Suburban shopping centres. Actually, any shopping centres. Main roads choked with cars driven by suits. Stainless steel cafe slash bars. Anywhere where the climate has been forcibly altered. Old people’s homes. The waiting rooms of bulk billing doctor’s surgeries. Shopping centre toilets. The library toilets during term time (I thought I had left the smell of hairspray and Impulse deodorant far behind me). Sydney University Village. Inner west kitchens that cannot, despite two visits from the chemical free fumigator, get rid of pervasive cockroaches. Cronulla.
Go tell your friends I’m still a feminist
But I’m not coming to your benefit
I give up
I give up
I’ll be at home to-day
- Le Tigre
Readers of Paulo Freire in English have tended to get excited about his term ‘conscientization’, as it has been translated from the Portuguese ‘conscientização’. It has come to mean, for followers of Freire, a deep learning, rooted in the experience of oppression and the decolonization of the mind. But it seems it would be more accurate to say that Freire was inaugurating a particular kind of ‘conscientization’ since it is used in Brazil to refer to the most didactic of awareness campaign type activities, such as to combat dengue fever (see Nossa Região: ‘Vigilância realiza arrastão contra dengue’, here).
Just a thought.
“…you cannot undo thousands of years of oppressing the mind through these nice kinds of Montessori-style experiments. (…). When you see these things in pictures and posters and booklets or television, the protofeudal, downwardly class mobile, liberally outraged activists are always present.
(…)
the moment you feel it’s really working, you have to stop and ask yourself, for whom is it working? Give it a try; be absent. See. And you will see within the week … it’s not so easy to undo a thousand years.”
– interview with Jenny Sharpe, Signs, Winter 2003, p. 623.
1. A French dictionary
2. A German dictionary
3. An encyclopedia of philosophy
4. A cigarette for afterwards
The Block: Still slated for demolition.
Balmain squat: Wins the right to stay .
“Love is either the mode of becoming which appropriates the other to itself by consuming it, introjecting it into the self until it the self disappears. Or love is the movement of becoming that allows the one and the other to grow. For such love to exist, each one must keep its body autonomous. One must not be the source of the other, nor the other of the one. Two loves must embrace and fecundate each other with no preconceived goal or end for either.”
- Luce Irigaray, ‘Passion élémentaires’ (1982), trans. Elizabeth Grosz in ‘Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminisms’, p. 170
