It matters what stories tell stories.
It matters what thoughts think thoughts.
It matters what worlds world worlds.
Donna Haraway
What if Nature does more than speak…
– what if it also reads and writes, calculates and creates,
copulates with itself in the most perverse, creative and also destructive ways?
What if it is political through and through?
Vicki Kirby
Multiculturalism is about including stories of difference.
Se trata de otras narrativas. It is about alter-narratives.
The stories of multiculturalism are stories of identity, and narratives of identity are stories of location. A story is always a retelling of an older story. This is my retelling.
Gloria Anzaldua
I have always understood myself through story.
The importance of language and finding just the right words is a point I often consider. I grew up loving picture books and thesauruses and asking my tri-lingual mother “What’s the word for…” and “How do you say…” Sometimes I find myself not being able to find the right words. Other times I take the liberty of creating new ones. Finding alternative ways of saying things that seem closer to the truth as I understand them is critical intellectual labour. Words are powerful. They write us into being.
I am a person who grew up in-between worlds – worlds of culture, of class, of legitimate and invisible identities. The borderlands, Chicana feminist-poet and scholar Gloria Anzaldua called this location. Finding my own voice to articulate an answer to the ubiquitous “Who are you and where do you come from?” has been an ever-shifting, challenging and often-painful residence in the borderlands. Anzaldua says we overcome this marginalisation by code-switching, by crossing borders. I have mumbled my way through the codes of the different spaces I have occupied in my life as a body in a world that privileges mouths and voices as speakers. I have screeched with rage within that same world that privileges certain mouths and particular kinds of voices that get to speak, and when spoken in particular tones.
I grew up as a Syriac-speaking person, a guest on the unceded ancestral territories of the Darug nation. I spent my childhood in the working-class-meets-welfare communities of Fairfield. And I was told, over and again by the old people in my community ‘Loup leshana’ – learn language.
I say Syriac-speaking, and not Assyrian, because my ancestral community, the ancient tribes of the Land of Two Rivers (Beth-Nahr-Ain), have been trying to find the just the right words, just the right stories, to explain who we are and where we fit into someone else’s code. Before British anthropologist Layard began to research us in the mid 1800’s to discover we were speaking a very old language, we understood ourselves by our tribal affiliations in a world prior to nations and borders and flags. In the new world, we are still arguing over just the right name that could represent us to those who demand it. Through the new lens of nationhood, for a people with no land-rights, my community has been re-articulating our stories ever since.
Cultural identity was the first narrative to code my experience. For me, land (and what country you are from) constructed one of the most crucial parts of my identity. For Assyrians, like many Indigenous folk around the world, ‘your country’ is not a border or a flag or a government, it is a piece of earth, or river or sky. In my language, we call this country Atra.
And so by the time I went to primary school I already knew that what I was named and what we name ourselves reflects not only our dignity and our sovereignty but might determine the conditions of our lives. I already knew that colonial notions of sovereign states did not represent my understanding of who I was, but there was no space for that language then, under 1980’s multicultural policy which fixated on flag waving and food fairs.
As I grew I learnt that life in the body of a woman – and its subsequent re-presentations – is a complex entanglement of agency, injustice, creativity and destruction. Contrary to the Cartesian binary split between mind and body, I understood my earth story as a very concrete, and sometimes ineffable materiality. It is the materiality of our body-as-existence that I wish to expand upon within this provocation. I want to rethink the ways that the stories we tell about our material world and our place within it author that world. Our bodies have a power and an agency that functions not merely as a resource for the brain that commands it into being the way colonial Europe imagined it. Elizabeth A. Wilson explored the gut as more minded than the brain in her work Gut Feminism. Inspired by her, and a school of thinking called ‘new materialist feminism,’ I am going to uncover how the material world shapes and writes us. I want to do this to blur the boundaries between who (or what) gets to ‘author the text’ about our lives. I want to disrupt the understanding that the mind or thought is more ‘reasoned’ than the rest of my body and for the sake of this publication, the lives and bodies of young people.
We often hear that young people are under-represented in public life, that their voices ‘need to be heard’ in the context of social policy making and institution-building. Some work is done in this arena, not nearly enough. Critics abound about whose voices even get to be heard in community consultations. That only certain articulations are ‘heard’ – think translated – because the one asking has programmed a code that young people must decipher in order for dialogue. This highly sophisticated skill of code-translation is wielded by many Aboriginal, Indigenous, Black and Peoples of Colour.
In the land of youth services we design consultations, focus groups and surveys in order to ‘increase access’ of the most vulnerable (the most oppressed) to social support services. And rightly so. It is every person’s right to access human services like housing, food, healthcare and literacy. We want the system of institutional power to ‘talk to’ those on the margins, and in certain moments, and always on the terms of the one asking, we invite those on the outside to ‘talk back.’
Policy makers are now seriously considering how the onus of code-switching and border crossing still rests upon the outsider trying to speak to the ‘inside,’ to those with power. This is the platform for social inclusion and access and equity policy. The paradigm of social inclusion insists that those on the margins of power – those oppressed by poverty, or class, or race, or disability, or sexuality, or all of these things at once – can have the power of the inner circle if they would only just learn the code! By code I do not mean the levels of English literacy proficiency required to fill out a Centrelink form. Code, in my understanding of Anzaldua’s work, is not about language as much as it is about power.
Let’s together go back to the first year of your Sociology degree (or your first welfare appointment) and revisit French theorist Michel Foucault. He called this the power of discourse. Discourses are the language-codes designed by institutions with the power of legitimacy. When we think of the institutions created by colonialism such as Health, Justice, Welfare, Police, Education – we see entire structures of power, funded and resourced, that produce their own research, their own evidence-bases, their own codes. These codes are then enshrined into laws and policies and government programs. These discourses then define what is healthy and what is not, what is crazy and what is not, what is criminal and what is not. The discourses have power not simply because they are backed by scientific evidence, but because they are promoted by the corporate media on the one hand and enforced by the judiciary and police on the other. It is of little material consequence that studies released by institutional power are disproven over and again. Creating an entire system of codes and crossings that affect the daily lives of young people is the assertion of institutional power. You are either in, or you are locked out.
Social policy makers, and the practitioners of welfare then invest millions of dollars trying to teach the code of the privileged to large numbers of people. This is evidenced by the multitude of mainstream social services that discipline and punish people for not keeping appointment times, not paying for a transport fare and for not ‘dressing the part’ when appearing in court. Instead of a critical deconstruction of the causes of oppression in the real lives of clients and communities, the system of colonial-capitalism asserts its dominance through its institutional power-discourse. I do not need to remind readers of the cruel, inter-generational consequences this brutal assertion of institutional power has had on Aboriginal children and for young people in out-of-home care.
So let me invite you now to stretch the bounds of your imagination to consider how young people are actually always ‘authoring a text.’ Not necessarily through mouths, or voices or words-as-articulations but through other materialities like their bodies and their radical relationalities.
The question for me then becomes not how are young people and communities of youth formed by, destroyed by and re-written by codes, often not their own, but rather what are the ways young people interact and intra-act with the stories and the codes that author them? What are the different stories we tell about young people and more confrontingly what do these stories iterate about ‘us’?
We are told that we now live in the epoch of the Anthropocene, an era in geologic development where Man (Anthropos in Greek) has affected the planet on scales of massive proportions. Through geo-traumas of mining and drilling for oil, increased carbon emissions causing global warming, corporate-controlled changes in farming and agricultural practice (including the use of genetically modified food and seed patents) and mass species extinction, expert commentators have analysed the imperialist and economic dimensions of this ‘new epoch.’ There is no denying that these human actions under colonial-capitalism have had irreversible consequences, marking this era as perhaps, one of the most urgent times to respond.
Does taking accountability for ‘the crimes of the Anthropocene’ fall on every one’s shoulders equally? What of the voices of global Indigenous peoples who have been denouncing, decrying and resisting land crimes for the past hundreds of years? What of young people who are resisting not with their voice, but with their bodies? Could we understand absence from school not as passive ‘disengagement’ but as an active, agential resistance and critical rejection to civic life? What does this say about how young people figure themselves as powerful actors in a dominant code that they can switch into and out of by their own material agency? Can this absence, this silence, understood as a materiality with power, ‘say’ something that perhaps we (we the privileged, we on the inside, we who benefit from institutional power) are unable to translate, or perhaps unwilling to hear?
To achieve the task of reconfiguring voice as material agency and not simply as a human larynx that utters articulations understood by hegemonic codes, I turn to Vicky Kirby’s understanding that the material is discursive and vice versa. I want to apply her material-discursive concept of nature’s textuality to contribute to feminist discourses on youth affairs not as purely cultural phenomenon with material implications, but as material-discursive intra-actions of becoming – inseparable to each other and in many cases, activitieswe only struggle to make meaning of. Now because this is not a large reflection, I am going to have to leave it up to you to check out her work. But speaking of queer materialist-feminist theory, let’s get quantum!
Diffraction as Methodology
Diffraction is the process where light, sound, or other waves change pattern after an either constructive or destructive interference. Instead of travelling in a straight line, waves will form new patterns of diffraction – changing their path, and more specifically, their pattern of movement.
Diffraction patterns can be observed in everyday life. When oily substances don’t mix with water, the interference causes a diffraction producing a rainbow-like effect. Waves will follow a pattern after an interference – for example a stone thrown into a pond. Should we throw in a second stone, each set of ripples meets each other, and will then fan out into new patterns called diffractions. That is, water was travelling in a wave before our stones were thrown into the mix and it is the superposition of the waves, that is, the moment and place the two different wave forms (ripples) meet that either cancel each other out or create new patterns of diffraction. This work has been used by feminist quantum physicist Karen Barad in her work Meeting the Universe Halfway.
The figure below is demonstrative of the diffraction pattern of water hitting a breakwater and then appearing in a new diffraction pattern, not only from the interference of the breakwater, but from the superposition of the waves that the interference caused. When a wave meets with interference, the diffractions meet with other waves resulting in the fan like pattern. Diffraction then, for Barad is both apparatus (the breakwater) and object (the water).
Feminists have taken up the phenomenon of diffraction to rethink relationality (the ways we relate to each other) and difference. Vietnamese-American filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha’s “inappropriate/d others” informs Barad’s work that says humans can “not be in relation with” power but can “be in critical, deconstructive relationality, in a diffracting rather than reflecting (ratio)nality – as the means of making potent connection that exceeds domination.”
This sounds complex but all it means is that radical difference to power does not have to occur the way Gramsci or other Marxist-theorists imagined it would have to be – as an oppositional or counter-hegemonic force. Feminist thinker Trinh T. Minh-ha’s understanding lends itself to a different positionality than purely oppositional. She thinks of it more as a critical ‘situated knowledge’ (Haraway) that allows women, particularly women of colour to speak from locations not constructed as purely oppositional to a (white, hetero) centre, but from our own, unrelated (and yet always related) places of dignity, story and lineage.
These ‘diffracted positions’ afford the knowledges of women of colour their own respect as differing– not merely different from a norm that still assumes that the only critical locations from which to speak are a centre (power) and a margin (disempowered fringe). Whilst always a relational process, Minh-ha’s critical deconstructive relationality shatters the mirror as a reflective methodology. Her diffractive positionalities are not just a story about all the ways this Other identity has differed from or been subsumed by a central norm (although this is part of that relationality), but how it carries its own power and agency in a myriad of interesting, complex and paradoxical patterns. These diffracted positions do not begin in opposition to something else (as if their genesis were only as a demonic birthing of being what-it-is-not.) They are locations and lineages that meet with (superpose) what is constructed as the centre/ norm (whiteness), and in a critical relationality. They both deconstruct the elements of power and privilege that create inequities (Barad’s destructive interference), but also impose their own agency, own power, own ability to meet with what is constructed as the centre, not as the centre, but as an entanglement of a plethora of locations that create and become new patterns of diffraction (constructive interference).
In these spaces, whiteness and the ethnic Other meet as waves with their own momentum, sometimes cancelling each other out, or sometimes they create new patterns that allow not only for an oppositional relationality, but a creative fanning out. These creative patterns create possibilities for solidarity, learning, kinship that offer dynamic pathways and non-linear movement. This radical difference comes via Karen Barad’s diffracting diffraction – a critical cutting together-apart and returning, “re-turning – not by returning as in reflecting or on going back to a past that was, but re-turning as in turning it over and over again – iteratively intra-acting, re-diffracting, diffracting anew, in the making of new temporalities…new diffraction patterns.”
So can we understand young people’s occupancy in the margins, in the in-between spaces, as newly, designed-by-us-for-us spaces that assert power? Can the borderlands create new radical relationalities that assert a form of power removed from the institutional gaze of discourse-power, that beckon to be seen and heard by the very fact of their existences? Are we brave enough in youth services to begin to understand power from such a lens?
And so, at the end of this tale (or are we at the very beginning?) we re-turn to me. Come back to my invisibility-power as a sovereign member of the global Indigenous that still exist despite history books telling you we are extinct. My body and my story and my language, all agential realities that utter and bleed and decry the crimes of colonial-capitalism that drills our ancestral homelands for petrol to fuel its money-machine whilst old people on our territories live in mudbrick dwellings without electricity or clean running water. With the radical understandings within this provocation I am no longer an outsider begging to be let in. If I am invited to the table of power, certainly I will sit and critically engage. I code-switch and cross borders to survive every single day and to ensure the survival of the lives of young people in my community. I also reside here in the borderlands in my invisibility-power. This place away from the ever-present gaze of institutional power. In my personal embodied sovereignty I understand myself to be part of a reality much bigger than the machine.
Thought List
Gloria Anzaldua(1942-2004) wasan American scholar and poet of Chicana cultural, feminist, and queer theory.
Karen Barad is an American feminist theorist and quantum physicist. She is currently Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Donna Haraway is a feminist biologist and American Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department and Feminist Studies Department at the University of California.
Vicki Kirby is an Australian Professor of Sociology and Anthropology in the School of Social Sciences, University of NSW.
Trinh T. Minh-ha is a Vietnamese-American filmmaker, writer, literary theorist and composer. She is currently Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.
Elizabeth A. Wilson is an Australian psychologist, feminist theorist and Professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
(Meet Mago Contributor) Annukina Warda