Shree Deshpande, Michael Richardson, Brandi Russell
Winston Churchill
Doubles
Westood RS
Kris Wright
Winston Churchill
4
Edmond North PY
Lindsay Willson
Winston Churchill
Octas
Anderson JT
Dominic Henderson, Adam Lipton, Lindsay Willson
all
Finals
all
all
any
Finals
any
any
na
1
na
na
unknown
2
na
na
Tournament
Round
Report
Harvard
4
Opponent: x | Judge: x
x
Holy Cross
4
Opponent: na | Judge: na
Fem K 1AC
Pflugerville TFA
2
Opponent: x | Judge: y
util aff with extinction and nuke war imps
St Marks
3
Opponent: na | Judge: na
Natives AC
St Marks
2
Opponent: na | Judge: na
Deleuze AC
Winston Churchill
Quarters
Opponent: North Crowley LR | Judge: Shree Deshpande, Michael Richardson, Brandi Russell
Dress AC
Winston Churchill
Doubles
Opponent: Westood RS | Judge: Kris Wright
Stock AC
Winston Churchill
Octas
Opponent: Anderson JT | Judge: Dominic Henderson, Adam Lipton, Lindsay Willson
Mouffe AC
unknown
2
Opponent: na | Judge: na
queerpess 1AC
To modify or delete round reports, edit the associated round.
Cites
Entry
Date
0 - Deleuze Fem K
Tournament: St Marks | Round: 2 | Opponent: na | Judge: na
Why would you ever want to use becoming-woman? Deleuze grossly calls woman "sexuality itself" and orients the woman as a simulacrum to be appropriated for the becoming-man and eliminates female subjectivity–turns case
Jardine 84 (Alice Jardine, "Woman in Limbo: Deleuze and His Br(others)", SubStance, Vol. 13, No. ¾, Issue 44-45, University of Wisconsin Press, 1984, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3684774, P 52-54, Accessed 9/10/16 GK) With D + G, however, none of these reasonings about becoming woman hold sway. There are, of course, overlappings (as, for example, with "There is a becoming-woman in writing" ~DLS, p. 55~), but they are few. For here, what is involved is le devenir femme de tout le monde, the becoming woman of every one everything, the whole world. With D + G, "to become woman" is less a metaphor for describing a certain social or textual process than a true meta morphosis-one thinks of Kafka's Gregor Samsa waking up as a bug. This is mainly because D + G's imperative "to become woman" has very little to do with women, at least not with women as D + G perceive them, as caught up within a Western binary machine over which they cannot and will never have control. In order not to lose sight of how and why this is so, it is essential to remember that the devenir, "becoming," for D + G, is a process, one which cannot be described or put into motion by any of our current conceptual machinery: "To become is never to imitate, nor to conform oneself to a model, whether it be of justice or of truth. There is no term from which one departs, nor one to which one arrives or should arrive. Nor are there two terms which are inter changeable. The question 'what's become of you?' is particularly stupid. Because as someone becomes, what he becomes changes as much as he does" (DLS, p. 8). With "becoming" there is no past or future and certainly no present there is no linear history: "In becoming, it is more a matter of involuting: this is neither regressing nor progressing" (DLS, p. 37). "Becoming" is topological, geological, geographical, not historical ~DLS, p. 48~. "Becoming," for D + G, means becoming caught up in a process of osmosis (not metaphor) with de-anthropologized and de-identitized entities - women, infants, animals, foreigners, the insane - in order to resist the dominant mode of representation represented by any majority. "People are always thinking of a majority future (when I'm grown up, when I'm in power . . ). When really the problem is one of a becoming-minority: not to act like, not to do like or imitate the infant, fool, woman, animal, stutterer, or foreigner, but to become all that, in order to invent new forces or new weapons" (DLS, p. 11). This osmosis maintains no identities, no images. To be caught up in a "becoming animal" means that one will resemble neither Man nor the Animal, but, rather, that each will "deterritorialize" the other. The final stage of"becoming" is to become "imperceptible" - beyond any percipion as historically required for Man to master the world - or woman. This does not mean, however, that all of these becomings are in a relationship of equality one to the other. The need for one or the other, in fact, changes according to the binary machine one is "escaping" from, and, in all cases, the "becoming woman" always has, over all the others, what D + G call a "particular introductory power" (MP, p. 304), a status as "first quantum" (MP, p. 342). "However, if all becomings are already molecular ~as opposed to molar~, including the becoming-woman, it should also be said that all becomings begin and pass through the becoming-woman. It's the key to the other becomings" (MP, p. 340). Again, this is not to say that "becoming woman" has anything to do with women per se. D + G's becoming woman is one "which is not ~to be~ confused with women, their past or future, and it is necessary that women enter into this becoming in order to exit from their past, their future, their history" (DLS, p. 8). We are not talking about men and women here, because they can only exist in the Western binary machine. It is, rather, a question "not ~of~ man and ~of~ woman taken as sexual entities, held in a binary apparatus, but ~of~ a molecular becoming, the birth of a molecular woman in music, the birth of a molecular sonority in a woman" (DLS, p. 122). Why then do D + G privilege the word woman? First, as they explain through a series of unanalyzed stereotypes, because it is "sexuality itself" which is the ultimate, uncontrollable becoming, when it can manage to escape immediate Oedipalization. ("Sexuality passes through the becoming-woman of~the~ man and the becoming-animal of the human" ~MP, p. 341~.) But also because, as "introductory power," "Woman" is both the closest to the category of "Man" as majority, and yet she remains a distinct minority. D + G explain that the notions of majority and minority here should not be opposed in any purely quantitative way: "Let us suppose that the constant or standard is Man- any white-male-adult-city-dweller-speaking a standard language-European-heterosexual (the Ulysses of Joyce or of Ezra Pound). It is obvious that "the Man" has the majority, even if he is less numerous than the mosquitoes, children, Blacks, peasants, homosexuals . . . etc." (MP, p. 133). The problem is not to gain, or accede to, the majority, but to become a minority; and this is particularly crucial for women if they desire to remain radical, creative, without simply becoming (a) Man: The only becoming is a minority one. Women, regardless of their number, are a minority, definable as a state or sub-set; but they only create by rendering possible a becoming, of which they do not have the ownership, into which they themselves must enter, a becoming-woman which concerns all of mankind, men and women included. (MP, p. 134) The woman who does not enter into the "becoming woman" remains a Man, remains "molar," just like men: Woman as a molar entity must become woman, so that man as well may become one or is then able to become one. It is certainly indispensable that women engage in molar politics, in terms of a conquest which they conduct from their organization, from their own history, from their own subjectivity: "We as women . ." then appears as the subject of the enunciation. But it is dangerous to fall back upon such a subject, which cannot function without drying up a spring or stopping a flood. The Song of life is often struck up by the driest women, animated by resentment, by the desire for power and by cold mothering. .. . (MP, p. 339) That is, woman (with her obligatory connotations: "transparent force, innocence, speed," ~MP, p. 354~ is what Man (both men and women: "virility, gravity," ~MP, p. 354~) must become. There must be no "becoming man" because he is always already a majority. "In a certain way, it's always 'man' who is the subject of a becoming. . .. A woman has to become woman, but in a becoming-woman of all of mankind" (MP, p. 357). That is, Man is always the subject of any becoming, even if "he" is a woman. A woman who is not a "woman-become" is a Man - and a subject to that extent and to that extent only. Woman is never a subject but a limit - a border of and for Man - the "becoming woman" is l'avenir de l'homme tout entier- the future of all Mankind. For D + G, She is what the entire world must become if Man men and women - is truly to disappear. But to the extent that women must "become woman" first (in order for men, in D + G's words, to "follow her example"), might that not mean that she must also be the first to disappear? Is it not possible that the process of "becoming woman" is but a new variation of an old allegory for the process of women becoming obsolete? There would remain only her simulacrum: a female figure caught in a whirling sea of male configurations. A silent, mutable, head-less, desire-less, spatial surface necessary only for His metamorphosis? Physicists say: Holes are not the absence of particles, but particles going faster than light. Flying anuses, rapid vaginas, there is no castration. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Mille Plateaux. Most important theorists have a repertory of exemplary fictions, fictions that they call upon frequently to interact with their specific theories in creative if predictable ways. Between the scene of Lacanian psychoanalysis and that of Lol V. Stein's ravishing, for example, the privileged rapport is one of repetition: for Lacan, Marguerite Duras understood and repeated his teachings without him.19 Or, between the invagination of Derrida's e'criture and that of the narrator in Maurice Blanchot's L'Arrit de mort, what is privileged is the process of mime: for Derrida, Blanchot understood his writings with him, inseparably.20 D + G's exemplary fiction writers include Lewis Carroll, Franz Kafka, Pierre Klossowski, and Michel Tournier—to mention only a few. What all of these writers' texts share with those of D + G is the surface quality of their figures: the privileged modality of relationship between the configurations of Deleuzian becoming and those of fiction is allegory. This is made most clear through Deleuze's essay on Tournier's 1967 novel, Vendredi, ou les limbes du Pacifique. 21 There it is no longer a question of whether Duras's Lol, as hysterical body, is or is not a subject of narrative; of whether Blanchot's J. and N., as organs of a hysterical text, are or are not simply new angles for modernity. For here it is a question of Speranza, a true Body-without-Organs: a woman who is not a woman but a female figure (an island), a space to be unfolded, molded, into new configurations for the metamorphosis of Man.
Becoming woman can never escape the gendered rhetoric that creates the patriarchal exclusion. The aff is rooted in the androcentric project and cant overcome the exclusion of the female body in their female body and ultimately has an end that is gendered or it fosters a subjectivity in which the female body cant survive
Shukin 2k NICOLE SHUKIN Becoming-Woman Now VERENA ANDERMATT CONLEY 2000 Full book "Deleuze and Feminism" Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook: Colebrook is a professor of English at University of Pennsylvania. Ian Buchanan is the Director of the Institute for Social Transformation Research based at University of Wollongong.EBSCO Host DOA 10/7/16 KAE-GK Deleuze’s ‘pragmatism’, his preference for becomings generated on surfaces, leads him to favour sites of extreme potency, or, in machinic parlance, motor power. His affirmation of creative force is reflected in a culinary fetish: of food that secretes power and prowess, metonyms for the ‘liberated elements’ in what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘the body without organs’ (1987: 260). Deleuze’s favourite things, furthermore, connote a virility of force and a blood-lust for becomings that are peculiarly male gendered. Unverifiably, but arguably, brain, tongue and marrow emit a muscular and raw masculinity. Considering Deleuze’s philosophical renovation of the self as an assemblage that scatters and reconvenes, a composition ever on the move, it is indeed hard to imagine him nurturing a taste for duck or fish, for meals consisting of whole organisms. Indirectly linked with the richness of his favourite foods is an emphasis on intensity as a valid ontology and the belief that molecular units of potency, or ‘kinematic entities’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 255), are capable of disrupting systems of control and capture, state and family apparatuses. This aspect of the thinking of Deleuze verges upon a romanticisation of the involuntary that threatens to exclude embodied women. One can trace the notion of the involuntary to Proust and Signs, where Deleuze links it to what he calls ‘the virtual’: ‘Proust asks the question: how shall we save the past as it is in itself? It is to this question that involuntary Memory offers its answer . . . This ideal reality, this virtuality, is essence, which is realized or incarnated in involuntary memory’ (Deleuze 1972: 60). In A Thousand Plateaus, to my mind, the involuntary turns into a relatively submerged quality associated with everything that resists regulatory apparatuses. Yet it is not at the site of the involuntary so much as at its unexpected conciliation with the regulatory implied by his virile tastes that feminisms need to be on the alert. Deleuze’s investment in the involuntary contains ethnographic overtones that are significant to a critical feminist reading. From what can be gleaned from his interviews with Parnet, Deleuze distinctly favours the raw over the cooked. Deleuze disagreed strongly with the structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss and his ‘institution of the totem’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 237). Yet the text of A Thousand Plateaus continuously invokes phenomena that evade domestication – or cooking – by Western culture: ‘nomad thought’, ‘primitive societies’, ‘the East’, war machines, music, packs, swarms, tribes, anomalies, becoming-woman, becoming-child, becoming-animal, -vegetable, -mineral, -molecular, sadomasochism, drugs, and so on. For this reason it is not amiss to resort to the very interpretations that Deleuze took issue with to explore a contrast Deleuze and Guattari stage between ‘nonvoluntary transmutation’ and domestication (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 269). It is because Levi-Strauss reduced different myths to the single structural paradigm, of the raw and the cooked, that Deleuze dis- agreed with his methodology, just as he disagreed with Freud’s absorption of a multiplicity of experiences into the Oedipal triangle. As Levi-Strauss writes: I propose to show that M1 (the key myth) belongs to a set of myths that explain the origin of the cooking of food . . . that cooking is con- ceived of in native thought as a form of mediation; and finally, that this particular aspect remains concealed in the Bororo myth, because the latter is in fact an inversion, or a reversal, of myths originating in neighbouring communities which view culinary operations as media- tory activities between heaven and earth, life and death, nature and society. (Levi Strauss 1969: 64–5) Fire and cooking, Levi-Strauss continues, are ‘the origin of man’s mortality’ (164); cooking instigates not just the nature/culture divide, but also the loss of an innate or immanent power of immor- tality retained by raw food. Also of importance to my purposes here is the connection Levi-Strauss finds in the myths between women and food: ‘~I~t is worthy of note that in the myths just discussed the sexual code should be apparent only in its masculine references . . . When the references are feminine, the sexual code becomes latent and is concealed beneath the alimentary code’ (269). It is my contention that the thinking of Deleuze contains a mythological or affective component that can be read according to the interpretations of Levi-Strauss. Deleuze seeks a power of immanence and ‘the movement of the infinite’ in becomings and machinic assemblages which are largely cast as involuntary (281). A broad division is set up in A Thousand Plateaus between an intense ‘nomadology’ (the raw) and domestic, regulatory structures (the cooked), a distinction that is unexpectedly reminiscent of nature/ culture binaries. Finally, Deleuze and Guattari never address the overdetermined historical, mythological, or affective associations between the female gender and domesticity, between women and cooked food. For this reason, gender remains to a great extent latent in A Thousand Plateaus.
Vote neg as an act of aborting the 1AC and pass the aff through the revolting corporeal threshold. This abjection is a method of embracing difference and diving into the unknown prism of our consciousness of the female body
Bono 05 (Paola Bono, "The Abjection of the Female Body: Hell as a Metaphor for Birth," 2005, http://arts. monash.edu.au/cclcs/research/papers/ Accessed 10/14/16 GK)
A new-born baby, really just born, the umbilical cord not yet cut; naked and crying, its face screwed up in the effort. Still dirty with blood and mucus, marks of its passage through the physical, corporeal threshold it has crossed to come to life. Carnal threshold, vagina of the mother's body, whence it comes, in whose womb it has grown - living matter on its way to being; so that the traces of that body still show on its little body. Some of you might remember this one of Benetton's "scandalous" ads, which some years ago did in fact provoke scandalized reactions, at least in Italy. Because it was being used for commercial ends, because it exploited childhood - nay, babyhood, for mercenary purposes. Or so the argument went. While childhood and exploitation would seem to have nothing to do with those babies who appear in numberless ads for diapers and baby-food; there has never been such an outcry in those cases. But then those babies are so pretty, so smiling and, most important, so clean! A further criticism (perhaps not spelled out exactly in these terms, but certainly this was its meaning) maintained that the ad violated - again, for those reproachable commercial ends - a most important and sacred moment, the moment of birth. And here I think is a crucial point, a truth at the core of those scandalized reactions: in the concept of the sacred, and in the focus on birth. The reasons given for it may strike one as hypocritical, but the spontaneous recoiling in disgust was sincere. What that image signified was birth in its "improper" physical reality, showing its traces on the baby's body dirty of the con/fusion with the mother's body. Mucus, blood, the wet stickiness of the carnal threshold, con/fusion: elements which, in Kristeva's term, we could recognize as belonging to the category of the abject. Because they are secretions, because they are inscribed in a borderline area: between the outside and the inside of the body, between the undefined self and other of the pre-natal dyad. It was an indecent image which exposed a secret everybody knows, the secret of an event everybody has experienced. It was unheimlich, uncanny in its familiarity and in its bringing to conscious attention what was and should have remained buried in the unconscious. Building upon Freud's notion of the uncanny as taboo, and referring to anthropological research, especially Mary Douglas' on purity and contamination, Kristeva in Powers of Horror identifies abjection - "one of those violent, dark revolts of being" (Kristeva 1982: 1) - as the horror of not knowing the borders of the self, a primary uncanny originated in the fertility and generative power of the mother's body. Like abjection, pregnancy and the pre-natal period are borderline phenomena, they are a space-time of con/fusion, bodily co-existence (coincidence) of identities which it links in a vital and deadly relation, at the same time preparing their separation and distinction. Space-time which both confuses and produces one and another identity, questioning that subject/object demarcation on which the delusive stability of the self is founded. Forever threatened by the frailty of a boundary built on the originary void of loss and on the impossible refusal of corporeality, the subject experiences in the feeling of abjection the uncertainty of its identity; the risk - fear and desire - of falling back into that space-time where it grew, which it left in order to be. Rejected, repressed, expelled, yet inevitably present and forever to be kept at bay, the abject physically inhabits those areas of the body which will become erotogenic zones, in that tension and coincidence between attraction and revulsion which also - especially - marks the female/maternal body. Borderline, marginal areas; and, Mary Douglas reminds us, "all margins are dangerous. ~So that~ we should expect the orifices of the body to symbolyse its especially vulnerable points". Eyes, mouth, nose, anus, genitals. And their secretions, which "by simply issuing forth have traversed the boundary of the body" (Douglas 1966: 121). Tears, saliva, vomit, mucus, faeces, urina, sperm, menstrual blood. As though in "horrendous excremental drains" (Camporesi, 1991: 12), in counter-Reformation Catholic culture these bodily secretions characterize the post-Tridentine hell, obscene site of a promiscuous and chaotic carnality; a vision which lasts until the 19th century, as Pietro Camporesi shows in The Fear of Hell. Images of Damnation and Salvation in Early Modern Europe, where he explores and analyzes the figurations of hell in art and literature. Thus, in the "oafish underworld" of Belli's sonnets - he argues - this vision becomes "almost a Tartarean version of birth ex-putri" (Camporesi 1991: 12, 13), where the phantasma of the great collective body of humanity, the archaic belief in a fertile death, a pregnant death, the nursemaid of new life, the sense of continuity in death-life re-emerged. The hidden shadow of the one belonging to the many reappeared, as did the sense of a fatal, cyclical rotation, an uninterrupted pendulum between life and death, between decomposition and rebirth (Camporesi 1991: 13-14). Continuity is not a reason for hope, in the awareness of belonging to the cycle of being; on the contrary, it engenders horror for the corrupting, destructive confusion of the self, a condition of imperfect and improper not-being-anymore. Imperfect and improper like the not-yet-being of the pre-natal period, spent in the closed, red, pulsating space of the mother's womb: suffocation and protection, dreaded hell and longed for Nirvana which in this longing is inhabited by the death drive. The womb is a liminal space, which must necessarily be crossed to come into the world; as in a rite of passage, this limen is ambiguously connoted, it is not-life and not-death. Analysing the liminal phase of rites of passage, Victor Turner remarks that its symbolism draws upon both "the biology of death, decomposition, catabolism" and "processes of gestation and parturition" (Turner 1967: 96); thus the same symbols - huts and tunnels, for instance - signify both the maternal womb and the tomb. While stressing the positive value attributed by Turner to the transitional liminal phase as a field of open potentialities, Paola Cabibbo underlines this "coincidence of opposing processes and notions ~which~ characterizes the peculiar unity of liminality; it is neither this nor that, and yet it is both this and that" (Cabibbo 1993: 13). Or, to use Turner's own words again, the subjects of a rite of passage "are neither living nor dead from one aspect, and both living and dead from another. Their condition is one of ambiguity and paradox, a confusion of all the customary categories" (Turner 1967: 97). Ambiguity, confusion: abjection. But in a socially and culturally created rite of passage there is no return to the limen between the before and after of initiation, once the subject has been re-defined and re-demarcated in a new social and subjective space. Abjection, on the contrary, is the recurring, threatening sensation of an incurable instability of the self, it is the radical and repeated questioning of the integrity of the subject. It finds expression in the body, in the secretions which crossing its boundaries exceed it, in its hollows, crevices, orifices. Sites of expulsion and - for example in the case of food - of incorporation; borderline sites of horror and pleasure, of abjection. Kristeva writes: We may call it a border: abjection is above all ambiguity. Because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it - on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger. But also, abjection itself is a compromise of judgment and affect, of condemnation and yearning, of signs and drives. Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which the body becomes separated from another body in order to be - maintaining that night in which the outline of the signified vanishes and where only the imponderable affect is carried out (Kristeva 1982: 9-10). And she goes on to argue that the abject is the violence of mourning for an 'object' that has always already been lost. ~...~ It takes the ego back to its source on the abominable limits from which, in order to be, the ego has broken away - it assigns it a source in the non-ego, drive, and death (Kristeva 1982: 15). In the fear and desire of being overwhelmed by that lost body is a form of the feeling of abjection, which in many cultures is expressed and contained through rituals of purification. Rituals: because the abject borders upon - coincides with, says Kristeva - the sacred. With the interdictions against the danger of its contamination, the abject lays at the roots of the sacred. "As abjection - so the sacred" (Kristeva 1982: 19) is the title of a passage where she briefly looks at the modes of purification in religion, from so called primitive religions to Jewish monotheism to Christianity: exclusion and taboo, transgression, sin - then to suggest that in our culture the abject finds expression and containment in writing. "Outside of the sacred, the abject is written" - she maintains, talking of "the aesthetic task - a descent into the foundations of the symbolic construct - ~which~ amounts to retracing the fragile limits of the speaking being, closest to its dawn, to the bottomless 'primacy' constituted by primal repression" (Kristeva 1982: 18). Literature can thus be seen as an exploration of the abject; metaphorization of lack and fear so that the self can come to life again in signs (see Kristeva 1982: 38). In a century marked by the process of secularization, but also traversed by a renewed need of the sacred, writing becomes "a cache for suffering"; in the unbearable instability of the boundary between subject and object, "the narrative is what is challenged first"; its linearity is shattered up to the scream of a language which resembles violence and obscenity. The descents into hell of Céline's and Lispector's writing are the collapsing of narration into that crying-out theme which, coinciding "with the incandescent states of a boundary-subjectivity ~...~ called abjection", is according to Kristeva "the crying-out theme of suffering-horror" (Kristeva 1982: 140-41). In the journey towards the origins, where life and death meet, where the danger and pleasure of the loss of self are intertwined, in literature as well the feeling of abjection often becomes embodied in the female/maternal body. Already signified in religions and myths, revisited by psychoanalysis, the mother and the maternal are the privileged figure of the inextricable proximity of life and death at the centre of the symbolic construction.
5/10/17
0 - Deleuze Identity Politics K
Tournament: Winston Churchill | Round: Quarters | Opponent: North Crowley LR | Judge: Shree Deshpande, Michael Richardson, Brandi Russell The 1AC uses “identity politics” to shape identity based on stability, authenticity, solidarity, and victimization. This fails and perpetuates racial stereotypes Gilroy 00 Paul Professor of American and English Literature at King's College London, previously Giddens Professor of Social Theory at the London School of Economics (2005-2012), Charlotte Marian Saden Professor of African American Studies and Sociology at Yale (1999-2005) and Professor of Cultural Studies and Sociology at Goldsmiths College (1995-1999). US Journal of Blacks in Higher Education he has been consistently among the most frequently cited black scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line Page/s 101-115 Identity ceases to ... claims of otherness.22
A ballot based on identity can't 'fix' debate Gilbert Et Al 2008 (Jeremy Gilbert, Éric Alliez, Claire Colebrook, Peter Hallward, Nicholas Thoburn - all have PhDs and whatever; "Deleuzian Politics? A Roundtable Discussion"; New Formations) Claire: If you ... that is inbuilt.
Your coalitions argument is outdated Lenco 08 Peter Lenco Faculty of Sociology Bielefeld University Philosophy, Politics, Resistance Gilles Deleuze And Global Social Justice Presented At The Conference Social Movements And/In The Postcolonial: Dispossession, Developmentand Resistance In The Global South Nottingham University, UK June 24-5 2008 The problem at ... have difficulty accounting.
Turns case: identity politics is why performance debaters remain segregated into race, gender, sexuality, other camps. Van Eijk 08 (T.J.K., Masters candidate @ Utrech University Gender Studies dep, “Diversity Management and Otherness-Politics: Organising (with) Difference How a theoretical thinking about diversity can make a difference in addressing policies and actions” pg. 37 June 12) Identity politics, as ... same social category.
Alternative avoids the link; Identity is sticky. Saldanha 06 Arun Saldanha Department of Geography, University of Minnesota, edia Studies at the Free University of Brussels, Belgium I finished my PhD at the Open University in the U.K. Reontologising race: the machinic geography of phenotype Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2006, volume 24, pages 9 ^ 24 Online There is an ... from becoming actual.
1/17/17
0 - Edelman K
Tournament: Pflugerville TFA | Round: 2 | Opponent: x | Judge: y
We should use the academic setting to facilitate change, rather than roleplaying as policymakers we should take this chance to challenge the heteronormative structures that pervade the Academy.
Elias 2003 (John Elias, Professor at San Francisco University, Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 45, no. 2/3/4, p. 64, 2003) Akin to organized religion and the biomedical field, the educational system has been a major offender. Wedded to disseminating the idea that heterosexuality is the ultimate and best form of sexuality, "Schools have maintained, by social custom and with reinforcement from the law, the promotion of the heterosexual family as predominant, and therefore the essence of normal. From having been presumed to be ‘normal,’ heterosexual behavior has gained status as the right, good, and ideal lifestyle" (Leck, 1999, p. 259). School culture in general is fraught with heteronormativity. Our society has long viewed queer sexualities as ". . . deviant, sinful, or both, and our schools are populated by adolescent peers and adult educators who share these heterosexual values" (Ginsberg, 1999, p. 55). Simply put, heteronormativity and sexual prejudice pervade the curriculum at the elementary, secondary, and post-secondary levels (for examples of this and ways of intervening, see: Adams, Bell, and Griffin, 1997; Letts and Sears, 1999; Lovaas, Baroudi, and Collins, 2002; Yep, 2002). Besides the hegemonic hold schools have had regarding a heterosexual bias, school culture continues to devote much energy to maintaining ". . . the status quo of our dominant social institutions, which are hierarchical, authoritarian, and unequal, competitive, racist, sexist, and homophobic" (Arnstine, 1995, p. 183). While there has been modest success in addressing various forms of prejudice in schools (Kumashiro, 2001), what is sorely lacking is serious attention to how the intersections of race, class, sexuality and gender are interwoven and dialectically create prejudice (e.g., racism, classism, and hetero~sexism~). Schools would be an ideal site to interrogate, and begin to erode, the kind of hegemony upon which heterosexism rests and is supported. To date, not much is being done in a systematic fashion to disrupt the ways in which U.S. schooling has perpetuated such hierarchies. It seems to me that sexuality education is ripe for the opportunity to challenge heterosexism in school culture; however, public school-based sexuality education is presently in serious crisis, as it has turned mostly to the business of pushing for abstinence- only sexuality education. According to federal legislation, states that accept funding for this form of sexuality education require that young people are taught to abstain from sexual activity until they get married. This has numerous implications for relationship construction; a more in-depth description and analysis of this form of sexuality education will follow later in this essay.
Debate is education. This is a critical site to interrogate heterosexuality
Elia 03 Elia, Professor @ San Francisco University, 2003. (John, Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 45, no. 2/3/4, p. 64, JCE) Akin to organized religion and the biomedical field, the educational system has been a major offender. Wedded to disseminating the idea that heterosexuality is the ultimate and best form of sexuality, "Schools have maintained, by social custom and with reinforcement from the law, the promotion of the heterosexual family as predominant, and therefore the essence of normal. From having been presumed to be ‘normal,’ heterosexual behavior has gained status as the right, good, and ideal lifestyle" (Leck, 1999, p. 259). School culture in general is fraught with heteronormativity. Our society has long viewed queer sexualities as ". . . deviant, sinful, or both, and our schools are populated by adolescent peers and adult educators who share these heterosexual values" (Ginsberg, 1999, p. 55). Simply put, heteronormativity and sexual prejudice pervade the curriculum at the elementary, secondary, and post-secondary levels (for examples of this and ways of intervening, see: Adams, Bell, and Griffin, 1997; Letts and Sears, 1999; Lovaas, Baroudi, and Collins, 2002; Yep, 2002). Besides the hegemonic hold schools have had regarding a heterosexual bias, school culture continues to devote much energy to maintaining ". . . the status quo of our dominant social institutions, which are hierarchical, authoritarian, and unequal, competitive, racist, sexist, and homophobic" (Arnstine, 1995, p. 183). While there has been modest success in addressing various forms of prejudice in schools (Kumashiro, 2001), what is sorely lacking is serious attention to how the intersections of race, class, sexuality and gender are interwoven and dialectically create prejudice (e.g., racism, classism, and hetero~sexism~). Schools would be an ideal site to interrogate, and begin to erode, the kind of hegemony upon which heterosexism rests and is supported. To date, not much is being done in a systematic fashion to disrupt the ways in which U.S. schooling has perpetuated such hierarchies. It seems to me that sexuality education is ripe for the opportunity to challenge heterosexism in school culture; however, public school-based sexuality education is presently in serious crisis, as it has turned mostly to the business of pushing for abstinence- only sexuality education. According to federal legislation, states that accept funding for this form of sexuality education require that young people are taught to abstain from sexual activity until they get married. This has numerous implications for relationship construction; a more in-depth description and analysis of this form of sexuality education will follow later in this essay.
K story
The entirety of the aff is predicated on solving and saving lives – i.e. stopping extinction, and any body count under util calculus – and while these are noble feats the obsession with ending death adheres to the futurist agenda of the squo. Futurism, using the idea to save lives and fear the death drives, only furthers the obsession with heteronormative reproduction and marginalized queer sex.
Notions of preserving some sort of future for our species valorize reproductive, heterogenital sex, while subordinating queer sex to nothing more than "meaningless acrobatics." This impregnates heterosexuality with the future of signification, necessitating violence against queerness.
Edelman 2004 (Lee Edelman, Prof. English at Tufts University, "No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive," 2004, pp. 11-13) Charged, after all, with the task of assuring "that we being dead yet live," the Child, as if by nature (more precisely, as the promise of a natural transcendence of the limits of nature itself), excludes the very pathos from which the narrator of The Children of Men recoils when comes upon the –nonreproductive "pleasures of the mind and senses." For the "pathetic" quality he projectively locates in nongenerative sexual enjoyment – enjoyment that he views in the absence of futurity as empty, substitutive, pathological – exposes the fetishistic figurations of the Child that the narrator pits against it as legible in terms of identical to those for which enjoyment without "hope of posterity" so peremptorily dismissed" legible, that is, as nothing more than "pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruins." How better to characterize the narrative project of Children of Men itself, which ends, as anyone not born yesterday surely expects form the start, with the renewal of our barren and dying race through the miracle of birth? After all, as Walter Wangerin Jr., reviewing the book for the New York Times, approvingly noted in a sentence delicately poised between description and performance of the novel’s pro-creative ideology: "If there is a baby, there is a future, there is redemption." If, however, there is no baby and in consequence, no future, then the blame must fall on the fatal lure of sterile, narcissistic enjoyments understood as inherently destructive of meaning and therefore as responsible for the undoing of social organization, collective reality, and, inevitably, life itself. Given that the author of The Children of Men, like the parents of mankind’s children, succumbs so completely to the narcissism – all pervasive, self-congratulatory, and strategically misrecognized – that animates pronatalism, why should we be the least bit surprised when her narrator, facing the futureless future, laments, with what we must call as straight face, that "sex totally divorced from procreation has to become almost meaninglessly acrobatic"? Which is, of course, to say no more than that sexual practice will continue to allegorize the vicissitudes of meaning so long as the specifically heterosexual alibi of reproductive necessity obscures the drive beyond meaning driving the machinery of sexual meaningfulness: so long, that is, as the biological fact of heterosexual procreation bestows the imprimatur of meaning-production on heterogenital relations. For the Child, whose mere possibility is enough to spirit away the naked truth of heterosexual sex – impregnating heterosexuality, as it were, with the future of signification by conferring upon it the cultural burden of signifying futurity – figures our identification with an always about-to-be-realized identity. It thus denies the constant threat to the social order of meaning inherent to the structure of Symbolic desire that commits us to pursuing fulfillment by way of a meaning unable, as meaning, either to fulfill us or, in turn, to be fulfilled because unable to close the gap in identity, the division incised by the signifier, that "meaning," despite itself.
The rhetoric of "survival" or "fighting against the future" implicitly valorizes the Child and subsequently reproductive sex. This kind of heteronormative discourse constructs a temporal operation to which queerness is inherently antagonistic.
Lippert 08 Lippert - University Assistant in American Studies @ the University of Vienna – 2008 (Leopold, Utopian Contemporaries: Queer Temporality and America, thesis, November. ~PDF Online @~ othes.univie.ac.at/2818/1/2008-11-26'0303723.pdf) Accessed 07.02.11 jfs Edelman opens his book with what he modestly terms "a simple provocation" (Future, 3), and what encapsulates the futility of an affirmative and assimilationist queer politics. He argues "that queerness names ~...~ the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism" (Future, 3), and reveals the implicitly homophobic discourse of all the Obamas and O’Sullivans who are fighting for the future of our children and our grandchildren. The futurist bias towards heteronormativity has been fueled, as Judith Butler points out, by "fears about reproductive relations" ("Kinship", 21), by uncanny anxieties over the prospect that queer citizenship may interfere with a nation "imagined for fetuses and children" (Berlant, Queen, 1), and by the fundamental antithesis that the queer and the child embody. The principal concern of futurist America, then, is the fate of its offspring, expressed in a fearful inquiry: "What happens to the child, the child, the poor child, the martyred figure of an ostensibly selfish or dogged social progressivism?" (Butler, "Kinship", 21). Edelman recognizes that the mythical child – is the epitome of a heteronormative future-oriented social – can only be saved by a "marriage of identity to futurity in order to realize the social subject" (Future, 14), which leads him to the ensuing claim that only the linear temporal process of "ever aftering" ("After", 476, emphasis in the original) can keep "society alive" ("After", 476). Heteronormative America, accordingly, is constituted through its own posterity, through a temporal operation to which queerness is inherently antagonistic. In an imagined community that relies on futurism as its life-giving engine, then, "the queer comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance, internal to the social, to every social structure or form" (Edelman, Future, 4).
Heteronormativity instills a fundamental fear of impurity in society; this amplifies systemic violence against queerness and places our species on a trajectory towards omnicide.
Sedwick 1990 (Eve Sedgwick, Professor of English CUNY, "Epistemology of the Closet," 1990, pp. 127-130.) From at least the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorray, scenarios of same-sex desire would seem to have had a privileged, though by no means an exclusive, relation in Western culture to scenarios of both genocide and omnicide. That sodomy, the name by which homosexual acts are known even today to the law of half of the United States and to the Supreme Court of all of them, should already be inscribed with the name of a site of mass extermination is the appropriate trace of a double history. In the first place there is a history of the mortal suppression, legal or subjudicial, of gay acts and gay people, through burning, hounding, physical and chemical castration, concentration camps, bashing—the array of sanctioned fatalities that Louis Crompton records under the name of gay genocide, and whose supposed eugenic motive becomes only the more colorable with the emergence of a distinct, naturalized minority identity in the nineteenth century. In the second place, though, there is the inveterate topos of associating gay acts or
Alt
Vote negative as an act of flourishing via traversing material conditions are the only imaginable way to transgress our constant desire of filling the Lack — allowances of ambivalence and risk allow for us to move through desire-filled states and into a world of pure pleasure
Berlant and Edelman 14 (Lee, Professor of English at Tufts, Laura, Professor of English at the University of Chicago, "Sex, or the Unbearable," pg 10-12 shr) I never suggested that flourishing involves a "simple" self- evidence in happiness that demands a detachment from "the bad life": flourishing involves traversing material conditions and then the affective sense of thriving, which is something different from and often incoherently bound to scenes and modes of living. This is why the materially "good life" might not be accompanied by a sense that life is good, why "good sex" might not be something one would want to repeat: without allowing for ambivalence, there is no flour- ishing. It therefore entails a complex navigation of life and noise, and the will to achieve it calls for practices and tendencies beyond mere accommodation to the world’s and our own negativity. Like- wise it isn’t quite right to call psychoanalytic processes "structure" in contrast to the rule of misrule that marks ongoing modes of social domination: both domains of repetition structure, in that they are scenes in which subjects and scenes assume forms that have pre- dictable, not determined, impacts. Structure is a process, not an imprint, of the reproduction of life.¶ De-antinomizing structure and the everyday, for example, one no longer has to see sex only as expressing a relation of power, or someone’s singular pleasures, or the shattering activity of the drives. We wouldn’t have needed Rubin to help us calm down and think about sex, and to think about affirming what’s threatening about it either, if we did not need to figure out how sex reproduces normativity while predictably disorganizing assurance about why we want what we want and what our variety of attachments mean; at the same time, not quite knowing ourselves, we demand all sorts of things on behalf of the appetites, such as the right to anonymity, ag- gression, acknowledgment, pleasure, relief, protection, and, often, repair. Fantasy, formally speaking, is not what glosses over this craziness but that which makes it possible to move within it— sometimes in the blindingly glossy sense of optimism Lee proposes but more formally in the sense its setting provides that ambivalent, incoherent, proximate forces can be moved, moved through, and with. These processes of exposure to power, norm, and desire are structuring in their very variety and variation. As I wrote recently in an essay about the work of Leo Bersani and David Halperin, "When in a romance someone has sex and then says to the lover, ‘You make me feel safe,’ we understand that she means that there’s been an emotional compensation to neutralize how unsafe and close to the abject sex makes her feel. ‘You make me feel safe’ means that I can relax and have fun where I am also not safe, where I am too close to the ridiculous, the disgusting, the merely weird, or—simply too close to having a desire. But some situations are riskier than others, as the meanings of unsafe sex change according to who’s having the sex" (Berlant 2009, 266). That’s where the politics comes in.¶ So when I say that I want to dedramatize our conceptual and em- bodied encounters with sex, I don’t mean that I want to live in the pastoral sex world of Shortbus (Mitchell 2006), cruising like a happy puppy sniffing around a sea of interesting crotches. To some degree Lee is right that my stance is a way of making peace with misrecog- nition. Making peace with it, it seems to me—being a realist of sorts as well—gives us a shot at displacing sex from its normative func- tion as the mechanism of emotional cohesion that sustains aggres- sive heteronormativity. But also, since misrecognition is inevitable, since the fantasmatic projection onto objects of desire that crack you open and give you back to yourself in a way about which you might feel many ways will always happen in any circuit of reciprocity with the world, why fight it? The question is where we move the dramatics of projection, what we can make available for changing their imaginary shape and consequence. I take cues from Lacan and Cavell to see sex as part of a comedy of misrecognition at the same time as it also can be a tragic drama of inflation and deflation. But "comedy" is a technical term here; it does not point to what’s funny or what feels good. Comedy stages explosive and implosive prob- lems of adjustment that are fundamentally affective and political— and survivable, if not affectively too bearable, even beyond the limit.
The Ballot is a performative act – the ballot is a discourse exercising binding power. Every ballot matter – repetition is what confers power on the performative act.
Butler 93 Butler, noted for her studies on gender and teaches composition and rhetoric at Berkeley, 93 (Dr. Judith, ‘Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex’) pp. 225 LRP Performative acts are forms of authoritative speech: most performatives, for instance, are statements that, in the uttering, also perform a certain action and exercise a binding power.4 Implicated in a network of authorization and punishment, performatives tend to include legal sentences, baptisms, inaugurations, declarations of ownership, statements which not only perform an action, but confer a binding power on the action performed. If the power of discourse to produce that which it names is linked with the question of performativity, then the performative is one domain in which power acts as discourse. Importantly, however, there is no power, construed as a subject, that acts, but only, to repeat an earlier phrase, a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence and instability. This is less an "act," singular and deliberate, than a nexus of power and discourse that repeats or mimes the discursive gestures of power. Hence, the judge who authorizes and installs the situation he names invariably cites the law that he applies, and it is the power of this citation that gives the performative its binding or conferring power. And though it may appear that the binding power of his words is derived from the force of his will or from a prior authority, the opposite is more true: it is through the citation of the law that the figure of the judge's "will" is produced and that the "priority" of textual authority is established. Indeed, it is through the invocation of convention that the speech act of the judge derives its binding power; that binding power is to be found neither in the subject of the judge nor in his will, but in the citational legacy by which a contemporary "act" emerges in the context of a chain of binding convention.
5/10/17
0 - Fem State Pic
Tournament: Holy Cross | Round: 4 | Opponent: na | Judge: na
Institutions operate in hyper-masculine ways in order to further patriarchal control – We must reorient our political rhetoric in order to disrupt this system
Clark, Esteemed author of feminist studies, 04 ( Mary E., Fall 2004, Women and Language, "Rhetoric, Patriarchy and War: Explaining the Dangers of "Leadership" in Mass Culture", Pg. 21-28, ProQuest Research Library, 7/7/14, CH) I begin by questioning the notion that patriarchy is a "natural" or "inevitable" form of human society. By "patriarchy" I do not mean a community or society where males hold political positions as spokespersons for the whole and often are adjudicators of local disputes. This "male function" is common in tribal and indigenous societies. But men's power over others is severely limited and generally held only at the pleasure of the entire group, especially the elder women.' Patriarchies, rather, are those much larger societies where not only is there gender dominance; they also are highly class-structured, with a small, powerful elite controlling the rest of society. A short history of these entities is necessary to understand today's dilemma. Rigidly controlled patriarchies have evolved and disintegrated at many times and in many places in the past few millennia of human existence—which, being the era of written history, is the condition of humankind most familiar to us. But, as I have argued elsewhere5 this was an unknown political condition throughout earlier human existence, when small, egalitarian, highly dialogic communities prevailed. Even today, small remnants of such societies still exist in corners of the planet that escaped the socially destructive impact of Western colonization. Modern Western "democracies" arc, in fact, patriarchal in structure, evolving out of the old, male-dominated aristocracies of late-Medieval Europe. Those historic class/caste hierarchies were legitimized by embedded religious dogma and inherited royal authority. Together, church and monarch held a monopoly of physical and economic power, creating politically stable, albeit unjust, societies. During the gradual development of the religious Reformation, coupled with the Enlightenment's concept of the "individual citizen," emerging egalitarian ideas threatened to destabilize the social coherence of patriarchal regimes. At the same time, principalities and dukedoms were fusing into kingdoms; kingdoms, in turn, were joining together as giant nation states. The United Kingdom was formed of England, Wales and Scotland—each a fusion of local earlier dukedoms. City States of Italy fused rather later. Bismarck created the "Second Reich" out of diverse German-speaking princedoms in the 1870s. And, adding to this growth in the sheer size of patriarchies there was a doubling of populations every couple of generations. Nation-states emerged as "mass cultures," with literally millions of persons under the control of a single, powerful government. The centralized physical power possessed by most of these several industrializing European nations matched or exceeded that of ancient Rome. To achieve coherence of such societies demanded a new legitimating force to create a broad base of support among giant, diverse populations. The erosion of the belief that classes were a god-given, "natural" state of affairs was hastened by the introduction of low-cost printing and rapidly growing levels of literacy (both necessary to underpin the new Industrial Age). These politically equalizing forces unleashed a host of social discontents that had to be controlled. The old religious threats of damnation or excommunication were fast losing their force, and new legal systems circumscribed the absolute powers of monarchs to control social behavior. This very cacaphony of voices threatened the stability of the new giant states. The "solution," of course, was to take control of the public dialogue, to define the legitimate "topics of conversation." This is the primary role of political "leadership" in today's mass societies, and that leadership uses two major tools to wield its influence: rhetoric and the mass media.
Using the state as an actor excludes the feminine
Tickner, prof @ USC, 01 (Ann, 2001, "Gendering World Politics", p. 2, 7/8/14, CM) The title of this introduction, "Gendering World Politics," both reflects some of these changes and conceptualizes a worldview into which feminist approaches fit more comfortably. While international relations has never been just about relations between states, an IR statist focus seems even less justified today than in the past. International politics cannot be restricted to politics between states; politics is involved in relationships between inter- national organizations, social movements and other nonstate actors, trans- national corporations and international finance, and human-rights organizations, to name a few. Decrying the narrowness of Cold War IR, Ken Booth has suggested that the subject should be informed by what he calls a "global moral science" that entails systematic enquiry into how humans might live together locally and globally in ways that promote individual and collective emancipation in harmony with nature. He goes on to suggest that the state, the traditional frame for IR, "might be seen as the problem of world politics, not the solution."3 Since women have been on the peripheries of power in most states, this broad conception of world politics seems the most fitting disciplinary defi- nition in which to frame feminist approaches. Theirinvestigationsofpolitics from the micro to the global level and from the personal totheinternational, as well as their analyses as to how macro structures affect local groups and individuals, draw on a broad definition of the political. Using explicitly nor- mative analysis, certain feminists have drawn attention to the injustices of hierarchical social relations and the effects they have on human beings’ life chances. Feminists have never been satisfied with the boundary constraints of conventional IR.4 While women have always been playersininternational politics, often their voices have not been heard either in policy arenas or in the discipline that analyzes them.
Affirm the 1ac rhetorical strategy but reject the plan – refusing the temptation to support patriarchal state thought thought opens up space to recognize the brutality beneath the patriarchal underpinnings of the state
It’s vital that you refuse all reasonable value to their normative legal project – allowing them case leverage is the most effective means of deflecting critical interrogation of normative legal thought
SCHLAG 91| PIERRE, "Symposium THE CRITIQUE OF NORMATIVITY ARTICLES NORMATIVITY AND THE POLITICS OF FORM" (http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3741andcontext=penn'law'review) A.B. It is apparent that virtually all aspects of normative legal thought are suited to the rhetorical reproduction and maintenance of the sovereign individual subject. As Charles Fried put it, "~b~efore there is morality there must be the person. We must attain and maintain in our morality a concept of personality such that it makes sense to posit choosing, valuing entities — free, moral beings." n259 This insistence of normative legal thought on the importance of a morally competent, normative subject is quite consonant with the rhetorical construction of the legal thinker as a sovereign individual subject. Indeed, this rationalist rhetorical construction is at once a prefigurement and the entailment of what Fried calls "choosing, valuing entities — free moral beings." The normative enterprise of norm-selection and norm-justification, with their emphases on choice orientation, value orientation, and prescription, is keenly suited to keeping the sovereign individual subject in the driver's seat. Likewise, the single-norm, conclusion-oriented character of legal thought, with its FIXATION ON END-PRODUCTS and its requirements that these end products be non-paradoxical, non-contradictory, complete, self-sufficient, discrete, separable, and transsituational, is conducive to deflecting any serious interrogation of either the rhetorical practices, forms, or processes that constitute the sovereign individual subject or his rhetorical enterprise: Hence, we are drawn toward the meticulous dissection and examination of what the legal subject has produced and whether these END-PRODUCTS have been produced in the right (non-contradictory, non-paradoxical, linear, authority-driven) way. And in turn, this orientation draws attention away from the legal subject who is producing all this stuff in the first place. n260 The action-deferring and reader-centered character of normative legal thought likewise ensure that no serious challenge is posed to the identity or character of the sovereign individual subject. The ~*901~ texts of normative legal thought are supposed to have their effect by appealing to the choice and the intellectual faculties of the reader. The texts are supposed to honor the reader's already preformed views, ideas, prejudices, and aesthetic representations of social and political life. There is to be no overt disabling or subversion of her identity or role. For instance, within the rationalist rhetoric of contemporary legal thought, it is permissible to write articles about Derridean deconstruction of legal thought — but to actually practice Derridean deconstruction will simply evoke resistance, misunderstanding, and incomprehension. The expectation is that any author will, of course, explain and justify any significant departure from the default positions and will refrain from any rhetorical exercise that might actually require active change on the part of the reader. Finally, the adversarial advocacy orientation of normative legal thought — which is attributable, at least in part, to the conflation of the role of lawyer and legal academic — does much to insulate the sovereign individual subject and its rhetorical supports from scrutiny. Because so many legal academics understand their legal thought to be positional in character — on behalf of some (intangible, often very worthy but poorly identified) client-surrogate, much of legal thought is produced within the explicit context of adversarial advocacy among academics and is devoted to advancing or defeating this or that position. Many normative legal thinkers understand themselves to be engaged in "passionate advocacy" on behalf of some cause. Now admittedly, there is no tribunal listening; no one is empowered to put all this normative passion into effect. But this does not mean that this passionate advocacy is therefore without effect: on the contrary, it often succeeds in BRACKETING ANY SERIOUS QUESTIONING of the rhetorical systems that enables such aimless passionate advocacy to be produced in the first place. Indeed, when one is engaged in passionate arguments to an imagined tribunal, the last thing one will do is question the argumentative structures that allow the arguments to be framed and presented in the first place. Not only does normative legal thought conduce to the maintenance of the sovereign individual subject and his rationalist rhetoric, but one can see the reverse process at work as well. Indeed, if normative thought occupies so much attention in the legal academy; if normative legal thought seems like the obvious, the "natural" thing to do; if the "what should we do?/what should the law be?" question seems so legitimate, so important; and if normative legal thought seems veritably like law itself, it is because the rhetorical ~*902~ situation — the default settings — have already enabled us, constituted our discourse, and configured our roles so that we will produce normative legal thought.
5/10/17
0 - Queerpess State K
Tournament: unknown | Round: 2 | Opponent: na | Judge: na
They think that countries can ever do something in the interest of queer bodies, but the state is always anti-queer. The aff’s faith in legal reforms makes violence inevitable inevitable because the world is founded on the abuse and domination over queer bodies
The Mary Nardini gang 2009 (criminal queers from Milwaukee, Wisconsin "toward the queerest insurrection" 2009) A fag is bashed because his gender presentation is far too femme. A poor transman can’t afford his life-saving hormones. A sex worker is murdered by their client. A genderqueer persyn is raped because ze just needed to be "fucked straight". Four black lesbians are sent to prison for daring to defend themselves against a straight-male attacker.1 Cops beat us on the streets and our bodies are being destroyed by pharmaceutical companies because we can’t give them a dime. Queers experience, directly with our bodies, the violence and domination of this world. Class, Race, Gender, Sexuality, Ability; while often these interrelated and overlapping categories of oppression are lost to abstraction, queers are forced to physically understand each. We’ve had our bodies and desires stolen from us, mutilated and sold back to us as a model of living we can never embody. 1 Free the New Jersey 4. And let’s free everyone else while we’re at it. Foucault says that "power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the processes which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies." We experience the complexity of domination and social control amplified through heterosexuality. When police kill us, we want them dead in turn. When prisons entrap our bodies and rape us because our genders aren’t similarly contained, of course we want fire to them all. When borders are erected to construct a national identity absent of people of color and queers, we see only one solution: every nation and border reduced to rubble. VII The perspective of queers within the heteronormative world is a lens through which we can critique and attack the apparatus of capitalism. We can analyze the ways in which Medicine, the Prison System, the Church, the State, Marriage, the Media, Borders, the Military and Police are used to control and destroy us. More importantly, we can use these cases to articulate a cohesive criticism of every way that we are alienated and dominated. Queer is a position from which to attack the normative - more, a position from which to understand and attack the ways in which normal is reproduced and reiterated. In destabilizing and problematizing normalcy, we can destabilize and become a problem for the Totality.
The political will fail – moving within the state causes a sense of pacification where the left believes they have done good while still upholding the existing inequalities—turns case
Mieli 80 (Mario Mieli, leader in the Italian gay movement, "Towards a gay communism" 1980, https://libcom.org/library/gay-communism-mario-mieli, MMV) I believe that homosexuals are revolutionary today in as much as we have overcome politics. The revolution for which we are fighting is among other things the negation of all male supremacist political rackets (based among other things on sublimated homosexuality), since it is the negation and overcoming of capital and its politics, which find their way into all groups of the left, sustaining them and making them counter-revolutionary. My arsehole doesn't want to be political, it is not for sale to any racket of the left in exchange for a bit of putrid opportunist political 'protection'. While the arseholes of the 'comrades' in the groups will be revolutionary only when they have managed to enjoy them with others, and when they have stopped covering their behinds with the ideology of tolerance for the queers. As long as they hide behind the shield of politics, the heterosexual 'comrades' will not know what is hidden within their own thighs. As always, it is only rather belatedly, in the wake of the 'enlightened' bourgeoisie, that the left-wing groups have begun to play the game of capitalist tolerance. From declared hangmen, and a thousand times more repugnant than the hustlers and fascists, given all their (ideological) declarations of revolution, the activists of these groups have transformed themselves into 'open' debaters with homosexuals. They fantasise about becoming well-meaning and tolerant protectors of the 'deviant', in this way gratifying their own virile image, already far too much on the decline, at a time when even the ultra-left have suddenly to improvise 'feminist' representatives for 'their' women. Moreover, the fantasy of protectors helps them to exorcise the problem of the repression of their own homoerotic desire. Under it all, the activists of the left always hope to become good policemen. They do not know that real policemen get in there more than they do, and that when this happens, they make love precisely with us gays. When will there be a free homosexual outlet for the activists of the ultra-left ?
Their constructions force the queer body into endless violence and exclusion through exile
Mary Nardini gang 2009 (criminal queers from Milwaukee, Wisconsin "toward the queerest insurrection" 2009) In the discourse of queer, we are talking about a space of struggle against this totality - against normalcy. By "queer", we mean "social war". And when we speak of queer as a conflict with all domination, we mean it. V See, we’ve always been the other, the alien, the criminal. The story of queers in this civilization has always been the narrative of the sexual deviant, the constitutional psychopathic inferior, the traitor, the freak, the moral imbecile. We’ve been excluded at the border, from labor, from familial ties. We’ve been forced into concentration camps, into sex slavery, into prisons. The normal, the straight, the american family has always constructed itself in opposition to the queer. Straight is not queer. White is not of color. Healthy does not have HIV. Man is not woman. The discourses of heterosexuality, whiteness and capitalism reproduce themselves into a model of power. For the rest of us, there is death. In his work, Jean Genet1 asserts that the life of a queer, is one of exile - that all of the totality of this world is constructed to marginalize and exploit us. He posits the queer as the criminal. He glorifies homosexuality2 and criminality as the most beautiful and lovely forms of conflict with the bourgeois world. He writes of the secret worlds of rebellion and joy inhabited by criminals and queers. Quoth Genet, "Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. Nothing in the world was irrelevant: the stars on a general’s sleeve. the stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flower-beds. Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details were all inter-related, had a meaning: my exile."
Vote negative to position the AC as a site of failure as a radical means of rejecting normative notions of success and productivity
Halberstam 11. J. J. Jack Halberstam, professor of English at the University of Southern California, The Queer Art of Failure, pg. 2 In this book I range from children’s animation to avant-garde performance and queer art to think about ways of being and knowing that stand outside of conventional understandings of success. I argue that success in a heteronormative, capitalist society equates too easily to specific forms of reproductive maturity combined with wealth accumulation. But these measures of success have come under serious pressure recently, with the collapse of financial markets on the one hand and the epic rise in divorce rates on the other. If the boom and bust years of the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first have taught us anything, we should at least have a healthy critique of static models of success and failure. Rather than just arguing for a reevaluation of these standards of passing and failing, The Queer Art of Failure dismantles the logics of success and failure with which we currently live. Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world. Failing is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well; for queers failure can be a style, to cite Quentin Crisp, or a way of life, to cite Foucault, and it can stand in contrast to the grim scenarios of success that depend upon "trying and trying again." In fact if success requires so much effort, then maybe failure is easier in the long run and offers different rewards. What kinds of reward can failure offer us? Perhaps most obviously, failure allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhoods to orderly and predictable adulthoods. Failure preserves some of the wondrous anarchy of childhood and disturbs the supposedly clean boundaries between adults and children, winners and losers. And while failure certainly comes accompanied by a host of negative affects, such as disappointment, disillusionment, and despair, it also provides the opportunity to use these negative affects to poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life. As Barbara Ehrenreich reminds us in Bright- sided, positive thinking is a North American affliction, "a mass delusion" that emerges out of a combination of American exceptionalism and a desire to believe that success happens to good people and failure is just a consequence of a bad attitude rather than structural conditions (2009: 13). Positive thinking is offered up in the U.S. as a cure for cancer, a path to untold riches, and a surefire way to engineer your own success. Indeed believing that success depends upon one’s attitude is far preferable to Americans than recognizing that their success is the outcome of the tilted scales of race, class, and gender. As Ehrenreich puts it, "If optimism is the key to material success, and if you can achieve an optimistic outlook through the discipline of positive thinking, then there is no excuse for failure." But, she continues, "the flip side of positivity is thus a harsh insistence on personal responsibility," meaning that while capitalism produces some people’s success through other people’s failures, the ideology of positive thinking insists that success depends only upon working hard and failure is always of your own doing (8). We know better of course in an age when the banks that ripped off ordinary people have been deemed "too big to fail" and the people who bought bad mortgages are simply too little to care about. In Bright-sided Ehrenreich uses the example of American women’s application of positive thinking to breast cancer to demonstrate how -dangerous the belief in optimism can be and how deeply Americans want to believe that health is a matter of attitude rather than environmental degradation and that wealth is a matter of visualizing success rather than having the cards stacked in your favor. For the nonbelievers outside the cult of positive thinking, however, the failures and losers, the grouchy, irritable whiners who do not want to "have a nice day" and who do not believe that getting cancer has made them better people, politics offers a better explanatory framework than personal disposition. For these negative thinkers, there are definite advantages to failing. Relieved of the obligation to keep smiling through chemotherapy or bankruptcy, the negative thinker can use the experience of failure to confront the gross inequalities of everyday life in the United States. From the perspective of feminism, failure has often been a better bet than success. Where feminine success is always measured by male standards, and gender failure often means being relieved of the pressure to measure up to patriarchal ideals, not succeeding at womanhood can offer unexpected pleasures. In many ways this has been the message of many renegade feminists in the past. Monique Wittig (1992) argued in the 1970s that if womanhood depends upon a heterosexual framework, then lesbians are not "women," and if lesbians are not "women," then they fall outside of patriarchal norms and can re-create some of the meaning of their genders. Also in the 1970s Valerie Solanas suggested that if "woman" takes on meaning only in relation to "man," then we need to "cut up men" (2004: 72). Perhaps that is a little drastic, but at any rate these kinds of feminisms, what I call shadow feminisms in chapter 5, have long haunted the more acceptable forms of feminism that are oriented to positivity, reform, and accommodation rather than negativity, rejection, and transformation. Shadow feminisms take the form not of becoming, being, and doing but of shady, murky modes of undoing, un- becoming, and violating.
Failure is a viable strategy and an artform of its own
Halberstam 11. J. J. Judith Halberstam, professor of English at the University of Southern California, The Queer Art of Failure, pg. 5 Illegibility, then, has been and remains, a reliable source for political autonomy. —James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State Any book that begins with a quote from SpongeBob SquarePants and is motored by wisdom gleaned from Fantastic Mr. Fox, Chicken Run, and Finding Nemo, among other animated guides to life, runs the risk of not being taken seriously. Yet this is my goal. Being taken seriously means missing out on the chance to be frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant. The desire to be taken seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the tried and true paths of knowledge production around which I would like to map a few detours. Indeed terms like serious and rigorous tend to be code words, in academia as well as other contexts, for disciplinary correctness; they signal a form of training and learning that confirms what is already known according to approved methods of knowing, but they do not allow for visionary insights or flights of fancy. Training of any kind, in fact, is a way of refusing a kind of Benjaminian relation to knowing, a stroll down uncharted streets in the "wrong" direction (Benjamin 1996); it is precisely about staying in well-lit territories and about knowing exactly which way to go before you set out. Like many others before me, I propose that instead the goal is to lose one’s way, and indeed to be prepared to lose more than one’s way. Losing, we may agree with Elizabeth Bishop, is an art, and one "that is not too hard to master / Though it may look like a disaster" (2008: 166–167). In the sciences, particularly physics and mathematics, there are many examples of rogue intellectuals, not all of whom are reclusive Unabomber types (although more than a few are just that), who wander off into uncharted territories and refuse the academy because the publish-or-perish pressure of academic life keeps them tethered to conventional knowledge production and its well-traveled byways. Popular mathematics books, for example, revel in stories about unconventional loners who are self- schooled and who make their own way through the world of numbers. For some kooky minds, disciplines actually get in the way of answers and theorems precisely because they offer maps of thought where intuition and blind ~unscripted~ fumbling might yield better results. In 2008, for example, The New Yorker featured a story about an oddball physicist who, like many ambitious physicists and mathematicians, was in hot pursuit of a grand theory, a "theory of everything." This thinker, Garrett Lisi, had dropped out of academic physics because string theory dominated the field at that time and he thought the answers lay elsewhere. As an outsider to the discipline, writes Benjamin Wallace-Wells, Lisi "built his theory as an outsider might, relying on a grab bag of component parts: a hand-built mathematical structure, an unconventional way of describing gravity, and a mysterious mathematical entity known as E8."1 In the end Lisi’s "theory of everything" fell short of expectations, but it nonetheless yielded a whole terrain of new questions and methods. Similarly the computer scientists who pioneered new programs to produce computer-generated imagery (CGI), as many accounts of the rise of Pixar have chronicled, were academic rejects or dropouts who created independent institutes in order to explore their dreams of animated worlds.2 These alternative cultural and academic realms, the areas beside academia rather than within it, the intellectual worlds conjured by losers, failures, dropouts, and refuseniks, often serve as the launching pad for alternatives precisely when the university cannot. This is not a bad time to experiment with disciplinary transformation on behalf of the project of generating new forms of knowing, since the fields that were assembled over one hundred years ago to respond to new market economies and the demand for narrow expertise, as Foucault de- scribed them, are now losing relevance and failing to respond either to real-world knowledge projects or student interests. As the big disciplines begin to crumble like banks that have invested in bad securities we might ask more broadly, Do we really want to shore up the ragged boundaries of our shared interests and intellectual commitments, or might we rather take this opportunity to rethink the project of learning and thinking altogether? Just as the standardized tests that the U.S. favors as a guide to intellectual advancement in high schools tend to identify people who are good at standardized exams (as opposed to, say, intellectual visionaries), so in universities grades, exams, and knowledge of canons identify scholars with an aptitude for maintaining and conforming to the dictates of the discipline. This book, a stroll out of the confines of conventional knowledge and into the unregulated territories of failure, loss, and unbecoming, must make a long detour around disciplines and ordinary ways of thinking. Let me explain how universities (and by implication high schools) squash rather than promote quirky and original thought. Disciplinarity, as de- fined by Foucault (1995), is a technique of modern power: it depends upon and deploys normalization, routines, convention, tradition, and regularity, and it produces experts and administrative forms of governance. The university structure that houses the disciplines and jealously guards their boundaries now stands at a crossroads, not of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, past and future, national and transnational; the crossroads at which the rapidly disintegrating bandwagon of disciplines, subfields, and interdisciplines has arrived offer a choice between the university as corporation and investment opportunity and the university as a new kind of public sphere with a different investment in knowledge, in ideas, and in thought and politics. A radical take on disciplinarity and the university that presumes both the breakdown of the disciplines and the closing of gaps between fields conventionally presumed to be separated can be found in a manifesto published by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney in 2004 in Social Text titled "The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses." Their essay is a searing critique directed at the intellectual and the critical intellectual, the professional scholar and the "critical academic professionals." For Moten and Harney, the critical academic is not the answer to encroaching professionalization but an extension of it, using the very same tools and legitimating strategies to become "an ally of professional education." Moten and Harney prefer to pitch their tent with the "subversive intellectuals," a maroon community of outcast thinkers who refuse, resist, and renege on the demands of "rigor," "excellence," and "productivity." They tell us to "steal from the university," to "steal the enlightenment for others" (112), and to act against "what Foucault called the Conquest, the unspoken war that founded, and with the force of law refounds, society" (113). And what does the undercommons of the university want to be? It wants to constitute an unprofessional force of fugitive knowers, with a set of intellectual practices not bound by examination systems and test scores. The goal for this unprofessionalization is not to abolish; in fact Moten and Harney set the fugitive intellectual against the elimination or abolition of this, the founding or refounding of that: "Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society" (113). Not the elimination of anything but the founding of a new society. And why not? Why not think in terms of a different kind of society than the one that first created and then abolished slavery? The social worlds we inhabit, after all, as so many thinkers have reminded us, are not inevitable; they were not always bound to turn out this way, and what’s more, in the process of producing this reality, many other realities, fields of knowledge, and ways of being have been discarded and, to cite Fou- cault again, "disqualified." A few visionary books, produced alongside disciplinary knowledge, show us the paths not taken. For example, in a book that itself began as a detour, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1999), James C. Scott details the ways the modern state has run roughshod over local, customary, and undisciplined forms of knowledge in order to rationalize and simplify social, agricultural, and political practices that have profit as their primary motivation. In the process, says Scott, certain ways of seeing the world are established as normal or natural, as obvious and necessary, even though they are often entirely counterintuitive and socially engineered. Seeing Like a State began as a study of "why the state has always seemed to be the enemy of ‘people who move around,’" but quickly became a study of the demand by the state for legibility through the imposition of methods of standardization and uniformity (1). While Dean Spade (2008) and other queer scholars use Scott’s book to think about how we came to insist upon the documentation of gender identity on all govern- mental documentation, I want to use his monumental study to pick up some of the discarded local knowledges that are trampled underfoot in the rush to bureaucratize and rationalize an economic order that privileges profit over all kinds of other motivations for being and doing.
5/10/17
0 - Queerpess State PIC
Tournament: unknown | Round: 2 | Opponent: na | Judge: na
The aff’s rhetorical performance is premised on the idea of a rational subject with free will who can act upon the law – this normative model of subjectivity is bureaucratic control itself – its essential meaning is the infliction of pain and death
We endorse the kritikal strategy of queer pessimism but reject their normative legal project. Affirm the 1ac rhetorical strategy but reject the plan – refusing the temptation to support normative legal thought opens up space to recognize the brutality beneath the liberal humanist mask of the state
It’s vital that you refuse all reasonable value to their normative legal project – allowing them case leverage is the most effective means of deflecting critical interrogation of normative legal thought
SCHLAG 91| PIERRE, "Symposium THE CRITIQUE OF NORMATIVITY ARTICLES NORMATIVITY AND THE POLITICS OF FORM" (http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3741andcontext=penn'law'review) A.B. It is apparent that virtually all aspects of normative legal thought are suited to the rhetorical reproduction and maintenance of the sovereign individual subject. As Charles Fried put it, "~b~efore there is morality there must be the person. We must attain and maintain in our morality a concept of personality such that it makes sense to posit choosing, valuing entities — free, moral beings." n259 This insistence of normative legal thought on the importance of a morally competent, normative subject is quite consonant with the rhetorical construction of the legal thinker as a sovereign individual subject. Indeed, this rationalist rhetorical construction is at once a prefigurement and the entailment of what Fried calls "choosing, valuing entities — free moral beings." The normative enterprise of norm-selection and norm-justification, with their emphases on choice orientation, value orientation, and prescription, is keenly suited to keeping the sovereign individual subject in the driver's seat. Likewise, the single-norm, conclusion-oriented character of legal thought, with its FIXATION ON END-PRODUCTS and its requirements that these end products be non-paradoxical, non-contradictory, complete, self-sufficient, discrete, separable, and transsituational, is conducive to deflecting any serious interrogation of either the rhetorical practices, forms, or processes that constitute the sovereign individual subject or his rhetorical enterprise: Hence, we are drawn toward the meticulous dissection and examination of what the legal subject has produced and whether these END-PRODUCTS have been produced in the right (non-contradictory, non-paradoxical, linear, authority-driven) way. And in turn, this orientation draws attention away from the legal subject who is producing all this stuff in the first place. n260 The action-deferring and reader-centered character of normative legal thought likewise ensure that no serious challenge is posed to the identity or character of the sovereign individual subject. The ~*901~ texts of normative legal thought are supposed to have their effect by appealing to the choice and the intellectual faculties of the reader. The texts are supposed to honor the reader's already preformed views, ideas, prejudices, and aesthetic representations of social and political life. There is to be no overt disabling or subversion of her identity or role. For instance, within the rationalist rhetoric of contemporary legal thought, it is permissible to write articles about Derridean deconstruction of legal thought — but to actually practice Derridean deconstruction will simply evoke resistance, misunderstanding, and incomprehension. The expectation is that any author will, of course, explain and justify any significant departure from the default positions and will refrain from any rhetorical exercise that might actually require active change on the part of the reader. Finally, the adversarial advocacy orientation of normative legal thought — which is attributable, at least in part, to the conflation of the role of lawyer and legal academic — does much to insulate the sovereign individual subject and its rhetorical supports from scrutiny. Because so many legal academics understand their legal thought to be positional in character — on behalf of some (intangible, often very worthy but poorly identified) client-surrogate, much of legal thought is produced within the explicit context of adversarial advocacy among academics and is devoted to advancing or defeating this or that position. Many normative legal thinkers understand themselves to be engaged in "passionate advocacy" on behalf of some cause. Now admittedly, there is no tribunal listening; no one is empowered to put all this normative passion into effect. But this does not mean that this passionate advocacy is therefore without effect: on the contrary, it often succeeds in BRACKETING ANY SERIOUS QUESTIONING of the rhetorical systems that enables such aimless passionate advocacy to be produced in the first place. Indeed, when one is engaged in passionate arguments to an imagined tribunal, the last thing one will do is question the argumentative structures that allow the arguments to be framed and presented in the first place. Not only does normative legal thought conduce to the maintenance of the sovereign individual subject and his rationalist rhetoric, but one can see the reverse process at work as well. Indeed, if normative thought occupies so much attention in the legal academy; if normative legal thought seems like the obvious, the "natural" thing to do; if the "what should we do?/what should the law be?" question seems so legitimate, so important; and if normative legal thought seems veritably like law itself, it is because the rhetorical ~*902~ situation — the default settings — have already enabled us, constituted our discourse, and configured our roles so that we will produce normative legal thought.
5/10/17
0 - Resolved T
Tournament: Winston Churchill | Round: Quarters | Opponent: North Crowley LR | Judge: Shree Deshpande, Michael Richardson, Brandi Russell Interpretation – the affirmative must defend desirability of topical action. “Resolved” means enactment of a law. Words and Phrases 64 Words and Phrases Permanent Edition (Multi-volume set of judicial definitions). “Resolved”. 1964. Definition of the ... establish by law”.
Standards
Institutional engagement: The state is inevitable—learning to speak the language of power creates the only possibility of social change debate can offer. This is best served by imagining the consequences of policy. Coverstone 05 Alan Coverstone (masters in communication from Wake Forest, longtime debate coach) “Acting on Activism: Realizing the Vision of Debate with Pro-social Impact” Paper presented at the National Communication Association Annual Conference November 17th 2005 JW 11/18/15 An important concern ... in America today.
2. Ground
In-round competitive equity is a voting issue: A. B. Violations of competitive equity prevent effective dialogue and participation. Galloway 7 Ryan Galloway 7, Samford Comm prof, Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28, 2007 Debate as a ... and power (Farrell, 1985, p. 114).
3. Limits- Only limited topics protect participants from research overload which materially affects our lives outside of round. Harris 13 Scott Harris (Director of Debate at U Kansas, 2006 National Debate Coach of the Year, Vice President of the American Forensic Association, 2nd speaker at the NDT in 1981). “This ballot.” 5 April 2013. CEDA Forums. http://www.cedadebate.org/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=4762.0;attach=1655 I understand that ... my everyday existence.
4. Dogmatism
5. Topical version of the aff A. B.
Vote negative: A. B.
1/17/17
0 - Spectrality K
Tournament: na | Round: 1 | Opponent: na | Judge: na
Social death and social life are constructs that deny our constant ontological state of simultaneous life and death. Abjection of social death affirms a white ontology of social life and the Other is cast as dead—their project is a projection of white spectrality
Peterson ’7 (Christopher Peterson visiting assistant prof. of literature @ Claremont McKenna College Kindred Specters: Death, Mourning, and American Affinity pg 9-10 DOA 9/5/16 GK) The political question then becomes: how does one resist the reduction of one’s existence to the liminal status of social death? In Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, Judith Butler provides a familiar answer to this question in a discussion that considers how the transgressions of Sophocles’ eponymous heroine deprive her of the "ontological certainty" reserved for those who fall within the norms of kinship (78). Situating Antigone’s ontological deprivation in the realm of contemporary politics, Butler argues that the socially dead "remain on the far side of being, as what does not quiet qualify as that which is and can be."19 In another context, Butler describes her work, in part, as an effort to "endow ontology to precisely that which has been systematically deprived of the privilege of ontology,"20 For Butler, social death correlates directly to a form of ontological deprivation. Although Butler seeks to displace kinship from the biological model in order to imagine a vast array of social arrangements, this reorganization of kinship remains no less ontological. Critiquing the abjection of the socially dead, Butler fails to question the ontological certainty of the "socially alive." What makes the ontology of the socially alive any more secure than that of the socially dead? Are not the socially alive themselves specters? While the conflation of social life with a presumptive heterosexual ontology may indeed condition the production of the socially dead, that says nothing of how the fiction of the former might itself be exposed and stripped of its ontological conceit. That the kinship relations of the so-called socially alive are also negotiated "between life and death" is a possibility that eludes Butler’s reading of Antigone, and has important implications for her effort to rethink kinship beyond the structure of the normative family. For if the assumption of self-presence begins by disavowing the death that haunts any life, then the production of the socially dead describes the process by which the hauntological condition of the socially alive is disavowed and projected onto those who transgress the norms of kinship. I borrow the term "hauntology" from Derrida, whose coinage in Specters of Marx means to displace the binary opposition between the presence and absence, being and nonbeing, life and death. Hauntology is thus another name for the spectrality that conditions all life. No kinship relations—even those of the socially alive—can claim immunity from the spectral. And this is neither to say that we are all socially dead in one form or another, nor to affirm the spectrality of kinship as an alibi for not addressing the alienation of slaves and other abject populations. What Patterson calls social death or what Butler (following Kristeva) understands as social abjection is not synonymous with what I am calling spectrality.21 For the latter is implicated in—but not fully reducible to—the social effects of racism, sexism, and homophobia that engender a field of unlivable, abject beings. The abjection and social death of racial and sexual others is initiated by the white, male, heterosexual’s denial of this own being-toward-death. While this spectrality is a generalizable condition of all "beings," this is not to say that its effects homogenize the social field: the social deaths of slaves, racial minorities, women, and queers are the effects of incommensurate—yet often intersecting—sociohistorical forces. To be socially dead, then, is in some sense to be doubly ghosted: for an African-American, this may mean that one’s lived experience is one being both a specter (in the generalizable sense) and a spook (to invoke the familiar racist trope of utter disembodiment). The presumptive ontology of whiteness is thus purchased precisely through the construction of the racial other as spook.22
The attempt to bring the excluded into the ontological field is a logic of reversal that maintains the ontological differentiation which recognizes some as dead and others as alive. Imbuing the ballot with the power to give life also gives it the power to take it away.
Peterson ’7 (Christopher Peterson visiting assistant prof. of literature @ Claremont McKenna College Kindred Specters: Death, Mourning, and American Affinity pg 11-12 DOA 9/5/16 GK) Wright’s account of Bigger’s betrayed presence prefigures the famous opening passage in Ellison’s The Invisible Man where the narrator remarks upon what it is like to be "bumped against by those of poor vision," that is, by those who can see the black male only as a "spook" or a "phantom."24 Angered by the blindness of white eyes, the narrator begins to "bump people back" (4). Rather than demonstrating that he is a "man of substance," however, his violent, bodily confrontation with a white man in the street only seems to affirm his ghostliness (3): In my outrage I got out my knife and prepared to slit his throat, right there beneath the lamplight in the deserted street, holding him in the collar with one hand, and opening the knife with my teeth—when it occurred to me that the man had not seen me, actually; that he, as far as he knew, was in the midst of a walking nightmare! And I stopped the blade, slicing the air as I pushed him away, letting him fall back to the street….He lay there, moaning on the asphalt; a man almost killed by a phantom. (4, his emphasis) Whereas Bigger’s violence makes him menacingly present, almost overly corporeal, the invisible man’s violence fails to materialize his body. But if Bigger becomes the "man of substance" that the invisible man endeavors to be, he does so only to experience the betrayal of that corporealization. When the invisible man asserts that he is "not a spook like those how haunted Edgar Allan Poe," this rejection of the racist stereotype demands to be read other than has a move from the incorporeal to the corporeal (3). That he is not a "spook" would seem irrefutable. But this refusal of pure disembodiment does not preclude the possibility of this spectralization. Spectrality, as I use the term, is inclusive of the material while not being reducible to corporeality. As the narrator informs us, "I did not become alive until I discovered my invisibility," which suggests a move from spook to specter that displaces the racist construction of the black male as both all and no body, as both menacingly present yet irrevocably absent (7). In promoting a move from spook to specter (rather than from spook to body), this study contends that political and theoretical responses to the social death of racial and sexual others too often sustain the ontological presumptions through which the binary between social life and social death emerges. From Butler’s effort to endow the socially dead with ontology, to Castronovo’s substitution of necrophobia for necrophilia, to Holland’s raising of the dead, these political moves rely on a logic of dialectical reversal whereby the excluded are imagined as coming to inhabit the ontological field. But if the ontological emerges through the suppression of the hauntological, then reanimating the socially dead through a logic of reversal only preserves the ontological differentiation that recognizes some lives as present and others as "dead."
Justice towards the other is the only non-deconstructable impact. Justice is the foremost concern for the policymaker, to pay respect to the otherness of the haunted Other.
McQuillan 08 (Martin McQuillan, "Derrida and Policy: Is Deconstruction Really a Social Science?" Derrida Today, 2009, DOA 9/8/16 GK) Again to be for Justice is to be in favour of breathing and given the way that this term is routinely abused and appropriated it is no doubt necessary to take care around this word. However, Derrida is moved to tell us that 'justice is the undeconstructable condition of any deconstruction' (Derrida 1994, 28). This is a syntagm with which I have wrestled for some time, given that any metaphysical concept can in principle be deconstructed and that 'justice' is surely a metaphysical concept politically and philosophically inscribed. To be too hasty in my commentary, the notion of justice that Derrida is invoking here is of course catachrestic and quasi-transcendental, whereby the idea of 'justice' refers to the act of deconstruction which does justice to the otherness of the event by enabling that otherness to speak, the undeconstructable (irreducible) condition of any deconstruction would be to articulate such otherness. The present importance of this is that in doing justice to policy one must take account of the difficulty of what is referred to by Derrida by the twin names of the 'undecideablity' and 'responsibility' of such an event. One the one hand, the policy maker should take account of the injustice of his/her own policy formation, which as a textual inscription, will inevitably fail to do justice to the possibilities of otherness within itself and will simultaneously and constantly be in the process of disarticulating itself from within as a consequence of this otherness, rendering itself unstable and radically undecideable. Taking account of this scenario will require the self-aware policy maker to act responsibly with respect to the task of policy making by taking time to reflect judiciously on the event of alterity (which will be forever undecideable) and at the same time acting responsibly with the respect to the other by doing justice to that other and acting quickly (or formulating policy quickly) which will respond to the immediate urgency in the here and now of the needs of the other. This is to say, once again that policy, properly understood, is beginning to look more and more like an untenable prospect from a "deconstructive" point of view. Some would say that it would be entirely typical of 'the Derrida Party' to have a policy of having no policies. However, this would be a crude reduction. I think the more considerable difficulty here is that it may not be possible for deconstruction ever to produce an inaugural or generative political discourse outside of an act of reading or critical intervention. From the point of view of a faithfulness to a certain manner of reading the world, there could be no political discourse worthy of the name of deconstruction which was generated outside of or anterior to a singular act of 'reading' a unique event. This is not to say that deconstruction would be for ever condemned to read and reread the texts of the political canon as a route to articulating the alterity repressed within them by the logocentric model of western political discourse (as if this were merely or simply a secondary, supplementary or weaker task than, say, policy making). Rather, with the reading (as critical intervention) of singular events comes the requirement to affirm a position with respect to that event and in so doing negotiate between that necessarily material and institutional position (counter-institutions are also institutions) and the risk to that position incurred by the affirmation of the unpredictable effects of otherness. Every policy then needs to be open to the risk of its own deconstruction by the very political conditions it puts in play. It is of course not the role of deconstruction to offer reassuring and easily appropriable policies to policy-makers. However, risk and policy are uneasy companions; we live in an age of 'risk management', in which policies are formulated to predict the unpredictable consequences of risk. Risk can be neutralised by techne, such is the dream of the death cult of contemporary managerialism.
The alternative is a juxtaposition—the only ethical response that fosters openness and refuses to impose order, containment, and domination onto such others. It problematizes the current order of politics by blurring the lines of identification. This aporia is the only way to move towards justice.
MacDonald ‘99 Department of Political Studies, Queens University 1999 Eleanor Science and Society 63.2 proquest In an unusually direct moment in his article, "Force of Law: The `Mystical Foundation of Authority'," Derrida makes the statement, "deconstruction is justice" (Derrida, 1992, 15). The question of the relationship between deconstruction and politics returns continuously to this claim. It also, of necessity, begs the question of what then is "deconstruction." In Spectres of Marx, Derrida describes deconstruction as "a motif." As well, in a comparison with Marxist philosophy he suggests that what he is doing is "a performative interpretation": "An interpretation that transforms what it interprets is definitive of the performative as unorthodox with regard to speech act theory as it is with regard to the 11 th Thesis on Feuerbach ( `The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however is to change it')" (Derrida, 1994, 51). Elsewhere, in the same text, Derrida uses the term "infinite critique" to describe his approach: A deconstructive thinking, the one that matters to me here, has always pointed out the irreducibility of affirmation and therefore of the promise, as well as the undeconstructibility of a certain idea of justice.... Such a thinking cannot operate without justifying the principle of a radical and interminable, infinite (both theoretical and practical, as one used to say) critique. This critique belongs to the movement of an experience open to the absolute future of what is coming, that is to say, a necessarily indeterminate, abstract, desert-like experience that is confided, exposed, given up to its waiting for the other and for the event. (Derrida, 1994, 90.) What this experience of "infinite critique" or this "motif" of deconstruction appears as, is a series of maneuvers performed on texts. These maneuvers seem designed to interrupt our confidence in meaning, and in the categories through which we organize meaning, by making these apparent, by playing with them, and by indicating the arbitrariness of their boundaries or oppositions. Deconstructive practices consist in a combination of wordplay, of play on metaphors, of taking things "to extremes," of introducing apparently unrelated texts as parallel to the central one and reading them alongside it, interweaving the multiple texts until meanings become jumbled, and new and unexpected meanings begin to emerge. The overall effect is to unsettle a text, to disturb any straightforward reading of it, to eventually abandon questions about authorial intention, to set the text adrift, as it were. And why is this "justice"? First, because of the "aporia" that it introduces - the sense of confusion that is in fact the "true" or "honest" and "ethical" response to and perception of the world. I use the word "honest" because what is other is truly other, and therefore finally unknowable - one is only being honest in an acknowledgment of this. And second, this is "ethical" because categories of meaning, it would seem, are imposed by us, onto others and otherness as a way of ordering, containing, and therefore dominating what is "other to ourselves." Language is a necessary violence for which deconstruction is the just or ethical response. What is true, then (in the understanding of the world that Derrida provides through deconstruction), is inadequation, non-commensurability, disjointedness. The ethical response is a recognition of this unknowability, a suspicion of all self-certainty. The political response is one of a corresponding openness, a promise of "democracy-tocome" (a promise which Derrida also assures us can never be wholly realizable in the present, in any present). At stake here is the very concept of democracy as concept of a promise that can only arise in such a diastema (failure, inadequation, disjunction, disadjustment, being "out of joint"). That is why we always propose to speak of a democracy to come, not of future democracy in the future present, not even of a regulating idea, in the Kantian sense, or of a utopia - at least to the extent that their inaccessibility would still retain the temporal form of a future present, of a future modality of a living present (Derrida, 1994, 64-5.)
5/10/17
JANFEB - Feminist Killjoy K
Tournament: Winston Churchill | Round: Octas | Opponent: Anderson JT | Judge: Dominic Henderson, Adam Lipton, Lindsay Willson The advocacy of free speech assumes that all voices have equal access, when in reality power inequities shape who can speak what Boler 2k Megan Boler (Professor in the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto and editor of Digital Media and Democracy), "All Speech is Not Free: The Ethics of "Affirmative Action Pedagogy," Philosophy of Education, 2000 All speech is ... limiting dominant voices.
AND, the problems within free speech are structural and largely produced via white patriarchal hegemony. Exclusion in discursive spheres happens on the level of subject creation – some marked subjects have less legitimacy than others. Patton 04 (Dr. Tracey Owens Patton is the director of African American and Diaspora Studies and a professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of Wyoming. Dr. Patton's area of expertise is critical cultural communication and rhetorical studies.2004 Reflections of a Black Woman Professor: Racism and Sexism in Academia, Howard Journal of Communications, 15:3, 192-194, Accessed 6/27/16, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10646170490483629) The first narrative ... disenfranchised occur frequently.
Nagging and disrupting the white-male hegemonic institutions in the academy creates a disruption of the language game that exists in the academy. Only by antagonizing the principles of exclusion can we disorient the habitual spaces of whiteness which is a prerequisite to combatting other forms of oppression Patton 04 (Dr. Tracey Owens Patton is the director of African American and Diaspora Studies and a professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of Wyoming. Dr. Patton's area of expertise is critical cultural communication and rhetorical studies.2004 Reflections of a Black Woman Professor: Racism and Sexism in Academia, Howard Journal of Communications, 15:3, 197-198, Accessed 6/27/16, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10646170490483629) Through my personal ... set of struggles.
Thus the alt is to reject the aff and reorient discourse spaces through a method of disempowering historic ethics and endorsing feminist epistemology. Social norms are internalized and become a source of comfort; rejecting social norms is associated with discomfort and unhappiness. The feminist killjoy embraces this discomfort in an attempt to disrupt the social order – unhappiness is key. Ahmed 10 Sara Ahmed "Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects)" The Scholar and Feminist Online The Barnard Center for Research on Women Summer 2010 To be unseated ... We must learn.
Only when we are free from our masculine restrictions can we then solve for hate speech and its violence against bodies deemed as Other Hatfield et al. 5 Hatfield, Katherine L., Schafer, Kellie, Stroup, Christopher A., 2005, Atlantic Journal of Communication, “A Dialogic Approach to Combating Hate Speech on College Campuses”, acc. 7/11/16, School of Communication Studies Ohio University, Speech Communication and Dramatic Arts Central Michigan University, School of Communication Studies Ohio University, pp. 43 Owen (1998) wrote that ... the hate messages.
5/10/17
JANFEB - Feminist Killjoy K - Deleuze Link
Tournament: Harvard | Round: 4 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
Their fetishization of movement and fluidity is violent because it essentializes what it means to be fluid, excluding oppressed bodies that are unable or can’t afford that risk
Ahmed 04 (Sara Ahmed is formerly the director of a new Centre for Feminist Research (CFR) at Goldsmiths, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, and a scholar that writes on the intersection of queer theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and post-colonialism, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, "The Contingency of Pain", 2004, Routledge, New York, pp 151-152 Accessed 9/15/16 GK) Furthermore, the positing of an ideal of being free from scripts that define what counts as a legitimate life seems to presume a negative model of freedom; defined here as freedom from norms. Such a negative model of freedom idealises movement and detachment, constructing a mobile form of subjectivity that could escape from the norms that constrain what it is that bodies can do. Others have criticised queer theory for its idealisation of movement (Epps 2001: 412; Fortier 2003). As Epps puts it: ‘Queer theory tends to place great stock in movement, especially when it is movement against, beyond, or away from rules and regulations, norms and conventions, borders and limits . . . it makes fluidity a fetish’ (Epps 2001: 413). The idealisation of movement, or transformation of movement into a fetish, depends upon the exclusion of others who are already positioned as not free in the same way. Bodies that can move with more ease may also more easily shape and be shaped by the sign ‘queer’. It is for this reason that Biddy Martin suggests that we need to ‘stop defining queerness as mobile and fluid in relation to what then gets construed as stagnant and ensnaring’ (Martin 1996: 46). Indeed, the idealisation of movement depends upon a prior model of what counts as a queer life, which may exclude others, those who have attachments that are not readable as queer, or indeed those who may lack the (cultural as well as economic) capital to support the ‘risk’ of maintaining antinormativity as a permanent orientation.
5/10/17
JANFEB - Feminist Killjoy K - Framing Addon
Tournament: Harvard | Round: 4 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
Their notion of agency misses the prior question of who gets access to being an agent In the first place – women and women of color are excluded from idealistic conceptions of agency without the k’s consciousness of social structures reproducing inequality
Rodruiguez 11 (Dalia Rodriguez,2011, Qualitative Inquiry, "Silent rage and the politics of resitstance: countering seductions of whiteness and the road of politization and empowerment" https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/~~#inbox/155f2644f681f418?projector=1 ) For feminists of color, theorizing has always occurred in the margins (Hurtado, 1992; Pollard and Welch, 2006). As women of color, we occupy a precarious position in academe. Despite being invisible, ignored, disrespected, and our work often devalued, women of color have redefined the margins (hooks, 1984) often through our scholarship. By writing about our experiences in the margins, we pro- vide rich insight as to our roles as faculty, researchers, and mentors. Rejecting the dominant’s definition of reality is central in enabling women of color in developing a positive self-concept (hooks, 1990). We actively resist external definitions, and self-define, seeing ourselves as survivors rather than victims. Only recently has this perspective been recognized. Holding an outsider within position (Collins, 1986) and being in the margins allows for a unique perspective that includes understanding the dominant group’s actions as well as their espoused ideologies. The perspective from which women of color view our marginality is central in defining ourselves. Instead of accepting this marginality as disabling, we reconstruct our own definition of who we are— to reflect a positive image, rather than negative. Regardless of our reality of experiencing oppression daily, we always have the power to redefine self. We cannot live our lives based on what the colonizer’s definition is of us, we need to define who we are on our own terms. As hooks argues, "We are not looking for that Other for recognition. We are recognizing ourselves . . ." (hooks, 1990, p. 22). Despite the limits set on women of color, the power lies within us to redefine the self. However, redefining self is only part of the process of becoming subject. The other critical part of becoming subject is becoming critically conscious of how social structures reproduce inequality. Becoming subject emerges as one comes to understand how structures of domination work in one’s own life, as one develops critical thinking and critical consciousness, as one invents new, alternative hab- its of being, and resists from that marginal space of differ- ence inwardly defined (hooks, 1989). Fundamental to claiming our right to subjectivity is the insistence that we must deter- mine how we will be and not rely on colonizing responses to determine our legitimacy. Becoming personally empow- ered through self-knowledge, even within conditions that severely limit one’s ability to act is essential for the libera- tion process. Change can occur internally—in the private, personal space of an individual woman’s consciousness. Collins (2000) argues, By persisting in this journey of becoming more critically conscious toward self-definition, we can empower our- selves. When linked with each other, our individual struggles take on a new meaning. A changed consciousness encour- ages people to change the conditions of their lives and this change occurs through action. A critical mass of individuals with a changed consciousness can in turn foster women’s collective empowerment. The process of becoming subject also includes, moving from silence to language, from indi- vidual, to group action (Lorde, 1984).
5/10/17
JANFEB - Feminist Killjoy K - Hate Speech Addon
Tournament: Harvard | Round: 4 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
Only when we are free from our masculine restrictions can we then solve for hate speech and its violence against bodies deemed as Other
Hatfield et al. 5 ~Hatfield, Katherine L., Schafer, Kellie, Stroup, Christopher A., 2005, Atlantic Journal of Communication, "A Dialogic Approach to Combating Hate Speech on College Campuses", acc. 7/11/16, School of Communication Studies Ohio University, Speech Communication and Dramatic Arts Central Michigan University, School of Communication Studies Ohio University, pp. 43~KAE
Owen (1998) wrote that "words can turn into bullets, hate speech can kill and maim, just as censorship can ... we are forced to ask: is there a moment where the quantitative consequences of hate speech change qualitatively the arguments about how we must deal with it?" (p. 37). This study was conducted to determine whether engaging students in discourse about hate speech would affect their perceptions of the appropriateness of hate speech. Tests indicated that when engaged in the discourse, participants are more likely to decrease their perception of appropriateness and have a more overt reaction to the hate messages.
Turn – the censorship that the aff opposes actually translates to challenging academic spaces and comfortability in criticisms which is key to a successful movement
Ahmed 15 (Sara Ahmed is formerly the director of a new Centre for Feminist Research (CFR) at Goldsmiths, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, and a scholar that writes on the intersection of queer theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and post-colonialism/ Ahmed, Sara. Article from her independent research blog: Against Students Posted on June 25, 2015. Web. Accessed 2/16/17 KAE)
So much violence is justified and repeated by how those who refuse to participate in violence are judged. We need to make a translation. The idea that being over-sensitive is what stops us from addressing difficult issues can be translated as: we can’t be racist because you are too sensitive to racism. Well then: we need to be too sensitive if we are to challenge what is not being addressed. We might still need to ask: what is meant by addressing difficult issues? It is worth me noting that I have been met with considerable resistance from critical academics when trying to discuss issues of racism, power and sexism on campus. Some academics seem comfortable talking about these issues when they are safely designated as residing over there. Is this "there" what allows "difficult issues" not to be addressed here? In fact, it seems to me that it is often students who are leading discussions of "difficult issues" on campus. But when students lead these discussions they are then dismissed as behaving as consumers or as being censoring. How quickly another figure comes up, when one figure is exposed as fantasy. If not over-sensitive, then censoring; if not censoring, then consuming. And so on, and so forth. My own sense: our feminist political hopes rest with over-sensitive students. Over-sensitive can be translated as: sensitive to that which is not over. All of these ways of making students into the problem work to create a picture of professors or academics as the ones who are "really" oppressed by students. This is what it means to articulate a position or a view "against students." One US professor speaks of being "frightened" by his liberal students. He blames so much on "identity politics." And indeed so much is blamed on identity politics: that term is used whenever we challenge how spaces are occupied. It has become another easy dismissal. We are learning here about professors (their investments, emotions and strategies of dismissal) more than we are learning about students.
5/10/17
JANFEB - Feminist Killjoy K - Narrative Link
Tournament: Harvard | Round: 4 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
The 1AC’s display of unhappiness and injury separates pain from its bodily containment in the Other, rendering the wound as an object to be obtained. Their narrative positions the judge as a subject to appropriate and then resolve this pain only when they are compelled enough to care, where each ‘successful’ ballot elevates their power over an increasingly invisible Other.
Ahmed 04 (Sara Ahmed is formerly the director of a new Centre for Feminist Research (CFR) at Goldsmiths, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, and a scholar that writes on the intersection of queer theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and post-colonialism, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, "The Contingency of Pain", 2004, Routledge, New York, pp 20-22 Accessed 1/15/17 KAE) How does pain enter politics? How are lived experiences of pain shaped by contact with others? Pain has often been described as a private, even lonely experience, as a feeling that I have that others cannot have, or as a feeling that others have that I myself cannot feel (Kotarba 1983: 15). And yet the pain of others is continually evoked in public discourse, as that which demands a collective as well as individual response. In the quote above from a Christian Aid letter, the pain of others is first presented through the use of the word ‘landmines’. The word is not accompanied by a description or history; it is assumed that the word itself is enough to evoke images of pain and suffering for the reader.2 Indeed, the word is repeated in the letter, and is transformed from ‘sign’ to the ‘agent’ behind the injuries: ‘Landmines are causing pain and suffering all around the world.’ Of course, this utterance speaks a certain truth. And yet, to make landmines the ‘cause’ of pain and suffering is to stop too soon in a chain of events: landmines are themselves effects of histories of war; they were placed by humans to injure and maim other humans. The word evokes that history, but it also stands for it, as a history of war, suffering and injustice. Such a letter shows us how the language of pain operates through signs, which convey histories that involve injuries to bodies, at the same time as they conceal the presence or ‘work’ of other bodies. The letter is addressed to ‘friends’ of Christian Aid, those who have already made donations to the charity. It focuses on the emotions of the reader who is interpellated as ‘you’, as the one who ‘probably’ has certain feelings about the suffering and pain of others. So ‘you’ probably feel ‘angry’ or ‘saddened’. The reader is presumed to be moved by the injuries of others, and it is this movement that enables them to give. To this extent, the letter is not about the other, but about the reader: the reader’s feelings are the ones that are addressed, which are the ‘subject’ of the letter. The ‘anger’ and ‘sadness’ the reader should feel when faced with the other’s pain is what allows the reader to enter into a relationship with the other, premised on generosity rather than indifference. The negative emotions of anger and sadness are evoked as the reader’s: the pain of others becomes ‘ours’, an appropriation that transforms and perhaps even neutralises their pain into our sadness. It is not so much that we are ‘with them’ by feeling sad; the apparently shared negative feelings do not position the reader and victim in a relation of equivalence, or what Elizabeth V. Spelman calls co-suffering (Spelman 1997: 65). Rather, we feel sad about their suffering, an ‘aboutness’ that ensures that they remain the object of ‘our feeling’. So, at one level, the reader in accepting the imperative to feel sad about the other’s pain is aligned with the other. But the alignment works by differentiating between the reader and the others: their feelings remain the object of ‘my feelings’, while my feelings only ever approximate the form of theirs. It is instructive that the narrative of the letter is hopeful. The letter certainly promises a lot. What is promised is not so much the overcoming of the pain of others, but the empowerment of the reader: ‘I hope you feel a sense of empowerment.’ The pain of the other is overcome, but it is not the object of hope in the narrative; rather, the overcoming of the pain is instead a means by which the reader is empowered. So the reader, whom we can name inadequately as the ‘Western subject’, feels better after hearing about individual stories of success, narrated as the overcoming of pain as well as the healing of community. These stories are about the lives of individuals that have been saved: ‘Chamreun is a survivor of a landmine explosion and, having lost his leg, is all the more determined to make his community a safer place in which to live.’ These stories of bravery, of the overcoming of pain, are indeed moving. But interestingly the agent in the stories is not the other, but the charity, aligned here with the reader: through ‘your regular support’, you have ‘helped to bring about’ these success stories. Hence the narrative of the letter ends with the reader’s ‘empowerment’. The word ‘landmines’, it is suggested, now makes ‘you’ feel a sense of empowerment, rather than anger or sadness. This letter and the charitable discourses of compassion more broadly show us that stories of pain involve complex relations of power. As Elizabeth V. Spelman notes in Fruits of Sorrow, ‘Compassion, like other forms of caring, may also reinforce the very patterns of economic and political subordination responsible for such suffering’ (Spelman 1997: 7). In the letter, the reader is empowered through a detour into anger and sadness about the pain of others. The reader is also elevated into a position of power over others: the subject who gives to the other is the one who is ‘behind’ the possibility of overcoming pain. The over-representation of the pain of others is significant in that it fixes the other as the one who ‘has’ pain, and who can overcome that pain only when the Western subject feels moved enough to give. In this letter, generosity becomes a form of individual and possibly even national character; something ‘I’ or ‘we’ have, which is ‘shown’ in how we are moved by others. The transformation of generosity into a character trait involves fetishism: it forgets the gifts made by others (see Diprose 2002), as well as prior relations of debt accrued over time. In this case, the West gives to others only insofar as it is forgotten what the West has already taken in its very capacity to give in the first place. In the Christian Aid letter, feelings of pain and suffering, which are in part effects of socio-economic relations of violence and poverty, are assumed to be alleviated by the very generosity that is enabled by such socio-economic relations. So the West takes, then gives, and in the moment of giving repeats as well as conceals the taking.
5/10/17
JANFEB - Feminist Killjoy K - Safe Space Link
Tournament: Harvard | Round: 4 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
Their criticisms of safe spaces and student-led censorship position over-sensitive student as a threat to the supposed happiness and coziness of academic institutions. Critiques of offendability are a racialized, gendered, and sexual strategy to reclaim lost hegemony won by oppressed bodies
Ahmed 15 (Sara Ahmed is formerly the director of a new Centre for Feminist Research (CFR) at Goldsmiths, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, and a scholar that writes on the intersection of queer theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and post-colonialism/ Ahmed, Sara. Article from her independent research blog: Against Students Posted on June 25, 2015. Web. Accessed 2/16/17 GK) The figure of the consuming student has something to say to other figures such as the censoring student. I now want to return to an earlier post "You are Oppressing Us." I referred to one letter that mobilised the figure of the censoring student (this letter has since been supplemented by yet more letters – one of which even equates alleged "no platforming" in the UK with various acts of extremism around the world). This letter speaks of how some have been stopped from speaking on campuses because they articulate viewpoints that are out of line with the views held by students (who are treated as remarkably consistent, as body or thing, and I am partly tracking what is achieved by this consistency). The figure of the censoring student exists in close relation to that of the consuming student: both work to create an impression that students have all the power to decide what is being taught as well as what is not being taught, what is being spoken about as well as what is not being spoken about; and that this power is at the expense not only of dons and departments, but also politicians, journalists and other public figures. Students: they keep coming up as having all the power. Really? Yes, really. I noted in my previous post how the letter relies on flimsy evidence because it is assembled around a desire for evidence. Indeed the instances of apparent censorship (translate: student protests) seemed to generate more discourse and discussion rather than preventing discourse or discussion. When students who protest against such-and-such speaker become censors, those who wrote and signed the letter become the ones who are silenced, whose freedoms are under threat. So much speech and writing is generated by those who claim they are silenced! But we can still ask: what is the figure of the censoring student doing. By hearing student critique as censorship the content of that critique is pushed aside. When you hear a challenge as an attempt at censorship you do not have to engage with the challenge. You do not even have to say anything of substance because you assume the challenge as without substance. In the first instance, critique and contestation ("they want the wrong courses!") is dismissed as consumerism; in the second instance, protest ("they don’t want the right people!") is dismissed as censorship. Sweep, sweep. Beep, beep. Error message. Another figure comes up, rather quickly, at this point: she is often lurking behind the censoring student. This is the over-sensitive student: the one who responds to events or potential events with hurt feelings. She also comes up as someone who stops things from happening. We can refer here to a number of recent pieces that I would read as a moral panic about moral panics. Many of these pieces refer to US college campuses specifically and are concerned with the introduction of safe spaces, and trigger warnings. The figure of the over-sensitive student is invested with power. The story goes: because students have become too sensitive, we cannot even talk about difficult issues in the classroom; because of their feelings we (critical academics) cannot address questions of power and violence, and so on. A typical example of this kind of rhetoric: "No one can rebut feelings, and so the only thing left to do is shut down the things that cause distress — no argument, no discussion, just hit the mute button and pretend eliminating discomfort is the same as effecting actual change." Or another: "while keeping college-level discussions ‘safe’ may feel good to the hypersensitive, it’s bad for them and for everyone else. People ought to go to college to sharpen their wits and broaden their field of vision." Here safety is about feeling good, or not feeling bad. We sense what is being feared: students will become warm with dull edges, not sharp enough in wit or wisdom. The moral panic around trigger warnings is a very good pedagogic tool: we learn from it. Trigger warnings are assumed as being about being safe or warm or cuddled. I would describe trigger warnings as a partial and necessarily inadequate measure to enable some people to stay in the room so that "difficult issues" can be discussed. The assumption that trigger warnings are themselves about safe spaces is a working assumption (by this I mean: it is achieving something). Indeed what I have said is rather misleading because the assumption that safe spaces are themselves about deflecting attention from difficult issues is another working assumption. Safe spaces are another technique for dealing with the consequences of histories that are not over (a response to a history that is not over is necessarily inadequate because that history is not over). The aim is to enable conversations about difficult issues to happen: so often those conversations do not happen because the difficulties people wish to talk about end up being re-enacted within spaces, which is how they are not talked about. For example conversations about racism are very hard to have when white people become defensive about racism: those conversations end up being about those defences rather than about racism. We have safe spaces so we can talk about racism not so we can avoid talking about racism! The very techniques introduced to enable the opening up of conversations can be used as evidence of the closing down of conversations. Anyone with a background in Women’s Studies will be familiar with this: how we come up against stereotypes of feminists spaces as soft, cosy, easy, which are the exact same sexist stereotypes that make Women’s Studies necessary as a feminist space. The very perception of some spaces as being too soft might even be related to the harshness of the worlds we are organising to challenge. The idea that students have become a problem because they are too sensitive relates to a wider public discourse that renders offendability as such a form of moral weakness (and as being what restricts "our" freedom of speech). Much contemporary racism works by positioning the others as too easily offendable, which is how some come to assert their right to occupy space by being offensive. And yes: so much gets "swept away," by the charge of being too sensitive. A recent example would be how protests against the Human Zoo in the Barbican, about how racism is disguised as art or education, are swept up as a symptom of being "over-sensitive. According to this discourse, anti-racists end up censoring even themselves because they are "thin skinned." So much violence is justified and repeated by how those who refuse to participate in violence are judged. We need to make a translation. The idea that being over-sensitive is what stops us from addressing difficult issues can be translated as: we can’t be racist because you are too sensitive to racism. Well then: we need to be too sensitive if we are to challenge what is not being addressed. We might still need to ask: what is meant by addressing difficult issues? It is worth me noting that I have been met with considerable resistance from critical academics when trying to discuss issues of racism, power and sexism on campus. Some academics seem comfortable talking about these issues when they are safely designated as residing over there. Is this "there" what allows "difficult issues" not to be addressed here? In fact, it seems to me that it is often students who are leading discussions of "difficult issues" on campus. But when students lead these discussions they are then dismissed as behaving as consumers or as being censoring. How quickly another figure comes up, when one figure is exposed as fantasy. If not over-sensitive, then censoring; if not censoring, then consuming. And so on, and so forth.
5/10/17
JANFEB - Feminist Killjoy K - State Link
Tournament: Harvard | Round: 4 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
They give too much credence to the institutions - The effect of university policies aimed at helping oppressed bodies vanishes in thin air, but the legal walls created stay in place. On-campus activists are put into a situation where they constantly make futile policies, while the university ignores its commitments. Only totally reorienting our existence in universities can we ever confront the walls that are constructed.
Ahmed 1 (Sara Ahmed is formerly the director of a new Centre for Feminist Research (CFR) at Goldsmiths, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, and a scholar that writes on the intersection of queer theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and post-colonialism/ Ahmed, Sara. Article from her independent research blog: Evidence Posted on July 12, 2016 – no pg. numbers, DOA 1/28/17 GKKE) To have evidence of a policy is not sufficient for the policy to be enacted. In this example the head of human resources removed the decision from the minutes: you can see here how the removal of evidence of something is an attempt to modify an arrangement. However what is being modified is the record of a modification. We learn how stasis can involve work: to keep an old arrangement you remove traces of the policy having been changed. ~but it~ was however put back in the minutes. This put back was a result of yet more diversity work: noticing the removal of evidence is evidence of labour. But then: when the practitioner tells her colleagues in meetings that the policy has changed, they look at her "like she is saying something really stupid." She might as well not have any evidence because as far as they are concerned the policy has not been changed. The story of a diversity policy that does not do anything is a tantalizingly tangible example of what goes on so often. But even if the story makes something tangible (and that it is so is a result of the labour and testimony of a diversity worker – think of how many tales like this are not told), it shows us how some things are reproduced by remaining intangible. This remaining is "stubborn," a stubbornness that is not dependent upon an individual (although it can involve individuals) but an effect of how things combine. She has evidence; she can point to it; but it is as if she has nothing to show. Diversity work: you learn that intangibility is quite a phenomenon. Intangibility can be the product of institutional resistance. And that is a philosophical as well as political point because it teaches us that what is not evident to the senses is not simply about the status of an object. The object here is not missing or even withdrawn. The object is right there. And it is there because the right procedures have been followed to make it there. An object that has been brought into existence does not appear. Something is not perceived despite being available or near to hand: you can not notice what is right in front of you without having to make any effort to turn away. Paper can disappear because the content of the decision that is recorded on that paper is not in agreement with what has "really" been decided, a decision that takes the form of a momentum; a direction that does not need to made into a directive because it is shared. That a policy can be agreed without being followed teaches us that a policy and a direction are not the same thing. Perhaps changing policies is a way of sustaining a direction, because those appointed to do equality and diversity (and appointments are often made to comply with the law) end up spending their time working on policies that do not do anything. As one practitioner I spoke to once said: "you end up doing the document rather than doing the doing." Doing the document. Not doing the doing. You can see why diversity workers often talk about walls when they talk about their work. Diversity work is a "banging your head against a brick wall job." As I commented in an earlier post, what makes an institutional wall even harder is that it is not a concrete or actual wall. If there was a wall there, we could point to it. The wall might then provide evidence of itself: a wall as self-evident. Although, to qualify this (as optimism) we have also learnt something is not always perceived even when it is tangible. What makes an institutional wall harder is that unless you come up against it (because of who you are, or what you are trying to do), this wall does not appear. The walls that diversity workers speak about are assumed as phantom walls: in your head not in the world. Racism and sexism are walls in this sense: in the world but assumed as in our heads not in the world. We have to live with that assumption. In the world. What is a phantom for some for others is real. What is hardest for some does not appear to others. And so: a policy disappears despite there being a paper trail, despite the evidence, or even because of the evidence. People disappear too, because of what they make evident, of what they try to bring into view. There are many ways in which you can end up disappearing. The story I have shared with you is one story of disappearance. And it is not just a policy that disappears in the story. A diversity worker: she ends up exhausted because despite all her efforts the same thing is still happening. Sometimes you stop because it is too hard to get through. So she might leave, or turn her energy toward something else: a new policy, a new document, a new job. And: this practitioner left her post soon after I interviewed her, for another post in another university. What happens to a policy can happen to a person. People disappear too: because of what they try to make evident, what they try to bring into view. What is evident, I implied at the start, is often a weaker sense: something is evident to someone. What is evident: a matter of perception. We are now learning: perception matters. The removal of evidence is an institutional process that renders somethings not evident to those who inhabit that institution. It is as if: nothing is there. No policy, no paper. Maybe a person appears, but you look at her blankly. What is she waving around! What is she going on about! The wall that you come up against, that blocks a progression (of a policy or a person), is not encountered by those who do not come up against it. There; nothing there. No wonder: There becomes despair.
5/10/17
JANFEB - Feminist Killjoy K - Wound Fetishism Link
Tournament: Harvard | Round: 4 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
Transformation of the wound into an identity of its own is the essence of commodifying suffering. Remembrance is the only mechanism to counter wound fetishization—we need specific and constant connections to these histories
Ahmed 04 (Sara Ahmed is formerly the director of a new Centre for Feminist Research (CFR) at Goldsmiths, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, and a scholar that writes on the intersection of queer theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and post-colonialism, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, "The Contingency of Pain", 2004, Routledge, New York, pp 31-34 Accessed 9/15/16 GK) How does pain enter politics? Does pain become political only through speech, or through claims for compensation? Pain has been considered by some as a very problematic ‘foundation’ for politics. Working with Nietzsche’s model of resentiment, for example, Wendy Brown argues that there has been a fetishisation of the wound in subaltern politics (Brown 1995: 55, see Nietzsche 1969). Subaltern subjects become invested in the wound, such that the wound comes to stand for identity itself. The political claims become claims of injury against something or somebody (society, the state, the middle classes, men, white people and so on) as a reaction or negation (Brown 1995: 73). Following Nietzsche, Brown suggests that reactions to injury are inadequate as a basis of politics since such reactions make action impossible: ‘Revenge as a "reaction", a substitute for the capacity to act, produces identity as both bound to the history that produced it and as a reproach to the present which embodies that history’ (Brown 1995: 73).10 Brown’s reworking of Nietzsche shows how an over-investment in the wound, ‘come~s~ into conflict with the need to give up these investments’ (Brown 1995: 73). I agree that the transformation of the wound into an identity is problematic. One of the reasons that it is problematic is precisely because of its fetishism: the transformation of the wound into an identity cuts the wound off from a history of ‘getting hurt’ or injured. It turns the wound into something that simply ‘is’ rather than something that has happened in time and space. The fetishisation of the wound as a sign of identity is crucial to ‘testimonial culture’ (Ahmed and Stacey 2001), in which narratives of pain and injury have proliferated. Sensational stories can turn pain into a form of media spectacle, in which the pain of others produces laughter and enjoyment, rather than sadness or anger. Furthermore, narratives of collective suffering increasingly have a global dimension. As Kleinman, Das and Lock argue, ‘Collective suffering is also a core component of the global political economy. There is a market for suffering: victimhood is commodified’ (Kleinman, Das and Lock 1997: xi). This commodification of suffering does not mean that all narratives have value or even equal value: as I show in Chapters 6 and 7, following Judith Butler (2002b), some forms of suffering more than others will be repeated, as they can more easily be appropriated as ‘our loss’. The differentiation between forms of pain and suffering in stories that are told, and between those that are told and those that are not, is a crucial mechanism for the distribution of power. We can reflect critically on the culture of compensation, where all forms of injury are assumed to involve relations of innocence and guilt, and where it is assumed that responsibility for all injuries can be attributed to an individual or collective. The legal domain transforms pain into a condition that can be quantified as the basis for compensation claims. The problem of wound fetishism is the equivalence it assumes between forms of injury. The production of equivalence allows injury to become an entitlement, which is then equally available to all others. It is no accident then that the normative subject is often secured through narratives of injury: the white male subject, for example, has become an injured party in national discourses (see Chapter 2), as the one who has been ‘hurt’ by the opening up of the nation to others. Given that subjects have an unequal relation to entitlement, then more privileged subjects will have a greater recourse to narratives of injury. That is, the more access subjects have to public resources, the more access they may have to the capacity to mobilise narratives of injury within the public domain. How should we respond to this transformation of injury into an entitlement that secures such forms of privilege? I would suggest that our response should not simply be to critique the rhetorical use of injury or ‘wounds’, but to attend to the different ways in which ‘wounds’ enter politics. Not all narratives of pain and injury work as forms of entitlement; so for example, to read the story of white male injury as the same as stories of subaltern injury would be an unjust reading. Whilst we cannot assume that such differences are essential, or determined ‘only’ by the subject’s relation to power, we also cannot treat differences as incidental, and as separated from relations of power. The critique of wound culture should not operate as generalised critique, which would mean ‘reading’ different testimonies as symptomatic. As Carl Gutiérrez-Jones argues, the critique of injury needs to recognise the different rhetorical forms of injury as signs of an uneven and antagonistic history (Gutiérrez-Jones 2001: 35). So a good response to Brown’s critique would not be ‘to forget’ the wound or indeed the past as the scene of wounding. Brown does ‘part company’ with Nietzsche by suggesting that ‘the counsel of forgetting... seems inappropriate if not cruel’ for subjugated peoples who have yet to have their pain recognised (Brown 1995: 74). I would put this more strongly: forgetting would be a repetition of the violence or injury. To forget would be to repeat the forgetting that is already implicated in the fetishisation of the wound. Our task might instead be to ‘remember’ how the surfaces of bodies (including the bodies of communities, as I will suggest later) came to be wounded in the first place. Reading testimonies of injury involves rethinking the relation between the present and the past: an emphasis on the past does not necessarily mean a conservation or entrenchment of the past (see Chapter 8).11 Following bell hooks, our task would be ‘not to forget the past but to break its hold’ (Hooks 1989: 155). In order to break the seal of the past, in order to move away from attachments that are hurtful, we must first bring them into the realm of political action. Bringing pain into politics requires we give up the fetish of the wound through different kinds of remembrance. The past is living rather than dead; the past lives in the very wounds that remain open in the present. In other words, harm has a history, even though that history is made up of a combination of often surprising elements that are unavailable in the form of a totality. Pain is not simply an effect of a history of harm; it is the bodily life of that history. To think through how pain may operate in this way we can consider the document, Bringing Them Home, which is a report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (1996). Bringing Them Home reports on the Stolen Generation in Australia, a generation of indigenous children who were taken away from their families as part of a brutal and shocking policy of assimilation. Generations of indigenous children grew up with little or no contact with their families, or with their community and culture. They were often taken from their homes in a violent manner.
5/10/17
JANFEB - Frats CP
Tournament: Harvard | Round: 3 | Opponent: na | Judge: na
Counterplan text: Public colleges and universities ought to ban on campus fraternity advertising, organization, or membership.
Fraternities are sites of rape, serious injury, and death.
Flanagan 14 (Caitlin, the Atlantic, citing Douglas Fierberg, attorney specializing in fraternity-related litigation, "The Dark Power of Fraternities", http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/03/the-dark-power-of-fraternities/357580/) "Until proven otherwise," Fierberg told me in April of fraternities, "they all are very risky organizations for young people to be involved in." He maintains that fraternities "are part of an industry that has tremendous risk and a tremendous history of rape, serious injury, and death, and the vast majority share common risk-management policies that are fundamentally flawed. Most of them are awash in alcohol. And most if not all of them are bereft of any meaningful adult supervision." As for the risk-management policies themselves: "They are primarily designed to take the nationals’ fingerprints off the injury and deaths, and I don’t believe that they offer any meaningful provisions." The fraternity system, he argues, is "the largest industry in this country directly involved in the provision of alcohol to underage people." The crisis-management plans reveal that in "the foreseeable future" there may be "the death or serious injury" of a healthy young person at a fraternity function.
Ban on campus fraternities solves – even banning fraternity advertising alone is good
Ryan 14 (Julia, The Atlantic, "How Colleges Could Get Rid of Fraternities", http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/how-colleges-could-get-rid-of-fraternities/284176/) Perhaps the most obvious way to end fraternities is for universities to simply remove Greek life from their campuses. "It’s not even really a turf war anymore between universities and Greek groups because it’s as as if universities have given up," Alexandra Robbins, author of Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities, said in an interview. "If higher education really wanted to get rid of Greek groups, they could. All universities would have to do is put their foot down, but they don’t." Universities could say no Greek groups or events on campus and prohibit advertising for Greek life on campus. Elizabeth A. Armstrong, a sociologist at University of Michigan and co-author of Paying for the Party, suggested universities could quell the power of Greek life just by treating fraternities like other clubs: "One method would be to say okay you are not so special. You do not get the special attention of the dean. We are going to actually allow other student groups on campus equal power," she said. "We are going to supervise you just as much as everybody else."
Fraternities are protected by the First Amendment's right to free speech
Lukianoff 11 Greg Lukianoff (President and CEO, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), "To Survive, Fraternities Need to Stand for Something, Anything," Huffington Post, 8/1/2015 A lot of fraternities seem to know that their freedom of association is protected by the First Amendment. (While the freedom to join and form groups is not technically listed in the text of the First Amendment, it is understood to arise from the protections of freedom of speech and the right to assembly.) What fraternities often do not know, however, is that there are several different kinds of freedom of association protected by the First Amendment, and they are not all made equal. The strongest kind of freedom of association protected by the First Amendment is the right to "intimate" association, best represented by the family. Our government recognizes that the bonds of family are particularly important and that it should do its best to avoid actions that interfere with this bond. The second strongest kind of freedom of association is called "expressive" association. Sensibly, courts understand that the right to freedom of expression would not mean a great deal if we are forbidden from joining together with like-minded individuals to amplify the power of our voices and take collective action. This understanding forms the basis of our right to form groups around commonly held beliefs whether they are religious, secular, or ideological. Everything from Mothers Against Drunk Driving to NORML is a kind of expressive association. (This includes my nonprofit, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, as well.)
The notion of free speech assumes that all voices are equally treated, when in reality power inequities shape who can speak what
Boler 2k Megan Boler (Professor in the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto and editor of Digital Media and Democracy), "All Speech is Not Free: The Ethics of "Affirmative Action Pedagogy," Philosophy of Education, 2000 KAE
All speech is not free. Power inequities institutionalized through economies, gender roles, social class, and corporate-owned media ensure that all voices do not carry the same weight. As part of Western democracies, different voices pay different prices for the words one chooses to utter. Some speech results in the speaker being assaulted, or even killed. Other speech is not free in the sense that it is foreclosed: our social and political culture predetermines certain voices and articulations as unrecognizable, illegitimate, unspeakable.1 Similarly, neither are all expressions of hostility equal. Some hostile voices are penalized while others are tolerated.2 Hostility that targets a marginalized person on the basis of her or his assumed inferiority carries more weight than hostility expressed by a marginalized person towards a member of the dominant class. Efforts to legislate against "hate speech" within public spaces cannot, in principle, recognize the differential weight and significance of hate speech directed at different individuals or groups. If all speech is not free, then in what sense can one claim that freedom of speech is a working constitutional right? If free speech is not effective in practice, then a historicized ethics is required. Thus the discomforting paradox of U.S. democracy: while we may desire a principle of equality that applies in exactly the same way to every citizen, in a society where equality is not guaranteed we require historically sensitive principles that appear to contradict the ideal of "equality." An historicized ethics operates toward the ideal of principles such as constitutional rights, but also recognizes the need to develop ethical principles that take into account that all persons do not have equal protection under the law nor equal access to resources. Within a climate of extreme backlash to affirmative action and to women’s rights, I propose what I call an "affirmative action pedagogy": a pedagogy that ensures critical analysis within higher education classrooms of any expression of racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, or sexism, for example. An affirmative action pedagogy seeks to ensure that we bear witness to marginalized voices in our classrooms, even at the minor cost of limiting dominant voices.
Their naïve assumption that people can actually have a voice in academia is wrong—the academic setting thrives on minoritarian voices hiding of the fear of being totalized by the racialized, patriarchal gaze
Patton 04 (Dr. Tracey Owens Patton is the director of African American and Diaspora Studies and a professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of Wyoming. Dr. Patton's area of expertise is critical cultural communication and rhetorical studies.2004 Reflections of a Black Woman Professor: Racism and Sexism in Academia, Howard Journal of Communications, 15:3, 192-194, Accessed 6/27/16, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10646170490483629)KAE
The first narrative is an example of the division of among women, borders, hegemony, and the double bind. I was at a meeting where the various benefits that some colleagues received were discussed (i.e., graduate or undergraduate assistant, graduate teaching stipend, research money, salary raise, and course reduction) as opposed to the lack of benefits other colleagues received. In this meeting I felt privileged to be included among those who should receive such benefits. Never before had my position and situation within the department been rewarded. I quickly learned my feelings were naive. I sure hope we will receive benefits comparable to Ryan’s3 (a Black male). I wonder, did Ryan really deserve the benefits he received? Did they really deserve the benefits they received? As Susan, a White female, speaks, she looks at me, as do others who are attending the same meeting. In an instant I am transformed from being included to being Black, and therefore, excluded. "Did they really deserve the benefits they received?" (italics mine). I am an outsider-within. In analyzing the above experience, if we problematize the notion of racism and sexism through the idea of belonging (i.e., border crossing) we are left with the paradox of the outsider withinboth belonging and disenfranchisement simultaneously. The notion of outsider within becomes a hegemonic category for organizing the institutional and cultural apparatus with its regulations and cultural functions for maintenance of the status quo. I am caught up in the politics of domination and colonizationthe same politics that allow my skin color to become more visible than my gender. In this moment, I am not only an outsider within, but I am ultimately an essentialized being. As an essentialized being I am marked and fixed into either=or categories. According to Hall (1996), ‘‘the essentializing moment is weak because it naturalizes and dehistoricizes difference, mistaking what is historical and cultural for what is natural, biological, and genetic’’ (p. 472). Because essentialization has been allowed to occur through the maintenance of hegemony, my skin color now supercedes any female bonding or so-called ‘‘sisterhood.’’ I have been rendered the visible invisible. The politics of domination and colonization allow me to be reduced, my unique characteristics obscured, and differences concealed. As P. H. Collins (1998) pointed out, Relying on the visibility of African-American women to generate the invisibility of exclusionary practices of racial segregation, this new politics produces remarkably consistent Black female disadvantage while claiming to do the opposite. (p. 14) According to hooks (1989), ‘‘as subjects, people have the right to define their own reality, establish their own identities, name their history. As objects, one’s reality is defined by others, one’s identity created by others, one’s history named only in ways that define one’s relationship to those who are subject’’ (p. 42743). Patton (2000) found that ‘‘those who define only mark themselves by what they are not, which contributes to the normalization or naturalization of whiteness as something not diverse and invisible. Non-whites become the marked, visible other. Further there is retention of power because the definer is never marked’’ (p. 38). The power to mark the body comes from those who have the power to represent. Groups who are able to retain and maintain the hegemonic order have the power to mark, classify, assign, and represent those ‘‘others.’’ According to Hall (1997), ‘‘Power, it seems, has to be understood here, not only in terms of economic exploitations and physical coercion, but also in broader cultural or symbolic terms, including the power to represent someone or something in a certain waywithin a certain ‘regime of representation’’’ (p. 259). Thus, the politics of domination and representation become played out on the body in favor of retaining the current hegemonic order. It is this naturalization of domination whether in terms of classism, racism, sexism, and so on, that allows hegemony to not only be widespread, but also ‘‘appear natural and inevitable’’ (Hall, 1997, p. 259). Therefore, by its very nature, the university recreates the hegemonic order and contributes to the reification of disenfranchised persons because it operates by constructing and has constructed an impassable boundarythe outsider within. The power of this impassable boundary seems to come not only from the current construction of hegemony, which privileges Whiteness above all else, but also from the ideological construction of the naturalized privilege of whiteness. It is this ideological construction that makes the imagining of academe as ‘‘accepting’’ and ‘‘welcoming’’ a place fraught with disenfranchisement, marginalization, and adherence to the status quo. Thus, like the colonizer’s gaze, attempts to fix and mark and naturalize the difference between the centered and the disenfranchised occur frequently.
Free exchange of ideas is outweighed by need for direct action – anything else accepts racism, neoliberalism, and economic inequality as the norm
Tillett-Saks 13 Andrew Tillett-Saks (organizer with UNITE HERE Local 217), "Neoliberal Myths," Counterpunch, 11/7/2013 KAE
The twofold argument against the protestors stems from two central myths of neoliberalism. The argument for free discourse as the enlightened path to justice ignores that direct action protest is primarily responsible for most of the achievements we would consider ‘progress’ historically (think civil rights, workers’ rights, suffrage, etc.), not the free exchange of ideas. The claim that silencing speech in the name of freedom is self-defeating indulges in the myth of the pre-existence of a free society in which freedom of speech must be preciously safeguarded, while ignoring the woeful shortcomings of freedom of speech in our society which must be addressed before there is anything worth protecting. Critics of the protest repeatedly denounced direct action in favor of ideological debate as the path to social justice. "It would have been more effective to take part in a discussion rather than flat out refuse to have him speak," declared one horrified student to the Brown Daily Herald. Similarly, Brown University President Christina Paxson labeled the protest a detrimental "affront to democratic civil society," and instead advocated "intellectual rigor, careful analysis, and…respectful dialogue and discussion." Yet the implication that masterful debate is the engine of social progress could not be more historically unfounded. Only in the fairy tale histories of those interested in discouraging social resistance does ‘respectful dialogue’ play a decisive role in struggles against injustice. The eight-hour workday is not a product of an incisive question-and-answer session with American robber barons. Rather, hundreds of thousands of workers conducted general strikes during the nineteenth century, marched in the face of military gunfire at Haymarket Square in 1886, and occupied scores of factories in the 1930’s before the eight-hour work day became American law. Jim Crow was not defeated with the moral suasion of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches. Rather, hundreds of thousands marched on Washington, suffered through imprisonment by racist Southern law enforcement, and repeatedly staged disruptive protests to win basic civil rights. On a more international scale, Colonialism, that somehow-oft-forgotten tyranny that plagued most of the globe for centuries, did not cease thanks to open academic dialogue. Bloody resistance, from Algeria to Vietnam to Panama to Cuba to Egypt to the Philippines to Cameroon and to many other countries, was the necessary tool that unlocked colonial shackles. Different specific tactics have worked in different contexts, but one aspect remains constant: The free flow of ideas and dialogue, by itself, has rarely been enough to generate social progress. It is not that ideas entirely lack social power, but they have never been sufficient in winning concessions from those in power to the oppressed. Herein lies neoliberal myth number one—that a liberal free-market society will inexorably and inherently march towards greater freedom. To the contrary, direct action has always proved necessary. Turns aff’s offense – their utopian discourse doesn’t consider the contours of the landscape that allows for it. Structural exclusion shows that not all voices are heard in free speech. Mitigates any ‘risk of offense’ args in the 1AR because their praxis of free speech is a flawed starting point
Racism must be rejected in every instance without surcease. It justifies atrocities, and is truly the capital sin.
Memmi 2k – Albert, Professor Emeritus of Sociology @ Unv. Of Paris, Albert (RACISM, translated by Steve Martinot, pp.163-165) KAE
The struggle against racism will be long, difficult, without intermission, without remission, probably never achieved, yet for this very reason, it is a struggle to be undertaken without surcease and without concessions. One cannot be indulgent toward racism. One cannot even let the monster in the house, especially not in a mask. To give it merely a foothold means to augment the bestial part in us and in other people which is to diminish what is human. To accept the racist universe to the slightest degree is to endorse fear, injustice, and violence. It is to accept the persistence of the dark history in which we still largely live. It is to agree that the outsider will always be a possible victim (and which person man is not themself himself an outsider relative to someone else?). Racism illustrates in sum, the inevitable negativity of the condition of the dominated; that is it illuminates in a certain sense the entire human condition. The anti-racist struggle, difficult though it is, and always in question, is nevertheless one of the prologues to the ultimate passage from animality to humanity. In that sense, we cannot fail to rise to the racist challenge. However, it remains true that one’s moral conduct only emerges from a choice: one has to want it. It is a choice among other choices, and always debatable in its foundations and its consequences. Let us say, broadly speaking, that the choice to conduct oneself morally is the condition for the establishment of a human order for which racism is the very negation. This is almost a redundancy. One cannot found a moral order, let alone a legislative order, on racism because racism signifies the exclusion of the other and his or her subjection to violence and domination. From an ethical point of view, if one can deploy a little religious language, racism is "the truly capital sin."fn22 It is not an accident that almost all of humanity’s spiritual traditions counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows, or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical counsel respect for the weak, for orphans, widows or strangers. It is not just a question of theoretical morality and disinterested commandments. Such unanimity in the safeguarding of the other suggests the real utility of such sentiments. All things considered, we have an interest in banishing injustice, because injustice engenders violence and death. Of course, this is debatable. There are those who think that if one is strong enough, the assault on and oppression of others is permissible. But no one is ever sure of remaining the strongest. One day, perhaps, the roles will be reversed. All unjust society contains within itself the seeds of its own death. It is probably smarter to treat others with respect so that they treat you with respect. "Recall," says the bible, "that you were once a stranger in Egypt," which means both that you ought to respect the stranger because you were a stranger yourself and that you risk becoming once again someday. It is an ethical and a practical appeal – indeed, it is a contract, however implicit it might be. In short, the refusal of racism is the condition for all theoretical and practical morality. Because, in the end, the ethical choice commands the political choice. A just society must be a society accepted by all. If this contractual principle is not accepted, then only conflict, violence, and destruction will be our lot. If it is accepted, we can hope someday to live in peace. True, it is a wager, but the stakes are irresistible.
Our alternative is to reject the aff and embrace historicized ethics that reveal the racial contradictions within the law, empowering marginalized voices to overcome current problematic discourse
Boler 2k Megan Boler (Professor in the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto and editor of Digital Media and Democracy), "All Speech is Not Free: The Ethics of "Affirmative Action Pedagogy," Philosophy of Education, 2000 KAE
JUSTIFICATIONS FOR HISTORICIZED ETHICS On what basis might one justify an affirmative action pedagogy? The first justification is forwarded by legal scholars in the area of critical race theory. The authors of Words that Wound address the tension between the First and Fourteenth amendment. The tension arises because, in fact all people are not equally protected under the law due to the institutionalized inequities within our society. This complicates the effectiveness of the First Amendment. Scholarship in critical race theory and educational analyses document that in recent years we find incidents of hate speech primarily to be directed at racial, religious, or sexual minorities. Not surprisingly, one finds in turn that invocations of the right to free speech are most often invocations to protect the right of the members of the dominant culture to express their hatred toward members of minority culture. These authors make important legal and historical cases to support their observation that, in practice, while the rhetoric of the First Amendment is a buzz word that makes all of us want to rally for its principle, in practice "~it~ arms conscious and unconscious racists — Nazis and liberals alike — with a constitutional right to be racist. Racism is just another idea deserving of constitutional protection like all ideas."4 Similarly, Judith Roof, a scholar from another discipline addresses classroom dynamics and argues that we must "read the appeal to the First Amendment as itself a kind of panic response in the same order as hate speech itself."5 A second justification for privileging marginalized voices is based on the measurement of the psychological effect of hate speech on targeted groups and individuals. As one legal scholar explains, hate speech affects its victim in the visceral experience of a "disorienting powerlessness," an effect achieved because hate speech is comparable to an act of violence.6 In reaction to hate speech, the target commonly experiences a "state of semishock," nausea, dizziness, and an inability to articulate a response. This scholar gives an example of a student who is white and gay. The student reports that in an instance where he was called "faggot" he experienced all of the above symptoms. Yet when he was called "honky," he did not experience the disorienting powerlessness. As the scholar remarks, "the context of the power relationships in which the speech takes place, and the connection to violence must be considered as we decide how best to foster the freest and fullest dialogue within our communities."7
Colleges are key to challenging racism
Gordon and Johnson 95 Jill Gordon (Charles A. Dana Professor of Philosophy, Colby College) and Markus Johnson, "Race, Speech, and a Hostile Educational Environment: What Color Is Free Speech?" Journal of Social Philosophy, 2003 KAE
From racially motivated police brutality to kindly condescension, racism and racialized behavior pervade American life and manifest themselves in a range of phenomena.1 Psychologists and legal scholars have demonstrated the various ways in which sometimes subtle but invidious racism permeates American institutions and personal interactions between whites and blacks.2 We focus on one particular institution and set of interactions, namely, predominantly white college campuses and the antiblack racist speech and behavior that take place there, in an effort to analyze the type of harm done in this context and to suggest a solution analogous to the legal precedent set in cases involving "hostile work environments." We believe that a hostile educational environment is one manifestation of what Charles Mills (1997) calls the legacy of the Racial Contract. Whites continue to express and act on racist beliefs and ideals, while refusing to recognize their ideas and behaviors as such, and when it comes to remedying the consequences of antiblack racism through legal means, pervasive white "moral cognitive dysfunction"3 keeps the legal system from recognizing and legitimizing the problem and from seeing potential avenues of redress already available. Unless or until there is redress of the harm to black students on predominantly white campuses, they are being denied a fundamental educational opportunity in institutions thought to be crucial to social and economic advancement in our de mocracy. This not only harms African Americans but threatens democracy itself.
5/10/17
JANFEB - Revenge Porn DA
Tournament: Winston Churchill | Round: Doubles | Opponent: Westood RS | Judge: Kris Wright The first amendment protects revenge pornography. The impact is a never ending cycle of mental, emotional, and physical oppression for the survivor. Koppelman 15. Andrew Koppelman John Paul Stevens Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science, "Revenge Pornography and First Amendment Exceptions," Emory University School of Law, Volume 65, Issue 3, 09/14/15, http://law.emory.edu/elj/content/volume-65/issue-3/articles/revenge-pornography-first-amendment-exceptions.html People are marvelously ... Court has constructed.
This reinforces a cultural of male-dominant sexuality and normalizes sexual violence – turns case Jensen and Okrina 4. Robert Jensen Professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas, a founding board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center, and a member of the board of Culture Reframed., Debbie Okrina Member of VAWnet – staff writer, “Pornography and Sexual Violence”, National Resource Center ... of that task.
1/17/17
JANFEB - Silence Feminism K
Tournament: Colleyville | Round: Octas | Opponent: na | Judge: na
Ontological starting points of identity based on language and experience is intrinsically biased and excludes feminine bodies by replicating their alienation. Construction of ontology has relegated women to a status of ‘theoretically mute’ and only replicates the marginalization – only severing from past uses of linguistics will allow women to establish their own language distinctly representing their own experience
Crary 01 (Alice, "A Question of Silence: Feminist Theory and Women's Voices." Philosophy 76.03 (2001): n. pag. Web. 11 Feb. 2017. Crary is a professor of philosophy at Harvard) pg. 375-378KAE
Women's experience, even when its relevance is acknowledged, may be portrayed in a way which is intrinsically biased. Feminist epistemology tends to start by claiming to speak to, and for, the pathos of women's descriptions of their feelings of alienation. It wishes to go on from this starting point and take account of the fact that historically and for the most part, not only have women not generally participated directly in the production of our body of knowledge, but they have also not participated in activities of theorizing about our body of knowledge. They have not taken part in those second-order activities which bequeath to us our image of knowledge.9 Women have, for the most part, remained theoretically and philosophically mute. Feminist epistemology (or feminist theory more generally) often presents itself as a vehicle through which women can come to find their own voices. It therefore naturally tends to take as its point of departure this sort of discussion of ways in which prevailing theoretical discourses have failed to engage women's voices. Perceptions (such as those just touched upon) of the historical irrelevance of women's experience to prevailing activities of theory- construction sometimes get coupled with a more general epistemological insight which does not itself turn on feminist pre- occupations: viz., that what a person takes from particular experiences is not written into the experiences themselves; that, from early childhood on, over the course of our cultural education, we learn to take experience as bearing on knowledge in many different ways. Feminist theorists have been particularly concerned to further specify the implications of this broad epistemological insight by bringing into relief the manner in which certain sorts of personal characteristics of knowers (such as gender, sexual orientation, race and class) can affect the way in which experience is taken to bear on knowledge. They tend to begin therefore with the following epistemologically relatively innocuous perception:1 As women, homosexuals, blacks, or members of the working class (etc.) we are socialized in ways which are specific to our 'group' or 'groups'; the manner in which we then incorporate our experience will reflect this difference in socialization. It is at this point that the particular strain of feminist theory I am concerned with begins to depart from a genuine responsiveness to women s voices. This epistemologically innocuous perception is often taken to support the suspicious-but epistemologically still potentially quite innocuous-claim that instances of androcentrism in discourse constitute evidence that all our discursive practices only reflect ways in which men incorporate their experience. It is in their manner of going on from this already suspicious claim that the feminist arguments I am concerned with diverge most dramatically from responsiveness to things that women say in recounting their experience and become driven by a kind of philosophical insistence. It is characteristic of these arguments to move from this claim (which is consistent with the perception that ways in which we take experience as bearing on knowledge reflect differences in our socialization) directly-and without acknowledging that any philosophically momentous step is being taken-to the following considerably less innocuous claim: Instances of androcentrism in language and theory constitute evidence that our language and theories-and, ultimately, all of our dominant bodies of knowledge-only reflect distinctly male experience. Some feminists who present themselves as beginning with the innocuous epistemological insight wind up advocating the claim that our current forms of knowledge are suited only to the task of incorporating the character of 'male experience', and that we currently lack a theoretical discourse at all adequate to the task of incorporating 'female experience'. It is an assumption of this claim that female experience is thoroughly and systematically different from male experience, where this means that women's and men's experience are in a strong sense incommensurable:12 women and men should be understood as perceiving and inhabiting logically separate 'realities'; 'male' language expresses distinctly male experience to the exclusion of distinctly female experience." This claim thus carries the suggestion that women should establish their own language (now one which would reflect distinctly 'female' experience), and it implies that this project will involve rejecting the concepts, theories and methodologies which have been integral to 'male' theory construction-including the very notions of objectivity, experience and rationality which are themselves thought by some feminist theorists to presuppose a masculine way of knowing the world. Some theorists go on from this already less than innocuous argument to claim that there can therefore be no such thing as an impersonal theory of knowledge or language. What once looked like the possibility of such a theory must now be given up on the grounds that it illicitly presupposes a gender neutral standpoint from which the theory can encounter its subject-matter. What some theorists see as the necessary intrusion of personal characteristics of the knower into both the structure and content of what is known is taken by them to demonstrate the impossibility of any attempt to construct a theory of what others have thought of as the 'language which we (women and men) share'.
Framing arguments from the standpoint of linguistic ontology commodify the feminine experience in an essentializing position of privilege
Crary 01 (Alice, "A Question of Silence: Feminist Theory and Women's Voices." Philosophy 76.03 (2001): n. pag. Web. 11 Feb. 2017. Crary is a professor of philosophy at Harvard) pg. 383-384KAE
The arguments I am concerned with begin with an innocuous general insight about the social context of knowledge. They underline the fact that we are socialized into certain norms and describe ways in which our experience is mediated by these norms. This insight is then often elaborated into the thought that gender (as opposed to sex which is often taken to be biologically determinative) is socially constructed. This strain of feminist thought is at odds with another feminist position, one which does not take a sociological perspective on gender but rather embraces an essentialist view, a view asserting that women simply experience things differently from men (and vice-versa). Some feminist arguments that explicitly claim to embrace the former sociological perspective and reject the latter essentialist one are nevertheless implicitly committed to some version of the latter. Some theorists have wanted to build on a relatively innocuous version of the sociological insight to go on to argue that our current forms of knowledge are adequate only to the task of incorporating distinctly male experience. As we saw, it is an implicit assumption of this claim that female experience is thoroughly and systematically different from male experience and this is just what feminists (and others, including various kinds of misogynist thinkers) who are essentialists about gender have hoped to show. This perception of ways in which our experience is mediated by social norms, when it is taken to show that our body of knowledge must be thoroughly and systematically pervaded by a masculine bias, thus becomes intertwined with an essentialist position with which it is deeply in tension. (Many feminist theorists whose work is threatened by this tension fail to notice it because they waffle between two senses in which one might understand the claim that 'female experience differs systematically from male experience'. They trade on the ambiguity between saying that women's experience tends to differ in systematic ways from men's experience (because women's and men's experience are both mediated by social norms which differentiate systematically between women and men) and saying that it is constitutive of women's experience and men's experience that they be systematically different (because it is essential to what it is to be a woman and what it is to be a man that each experience things differently).) These kinds of arguments therefore leave themselves open to criticisms that have been made of essentialist arguments about gender. In tacitly assuming that women's and men's experience are essentially different, they suggest that there are some features of women's experience which cannot be influenced by socialization. And they incline toward the suggestion that women's experience (or 'women's intuition') is self-validating: it is unquestionably valid because beyond the reach of any social or individual forces. Without some independent argument (i.e., an argument for why social differentiation with respect to gender is of an epistemologically privileged kind), this move, which places a fundamental division between women's and men's experience, threatens to make room for further fundamental divisions along lines other than gender-e.g., among groups of women from different backgrounds. It welcomes a splintering of what might be called 'women's reality' into numerous separate 'realities' for women of different races, classes, sexual orientations, ethnicities or religions (each of whom may, on this line of thought, be presumed to inhabit their own self-validating 'reality'). It suggests that there are a priori obstacles blocking communication between diverse groups of women as well as between women and men. This strain of feminist theory thus veers toward the conclusion that true communication between persons with significantly different personal characteristics is impossible.
The role of the ballot is to endorse the debater that best creates a liberatory pedagogy. Changing the way we teach and learn is what enables hope for oppressed bodies to be able to overcome the hetero-patriarchy. Every ballot is an endorsement of a form of education, where only the criticism shifts away from colonial whiteness and sexism in educational spaces like debate
hooks 13 (hooks, bell*. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, "Teach 1: The Will to Learn". 08-21-2013. Taylor and Francis. pp. 4-8 Accessed 2/15/17 GK *bell hooks is an acclaimed intellectual, feminist theorist, cultural critic, artist, and writer. hooks has authored over three dozen books and has published works that span several genres, including cultural criticism, personal memoirs, poetry collections, and children's books. Her writings cover topics of gender, race, class, spirituality, teaching, and the significance of media in contemporary culture.)KAE
Feminist intervention was amazingly successful when it came to changing academic curriculum. For example, it was not Black Studies which led to the recovery of previously unrecognized black women writers like Zora Neale Hurston. Feminist scholars, and this includes black women, were the ones who resurrected "herstory," calling attention to patriarchal exclusion of women and thus creating the awareness that led to greater inclusion. Even though I began my teaching in Black Studies, the courses I taught that were always packed with students (I had to turn students away) were those focused on women writers. The feminist challenge to patriarchal curriculum and patriarchal teaching practices completely altered the classroom. Since colleges and universities rely on students "buying" the commodity "courses" to survive, as more students flocked to courses where teaching practices as well as curriculum were not biased, where education as the practice of freedom was more the norm, the authority of the traditional white male power structure was being successfully undermined. By joining the campaign to change the curriculum, white males were able to maintain their positions of power. For example, if a racist patriarchal English professor teaching a course on William Faulkner that was a required course with many students attending, had to compete with a similar course being taught by a feminist anti-racist professor, his class could end up with no students. Hence it was in the interest of his survival for him to revise his perspective, at least to include a discussion of gender or a feminist analysis. As an insurrection of subjugated knowledges, feminist interventions within the academic world had greater impact than Black Studies because white women could appeal to the larger, white female student population. From the onset Black Studies mainly addressed a student constituency made up of black students; feminist studies from the onset addressed white students. Even though Women’s Studies courses initially attracted mostly white female students, usually those with some degree of radical consciousness, as gender equality became more an accepted norm the feminist classroom has grown larger and has attracted a diverse body of white students and students of color. Significantly, feminist professors, unlike most non-feminist Black Studies professors, were much more innovative and progressive in their teaching styles. Students often flocked in droves to feminist classrooms because the schooling there was simply more academically compelling. If this had not been the case it would not have become necessary for mainstream conservative white academics, female and male, to launch a backlash that maligned the Women’s Studies classroom, falsely presenting it as teaching students that they did not need to study anything by white males and insisting that students really had to do no work in these classes. By devaluing the feminist classroom they made students feel that they would appear academically suspect if they majored in these alternative disciplines. Of course, the feminist classroom was a rigorous place of learning, and as a bonus the teaching style in such classrooms was often less conventional. No matter the intensity of anti-feminist backlash or conservative efforts to dismantle Black Studies and Women’s Studies programs, the interventions had taken place and had created enormous changes. As individual black women/women of color, along with individual white women allies in anti-racist struggle, brought a critique of race and racism into feminist thinking that transformed feminist scholarship, many of the concerns of Black Studies were addressed through a partnership with Women’s Studies and through feminist scholarship. Over time, as the academy shifted, making the reforms needed to embrace inclusion—gender equality and diversity—feminist and/or black scholars were not necessarily situated only in alternative programs. The mainstreaming of progressive feminist professors and/or black professors/professors of color— that is, taking them out of the "ghetto" of Women’s Studies or Ethnic Studies (which happened because white men wanted to regain their control over these disciplines)—gave them backcontrol, but it also meant that it brought dissident voices into the conventional disciplines. Those voices changed the nature of academic discourse. Very little praise is given Women’s Studies, Black Studies/Ethnic Studies, for the amazing changes these disciplines spearheaded in higher education. When progressive white men created the alternative discipline of cultural studies, teaching from progressive standpoints, the success of their programs tended to overshadow the powerful interventions made by women and men of color simply because of the way white-supremacist thinking and practice rewards white male interventions while making it appear that the progressive interventions made by women and men of color are not as important. Since cultural studies often included recognition of race and gender, even as it allowed for the maintenance of the hegemony of white male presence, it unwittingly became one of the forces that led colleges and universities to dismantle Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies programs with the argument that they were simply no longer needed. The overall mainstreaming of alternative disciplines and alternative perspectives was a tactic deployed to take away the concrete locations of power where different policy and educational strategy could be enacted because folks did not have to rely on the conservative mainstream for promotion and tenure. Well, all that has changed. Successful backlash undermining progressive changes has changed things back to the way they were. White male rule is intact. All over our nation, Women’s Studies and Ethnic Studies’ programs have been ruthlessly dismantled. Conservative manipulation of mass media has successfully encouraged parents and students to fear alternative ways of thinking, to believe that simply taking a Women’s Studies course or an Ethnic Studies course will lead to failure, to not getting a job. These tactics have harmed the movement for progressive education as the practice of freedom, but they have not changed the reality that incredible progress wasmade. In Teaching Values Ron Scapp reminds us: "The antagonism toward and fear of those who ‘question’ had a long (and violent) history. That those asking questions today and rejecting the ‘givens’ of our cultural history are seen as pariahs and are under attack should also not be ‘surprising.’ " Scapp calls attention to the fact that the folks who resist progressive educational reform "are quick to dismiss or discredit (and sometimes destroy)," but this does not alter the fact that there has been a powerful meaningful insurrection of subjugated knowledges that is liberating and life-sustaining. Struggles for gender equality and ethnic diversity linked issues of ending domination, of social justice with pedagogy. The classroom was transformed. The critique of canons allowed the voices of visionary intellectuals to be heard. Gayatri Spivak brilliantly challenged the notions that only citizens of this nation can know and understand the importance of the traditional canon. Daringly she states: "The matter of the literary canon is in fact a political matter: securing authority." In Outside in the Teaching Machine she explains the importance of "transnational literacy," starting with a discussion of the high school classroom. Writing about the canon, Spivak contends that she "must speak from within the debate over the teaching of canon," from a perspective informed by postcolonial awareness of the need to create justice in education: "There can be no general theory of canons. Canons are the condition of institutions and the effect of institutions. Canons secure institutions as institutions secure canons . . . Since it is indubitably the case that there is no expansion without contraction . . . ~W~e must make room for the coordinated teaching of the new entries into the canon. When I bring this up, I hear stories of how undergraduates have told their teachers that a whole semester of Shakespeare, or Milton, or Chaucer, changed their lives. I do not doubt these stories, but we have to do a quality/quantity shift if we are going to canonize the new entries . . . The undergraduates will have their lives changed perhaps by a sense of the diversity of the new canon and the unacknowledged power play involved in securing the old." Spivak’s work, emerging from a transnational, feminist, anti-racist, left critique, embodies the extraordinary genius and power of the intellectual interventions transforming the old academy
Liberation arguments predicated on the use of language create error replication which turns case – linguistic and epistemic practices are conceptually ‘male’ and create metaphysical underpinnings and control over the epistemic practices of language
Crary 01 (Alice, "A Question of Silence: Feminist Theory and Women's Voices." Philosophy 76.03 (2001): n. pag. Web. 11 Feb. 2017. Crary is a professor of philosophy at Harvard) pg. 381-382 KAE
Consider how certain strands of feminist theory may encourage us to develop a distorted picture of women's relation to particular linguistic and epistemic practices. Feminist theorists have drawn attention to different ways in which linguistic expressions may encode a masculine bias. 'Exorcising"9 or eliminating such bias from a particular expression may afford a woman a greater sense of the compatibility between her words and her experiences. She may also find that her first discovery of bias is systematically related to other instances of bias in her forms of thought and speech. Feminist investigations have revealed some of the deeply ingrained ways in which the uses of linguistic expressions encourage what might be called 'masculinist thought'. Once the practice of referring to all people with the expressions 'man' and 'mankind' had been uncovered, feminists uncovered expressions such as 'people and their wives'20 and 'spousal consent for obtaining an abortion'. But such investigations depend for their possibility on our ability to use expressions in ways which are not 'masculinist'. Our recognition of the practice of using 'man' to refer to all people as a biased use of language depends on our being able to recognize other uses of 'man' as not biased. When theorists respond to a woman's sense of 'not being at home in her language' by recommending the wholesale rejection of 'male language',2' they presuppose that our most basic concepts of objectivity and rationality (which are seen as somehow precipitating the local biased uses of language) can, in the end, simply be rejected. They operate on the assumption that when we have gone deep enough-when we have fully corrected the masculine biases of language-we will wind up with a language which is no longer conceptually akin to our present 'male' language. We will then not merely have readjusted our forms of expression to accommodate certain feminist insights, but we will have, as it were, 'gotten outside of our 'male' skins'. Even in those cases, however, in which we can achieve a limited analogue of a wholesale rejection of things 'male' in favour of things 'female', such a gesture still will not accomplish what is intended. The affirmation of the negation of a metaphysical thesis tends to issue in another metaphysical thesis-one which partici- pates in the same picture and hence bears the image of its opposing counterpart. The theorists I am concerned to criticize here reflect on traditional metaphysical renderings of our basic everyday concepts of objectivity, rationality and experience-and accept these renderings as successfully representing the structure of these concepts and then turn on them and want to reject them as fully 'male'. This gesture of rejecting a traditional metaphysics of objectivity, rationality and experience is open to question from the fol- lowing direction. Given that the theorists who make it want to distance themselves from confused or limiting metaphysical accounts of these concepts, we need to ask whether the gesture suits their purposes. The worry is that, if our current metaphysical conceptions of rationality, experience and objectivity are understood as presupposing what is 'male' as a norm for all humans, and if we attempt sim- ply to affirm the negation of these traditional metaphysical theses (imagining we are thereby exchanging 'male' basic concepts for 'female' ones), then we end up simply maintaining the structures of that 'male' metaphysics, reflected now in the mirror-image of its antitheses. Mere denial of the validity of what some philosophers have seen as the metaphysical underpinnings of our most basic concepts will not amount to a dismantling of that tradition. In simply denying some of the central tenets of traditional metaphysics, some theorists recognize it as advancing straightforward tenets which can be denied and thereby limit themselves to a space of alternatives whose dimensions are determined by that tradition. Denial of the correctness of a traditional metaphysical thesis in a sense simply rehearses a moment within the tradition.22 Certain kinds of feminist arguments legitimize traditional ('male') metaphysics in their very attempt to reject it.
We cant decentralize or liberate our language when consecutively operating in a dominated language system
Crary 01 (Alice, "A Question of Silence: Feminist Theory and Women's Voices." Philosophy 76.03 (2001): n. pag. Web. 11 Feb. 2017. Crary is a professor of philosophy at Harvard) pg. 385-386 KAE
It is helpful to consider this sort of argument against the back- ground of a well known critique, developed in Wittgenstein's writings, of a prevalent and very natural view of nonsense. Wittgenstein attacks views on which combinations of words fail to make sense because the thoughts that they (try to) express are taken to be in some way impermissible or illegitimate. He stresses that, in so far as such views represent combinations of words as failing to be proper units of language on account of the nature of thoughts they (endeavour to) impart, they presuppose an understanding of the very combinations of words they portray as nonsensical. These views waver unsteadily between representing certain strings of signs as having senses we can at least vaguely make out and rejecting those same strings of signs as lacking sense. They are at least tacitly committed to drawing on a problematic category of nonsensical yet somehow also intelligible strings of signs. Wittgenstein's critique bears directly on the feminist arguments at issue here. It is a presupposition of these arguments that we are in a position to grasp the notion of 'female' thoughts although-situated as we are within a 'male' language-we are not yet in a position fully to articulate them.24 It is at least implicit in them that there are ('female') thoughts which, because of the limits of ('male') language, we are unable fully to say or think. When we formulate these ('female') thoughts in ('male') language, we necessarily fail to give full expression to their ('female') meaning. We are, nonetheless, somehow able to achieve a position from which we can discern what ('female') thoughts these as yet nonsensical sentences would be expressing if they could be properly formulated. Still we recognize that the limits of ('male') language confine us. Try as we might, we can't (as yet) fully express these ('female') thoughts. This way of understanding the significance of certain nonsensical ('female') combinations of words commits its proponents to an understanding of language as having a communicative function over and above that of saying what can be said. The nonsensical ('female') sentence does not express an intelligible thought, yet it imparts a 'meaning' in spite of its senselessness. It show us that there is something it is attempting to say even though it cannot be said-something which is, as of yet, unsayable. It is implicit in such arguments, then, that it is in some sense intelligible to discuss what a nonsensical ('female') thought attempts to express. Theorists who embrace such arguments resemble proponents of the view of nonsense Wittgenstein attacks in that they find themselves committed to a notion of intelligible nonsense. In saying that certain nonsensical ('female') sentences attempt to express things that can't be said, these theorists simultaneously use those ('female') sentences to impart something and deny that that something can be said. They tell us that the sentences are nonsense at the same time that they provide us with an apparently intelligible rendering of what it is the sentences fail to say.25
5/10/17
JANFEB - Stock NC
Tournament: Winston Churchill | Round: 4 | Opponent: Edmond North PY | Judge: Lindsay Willson I value morality as per the term ought in the resolution. Structural violence is exclusionary and horribly dehumanizing to minority groups and can be combatted by altering the structures that cause it – hurting morality. Winter and Leighton in 1999 (Deborah DuNann Winter and Dana C. Leighton. Winter: Psychologist that specializes in Social Psych, Counseling Psych, Historical and Contemporary Issues, Peace Psychology. Leighton: PhD graduate student in the Psychology Department at the University of Arkansas. Knowledgable in the fields of social psychology, peace psychology, and ustice and intergroup responses to transgressions of justice) (Peace, conflict, and violence: Peace psychology in the 21st century. Pg 4-5) Finally, to recognize ... building lasting peace.
Contention 1: Funding There’s a contradiction within government policy —- restricting free speech may be unconstitutional, but not doing so causes public colleges to lose federal funding under Title IX. Title IX order on campus ‘harassment’ violates rights, free speech advocates say By Bradford Richardson - The Washington Times - Sunday, May 1, 2016 http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/may/1/title-ix-harassment-order-seen-as-free-speech-thre/ Several free speech ... this federal overreach.”
State cuts have led tuition to spike harming the ability to students to enter college, especially those who come from low income backgrounds or are people of color – The impact is a blow to the national economy because a college degree is a crucial internal link to working in a skilled job, decreasing health care costs, and bringing greater wealth to local communities Mitchell et al 16 (Report published by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities; authors were Michael Mitchell (State Budget and Tax), Michael Leachman (State Budget and Tax), and Kathleen Masterson, "Funding Down, Tuition Up: State Cuts to Higher Education Threaten Quality and Affordability at Public Colleges", http://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/funding-down-tuition-up,) Years of cuts ... higher education funding.
The only thing keeping graduation rates stable is financial aid —- allows students to study full-time, encourages academic progress, and is the only way low-income students can afford to enroll Johnson 14 (Hans Johnson – supported by the College Access Foundation of California and writing for the Public Policy Institute of California, "Making College Possible for Low-Income Students: Grant and Scholarship Aid in California", http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R'1014HJR.pdf, pg. 20-24, EmmieeM) Students fail to ... a four-year college.
Contention 2: Cyberbullying Anti-cyberbullying laws key to prevent cyberbullying – squo solves and checks off campus behavior. College’s are uniquely key and create spillover to off campus behavior. Patchin 10. Justin W. Patchin, Professor of Criminal Justice in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, 09/28/10, "Cyberbullying Laws and School Policy: A Blessing or Curse?," Cyberbullying Research Center, http://cyberbullying.org/cyberbullying-laws-and-school-policy-a-blessing-or-curse//AD Many schools are ... be all ears…
Cyberbullying is conducive to abuse and kills self worth – impedes the ability to get education, turns case ETCB 16, End To Cyber Bullying, The End to Cyber Bullying (ETCB) Organization was founded in 2011 to raise global awareness on cyberbullying, and to mobilize youth, educators, parents, and others in taking efforts to end cyberbullying, “A Surprising Long-Term Effect of Cyberbullying, ETCB Organization, 2016, http://www.endcyberbullying.org/a-surprising-long-term-effect-of-cyberbullying///AD If someone repeatedly ... anything but impermanent.
1/17/17
JANFEB - Title IX DA
Tournament: Winston Churchill | Round: Octas | Opponent: Anderson JT | Judge: Dominic Henderson, Adam Lipton, Lindsay Willson There’s a contradiction within government policy —- restricting free speech may be unconstitutional, but not doing so causes public colleges to lose federal funding under Title IX Title IX order on campus ‘harassment’ violates rights, free speech advocates say By Bradford Richardson - The Washington Times - Sunday, May 1, 2016 http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/may/1/title-ix-harassment-order-seen-as-free-speech-thre/ Several free speech ... this federal overreach.”
State cuts have led tuition to spike harming the ability to students to enter college, especially those who come from low income backgrounds or are people of color – The impact is a blow to the national economy because a college degree is a crucial internal link to working in a skilled job, decreasing health care costs, and bringing greater wealth to local communities Mitchell et al 16 (Report published by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities; authors were Michael Mitchell (State Budget and Tax), Michael Leachman (State Budget and Tax), and Kathleen Masterson, "Funding Down, Tuition Up: State Cuts to Higher Education Threaten Quality and Affordability at Public Colleges", http://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/funding-down-tuition-up,) Years of cuts ... higher education funding.
5/10/17
NOVDEC - Balancing Test T
Tournament: UT | Round: 1 | Opponent: Dulles DH | Judge: Chris Leonardi Interpretation- if the affirmative defends overturning the clearly established clause of qualified immunity they must defend an alternate objective balancing test to replace the standard.
A "limit" on qualified immunity must create an objective balancing test.
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FIFTH CIRCUIT 98 (LORENZO COLSTON, Plaintiff-Appellee, and YOLANDA MICHELLE COLSTON, Individually and as Next Friend of Lauren Colston and Quinton Colston, Minor Children, Intervenors Plaintiff-Appellees, versus BRYAN BARNHART, Texas Department of Public Safety Officer; et al, Defendants, BRYAN BARNHART, Defendant-Appellant. No. 96-40634 UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FIFTH CIRCUIT 146 F.3d 282; 1998 U.S. App. LEXIS 16178 July 14, 1998, Decided) In this regard the Supreme Court also said: By defining the limits of qualified immunity essentially in objective terms, we provide no license to lawless conduct. The public interest in deterrence of unlawful conduct and in compensation of victims remains protected by a test that focuses on the objective legal reasonableness of an official's acts. Where an official could be expected to know that certain conduct would violate statutory or constitutional rights, he should be made to hesitate; and a person who suffers injury caused by such conduct may have a cause of action. B. Violation C-Standards
1. Legal precision- immunity jurisprudence always focuses on refining the balancing test
Texas Law Review 04 (Texas Law Review February, 2004 82 Tex. L. Rev. 767 LENGTH: 15810 words NOTE: The Paradox of Qualified Immunity: How a Mechanical Application of the Objective Legal Reasonableness Test Can Undermine the Goal of Qualified Immunity*) In a series of decisions over the past thirty years, the Supreme Court of the United States has attempted to define the precise contours of qualified immunity in a manner that balances the competing interests inherent in damage suits against government officials. n9 In Harlow v. Fitzgerald, n10 the Court defined the limits of qualified immunity in objective terms. The Court held that qualified immunity shields government officials performing discretionary functions from liability "insofar as their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known." n11 Justice Powell, writing for the Court, stated that "reliance on the objective reasonableness of an official's conduct, as measured by reference to clearly established law, should avoid~ed~ excessive disruption of government and permit~ed~ the resolution of many insubstantial ~*769~ claims on summary judgment." n12 Five years after the Harlow Court announced the objective legal reasonableness test, the Supreme Court clarified the definition of clearly established law in Anderson v. Creighton. n13 According to the Anderson Court, "the contours of the right ~the official is alleged to have violated~ must be sufficiently clear that a reasonable official would understand that what he is doing violates that right." n14 Finally, the Court further refined the objective legal reasonableness test in Siegert v. Gilley n15 by establishing a two-part algorithm for assessing a claim of qualified immunity: (1) taking the facts in the light most favorable to the party asserting the injury, the trial judge first must determine whether the plaintiff has alleged a constitutional violation under current law; n16 (2) if the plaintiff fulfills this requirement, the judge then must determine whether the defendant's conduct was objectively reasonable with reference to clearly established law at the time of the conduct in question. n17 They conflate two distinct concepts and policy actions of curtailing versus limiting- that causes confusion and mis-educates us about QI which kills topic education.
Legal precisions outweighs limits and ground —- it’s a prerequisite to effective policy education. Shannon.
Shannon 2 – Bradley Shannon, law at University of Idaho, January 2002 (Washington Law Review, 77 Wash. L. Rev. 65, Lexis The second answer to the question why we should care about the use of proper Rules terminology goes to the cost of using improper terminology even in seemingly trivial contexts. Understanding legal concepts is difficult enough without the confusion created when an inappropriate term is used to represent those concepts. And this is true regardless of how minor the misuse. In some sense, every misuse of legal language impedes the understanding - and, consequently, the progress - of the law. Key to predictability – laws and policies are based on legally precise definitions, so promotion laws are an entirely different set of laws concerning assistance for society at large – it’s a different literature base than the rest of the resolution, which makes it impossible to prep against the aff thus killing fairness. Also kills education because there’s no way for me to effectively engage the aff.
2. Not specifying allows them to shift in the next speech out of whatever I read- I lose all of my counterplans and disads to the specific implementation of the aff. A limit can be interpreted in those three ways in addition to any subset of redefinitions under each policy- all of which are different in implementation ie limiting a particular procedure requires overarching change in the police system, limiting an aspect of the procedure is a change in the judiciary, and limiting scope is specific to organizations. Makes them a moving target because there is no true advocacy in the 1AC and I become prone to new extrapolations. Kills fairness- I literally can’t read anything. Kills education because we don’t get to discuss the merits of the implementation mechanism.
Circumvention means you can vote neg on presumption-If the aff doesn’t establish a new, objective test courts will circumvent the ruling and grant BROADER immunity- Pierson Proves
Rudovsky, Law @ Penn, 89 (David, THE QUALIFIED IMMUNITY DOCTRINE IN THE SUPREME COURT: JUDICIAL ACTIVISM AND THE RESTRICTION OF CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS., Copyright (c) 1989 The Trustees of The University of Pennsylvania University of Pennsylvania Law Review NOVEMBER, 1989 138 U. Pa. L. Rev. 23) The most recent statement of the controlling standard in Anderson v. Creighton n91 provides immunity to a fourth amendment claim where the legal principle upon which the claim is based is not clearly ~*39~ established or, even if the legal standard is clearly established (in this case the probable cause requirement of the fourth amendment), if a reasonable police officer would have believed the conduct to be legal. n92 Furthermore, subjective bad faith or malice may not defeat the immunity claim. n93 Each element of the Pierson test is therefore negated: the officer need not have probable cause and she need not have acted in good faith. How did the Court get from Monroe and Pierson to Anderson? An analysis of the Court's qualified immunity opinions shows an overriding concern with protecting public officers from damages liability. In addition, the Court has responded to the conceptual difficulties inherent in a process that seeks to construct a unitary doctrine, applicable to a wide range of officials and to the entire spectrum of constitutional violations, by redefining the substantive definition of qualified immunity wherever existing doctrine would limit the defense.
Courts are on the brink now – judiciary vacancies are intact but clogged at historic levels
Bannon 13 Testimony: More Judges Needed in Federal Courts Alicia Bannon September 10, 2013 https://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/testimony-federal-courts-need-more-judges Ms. Bannon received her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was a Comments Editor of the Yale Law Journal and a Student Director of the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic. DOA 11/4/16 KAE While the current high level of judicial vacancies partially explains this high per-judge burden, even if every existing vacancy were filled, the existing workload per sitting judge would still exceed historical levels, as reflected by the red line in Figure 2. In contrast, the green line estimates what per-judge caseloads would be if all 2009-2013 vacancies had been filled and Congress had created 85 additional district court judgeships (the number of additional permanent and temporary judgeships proposed in the Act). As Figure 2 demonstrates, authorizing these additional 85 judgeships is necessary to restore the number of pending cases per sitting judge to the level of the late 1990s. The growing workload in district courts around the country negatively impacts judges’ ability to effectively dispense justice, particularly in complex and resource-intensive civil cases, where litigants do not enjoy the same "speedy trial" rights as criminal defendants. For example, the median time for civil cases to go from filing to trial has increased by more than 70 percent since 1992, from 15 months to more than two years (25.7 months). Older cases are also increasingly clogging district court dockets. Since 2000, cases that are more than three years old have made up an average of 12 percent of the district court civil docket, compared to an average of 7 percent from 1992-1999. For a small company in a contract dispute or a family targeted by consumer fraud, these kind of delays often mean financial uncertainty and unfilled plans, putting lives on hold as cases wind through the court system. All too often, justice delayed in these circumstances can mean justice denied. These patterns of delay are starkly reflected in the districts for which additional judgeships are recommended, many of which lag behind the national average in key metrics. In the Eastern District of California, for example, the median time for civil cases to go from filing to trial is almost four years (46.4 months). This district would receive six additional permanent judgeships and one additional temporary judgeship under the Act. In the Middle District of Florida, over 23 percent of the civil docket is more than three years old. This district would receive five additional permanent judgeships and one additional temporary judgeship under the Act. The federal courts are a linchpin of our democracy, protecting individual rights from government overreach, providing a forum for resolving individual and commercial disputes, and supervising the fair enforcement of criminal laws. In order for judges to perform their jobs effectively, however, they must have manageable workloads. The Brennan Center urges Congress to promptly pass the Federal Judgeship Act of 2013, so as to ensure the continued vitality of our federal courts.
QI lets courts avoid pointless and redundant litigation – limits spike lawsuits, which triggers the impact.
Ignall 94 David J. Ignall (Associate, Wiley, Rein and Fielding, Washington, D.C. J.D., The College of William and Mary, 1991; B.A., Cornell University, 1987). "Making Sense of Qualified Immunity: Summary Judgment and Issues for the Trier of Fact." California Western Law Review: Vol. 30: No. 2, Article 2. (1994). http://scholarlycommons.law.cwsl.edu/cwlr/vol30/iss2/2 DOA 11/4/16 KAE On a motion for summary judgment concerning qualified immunity, the court should consider evidence with respect to qualified immunity differently than with respect to the merits. Even if the plaintiff produces sufficient evidence to create a jury question on the merits, the defendant should be entitled to qualified immunity if the plaintiff cannot produce evidence to support a judgment as a matter of law against the defendant-i.e., sufficient to show that the defendant violated a clearly established right of which a reasonable person would have known. If the ruling on the issue of qualified immunity mimics the ruling on the merits, the defense of qualified immunity is superfluous because it would be available only when the plaintiff would be unable to prove liability. The only protection left to the defendant is the ability to file an interlocutory appeal to argue that the plaintiff would be unable to prove liability on the merits. Because qualified immunity should be denied only when the plaintiff can prove as a matter of law that the defendant violated a constitutional right, the merits should never become an issue with respect to that defendant. If the defendant loses qualified immunity, he would necessarily be liable on the merits. By making qualified immunity the only issue, the court can focus the litigation so that qualified immunity can serve its purpose of protecting officials from the injustice of subjecting them to liability in the absence of bad faith and the diversion of official energy associated with defending a lawsuit. Thus, qualified immunity would truly be a shield to all but the truly incompetent and those who knowingly violate the law.
That tips the scale – collapses the federal judiciary – it overburdens dockets and expansion won't keep pace. Outweighs the case – destroys the foundation of American justice and ensures unequal treatment – turns under their framework of processual application.
Oakley 96 John Oakley, 1996 Oakley is a Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of California Davis. "The Myth of Cost-Free Jurisdictional Reallocation," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Volume 543, p. 52—63, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1048447 Personal effects: The hidden costs of greater workloads. The hallmark of federal justice traditionally has been the searching analysis and thoughtful opinion of a highly competent judge, endowed with the time as well as the intelligence to grasp and resolve the most nuanced issues of fact and law. Swollen dockets create assembly-line conditions, which threaten the ability of the modern federal judge to meet this high standard of quality in federal adjudication. No one expects a federal judge to function without an adequate level of available tangible resources: sufficient courtroom and chambers space, competent administrative and research staff, a good library, and a comfortable salary that relieves the judge from personal financial pressure. Although salary levels have lagged—encouraging judges to engage in the limited teaching and publication activities that are their sole means of meeting such newly pressing financial obligations as the historically high mortgage expenses and college tuitions of the present decade-in the main, federal judges have received a generous allocation of tangible resources. It is unlikely that there is any further significant gain to be realized in the productivity of individual federal judges through increased levels of tangible resources,13 other than by redressing the pressure to earn supplemental income.14 On a personal level, the most important resource available to the federal judge is time."5 Caseload pressures secondary to the indiscriminate federalization of state law are stealing time from federal judges, shrinking the increments available for each case. Federal judges have been forced to compensate by operating more like executives and less like judges. They cannot read their briefs as carefully as they would like, and they are driven to rely unduly on law clerks for research and writing that they would prefer to do themselves.16 If federal judges need more time to hear and decide each case, an obvious and easy solution is to spread the work by the appointment of more and more federal judges. Congress has been generous in the recent creation of new judgeships,17 and enlargement of the federal judiciary is likely to continue to be the default response, albeit a more grudging one, to judicial concern over the caseload consequences of jurisdictional reallocation. Systemic effects: The hidden costs of adding more judges. Increasing the size of the federal judiciary creates institutional strains that reduce and must ultimately rule out its continued acceptability as a countermeasure to caseload growth. While the dilution of workload through the addition of judges is always incrementally attractive, in the long run it will cause the present system to collapse. I am not persuaded by arguments that the problem lies in the declining quality of the pool of lawyers willing to assume the federal bench18 or in the greater risk that, as the ranks of federal judges expand, there will be more frequent lapses of judgment by the president and the Senate in seating the mediocre on the federal bench.19 In my view, the diminished desirability of federal judicial office is more than offset by the rampant dissatisfaction of modern lawyers with the excessive commercialization of the practice of law. There is no shortage of sound judicial prospects willing and able to serve, and no sign that the selection process-never the perfect meritocracy-is becoming less effective in screening out the unfit or undistinguished. Far more serious are other institutional effects of continuously compounding the number of federal judges. Collegiality among judges, consistency of decision, and coherence of doctrine across courts are all imperiled by the growth of federal courts to cattle-car proportions. Yet the ability of the system to tolerate proliferation of courts proportional to the proliferation of judges is limited, and while collapse is not imminent, it cannot be postponed indefinitely. Congress could restructure the federal trial and appellate courts without imperiling the core functions, but the limiting factor is the capacity of the Supreme Court to maintain overall uniformity in the administration and application of federal law. That Court is not only the crown but the crowning jewel of a 200-year-old system of the rule of law within a constitutional democracy, and any tinkering with its size or jurisdiction would raise the most serious questions of the future course of the nation.
5/10/17
SEPTOCT - Caputi K
Tournament: all | Round: Finals | Opponent: all | Judge: all
Metaphor
"WE CALL SHIPS ‘SHE.’ WE CALL OUR WAR MACHINES ‘WOMEN.’ WE COMPARE WOMEN TO BLACK WIDOWS AND VIPERS. AND YOURE GOING TO TELL ME IT’S NOT ‘LADY-LIKE’ TO SCREAM, TO TAKE UP SPACE TO FIGHT AND DEMAND RESPECT AND DO WHATEVER THE HELL I WANT. YOU’VE LOOKED AT NUCLEAR BOMBS AND BEEN SO IN AWE THAT YOU COULD ONLY NAME THEM AFTER WOMEN. DON’T TRY TO DOWN-PLAY MY POWER."
Representations must be used in policy making. The 1AC's knowledge production is the basic building block of politics. Questioning the 1AC must be dealt with before blindly walking into policymaking.
Bleiker 2k (Roland, Senior lecturer, peace and conflict studies, Contending images of World Politics, pg 228) Various implications follow from an approach that acknowledges the metaphorical nature of our understanding of AND if options available to decision makers who deal with the phenomenon of terrorism.
Metaphors are an implicit part of criticism and altering material conditions of oppression
Forest 06 Forest, Heather. The Power of Words: Leadership, Metaphor and Story. Proceedings of 8th Annual International Leadership Association (ILA) Conference., Leadership at the Crossroads, 2-5 Nov. 2006, Chicago, IL. CD-ROM. College Park, MD: ILA, 2007 KAE An effective leader must be a competent storyteller who can use oral communication skills to AND stories and metaphor. In doing so, he catalyzed a social movement.
Nuclear power is a symbol of power for Indigenous and female bodies
Caputi 91 THE METAPHORS OF RADIATION Or, Why a Beautiful Woman Is Like a Nuclear Power Plant JANE CAPUTI American Studies, Ortega Hall, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 1991 KAE I hold to the traditional Indian views on language, that words have power, AND , the sacredness of the Earth, and indeed of nuclear power itself.
Turn aff: native women and children see the nuclear reactor as a symbol of femxle power
Caputi 91 THE METAPHORS OF RADIATION Or, Why a Beautiful Woman Is Like a Nuclear Power Plant JANE CAPUTI American Studies, Ortega Hall, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 1991 KAE The linear Western, masculine mode of thought has been too intent on conquering nature AND rationality." - figure out the strategic distinction for using caputi and ahmed
Rage is commonality and transcends beyond traditional understandings of anger to recognize the various lived experiences of other womxn as other faces of ourselves – we recognize difference and we stand together although our shackles are very different. We use rage to sustain ourselves, to survive. Intersectional female rage is a pre-requisite to a successful movement against patriarchy – otherwise, civil society will co-opt and divide the struggle, forcing the movement underground behind closed doors, which keep the conversation in the domestic sphere.
Nuclear power is it makes womxn into a medusa or Gorgon, metaphors for vitality and rage against the idea that womxn should stay home and look pretty
Caputi 91 THE METAPHORS OF RADIATION Or, Why a Beautiful Woman Is Like a Nuclear Power Plant JANE CAPUTI American Studies, Ortega Hall, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 1991 KAE The second metaphor I will call upon here is the Gorgon. Since the early AND can look to the Gorgon for vital information about paralyzing the nuclear rippers.
The alternative is to embrace defiance. Our 1NC speech act is already a form of defiance in a space in which women are supposed to recede into the background. Only the 1NC imagination can serve as a form of liberation from traditional notions of happiness.
Ahmed 10 Sara, 1/1/2010. Professor of Race and Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London. The Promise of Happiness. Duke University Press. KD Going along with this duty can mean simply approximating the signs of¶ being happy AND so submissive, so backward to assert her own will" (309).
10/15/16
SEPTOCT - Indigenous Autonomy CP
Tournament: St Marks | Round: 3 | Opponent: na | Judge: na
Text: Indigenous communities should individually decide for themselves whether they want to prohibit the production of nuclear power in their territory commonly known as the United States.
Competition: Mutually exclusive: they decide for themselves, so they don’t actually necessarily ban. The perm is severance. Individually implies that the policy of the action is grouped. Competes through net benefits.
I’ll defend the CP as unconditional.
The Counterplan solves better than the plan: consultation leads to the best policies for each clan. Thomas 95
EDWARD K. THOMAS, 1995 (PRESIDENT CENTRAL COUNCIL OF THE TLINGIT AND HAIDA INDIAN TRIBES OF ALASKA, May 18, 1995, http://www.archive.org/stream/biataskforcehear00unit/biataskforcehear00unit'djvu.txt) The opportunity for Tribes to participate in the reorganization process was greatly increased by holding the various meetings close to their Tribal headquarters. Many tribal leaders and Tribal members did attend the meetings and many testified at the times set aside on each agenda for hearing testimony. Witnesses either spoke on the business of the day or on the reorganization plan and the reorganization planning process. Their testimony helped Task Force members in their decision-making. We were better able to understand how they felt on many very important reorganization issues. Their testimony did make a difference in our final product. That is why Tribal consultation is important. Tribes, more than anyone else, know what is best for them. They know better than anyone what policies would be bad for them.
Legal discourse about Native populations can never escape the web of coloniality ~:21 sec~
Gehres 01 (Edward D. Gehres III*, "Visions of the Ghost Dance: Native American Empowerment and the Neo-Colonial Impulse," Hein Online, 2001, Online, Accessed 8/20/16, Pages 163. *Associate, Arnold and Porter, Washington, D.C.; J.D., 2001, University of Virginia School of Law; MA., 1996, The Graduate School of Political Management at The George Washington University; A.B., 1994, University of Michigan.) The application of these constructs of European derived legal discourse to the issue of a congressional waiver of tribal sovereign immunity reveals that despite intermittent advances in policy that have strengthened tribal sovereignty, the vestiges of colonial legal reasoning still hold strong influence in American legal thought. What has emerged with the instantaneous congressional and judicial reactions to the public backlash surrounding the empowerment of a few Indian nations is the "neo-colonial impulse" in policymaking. The reapplication of backward looking colonial images of Indian nations and culture, combined with the fundamental misconception that Indian nations should not participate in the policymaking surrounding their own sovereign powers of government, has produced a situation that could pose significant threats to the stability of enterprise development efforts by subjecting tribal governments to coercive and frivolous lawsuits from states and citizens seeking redress from the supposedly "unfair" advantages possessed by Indian nations. Tribal governments readily acknowledge that creative solutions must be sought to establish limited waivers and disclosure requirements concerning a tribe's sovereign immunity so that entities dealing with Indian nations will have proper protections and fair notice. Tribal governments need to decide for themselves how much sovereign immunity they must cede and under which circumstances this should be done. The proper scope of their waiver and disclosure requirements ought to reflect the input of their bilateral partners in government and enterprise development, but the ultimate decision over these inherent sovereign powers ought to rest with those possessing them. The perceptions fueled by the misunderstanding of recent economic development success and the fear and anger that have arisen as a result of new Indian empowerment must cede to the creation of new theories for the future of federal-Indian relations.
Previous consultation processes prove—Consultation processes make clans full partners in the process—the plan merely continues the legacy of colonization. Chino 95
WENDELL CHINO, 1995 (MESCALERO APACHE TRIBE, HEARING BEFORE THE COMMITTEE ON INDIAN AFFAIRS UNITED STATES SENATE, http://www.archive.org/stream/biataskforcehear00unit/biataskforcehear00unit'djvu.txt) The Joint Tribal BIA Tribal Department of the Interior Advisory Task Force on the reorganization of the Bureau of Indian Affairs task force was chartered on December 20, 1990 by the Secretary of the Interior. The charter was to develop baseline goals and plans for reorganization to strength the BIA's administration of Indian programs. The creation of the task force was based on a congressional mandate in response to tribal concerns that the Department of the Interior was planning to move forward with the reorganization of the Bureau of Indian Affairs prior to appropriate participation and consultation with Indian tribes. The initial task force charter was for 2 years and was extended an additional 2 years by the Secretary of the Interior on November 18, 1992, in order to en- sure that the task force's efforts were tribally driven; yet, at the same time, a joint partnership effort — 36 of the 43 members of the task force were tribal members, 5 were BIA employees and 2 were Department of the Interior employees. The 36 members were 3 rep- resentatives from each of the Bureau's 12 area locations who were nominated by the tribes and appointed by the Secretary. The task force was led by cochairpersons representing the tribal and Federal partnership. The Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs was named the Federal cochair by the Secretary, and the tribal representatives elected Wendell Chino, President of the Mescalero Apache Tribe, the tribal cochair. The task force held its first of 22 meetings on January 22 through 24 1991, in Crystal City, VA. During the 4 years of its charter every effort was made to con- duct its meetings in different administrative areas to allow as many local tribes to participate as possible. To further ensure that this effort was tribally driven several steps were taken: One, time was set aside at each meeting to listen to the concerns and comments of the tribal leaders; two, tribal task force members were made responsible and held accountable for meeting with their respective tribes; three, each BIA area appointed Federal coordina- tors to facilitate ongoing consolidated sessions with the tribes; four, all tribes were invited to submit written comments for task force consideration. As a result of this participatory consultation process, tribes have been full partners in the recommendations presented.
Bringing indigenous views back into the picture is necessary for global survival.
Suagee 92 Dean B. Suagee, 1992 (J.D., University of North Carolina, University of Michigan Law School, University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform, 25 U. Mich. J.L. Reform 671, Lexis, Accessed July 6, 2009) The global environmental crisis has more than adequately demonstrated that business as usual will not and cannot ensure global survival. What is needed is a fundamental shift in consciousness, and this means that the views of indigenous peoples — our laws and rules and relationships to the natural world — have to be brought back into the picture.
Grouping NB
Some indigenous people see waste facilities as good. To clarify, my argument is not that all groups should do this, but they need the option- the aff denies that.
Gover et al, Kevin, and Jana L. Walker (Native American Attorneys at Gover, Stetson and Williams). "Escaping Environmental Paternalism: One Tribe's Approach to Developing a Commercial Waste Disposal Project in Indian Country." University of Colorado Law Review 63 (1992): 933. The second and more controversial issue facing tribes involves the use of reservation lands as sites for commercial solid and hazardous waste disposal facilities. Looking at the waste industry as a form of economic development, in many respects it can be a good match for tribal communities. The industry is usually willing to pay the costs of developing new projects without requiring a tribe to put any cash up front. Since most tribes just do not have the money to independently fund large-scale economic development, this makes the industry attractive to Indian communities desperate for development. The waste industry needs isolation and an abundance of land, and, again, because of the overall lack of tribal economic development, undeveloped land is a resource that many tribes have. The waste industry also provides numerous opportunities for unskilled and semi-skilled workers, including training in the construction and environmental compliance fields. On most reservations, unemployment is extremely high and opportunities for training Indians very limited. Finally, the waste industry is and must be recognized as an indispensable and legitimate part of the services sector of the economy, and as such, can be an extremely profitable form of development for tribes. All of this means that, under certain circumstances, a solid or hazardous waste disposal project may represent a viable and appropriate form of industrial development for some tribes and can provide extraordinary opportunities for economic development on some reservations. It is not appropriate for every community, and we certainly are not urging tribes to site waste facilities on their reservations. Each tribe must decide for itself if it is interested in such development. Our intent is merely to put things in a more honest perspective and to describe one process that, when and if a tribe seriously considers a commercial waste proposal, it can use to evaluate the proposal effectively and, if it's feasible, plan for its development.
Implications. A) Grouping indigenous identities together is much worse- you don’t take into account particularities, which turns case since you just reify native violence by not acknowledging this. B) Also, it does not matter that you read specific authors who do not want nuclear power on their land- that’s just a reason they should ban individually, which solves the aff. But you shouldn’t impose this on other groups.