My guilty pleasure as a leftist is watching Hamilton. So much liberalism, ouch. But the music slaps so hard.

Because we live in a society where our worth is heavily framed in terms of our production/capitalist exploitability as workers, emphasizing the importance of taking care of ourselves is absolutely important and can even be radical. However, “self care” as a framework has increasingly become individualizing and part of the larger neoliberalization of health/wellness in the U.S.. One place where this becomes especially clear is in the way self care has become deeply intertwined with the beauty industrial complex in contemporary practices and ideologies of “skin care”. 

More below the cut. 

Self care, at its root, is not the problem. As Audre Lorde’s famously said, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare”. We are frequently made to feel that our only value is in how much we are able to do, how busy we are, how convenient we are; in this context, taking care of ourselves can feel selfish, and reframing the way we value ourselves and our needs becomes particularly important. However, increasingly we can see the ways in which self care serves to make contemporary capitalism (appear) tenable. 

This becomes clear first and foremost through the way self care is positioned as a response to the harm which occurs through late stage capitalism; we only need self care because of neoliberalism/capitalism, and yet by imagining self care as a practice of healing and revaluing the individual over the corporation, self care implicitly naturalizes the system which produces the need for self care. Essentially, self care operates through a neoliberal framework, individualizing care, healing, and wellness, in ways which disrupt or obscure communal networks of care. Through this framework, care not only becomes something which is enacted by and for the individual, but also constructed as the responsibility of the individual–typically in addition to regular obligations.One of the central problems exploiting workers causes corporations (assuming workers do not strike) is the problem of selling products–if no one can afford to purchase items, the system starts to fall apart. Because of this, mobilizing self care to encourage consumption helps support the entire system. “Self care” has increasingly become appropriated and intertwined with consumption; not only has he phrase itself becomes a kind of marketing, used in ads to sell products (for example, targeted instagram ads by a companies with the handle such as “selfcareisforeveryone” offering t-shirts with catchy slogans like “GOING TO THERAPY IS COOL!”), but “self care” as a practice is frequently associated with buying the things you want (#treatyoself) or, more and more often, buying items specifically marketed as being specifically necessary to produce relaxation, namely bath bombs, facemasks, and other skin care products. 

This is not a failure of those who are using self care to survive, but something directly produced by and through neoliberalism/capitalism; the necessity of self care starts to feel like

[image id:Seth Rogan putting duct tape over huge crack in the wall] 

but the central issue isn’t the people using the duct tape, it’s the way the late stage capitalism and neoliberalism intentionally frame band-aid solutions as meaningful responses to the damage capitalism produces–and then sell the band-aids for a profit. 

The connection between specifically skin care related products and broader “self care” discourse is certainly nothing new or surprising; in the last few years skin care has increasingly become a central focus in the marketing of U.S. beauty practices, with the concept of “self care” often being mobilized in these discourses. As Constance Grady argues in her 2018 Vox article “The skin care wars, explained,” contemporary ideas about skin care have not been hijacked by corporations “because skin care in its modern form has always been corporate” (emphasis added). 

While there are many ways in which one might critique this–for example, the way someone’s “natural” face comes to mean a face without makeup, subsequently naturalizing the artificial, expensive, and extensive routines which are required to achieve “clear” “moisturized” “healthy” “glowing” “natural” skin –what I am interested in exploring here is the shift in language from the beauty industry’s heavily “choice feminism” flavored branding of make up to the current branding of skin care. Whereas the branding of make up was (and still is) typically linked to discourses of creativity, freedom, and power (ie “winged eyeliner sharp enough to cut a man”), skin care is dominantly a neoliberal disciplining discourse, centered on the notion of individual responsibility to clean/purify skin through strict regimens of “care”. This is absolutely not to imply that make-up is better than skin care, merely to point to the various ways the beauty industrial complex deploys certain positive associations, often appropriated from or in conversation with the language of various feminisms, in order to increase marketability. 

One of the things which Jia Tolentino points out in her 2017 New Yorker article “The Year That Skin Care Became a Coping Mechanism,” is the way that while beauty standards have remained largely the same, the framing of these ideals shifts as feminism becomes more common in society–for example, rather than emphasizing looking young/anti-aging, there is an increase in the use of words like “radiance.” While her overall argument suggests that anti-aging skin care is an act of resistance because of the way it insists that there will be a future during a moment where the future feels increasingly unstable, the “coping mechanism” actually seems to be a response to agency panic, a way of controlling one’s self as a response to general instability. Again, like self care it imagines that individualized practices resist structural violence, while simultaneously increasing the marketability of misogynists beauty ideals. 

Feminist aesthetics and language are frequently appropriated by corporations to sell products to “conscientious” consumers (obligatory reminder that there’s no ethical consumption under late stage capitalism), or to profit off of the increasing visibility of various feminist activism. Just as we can see with the way the broader category of  “self care” is increasingly mobilized by corporations to sell products, in the last few years we’ve seen “skin care” culture come into vogue as the “positive” new version of make-up culture. The idea here is that skin care allows people to be “natural” and “healthy,” simultaneously justifying the time and expense associated with these updated beauty regimes, while also imaging that a) “healthy” skin is clear/even/looks “perfect” without the need for makeup and b) this skin is attainable by anyone who puts in the effort to achieve it. At best, skin care culture is a kind of capitalist ambivalence: regardless of whether prioritizing skin care is better than prioritizing cosmetic routines, the beauty industry only cares about selling product. As Tolentino argues, “when my skin feels good, I feel happy…at the same time, it’s impossible to ignore that the animating idea of the beauty industry is that women should always be working to look better”. Grady similarly points to this ambivalence, pointing out that “while it’s true that some forms of acne and dry skin are physically painful, the drive for “perfect” poreless skin is primarily an aesthetic one”.

At worst, skin care is insidious and damaging because despite the rhetoric of “care,” skin care is, at its base, a discourse of neoliberal bodily discipline–skin “defects” cannot simply be covered up but must be addressed through intensive routines which center a personal responsibility in fixing them. It is these same logics which produce the idea of a “glow up” (or “glo up”) which frequently compare an “ugly” picture of an individual–typically during their early teens (while they were going through puberty)–next to a “glowed up” version of the individual as a young adult. While these pictures do frequently involve makeup as part of the “glow up”, weight loss and clear skin are often associated with a glow up, and one of the central ideas being conveyed through this practice is that beauty is something “achieved”. 

Ultimately, my point is not to critique those who engage in skin care as self care, but rather the beauty industrial complex itself and the way that corporations intentionally appropriate and mobilize discourses of resistance in order to sell products. We know that physical appearance is associated with inner qualities and value; having “bad” skin often becomes a social signal for poor moral qualities (uncleanliness, laziness, unhappiness, lack of self care, etc); as many have come to realize, “choice feminism” is useless because while we do of course have agency, our choices are in part produced by the contexts we find ourselves in; the problem is not the individual people who engage in extensive skin care regimes, but rather the way that this is produced as a necessary and/or desirable choice. What we need to do is de-corporatize self care, and expand self care into practices of mutual/communal care. What we need is to create a world where self-care is more compatible with community organizing/striking/protesting than it is with the consumption of serums, lotions, face masks, face oils, exfoliators, toners, and eye creams. 

This week I watched Terminator: Dark Fate, which carries forward from the second Terminatorfilm,Terminator: Judgement Day (1991), wisely ignoring everything that happened in movies 3-5. Dark Fate is set in the year 2020 and follows Dani Ramos, humanity’s new hope to survive the future robot apocalypse, as she, Grace (an augmented human from the future), Sarah Connor, and Carl (a T-800 model terminator) fight against a Rev-9 sent back in time to kill Dani. Overall, to quote my sibling, the movie “isn’t a literary masterpiece,” but it is fairly enjoyable–especially if you’re thirsting over the main leads. However, because I have a feral academic-garbage brain I also wanted to spend some time unpacking what I saw as the film’s three major discourses: surveillance/technological inevitability, race politics, and human exceptionalism. These are fraught discourses, often represented in contradictory and confusing ways over the course of the film, but I think it is generative to sit with them and to try to work out what messages are intentionally and/or unintentionally being conveyed through the movie, as well as what the potentials and limitations of these messages might be. 

Spoilers ahead.

i. Surveillance & Technological Inevitability

Before getting into the content of the film, one thing which may be useful to consider is how the movie previews shown in the theater before the start of the movie contextualize reception and engagement with the actual story Terminator: Dark Fate tells. There were quite a few trailers before the movie–enough so that one patron a few seats down in my row loudly commented “is the movie going to start now or what??” as yet another trailer started playing, the majority of which were either for war or horror movies. The two in particular I am interested in discussing are The King’s Man (2020)andMidway (2019), and the way that they both glorify and justify the imperialist/security state. The King’s Man trailer, for example, positions the titular agency as being an “independent intelligence agency” which essentially is able to actively “protect” people while governments fall short. In between clips from the film, title cards read “witness the rise…of the civilized,” a shockingly open and yet seemingly unconscious connection between the King’s Man narrative and British colonialism/imperialism. Immediately following this trailer is one for Midway, a WWII moving centering on the aircraft carrier USS Midway immediately after the events of Pearl Harbor, which a character in the trailer calls “the greatest intelligence failure in the history of the US”. The reason why these trailers are important to keep in mind is because they implicitly respond to some of the anxieties articulated in Terminator; if Terminator films speak to fears of technology and surveillance, these trailers argue that really technology, surveillance, and military power are all important aspects of “civilized” nations, necessary for security and safety. 

This actually ties in immediately to the opening of Terminator: Dark Fate, and the death of John Connor which can be interpreted, in one sense, as a failure of surveillance. This actually specifically made me think of Inderpal Grewal’s article “Security Moms,” and the rise of the neoliberal female citizen subject as an agent of security through motherhood in the post 9/11 U.S. The “security mom, essentially, is a “conceptualization of women as mothers seeking to protect their innocent children - a figure that is not so new in the history of modern nationalisms, or even American nationalisms and racism” (Grewal 27). Much like the King’s Man trailer suggestion that private intelligence is better suited to save lives than governmentalized intelligence, “neoliberalism suggests that the state is unable to provide security and thus it disavows its ability to protect all citizens”–only in here, it is the figure of the mother rather than a private agency which becomes the new and better fitted agent of surveillance, always watching for enemies in order to protect their children (Grewal 28). In a voice over, Sarah Connor tells us that she “saved three billion people but [she] couldn’t save [her] son”; a T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) model Terminator which had been sent back before Skynet was destroyed and continued carrying out orders “from a future that never happened” walks right past Sarah and shoots John. While Sarah leaps in to action after she recognizes the threat, she is unable to stop the T-800 from killing her son in seconds. This might actually be a key difference between Sarah Connor and Grewal’s “security mom”: while security moms are a largely a post-9/11 construction of neoliberal/nationalist motherhood, Sarah Connor was a successful security mom in 1991, constantly vigilant and constantly surveilling her surroundings for concealed enemies who could kill her son. In the post-9/11 era, Sarah Connor’s belief that the apocalypse has been averted causes her to believe that she and her son are safe, resulting in inadequate surveillance/vigilance and her son’s death. Much like the framing of Pearl Harbor in the Midway trailer and 9/11 in real life, disasters happen because of failures to appropriately surveil. 

Technological state surveillance itself is reflected in strange ways in the film, which seems to be at once critiquing and accepting constant surveillance. Sarah Connor keeps her cell phone in a chip bag to avoid being tracked and tells Grace and Dani that they will not last without her help because they are not aware of the constant surveillance occurring at every traffic light, every store, every gas station, etc–information the Rev-9 terminator chasing Dani will certainly have access to. Terminator: Dark Fate expresses fears of technological abuse/control and surveillance, but constantly frames these fears as the failure of the government to control these technologies–the threat isn’t what the government will do or is doing with these technologies, but rather that these technologies are uncontrollable or might be used by enemy agents. While one could argue that the fear being expressed here is actually a critique of the existence of surveillance technologies–that technologies exist for a reason and will do what they are programmed to do–this framing overwhelmingly still imagines a kind of governmental neutrality, where the threat is the located exclusively in the technology itself, not in those creating and using it. Here I also want to emphasize that while in Judgement Day there’s a deeper critique of the military industrial complex and the role of private corporations, in Dark Fate it appears to be the government alone engaged in constant surveillance and the technologies which result in the robot apocalypse, with the role of capitalism largely obscured from the connection between the new evil AI, Legion. In this same vein, while it seems that Legion is built as a weapon by the government, but we do not even explicitly know which government–again, the threat isn’t government construction of Legion (although Sarah does comment “they never learn”) but rather the technology itself. 

In the original movies, Skynet was a defensive surveillance software–but this is no longer science fiction; as Edward Snowden revealed/confirmed in 2013, constant mass surveillance is a real thing, and there are real ways people can avoid it (using VPNs, encryption, covering webcams, anti-facial recognition makeup (called CV dazzle), wearing disguises, etc). Despite this, and despite Sarah Connor’s awareness of constant surveillance, the characters don’t do much to avoid surveillance and just as Sarah originally predicted, the Rev-9 easily tracks them through governmental surveillance apparatuses. In the same way, surveillance and the technological abuse/carelessness which bring about the robot apocalypse are largely imagined inevitable. While there is a constant argument for agency and the idea that people can and must make choices in the present moment that determine the future, nothing is done to disrupt surveillance in the present moment, and the future seems to be unstoppable. While we can certainly think about the switch from Skynet to Legion, and the way this articulates a different set of social concerns and anxieties in 2019 than in the late 80s/early 90s, stopping Skynet delays but does not prevent what seems to be, from a material standpoint, the same future. In this same vein, when Grace dies so that Dani can use her power source to destroy the Rev-9, Grace tells Dani “we both knew I wasn’t coming back”; this frames her death as predetermined and fixed. Similarly, at the end of the film Sarah tells Dani she will help her to “prepare”, implicitly suggesting that the future cannot be prevented–further legitimizing the reading of the Skynet to Legion switch as an inability to meaningfully change the future. This brings us to the line used both in Judgement DayandDark Fate: “there is no fate but what we make for ourselves”. While this line seems to suggest that we have agency and can make choices that change the future, the inability to actually enact change might instead lead to a counter reading of the line: is it that we make fate, or that the fate we get is the one we “deserve”? 

ii. Race (& Gender) Politics

There’s actually quite a bit to think about in terms of the racial politics of Terminator: Dark Fate. One the one hand, we can certainly think about the underlying savior discourse and the transition of this role from a white man to a Mexican woman. There is some fairly heavy handed Christian symbolism involved in John Connor as the white male hero—John’s initials parallel him to Jesus Christ, and Sarah comments “let her play Mother Mary for a while” when she thinks Dani has become the new target because a son Dani will someday give birth to will be the new savior of humanity. Sarah also comments that Dani isn’t the threat, it’s herwomb. I want to go two directions on this comment: first, while it of course turns out that Dani is the hero herself, the idea of Latinx wombs as a threat is intricately tied to U.S. immigration policies and histories of eugenics, with the imagined threat being to the preservation of the (white) nation, so to here articulate the idea of Latinx reproduction as a kind of weapon to protect humanity is to offer something very different from a discourse of salvation through white reproduction/motherhood. Second, this line offers a kind of meta commentary on the way the previous movies claimed John as the savior (despite Sarah’s own heroism) to convince viewers that Dark Fate is more politically aware than previous Terminator movies, since Dani is the one destined to save the world (which  of course ties back into my previous discussion of the unresolved tension between fate and agency), not her son and not a white man.

Moving beyond the switch in hero, one of the main things I want us to consider in thinking about the racial politics of Dark Fate is the question of collateral damage: while it’s nothing unusual to see large amounts of collateral damage in the background of an action movie, here this damage seems to be located exclusively in the Global South (specifically Mexico). Most (but not all) of the destruction is disassociated from individual people–for example, in one scene the Rev-9 drives a bulldozer down the wrong side of a freeway, crushing or crashing into numerous cars which obviously have people inside, even though we do not see most of them. Scenes of damage or interactions between populations and the Rev-9 in the U.S. do not result in death the same way that they do in Mexico/along the border. When the Rev-9 is knocked off of a plane after take off and crashes into a backyard in Texas, for example, he picks himself up and apologizes to the white people barbecuing in the yard for destroying their shed before continuing on his way. Similarly, when he flies over a military base which is actively attacking him, he ignores them and continues his pursuit of Dani without fighting back. While in both of these cases, one might argue that this is connected to the Rev-9’s obsession with fulfilling his mission without needing to kill anyone who is not actually preventing him from reaching Dani, a) this is a work of fiction so someone decided that the Rev-9 could fulfill his mission with minimal collateral damage in some spaces but not others, and b) in the final fight at the dam, the workers simply disappear when the fighting begins, removing them from any risk of becoming collateral damage. 

Although there are action scenes throughout the movie, the last scene to involve mass violence against background characters is in the detention center. Before I get into the discussion of collateral damage/background character death at the detention center, I want to start by discussing border crossing and the representation of the detention center more broadly. There are some ways in which Dark Fate does attempt to address the violence involved in detention centers and U.S. immigration policy, but overwhelmingly it falls short. One of the ways we see this is in the actual crossing of the border and the way that it’s not particularly difficult or dangerous for Dani, Grace, and Sarah to cross. Certain popularized images of border crossing are deployed in ways which might suggest this is an authentic look at what it means to cross borders without documents (Dani, Grace, and Sarah ride on the top of a train with other migrants, which I suspect draws from the documentary Which Way Home, and Dani’s uncle, a Coyote, helps them cross the desert and enter the U.S. through a tunnel under the border wall), however the way these images are used as a shorthand undermines the danger undertaken/violence experienced by real undocumented migrants as the result of U.S. border policy. Riding the freight trains, called El tren de la muerte or La Bestia (the Death Train or The Beast) in real life, is highly dangerous and many people are killed or suffer serious and long term injuries as a result, and although we are told that Dani’s uncle is a good Coyote who gets people across safely (and he is of course helping his own niece), crossing the desert is extremely dangerous and many people die. Representing this crossing in maybe 10 minutes of screen time makes it seem easy and safe, obscuring the very real dangers faced by migrants in real life. Similarly, in the detention center border patrol agents are represented as apathetic but not particularly violent/dangerous, and the depictions of the cages migrants are kept in do not come close to reflecting the overcrowding experienced by the people who are being imprisoned in detention centers in real life. Furthermore, the imprisoned migrants do not have speaking roles and become non-agentive; the real suffering of undocumented migrants becomes nothing more than a setting, offering no significant or useful critique of U.S. border policies/politics. This brings us back to that question of collateral damage in the detention center. After Grace breaks out of the medical room she was being held in, she unlocks all of the cages and detained migrants begin to flee; although I have seen this described in some places online as her “freeing” them, escaping migrants become a distraction which aids in Dani, Sarah, and Grace’s actual escape from the detention center and the Rev-9 which has caught up with them. While most of the violence is enacted on border patrol agents rather than migrants (which is good), the Rev-9 does kill/harm some of the migrants who block his path as they attempt to escape, and the only border patrol agent we can identify as a speaking character to be killed is the Black woman who was pointedly apathetic to Dani’s pleas for help during the intake process. Most, if not all, of the other border patrol agents with speaking lines at the detention center are white, and seem to be framed as almost more sympathetic; the medical personnel fixing Grace’s wounds, for example, notices the metal interlaid in her body and are horrified by “what’s been done to her,” viewing her as a victim to be sympathized with. While one of the guards insists “we call them detainees” when Grace escapes from her handcuffs and demands to know where the prisoners are being kept, which offers an attempted commentary on the linguistic obscuration of violence and white apathy, we again must come back to the fact that the white medical guard is left unharmed while the Black guard is very pointedly killed. 

We might push back on this overall interpretation by thinking about the ways that in real life people of color can become complicit in systems of white supremacy which will ultimately harm them while continuing to overwhelmingly protect white citizens, as well as the way that the Global South so frequently is a site of collateral damage, and experiences the displaced violence of the Global North. However, what I want us to think about is that this kind of intervention is useless when it is left latent, and overall only feeds into the constant racialized violence which plays out in movies and television programming. Furthermore, I want us to think about James Cameron’s comment about Judgement Day when he said that the T-1000 looked like an LAPD officer because “the Terminator films are…about us losing touch with our own humanity and becoming machines, which allows us to kill and brutalize each other. Cops think of all non-cops as less than they are”. While some have argued that Dark Fate picks up this legacy by making border patrol the villains, and the Rev-9 does clearly represent a military/border patrol kind of threat, the Rev-9 is also always a person of color. The base appearance, played by Gabriel Luna, is a man of color, and every single person it transforms itself to look like (which we are told kills the person being copied) is also a person of color. Because of this, there is a way in which the critique of border patrol is divorced from white supremacy and people of color become part of what is imagined as the threat. 

iii. Thinking About Humanity 

Finally, this ties into the discussion of humanity and the idea of human exceptionalism and purity articulated throughout Dark Fate. As with much of what I have previously talked about, this is a frequently contradictory kind of discourse which simultaneously broadens and constrains the idea of what “humanity” is/means. One example of this is the way in which augments and terminators that grow a conscious queer the boundary between “human” and “machine.” When Sarah demands they shoot Carl in the face to see what he “really is,” Dani insists “I don’t really care what he is”; through this there seems to be, on some level, an articulation that there’s more to being “human” than literally being a human being. Furthermore, these characters are queer in multiple dimensions–Grace is a very butch, very queer feeling character, and while I don’t want to say that the reformed murderous robot said Ace Rights, Carl’s character doespush back against the heteronormative coital imperative by through his relationship to Elisa and his adopted son Mateo, which offers a model of meaningful romantic partnership and family commitment which does not involve biological reproduction or sexual intimacy. However, despite these queer potentials, we are constantly pushed back towards a privileging of “human” through frequent assertions that Grace is human (not a machine, just augmented), that augmentation is unstable (Grace’s frequent metabolic crashes and dependence on a cocktail of medication to keep herself going), and Carl only has the approximation of a conscious and cannot love the way humans do. Furthermore, Carl and Grace both die, suggesting that this queering of the human/machine boundary is untenable. 

So what does “humanity” mean in Dark Fate? Ultimately, it seems to mean protecting the vulnerable and being willing to sacrifice yourself to do it. During the final confrontation between Dani, Sarah, Grace, and Carl, the Rev-9 says “I know she’s a stranger, why not let me have her”; Sarah responds: “Because we’re not machines you metal motherfucker”. While I obviously think the film offers a confused message on agency and that we need to be critical of the racial politics of the film, this ties into what I think (or what I would like to think) the movie hoped to say about border patrol and detention centers: we need to do better by refugees and undocumented migrants. It doesn’t matter whether we know someone, whether we imagine they are deserving or undeserving, what it might or might not cost us to do the right thing; we can choose, in this moment, whether or not we step up and fight against the detention of undocumented migrants, whether we resist ICE, whether we advocate for refugees. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves. 

Today, while sitting in a shaded outdoor common space on my college campus, comparing sets of blood test results from the last year to see if there was anything I wanted to bring up with my doctor, I overheard a snippet of conversation between two middle aged women. What stood out to me was the woman who said, clearly in praise, “I know she’s suffered extremely, but she comes to work and she does her job!”

This is a kind of violence.

Now, maybe you’re reading this thinking What?? Sounds like the lady is a badass, good for her! Or maybe you’re thinking Why are you complaining? I would be appreciative that my coworker was doing her job despite hardship! Everybody has problems, I have problems, but I don’t bring them to work with me!

So before I break this down, let me tell you a little bit about two of my coworkers with disabilities: for context, there are other people at my place of employment with disabilities but I am most familiar with “A” and “B”’s specific circumstances, so they’re who I’m going to talk about here. Both coworkers I am discussing here are white, straight, cis women. I am not going to give any specifics that might make them identifiable, but I will say that “A” is in a skinny young adult with an autoimmune disorder; and “B” is middle aged, plus-sized, and has multiple disabilities. “B” is required to be provided with a chair so that she can sit periodically and has restrictions on how much weight she can lift; “A” has not requested or received any accommodations, although she does miss work periodically when she has bad flair ups. My manager has told me multiple times that she hates seeing “B” sit down because she thinks it “looks bad,” and both she and other managers have frequently harassed “B,” telling her that they need to see her doing more, threatening to stop allowing her use the chair (despite the fact they are required by company policy, and I believe law, to provide this accommodation), and writing her up for sitting down, claiming she is using her chair “too much.” All this is despite the fact that she was moved, against her wishes and to her disadvantage, by said managers from a position that allowed her to accomplish tasks while sitting (and to use a mobility aid while performing tasks while standing), to a position which makes it so that sitting in accordance with her doctor’s directions makes it more difficult for her to accomplish her assigned tasks; she also has less ability to use a mobility aid. “B” frequently expresses concern that she will be fired, and frequently goes longer than she is supposed to without sitting or lifts significantly more than she is supposed to (impacting her health), because she is afraid of being written up, or having a customer complain she was not helpful enough. My other coworker, “A” frequently works while visibly suffering from flair-ups and explains at length to myself and other managers that she is trying to get her health stabilized so that she does not inconvenience anybody, and because she wants to be a good employee. My manager praises “A,” except when “A” does have to miss a period of work because of her condition, and then, despite the fact that “A” always brings in documentation showing she was not only having a flair up, but was receiving treatment, my manager writes “A” up because her absences are “too much at this point,” and “beyond what we can reasonably excuse.” This is only the smallest possible example of the harm done by praising someone for “coming to work and doing her job.”

This mentality focuses on a valuing of human life based off of how productive and convenient a person is, and it’s something I see prevalent in classroom and employment settings (both as the affirmation, as well as the inverse “I know X is going through a lot, but they’re attitude is terrible, they’re just not doing a good job!”). Essentially, the value assigned to a person as an employee (or as a student) is based on how much they are able to do despite disability (or other barriers), and is framed through a lens of personal convenience (ie “I’m not ableist, I just don’t want to get stuck doing all the work because they can’t”). At its core, I believe the idea that this mentality stems from ableism, neoliberalism, and capitalism.

Disabled people, especially disabled women, are under constant surveillance; there’s a great article by Sharon Dale Stone called “The Myth of Bodily Perfection,” where she discusses the idea of bodily perfection and points out that morality is generally tied to ability, and that people (especially women) are likely to conceal disability if they can. This is because of capitalist ideas of productivity, as well as neoliberalism; anyone who is not appropriately productive, who can’t come to work and do their job, must just be lazy, must not be trying hard enough. “Model” disabled figures, such as the woman I overheard be discussed on campus, are used to prove this; if she can do her job, why can’t someone else? What is overlooked is not only that people have different needs and abilities and not everyone can come in every single day and meet/exceed expectations (or that the additional burden of trying to do this may not be desirable, and shouldn’t be enforced), but it overlooks the actual lived experiences of this “ideal” figure: what is it costing her to fill this role? Why is she put in a position where she has to? Furthermore, why are you blaming those who cannot do it? While it may be inconvenient for you to “pick up the slack,” rather than blaming your disabled coworker, maybe ask why your employer is setting you both up to fail–why is your coworker being asked to work beyond their ability, and why are you? Why is the workplace not setup to accommodate for disability?

This also ties into another of Stone’s points: that we imagine individuals are “totally able or totally disabled, with no in-between,” and that disability cannot be concealed (418); essentially, in the hegemonic imagination if someone is disabled they should not only experience the same amount of disability at all times, but should be completely (and visibly) disabled. The employed disabled figure is something of a paradox: while neoliberal Model Minority figures exist, those with visible disabilities must either be able to achieve this status, or be viewed as unemployable; this comes out in sentiments along the lines of “Well, if they were able to do x,y,z task last week, they can do it today!” and “All I’m saying is if they can’t do the job, they shouldn’t work here!” With invisible disabilities, it largely comes out as a complete refusal to believe the person in question is disabled; this doesn’t always mean a specific belief that the person is lying, but rather a refusal to engage with, on a meaningful level, the idea that a person who “looks” healthy and normal has real limitations that impact their ability to do things, and is not just “being lazy” when they can’t do something.

So what’s the solution to this? Ultimately, what I want is good allyship. Think critically before you speak. Ask yourself why is it so important to you that your coworkers, who are “suffering extremely” are also meeting your standards of productivity. Look for ways to make your workplace or classroom more accessible. And above all else, try to find ways to build solidarity; instead of praising the woman who is working despite suffering, ask what you and others can do to alleviate the suffering.  

septictankie:

Dr. Fauci on why the U.S. is ‘out of the pandemic phase’

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Early in the pandemic, liberals lionized Fauci, putting him on tote bags, coffee mugs, even in that absurd photo shoot for People. Now he’s lying to the public about COVID in the service of capital, and libs are going to eat it up with a spoon because of their infantile idolatry.

Liberals: “Ugh, it’s so cringe when these teen socialists wear t-shirts with Che Guevara on them!” Also liberals:

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This country hates teachers as much as it loves war and killing brown people

Dr. Fauci on why the U.S. is ‘out of the pandemic phase’

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Early in the pandemic, liberals lionized Fauci, putting him on tote bags, coffee mugs, even in that absurd photo shoot for People. Now he’s lying to the public about COVID in the service of capital, and libs are going to eat it up with a spoon because of their infantile idolatry.

Liberals: “Ugh, it’s so cringe when these teen socialists wear t-shirts with Che Guevara on them!” Also liberals:

Capitalism deflates your consciousness- Mark Fisher’s ‘all of this is temporary’

In our current times, we are unable to see a future or alternative reality beyond capitalism because it has become so ingrained in us. Indeed, as Slavoj Zizek famously said, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. This is what Mark Fisher calls ‘Capitalist Realism’. In his talk entitled ‘all of this is temporary’ (available on YouTube), he makes…

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Capitalism deflates your consciousness- Mark Fisher’s “all of this is temporary”

In our current times, we are unable to see a future or alternative reality beyond capitalism because it has become so ingrained in us. Indeed, as Slavoj Zizek famously said, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. This is what Mark Fisher calls ‘Capitalist Realism’. In his talk entitled ‘all of this is temporary’ (available on YouTube), he makes…

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Imagine a world in which, every time you finally learn how to avoid something harmful, you have to totally forget two hard-learned lessons. What kind of dystopia is this? That’s what “for every new regulation we will repeal two regulations” means.

New Year, New Pandemic Links

New Year, New Pandemic Links

https://twitter.com/DerfBackderf/status/1477040852853739524

* Brace for Omicron. Wisconsin COVID-19 case counts matching levels not seen since November 2020. Omicron is spreading at lightning speed. Scientists are trying to figure out why. Where are hospitals overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients? Look up your state. After Vaccines: Where Covid Death Rates Have Risen. Omicron Is Pushing America Into…

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10 décembre 1948 : l’Onu adopte la Déclaration universelle des Droits de l’Homme.

Soixante douze ans plus tard, des dizaines de millions d’enfants pauvres travaillent pour que les multinationales puissent réduire leurs coûts et augmenter leurs profits.

Academia link: CLICK HERE TO READ

Abstract

Neoliberalism has been implemented in Latin America for about three decades. This article reviews Mexico’s neoliberal trajectory to illustrate the political, economic, and social alterations that have resulted from this process. It finds that representative democracy has been perverted through fear, putting central political decisions in the hands of power groups with special interests. The border between the state of law and the state of exception is blurred. Economic structural adjustment with liberalization and privatization has provoked recurrent crisis, but has been maintained, leading to the destruction of the national productive structure in favor of supranational corporations, particularly financial capital. The association between criminal economy and economic criminality is also discussed. The privatization of social benefits and services requires state subsidies and allows the privatization of profits and the socialization of losses. The social impact of this process has been devastating, with a polarized income distribution, falling wages, increased precarious jobs, rising inequality, and extreme violence. Health conditions have also deteriorated and disorders associated with violence, chronic stress, and a changing nutritional culture have become dominating. However, in Latin America, massive, organized political and social mobilization has broken the vicious neoliberal circle and elected progressive governments that are struggling to reverse social and economic devastation.

Academia link: CLICK HERE TO READ

People are starting to care about the environment, and that’s wonderful… but there’s a catch. Always is, isn’t there? It’s a mix of aestheticism, marketing, and research suppression. More often than not, most entrepreneurs and companies are out to make a quick buck off of people who think that reducing waste or using renewable materials is active environmentalism. It’s not their fault for having the wool pulled over their eyes, that’s how so called “green capitalism” is designed, blaming others for being fooled is just victim blaming. Another tool of separation by the ruling class is greenwashing.

An example of greenwashing is this: 

You do see the problem here, right? I mean you’d have to be metaphorically blind to miss it. What good is reducing carbon emissions when you’re using a plastic bottle? Creating plastic causes hella emissions, From an article by NPR (I know, they sold out, but hear them out) “By one estimate, emissions from producing and incinerating plastics could amount to 56 gigatons of carbon — almost 50 times the annual emissions of all of the coal power plants in the U.S. — between now and 2050. … And that’s what makes replacing plastic a problem without a clear solution.” For the whole article, click the quote.

But where’s the point in what I’m saying? It’s not gonna stop anytime soon. The point is to potentially educate those who fall for these these things, as I’ve stated before, they’re victims of marketeering and (probably) propaganda propelled forward by the ruling class. In the end, putting green in front of whatever is being sold doesn’t make it true. Don’t be a victim, be what they fear most, educated.

That’s all for tonight (currently 7:22 American Central time zone as I’m typing)

I’d love for you to share this, with how many (ugh) liberals are on Tumblr, I wouldn’t be surprised if I got backlash for blaming capitalism, but anyway, this has been @punkofsunshine​, have a good one and stay safe.

Now, I may be a peace-loving hippie, but I’m one of those people who is in favour of attacking fascists. To explain my point of view I will quote Lady Death herself “Every [German] who remains alive will kill women, children and old folks. Dead Germans are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a [German], I am saving lives.” -Lyudmila Pavlichenko 

So what does this have to do with the neoliberal thought prison? It perceives all violence as equal, when that couldn’t be further from the truth, Punching a Nazi isn’t the same level as assaulting people because you don’t like the colour of their skin. Yet if you punch a Nazi, you’re somehow “restricting freedom of speech,” in a way they’re right, fascists can’t peddle their hate speech if they’re missing a bunch of teeth, for an example of this hit this link to see how the neoliberal and conservative parties enable fascism. 

You can be intolerant of intolerance, it is necessary to be.