give me passionate rationality

and maybe someday my intellect and passion, they will fight it out
"some old new excuse" - the lost patrol

it just so happens that lately i've run into some texts that do a very good job of articulating many of my thoughts on the very practical matter of how people tend to believe there are clear boundaries between the personal and the political or the emotional and the rational, how human interaction is influenced by rigid allegiance to these dichotomies, how this dynamic disrupts organizing work and communication in general, and what's to be done. so i copied down some relevant points from two sources, and here they are, with bullet-point summary by me:

from Interviews/Entrevistas by Gloria E. Anzaldua, AnaLouise Keating (ed.)

passionate rationality as impetus for action towards social change

“[V]isionary pragmatism” and “passionate rationality” [are something] Patricia Hill Collins associates with African-American women’s … moral frameworks and spiritual worldviews that combine “caring, theoretical vision with informed, practical struggle.” Their desire to achieve social justice is infused with deep feeling, or what Collins describes as “passionate rationality,” which motivates them and others to work together for social change. According to Collins, “This type of passionate rationality flies in the face of Western epistemology that sees emotions and rationality as different and competing concerns… [D]eep feelings that arouse people to action constitute a critical source of power.” Like the African-American women Collins describes, Anzaldua attempts to generate this passionate rationality in her readers. (Introduction by AnaLouise Keating)

necessity of both rational and emotional action

Jamie Lee Evans: [You’ve said] that you’re “very hopeful” about the possibilities of alliance making, and you associate that hope with your belief that “to be human is to be in relationship; to be human is to be related to other people, to be interdependent with other people.” … Do you still feel hopeful? Has your hope grown? Diminished?

I’ve expanded that hope as well as the theory of alliance making … I now believe alliances entail interdependent relationships with the whole environment… When I had the drawbridge or island model, I was thinking in terms of people – the marginalized, disenfranchised groups hooking together and building a network, El Mundo Zurdo, where we could help each other. I’ve now taken into account … what’s not expressed outwardly, what’s not voiced … Alliance making is already more than just a rational, physical action. It’s already an emotional, psychological action, and now I’m seeing how the imaginal … is interacting with the older alliance making energies.
….
Making Alliances
What’s really interesting to me is a kind of paradox; there are groups of people who really want to work with other people and then there are other groups who want to separate and isolate out. One reason I’m doing this kind of work is that I’ve always been a mediator, I’ve always been a bridge. I think that ignorance is one of the enemies we have to combat – ignorance of power, ignorance about each other’s histories, ignorance about other ways of living and other perspectives. Ignorance is a form of desconocimientos, an intentional kind of ignorance.

politics of emotions and political context of personal experience

Part of my message to the young people struggling and making alliances is both the necessity of holding onto their beliefs and the necessity of changing their beliefs. I present them with my hit on things. But they have to choose which way they’re going: Will they change in ways that the group in power wants them to, or will they seek out their new identity and follow their own direction? It’s complex. It involves the emotions. When a person is slighted that person knows it. Something in their gut, in their heart – hurts. It’s like someone pricking you with an ice pick. The assumption is that you have to remain calm, cool, and rational and not let your feelings overwhelm you, not let anger take over. I tell them, “You have to look at those feelings. There’s a politics of the emotions behind each feeling. Behind guilt, behind anger, behind shame – those feelings are tied to specific experiences you’ve had. There’s always a political context to those personal experiences.” What I tell them goes against the grain, which is that you’re supposed to be cool, calm, and put on a face when you’re doing coalition work. You’re supposed to play a role.

injustice as emotional and political wounds, alliance making as healing wounds

Alliance making is therapeutic. You’re trying to heal a community or a culture while healing yourself. That’s all alliance work is: you’re trying to heal wounds. You’re trying to bring in justice, human rights, to people who have been wounded and disadvantaged in their lives …. These are wounds – emotional and psychological as well as political wounds. Becoming allies with people is really about helping each other heal. Basically. And that is the vocabulary. I don’t use the vocabulary other people working with alliances use. Because it’s hard for people to expose themselves and their wounds to a stranger who’s potentially an ally but could also be an enemy.

importance of openness and working out of personal problems

[I]f we were good allies to each other … [w]e would have to start from a place of openness. Anywhere along the working out of the alliance there’s always the closing of doors, and then you have to open them up again. We close doors when we hurt each other out of desconocimientos, such as ignorance. Or the hurt may be intentional, a way of taking back control. People want to keep their personal feelings out of it. But you can’t. You work out personal problems while working out the problems of a particular group, community, or culture. You work on two fronts: inner and outer.

covertly exercising power over someone by “stepping on” them

Shifting power
Jamie Lee Evans: Can you say more about interconnections between the personal and the political?

I use images to help people connect with different experiences. One of the images I use for this idea of who has power and who doesn’t is the image of the shadow and who’s stepping on the shadow. So I’ll have something like this. [While drawing.] This is the body of the person and when somebody is stepping on your shadow – in Spanish it’s called “pisan la sombra” – they’re stepping on your face but they’re doing it in a covert way. They’re putting you down and walking on you without acknowledging that they’re doing it, and you sometimes are buying into it.

moving out of conditioned oppressor/oppressed roles as both personal and political act

So when somebody who has control over us is in dialogue with us, we unknowingly fall into assuming a subordinate role. And the other automatically assumes the role of control, the role of the oppressor. You see this dynamic between students and teachers, between whites and colored, between middle class and working class. Always people fall into the roles they’ve been indoctrinated into. Decolonizing oneself from this kind of oppressor/oppressed role is both personal and political, inner and outer. As a bridge I’ll say, “This is a scenario that happens often.” Or “This is an assumption we all buy into.” Or “These are some dangers when you’re doing alliance work.”

addressing power dynamics by evaluating the positions from which you/others speak

My role is that of teacher, healer, translator, mediator. That’s my job as a writer. People look to me for images, for ideas. They take these ideas, think about and expand on them. They think of me as a model. It’s alright for them to think of me as a model. But there’s a danger, the danger of the pedestal. They give me their power and in return I’m supposed to tell them what to do. So when I’m communicating my ideas I try to turn it back: “What would you do if you were in this situation? Think about it or talk about it or write about it.” “What does it mean for me to be on this pedestal up on stage, looking down at you? And what does that mean that you’re down there looking up at me?” Be aware of the roles you assume for others and for yourself. My goal is to encourage them to challenge every assumption, to question everything, and to always, always look at their positions – where they’re speaking from.

personal perspective as “mouth with feet”; “speaking from where you’re standing”

I have another image: una boca (a mouth) with feet. Perspective is where you stand. When you speak, you speak from a particular world. In a classroom you’re speaking from the world of the academy, from an intellectual identity. In your workplace, at your job, you’re speaking as employee, menial, management, or top of the heap. What comes out of your mouth changes every time the place you’re speaking from changes. So when you’re doing alliance work it’s very important to … position yourself and say what your stance is on particular things so that the other people you’re working with know exactly where you’re coming from. They can then … challenge some of these positions. It’s the first step in finding out whether a person who wants to be your ally is for real. Is she speaking from where she’s standing? Is she putting her feet in her mouth or vice versa? You get a sense of whether or not you can trust a person. You go with your gut feeling. Sometimes they’ll say all the right stuff, but you know they’re trying to put one over on you or on themselves.

from "Gender and the Independent Media Center: How alternative is this alternative?" by Lisa Brooten

new/feminist definition of power as “power with/to”, not power over

As a move towards a process of demilitarization, feminist scholars have promoted an alternative conception of power that moves away from the conception of power over others, to a conception of “power to” or “power with,” or the ability to empower oneself and others […]. Rather than seeing power as limited and divisible, a zero-sum game that drives competition, this conception sees power as unlimited and generative, increasing with its application. Rather than requiring dominance and hierarchy to maintain itself, this type of power is thwarted and destroyed by hierarchy and dominance …, which are dependent on and made manifest in highly gendered systems and structures.

ability to have a “voice” as indication of level of power held or exercised

With a focus on differing conceptions of power, issues of voice become central. Who has the ability and the right to speak, and for whom? In many cases, social norms govern who should speak and about what. Those accounts that fall outside of what are considered genderspecific experiences are often censored (at the least self-censored) in mainstream media, such as women writing about the front lines as a lived experience, or men writing about threats to masculinity.

mind/body, public/private, political/personal dichotomies are based on “gender discourse”

Carol Cohn’s (1987) groundbreaking work on the language used by military and defense analysts … examines gender as a social construction, and analyzes how gender acts to shape a system of meanings, images and words that dichotomize the world and how we think about it. Within these dichotomized sets of meanings, such as mind opposed to body; aggression to passivity; public to private; confrontation to accommodation, political to personal, and so on, the set of terms most associated with culturally normative masculinity is consistently favored over the other set of terms, gendering them in the process …. Thus, associating oneself with one or another of these terms acts to place you within a particular gender, and the higher or lower valuation with which it is associated […]. Gender discourse, then, is “the phenomenon of symbolically organizing the world in these gender-associated opposites” or binaries.

further, gender discourse plays a role in devaluing the “feminine” end of these dichotomies

Gender discourse becomes a means through which certain kinds of thought and action get effectively preempted. In the world of military and defense intellectuals, the impact of gender discourse is that some issues get left off the table for discussion. …. In addition to certain topics of discussion, tone of voice and emotional reactions are also policed, so that a speaker addressing the emotionally troubling realities of warfare gets written off as “a hysterical housewife” or “wimp” or some other gendered term of dismissal …. The result is a hegemonic masculinity, a pervasive, heterosexually defined masculinity requiring that men avoid effeminacy, overly intimate relations with men, and failure in sexual relationships with women, and manifest by adult males through strictly social relationships with men and primarily sexual relationships with women ….

Within a highly gendered discourse community, then, it is not necessarily that a more normatively “feminine” perspective is not present, but rather that such a perspective has become devalued, and those who speak from such a perspective (or are forced to act this perspective) are accordingly gendered within that discourse community. It is thus not just a matter of choosing what to say and saying it, but rather that one advertently or inadvertently chooses a position within the discourse. The enactment of normatively “masculine” perspectives or values is not necessarily limited to men …. Thus, challenging gender discourse requires more than making sure that women’s voices are heard. It must also include an analysis and understanding about how certain ways of thinking become devalued and silenced, an active recognition of these patterns and processes, and the presentation of alternatives that can challenge them.

a couple more specifically imc-related points:

the imc's aim to create an alternative to mainstream media parallels feminist movement

Indymedia and the (attempted) deconstruction of patriarchy
The IMC’s efforts to create a media space outside of the mainstream, corporate media correspond with feminist strategies of empowerment that attempt to create independence from a male-created and dominated reality. Unfortunately …, much of the “reality” as represented on the IMC is still male-created and highly gendered, although it does at times contest the mainstream media’s normative hypo-masculinity. The IMC network does, however, in both its content and process, contest the hierarchical nature of corporate, governmental and military structures, and many of these challenges recognize gender norms as an issue central to the problems they are working to address.

the imc position that even “objective” journalism is inherently biased/politicized mirrors feminist critiques of traditional “objectivity” as devaluing the “emotional components of reason”

A central premise of the IMC is that “objective” reports are as ideologically-driven as those that clearly spell out their political agenda, a notion that directly challenges the status quo and closely mirrors the feminist critique of mainstream scientific research questions and results. This critique maintains that the questions and priorities that drive much research “have been constructed primarily to produce answers to the kinds of questions an androcentric society has about nature and social life,” thus distorting and providing only a partial understanding by “devaluing contextual modes of thought and emotional components of reason” …. The IMC challenges blind acceptance of authoritative news sources by demanding that reporters contextualize their stories, both in terms of how its own texts should be read – i.e., that the IMC is not an objective news source, but a forum for collective production and discussion – and in terms of the stories themselves, in challenging writer/participants to provide a historical, political, economic and social context within which to understand complex issues. The IMC also challenges readers to see those issues left off the table, not discussed in mainstream media, with its “sanitized abstractions of death and destruction” …. IMC “norms” tend to privilege (or at the least acknowledge the relevance of) emotion and compassion …There was [in firsthand accounts from Iraq] a rhetorical practice of valuing and at times privileging the emotion of a situation and the witness’ response to the situation, especially over a more factual account that removed human reactions to the horror of the scene. In addition, the IMC promoted the personal involvement of the reader through a public, collective process of media critique that often included a critical gender analysis of mainstream, corporate media. The IMC critique of gender norms is not solely focused outward, however. The network has also been dealing with its own gender issues, raised in large part by the women of Indymedia.