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“My father lives with another wife,” Murad, 26, explained to me in April 2019, “so I live with my mother in one room.” His family’s shack is on the shabby edge of Gaza City, the toilet separated from the eating, sleeping, and living areas by only a thin curtain. There is no kitchen, just a small gas stove, but after Murad’s injury there was little to cook. Before Murad was shot on May 14, 2018, he used to make 20 NIS, or $5.80, a day as a self-taught electrician. He has not worked since his injury, and the aid he receives from the authorities isn’t enough to keep him and his mother afloat. The help offered to him by his family has been scant. “I can only afford to buy biscuits,” he said. “Last night we just ate stale bread for dinner. We have nothing. We’ve not had gas for a month.”
If we conjure the political will to create socialized medicine under the argument that health care is a human right, what forms of becoming gendered will be covered? To say that only bottom surgery would qualify is to reinscribe precisely our enemies’ reductive biopolitics of genital obsession. But what if becoming woman is a process not simply of jumping across a gendered binary, but one constantly occurring within gender itself? Do we then lean into or out of the medicalization of the gendered body? Do we have a right to be hot? Why should the socialist state cover one woman’s acquisition of breasts and not another’s augmentation of them? What is the space of nonequivalence between these two visions of “rights,” the right to purchase a commoditized medical service and the rights of an individual within a sociopolitical collectivity? If the welfare state is staked on the ethical wager that the plastic body is sponsored by the collectivity to help realize a collective vision of the good, what is the relation between rights and desires? And if the body is not private property to be managed as an investment, then how do we relate to it?
this essay got a lot of backlash (mostly due to quotes taken out of context) but i like the way it framed these questions
[...] There was Bernie Sanders, a socialist from a Brooklyn immigrant family who does not appear in Romance. He became the mayor of a small city in Vermont, then a senator, and finally ran twice for President. “I have cast some lonely votes, fought some lonely fights, mounted some lonely campaigns,” he wrote in 2015. “But I do not feel lonely now.” I don’t feel lonely anymore, but it isn’t nearly enough. An infinite amount of care seems necessary. While we gather our strength, the lucky ones among us will grow old.
The company installed turnstiles on one side of the clock shed, bright metal turnstiles with thick, horizontal bars that met you at eye, chest, crotch and shin level. A union steward told me the company planned to wire the turnstiles to the clocks so the turnstiles would open only when you clocked in at the beginning of shift and when you clocked out at the end of shift. They’d stay shut the rest of the time and we workers would be trapped inside the shipyard with fencing and barbed wire on one side of us and the river on the other. Like a prison.
One day I looked at that fence, that barbed wire, those turnstiles that locked us in. I was in a prison, but it felt ordinary, typical, even natural, and I thought about why that is.
[...]
It’s as though these pieces – the razor wire, chain-link fence, cop, helicopter, identification papers – were waiting to be assembled into an enormous and inescapable prison. Who’s to say they aren’t already assembled? What evidence is there to prove otherwise? Maybe the prison was assembled long ago and we couldn’t see it because we’re born into it and it felt natural. Maybe all prisons feel natural after enough time has passed.
But a prison isn’t just a collection of razor wire and cameras. I could stack all of the pieces in a pile and they wouldn’t make a prison. Adding a cop and a guard won’t turn them into a prison either. Even adding you and me – as prisoners – leaves something out.
[...] One afternoon, he might have pulled the cable too hard or too quickly or maybe his feet were unbalanced when he tugged on it. Maybe he didn’t see that the cable was caught on something, if it was caught on anything. Maybe he tripped on the welding cable. Maybe he just slipped on the metal dust or grease dotting the metal. What we know for sure is that Coby slid forward fast. He hit the side of his head on one arm of the solid, cast-steel kevel. That impact turned him perpendicular to the barge and the force hurled him over the side head first. The welding cable lassoed his left ankle and Coby swung upside-down like a pendulum halfway down the side of the barge. His hardhat lay on the concrete below and Coby’s brain dangled from the side of his head. The foremen ordered no one to touch Coby until the ambulance came and so his brain hardened while everyone waited. As it scraped back and forth across the steel, the brain made a sound like small stones skimming over the thick surface of a pond. That evening the company ordered overtime work for the installation of the third safety chain along the gunnel which OSHA required. There had been only two.
Coby was twenty-three years old. He had two sons, one a toddler, the other an infant.
I did Coby’s job.
In the shipyard, you could easily distinguish the foremen from the workers. The foremen wore white hardhats and the workers – the welders, steel fitters, riggers, pipefitters, carpenters and painters – wore red-orange hats coated with black dust. The foremen wore clean clothing while we workers wore filthy clothes and leathers covered in metal shavings and grime. When rain’s pouring or it’s cold outside or it’s hot outside, the foremen would stay in their offices which used to be an old, single-wide trailer mounted on cinder blocks by the river bank. That first summer I worked there the company hired a crew to construct a new building for the foremen, a large, gray box of cinder blocks with metal doors and loud locks and a sign that read, “Foremen Only!”
I fantasized about butchering my bosses, getting them in a headlock and slitting their throats and bleeding them out like hogs, but that anger ate me up and I didn’t want to spend time in a state prison or death row due to one of those no-accounts so I took a new approach. My last set of lousy jobs before the shipyard was at various restaurants as a cook and on those jobs we slowed the work down when we were treated too awfully or sabotaged equipment or, in one case in which the restaurant manager attempted to force the staff to work for three hours for free, we walked out of his restaurant in front of the owner. I learned something vital from these activities.
the labour movement is, if nothing else, a more healthy outlet for existing anger
Our instructor nodded then gave us a lecture about work ethics, on-the-job safety, being concerned about the company “as if we owned it,” and how that job had good benefits and there were a lot of other guys out there ready to fill our shoes if we decided we didn’t want to work. There’s a scrap of paper next to me on the table and a couple of number-two pencils. I grabbed one and sketched this guy as he talked. He’s blond, about five feet, nine inches tall, cream-colored hair and a cream-colored mustache, dressed in tight, new blue jeans and a cotton, candy-yellow knit shirt. He must weigh at least two-hundred and fifty pounds; his belly’s avalanching over his belt and he’s got droopy, triangular man-tits. His puffy cheeks pushed his face into a crack: he’d suffocate if he stood in a freezer too long. He wore mirrored glasses and I guessed he’s ex-military, rent-a-cop or a soldier-wannabe, which he soon confirmed.
"as if we owned it" fuck you
The meeting in the park was straightforward and no snipers appeared, if snipers can ever be said to appear. We talked about the safety violations occurring all across the shipyard, those that occurred because the company wasn’t enforcing safety regulations and those that occurred because the company was actively pushing us to violate safety protocol. We talked about our low pay or lower-than-standard pay. We talked about the union which had a history of working hand-in-hand with the company. Stories were told of the union flipping coins over worker’s jobs and golfing with administrators on the company payroll and on union time. Most importantly, we decided to put together a small newsletter and distribute it throughout the shipyard. This way we’d get accurate information into folks’ hands about the conditions inside the shipyard.
“They’ll fire us for making that newsletter, much less passing it out inside the yard,” Mueller warned us. “So we’re going to be smart about how we get it in and circulate it,” I said and Mueller suggested we bring it in stuck inside our hardhats or welding vests, rolled and crammed in boots, folded into lunch boxes.
[...] At work, all I thought about was this escape route. I kept notebooks on how to do it; grow organic vegetables, round up work as a painting contractor, rob banks, buy my own welding equipment and start my own business, scuba dive near Yellow Banks in the Ohio River and find the lost Confederate silver, grow pot. Everyone there planned the same thing. We’re all plotting our big break, the day we can flip off the administrators and the president of the company and walk away from sweat and metal dust and foremen and worries over rent and mortgage and health insurance and grocery prices. For most of us, the lottery held the best chance and several guys in my area came around each Friday with a photocopy of lotto tickets and pick numbers they bought with pooled money. Some guys hoped to start their own business and escape through that, when they win. A few guys hoped that Jesus would return soon and save them from this place. Except for Jesus, all our escape routes relied on somehow getting more of the money.