Tuesday 29 August 2017

How To Make Your Vote Meaningful In A Meaningless Postal Survey

On the weekend I was honored to witness two dear friends marry each other; to see them turn to each other and say "I do". Of course they’ve been saying "I do" to each other for a long time now, in a myriad ways - but this time they did it in front of friends and family and a marriage celebrant, and they signed a piece of paper, and their "I do"s made something happen. It made them husband and wife.

In speech acts theory, marriage vows are a perfect example of a performative utterance, which is when you say something that doesn’t just describe the world, but changes it as well.

The Australian government is holding a plebiscite postal survey about marriage equality, and it’s dumb and offensive and the result of the plebiscite  postal survey isn’t legally binding. Moreover, the Paradox of Voting means that you are very, very, very unlikely to cast the vote that will change the result from 'no' to 'yes', or 'yes' to 'no' - it essentially makes no mathematical difference if you vote or not. So, in a sense, neither the plebisicite postal survey in general nor your vote in particular are performative utterances. They are not designed to change the world. Should you boycott the plebiscite postal survey?

No.

Also:

No.


[*edit: thank you to a friend who pointed out that it isn't even a plebiscite, it's a postal survey, which makes it even more ridiculous.]

To the people who are disgusted by the idea of voting for marriage equality: I take your point, it is disgusting, but - and I will never stop saying this - if this is the most disgusting, humiliating, or undignified thing that you have faced for LGBTQI rights, then you’re doing okay, honey.

But also consider - performative utterances are performative under a certain set of conditions. They’re not just words - they’re words in context. Marriage vows change the world when they’re uttered in the presence of a celebrant, accompanied by signatures. Likewise, a ‘yes’ vote can be made to be performative by changing the conditions of it.

In fact it’s really, really easy to make your ‘Yes’ vote performative: you tell people that you’re going to vote Yes.

(You don’t even have to actually vote to do this, but after you've told people that you'll vote, you may as well do it - it’ll take all of a cumulative two minutes to make an honest person of yourself.) 

One private vote may be pointless, but one public expression of ‘Yes’ has the power to make something happen.

We haven’t even started voting in this plebiscite postal survey yet and I can’t stop crying over how many groups on my Facebook feed - groups that ostensibly have nothing to do with LGBTQI rights, like the WA Youth Jazz Orchestra and the UWA Postgraduates Student Association - have shared 'how to enrol' information to their followers and said that they will be voting 'Yes' to marriage equality. Acquaintances put banners and frames on their profile pics to say the same. In real life, the City of Vincent recently declared its commitment to marriage equality, and will raise a rainbow flag outside its admin building.

Thing is, it hasn’t always been like this.

In the early 2000s - not even 15 years ago, really - I never heard any of my friends or classmates talking about gay stuff (although looking back, I’m pretty sure some of them were a lot gayer than I gave them credit for). If support for LGBTQI rights had been more obviously visible back then, we would all have saved ourselves a lot of trouble. I also grew up bisexual in a church that I was pretty sure couldn’t accept me.  Now, I’m still bisexual, and I’m still a Christian, and I go to a church with people whose support I don’t even have to ask for because they're just vocal about it.

You guys. This is not a small deal. Christians are supposed to be the ones against marriage equality and yet Australian Christians for Marriage Equality have just declared their campaign for Christians who will be voting Yes. We didn’t have this kind of visibility for queer little church kids fifteen years ago; we didn’t know who to ask if we would still be okay.

When you start the long, sometimes lifelong process of coming out, the first person who accepts you becomes a tiny island of security in an ocean of confusion and aloneness. If you're lucky, you think, you might find one other person who is okay with you, and you can swim between islands. The more people who accept you, the more islands you have, until one day you realise some of your islands have joined up and formed whole peninsulas, countries, continents of solid land and you don't have to swim any more. Declaring that you will be voting Yes makes you another safe place to tread.

There are lots and lots of ways you can support LGBTQI people generally; and lots of ways you can support marriage equality specifically. This isn't the final word on equality, not by a long shot, but this is a moment we're leaning in to, and we promise, if you cast this tiny, meaningless vote, we will hold it to your credit as meaningful. Your private vote is not performative, it’s not pivotal, but when you vote for marriage equality and then declare your intention to vote for marriage equality (how easy is that!), you change the world for someone you know.

Thursday 24 August 2017

Observations About Kayaking That Are Also Metaphors For Life, Like, Just If You Think About It

In an effort to get more exercise, avoid thinking about the inevitable heat death of the universe, and Try Something New, I started kayaking lessons.

Kayaking is dumb. It’s the dumbest thing you can do on the water in an oversized plastic coffin with a plastic stick. I love it. I’m so bad at it, you guys. Here are some observations about kayaking that are also metaphors for life, like, just if you think about it.

To paddle your kayak in a straight line you need to draw your paddle as close to the kayak as possible. This is a lot harder than drawing your paddle away from the kayak, which will send you spinning in a circle, so you need to practice it.

There are lots of reasons why you can’t draw your paddle close to your kayak - the kayak is too wide, the water is too choppy, the drag of everyone else’s kayaks is putting you off. When you can paddle in a straight line, all those things suddenly stop making a difference. Weird.

If you flip your kayak and fall out, you have to leave your kayak upside down, swim with it back to shore, and start again. If you try to flip your kayak back over in the middle of the river, it will inevitably fill up with water and sink to the bottom.

If you’re kayaking on your own, you need to think about the shoreline and how you’re going to get your kayak out of the water if you flip. Make it easier for yourself. Don’t kayak next to a wall.

You cannot get more wet than when you deliberately flip your own kayak, fully clothed; after that, getting rained on is like being towel-dried with tiny drops of water.

It’s harder to flip a kayak if you are physically light.

The best way to get warm at the end of your lesson when it’s ten degrees and raining is to help everyone else drag their kayaks up the beach and load them onto the trailer.

Kayaking is really tiring if you have noodle arms, but then you get to see everything - your university, your city, your life - from awholenother perspective and it’s worth it. (You guys. I got to go inside the blue boat house. Technically the blue boat house is private property and I will deny everything.)



Sucking at kayaking with a bunch of strangers who also suck at kayaking is so much fun.

You cannot think about keeping your kayak in a straight line and the inevitable heat death of the universe at the same time.

Wednesday 16 August 2017

Everyday Things

Okay.

I’ve been going back and forth about what to write on this blog, like do I want to write something about Charlottesville, about the threat of nuclear war, about asylum seekers in detention centres, about this plebiscite for marriage equality, do I not want to write about these things, should I even write about these things or should I shut up and not presume to have anything new or interesting to say because others have voices that need to be heard more and because really, we don’t need any more White People Having New Feelings About Things, and ultimately I think yes, I should shut up and not presume to have anything new or interesting to say about these things - except to say two things:

One - and this does need to be said because staying silent and "not taking sides" is taking a side, although I hope you know me well enough to know which side I am on - but I’ll say it again for the record:
I am against white supremacy.
I am against nuclear war.
We need to bring asylum seekers out of offshore detention and into Australia and begin to do the work of admitting our mistakes, asking for forgiveness, and making repairs.
The marriage equality plebiscite is dumb and offensive, but kudos to the government for motivating so many people to update their electoral details, this will come in handy when we vote them out. Democracy!

Two - if you’re a grad student and you’re taking stock of how much work you’ve done in the last few days/weeks/months and you’re feeling kinda shitty about that, remember that trying to understand and respond to the world is also a kind of work, so don’t beat yourself up about it, you’re being an adult with normal emotional responses to awful situations and that takes effort too.

So those are the things I wanted to say, and here are some things I’ve been reading and pondering specifically in relation to white supremacy which may or may not be helpful to you. Ironically and unfortunately they are mostly from white writers, because those are the people I still tend to read the most, but I want to correct this.

What to do about Charlottesville
Here is a list of organisations in Charlottesville that you can donate to if you’ve got a spare couple of bucks. You can’t change people’s actions but sometimes you can meddle with the consequences of their actions, and it’s vaguely comforting to think that one of the consequences of white supremacy is more financial support for organisations that white supremacists hate.

White People: 0-60 for Charlottesville
This is about white people having new feelings about things that POC have been having feelings about for a long time, and what white people can do about those feelings.

Brene Brown did a facebook live video last night about Charlottesville from her perspective as a researcher on shame and fear, and she has a lot of interesting things to say about pain, owning our history, and the difference between shaming people and holding them to accountability. (For example, is it okay to find and publish the names of white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville, even if they lose their friends and families and jobs? Yes. That's accountability.)

IndigenousX
We don’t get to shake our heads at the US and say "we're not like that" or "that'll never happen to us". Australia has its own white colonial past and present that we need to reckon with, which includes giving more space to the voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. IndigenousX is a really cool organisation that amplifies those voices.

Rave Sashayed is one of my favourite writers and she very frequently has something useful to say about Feeling Things, I found this post particularly helpful:

" [...] a really good thing and a thing i highly recommend in times of crisis is to get off the internet for a while. your brain thinks that only YOUR PERSONAL rapt, terrified attention will solve the problems that beset us as a world and a country, but god bless it, it is wrong […] i don’t know what it’s like where you are, but it’s beautiful outside in DC today. go breathe in that good air, if you can. get strength from that good sunlight. think of yourself like a tree. make your roots strong."

***

It’s weird when you drag your personal, rapt, terrified attention away from the news and people are doing other, everyday things - shopping for groceries, tweeting about their research, hanging out with their pets, getting married; so I’m going to try and get back into writing about the regular, everyday things that makes up being a linguistics grad student. This is the stuff of our lives, too, and I guess this is what we’re fighting for, to be able to live them as we see fit.