MuinteoirSaoirse [she/her]

Supporting rebellion in the DRC and wanting the people of the DRC to achieve a revolutionary success is not even remotely in the same category as supporting US-backed militias from Rwanda doing mass murder and the displacement and death of the millions of people whose emancipation Cuba believed in. People aren’t chess pieces in some grand strategy game. Revolution comes from the masses and is to free the masses. Revolution doesn’t come from imperial militias doing murder and everyone starving and dying because the whole place is being ravaged for its mines. And there’s nothing revolutionary about dismissing the deaths of the very people you supposedly believe should have a revolution as inconsequential because Rwanda has “valid reasons” for fucking killing them all.

Supporting American-instigated forever wars because an exploited people aren’t revolutionary is certainly an interesting stance.

My comment was not in defense of China (though bringing up the Khmer Rouge as if that has any bearing on current Chinese foreign policy is wild), my comment is on the material benefit to the US for M23 to be attacking the DRC, which seems a rather important piece of information for understanding how a militia that is armed by the US and Israel and is attacking people to the US’s benefit might be worth criticizing.

But then you made it immediately clear that you believe in collective punishment, as if the millions of people of the DRC should continue to be ravaged by US imperialism because of some nebulous connection that they have as an entire people to the Rwandan genocide, which, frankly, is a troubling viewpoint to take.

May you expand on what reasons would validate taking weapons from the US and Israel and arming militias to attack a neighbouring nation where 7 million people are displaced and twenty years of war and have famine have resulted in millions of deaths?

And do these valid reasons take into consideration that China became the largest stakeholder in the DRC’s mineral mines about a decade ago, which coincides with the rise of said militias using US and Israeli supplied weaponry to murder people there? Or is it somehow coincidence that at a time when China is dominating the EV and green energy market (which relies heavily on imports from the DRC) and the US is openly asserting that they will crush Chinese EV and green energy markets, that US and Israeli supplied militias are just so happening to target the mining operations in the DRC?

The West doesn’t even have “not being arrested on sight” if you’re racialized. Black trans women get arrested on sight for presumptive involvement in sex work so much that they say they got picked up for “walking while trans.”

“In one American study, the largest-ever survey of transgender and gender non-conforming people, 41 percent of Black trans women reported having been arrested or jailed because of their gender identity” - Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives

It’s even worse if you’re found with condoms on your person, that becomes “evidence” that you are engaged in sex work. So trans sexuality is inherently criminalized, as of course no one would choose to have sex with trans people if it wasn’t some sort of illegal transaction.

Truly the amount that economically secure, educated white queers are disconnected from the realities of further marginalized queer people domestically is astounding, and the fact that this disconnect allows them to position whatever colonial monstrosity they call home as being more “progressive” than the victims of imperialism that they castigate as being queerphobic is endlessly frustrating. But of course, having a vector of oppression such as queerness is seen to render them as pure victim, as completely divorced from the way they personally participate in and benefit from imperialism. As if queerness can wash away the blood that stains our hands.

Endlessly tired of imperial core queer “solidarity” being based around nebulous demands for “human rights” that, to no one’s surprise, often results in siding with the state against its enemies because they’re just so backwards while people in the core are languishing in jail/detention centres and those queers abroad that are supposedly in need of saving get delivered aid missiles and IMF austerity.

I love to recommend books, and so here is a smattering of books about Ireland from a variety of subjects and perspectives (largely focused on feminism as per my area of study).

Celtic Heritage: Ancient Tradition in Ireland and Wales, Alwyn and Brinley Rees

Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland, Anthony Bradley, Maryann Gialanella Valiulis

LGBTQ Visibility, Media and Sexuality in Ireland, Páraic Kerrigan

Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place and Irish Women, Bronwen Walter

Ireland and the Magdalene Laundries: A Campaign for Justice, Claire McGettrick, Katherine O’Donnell, Maeve O’Rourke, James M. Smith, Mari Steed

The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial History, Patrick R. Mullen

Philosophical Perspectives on Contemporary Ireland, Clara Fischer, Áine Mahon

Women and the Irish Nation: Gender, Culture, and Irish Identity 1890–1914, D. A. J. MacPherson

Positioning Gender and Race in (Post)colonial Plantation Space: Connecting Ireland and the Caribbean, Eve Walsh Stoddard

Queer Performance and Contemporary Ireland: Dissent and Disorientation, Fintan Walsh

Gender and Colonialism: A Psychological Analysis of Oppression and Liberation, Geraldine Moane

Dedication and Leadership: Learning from the Communists, Hyde Douglas

The Irish Novel at the End of the Twentieth Century: Gender, Bodies, and Power, Jennifer M. Jeffers

Contemporary Irish and Welsh Women’s Fiction: Gender, Desire and Power, Linden Peach

Literature, Partition, and Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine, Joe Cleary

Weaving Transnational Solidarity, Katherine O’Donnell

Palgrave Advances in Irish History, Katherine O’Donnell, Mary McAuliffe, Leeann Lane

Sapphists and Sexologists: Histories of Sexualities, Mary McAuliffe (not specifically Irish, but by an Irish author and it does explore lesbian desire in colonial Ireland)

Trad Nation: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Irish Traditional Music, Tes Slominski

The James Connolly Reader, Shaun Harkin, James Connolly, Mike Davis (a great collection of Connolly’s works including a few that are out of print or hard to find elsewhere, like Labour in Irish History though I think that’s not so hard to get anymore with eBooks)

Revolutionary Works, Seamus Costello

A Literary History of Ireland, Hyde Douglas

Myths and Folklore of Ireland, Jeremiah Curtin

Early Irish Literature, Myles Dillon (also The Cycles of Kings and Irish Sagas)

Celtic Women: Women in Celtic Society and Literature, Peter Beresford Ellis

A Brief History of the Celts, Peter Beresford Ellis (also The Druids and Celtic Myths and Legends and A Dictionary of Irish Mythology)

Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, Thomas Crofton Croker

If you’re looking for someone who is doing some really interesting scholarship on Irish indigeneity, coalition building with colonized Indigenous people globally, and preserving/resurrecting obscure and regional Irish-language terms and idioms, I recommend Manchán Magan.

Ali Kadri’s The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of Systemic Destruction explores exactly such an economic model. He expands on the theory of waste as the primary commodity of neoliberal capital order in China’s Path to Development: Against Neoliberalism and also its function as the driving force of imperial wars of encroachment in Imperialism With Reference to Syria and Arab Development Denied: Dynamics of Accumulation by Wars of Encroachment.

I cannot recommend his work enough in understanding the way that imperialism under neoliberalism uses the production of waste as its primary mode of accumulation. War and destruction are often seen as the consequences of accumulation by resource theft, but Kadri posits that the waste itself is the commodity and resource theft is a secondary (although still desired and lucrative) goal in war. By de-reproducing labour, that is to say, by collapsing the labour time and resources necessary in reproducing labour to a single moment of liquidation, the entire value of that commodified labour is extracted at one go.

Destruction is not a byproduct of war, destruction is the product of war, and the accumulation of wealth through waste production is an explosive industry with massive profits–and without the drawback of any value being clawed back by labour in their need to reproduce their class. It is the ultimate end of commodified “thingification” (objectification) of labour.

The Zionist entity has been doing biological warfare since its inception, check out Benny Morris and Benjamin Z. Kedar’s Cast Thy Bread: Israeli Biological Warfare During the 1948 War. The article pieces together documents on Operation Cast Thy Bread, which poisoned wells across Palestine and Egypt and caused a typhoid epidemic. Ben-Gurion even ordered the poisoning of wells in Cairo as a pre-emptive strike.

Egyptian Prime Minister Nuqrashi Pasha told the UN Mediator for Palestine, Count Folke Bernadotte, at their meeting on 29 May, shortly after the Egyptian capture of the two Arab Platoon operatives outside Gaza contaminating ‘the water supply of the Egyptian army’ with ‘vials of cholera and dysentery germs’: ‘The Egyptian Government held the Jewish authorities responsible for this since this sort of thing had to be planned inasmuch as it was not possible to buy germs for such purposes in retail shops. Scientists and high officials had to be involved… [in] such well-planned acts.’

I think a lot of queer theory pushed by english-american academia spends too much time focused on dividing “sex” and “gender” in an entirely arbitrary and hegemonic way, perpetuating the idea that sex has some essential biological immutability, which not only holds back trans theory, it completely erases intersex theory.

So, for anyone interested in reading a bit more about intersex:

Challenging Lesbian Norms: Intersex, Transgender, Intersectional, and Queer Perspectives, Angela Pattatuchi Aragón

Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States, Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock

Beyond Gender Binaries: The History of Trans, Intersex, and Third Gender Individuals, Rita Santos

Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, Dean Spade

Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, Eric A. Stanley

Sex/Gender: Biology in a Social World, Anne Fausto-Sterling

Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, Anne Fausto-Sterling

Expanding the Rainbow: Exploring the Relationships of Bi+, Polyamorous, Kinky, Ace, Intersex, and Trans People, Brandy L. Simula, J.E. Sumerau, and Andrea Miller

Intersex, Catherine Harper

Intersex Matters: Biomedical Embodiment, Gender Regulation, and Transnational Activism, David A. Rubin

Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex, Elizabeth Reis

Contesting Intersex: The Dubious Diagnosis, Georgiann Davis

The Spectrum of Sex: The Science of Male, Female, and Intersex, Hida Vilori and Naria Nieto

Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience, Hilary Malatino

Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub

Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience, Katrina Karkazis

Critical Intersex, Morgan Holmes

Intersex Rights: Living Between Sexes, Nikoletta Pikramenou

Transgender and Intersex: Theoretical, Practical, and Artistic Perspectives, Stefan Horlacher

Moosehead and a knife, that’s Dartmouth in a nutshell.

I recommend checking out Alice Domurat Dreger’s Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex, which is one of the earliest works in the anglo world exploring intersex from a social perspective, and digs historically into the process through which western medical fields developed an entirely arbitrary distinction to biologically “sex” men and women, and how that was propelled into dominant social ideology.

Despite her more recent anti-trans talking points, back in the day Dreger’s work was a really big part of the developing intersex community (by community here I mean community as in, people beginning to “come out” as intersex or meet other intersex people and share their experiences and form an identity as intersex as opposed to the previously near-universal intersex experience of living in secret shame, believing you had an embarrassing and unique medical condition, or being left entirely in the dark as doctors performed surgeries on you and either never told your parents or your parents chose to bury it and lie to you).

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For anyone who would like to read a bit more about Hui identity, Xiaoming Wang’s Muslim Chinese – The Hui in Rural Ningxia: Internal Migration and Ethnoreligious Identification is a historical overview of Hui identity in China from their arrival in the Tang dynasty to present, and then a cultural overview that explores Hui culture and tradition.

Yuxiang Wang’s Language, Culture and Identity Among Minority Students in China: The Case of the Hui, is a pedagogical treatise on crafting more culturally sensitive and diverse classrooms to ensure the continued promotion of China’s multifaceted ethnocultural heritages.