with neo-Marxist or psychoanalytic theories. Others have
transformed border theory (Anzaldua 1987; Young, 1994, Lewis 1996; Alexander and MohantyTalpade 1997;
Gedalof, 1999; Mani, 1999; Lewis, 2000).

A related development is associated with valorisation

of the term diaspora. The concept of diaspora is increasingly used in analysing the mobility of peoples,
commodities, capital and cultures in the context of globalisaton and transnationalism. The concept is
designed to analyse configurations of power both productive and coercive in local and
global encounters in specific spaces and historical moments. In her work (Brah 1996, 2002)
addresses the concept of diaspora alongside that of Gloria Anzalduas theorisation of border and the
widely debated feminist concept of politics of home . The intersection of these three terms is
understood through the concept of diaspora space which covers the
entanglements of genealogies of dispersal with those of staying put . The term homing
desire is used to think through the question of home and belonging; and, both power and time are viewed as
multidimensional processes. Importantly,

the concept of diaspora space embraces the

intersection of difference in its variable forms, placing emphasis upon emotional
and psychic dynamics as much as socio-economic, political and cultural differences .
Difference is thus conceptualised as social relation ; experience; subjectivity; and,
identity. Home and belonging is also a theme of emerging literature on mixed-race identities which interrogates
the concept of race as an essentialist discourse with racist effects (Tizard and Phoenix 2002/1993, Zack 1993;
Ifekwunige 1999; Dalmage, 2000). Accordingly, the idea that you are mixed-race if you have black and white

the analytical focus is upon varying and variable

subjectivities, identities, and the specific meanings attached to differences.
parents is problematised. Instead

Perm do the aff than the altBlackness is not an unchangeable ontological voidit is contingent and
contains subjectivity

Hudson 13 Peter Hudson works at the Political Studies Department at the University of the Witwatersrand
in Johannesburg. (The state and the colonial unconscious, Social Dynamics: A journal of African studies, DOI:
10.1080/02533952.2013.802867)
My foil here is the ontological fatalism of Frank Wildersons argument. See Wilderson (2008), according to which
the only way Humanity can maintain both its corporeal and libidinal integrity is through the various strategies
through which Blackness is the abyss into which humanness can never fall (105). And were there to be a place
and time for blacks cartography and temporality would be impossible (111). Here then, the closure of colonialism

the meaning of whiteness and that of blackness is

carried via a constellation of postulates, a series of propositions that slowly and
subtly work their way into ones mind and shape ones view of the world of the
group to which one belongs a thousand details, anecdote stories which are woven into prejudices,
myths, the collective attitudes of a given group (Fanon 1968, 78, 133). This is how the subject
positions of both whites and blacks are constituted . We can call this constellation the Colonial
is absolute. Whiteness as whiteness

Big Other (symbolic) in and through which the colonial relation is constituted and reproduced. This Big Other is
white, in that whiteness is its master signifier and therefore all identities are white under colonialism. Everyone is
white in the colonial symbolic including blacks; it is just that they are less white than whites to the point of not
being at all Fanon says again and again that the black man desires to be white but, when he looks at himself
through the eyes he has adopted, the eyes that are his what he (qua white eyes) sees is something that
doesnt exist inequality, no non-existence (Fanon 1968, 98, original emphasis). He subsists at the level of nonbeing (131) just as the white, when it sees the black, sees an other that is, as Fanon says absolutely not self, so

This is the depth of the fissure in the black

colonial subject position, caught between two impossibles: whiteness, which he desires
but which is barred to him, and blackness, which is non-existence. Colonialism,
does the black see himself as absolutely not self (114).

anxiety and emancipation. Thus the self-same/other distinction is necessary for the possibility of identity itself.
There always has to exist an outside, which is also inside, to the extent it is designated as the impossibility from
which the possibility of the existence of the subject derives its rule (Badiou 2009, 220). But although the excluded
place which isnt excluded insofar as it is necessary for the very possibility of inclusion and identity may be
universal (may be considered ontological), its content (what fills it) as well as the mode of this filling and its
reproduction are contingent. In other words, the meaning of the signifier of exclusion is not determined once and
for all: the place of the place of exclusion, of death is itself over-determined, i.e. the very framework for deciding
the other and the same, exclusion and inclusion, is nowhere engraved in ontological stone but is political and never

the
modes of the othering of otherness are nowhere decided in advance (as a certain
ontological fatalism might have it) (see Wilderson 2008). The social does not have to be divided into
white and black, and the meaning of these signifiers is never necessary because they are signifiers. To be
sure, colonialism institutes an ontological division , in that whites exist in a way barred to blacks
who are not. But this ontological relation is really on the side of the ontic that is, of all
contingently constructed identities, rather than the ontology of the social which
refers to the ultimate unfixity, the indeterminacy or lack of the social. In this sense, then, the white
terminally settled. Put differently, the curvature of intersubjective space (Critchley 2007, 61) and thus,
specific

man doesnt exist, the black man doesnt exist (Fanon 1968, 165); and neither does the colonial symbolic itself,
including its most intimate structuring relations

division is constitutive of the social, not the

colonial division. Whiteness may well be very deeply sediment in modernity itself, but respect for the
ontological difference (see Heidegger 1962, 26; Watts 2011, 279) shows up its ontological status as ontic. It
may be so deeply sedimented that it becomes difficult even to identify the very possibility of the
separation of whiteness from the very possibility of order, but from this it does not follow that the
void of black being functions as the ultimate substance, the transcendental
signified on which all possible forms of sociality are said to rest . What gets lost here, then, is
the specificity of colonialism, of its constitutive axis, its ontological differential.

Wilderson constructs an ungendered black subject which fails to

accurately describe violence against black flesh and ignores the female
black body
Hodges 2012 Asia Hodges University of California Irvine, African American

Studies, Mamas Baby & the Black Gender Problematic

http://www.academia.edu/2027925/Mamas_Baby_and_the_Black_Gender_Problemati
c
Asia Nichole Hodges Undergraduate Critical Theory Conference 2012 Mentor:
Tamara Beauchamp Mamas Baby & the Black Gender Problematic For me, this
paper represents an opportunity to bring focus to the ungendered black subject of
afropessimist thought, a concept I was first introduced to in winter quarter of 2011,
which was the most theoretically rich coursework I have ever undertaken. In
retrospect, the work of Frank Wilderson, III also appeared at a very critical moment
in my development, both as a thinker and as a black woman engaged in organizing
around issues affecting the black community on campus as well as back home.
Afropessimist thought resonated deeply because it spoke to the terrifying truths of
antiblack racism, black structural positionality and black life, corroborating my own
experience but more importantly providing the language and a framework through
which to approach a more thorough explanation of this experience theoretically.
Further, when I use the term black I mean it in the sense closest to the truth of
the paradigm of afropessimist thought as described by Wilderson in Red, White &
Black: Cinema & the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. It is my intent to critique
Wildersons argument for an ungendered black subject using the work of black
feminist scholar, Hortense Spillers, and explore the categories she protects in her
work. She is indispensible here not only because she was an impetus for Wildersons
project, but also because it was her thought that mothered my own. In conversation
with the seminal article of Hortense Spillers, Mamas Baby, Papas Maybe: An
American Grammar Book, Wilderson explains that, for him, antiblackness functions
as a prohibition on gender, thus the black subject is inherently genderless. He
writes, Gratuitous violence relegates the Slave to the taxonomy, the list of things.
That is, it reduces the Slave to an object. Motherhood, fatherhood, and gender
differentiations can only be sustained in the taxonomy of subjects.1 While this
framework has helped me to understand of the structuring properties of violence,
and grasp its role in subject formation more generally, this explanation features an
ungendered black subject and cannot be extended to the truth of my life as a black
and as a female. This is not to say that afropessimism does not hold the potential to
speak to the effect of antiblackness on gender. To the contrary, it was Spillers who
first argued that such work was fruitful, writing that in undressing these conflations
of meaning, as they appear under the rule of dominance we would gain the
potential for gender differentiation as it might express itself along a range of stress
points, including human biology in its intersection with the project of culture.2 Both
Wilderson and Spillers take the dereliction of the black from civil society as their
point of departure, but in many ways, Spillers has offered us a great deal more than
we know what to do with on Wilderson, III, Frank B., Red, White & Black: Cinema and
the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010, 136. 2
Spillers, Hortense. "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe."Diacritics. (1987): 66. Print. 1
matters of gender and antiblackness. In Mamas Baby, Papas Maybe she theorizes
that there is a profundity to the particularities of the position of the female black
that is exemplified through regimes of naming. In the spirit of black feminism,
though its ensemble of questions cannot help me here, I must occasion an
explanation of black positionality that accounts for the manner of existential
negation and the modes of violence which position me, moving beyond the
concerns with black patriarchy. Theoretically, antiblackness does not only lend itself
to an argument against a gendered understanding of my condition, it also offers an

opportunity for a more nuanced understanding of gender itself. This begs the
question, what does a genderless black subject help us to understand that a more
complicated rendering [or gendering] of the black subject would obscure? In my
view, black political thought lags here, unable to describe its condition without
relegating the particularities of the female black to the abyss. Moreover, it seems
the black female labors in service of civil society in ways we have yet to fully
understand. Spillers supports an argument for the necessity of this work in building
a more robust theoretical foundation for black political thought, and afropessimism
could be our point of departure. For Wilderson, there is a line of recognition and
incorporation. Above it are human beings, civil society made up of white men and
women, and below it is the black in absolute dereliction, a concept he draws from
Frantz Fanon writings on the black condition. I mean to suggest that the distinction
were looking for under the line of recognition and incorporation is not man and
woman, which Wilderson would reject, but that is not to say there is no distinction
to be made whatsoever. It seems we may too hastily disregard the possibility for
distinction for three reasons, described loosely as outlined by Spillers: 1) there was
no distinction made between male and female slaves on the ships, 2) men and
women performed the same hard, physical labor and lastly, 3) gender is a category
requiring the symbolic integrity from which the black is barred. I am unable to go
into each in detail here, but the validity of these points of contention is not what is
in question for Spillers. The distinctions made on ships or on fields are not the only
sites we should scourer for insight into the black gender problematic, and evidence
that captives are not regarded as men and women, like their captors, is
elucidating but not explanatory. In Mamas Baby, Papas Maybe, Spillers uses
naming as a point of entry into black gender problematic. She revisits Daniel Patrick
Moynihans report on the state of the black community in America during the late
1960s, and meditates on the significance of black women emerging as the locus of
black pathology. She writes that for Moynihan, the Negro Family has no Father to
speak ofhis Name, his Symbolic function mark the impressive missing agencies in
the essential life of the black community and it is, surprisingly, the fault of the
Daughter, or the female line. Thus, it is the displacing [of] the Name and the Law
of the father to the territory of the Mother and Daughter [that] becomes an aspect
of the African-American females misnaming.3 The black is without the gendered
symbolic integrity that the subjects of civil society enjoy; the black performs to both
genders, as well as anything in between and beyond, and is not granted the
protections of motherhood or the entitlements of fatherhood for example. Moynihan
observes the behavior of the black family and concludes that it is a manifestation of
the backwardness of blackness generally, and the pathology of black women in
particular. But a structural analysis would include a discussion of historical context,
relations to power and positionality, with an understanding of the black as
positioned through the violence of captivity. Moreover, the emergence of the female
black marks the divergence between chattel slavery and racial slavery. Peter Wood,
professor of history at Duke University, explains that partus sequitir ventrem, that
which is brought forth follows the womb, is a legal doctrine which mandates that
the child follows the status of the mother, or rather in the case of the female black,
her child is doomed to captivity. Woods notes that there was a shift from
indentured servitude to lifelong slavery to heredity slavery, where not only am I
enslaved but my children as well and emphasizes that it was indeed a remarkable
shift4. However, the problem is not that we do not know this history, but rather we
have not dealt with it theoretically, and even in the most likely 3 4 Ibid, 66. of

discourses, particularity on the basis of sex is not explored. In chapter 11 of Red,

White and Black, Wilderson takes up the issue of gender and sex under captivity,
but largely leaves the work Spillers does in Mamas Baby, Papas Maybe untouched.
Earlier in the chapter, she is employed as support for Wildersons claim that the
position of white women and black females are made distinct as a direct
consequence of captivity. However, when Wilderson addresses blackness and
gender, specifically gender ontology and the reification of gender, Spillers absence
is haunting. Moreover, the effect of captivity on gender is not simply a reversal of
power between the categories of man and woman as suggested by Moynihan,
but rather that these categories are in fact eviscerated entirely where the black is
concerned. Though the black does not hold the symbolic integrity for gender
normativity, as argued by both Wilderson and Spillers, the categories of male and
female are still apt here; man and woman representing the body and the latter,
eviscerated categories, representing Spillers notion of the flesh. She writes: Before
there is the body there is the flesh, that zero degree of social conceptualization
that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of
iconography. Even though the European hegemonies stole bodiessome of them
female we regard this human and social irreparability as high crimes against the
flesh, as a person of African females and African males registered the wounding. 5
Here, Spillers shows that the violence of captivity registers on multiple levels, and of
course that the violence can be understood from multiple registers, however the
flesh that registers the wounding is sexed, the violence at times sexualized. So how,
then, does the female black function within the structure, positioned through
regimes of sexualized violence? My project is to seek answers to the questions
developed here by acquiescing to the chasms in our understanding. I do not aim to
fill the chasm here, but only to make the conceptual leap and let the matter remain
unresolved so that we might titter on the edge and engage further with the black
gender problematic. To conclude, the closing thoughts of Spillers in Mamas Baby,
Papas Maybe, The female breaks in upon the imagination with a forcefulness that
marks both a denial and an illegitimacy In this play of paradox, only the female
stands in the flesh, both mother and mother-dispossessed. This problematizing of
gender places her, in my view, out of the traditional symbolics of female gender,
and it is our task to make a place for this different social subject. 5 Spillers, 67.
Their denial of the different experiences faced by black women reinscribes
the hierarchal gender orderings which civil society demands.

Weheliye 2014
Habeas Viscus, Alexander G. Weheliye, 2014, Duke University Press, Pg. 4041
While Wynters resistance to the universalization of gendered categories
associated with bourgeois whiteness in certain strands of feminism, which I
discussed in chapter I, is understandable, her genealogy of modernity,
which sees a mutational shift from the primacy of the anatomical
model of sexual difference as the referential model of mimetic
ordering, to that of the physiognomic model of racial/cultural
difference in the Renaissance, remains less convincing, because it leads to
the repudiation of gender analytics as such. This aspect of Wynters thinking
fails to persuade in the way the other elements of her global analytics of the
human do, since it assumes that beginning with the colonization of

the Americas, race (physiognomy) dislodges gender/sex (anatomy)

as the systematizing principle according to which the Homo sapiens
species is categorized into full humans, not-quite-humans, and
nonhumans. The shift Wynter diagnoses, though surely present in the
history of modernity, cannot be encompassed by the distinction
between physiognomy and anatomy, even if not construed as either
categorical or complete, because neither anatomy nor sexual difference
recede like silhouettes sketched in the soil at the shores that
delimit the Drexciyan waters of the Middle Passage. Instead, sexual
difference remains an intoxicating sociogenically instituted mode of
mimetic structuring in modernity, though always tied to specific
variants of (un)gendering. Wynters dismissal of gender/sex as
forceful indicators of the hierarchical ordering of our species thus
seems to discard sexual difference with the proverbial bathwater;
and it also largely leaves intact the morphological dimorphism upon
which the modern west constructs gendered stratification.
The division between white and black is not ontologicalits contingent
Peter Hudson 13, Writer at the Political Studies Department, University of the
Witwatersrand, The state and the colonial unconscious, Social Dynamics: A journal
of African studies, 7/12/13,
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/02533952.2013.802867
Thus the self-same/other distinction is necessary for the possibility of identity itself .
There always has to exist an outside, which is also inside, to the extent it is designated as
the impossibility from which the possibility of the existence of the subject derives
its rule (Badiou 2009, 220). But although the excluded place which isnt excluded insofar as
it is necessary for the very possibility of inclusion and identity may be universal (may
be considered ontological), its content (what fills it) as well as the mode of this filling and its
reproduction are contingent. In other words, the meaning of the signifier of exclusion
is not determined once and for all: the place of the place of exclusion, of death is
itself over-determined, i.e. the very framework for deciding the other and the
same, exclusion and inclusion, is nowhere engraved in ontological stone but is
political and never terminally settled. Put differently, the curvature of intersubjective
space (Critchley 2007, 61) and thus, the specific modes of the othering of otherness
are nowhere decided in advance a certain ontological fatalism might have it. The
social does not have to be divided into white and black, and the meaning of these
signifiers is never necessary because they are signifiers. To be sure, colonialism institutes an
ontological division, in that whites exist in a way barred to blacks who are not. But
this ontological relation is really on the side of the ontic that is, of all contingently
constructed identities, rather than the ontology of the social which refers to the
ultimate unfixity, the indeterminacy or lack of the social. In this sense, then, the white man doesnt exist, the
black man doesnt exist (Fanon 1968, 165); and neither does the colonial symbolic itself, including its most
intimate structuring relations division is constitutive of the social, not the colonial
division.

AT- FLUIDITY LINK

Not all fluidity is necessarily whiteness; fluid mobility is inevitable in some
contexts for many people, and it can be used to conceal whiteness or to
weaponize privilege against it: context determines what. In short, they
need to win that other links outweigh the transformative potential of our
method for them to win that our 1ac is a fluid method that reinscribes
whiteness
Beasley 10 [Chris, The Elephant in the Room: Heterosexuality in Critical
Gender/Sexuality Studies, NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research,
Volume 18, Issue 3, 2010]
Rather than conceiving heterosexuality as simply to be conflated with the
heteronormative, as a closed system, it is useful to consider the Deleuzian account of
becomingthe notion of an open-ended system (Deleuze & Guattari 1980/1987: 612; see also Chia
1996: 3435). Such a conception does not necessarily ignore the constraining
normalization of heterosexuality in which corporeal identities and practices are
situated as dualistic forms of inherent immoveable being, but nevertheless refuses to
accept that this is all there is. The anti-juridical thought with which Deleuze is associated
enables attention to the transgressive micro-political which arises out of a disavowal of set binary
positions as the only actuality. Instead such an approach proposes an incessant dynamic
mobility whichthough blocked and containedremains incompletely closed, unfinished and
unpredictable (Deleuze & Parnet 1987: 133; Eveline 2005: 644). If heterosexual inter-corporeality is
understood in this Deleuzian sense of a terrain of becoming, rather than a matter of primordial being, it is also
possible to claim for it an expansive productivity that cannot be reduced to the heteronormative. It can be
countenanced as capable of deterritorialization, of breaks and spaces, as well as micro-practices which move
away from set binary meanings/identities towards more dynamic, diffused, and heterogeneous possibilities

Deterritorialization does not inevitably equate to the

dissolution of hetero/homo and gender binaries (though this might indeed be a direction) and thus does not
propose heterosexuality's productivity as a synonym for erasure of its specificity. Rather such an approach
enables heterosexuality to be reconceived as a field of potential transgression. The
intention of such a rethinking is bring to the fore a positive optimistic micropolitics and destabilize socio-political determinism. Nevertheless, to my mind this is not
sufficient to a consideration of transgression in relation to the mainstream, to heterosexuality. Deleuze, along
with Foucault and queer theorists like Bersani, turns our attention to a positive fluidity, mobility,
and multiplicity. However, this unremitting attention to a propulsive social creativity, to flows of becoming
which have infinite possibilities (Jenkins 2009: xi, emphasis added) may involve a privileged
disembodiment side-stepping racialized/ethnic/cultural location in bodily and geographic terms (Beasley
2005: 168174). The Deleuzian emphasis on the open-ended quality of sociality, on becoming
(Deleuze & Guattari 1972/2004).

rather than being, offers a significant step forward for analyses of heterosexuality and heterosex, in so far as they
have become encased in negative characterization as exemplary normalization. Nevertheless, such an open-ended
emphasis can amount to a strategy not simply of de-essentializing but of dematerialization, which places in the
shadows asymmetric constraints in existing social relations but also the constraints of visceral physicality and
embodied interconnection. Sexuality and heterosex demand an account of pleasure and transgression which
tenaciously holds on to the sensuous fleshliness of sociality,

to both the creativity and the limits of

social flesh (Beasley & Bacchi 2007). Secondly, fluidity/multiplicity in sexual practices is not
necessarily transgressive. Endless fluidity/multiplicity perhaps can be deemed transgressive in
relation to minority sexualities, but in the sphere of the heterosexual mainstream such
productivity might after all largely maintain and extend the hegemony of the
heteronormative. For heterosexual transgression to have any substantive meaning at all,
an advocacy of fluidity must be moderated by a stance which challenges the
heteronormative (Beasley forthcoming). However, despite some caveats, what is useful about the
work of writers like Deleuze is that heterosexuality can no longer be cast in such

approaches as an immoveable elephant from which nothing pleasurable or positive can be gained
and which is therefore best ignored by critical commentators. The refusal to inculcate socio-political
determinism enables a rejection of simplistic accounts of sexual modes, a rejection
of notions that queer/minority sexualities are somehow politically pure and
synonymous with transgression or that heterosexuality is unremittingly oppressive
and transgressive heterosexuality an oxymoron. In destabilizing reductive assumptions about
the political possibilities of sexualities we can then consider the potential myriad of fissures
in the socially normative and hence develop evidence to question both its seeming strangle-hold and
naturalized status. All the same there remain significant uncertainties about what counts as transgressive
and socially subversive, and what counts when heterosexuality is the site. What is the difference between the
merely unusual and the transgressive in this instance? This is a problem for discussions about social life and about

transgression
cannot be understood as only available at the social margins. Instead, transgression
may be seen as intrinsic within dominant practices like heterosexuality (rather than
sexualities per se but is particularly an issue when analysing heterosexuality. I would assert that

necessarily always external to them). But what then might transgression in the realm of the dominant look like
(Beasley 2011 forthcoming); how might a transgressive heterosexuality be conceptualized? It would seem that

considering the question of a pleasurable transgressive heterosexuality, and what it might

involve, complicates our understandings of self and social change and thus opens up
hopeful, if not infinite, possibilities.

ROOT CAUSE
White cis male oppression is the root cause of racial oppression
Katie, Sept 22 2005 (Student in English and French at Minnesota,
http://macthirdwave.blogspot.com/2005/09/lesbianism-act-of-resistance.html,
Lesbianism: an Act of Resistance)
Lesbianism: an Act of Resistance

Before I summarize my chapter from This Bridge Called My Back, here are some key concepts and terms:
Predatory heterosexuality: the system by which patriarchal institutions dominate women through
coerced heterosexuality based on heteronormativity. Heteronormativity: the concept that social
institutions reinforce the idea that the traditional gender roles based on the heterosexual relationship
are the only natural ways for people to exist within both their gender and sex. Slave-master
relationship: this describes the relationship between black people and white people, respectively,
based on the legacy of slavery in the United States; also related to the relationship between women
and men. In her essay Lesbianism: an Act of Resistance, poet and author Cheryl Clarke spends a lot of time

similarities between womens oppression and the oppression of African

Americans in the United States at the hands of the white capitalist male.
Drawing parallels between the experiences of lesbians and the experiences of many
black people, and in agreement with Elizabeth Cady Stantons analysis, Clarke concludes that racism
and sexism have been produced by the same animal : the white Saxon man
(131). More specifically, in terms of womens oppression, Clarke claims that men use the institution of
heterosexuality to control women. Through coerced heterosexuality, and by
claiming that sex between a man and a woman is the only natural sexual and
romantic relationship, male-supremacist institutions insure their own perpetuity and
control over [women] (130). Furthermore, she argues, the white man learned how to relate
to black people based on his existing relationship to women under the system of
patriarchal heterosexual monogamy, viewing them both as property, as a sexual
commodity, as a servant, as a source of free or cheap labor, and as an innately inferior being (131).
Despite this similar oppression, however, Clarke points out the inability of many black men to
identify sexism as inextricable from racism and from the black womans oppression ,
and that predatory heterosexuality is the root of what Clarke calls the slave-master
relationship that has always existed between white and black people. Because of the misogyny
and blatant heterosexual superiority complex among these black men, the black
lesbian is not only socially marginalized on the basis of her skin, but also
alienated from the black political community by the homophobic sexism of her
black male peers. Therefore, Clarke believes strongly in the power lesbians hold in
undermining the oppression of all women , claiming that lesbian-feminism has the
capacity of reversing and transformingpredatory
heterosexuality ////////////////(134). With this conviction, Clarke turns her attention to the divide
articulating the

between black and white feminists and to the taboo surrounding interracial lesbian relationships. Criticizing her
feminist peers for adamantly opposing all white feminists and questioning black lesbians commitment to the

Clarke calls on her peers to

accept or reject allies on the basis of politics notof skin color (135). Furthermore, since
black women and white women enter relationships with a history of competitive
oppression, lesbian-feminists who defy the taboo of interracial homosexual relationships begin the
process of reframing the historical context of their interaction, of transform[ing]
the history of relationships between black women and white women (136). Clarke
concludes that the ultimate resistance for both black and white lesbians is to
stop fighting, and start loving each other as lovers and allies in the fight against
racist heteronormative oppression.
liberation of black women if they happen to sleep with a white woman,