Day: December 11, 2006

Self-transformation and the challenges of unpacking privilege

arielladrake
[Hi everyone, I’m Jen/Arielladrake. Tekanji has kindly invited me to guest-blog here for a while. I’m a mixed race (Asian/white) Australian, bisexual cisgendered woman who lives and goes to university in Queensland. I’m a sociology/politics/applied ethics major with a bent towards gender studies. I have a personal/political blog on Livejournal, which can be found here.]

Something that comes up often in discussions about challenging privilege is this idea that asking someone to check their privilege is akin to expecting them to engage in some kind of Maoist form of self-criticism. This analogy almost always gets my back up for a few reasons. Some of these are quite personal, and I don’t really wish to go into them here, but aside from that, it’s about the fact that such reactions tend to betray a misunderstanding of the nature of the state, and a failure to acknowledge the particular coercive powers of the state; coercive power that non-state parties generally don’t have. However, this misunderstanding, whilst one reason for my frustration, isn’t the whole story either. Continue reading

Site Notice

tekanji
[12.13 Please Note: Comments are not “being deleted” as many people are claiming. This blog is moderated and that means that all comments must go through the moderation queue first. Because of an issue with Spam Karma, sometimes comments get approved without going through first. When I see that, I automatically put them back into the queue without reading them first. That doesn’t mean they’re deleted, it just means that they haven’t been reviewed by a moderator yet. The bloggers here do not live online so be patient!]

Apparently a lot of people are having trouble getting comments through. I’m not sure if this is another Akismet problem (it was freaking out about a month ago) or a Spam Karma problem. If you try to comment, please save your text in another file before you submit it so you don’t lose anything if it screws up. Also, if you have any idea what plugin is giving the error, I would much appreciate being informed.

Half the time I’m not even being mailed the comments, and the other half I’m getting mailed comments but then they aren’t in the queue to approve. I’ll try to fix this as soon as possible, but since I don’t know what’s freaking out and why I don’t know how long it’ll take.