Censoring women and poetry

March 29, 2013 by 2 Comments

Pramila Venkateswaran

“They hate our freedom,” said President Bush in 2001. We are not sure who “they” were or what freedom he was talking about, but the statement was presumptuous and based on false arguments. What freedom are we talking about? What are its dimensions, who is allowed to hold it and who not, how much can we have, and who places limits on it and how?

In a recent Performance Poets gathering in a chain bookstore, poet Pramila Venkateswaran read her poem entitled “Ode to the Vagina.” Two parents passing by with their children heard the words of the poem. They complained to the chain about the language that they overheard that evoked female body parts. Notwithstanding that it was a reading space for a special event, the chain commanded the host, Performance Poets, out. The latter had to apologize and state that they would make sure that invited poets would not read anything that was injurious, hateful and obscene. As Venkasteswaran said, the poem talked about the sacredness of the woman’s body, not its obscenity. How did writing about the female body become an object of censorship? That is the real question.

Spaces for poetry and other art works are sparse in corporate America and are increasingly under scrutiny of standardized definitions of morality that impede dissent or simply questioning, one of the beauties of poetry. The poet Aimé Cesaire once said that poetry is a way of saying everything while seeming to say nothing, but everything is there. He thought that he could get around censorship. Is it still possible to do that under the current neoliberal order? Meanwhile, the same corporate world uses public airwaves to bombard children with incredible violence and denigration of women.

And forget about poetry; a high school teacher may lose his job for using the word vagina…

For the sake of freedom, here is the poem:

Ode to the Vagina

Strictly vertical , as if you were bisecting
A woman’s lips, you loosen up with time.
You speak volumes, learning to shed
Learned shame the more you understand
Yourself.

You first saw yourself in a mirror
And drew back in horror at your
Dark amorphousness, as once men did
When they thought you had teeth that would
Dismember them.

People thought your tongue was dangerous,
It made them want you more when they
Found you enjoyed receiving them.
But when you expressed yourself more,
you were shunned.

You did not rest, for rest to you was death.
Instead you embraced your darkness.
It kept calling out to you, come, come,
you yearned to enter it,
this jet brilliance of space,
emptiness that knows itself without
intermediaries, the beginning,
velvet and longing, bearing creation
after creation after creation after
creation.

You are goddess, unquenchable
weaving an endless yarn. You are
endless, but no yarn, for you are no fake,
despite your games sometimes
of acting, faking some beached creature
wailing its diminuendo—that’s your recreation.

But deep within, you are surprise and
cornucopia. Old age and desert sands
are not in your language. You speak
of rivers, you sport in soft sand
that turns with the moon, you know
how to rebel, how to give and take,
you know the delicate ring of fire
that the barbaric will enter despite
your shrill “No.” You know that the barbarian
is your own personal stranger.

You reignite,
you choose,
you want to wake
up to your own solitary self.

by Pramila Venkateswaran

(Photo Credit: String Poet Journal / YouTube)

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Revealing the code of silence that rules reproductive rights

March 8, 2013 by 1 Comment

In Algeria abortion is simply illegal. A woman can be punished by six months to two years in prison and a fine. The abortionist is subject to one to five years in prison and a hefty fine.

According to the president of a women’s rights association, as reported in the Algerian newspaper L’Expression, there are about 80 000 abortions a year for 775 000 pregnancies in Algeria. The police reported only 27 cases in 2012. So what is happening in Algeria?

The code of silence is the rule.

Women who seek help with unwanted pregnancies have few options and they all imply a sense of shame and fear. The rule is to use word of mouth information and have enough money, on average $400, which is high price in Algeria.

The journalist of L’Expression follows the same principle of word of mouth to investigate the providers’ identities, how women get information and how the procedure is performed. It leads him and his partner to doctors who are militant and outraged by the situation as well as to charlatans who take advantage of women’s desperate search for relief. In any case, women are ashamed, isolated and have no protection and no recourse as they face horrendous medical consequences.

The article sends a clear message that this situation is shameful for society and that it has to change. As the reporters note, there have been changes, especially with the advent of the Internet. Women in Algeria have begun to engage in a public forum to break the rule of silence. We have seen the possibilities of these strong women’s voices in neighboring countries.

The code of silence has become the rule as well for many women in the United States seeking reproductive services where, law after law, women’s right are being restricted, putting many women to precarious situations. In 42 states restrictions on abortion rights have already been anticipated under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which will be enacted in 2014.

2012 has been the second year with the greatest number of new legislation to restrict access to reproductive services such as abortion, with about 122 provisions related to restrict access to reproductive health. Being a woman at the age of reproduction is a risky condition … in the United States as in Algeria.

Stop the code of silence, let’s hear women’s voices and respect their right to be.

 

(Photo Credit: Reuters / Zohra Bensemra)

 

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Plenty of reasons to be outraged

February 21, 2013 by 3 Comments

Jessica Valenti started a recent address with a question that she said a young man asked her: “Why are you so angry?” She immediately said that she was not angry but sad and exhausted. Then after enumerating a series of laws and actions against women and reminding the audience that the Hyde Amendment has nullified the Roe decision for many financially vulnerable women, she finally admitted that she is angry: “I am angry that forty years after Roe, women are still fighting for recognition of our basic humanity.”

The fact is that there are plenty of reasons to be outraged.

A recent study demonstrates that, in the United States, many actors are eager to deny women their basic humanity and access to care and are already doing great harm to pregnant women thanks to recent legislation that put a pregnant woman in a lower rank than a fetus.

The feticide laws have encouraged and required health providers to inform police of pregnant patients who had problems with drugs. Many providers comply with these demands quite easily, especially when their patients are African Americans and/or poor. In many instances, for women patients, and especially for African American women patients, there is no medical confidentiality.

Why are so many American doctors ready to relinquish their medical ethical responsibility toward their women patients? A court can put a fetus in protective custody with a guardian to the fetus being appointed by a court decision requiring “the fetus to be detained…and transported” to the local hospital for “in patient treatment and protection.” The care of the mother is not considered, whether by health care providers of the pregnant woman or whether by the court.

Where are medical ethical rules for women like Laura Pemberton who wanted to have a vaginal delivery after having had a C-section? Her doctor used a court order to perform the surgical procedure. Pemberton was strapped and hauled off to a judge who decided her fate. Neither she nor her husband was allowed legal assistance.

In case after case, pregnant women who have sought help for reasons ranging from problems with drugs to requesting vaginal birth as the first option have been threatened and persecuted instead of being helped, and all of this with the approval of their own health care provider.

Where are the social workers and social programs to support women with the problem of drug addiction? Instead, their lives are torn apart even more?

Astonishingly, already inadequate access to health care is threatened during pregnancy, especially, but not only, for women who live in precarious conditions. They need to be listened to in order to receive the most appropriate care. Instead of receiving health care, they get prison.

Absurd situations have been created to intimidate and even terrorize pregnant women.  Sometimes the State goes to unbelievable lengths. For example, one woman was imprisoned because she “did willfully and unlawfully give birth to a male infant”.   In its absurdity, the wording of the official court document shows the profound disdain for the life of the pregnant woman

Sending pregnant women to prison in the name of protection of the personhood of the fetus while prenatal care provided by the state to incarcerated women is notoriously inadequate, if not absent, is absurd … and criminal.

There is an alternative.

Under the Nazi occupation of France, authorities commanded French doctors to report any wounded person. The board of the newly formed French Medical Association responded immediately:

“The President of the French Medical Association takes this occasion to remind every colleague that when called to assist the sick or the wounded, there is only one mission to fulfill and that is to deliver care. Respect for professional confidentiality is a necessary condition for the trust those who are ill have in their physicians. No administrative reason whatsoever exists that allows you to free yourself from this obligation.”

This declaration was sent to every doctor in the country. It became the nonnegotiable rule of ethics. It still is. This declaration is engraved on marble and is visible in the hall of the French Medical Association building in Paris. It is also taught in medical school to future doctors who would have eventually to fight for their patients’ protection. To this day, medical confidentiality is key and protects patients, even in court.

Doctors, nurses and other medical and social workers should be protecting women, who deserve the care they need. Instead, they have become `providers’, removing their human responsibility that the French doctors once understood to be their unbreakable ethical duty. Alternatives to state brutality already exist. Being ethical sometimes demands resistance to inhuman laws.

 

(Photo Credit: Charlotte Cooper / Flickr)

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French prison workers win the right to labor protection!

February 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Until now in France, being employed while incarcerated was not placed under labor protection of the civil society. Instead, it was regulated by the prison system. There was no work contract and wages were as much as three times less than minimum wage. On Friday, a court decision changed all that, placing prison workers’ protection under the regime of regular labor laws.

While in jail as a remand prisoner, Marilyn Moureau worked for a phone company. She was laid off for having placed personal phone calls during her work time. In the language of prison management, she was “déclassé” (displaced), a term designed to mark the difference between prison labor and `real’ work. She took her former employer to the Labor Relations Board (prud’homme) and charged them for not respecting proper employment procedures. She won and got everything that is guaranteed by law for workers, including damages and compensation.

This is an important decision because it asserts that work is work whether workers are incarcerated or not. Labor rights should apply to every worker, including prisoners. It also states that people must keep their civil visibility while in jail or prison.

Moreau’s lawyer declared, “It is a great day for all the prisoners of France … an historical decision!”  Let’s hope it inspires the struggle fight to induce changes in worker protection around the world.

(Photo Credit: Nouvel Obs / Thierry Creux / MaxPPP)

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Where’s the outrage at the forced powerlessness of pregnant women?

February 4, 2013 by 4 Comments

 

According to a recent study, as described in a post here last month, in the United States, being a person is tricky business if you are pregnant, poor, or a woman of color. That study responds to two sets of interrelated events: [1] the effort to pass laws that give a fetus the constitutional right of a person, thus far passed in 38 states; and [2] the increased number of arrests and incarceration of pregnant women.

The study raises many questions, ranging from the conceptualization of protection, including medical care, based on the socioeconomic status of the pregnant woman, to the concept of fetus personhood. Fetus personhood was embedded in the Roe v Wade decision in its discussion of a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy as “not absolute, and … subject to some limitations…. A State may properly assert important interests in safeguarding health, in maintaining medical standards, and in protecting potential life.”

Pregnant women have been incarcerated with greater frequency because of the establishment of a process that renders them available and appropriate to incarceration. The study identifies that process through the records and examination of the incarceration of pregnant women in the United States between 1973 and 2005. In every case the bases of arrest was the protection of the personhood of the fetus.

Being-pregnant, then, has become being-powerless. At one level, this is not new. In Beggars and Choosers, Rickie Solinger recounts how officials used White pregnant teenagers to fuel the adoption business: “Beginning in the late 1940s, community and government authorities together developed a raft of strategies some quite coercive, to press white unwed mothers to relinquish their babies to deserving couples” (70). Those teenagers were presented as “mentally disturbed” because they failed to have a husband to protect them, “a proof of neurosis,” making them potential bad mothers. The same authorities singled out and removed unwed Black teenage mothers from any public assistance, intensifying their already precarious situation.

In both cases the personhood of the young woman was reduced to being a carrier in which the state had a prevailing interest of control and protection. In this historical context, the Roe v Wade decision allowed the same ambivalence to be developed concerning the personhood of all women, with the invisible hand of the state ready to take over a woman’s right to control her body.

The study emphasizes the responsibility of the perverse effects of this lack of clarity of the woman’s existence as a person with regard to women’s versus fetus’ personhood. These effects created an insidious web of laws, which have led to the mounting incarceration of pregnant women. The fact that 38 states passed feticide or similar laws that have justified the arrest of pregnant women is no accident.

As we saw with Aaron Swartz’s suicide prompted by the violence of the American justice system, no campaign with celebrities and intellectual was organized to defend an individual who tried to defend our rights. In the case of both incarcerated pregnant women and Aaron Swartz, the outcry is limited and will probably remain so, thanks to the combined power of the State and a Civil Society that bends to corporate needs and wishes. Every day in this country, women are imprisoned because they are less important, they have less being-in-the-world, than something called the protection of “potential life.” Where is the outrage?

 

(Image Credit: The Atlantic / Lauren Giardano)

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Violence against women has many faces

November 30, 2012 by Leave a Comment

November 25th is marked as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. This date was decided upon in the United Nations to remember the assassination of the Mirabal sisters by the Trujillo regime, in the Dominican Republic, November 25, 1960.

This day is to raise awareness of the fact that women around the world are subject to rape and domestic violence and other forms of violence. The secretary general of the United Nations Ban Ki-Moon declared: “Millions of women and girls around the world are assaulted, beaten, raped, mutilated or even murdered in what constitutes appalling violations of their human rights. […] We must fundamentally challenge the culture of discrimination that allows violence to continue. On this International Day, I call on all governments to make good on their pledges to end all forms of violence against women and girls in all parts of the world, and I urge all people to support this important goal.”

Should the European Union support this important goal and challenge the culture of discrimination within its behavior as an institution, as crimes against women are committed in member states? The death of Savita Halappanavar for denied therapeutic abortion in Ireland is only one of numerous cases of women being killed or injured because some States still have laws denying reproductive care to women. Those laws have remained the same sometimes since the 19th century. For instance in Ireland, doctors or nurses who help women who seek an abortion are punishable under the Offences Against the Person Act of 1861 that prescribes a minimum sentence of two years hard labor and can result in a life sentence.

The nomination of Tonio Borg (overtly against women and LGBT’s rights) as the new commissioner for Health will accentuate the impossibility for the European commission to stop state-legitimized violence against women in Member States with anti abortion, restrictive reproduction laws, such as Ireland, Poland,  and Malta. These laws are generalized in many countries from Africa to the Americas, including the United States.

Restrictions for women are economic as well. Where contraceptives are expensive or simply difficult to obtain, abortion services are generally illegal or restricted. Meanwhile, women are in the main still economically dependent.

Having a weak health commission in the Europe Union is no surprise. It results from lobbying from member states that don’t want to see the European convention on human rights and parliamentary resolutions applied to health care and in particular to women’s reproductive health. If women’s reproductive health were seen as a human right, those members who are inconsistent with EU conventions would finally be held accountable.

Violence against women has many faces. Often the violence stems from state denial of services or state practices of humiliated access to important services. In Baltimore, Maryland, for example, as in much of the United States, incarcerated pregnant women travel shackled to medical appointments.  These women are seen in regular hospitals walking among other patients with their guards and shackles.  Their treatment and humiliation is shaped by federal, state or local policies, which even force them to deliver their babies in chains, putting their lives at risk exactly as Savita Halappanavar lost hers.

 

 

(Photo Credit 1: AP / Shawn Pogatchnik / Salon) (Photo Credit 2: Reuters / Cathal Mcnaughton / Salon)

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From Paris to Baltimore, our prisons are full but empty of sense

November 21, 2012 by 1 Comment

Christiane Taubira

The majority left French Senate has rejected the 2013 budget for Social Security presented by the socialist government. Amazingly, right wing and communist senators joined forces to vote the budget down, although not for the same reasons. The Communists opposed the austerity measures arguing that they add up to social injustice whereas the right wing senators would like to have more austerity and reduce the social/health care welfare that is one of the pillars of French society.  Despite this seeming setback, many hope that social security and the French Health Care system will remain a key part of a societal structure of public service.

To understand the reason for this hope, we must turn to the justice department and its rhetoric of welfare and criminalization. The previous ministers of justice under the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy, inspired by the American approach of “le tout incarceration” (every thing converges into incarceration), had planned to build more prisons. In order to fill these new cells, the Sarkozy’s justice department designed a series of programs, including charging youth as adult; instituting immediate sentencing which often meant no jury and little time for the accused to prepare for trial; and introducing mandatory sentences. In 2007, a bill requiring minimum mandatory sentencing for repeated offenders passed. And so the prisons and jails filled up.  At the same time, under the rule of austerity, a series of welfare programs were cut.

After the election of a socialist president, Francois Hollande, his justice minister, Christiane Taubira, presented a “new penal politics of the government”. She broke with the policies of her immediate predecessors. She sent an official memorandum to all public prosecutors recommending sentencing reduction and favoring alternative sentences. As for repeated offenders she said, “All decisions must be personalized, including for repeated offenses.” She went on to clearly delineate the limits of mandatory sentencing and as well as its ultimate suppression.

Taubira went further and refused the logic of immediate trial, responsible for one third of the 66 748 people incarcerated in France, and asked the public prosecutor to stop using it. Christiane Taubira declared: “Nos prisons sont pleines, mais vides de sens.” “Our prisons are full, but empty of sense.” Her predecessors were eager to send people to jail; their motto was “tough on crime.” In the past 10 years the tally of prisoners increased by 20,000, creating “inhuman conditions” as was noted by the European committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT), which also recommended “a zero tolerance of ill-treatments” by police officers. Christiane Taubira wants to remedy these conditions by quickly reducing the number of people in French prisons recognizing that incapacitating people in over-populated cells only creates more precarious lives.

Meanwhile, in Baltimore the debate about the construction of a new juvenile detention center rages, with no signs of a change in paradigm. Juveniles may be tried as adults, and the majority of women in prisons are single mothers. Meanwhile, welfare support is shrinking. Where is the Commission in Baltimore that will declare zero tolerance of ill treatment of the city’s most vulnerable?

 

(Photo Credit: Liberation / Bertrand Langlois / AFP)

 

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What’s happening in Baltimore? Incarceration

October 15, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Governor of Maryland Martin O’Malley just announced the building of a new juvenile detention center specifically for youth charged as adults. It will cost a hefty $100 million dollars … at least. All this is supposed to ensure the safety of Baltimore and its youth.

Revisiting Maurizio Lazzarato’s recent argument that debt is the neoliberal condition, let’s think about the penal debt imposed here on women and men. But not just any women and men. In Baltimore’s Detention Center, eight out of ten women and nine out of ten men are black (Jail Daily Extract, division of Pretrial and Detention Services).

Baltimore’s Detention Center is part of the surge of incarceration that has taken place in the United States within the past thirty years. As sociologist Loic Wacquant has noted, in “the stingy social state and the gargantuan penal state,” three determinants make people more likely to be incarcerated: class, race and place. That’s how the state cares for the poor, for minority men and women.

Baltimore is one of the few cities in the United States that lost financial control of its detention center. In 1991, following a budget crisis, the city relinquished management of its detention center to the State, at the behest of then Governor Donald Schaeffer. The State’s agenda included the construction of Central Booking, opened in 1995. For many in Baltimore, Central Booking became the place to stay. Previously, one stayed in one of nine district police stations, which were more integrated into neighborhood communities. But neighborhood and community facilities were insufficiently “tough on crime,” and so they had to go.

In the logic of creating a penal debt, targeted populations have to be put into a position where they owe their freedom to the authorities. In Baltimore, the police have intensified their activity, thanks to the war on drugs, the war on the poor, the various wars on women, including the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act and the welfare reform of 1996.

Central Booking was hailed  as a model of “efficiency”. That efficiency meant the increasingly robotic incarceration of the increasingly impoverished populations of Baltimore, where 63% of the population is African American.  As a result of intensified and broadened police activity, 90% of people incarcerated in Baltimore City are awaiting trial compared to 63% nationally (Division of Pretrial Detention and Services Daily Population Report, January 4, 2010). 89% of the incarcerated are African Americans. Once in the system, your penal credit score drops. And that, in Baltimore, is called efficiency.

With 12 million “bodies being processed” every year by Central Booking institutions across the country, one wonders why the State is so invested in this form of manipulation of bodies. In the current ownership society, the penal credit score is now clearly attached to faster rates of prison recidivism, thanks to programs that keep track of the lives of former prisoners. For instance, Johns Hopkins (both the university and the hospital) demands a background check, criminal and financial, for any applicant to any job, including that of volunteer. This system of background checks has become so routine that its threatening panoptic dimension has been into “keeping Hopkins safe”. “Tough on crime” morphs into “safe” at work.

What is happening in Baltimore? Debt through incarceration. The impoverished youth of Baltimore is going to incur more penal debt through a project that invests scarce social welfare money into a prison that will have to be filled … with the impoverished youth of Baltimore. The circle is closed … efficiently.

 

(Photo Credit: Baltimore Sun)

 

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The European Union, France and the attacks on the Roma: who’s next?

September 5, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Members of the Roma community in a camp in Lyons, 2010

When, in 2007, the European Union opened its membership to Eastern European countries, it only left the door ajar. As Renault or other European corporations had welcomed the entrance of Eastern European countries into the Union, seeing the potential for reserve of cheap labor, the promise of a “we stand together European citizenry” of these new members did not apply to the Roma, who are European citizens. In eight European Countries including France, the Roma have been under work restrictions, with only 150 types of work or “métiers” opened to them. Moreover, an employer who would like to hire a Roma would have to pay a monthly 700€ (about $900) flat tax on salary, a huge deterrence to employment.

This summer, despite the recent formation of a French socialist government, which includes a few Europe Ecology ministers, under the presidency of François Hollande, the policies of removal of Roma camps from some sites in France, a practice started by Sarkozy and opposed at the time by one François Hollande, have been reenacted under the aegis of Manuel Valls, the minister of the interior.

These removals triggered a series of criticism, including from other members of the government such as Cecile Duflot (Europe Ecology) who pointed out the counterproductive nature of such actions that push already stigmatized population toward more precariousness.

Martine Aubry, socialist mayor of Lille, one of the cities where Roma were evicted, was reported to be furious at M. Valls for having engaged in this action without any consultation with her or her administration.  She also emphasized that it was a serious breach in the work that her city has done to welcome the Roma. This work included construction of camps, with three more being built when the police dislodged the Roma from unofficial sites.

M.Valls claimed that the camps were unauthorized and therefore unlawful, adding that the law of the republic had to prevail. However, the laws have consistently ignored the reality of life for the Roma community and have targeted them as scapegoats by describing a surge of Roma population that would occur if they were to be `unleashed’.

The `surge’ of Roma in France amounts to 15 000 people. That number has remained stable for years despite the politics of expulsions, according to anthropologist Martin Oliviera, a member of the European Observatory Urban-Rom who works in a suburb of Paris. He adds that the Roma are not nomadic, as the cliché supports. He emphasized that their vocation is not to gush, or spill, westward “as if Europe was slanted.”

The politics of exclusion, on the other hand, are slanted. They are part of a capitalist framework that has evolved to a new neo liberal order that plays out to build (or to generate) the “vulnerable” that becomes the “filthy” as the politics of exclusion grows, and the French socialists are themselves entangled in this. The impediments to living and working for the Roma are in place. Unquestionably, various critics forced the government to make a gesture: the tax on salary was removed and the number of Métiers authorized increased. But it is too little and will not produce the real support that the Roma need.

So now, many are being rendered vulnerable under the same framework. Many are in the streets with no sense of belonging. This is not about charity for the Roma. It is about living in resistance to an order that we have allowed to be ours.

 

(Photo Credit: Libération / Jeff Pachoud / AFP)

 

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The unmaking of the indebted woman

August 22, 2012 by 3 Comments

In this season of hollow political American presidential campaigns, The Making of the Indebted Man: Essay on the Neoliberal Condition, by Maurizio Lazzarato appears as a work of resistance. The book explores contemporary financial power and the debt crisis that comes with it, a crisis that has shaped our current political situation.

Maurizio Lazzarato sees the debt system as a political project that means to engage the individual for the future. Debt creates a system of efficiency/ profitability that tends to control all individuals, unemployed or employed. As Lazzarato points out, the economical origin of the current crisis, the subprime crisis, has been rendered invisible. In fact, the couple debt-fault is only applied to individuals while the debt crisis, as the failure of the entire neoliberal system, is left untouched, unmentioned.

The creation of mechanisms of debt has been the central action of neoliberal political economy. This new world order begat a dynamic of work subjectivity in the post-industrialized economy, thanks to the neoliberal turbine: the differential of power between the lender and the borrower. According to Lazzarato, Michel Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics expounded on the historicity of incipient neoliberal governance, but neglected to incorporate the power-function of debt-money finance in neoliberal governance. Lazzarato relies on Gilles Deleuze’s Postscript on the Societies of Control to argue that as capitalism moved from production to service, social control moved from disciplinary control to market based control with the fluctuation of interest rates as the basis of the production of indebted citizens.

In this world, debt political economy is the real global controlling power.

In his conclusion, Lazzarato calls for new solidarities and a new cooperation, reminding us that neoliberalism has also legitimized a debt toward the planet itself.  There’s global debt, and there’s planetary debt, and the two are intertwined and mutually reinforcing. Nevertheless, I wonder if the title, the making of an indebted man does not carry a singular and restrictive vison. After all, the making of the indebted woman started way before the advent of neoliberalism.

In “The political economy of vulnerable”, Dan Moshenberg recently highlighted a transnational reality of the fate of the indebted woman, showing that this “in debt” status now has a widely recognized name: the vulnerable. Moshenberg showed how predatory rates of local banks rendered a woman desperately vulnerable and isolated until she finally killed herself. Debt is part of the recently installed system of domination that will continue to control women, as our lives (including sexual and reproductive) will be even more dependent on this global financial order. Now is the time for women to strengthen and intensify our resistance. The unmaking of the indebted woman is the beginning of the end of the neoliberal condition. Cancel the debt … now!

 

(The Making of the Indebted Man: Essay on the Neoliberal Condition, by Maurizio Lazzarato, translated by Joshua David Jordan, will be released in the United States by Semiotext(e) next month.)

 

(Image Credit: aspoonfulofsuga)

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