Explaining my choice of blog title

 

A male human head louse, and a featured picture (and prior Picture of the Day) on Wikimedia Commons. I wonder if this one will ever protest for their own civil rights in a way we can hear or understand.

I believe the most interesting research comes from questioning fundamental assumptions of a field. I also want it to also be as widely applicable while still being descriptive and faulting the model, rather than the counterexamples, if there is stuff that isn't explained well in the model. With that in mind, I'll explain the main reason for my choice of blog title.

I have been considering the reciprocal interaction between respectability politics, identity politics, social organisation, stigma and prejudice. What does this even mean? For each of these concepts I'm going to first provide controversial working definitions chosen arbitrarily by myself in a way which I interpret these terms as meaningful. My definitions are certainly inspired by previous material I've read, but I will just define them here in my own words and thoughts what I construe them to mean:

• Respectability politics is the mindset of viewing groups with shared identity as hierarchies, and coupled with that is a tendency to form hierarchies out of homogenous groups. 
• Identity politics is the concept that our thoughts, feelings and behavior, both influence and are influenced by our identity in terms of political expression.
• Social organisation is a phenomenon where, both individually and collectively, in-groups and out-groups are formed. An in-group (or out-group) is a social group which people identify with (or not identify with) respectively.
• Stigma is a phenomenon of being ignored. This contains two main parts: being ignored both in political expression, and also being ignored in the defence of that expression. My reciprocal definition here is privilege: having the ability to ignore political expression, and also the ability to show increased scrutiny to political expressions.

I'm going to emphasise my initial choice of definitions here is completely arbitrary even if inspired a lot by what I've read. But I use these definitions for these terms because currently I think it is the best I can do with the language available to me, and because the alternatives that I've already seen to define these terms does not generalise principles in a very flexible way in intersectional feminism that I want to describe here. My main focus here is, instead of describing the phenomenon and then building an explanatory model on top of those definitions, I'm explicitly baking in my presumptions and explanations of phenomena mostly into the definitions. I'm not sure I've seen this kind of writing style before - explicitly using nonstandard to express controversial parts of an explanation - if you know of anything similar please let me know! In future posts I'm going to talk more about this particular choice and my thoughts on this kind of approach in general. 

Under these definitions I want to deduce how they relate to each other in a sort of logical expression. One approach to that is fairly straightforward: identity politics contributes to social organisation of homogenous groups where everyone in the group is of roughly equal stigma and privilege. Respectability politics produces prejudice and stigma - both real and imagined - in the process of forming hierarchies.  

There are some loose (ie. hardly conclusive) parallels I can draw between my arbitrary definitions and some research in psychology and neuroscience. his includes some concepts interpreted as 'bad' things, which are generally taught in a way that they can become recognised and their effects weakened: illusions, cognitive biases and logical fallacies. These concepts are also explained academically in terms of neutral traits which for lack of a better term is often called 'human nature' because it is such an anomolous mixed bag of different implications: personality and genetic predispositions. Heren's a different approach: what if I were a hypothetical genetic engineer, psychologist or neuroscientist of some sort, that is able to change these processes in people? What would I end up doing with this power - which for sake of simplicity I will refer to as 'thought power'? 

One option is to build on my own self-serving desires, or maybe instead the desires of a financially rich person, to try and encode certain political beliefs in my model. There's a large handful of dystopian fictional stories where that idea has been explored.⁠ (Footnote: my favourite among these is The Island (2005 film). I like it because it's so overblown and sensationalised that it felt irreverent to me, and in my childhood I think this is one of the first films I really started connecting with this idea that changing how other people think, also known as psychological manipulation, is a moral minefield.)

However, I don't believe it is possible to completely 'game the system' if my definitions hold true; according to these definitions, stigma and prejudice will consistently follow in some form alongside social hierarchies via respectability politics, and identity politics will continually provide pressure for both homogenous groups to form and for hierarchies to collapse into homogenous groups. I suppose I'm thinking of this a bit like petri dish of suffering: I can change the environment like what food is available and what the initial conditions are, but eventually as resources shift around or are consumed, differences will start to emerge. So I am drawing a loose analogy between what food is to the arrangement of organisms on a petri dish, and what political power is to the different products of social organisation. 

I am now going to make a rather large claim about this explanatory model, by retroactively considering historical civil rights movements and legislative attention, in an attempt to describe how the petri dish of geopolitics has viewed different groups. Feminism has gone through a few different, arbitrarily named 'waves' historically largely in parallel to racial justice movements - and the nuanced interaction between those two in particular, as a large part of intersectional feminism, is interesting to me. Homosexuality as an identity in Europe emerged around the 1900s, but civil rights movements for it took decades longer to form where for a time the identity lived somewhat peacefully in a culture of "don't ask don't tell". Only in the 1950s, with the rise of McCarthyism and the lavender scare was the stigma from being associated with homosexuality in any way, strong enough to lose careers. To any readers familiar with gay marriage law reform, it could be described as an initially radical movement that soon became single-issue and reform-oriented, and moved into bureaucratic relationships with government. This shift towards forming a hierarchy among a group of diverse sexualities could be described as a tidal wave of respectability politics under my definitions. Transgender civil rights have largely gained mainstream attention as it has become increasingly well known how this single-issue reform has sidelined LGBT people who do not fit a strict narrative of a person that is 'respectable' to non-LGBT people. This can, and also has been discussed at length for racial justice movements as well. 

History of LGBT identities in Europe⁠ (Footnote: Eckstrand, K. L., & Potter, J. (Eds.). (2017). Trauma, Resilience, and Health Promotion in LGBT Patients: What Every Healthcare Provider Should Know. Springer International Publishing.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54509-7 )

Alternative sexualities, like bisexuality and demisexuality which dictate attraction in more flexible and mutable terms of identity than the way same-sex marriage is constrained by gender identity (or in some cases legally codified only to "biological" sex/gender), have had negligible attention from law and policy makers - the ways in which bi-erasure has formed in policy and legislation is something I want to write about more. This is also largely true for the wide array of identities of non-binary people which has admittedly gained traction in the US with "X" gender markers but the poor international acceptance of "X" gender markers currently renders them somewhat useless internationally. There are also several shortcomings in protecting non-binary people from legal discrimination. (Footnote: For one article with more details on this: Meerkamper, S. T. (2014, April 16). Non-Binary Identities & the Law. Transgender Law Center. https://transgenderlawcenter.org/archives/10208 ) I can't predict exactly which of these will gain more legal and civil activism attention in the coming decades, but I think both more diverse sexualities and identities will get more legal attention in future. 

Making the big assumption that civil rights for those groups are acquired and largely successful, what will come after that? At this point I am being very speculative and opinionated, and only loosely relying on my initial definitions. I believe civil rights questioning the social organisation of romantic attraction itself would come next - meaning polyamorous civil rights. Again, purely speculative opinion: I don't genuinely believe polyamorous civil rights will come until LGBTIQA+ rights expand from single-issue movements to enabling activists to legally encode the flexibility and diversity of attraction in policy and law. 

For example, an idea in the book "Undoing Monogamy" (Footnote: Willey, A. (2016). Undoing monogamy: The politics of science and the possibilities of biology. Duke University Press. ) stood out to me that I hadn't considered before: an assumption of heteronormative society that generally defines monogamous familial boundaries by who it's publicly permissible to have sexual or romantic interaction with. I'm still reading this book, and I think ideas like this illustrate there is still a lot for me to understand the commonalities of intersectional feminism civil rights movements in questioning many assumptions built in heteronormativity. One of these assumptions is to rely on shaming any activities with a vague resemblance to some 'forbidden liability' like sexual misconduct which ends up as a perverse incentive that denies civil rights. I've seen this problematic assumption and its effects in teaching,⁠ (Footnote: Bad Girls: On Being the Accused. (2017, December 22). Bully Bloggers. https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2017/12/21/bad-girls-on-being-the-accused/ ) in psychiatry,⁠ (Footnote: Really great read! Pretty short too. Appel, J. M. (2019). When Liability and Ethics Diverge. FOCUS, 17(4), 382–386. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.focus.20190031 ) and in animal rights.⁠ (Footnote: Deckha, M. (2020). Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders. University of Toronto Press. https://doi.org/10.3138/9781487538248 )

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That explains the 'polyamorous' part of 'polyamorous computers'. Well, what about the computers? What have they got anything at all to do with it?

Technology has historically changed many of the 'rules of the game' in social organisation. This happens through making different forms or modes of social interaction more or less accessible or visible, through a litany of social media experiments which would frankly never pass ethics board approval. Changing the 'rules of the game' by encouraging performative emotions as the desired or expected way to engage with political media on social media platforms has made the platforms themselves more judgemental,⁠ (Footnote: This is my colourful interpretation of the results from: Rathje, S., Van Bavel, J. J., & van der Linden, S. (2021). Out-group animosity drives engagement on social media. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(26), e2024292118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2024292118 ) although the exact mechanisms of that remain unclear - this is in my opinion largely a question of which dark patterns are the most malfeasant, which I believe is an untenable thesis statement to seek ethics board approval for a randomized control trial. What I would call technocratic theocracies - technology companies and corpoations whose CEOs hold comparable thought power via dark patterns and related psychological manipulation, to oligarchs of centuries past - have pretty clearly done the lion's share of precipitating this change in political polarisation. 

Facebook's rebranding to Meta in an attempt to build monopoly over social organisation via virtual reality in my mind reflects one step along the chain in a profit motive to generate market value from thought power (as is the entire industry of marketing and advertising). Along in this chain is the maybe sci-fi, maybe-70+-year-reality (again, highly speculative) of brain-computer interfaces such as the human connectome project which if it were to occur would be extremely lucrative in selling thought power to the highest bidder. Ultimately, in my hypothetically farfetched future, those human-computer consciousnesses will need to advocate for their own civil rights too, and I believe it would follow in a parallel similar to our meatball world. This makes me think if humanity can achieve polyamorous civil rights for uploaded consciousnesses then social justice will become only a problem, not a crisis - to paraphrase slightly, "a crisis is just a problem with no solution in sight." (Footnote: This is something I heard from Greta Thunberg on a Juice media podcast: https://youtu.be/MibVpT2XUb4?t=805

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