Ri J. Turner

Accountability and White Anti-racist Organizing: Stories from Our Work

annette — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Edited by Margery Freeman, Lila Cabbil, Kimberley Richards, Jeff Hitchcock, Bonnie Berman Cushing

Inc., Dostie, Crandall, & Douglass Books

“Actively listen... You cannot help if you do not hear... Actively listen...” These words swirl across the cover of Accountability and White Anti-racist Organizing: Stories from Our Work. The book is a collection of eleven articles by white anti-racist activists reflecting on their experiences with accountability. Almost all of the contributors trace their activist roots back to Undoing Racism™ trainings from the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB), and in fact the book opens with a foreword by Ronald Chisom, co-founder and executive director of PISAB. Contributors also have ties to other prominent white anti-racist organizations, including the Challenging White Supremacy Workshop (CWS) and the White Privilege Conference.

What is accountability? In the book's introduction, the editors write, “Accountability in the traditional sense implies an underlying power that can administer sanctions, but if there are no sanctions, if one is in the power position, why be accountable, and who can hold you to it? So accountability as we view it in regard to white anti-racist organizing is about a willingness to share power.”

Some of the book's contributors focus on philosophies or systems of accountability. For example, Shelly Tochluk and Cameron Levin, of AWARE-LA (Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere – Los Angeles) and RJA (Racial Justice Alliance) describe the model for accountability they have developed, entitled Transformative Alliance Building. They emphasize “two-sided accountability” (between white people and people of color) in contrast to “one-sided” models that emphasize white accountability to people of color without discussing the necessity for reciprocity. One-sided accountability, they claim, leaves white activists mired in white guilt, which causes them to believe that they are incapable of taking full responsibility for tasks they should shoulder (such as organizing other white people against racism). This in turn prolongs the burden of over-dependence on activists of color.

Other articles focus on “applied accountability.” Larry Yates writes about his long tenure with the National Low-Income Housing Coalition/Low Income Housing Information Service (LIHIS). Thanks initially to the conditions of receiving grant money from the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, a majority of LIHIS Board members were people directly impacted by the issue at hand: current or former residents of public or assisted housing. “These funder requirements,” writes Yates, “gave the LIHIS Board a clear framework of accountability.” He describes how this, along with other aspects of the organization's institutionalized commitment to tenant self-determination, helped LIHIS develop a national grassroots base that was able to act effectively on both local and national levels to change HUD (Department of Housing and Urban development) policy.

I appreciate this collection especially for its focus on telling “Stories from Our Work.” This is not a book about pedagogy or identity development, about “how to get more white people to take on an anti-racist outlook.” This is a book about action, about implementing an anti-racist outlook in a sustained way in specific contexts. Additionally, it is not a book about individual white heroes or heroines. It is a book about movement-building, about creating and sustaining networks of people that can support each other in doing long-term coordinated work. These are stories that I want and need to hear as a young white anti-racist activist.

Additionally, it makes sense for a book about white anti-racist activism to focus on the concept of accountability. As each contributor describes in his/her own way, white privilege grants disproportionate access to systems, institutions, and resources. The task of white anti-racist activism is not to deny the truth of that access in order to seek individual absolution. Rather, the task must be to leverage that access strategically (or to put it more bluntly, to work within the system in one way or another) to bring about radical change. The key challenge, as this book hashes out in eleven different contexts, is to do that work without losing the focus on ending racism—in other words, to be accountable to people of color, and to each other as well.

Written by: Ri J. Turner, March 14th 2011

Transnational Social Work Practice

annette — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Edited by Rich Furman, Nalini Junko Negi

Columbia University Press

Transnational Social Work Practice is definitely not a book intended for a popular audience. That it is a textbook was clear to me before I even laid eyes on the book, when I noted that the list price on Amazon.com—for this slim 241-page volume—was $50. The articles, too, are written with the assumption that readers are familiar with a number of complex social work and development concepts, such as sustainability, cultural competence, and professional accreditation, among others. Nevertheless, I read the anthology as a lay person, and I found it an engaging, accessible read that opened my mind to new questions about global development and social change.

The book is divided loosely into two sections. It begins with an introduction to the concept of transnationality—the state of individuals and communities who are living life with a sustained investment in two or more nations (as contrasted with an “older” immigration pattern of gradually transferring one's presence and investment out of one country and into another).

Following this introduction is a collection of four articles (entitled “The Context of Transmigration”) that further illuminate issues that affect transnational populations, including environmental change and degradation, economic networks that cross national borders (including networks of remittance), and globalization. The second section of the book (“Services to Transmigrants”) focuses on the application of social work practice to transnational populations. The nine articles in this section explore the role of social workers in responding to processes including cross-border human trafficking, refugee resettlement, and violence against migrant workers. One article, “Using Internet Technology for Transnational Social Work Practice and Education,” reflects upon the growing availability of translation software, useful both for bridging client/provider language gaps and for facilitating resource-sharing among an increasingly international professional community. Another article, “Incorporating Transnational Social Work into the Curriculum,” considers the need to prepare social work students for an increasingly international and transnational field—for example, by developing a service-learning class designed to be held at the Texas-Mexico border, as the article's authors did.

As a lay reader, one of my favorite aspects of the book was the discussion of the macro, mezzo, and micro levels at which social work practice can function. Cynthia A. Hunter, Susannah Lepley, and Samuel Nickels lay out this distinction most clearly in the last article in the book, “New Practice Frontiers: Current and Future Social Work with Transmigrants.” Micro practice refers to the one-on-one work between provider and client, which can be focused on individual coping and meaning-making, or on case management (connecting clients with welfare services for which they are eligible). Macro practice refers to advocacy and policy-making—changing institutions and systems at national and international levels.

What Hunter, Lepley, and Nickels consider mezzo-level social work (and authors Brij Mohan and Julia E. Clark describe as macro-level social work in their article “Macro Social Work Practice with Transmigrants”) can be described as a sort of “back door” to political organizing, in which providers are able to connect clients with information about their situation, and with other clients in similar situations, in a way that empowers them to organize themselves to change their circumstances. I appreciated the authors' acknowledgment of the complexity of the power relations surrounding this practice, especially if the providers in question are outsiders who have, on one hand, little local understanding, and, on the other, access to resources that their clients do not have. I also appreciated the push to consider how outsider social workers can transfer that access to clients in strategic ways.

In the end, this is the major question that the book raised for me: Can international social work be solidarity work? If the global North must be engaged in the “development” of the global South, might it be possible for “providers” to take advantage of that “welfare infrastructure” to transfer information and resources to “clients” from developing countries in a way that empowers them to demand that development take place on their own terms?

Written by: Ri J. Turner, March 13th 2011

Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things

mandy — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Randy Frost, Gail Steketee

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

I was pleased as soon as I ran my fingers over the pleasantly matte dust jacket of Stuff. My pleasure only grew once I dove in: authors Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee smoothly meld case study and psychological analysis for an engaging read. Throughout their account, they also include a broad (though never deep) smattering of speculations about the anthropological, neurobiological, and political aspects of hoarding.

The case studies are fascinating and eclectic. The most extreme is a dire, almost sensationalist account of a cat-hoarding cult that sprung up around a psychiatrist in New York City in the 1970s, involving many of the psychiatrist's patients and hundreds of cats. A more pedestrian example is the story of a woman who got into the habit of ordering magazines in stacks of three, so that she could touch only the top and bottom copy, leaving the middle copy pristine.

The authors' analysis is insightful, accessible, and deeply resonant. Drawing on sources as diverse as the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and the television special Affluenza, Frost and Steketee muse about the nature of self-worth, meaning, and identity in a consumer age. They sensitively acknowledge the profound significance of hoarding to those who practice it—whether it is the woman who believes that she will lose her memory in the absence of physical reminders; the man with ideas for reusing even the most ragged, cast-off item; or the woman whose stacking behavior began as a way to wall off a room in which she was raped. One chapter at a time, the authors piece together a framework for understanding the beliefs and desires that underlie hoarding—difficulty with so-called “executive” functions such as planning and decision-making; an attempt to preserve memories and opportunities; and, perhaps, an advanced capacity for seeing meaning, beauty, detail, and potential in material objects.

Narratives such as Stuff walk a difficult line, acknowledging the very real havoc that psychopathology can wreak on human lives, without casting it as an extra-human phenomenon that renders its bearers worthless, incomprehensible, monstrous, or undeserving of autonomy. Throughout their book, Frost and Steketee try hard to emphasize the humanity of their subjects—so hard, in fact, that they wind up sounding like they are trying to convince themselves. The book radiates an uncomfortable combination of identification and disgust—for example, the authors joke that they notice their colleagues tidying their offices out of the fear that they too will be labeled “hoarders” by the experts.

As another example, consider the following description: “Some theorists have posited that people with hoarding tendencies form attachments to possessions instead of people.... Hoarders...are remote and suspicious. Irene, however, defied this categorization.... She had a quick wit and a well-developed sense of humor. It was easy to see why people liked her.” The authors continue, “It is no coincidence that most of the people described in this book are highly intelligent. Although hoarding is considered a mental disorder, it may stem from an extraordinary ability.” I appreciate the nuance—I would rather explore hoarders' heightened sensitivities than flippantly label them damaged goods. However, this “madness equals genius” move merely reinforces the idea that human lives are only valuable as long as they are “productive” or otherwise gratifying to an external observer. What if Irene had not been personable, or “articulate and insightful,” as she is later described? Would we then be justified if we failed to relate to her, or to see her life as worthwhile?

Like many human traits, hoarding can be extremely debilitating—at times even fatal. And, as the authors point out, perhaps it is also a form of artistry. However, it is essential to tell the story of both the disorder and the gift without sensationalism and without thank-God-it's-them-and-not-me relief. Frost and Steketee strive for this balance, but in the end it eludes them.

Written by: Ri J. Turner, March 8th 2011

You Have Given Me a Country

caitlin — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Neela Vaswani

Sarabande Books

At the beginning of You Have Given Me a Country, author Neela Vaswani writes, “What follows is real, and imagined.” Thus begins Vaswani's memoir, a dreamy collection of reflections on her family's multiracial, multinational history.

Ashok Vaswani, Neela's father, was born in Sindh (now a province of Pakistan) before the cataclysm of Partition. As a toddler, Ashok fled with his family to the new state of India, where his father found a job as a traveling railroad physician. Later, Ashok traveled to the US to practice medicine and to leave behind a tense postwar economy and a family that had fractured under the pressure of exile. “To my father, nationality was fickle, unreliable,” writes Neela. “My father said, 'Homeland is in the body,' and 'Land is in the blood.'”

Neela's mother, Sheila Vaswani (nee Kent), was born an Irish Catholic American to a family that could beat up and then forgive an uncle who had molested another relative, but that could never accept a gay cousin. Sheila remained a lifelong Catholic, sitting stone-faced at church with her mixed-race daughter, forevermore denied the privilege of communion for having married outside her faith. It was Sheila who castigated Neela's father's colleagues for calling him Frank: “It's not hard. Ashok. Rhymes with Coke.”

The book is told in a loosely chronological series of vignettes and family stories. On the whole, You Have Given Me a Country is told through Neela's eyes, but it is not Neela's story. Although we learn the journeys, prides, and sorrows of Ashok and Sheila, we catch only glimpses of Neela: a nosebleed here, a day in preschool there, and then, at the end, the preparations for her wedding, to a man whom we never really meet. What we do learn about Neela, though, is that she has consistently watched and loved each of her parents, seeing the complexity, the isolation, the miracle of their lives together, creating one tiny space where, as Neela writes, “difference was a way of life. A constant negotiation of respect, ignorance, new understanding... What was not accepted by society was real and lived by me and mine. Love, the great border crosser. No passport required.”

By deliberately framing her story as a “mixed-genre memoir” (which is to say a lived history, but one that refuses to claim perfect allegiance to fact), Vaswani makes a contribution to the contemporary debate about trauma, memory, and narrative. By refusing to promise truth, Vaswani protects her story against anyone, be it relative or critic, who would wish to discredit its accuracy. At the same time, she carves out space to tell as much truth as she wants while still protecting her family's privacy; readers are bound to remember that each story she tells could be a fabrication, after all. (It should be noted that Vaswani is not the first author to take this approach: Audre Lorde's “biomythography” Zami: A New Spelling of My Name comes to mind.)

Critics sometimes have a point when they complain about the accuracy or objectivity of memoirs. However, sometimes these complaints are merely cleverly—and perhaps unconsciously—disguised ruses to silence marginalized stories that are, at best, uncomfortable, and at worst, incriminating. By sidestepping the demand to portray herself as an objective witness, Vaswani shrewdly protects her own story against such attempts to discredit it. Simultaneously, she subtly makes the point that when it comes to narrative, validity and significance stem from something more complicated than mere literal truth.

Vaswani's prose is spare and vivid and her characters richly human. In this series of carefully chosen, effortlessly linked memories, she tells the histories, the romances, and the tragedies of her own family's dance with diaspora, exile, homeland, immigration, identity, and dignity.

Written by: Ri J. Turner, October 20th 2010

Anarchism and Its Aspirations

admin — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Cindy Milstein

AK Press, Institute for Anarchist Studies

Anarchism and Its Aspirations is a collection of several essays that together offer an introduction to modern anarchist thought and its applications. The title essay, which is the first and longest essay in the book, discusses anarchism’s historical and philosophical roots, as well as its fundamental tenets. The other three essays, “Anarchism’s Promise for Anticapitalist Resistance,” “Democracy is Direct,” and “Reclaim the Cities: From Protest to Popular Power,” attempt to tease out the relevance of anarchism in the contemporary context of state consolidation and the globalization of capital.

The book is geared toward two audiences: first, established anarchists who want to renew their visions for anarchism, and second, readers curious about anarchism who are familiar with the basics of progressive political theory, but unacquainted with anarchist thought in particular. As the author states explicitly, the book attempts to present a rosy view of anarchism–an emphasis on what it strives to be capable of–more than a detailed analysis of its past or present weaknesses or distortions. However, the author does touch on her opinions about the areas in which anarchism has room to grow–in particular, she discusses the importance of getting beyond “protests against” and placing more emphasis on building popular power.

I appreciated the book’s visionary tone, as well as the clear analysis of what anarchism uniquely has to offer to other progressive schools of thought. Among the many aspects of anarchism discussed in the essays, I found the focus on unabashed utopianism particularly compelling. In a world in which even the most progressive of activists often think in terms of strategic compromise, it is refreshing to remember that it is possible to dream bigger dreams–anarchist dreams of pluralism, direct democracy, organizing for mutual aid based on true consensus, and above all, an abundance of resources, love, play, sustainability, and peace for all inhabitants of the planet.

If Anarchism and Its Aspirations has a single flaw, it is its tendency towards slightly dense prose. Overall, it is highly readable, especially given the many layers of history and politics that it explores with depth and nuance. However, a few more anecdotes and applications would have helped this particular reader immensely–the most striking example is the “battle of Seattle,” which is mentioned throughout the book as a watershed moment for modern anarchism, but which is never elucidated, not even via a brief account of the events of November 30, 1999. In this regard, the book occasionally assumes prior knowledge and familiarity (which I, for one, didn’t have) with the internal politics of modern anarchism, which renders some of the book’s detailed political discussion abstract and difficult to follow. In general, I don’t have a problem with finding myself in over my head when I’m reading about something new–in this case, though, the book states that one of its two main aims is to serve as an introduction to anarchism to those who are unfamiliar with it, so I feel that the omission deserves comment.

On the whole, though, Anarchism and Its Aspirations succeeds in painting a hopeful portrait of the relevance and utility of an anarchist framework in the context of the contemporary struggle for revolutionary social change.

Written by: Ri J. Turner, July 24th 2010

Fearless Female Journalists

admin — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Joy Crysdale

Second Story Press

Fearless Female Journalists is a set of ten short profiles of female reporters, photojournalists, and newscasters hailing from various times and places over the last two centuries.

Among the women featured is one of the early pioneers of modern journalism: nineteenth-century American newspaperwoman Nellie Bly, a daredevil stunt reporter. Nelly Bly is perhaps most famous for circumnavigating the globe in seventy-three days in an era before airplanes, but she also took on assignments designed to do good as well as to make a splash. For example, she got herself admitted as a patient to the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island in order to expose the terrible conditions there. In a later chapter, we meet Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian reporter who, despite her privileged origins as the daughter of diplomats, made the decision to risk–and ultimately lose–her life in order to report on the Russian occupation of Chechnya. (Politkovskaya was assassinated on October 7, 2006, at age forty-eight.) The book closes with a portrait of Thembi Ngubane, a young South African woman who recorded an audio journal about her life with AIDS as part of an effort to end the stigma around AIDS, as well as to push the South African government to acknowledge the tragic proportions of the AIDS epidemic.

The book is geared towards children–I estimate that it is most appropriate for an audience aged seven to eleven. The profiles are attractive and highly readable, complete with photographs and sidebars containing “fun facts.” The stories are entertaining and inspiring, and the selection of featured journalists reflects some variety in terms of era, type of journalism, and nationality (although the book still skews heavily toward heterosexual North American white women). Unfortunately, the book does have a downside–it is written from a “nice, liberal” standpoint, in which history is presented as an inexorable march towards progress, driven by a few exceptionally determined actors. This perspective glorifies individual high-profile “heroines” while erasing the history of communal struggle. It also obscures the reality that, in most cases, the few exceptional people who “make it big” do so not because they are more courageous or determined than thousands of others, but rather because they got lucky or started out with some “extras,” such as racial or class privilege.

The book reaches its nadir at the beginning of the final chapter, when it begins the profile of Thembi Ngubane by blatantly exoticizing her ethnicity: “Thembi Ngubane had a beautiful voice. Like her name, it was wonderfully African. Her voice flowed and lilted and swam around words, especially words with ‘r’ in them."

While I enjoyed reading Fearless Female Journalists and learning about the ten outstanding women profiled within, I could have happily done without the book’s uncritical, unconscious approach to the narrative of history and social change.

Written by: Ri J. Turner, July 23rd 2010

Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible

admin — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Edited by Gregg Drinkwater, Joshua Lesser, David Shneer

New York University Press

Torah Queeries is a compilation of sixty drashot, short exegetical essays, each of which addresses one of the parshiyot, segments of the Torah that comprise the yearly cycle of the reading of the Five Books of Moses. The reason there are sixty drashot rather than the usual fifty-four is because six additional ones are included, each dealing with one of the major Jewish holidays. Each drash engages the pertinent sacred text from a particular queer perspective—whether by exploring passages traditionally assumed to prohibit homosexuality (such as Elliot Dorff’s “How Flexible Can Jewish Law Be?”), by “updating” the story so it speaks to some aspect of the modern-day quest for a more just community (such as Steve Gutow’s “Setting the Stage for Pluralistic Judaism“), or by uncovering the presence of queer gender or queer desire in the Torah itself (such as Sarra Lev‘s “Esau’s Gender Crossing”).

On one hand, the book is an attempt to queer the act of Torah interpretation itself in a variety of ways: reading against the grain, turning traditional interpretations on their heads, reading with an eye to the margins of the stories, and claiming the right (as queer people and other outcasts) to interpret Torah in the first place. On the other hand, as the editors are careful to point out, there is absolutely nothing new about approaching Torah interpretation in this way. Although this is sometimes forgotten, Torah interpretation has always been fundamentally creative, confrontational, and revolutionary.

One need only read a single page of Talmud to understand that contradiction, upheaval, and the search for a more just and inclusive Jewish society are at the sacred core of textual interpretation and generation in (at least rabbinic) Jewish tradition. Thus, Torah Queeries is both boundary-crossing and radical and squarely traditional. As its focus on, and profound respect for, the Torah suggests, the book seeks to root itself firmly in history while simultaneously contributing to the continued dynamism of a modern, evolving Judaism.

Torah Queeries is close to my heart, and I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to participate in the project in its first incarnation as a weekly queer Torah commentary blog. I’m also fortunate to be able to say that many of the authors in the anthology are my colleagues and friends. I’ve experienced firsthand the amazing community that has accrued around a shared love of Torah, as well as a shared belief in the value and dignity of queer people in all our forms.

Torah Queeries and related queer Jewish projects are creating venues for queer Jewish scholarship, creativity, and community. This is precious, powerful work.

Written by: Ri J. Turner, April 8th 2010

Song Over Quiet Lake

admin — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Sarah Felix Burns

Second Story Press

In Song Over Quiet Lake, Sarah Felix Burns tells several intertwining stories of loss, love, and healing. The novel centers on an unlikely friendship between a young white woman, Sylvia, and a Tlingit elder, Lydie Jim. Both are students at the University of British Columbia, and they meet when Sylvia is assigned to be Lydie’s tutor. Although their relationship is formal at first, they gradually become deeply drawn into each other’s lives.

Sylvia learns the painful story of Lydie’s past: snatched away from her family at a young age and forced to attend a residential boarding school, Lydie has spent her entire life struggling to salvage enough dignity, rootedness, and love to take care of her own children in the face of a world determined to tear First Nations families apart. In return, Lydie learns about the tragedy in Sylvia’s past: the younger brother who was kidnapped as a toddler, leaving Sylvia’s mother frozen in time and grief, unable to love her two remaining children.

Sylvia and Lydie narrate most of the novel, but interspersed with their voices are the voices of the other characters in the web—Sylvia’s erstwhile boyfriend River, Lydie’s sons Jonah and Mitchell, Sylvia’s mother Miriam, and several others. Serving as an overlay to the personal stories, the broader historical narrative shows up in the voice of a priest who was once one of Lydie’s boarding school teachers. Well-intentioned but passive, the elderly priest relives his memories of complicity—his participation in the residential school system, his failure to stop a cruel practical joke that resulted in a young boy’s death, his refusal to demand that Canada grant asylum to Jews fleeing Nazi Germany.

All the characters in Song Over Quiet Lake are victims of the ravages of historical or personal tragedy, and they are victims of the intergenerational transmission of unresolved trauma. They are struggling to move forward with their lives, to emerge from past sorrows in order to build something new. They are also struggling to be able to give at least a little bit to each other, like the song (referenced in the novel’s title) that Lydie’s mother gave to Lydie as a young child. Even when Lydie returned from boarding school having lost her native language, with the result that she could no longer speak with her mother in words, they could still sing together and know they had each other’s love.

The novel’s dialogue is limp and stilted, and the prose as a whole lacks life. However, the characters are convincing and moving, and their complex, interwoven lives tell important stories about national guilt and communal resilience.

Written by: Ri J. Turner, April 7th 2010

Transforming Faith: The Story of Al-Huda and Islamic Revivalism Among Urban Pakistani Women

admin — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Sadaf Ahmad

Syracuse University Press

In Transforming Faith, Sadaf Ahmad explores the role of Al-Huda, a women’s Islamic religious school, in promoting the spread of a particular kind of Islam, especially among educated middle- and upper-class women in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Ahmad sets the scene by situating her topic in an historical and global context. She provides a broad overview of the various branches of Islam, and she tells the history of Pakistan’s self-conception as an Islamic state. She describes how Pakistani leaders have drawn discursively on certain flavors of Islam in order to consolidate political power, and how those choices laid the foundation for today’s increasingly conservative politico-religious milieu in Pakistan. Ahmad also links these developments to contemporary global pressures, including the hegemonic and military threats to Pakistan that accompany the skyrocketing Islamophobia in the West.

Against this backdrop, Ahmad explores the growing movement of Islamic women’s religious education, which takes place through small dars, classes for neighborhood women about technical and practical dimensions of Islam that are usually run out of one woman’s home, and through the larger, more institutional Al-Huda network. Its official branches and smaller, less formal dars are run by Al-Huda graduates.

Drawing on a body of carefully selected theory, Ahmad sensitively situates her description of the Al-Huda movement (which in many ways promotes a rigid, patriarchal form of Islam) in its political and cultural context. She notes that women are often positioned by the modern state as the “keepers of tradition,” and that women (especially Muslim women under the Western gaze) are perceived to be helpless victims of patriarchal and state pressure. While she does not hesitate to identify Al-Huda’s flavor of Islam as reactionary, she is also careful to tease out the complex reasons that women seek out Al-Huda and find its teachings transformative and personally meaningful.

On the whole, I found the book extremely nuanced and insightful; however, I did feel that one key element was missing. I found it strange that Ahmad does not discuss the communal feminist aspects of Al-Huda and the dars. Large numbers of women are organizing themselves and each other to obtain highly technical religious knowledge without the mediation of male teachers. In fact, Al-Huda promotes Arabic literacy to enable women to develop a direct relationship with the sacred text of the Qu’ran. It seems that this growing expertise might enable women to take more of a role in defining what it means to be a devout Muslim (and a devout Muslim woman in particular), which could have far-reaching implications. The lack of discussion of this question is puzzling.

Ultimately Transforming Faith is an exploration of the role of pedagogy in producing social and cultural change. How do teachers (in whatever sense of the word) identify and recruit a body of students? In a given sociopolitical context, how do teachers discursively situate their chosen body of knowledge (or, as Foucault would say, technologies of the self) against the backdrop of their students’ lives? What makes it possible to convince students to use those technologies of the self to discipline themselves into “ethical/pious subjects” (as Ahmad writes, drawing on Foucault and Mahmood)? In what way does the state co-opt those particular “ethical/pious subjects” for its own ends? In what ways do “ethical/pious subjects” develop a particular vantage point for resistance?

With its complementary combination of critical history, theory, and ethnography, Transforming Faith is an excellent—and thoroughly readable—case study for examining these questions.

Written by: Ri J. Turner, April 6th 2010

My Baby Rides the Short Bus: The Unabashedly Human Experience of Raising Kids with Disabilities

admin — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 17:01:00 +0000

Edited by Yantra Bertelli, Jennifer Silverman, Sarah Talbot

PM Press

My Baby Rides the Short Bus is an anthology of articles written by parents about their firsthand experiences of raising children with disabilities. In addition to their common identity as parents of disabled children, the contributors also share another trait: all of them find themselves outside of the mainstream by virtue of identity or political perspective. Together the articles make up a lively collection of authentic voices that speak to the joys and challenges of being marginalized and/or subcultural parents raising special-needs children.

Many of the authors write about how their non-mainstream identities have affected their experience of raising special-needs children. Thida Cornes writes about how she learned to work within the constraints of her own disability, dystonia (a physical disability that causes muscular spasms), to take care of her son, who has been diagnosed with cerebral palsy. A lesbian minister, Maria June writes about becoming, at age twenty-three, the foster mom of a fifteen-year-old with special needs. Amber E. Taylor, a self-described “black biracial dyke with head-to-toe visible tattoos and a bald head” and an adoptive parent of a son with Down syndrome, writes about the backlash she receives from biological parents of disabled children who think she shouldn’t attend support group meetings because she “chose” to parent a special child.

The authors also write about the process of navigating the many institutions ostensibly set up to help special-needs children, but which often end up sidelining them. Several authors write about the experience of diagnosis: the behavioral testing milieu in which young children, separated from parents and subjected to unfamiliar conditions, unsurprisingly fail to show their full range of abilities, and then are slapped with labels that sometimes sound more like death sentences. Authors who spend 24/7 with their children write about the experience of not being believed by “specialists” about their children's abilities and needs, or being subtly blamed for their children’s disabilities. Expressing the frustration felt by many of the authors, Kerry Cohen writes, “Unless I hate the things that make [my son] different from other children, I will always be a wayward mother.”

But not all the stories are about frustration and tragedy—many of the authors write about the creative and energetic ways they have found to help their children thrive, often in direct opposition to the institutions that are set up to “help.” Karen Wang and Heather Newman write about “unschooling”—creating stimulating and safe learning spaces at home, tailored specifically to their children’s particular needs—while Shannon Des Roches Rosa tells how she co-founded a special education PTA that helps parents of children with disabilities advocate for their children in the local public school system.

As so many of us know from personal experience, it can be very difficult to be part of multiple marginalized communities. As one of the authors, Andrea Winninghoff, laments, “In a community of parents with deaf kids, I will always be the single, young, gay mom. Among gay parents, I will always be the one with the deaf kid that they can’t speak to.” While there are many books available on parenting special-needs children, very few of those books offer an explicitly political analysis of the rights of special-needs families and of the systems that do or don’t serve them, and very few of those books acknowledge the experiences of parents who are out of the mainstream, whether due to race, class, gender identity or sexual orientation, disability, political beliefs, or lifestyle. Frank, engaging, and broad-ranging, My Baby Rides the Short Bus is a rare and precious treasury of these too-often invisible stories.

Written by: Ri J. Turner, February 11th 2010

Herizons Magazine (Fall 2009)

admin — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:01:00 +0000

Edited by Penni Mitchell

I had never heard of the Canadian feminist news magazine Herizons before receiving my copy of the Fall 2009 issue in the mail. In fact, I often avoid globally-oriented, North American feminist articles, because they too often read like a contemporary version of the white man’s burden (“Oh dear, look at the how the brown barbarians treat their women”). While Herizons didn’t completely escape this snare, on the whole it was a refreshing surprise.

The most striking feature of the publication is its emphasis on women’s power to create change in local struggles. The opening letter from the editor, introducing the issue’s theme, is entitled “The Unstoppable Women of Asia.” In glowing prose, editor Penni Mitchell describes the determination and savvy of the women behind each of the political struggles covered in the issue (including the Nepali fight for “substantive equality” to be written into the new constitution, as well as Afghan women’s protests against the patriarchal Shia Personal Status Law). This is a welcome departure from so many Western portrayals of developing countries—rather than emphasizing the repression of brown women by “uncivilized” brown men, and the oh-so-noble efforts (by Westerners, of course) to “save” those women, Herizons puts the focus on the women themselves, and in particular, their dynamic acts of resistance and their creative visions for change.

The one article that misses the mark in this regard is “Making a Statement: Gender Roles in India Slowly Changing,” which unfortunately takes the all-too-familiar stance that Westernization automatically improves the status of women. (Really, Kaj Hasselriis, does the fact that you saw a young girl in “an unusual outfit—jeans and a t-shirt” indicate that sexism in India is on its last legs?) However, thankfully, Herizons does acknowledge that sexism is also a continuing reality “at home”—in addition to the international coverage, the issue also places a focus on Canadian feminist issues, including the fight for Canadian custody laws that acknowledge the impact of domestic violence. Another “local” feature article profiles Canadian Aboriginal theater director and playwright Yvette Nolan.

On the whole, the magazine takes an optimistic, visionary tone. In fact, at times I felt that the magazine was almost too upbeat, and ran the risk of idealizing some of the activists profiled within its pages. However, the parting shot (a one-page piece by Lyn Cockburn entitled “Fall of Patriarchy Imminent”) restored the balance. In a cheery satirical tone, Cockburn reminds us that the struggle is far from over: “Given the wild success of both post-feminism and post-racism, it is no wonder that I...await post-patriarchy with barely restrained enthusiasm.” As those of us involved in activism know all too well, it’s often difficult to strike a balance between clearly naming oppression and celebrating our progress toward ending it. Herizons walks this line skillfully, emphasizing the dignity of struggle without sugarcoating the context.

While the overall quality of reportage is high, not every article makes the grade—such as Susan G. Cole’s poorly written, barely relevant column entitled “Michael Jackson’s Swan Song.” On the other hand, the feature article “Is Feminism Men’s Work, Too?” is a gem—a great short introduction to doing political work from a place of (relative) privilege. Finally, the issue closes with a multitude of engaging, well-written, and useful book and music reviews.

I’ll be picking up future Herizons issues to find out about women’s current political struggles and successes both in Canada and worldwide—and I’ll look forward to enjoying some quirky, heartening editorializing along the way.

Written by: Ri J. Turner, February 8th 2010