immiseration, difference and art at a women’s shelter

1

immiseration, difference and art at a women’s shelter

nancy viva davis halifax and Liza Kim Jackson

presented at Unruly Engagements

Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, 2014

“And the thing of it is, it’s getting worse. It’s not getting better, it’s getting

worse, because some of the stories I hear from ladies, I can’t believe, you know,

that they’re in the system and the system is tearing them apart”

(R. Women of the Junction and RWC. 2013)

It is getting worse: We can’t tell it better. Homelessness and poverty are two of

the violences that women with disability in contemporary global culture

2

experience and to which the response is indifference. The conditions of

homelessness and disability intersect and are laced through with a lineage of

capitalist anti-relationalities, conditions that for us constitute indispensable and

material perspectives as a basis for critique.

In this presentation we will recuperate accounts of economic, institutional and

symbolic violence as expressed and produced within the crip social praxis art of

the Red Wagon Collective (RWC). These accounts have been gathered in the

context of a weekly artgroup alongside women who have or do live as disabled

and homeless. Many of these women have also lived in a shelter in the Junction

neighbourhood, Toronto, Canada. These accounts are presented within this

paper as fragments of text as well as projected images.

As the RW, we are oriented to the homelessness and disability we live next to.

This forms the empirical basis of our work. Within and external to shelters the

scattering of homeless bodies is done with no thought of community or

neighbourhoods and neighbourliness. And yet, we are neighbours and we

protest the scattering. As neighbours, our bodies come in contact to coproduce

relational and ethical knowledges. We share streets with nos voisine - our

neighbours. Nos voisine will easily tell you that: anyone can become homeless,

however, they address disability more obliquely as if it remained “a master

trope” which threatens to disqualify them (Mitchell & Snyder 2006, 125), and

yet as a social space, “becoming disabled” functions isomorphically with

homelessness and its “anyone can….”.

3

Within the artgroup, the space among us women (so identified through access to

shelter - for women) expands and contracts across material and embodied

difference. Our places within and without the marketplace we call society,

makes certain of our relationships taboo, foreclosed, instrumental, understood in

advance of their unfolding in real time. Our praxis of cross-class and

intersectional relationships spans the divide between the propertied and the un-

propertied (Savage 2003, 342). The relational tensions are fecund, questions

resound with unspeakability, and the containment against which we strain,

frustrates.

(J, A. 2013. Women’s Stories of Aging, Disability and Homelessness)

4

working in the neighbourhood

This work is grounded in a creative critique of the normativizing forces of

capitalism; it is also grounded within The Junction, a geo-temporal location

where the war on the poor is enacted through gentrification and through

multiple levels of institutionalization (Wacquant 2009). Located within Toronto,

the Junction takes up the proffered neoliberal strategies supporting the

attainment of Toronto’s global city status. Those who cannot be contained

within the discursive realm of gentrification are positioned as gentrifications’

monstrous Other.

“Who is she?

She is young, she is old, she is an artist, she is a teacher, she is a lawyer, she is

a daughter, she is a housewife, she is a poet, she is kind, she is pretty, she is a

mother, she is a grandmother, she is an invalid, she is sick, she is a sinner, she

is helpless, she is lonely, she is defenseless, she is homeless…”

(quoted from above)

The Junction neighbourhood carries a weighted history. (Blomley 2004;

Edmonds 2010a). Despite describing itself as located historically on the site

where two First Nation trails crossed, Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat and

Anishnaabeg histories are erased from the dominant narrativization of the

neighbourhood identity. Settler city spaces promote narratives of white identity

and spatial power expressed as the regulation of gender, sexuality, ability and

racial hierarchies as well as relations to land such as private property,

displacement and segregation (Blomley 2004; Edmonds 2010a; Morgensen

5

2012). The production of whiteness is tied to the assertion of bourgeois interests

that normativize the autonomous cismale, hetero-able embodied subject. This

dominant and normative figure is evident in the landscape of the Junction and

disciplines the white frontier space which, once decentered from a white

supremacist lens takes shape as a “transcultural space” of multiple difference

(Blomley 2004; Edmonds 2010a).

Immiseration

(Tent installation, 2013, Common Pulse Disability and Arts Symposium, Women of the Junction and RWC) The enrichment of the bourgeois body is predicated on the removal and

impoverishment of its Other. Seizure of land and labour results in disabling life

6

conditions: immiseration, toxification, slow disablement and death, overwork,

undernourishment and erasure (Marx [1867] 1990). Women, historically

rendered as property and reproductive labour, continue to be folded into the

categorization of the under/ un-paid worker, and, alongside queer and trans

identified people, are subject to distinct forms of brutality within patriarchy.

The configuration of colonial and capitalist relationalities again play out

through gentrification. During the post WWII flight of industry to sites of cheap

highly exploitable labour in the developing world1, the Junction fell into

decline. In between empty storefronts, second hand stores, porn outlets and

donut shops took root as did unemployment and informal work such as sex-

trade, drug culture and petty crime performed by what Marx called the

“lumpenproletariat” (Jackson 2009). Gleeson (1999) notes that the

lumpenproletariat has been historically populated by those disabled from birth,

those injured or immiserated on the job, the elderly, infirm, addicted, or

otherwise Otherwise. The lumpenproletariat constitutes the monstrous other to

both the bourgeois and the revolutionary. Forced into an ideological space, it

appears as idle and non-productive (Gleeson 1999, 108, 133). Bodies

categorized as such are subject to institutionalization in necropolitical spaces of

slow death, bare life, twice dead, living dead, undead... such as the women’s

shelter in which our work takes place (Cazdyn 2012, 8). While society might

1 We use the term “developing world” to denote the global extension of capitalism and the competitive relations it imposes on the working and marginalized classes internationally.

7

view the shelter as a charitable institution it is, according to nos voisines2

accounts, a space of further disablement.

“sometimes I’d rather be living on the street or in a shelter….

I’m just saying in my building there’s no accountability to get things done ...

They make it so that it’s a maze, that you’re supposed to go up the chain of

command, right?”

(L. Women of the Junction and RWC. 2013: un-paginated)

Gentrification asserts itself as another colonization where radically new ideas of

marketized belonging circulate. The up scaling of business and property is

mirrored by the disciplining, cleansing, revitalization and bourgeoisification of

the bodies in the landscape as healthy, reproductive, as living a lifestyle -

underpinned by an industrious and marketized morality. Those bodies who

cannot assimilate to - and yet are produced by - the market logics are cast as

“the” problem, as the monstrous Other. Erevelles (1996), in writing of how the

trope of disability is accorded to classed and racialized bodies reminds us that

this strategy is what permits bourgeois society’s denial of access to material,

economic, symbolic and political resources (525-6). Thus disability is a key

ideological and intersectional category in understanding how bodies become

classed as exploitable, unproductive and expendable.

2 we take on the reference nos voisine to replace the common naming within the institution: “the women.” The French, nos voisine, offers a conceptual entrance using an alternative feminized language. It is a language that an RWC hope speaks to our relation with women living at the shelter - our neighbours.

8

“My hours, of course, at work started to be cut off. I started another job, but the

money that I was seeing and hours I was getting was so little. With all the

money that I saved I had to eat and pay my bills. Everything was becoming

expensive, my paycheck was becoming smaller...it's our money. Absolutely. The

lowest of the low. Those big guys they have big money, they have an account in

the islands somewhere. We don't even know. In a Swiss bank and they're hidden.

They don't even want to mention. They run away from paying.”

(J. Women of the Junction and RWC. 2013)

(A. 2013. Women of the Junction and RWC: un-paginated)

9

Antidotes

“When things start to go down I would walk. That was my way of

medication, of medicating, of fixing my brain or fixing my

life or figuring out what next do I do.”

(J. 2013. Women of the Junction and RWC: un-paginated)

The praxis of the artist project, RW, moves towards the collaborative

development of an alternate space that is amenable to and supports collective re-

imagining. There, our art is present as antidote, acting homeopathically against

the numerous violences–and, we assert, as seeds to an anti oppressive futurity.

Simultaneous to these movements and presencings, the multiple enactments of

violence to which RWC is witness implacably surges, a violence we cannot halt,

but upon which we intervene.

Crip praxis

“And the exhaustion and the tiredness or whatever we are feeling, it’s because

there is no program for us. There is no stimulation to push the buttons inside

and say, hey, today is this, you have to do something. All you do, you have time

for medication, for lunch, for breakfast, you feel like you are in a camp or in the

army somewhere. So, no stimulation. That’s why we feel exhausted. That’s

why."


10

(Monday Art Group and RWC, 2013, the art of conversation)

Beside theoretical and symbolic practices lies a set of possibilities introduced by

a social practice arts (SPA) as the form which regards the social, or relationality,

as the artists material / medium (Gablik 1991; Jackson 2011; Jackson 2009;

Kester 2004; Lacy 1995; Rosler 1981/2006; Taylor 2006). The addition of a crip

lens attends to the materiality of the body/s within the medium of the social.

Crip social practice becomes an artistic mode adequate to developing a praxis

that challenges how bodies are organized, disciplined and symbolized in relation

to each other. Crip social practice arts: "draw attention to critically queer,

severely disabled possibilities [which] ... [w]ill exacerbate, in more productive

ways, the [multiple] crisis of authority ” (McRuer 2006, 31) that hail from

11

normative bourgeois systems. Via a crip aesthetic move, capitalism emerges as

the monstrous other, to which the homeless/disabled body speaks back.

“the housing worker realizes I can’t live in one room because of all of my

medical equipment. I’m on the lists for subsidized housing. I’ve waited twelve

years. There’s almost no accessible units, so, I have to keep waiting.”

(S. 2013. Women of the Junction and Red Wagon Collective: un-paginated) RWC borrows from Lather’s (1986) discussion of praxis and her emphasis on

reciprocity and open ended discourse positioning it alongside Kester’s (2004)

dialogical practice, which proposes that: “An alternative approach would

require us to locate the moment of indeterminateness, of open-ended and

libratory possibility ... in the very process of communication that the artwork

catalyzes;” one that is not “insensitive to the specific identities of speaking

subjects” but is a “dialogical exchange based on reciprocal openness” (90). The

basis for establishing such a communicative exchange lies phenomenologically

in the co-presence of our/all bodies as nos voisines. Opening to the world

through re-conceptualizing arts practice, we enter a back and forthing across

world, ideas and making (Abram 1996; Ahmed 2006; Bolt 2010; Gablik 1991).

This is an iterative and performative (Butler 1997; Taylor 2006)

phenomenological (Ahmed 2006; Van Manen 2014) and crip praxis from which

we return radically reoriented.

12

(S. 2013. Women’s Stories of Aging, Disability and Homelessness)

Knowledge production - is our knowledge power?

For the RWC, CSPA is not just as an aesthetic and material self-expression, but

is a form of knowledge production - it is evidence - about the embodied lives

lived within and beyond the social space of the women’s shelter. An enacted,

lived, produced and shared knowledge that registers and finds recognition

among bodies and across the senses (Abram 1996; Code 1995; Hennessy 1993;

Lather 1986 ; Marx 1988; McRuer 2006; Wacquant 1993). Challenging

relational patterns in order to open the potential for multiple forms of

knowledge exchange is inclusive of a decolonial perspective. Mignolo (2000)

writes that: “an other thinking,” would lead to the openness of the

13

“unforeseeable diversity of the world” and of “unheard and unexpected” forms

of knowledge…” (81). Our work is to stitch and color within spaces of

endurance, opening new spaces for altered economies of knowing, being,

making and exchanging.

Art language can cope with contradictory knowledge forms, and does not reach

for a completed form of truth but works as texture, color, affect, between

official forms and upsets and transgresses them - co-knowledge creation can be

a map of sociality within the larger unknown (Gablik 1991; Clover 2011). A

critique of elitist forms of knowledge puts forward the position all bodies are

knowing and that all knowledge has value. RW’s praxis is about seeing all

expression as dialectically important, as in a tense conversation towards an open

future.

“I want to be treated as a real artist.. which I am .. and not a burning

sensation”

(A. 2013. Women of the Junction and RWC: un-paginated)

But what is this embodied knowledge generated from a site of homelessness and

disability? it is not the new knowledge demanded by the academy. It is tiring old

knowledge especially for those living it, and the repetition of it nags and is met

by disbelief (Scarry 1985).

14

...it might sound off the wall...is there any way that we can get those higher ups

to come and live in the shelter system for a month with only the clothes on their

back?” - cause then they would really know.

(A. 2013. Women of the Junction and Red Wagon Collective: un-paginated)

Embodied knowledge makes an ethical demand.

(M. 2013. Women’s Stories of Aging, Disability and Homelessness)

In line with its crip and artistic temperament we look for the unknowable,

inconclusive specificity, the unnameable, and the self-named (Gablik 1991;

davis halifax 2009). We find at the heart of the work a movement between

bodies, a complex of tenuously fluxing exchanges based in the materiality of

life. We work with a redefinition of economy that is synonymous with culture

that cannot be separated from the mutuality of our survival (Blaney and

Inayatullah 2009; Gibson-Graham 2008). Shannon Jackson (2011) orients our

gaze towards the material relations of support that subtend art production but

often remain invisible in artworks. RWC understands that the economic web of

15

our sociality is important to the work. Thus all the exchange relations build

towards our coming together to contribute to how we understand what we are

doing and becoming. Our work then, circulates within the realm of lumpen and

diverse economies, of social reproduction as the feminized economic spaces of

maintaining the social fabric (Gibson-Graham 2008; Gleeson 1999; McLennan

in Bourke et al. 2011). From this perspective craft practices are not antithetical

to art.

(Monday Art Group and RWC)

“We want a brick house full of rooms… you know and lots of things for

women.”

(X. 2013. Women of the Junction and Red Wagon Collective: un-paginated)

economies and exchanges

Our critique observes our own designated poverty within a neoliberal society of

over consumption. And yet exchange does happen. In a space of scarcity we

16

manifest endurance into an ethics of abundance. “I don’t need much” (nos

voisine). The fact that we are only sporadically funded, that we work within

material contingency: the materials come from goodwill, are recycled, or when

we do have a bit of a budget we can purchase some. Shopping is part of the

performance. But we also think about the violence that subtends mass

production; Walmart and the dollar stores supported by super-exploited labour

there that intersects problematically with immiserated and poor bodies here,

connected and competing through a system of capitalist production.

We work with these materials to create useful objects, objects for warmth or

contemplation. These objects often circulate as gifts binding together family,

friends into communities of mutual survival. Nos voisine are also, more often

than not, each other's first responders in a crisis and in the sharing of

knowledges that allow for their survival. And we, RWC, are within this gifting

and affective economy. We receive hats, paintings, homemade vegan cakes and

dips, we receive apples and cosmetics, whatever is circulating in this scant

economic space - among these bodies - becomes an object for recognizing the

social dimension. gratitude, love.

“I don’t know what to do. I feel so strong about doing something, anything. I

mean, sincerely, if I have to go on a hunger strike I would, because everybody

needs a life, everybody… especially when they are so honest and they work so

hard and they lost everything.”


17

aesthetics of praxis The aesthetics of our work is determined both by the conditions of lack and the

exuberance of creative bodies. The making of material objects is

simultaneously the mending of a rift within the social fabric. There is a different

kind of vision: the work is allowed to be what it is. “My mother taught me to

knit;" "I don’t follow patterns — I just have to look at something” (nos

voisines). RW advises: imagine differently – do not plan to knit an item in one

color but work with small supplies, make small things, error, failure, mistakes,

absences are part of the ontology. That nos voisines might imagine the work as

another lack of resources intertwines with RWC’s imagining dialogue. The

dialogue weaves with the material and the conditions in which we create. RWC

want to open up the material world but we don’t have the access either, the

neoliberal real constricts even more distribution – stresses our bodies, constrains

relations.

How we’re understood as artists within the larger community also needs address

– if the arts/theory world looks from the outside at what we are doing they

critique it from within already prescribed conventions. Our response is that

those conventions do not apply to this work: we are thinking and doing

differently (Gablik 1991). It is the totality of the processes of material aesthetic

practices and the relationalities that subtend them that our work addresses.

18

(X. Women’s Stories of Aging, Disability and Homelessness, 2013.)

Theory, even if conceptualized as social action, is not enough. A praxis must be

developed where knowledge about capitalism is co-produced through dialogue,

taking a form that extends from and circulates back to the bodies who produced

the knowledge. Our work shows us that critiquing colonial capitalism as an

inherently violent sociality from an antipoverty and crip perspective is integral

to a fuller understanding of each. Most importantly our work engages with daily

life, material, emotional, mindful exchanges across intersectional positionalities

in a social space marked by disability and homelessness. Exchanges that are

mutually transforming for all and form a ground up democratizing politics.

“How do you make it right? We feel like losers but I’m not. That’s me. That’s

how I feel. That’s who I am.”


19

Bibliography Abram, David. 1996. The Spell Of The Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More–Than–Human World. New York: Pantheon. Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Bolt, Barbara. 2010. Heidegger Reframed: Interpreting Key Thinkers for the Arts. London and New York: IB Tauris. Blaney David L. and Naeem Inayatullah. 2009. Savage Economics: Wealth, Poverty, and the Temporal Walls of Capitalism. New York and London: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York and London: Routledge. Blomely, Nicholas. 2004. Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property. New York: Routledge. Cazdyn, Eric. 2012. The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture, and Illness. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Clover, Darlene. 2011. “Success and challenges of feminist arts-based participatory methodologies with homeless/street involved women in Victoria.” Action Research 9, 1, 12–26. Code, Lorraine. 1995. Rhetorical spaces: Essays on gendered locations. New York and London: Routledge. Edmonds, Penelope. 2010. Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th-Century Pacific Rim Cities. Vancouver: University of British Columbia.

20

Erevelles, Nirmala, and Andrea Minear. 2010. “Unspeakable Offenses: Untangling Race and Disability in Discourses of Intersectionality.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, 4, 2, 127–145. Erevelles, Nirmala. 1996. “Disability and the Dialectics of Difference.” Disability & Society 11 4, 519–538. Gablik, Suzi. 1991. The Reenchantment of Art. New York: Thames and Hudson. Gibson-Graham, Julie, Katherine. 2008. “Diverse Economies: Performative practices for ‘Other Worlds.’” Manuscript based on the Progress in Human Geography Lecture, March 2006, Chicago AAG. Gleeson, Brendan. 1999. Geographies of Disability. New York and London: Routledge. Hennessy, Rosemary. 1993. “Women’s Lives / Feminist Knowledge: Feminist Standpoint as Ideology Critique.” Hypatia 8, 1, 14–34. Jackson, Kim. 2009. The Reproduction of Capitalism and Culture in the Junction. Unpublished Masters Thesis, Interdisciplinary Studies, York University. Jackson, Shannon. 2011. Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. New York and London: Routledge. davis halifax, nancy viva. 2009. Disability and Arts-Informed Research: Moving toward Postconventional Representations. Amherst and London: Cambria Press. Kester, Grant. 2004. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley, LA, London: University of California Press. Lacy, Suzanne. Ed. 1995. Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. San Francisco: CA: Bay Press.

21

Lather, Patti. 1986. “Research as Praxis.” Harvard Educational Review 56, 3: 257–277. Marx, Karl. [1867] 1990. Capital Vol. I. London: Penguin Classics. Marx, Karl. 1988. “Private Property and Communism.” Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 99–114. New York: Prometheus Books. McLennan, Matthew R. 2011. “Our Streets! Practice and Theory of the Ottawa Panhandlers Union,” In Bourke, Alan, Tia Dafnos and Markus Kip. (Eds.) Lumpencity: Discourses of Marginality. Ottawa, ON: Red Quill Books. 389-408. McRuer, Robert. 2006. Crip theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New York University. Snyder, Sharon L. and David T. Mitchell. 2006. Cultural Locations of Disability. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mignolo, Walter D. 2009. “Coloniality: the Darker Side of Modernity.” In Sabine Breitwisser (ed.), Modernologies; Contemporary Artists Researching Modernity and Modernism. Catalogue of the Exhibit 39–49. Barcelona, Spain: Modernologia/Modernologies/ Modernology at the Museum of Modern Art. Scott Lauria Morgensen (2012). Theorising Gender, Sexuality and Settler Colonialism: An Introduction. Settler Colonial Studies, 2(2), 2-22. Rosler, Martha. 1981/2006. 3 works. The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Savage, Mary C. 2003. “Can Ethnographic Narrative Be a Neighbourly Act?” In Yvonna S. Lincoln and Norman K. Denzin (eds), Turning Points in Qualitative Research: Tying Knots in a Handkerchief 331–350. Walnut Creek, CA: Altimira Press.

22

Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body In Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Diana. 2006. “Performance and/as History.” TDR 50, 1, 67–86. Van Manen, Max. 2014. Phenomenology of practice: meaning-giving methods in phenomenological research and writing. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Wacquant, Loïc. 2009. Punishing the Poor. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Wacquant, Loïc. 1993. “On the Tracks of Symbolic Power: Prefatory Notes to Bourdieu’s ‘State Nobility.’” Theory, Culture & Society 10, 1–17. Women of the Junction and Red Wagon Collective. 2013. We have a message: Women’s Stories of Aging, Disability and Homelessness, Toronto: Anagraphia. Women’s Stories of Aging, Disability and Homelessness. 2013. A community arts project funded by Canadian Centre for Disability Studies, Faculty of Health, York University. https://gatheringspace.wordpress.com/projects/womens-stories-aging-disability-and-homelessness/

immiseration, difference and art at a women’s shelter

Documents