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PARIS -- Denis Payre, a self-described French jet-setter, built a successful high-tech company from scratch, then decided to quit at age 34 to spend more time in France with his wife and young children. Instead, Payre said, he a tax bill was pushed into exile by the French government, which sent him of nearly $2.5 million on paper assets he couldn't cash in. "They were asking me to pay taxes on money I didn't have," Payre said. "I had no choice but to leave the country." Payre, who moved his family to neighboring Belgium eight years ago, is today part of a sizable community of rich expatriate French driven out by the world's highest tax bills on wealthy citizens. The exodus continues: On average, at least one millionaire leaves France every day to take up residence in more wealth-friendly nations, according to a government study. At a time when France is struggling to stay competitive in an increasingly integrated world, business leaders say the country can't afford to make refugees of some of its most established business families. They include members of the Taittinger champagne empire, the Peugeot auto magnates and leading shareholders of dominant retailers Carrefour and Darty. Also going are members of a new generation of high-tech entrepreneurs. Socialist leaders and some government officials argue that the rich are merely trying to shirk their social responsibilities by fleeing the country with their millions. "France is penalizing success in a big way," argued Payre, who is now 43 and has started a new company in Brussels that he said did nearly $32 million in business this year. "The loss in income for the government is the smallest part. The big issue is the loss of all that creative energy this country is dying for." Payre said that when he decided to leave his high-tech company, Business Objects, in 1997, he owned shares that were worth $110 million -- on paper. French tax authorities required Payre to pay a wealth tax of 2.2 percent on the shares, based on what the shares would have been worth had he sold them at the market's highest point. But Payre said that he didn't have access to them because of stock market regulations that limited his ability to sell and that, in any case, a market dip had devalued the shares below that peak. The wealth tax -- officially called the solidarity tax -- is collected on top of income, capital gains, inheritance and social security taxes. It's part of the reason France consistently ranks at the top of Forbes magazine's annual Tax Misery Index -- a global listing of the most heavily taxed nations. Wealthy citizens' tax bills can be higher than their incomes, according to tax analysts. President Jacques Chirac's government attempted to rectify that disparity last year with changes intended to guarantee that no one would pay more than 60 percent of income in taxes. But many businesspeople say actual maximum tax rates still hover at around 72 percent. France's tax structure is more than a means of supporting the nation's expensive cradle-to-grave social services. It is deeply rooted in the nation's history and psyche, dating to the French Revolution of 1789, when impoverished peasants overthrew an obscenely wealthy aristocracy and sent many of its members to the guillotine.

The Cost There are over 300 million Americans today. Suppose UBI provided everyone with $10,000 a year. That would cost more than $3 trillion a year — and $30 trillion to $40 trillion over ten years. This single-year figure equals more than three-fourths of the entire yearly federal budget — and double the entire budget outside Social Security, Medicare, defense, and interest payments. It’s also equal to close to 100 percent of all tax revenue the federal government collects. Or, consider UBI that gives everyone $5,000 a year. That would provide income equal to about two-fifths of the poverty line for an individual (which is a projected $12,700 in 2016) and less than the poverty line for a family of four ($24,800). But it would cost as much as the entire federal budget outside Social Security, Medicare, defense, and interest payments. Some UBI proponents respond that policymakers could make the UBI payments taxable. But the savings from doing so would be relatively modest, because the vast bulk of Americans either owe no federal income tax or are in the 10% or 15% tax brackets. For example, if you gave all 328 million Americans a $10,000 UBI and the cost was $3.28 trillion a year (about $33 trillion over ten years) before taxes, then making the UBI payments taxable would reduce that cost only to something like $2.5 trillion or $2.75 trillion (or $25 trillion to $27.5 trillion over ten years). Paying For It Where would the money to finance such a large expenditure come from? That it would come mainly or entirely from new taxes isn’t plausible. We’ll already need substantial new revenues in the coming decades to help keep Social Security and Medicare solvent and avoid large benefit cuts in them. We’ll need further tax increases to help repair a crumbling infrastructure that will otherwise impede economic growth. And if we want to create more opportunity and reduce racial and other barriers and inequities, we’ll also need to raise new revenues to invest more in areas like pre-school education, child care, college affordability, and revitalizing segregated inner-city communities. A UBI that’s financed primarily by tax increases would require the American people to accept a level of taxation that vastly exceeds anything in U.S. history. It’s hard to imagine that such a UBI would advance very far, especially given the tax increases we’ll already need for Social Security, Medicare, infrastructure, and other needs. The Risk UBI’s daunting financing challenges raise fundamental questions about its political feasibility, both now and in coming decades. Proponents often speak of an emerging left-right coalition to support it. But consider what UBI’s supporters on the right advocate. They generally propose UBI as a replacement for the current “welfare state.” That is, they would finance UBI by eliminating all or most programs for people with low or modest incomes. Consider what that would mean. If you take the dollars targeted on people in the bottom fifth or two-fifths of the population and convert them to universal payments to people all the way up the income scale, you’re redistributing income upward. That would increase poverty and inequality rather than reduce them. Yet that’s the platform on which the (limited) support for UBI on the right largely rests. It entails abolishing programs from SNAP (food stamps) — which largely eliminated the severe child malnutrition found in parts of the Southern “black belt” and Appalachia in the late 1960s — to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), Section 8 rental vouchers, Medicaid, Head Start, child care assistance, and many others. These programs lift tens of millions of people, including millions of children, out of poverty each year and make tens of millions more less poor. Some UBI proponents may argue that by ending current programs, we’d reap large administrative savings that we could convert into UBI payments. But that’s mistaken. For the major means-tested programs — SNAP, Medicaid, the EITC, housing vouchers, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), and school meals — administrative costs consume only 1 to 9 percent of program resources, as a CBPP analysis explains.[1] Their funding goes overwhelmingly to boost the incomes and purchasing power of low-income families. Moreover, as the Roosevelt Institute’s Mike Konczal has noted, eliminating Medicaid, SNAP, the EITC, housing vouchers, and the like would still leave you far short of what’s needed to finance a meaningful UBI.[2] Would we also end Pell Grants that help low-income students afford college? Would we terminate support for children in foster care, for mental health services, and for job training? Ed Dolan, who favors UBI, has calculated that we could finance it by using the proceeds from eliminating all means-tested programs outside health care — including Pell Grants, job training, Head Start, free school lunches, and the like, as well as refundable tax credits, SNAP, SSI, low-income housing programs, etc. The result, Dolan found, would be an annual UBI of $1,582 per person, well below the level of support most low-income families (especially working-poor families with children) now receive. The increase in poverty and hardship would be very large.[3] That’s why the risk is high that under any UBI that could conceivably gain traction politically, tens of millions of poor people would likely end up worse off. To further understand the risks, consider how working-age adults who aren’t working would fare. In our political culture, there are formidable political obstacles to providing cash to working-age people who aren’t employed, and it’s unlikely that UBI could surmount them. The nation’s social insurance programs — Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance — all go only to people with significant work records. It’s highly unlikely that policymakers would agree to make UBI cash payments of several thousand dollars to people who aren’t elderly or disabled and aren’t working. (By contrast, there is political support for providing poor families that have no earnings with non-cash assistance such as SNAP, Medicaid, rental vouchers, Head Start, and the WIC nutrition program.)

The idea of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) is gaining more attention. With a UBI, the government would give every adult the same fixed, monthly payment regardless of work status, health, or wealth. There are serious reasons to be cautious about UBI: It is offered as a solution to technological unemployment, but jobs aren’t disappearing; rather, work is changing. A quarter century after the digital revolution began, the economy now employs 37 million more people and offers a record-high 6 million job openings. Viewed by some as an alternative to work, UBI would shrink the labor force. By definition, a smaller labor force would mean lower economic output and lower tax revenues to invest in the future. UBI is very expensive. A $12,000-per-year UBI would cost the government $2.4 trillion annually, or one-eighth of GDP. That’s nearly as large as the entire US safety net today. Because UBI is universal, it would divert assistance from the most needy. Even under a leading proposal that leaves most of the safety net intact, a single parent with three children could lose up to $19,000 in annual benefits on net. The idea has been scarcely tested. Only one of a handful of experiments with UBI would provide insights relevant to the US economy, but that study is still in its early stages. While the motivation behind UBI is admirable, it is not the right solution to the country’s core economic problem: the concentration of opportunity.

How Much Would Universal Basic Income Cost? In July 2022, there were 164 million Americans in the labor force.7 FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. "Civilian Labor Force Level." A GBI of $12,000 per year ($1,000 per month) for each person in the labor force would cost $1.968 trillion per year. Many supporters argue that UBI would not need to be an addition to current welfare spending; a basic income would allow the government to cut redundant programs and reduce associated bureaucratic costs. A UBI would cost even more—with more than 300 million Americans, $12,000 per year would cost more than $3.6 trillion per year.

PWBM projects that the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act of 2021, introduced by Senator Elizabeth Warren, would raise $2.1 trillion over the standard 10-year budget window (2022-2031) under scoring conventions used by government agencies. Incorporating the effects of enhanced IRS enforcement, our projection rises to $2.4 trillion over 2022-2031 and $2.7 trillion over 2023-2032. Also incorporating macroeconomic effects of the Act reduces estimated revenue to $2.0 trillion over 2022-2031 and $2.3 trillion over 2023-2032. We estimate that the Act would reduce GDP by 1.2 percent in 2050.

A study published this week sheds doubt on ambitious claims made for universal basic income (UBI), the scheme that would give everyone regular, unconditional cash payments that are enough to live on. Its advocates claim it would help to reduce poverty, narrow inequalities and tackle the effects of automation on jobs and income. Research conducted for Public Services International, a global trade union federation, reviewed for the first time 16 practical projects that have tested different ways of distributing regular cash payments to individuals across a range of poor, middle-income and rich countries, as well as copious literature on the topic. It could find no evidence to suggest that such a scheme could be sustained for all individuals in any country in the short, medium or longer term – or that this approach could achieve lasting improvements in wellbeing or equality. The research confirms the importance of generous, non-stigmatising income support, but everything turns on how much money is paid, under what conditions and with what consequences for the welfare system as a whole. From Kenya and southern India to Alaska and Finland, cash payment schemes have been claimed to show that UBI “works”. In fact, what’s been tested in practice is almost infinitely varied, with cash paid at different levels and intervals, usually well below the poverty line and mainly to individuals selected because they are severely disadvantaged, with funds provided by charities, corporations and development agencies more often than by governments. Experiments in India and Kenya have been funded, respectively, by Unicef and Give Directly, a US charity supported by Google. They give money to people on very low incomes in selected villages for fixed periods of time. Giving small amounts of cash to people who have next to nothing is bound to make a difference – and indeed, these schemes have helped to improve recipients’ health and livelihoods. But nothing is revealed about their longer-term viability, or how they could be scaled up to serve whole populations. And there is a democratic deficit: people who get their basic income from charities or aid agencies have no control over how payments are made, to whom, at what level or over what period of time. The Alaska Permanent Fund, built from the state’s oil revenues, pays all adults and children a dividend each year – in 2018, it was $1,600 (£1,230). The scheme is popular and enduring; it has been found to produce some positive impacts on rural indigenous groups, but it makes no claim to sufficiency and has done nothing to reduce child poverty or to prevent widening income inequalities. Finland undertook a two-year trial, from January 2017 to December 2018, of modest monthly payments of €560 (£477) to 2,000 unemployed people – but the government has refused to fund further expansion. It told us little about UBI except that, when push comes to shove, elected politicians may balk at paying for a universal scheme. The cost of a sufficient UBI scheme would be extremely high according to the International Labour Office, which estimates average costs equivalent to 20-30% of GDP in most countries. Costs can be reduced – and have been in most trials – by paying smaller amounts to fewer individuals. But there is no evidence to suggest that a partial or conditional UBI scheme could do anything to mitigate, let alone reverse, current trends towards worsening poverty, inequality and labour insecurity. Costs may be offset by raising taxes or shifting expenditure from other kinds of public expenditure, but either way there are huge and risky trade-offs. Money spent on cash payments cannot be invested elsewhere. The more generous the payments, the wider the range of recipients, the longer the scheme continues, the less money will be left to build the structures and systems that are needed to realise UBI’s progressive goals. As this week’s report observes, “If cash payments are allowed to take precedence, there’s a serious risk of crowding out efforts to build collaborative, sustainable services and infrastructure – and setting a pattern for future development that promotes commodification rather than emancipation.” This may help to explain why UBI has attracted support from Silicon Valley tycoons, who are more interested in defending consumer capitalism than in tackling poverty and inequality. The report concludes that the money needed to pay for an adequate UBI scheme “would be better spent on reforming social protection systems, and building more and better-quality public services”. Redistributing the personal tax allowance and developing the idea of universal basic services (UBS) could offer a more promising alternative. This calls for more and better quality public services that are free to those who need them, regardless of ability to pay. Healthcare and education are obvious examples, and it is argued that a similar approach should be applied to areas such as transport, housing, social care and information – everyday essentials that should be available to all. Collective provision offers more cost-effective, socially just, redistributive and sustainable ways of meeting people’s needs than leaving individuals to buy what they can afford in the marketplace.

[Neal Harris, Department of Social Sciences, Oxford Brookes University, Critical Theory and Universal Basic Income, 3-10-2023,

This is the conundrum of UBI for the left: there is an obvious quantitative gain – which is seemingly undeniable. The poorest in society will benefit from better healthcare outcomes, may live longer and may have greater access to the market economy. However, these quantitative benefits do not signal the move to a more emancipated socialistic society. The counterpoint to these quantitative benefits is the further colonisation of social domains by capitalist forms of cognition and subjectivity. As such, in this paper, I have argued that the further dominance of pathological forms of desire and consciousness need to be factored into the discussion of whether the left should embrace UBI as a policy. As such, despite the claims made by its progressive advocates, when viewed from a critical theory perspective, it seems possible that implementing a UBI may entrench neoliberalism, rather than challenge it. Critical theory is thus of importance to this conversation, as it is through a fusion of Marxian, Weberian, neo-Hegelian, and psychoanalytic insights that reification and can be interrogated. From a critical theory perspective, one may suggest that the implementation of UBI payments could defer, rather than expedite, progressive qualitative transition.

At first blush, universal basic income (UBI) seems a very attractive idea, especially to a progressive. Yet it suffers from two serious problems. First, the odds are very high that an effort to secure UBI would prove quixotic. Second, and more disconcerting, any possibility of overcoming the formidable obstacles to UBI will almost certainly require a left-right coalition that has significant conservative support — and conservative support for UBI rests on an approach that would increase poverty, rather than reduce it.

The key issues related to UBI include what it would cost, how it would be paid for, and the risks it poses. Let’s take these one at a time.

Feminists scholars (McKay, 2005; McLean, 2016; Zelleke, 2011) who are in support of an income maintenance fund, such as universal basic income, have proposed how this regular payment will contribute to women’s autonomy, increase their economic power and independence, as well as re-balance many of the gender inequalities that continue to exist in society. Other feminist scholars (Robeyns, 2010; Gheaus, 2008) are less enthusiastic about the idea of a universal basic income and suggest that it will not help diminish the gendered division of labour, or reduce the gender pay gap, nor increase the participation of women in employment markets. For example, Gheaus (2008: 3) argues that ‘should a BI be introduced, it would be reasonable to expect an overall drop in female labour … differing income effects for different groups of women … and a drop in women’s bargaining power within the household, decreased selfesteem and loss of social capital’. In other words, Gheaus suggests that women may be more likely to give up full-time careers in the world of work, knowing that there’s a sustainable means in which they can base themselves at home, overseeing caring and domestic responsibilities. Feminist views on universal basic income although varied, recognize that a universal basic income will have important effects on poverty, but might not contribute substantially to shift structural inequalities around gender. While many women may benefit from such a policy reform, it is not clear whether or not a universal basic income has the potential to really ‘transform the patriarchal capitalist state’ (O’Brien, 2017: 100). Drawing on feminist arguments for and against a universal basic income, this chapter examines the lives of women from an intersectional perspective to understand the multilayered social influences and constraints which women with diverse identities experience.

Histories of biopower deeply affected Native people’s relationship to the body and to sexuality. Being surrounded by discourses of death, annihilation, and conquest, embedded in almost every popular image of Native peoples, negatively affects Native peoples’ self-esteem, contributing to numerous personal and collective challenges. Most images of Native peoples produced by popular culture are of Pocahontas or Sacajawea. Typically, these Native women are placed within narratives that would have them betraying their race and sacrificing themselves and Native lands for their love of white men. Looking at repetitive images of Native bodies ripped apart physically, mentally, spiritually and sexually by settler colonialism reminds Native peoples that the inevitable expectation for them is death. How can Native peoples feel good about their bodies and sexuality when these are the dominant images and historical facts of their lives? Conquest requires learning a new set of rules for intimacy. Despite these negative images, Native peoples continue to survive and feel sexual desire.

Natives, and lots of other folks, like sex but are terrified to discuss it. For many tribes, this shame around sex started in the boarding schools, and sexual shame has been passed down for generations. Native communities have adapted silence around sexuality to survive the imposition of colonialism in the United States. While the silence around sex and sexualities in Native communities is in some respects similar to that found in mainstream U.S. society, this attitude of silence has dire consequences for Native peoples, because of the relationship of sexuality to colonial power. Colonialism constitutes biopolitics, which marks the Native for death because of the biological and political threat they pose to the U.S. nation-state. Biopolitical logics are advanced through sexualization, racialization, and the gendering of colonial and non-colonial subjects. Sexuality is difficult terrain to approach in Native communities, since it brings up many ugly realities and colonial legacies of sexual violence. As Andrea Smith argues, sexual violence is both an ideological and a physical tool of U.S. colonialism. Because of this reality, there is a high rate of sexual abuse in Native communities. Non-Native pedophiles target children in Native nations because there is little chance of perpetrators being brought to justice or caught by tribal police, since non-Natives on tribal lands are not bound to the same laws as Natives. Historically, and arguably in the present, Native women have been targeted for medical sterilizations. In some Native nations, tribal councils have adapted heterosexist marriage acts into their tribal constitutions. All of this proves that the hyper-sexualization and dehumanization of Native peoples negatively affects Native communities. The response to these horrific crimes has often been silence both by the victims and Native communities as a whole. Native nations have also made laws concerning sexual abuse and rape, so conversations regarding inappropriate behavior of sexual expression do occur in Native nations. The problem is that conversations about safe and fun sex rarely happen because conversations about sex usually only focus on what sexual behaviors are wrong and bad. Sexuality cannot be repressed because it is everywhere. Yet the relationship between colonial power and normative discourses of sexualities is not a part of these dialogues. Heterosexism and the structure of the nuclear family need to be thought of as a colonial system of violence.

Students Semmi and Dakota recognized that the erotic extends to every aspect of our usual lives. Semmi found the erotic as she trusted and reveled in her body’s abilities, and Dakota saw the revitalization of an entire nation in one brief moment. Daniel Heath Justice warns that Indigenous peoples working towards decolonization can’t afford to ignore “sex and embodied pleasure” as a source of empowerment. He states that “[t]he indigenous body is more than flesh, blood, and bone … Native bodies are sites of both colonized conflict and passionate decolonization” (2008, 161). Extending Justice’s thought slightly, I would suggest that there is a danger in relying too much on one aspect of our being, as, in doing so, we become unbalanced. Hinging our worth and desire on only one facet of our magnificent existence has two consequences: the first is that the single-minded, concentrated attention paid to one part of your identity may leave you disoriented and lost if that feature disappears. The second issue stemming from blindness to the full spectrum of the erotic is the loss of a potential skill or talent that goes unrecognized due to myopic attention focused elsewhere. Lorde states that “[t]he erotic is a site of potential that unifies and evolves the amalgamation of all the facets that encompasses the bodily experience” (55). As well, Lorde and Indigenous scholars like Justice, Akiwenzie-Damm, Womack, and Chris Teuton (member of the Cherokee Nation) claim that the erotic can be a site for liberation and empowerment against an oppressive, patriarchal, and anti-erotic society. One of the oldest known erotic texts is the ancient Indian text of the Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana. While many have heard of the Kama Sutra and remember it for its detailed drawings of sexual positions, the Kama Sutra actually reveals a critical interpretation of the erotic. Written over 1,800 years ago, in the second century CE, this text gives advice on erotic practice, along with practical advice on behaviour leading up to, during, and after sexual activities. The author explicitly states: This work is not intended to be used merely as an instrument for satisfying our desires. A person, acquainted with the true principles of this science, and who preserves his Dharma [virtue or religious merit], Artha [worldly wealth], and Kama [pleasure or sensual gratification], and has a regard for the practices of the people is sure to obtain the mastery over his senses. In short, an intelligent and prudent person, attending to Dharma and Artha, and attending to Kama also, without becoming a slave to his passions, obtains success in everything that he may undertake. (172) Considered by many to be the foremost guide on the erotic, the Kama Sutra is a text of erotic enlightenment demonstrating that the mind and the body are inscribed with erotic areas that respond to physical and mental sensations. As the erotic is interpreted in the following chapters, the Kama Sutra adds to the understanding of the erotic experience as an attainment of human completeness. Philosopher Georges Bataille wrote Erotism: Death & Sexuality52 in the late 1950s. Similar to the Kama Sutra and Lorde’s work, Bataillie emphasizes the importance of “continuity” in sexuality, meaning humans should appreciate how the erotic is not limited to the realm of sex, but is an ethos that reaches out into all elements of our lives. He claims, “We are discontinuous beings, individuals who perish in isolation in the midst of incomprehensible adventure, but we yearn for our lost continuity” (60–61). Desires fulfilled may lead to pleasure and ecstasy, and this is one of the potential gifts of the erotic. In the same way that Driskill, Rifkin, and Chrystos demonstrate, Bataille also encourages people to push boundaries, and argues that “Eroticism always entails a breaking down of established patterns ... of the regulated social order” (75).

The Pickton murders disclosed at once the heightened vulnerability of Native women and the reasons why the racial dimensions of the murders escaped public notice.3 For many non-Indigenous people, it was impossible to see the Aboriginality of the missing women because they could not see Aboriginal people at all. Colonial discourses define “Indianness” as existing only in the historical past, doomed to disappearance or relegated to the anachronistic space of the reserve (reservation). Consequently, contemporary Native people confront nearly complete social invisibility, especially in cities. According to a statement by the Native Council of Canada, there remains “a strong, sometimes racist perception that being Aboriginal and being urban are mutually exclusive” (Native Council of Canada 1992, 10). The stakes of social erasure emerge from the unique legal and political challenges represented by Native communities. Two factors distinguish the status of Native communities from that of other racialized groups: claims to political autonomy that arise from historical status as independent nations, and territorial rights based on longtime use and occupation of the land (the foundation of the common-law doctrine of Aboriginal title). Because Native communities controvert the political authority and territorial claims of colonial nation-states, settler colonialism, explains Patrick Wolfe, depends upon the “logic of elimination,” a historical imperative that emerges from European expansion and remains “an organizing principle of settler-colonial society” (2006, 388). Contemporary violence, including gendered violence, enacted on Indigenous bodies extends from and repeats the colonial subjugation of Indigenous communities and their eviction from traditional homelands, the histories that transformed Indigenous territories into cities where Indigenous populations persist as small, often segregated minorities. As the social invisibility of Native people obscures the challenges that Indigeneity poses to the political order, so too does it conceal the violence that ensues from dispossession. In the political dynamics that surround the murders, then, Indigenous women’s bodies and land figure as intersecting sites of colonial power, thus underscoring the centrality of gendered violence in ongoing contests over territorial and political control. In representations of the Pickton murders, the Indigenous woman’s body became a site of contestation, its meanings bound up with the political significance of the killings. Media accounts sensationalized the murders by fixating on their brutality and, when the identities of the women eventually became clear, by playing on stereotypes about Aboriginal degeneracy. The dominant framing characterized the missing women as drug-addicted sex workers, as “blameworthy,” thereby deflecting attention from the structural dimensions of the violence (Jiwani and Young 2006, 901). This attitude extended even to those Aboriginal women who did not engage in sex work. The “conflation of Aboriginal woman and prostitute,” explains Sherene Razack, creates “an accompanying belief that when they encountered violence, Aboriginal women simply got what they deserved” (2002, 131). As the murders occupied front-page news, they became an urgent subject of Indigenous women artists who demanded attention to the Aboriginality of the missing women, the reasons for their vulnerability, and connections between gendered violence and ongoing colonialism. In the billboard created by Belmore, the fringe of red beads that cuts across the model’s back is a racial signifier that marks this body as Indigenous, and because the fringe resembles streams of blood, it also represents violence. Just as Indigeneity and violence are bound together in a single signifier, so too is it impossible to comprehend the murders apart from their racial dimensions. To explain why so many Aboriginal women fell prey to a serial killer, we must ask what drew these women to Vancouver’s impoverished Downtown Eastside where Pickton sought his victims, what led some to sex work and drug addiction, and why police and community members initially paid no heed to their disappearances and saw their lives and deaths as matters of little consequence. The questions alone expose injustices that create social marginality registered in the term “fringe.” The answers reveal how contemporary sexual violence is bound up with histories of dispossessing and disempowering Indigenous peoples. By representing brutality enacted on the body of an Aboriginal woman, then, Fringe condemns not only the murders themselves but also the colonial dynamics in which they are embedded. By elucidating connections among gendered violence, colonialism, and patriarchy, Native women artists, in my reading, advance an Indigenous feminist practice that centers on culture. Indigenous feminism, in Cheryl Suzack’s words, “represents a critical paradigm ... [that] focuses on the intersections between colonialism and patriarchy to examine how race and gender systems overlap to create conditions in which Indigenous women are subjected to forms of social disempowerment that arise out of historical and contemporary practices of colonialism, racism, sexism, and patriarchy leading to social patterns of ‘discrimination within discrimination’” (Suzack 2015, 261). Whereas the Pickton murders brought widespread public attention to Native women’s heightened vulnerability for the first time, subsequent S I G N S Spring 2021 y 565 Native community activism has given rise to social movements in Canada and the United States to demand justice for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. The objective of an Indigenous feminist project, writes Suzack, “is to achieve ‘gender justice’” (261), and in the case of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, the movement endeavors to address ongoing dynamics of colonialism and patriarchy that cause Native women to go missing, render their disappearances invisible, and preclude legal justice. Yet despite the acute social disempowerment and violence confronted by Indigenous women, Indigenous feminism, as critical paradigm and political practice, confronts accusations that it undermines more crucial struggles for land and sovereignty, the enduring centers of Indigenous politics, and thus contributes to ongoing colonization (Huhndorf and Suzack 2010; Suzack 2015). Within Indigenous studies, writes Joanne Barker, scholars have “frequently compartmentalized gender, sexuality, and feminism, bracketing them off from analysis of ‘more serious political’ issues such as governance, treaty and territorial rights” (2017, 10–11). By bringing to light the entanglements of patriarchy and colonialism, Indigenous women artists’ responses to the Pickton murders underscore intrinsic connections between the politics of gender and those of land and sovereignty. Attention to spatiality in their work, I argue, shows that gendered violence is not merely a consequence of colonial assaults on land, culture, and political power but is rather the very paradigm of those assaults. Because of the geographical ubiquity of violence against Native women, the fact that it cuts across boundaries of Indigenous communities and colonial nationstates, these artists’ work limns the distinctive contours of a transnational Indigenous feminist project while also facilitating a feminist rethinking of Native politics that insists on the urgency of gender. This Indigenous feminist critique in turn levels a forceful challenge to colonial nation-states by exposing the dire conditions they have created for Native communities, the presence of the “third world” within the “first world” that attests to colonialism as ongoing process. By exemplifying the power of culture to elucidate the political dynamics of the murders and connect them across time and space, these artists’ work discloses the neglected significance of culture as an Indigenous feminist practice.4 But as these artists intervene in a colonial history of representation by turning the Native women’s body into a figure of protest, they inevitably confront the enduring force of colonial discourses that threaten to mute subversive meanings. This includes a long history of images that conflate Indigenous women’s bodies with land in order to rationalize European expansion.

A queer, indigenous, sex positive reading offers a larger frame to critically analyze settler-colonialism and Native peoples’ response to conquest. Often Native peoples are represented as hypersexualized and as desiring white people. As Shari Huhndorf has argued, little work in Native studies has been done on visual representations of Native peoples in popular culture even though that is where most of the narratives of Native peoples are distributed. In other words, fictional historical accounts of Native peoples are the dominant mode of representation, yet these have little to do with actual living and breathing Native peoples. Native peoples are always placed in the past and not in the present or future. Most representations of Native peoples involve periods of first contact between settlers and Native peoples; rarely are Native peoples represented pre-contact or post-conquest. Sacajawea and Pocahontas have gained a mythological status as a result of these types of representations. However, Pocahontas and Sacajawea are presented as caricatures and not as Native women who were loyal to their Native nations. The idea of Native people and Native political issues existing in the present disrupts the primary representations of Native peoples as fictional characters from history. I focus on representations of Native peoples in popular culture because many of these images circulate un-interrogated. The analyses that do exist lament the sadness and tragedy of these representations, but alternative “positive” representations respond to colonial sexual violence portraying Native peoples as asexual to protect them from heteropatriarchy and settler-colonialism. A queer Indigenous reading of popular culture places Native peoples in the present and offers sex positivity as an alternative to desexualizing Native communities. After all, as history shows, desexualizing Native peoples has not helped us escape the sexual violence inherent in the heteropatriarchal logic that is the foundation of settler colonialism.

Violence. Death. This is what awaits Native peoples in modernity. Love. Hope. These feelings are also part of the Indigenous experience in Native America. As a queer Native woman who belongs to the Colville Nation, I am passionate about my work on sexualized cultural representations of Indigenous peoples that have been informed by colonial narratives, heteronormativity, and death. By investigating the iconography of popular representations of Native people, my dissertation documents how Native peoples have been historically and culturally sexualized through media like films, coins, statues, and plays. I critique and ultimately challenge how dominant U.S. popular culture sexualizes Native bodies as culturally (and therefore racially) unable to conform to white hetero-reproductive norms. I argue that the white colonial body politic constitutes Natives as dispensable bodies and populations through the queering of indigeneity, a process that changes across different historical contexts. Native peoples have been “queered” through colonial logics of sexuality by making Natives appear sexually aberrant from white settlers and therefore in need of paternalistic care by heteropatriarchy. This move to queer Native Americans maintains settler colonialism in several important ways: the queering of Natives is a crucial part of how they are constructed as unable to manage their land and resources. Unable to fulfill the role of householder, Native peoples fall under the management of white heteropatriarchy instead. These images support narratives of settler colonialism that erase the violence of conquest. Native peoples have internalized and/or rejected these representations of settler colonialism through writing poetry, becoming alcoholics and drug addicts, performing Native theatre, producing and directing Native films made by and for Native peoples, committing suicide, laying sad on their couch watching hours of television, etc. In other words, Native peoples continue to live with these representations of death and grapple with the ongoing effects of settler-colonialism. Some Native nations have responded to these images by desexualizing Native communities and conforming to heteronormativity, passing anti-gay marriage laws, and enforcing a structured silence around sex, all in an attempt to avoid the violence of settler-colonialism. This response has meant the exclusion of queer Native peoples and has not allowed either Native peoples or Native studies to take sexuality seriously as an analytic of study. As an alternative to heteronormative and desexualized readings of representations of Native peoples in popular culture, I use sex positivity as a framework and explore queer possibilities for articulating Indigenous nationhood, sovereignty, and self-determination.

“Decolonization is Not a Metaphor” instead intensifies the difference formulated by Wolfe between (1) Blackness as “expansive”, “inherited” through the one-drop rule “by an expanding number of ‘black’ descendants”; and (2) Indigenous peoples “racialized” as “subtractive”: “Native Americans are constructed to become fewer in number and less Native, but never exactly white, over time” (Tuck and Yang :12; see also Wolfe :387). This subtractive logic is propelled, not surprisingly, by the priority of land: “Native American is a racialisation that portrays contemporary Indigenous generations to be less authentic, less Indigenous than every prior generation in order to ultimately phase out Indigenous claims to land and usher in settler claims to property” (Tuck and Yang :12). What might animate the anti-Black logics of the one-drop rule dissolves except in a synthetic analysis that would collapse both “the racializations of Indigenous people and Black people in the US settler colonial nation-state” as “geared to ensure the ascendancy of white settlers as the true and rightful owners and occupiers of the land” (Tuck and Yang :12), which is to say both Indigenous and Black peoples are structured by a common settler-colonial project, even as Black people (insofar as “the US government promised 40 acres of Indian land as reparations for plantation slavery” [Tuck and Yang :29]) are also figured as proto-settlers. The grounding “settler” concept frays further when considering that (1) the “Indian Removal Act” also rendered native peoples unwilling settlers by relocating them to already Indigenous populated territories (Smithers :117–128); (2) Indigenous peoples remain Indigenous when they move or are forcibly moved, because indigeneity expresses relationality, not possession (Blackwell et al. :127; Radcliffe ); (3) in Latin America, creolisation has, complexly, been referred to as an “indigenizing process” (Castellanos :777; Jackson :42–44); and (4) African indigeneity meant a unique intensification of structures of slavery on the African continent through settler colonialism (Kelley ). The last two points also serve to underscore the Anglo-centrism of Tuck and Yang’s argument, as Canada and the United States remain their point of departure for understanding of the relation between Blackness and Indigeneity, rather than the Western hemisphere as a whole.

We must remember that material change-making need not necessarily be dramatic, and the expectation of change as solely sudden and cataclysmic is unreasonable. Building a new and innovative Left should be a primary concern, but it is important to remain free from the constraints of Left sectarian dogma, cults of personality, and selfish jostling to be recognized as “movement leaders.” We can organize humbly and horizontally and resist the stratification of more easily destructible movements past, and we do not need leaders in any classical sense. While infighting and schisms that plagued movements of the past provide useful examples to avoid, past successes also need to be examined without romanticizing them. If our only purpose is to mimic the revolutionaries of previous generations rather than to improve upon their theory and methods, then we risk repeating their errors and reproducing their harms. Some may argue that the need for a more singular and centralized movement is rooted. But we have seen how mass movements have been splintered and destroyed by the state’s targeting and elimination of movement leaders. We have also seen (and continue to see) the elitism, community disconnect, and pandering to systems of power that come with individuals positioning and communicating themselves as movement leaders. Given the almost innate corruptibility of movement leadership in these ways, it is worth earnestly interrogating whether we need these conventional structures at all and, if so, how we could benefit from more horizontal and autonomous organizing.

Brown is one of who showed up to protest police violence against Black people in the United States following the deaths of , , and more. Protesters marched through U.S. cities and across the world. At times, U.S. police lobbed flash-bang grenades at protesters and . And many people — including some credentialed journalists — were arrested. This movement also comes in the middle of a — with — that . "I've had friends come to me, concerned about my showing up to a protest and saying, 'Imani, who's going to get you first, the cops or the COVID?'" said Brown, who, as a cancer survivor and a lesbian, has been participating in demonstrations for years. "There are many times in my life where I have protested for my rights, whether it be my right to get married or my right to exist as an African American in this country," she said. National attention may wane, camera crews and the larger crowds may fade, but some protesters are still staging rallies and marches in cities across the nation, from . to to How do these activists continue to fight for racial justice without burning out? In early June, Nearly 500 people responded, some of whom described how tough it can be to keep up the fight against racism, and the exhaustion that can come with it. "Sometimes you can have depression, and sometimes it's this very real feeling of hopelessness," said Cher Weixia, an associate professor of legal studies, social justice and human rights at the School of Integrative Studies at George Mason University. "All of this adds up together to a chronic phenomenon of activist burnout." When the scope of the fight feels overwhelming, Paul Gorski, an activist and researcher who studies activism burnout in North Carolina, said activists can feel "like a sellout" if they take a break. For some, this manifests in a fear that if they don't fight their hardest today, all of the work will have been for nothing. Keshia Crosby-Williams, a 38-year-old from Brooklyn, N.Y., noted that fear. "A lot of my anxiety comes from that, from all this effort, from so many people coming together, so many protests, so many conversations happening around the dinner table, [what] if at the end of all of this, nothing changes, nothing gets better," Crosby-Williams said. Activism burnout is particularly rife among Black racial justice activists, not only because they are fighting a centuries-old fight, but they're also experiencing something called racial battle fatigue, which Gorski says is the "cumulative impact of experiencing racism day to day."

The sex worker is a figure at once blessed and burdened with an excessive signifying power. Years after her appearance in Marx’s Economic and Philo- sophical Manuscripts as both metaphor for and example of wage labor, she surfaces again in a footnote to Capital as le femme de leur, her feminized vulnerability a sign of the coercion of ownership and private property. At first, she is the inanimate (if also “very delicate”) commodity, but her chiasmatic transition into a subject also marks a key turn in the argument, as Marx ([1867] 1990: 178) moves from the commodity-object that cannot take itself to market (the dancing table) to the commodity-subject who can (the worker who must sell her own labor power).

In the opening of his highly influential essay “The Pedestal and the Veil: Rethinking the Capitalism/Slavery Question,” Walter Johnson (2004: 299) begins by asking, “What does it mean to say that a person has been commodified? Is this about slavery? Prostitution? Wage labor?” Johnson’s essay largely concerns the tension between the first and third of those possibilities: between a historical claim that capitalist wage labor replaces slave labor and a more rhetorical claim that slavery persists under capital as “wage slavery.” Johnson argues that this “metaphorical promiscuity” (306) allows Marx to imply that slavery is both the opposite of wage labor and a metaphor for it. But what of Johnson’s brief invocation of the prostitute, who also appears both as commodity object and as commodity subject in Marx’s account? While there is no doubt that the history of slavery and the discourse of the slave’s unfreedom are more central to Capital (and to capital), we suggest that the sex worker also does “promiscuous” work across political economy. Like the figure of the slave, the sex worker appears both as the other of the wage worker (because she is a mere commodity object rather than vivified labor power) and as wage work’s violent generalization (as when to prostitute becomes a metaphor for selling one’s abilities or capacities). Whereas the figure of the slave constructs and deconstructs the distinction between freedom and unfreedom, the sex worker complicates the difference between productive and nonproductive work. In this sense, understanding the rhetorical work done by the figure of the sex worker is crucial both to understanding and to resisting what Moishe Postone (1993: 17) terms a “productivist” ideology—one which would “affirm [wage] labor and industrial production” instead of seeking to abolish them.

Being cannot be anything but being-with-one-another, circulating in the with and as the with of this singularly plural coexistence.” So rather than the coercive “we” that dominated the communist parties of historical communism, we became a “we” in difference from itself, gathered together in the wake of your death. I’ll be honest, I was kind of devastated. After your death I spent a lot of time trying to find you in the places you used to hide and especially the songs you used to listen to. The first thing I put on was the Germs (you loved Darby Crash) but that didn’t last long. I never shared your attachment to punk. Being manifestly uncool, my relationship to punk was pretty much Siouxsie Sioux, to whom I cathected around the age of twelve. There was something about her rejection of the domestic, suburban, and normal that made sense to teenage me—a queer black, brown, and blue boy adrift and alone in Northern Colorado. I don’t think you had strong feelings for Siouxsie one way or the other, but there is more than a passing resemblance between my teenage attachment to Siouxsie and yours to Crash. Both began as bad objects in their scenes: Crash in Los Angeles and Siouxsie in London. They were unlikely figures for two queer of color kids to identify with, least of all because both attempted (and failed) to appropriate (ironically or otherwise) the symbols of white supremacy by employing the swastika in their early acts. The swastika was something Siouxsie tried to atone for and that Crash refused to atone for and didn’t have time to do anyway because he, like you, died too young. Siouxsies name was itself an appropriation of the tribal name of the Sioux people, another chapter in the ongoing dispossession of the already dispossessed. We shouldn’t forget these transgressions, their unnerving entanglements with the violence of whiteness and white supremacy, but something about them nonetheless helped us sustain life in spite of the odds stacked against us. And the odds are stacked against queer teenagers of color in these United States. Darby’s and Siouxsie’s performances became the stage for what you described as the punk rock commons, “a being with, in which various disaffected, antisocial actants found networks of affiliation and belonging that allowed them to think and act otherwise, together, in a social field that was mostly interested in dismantling their desire for different relations within the social.’” In this punk essay, you cited Tavia Nyong’o, who argues that the word “punk” owes a debt to blackness, queerness, and the violent measures through which a phobic world responds to both. Siouxsie acknowledged a part of that debt when describing the queerness of the parties that gave birth to Londons early punk scene: It was a club for misfits, almost. Anyone that didn’t conform. There was male gays, female gays, bisexuals, non-sexuals, everything. No-one was criticized for their sexual preferences. The only thing that was looked down on was being plain boring, that reminded them of suburbia. Notice here how Siouxsie’s party resonates with the one described by Moten: “This is the party of the ones who are not self-possessed, the non-self-possessive anindividuals. This is the party of the ones in whom the trace of having been possessed keeps turning into this obsessive compulsive drive for the total disorder that is continually given in continually giving themselves away.” Which is a way of saying that our party owes a debt to the black radical tradition as much as to the radical tradition of black and brown queer house parties on Chicago s South and West sides. Unlike Crash, Siouxsie survived the early 1980s and with her survival came the emergence of a new sound characterized by thick, textured melodies, lush orchestration, and heavily processed vocals. Some people described it as post-punk and others described it as goth, but everyone seemed to agree that it lingered in the darkness—perhaps an unacknowledged way of acknowledging her debt to blackness. Like blackness, Siouxsie’s darkness wasn’t merely negative space. Her dark­ ness was from the underside, the B-Side, the upside-down world of the normative, retrenched, dystopian, suburban, white, neoliberal hell that took hold in Thatcher’s Britain and Reagan’s United States. Siouxsie’s darkness was a pharmakon to the annihilating “light” cast by the shining city on the hill. It was dense, dark negation as the negation of the negation. Darkness, for the members of Siouxsie’s party, was a place where [we] could gather, take cover, and keep each other alive as the “light” tried to burn them out of their holes and snuff them out of existence. If their party was increasingly imperiled by the normative regimes of social comportment demanded by Thatcher and Reagan, the 1986 song “Party’s Fall” tells the story of the breakdown and falling apart as a condition of possibility. In the song, the collapse of each party becomes the condition for the emergence of something new the next night: “Your parties fall around you Another night beckons to you Your parties fall around you Another night beckons to you” That the party falls apart only to come back another night is why, following Moten, “the party I’m announcing is serially announced.” In “Party’s Fall” the present is always returning to itself, as Siouxsie points us toward a future in which the very thing that has fallen apart (the party) reconstitutes itself. Which is a good thing, it turns out, because the party is the one thing standing between the subject of her address and annihilating loneliness. About a year after your death, a friend and I are talking about you in a bar. He looks at his drink and says, “I used to be alone. And then I met him and I wasn’t alone. Now he’s gone and I’m alone again.” The party is a way of ameliorating loneliness, and the endlessly renewable capacity to throw another party becomes Siouxsie’s condition for a practice of being with in which the misfit’s loneliness becomes the conditions for a relation of being together in difference and discord with other misfits that are lonely and (un)like her. I suspect that this is why we threw so many parties after you died. They were a way of bringing you back to us, of making us a little less alone again. Ours was not a political party, like The Communist Party. Political parties endure, but they often endure through coercion, violence, and force. Instead, I mean our communist party as a name for what Siouxsie describes as the endlessly renewable chain of events performed into being by a plurality of broken people who are trying to keep each other alive. For you. Crash’s performances were an antidote to (but not a denial of) loneliness. Loneliness is common, and it is often crushing for queers and trans people of color. But it can also be a condition for the emergence of queer sociality and the undercommons. While it would be easy to assume that your punk essays are about the white boys in them (Crash in particular), it would be more accurate to say that they are about the work to which queers of color put these performances while struggling to stay alive, get free, and open up other ways of being (and surviving) in the world together. “Through my deep friendships with other disaffected Cuban queer teens who rejected both Cuban exile culture and local mainstream gringo popular culture,” you wrote in Cruising Utopia, “and through what I call the utopia critique function of punk rock, I was able to imagine a time and a place that was not yet there, a place where I tried to live.”” Today, we place an emphasis on “tried.” Near the end of Siouxsie’s song, she utters the phrase “maybe you’re alone,” breathlessly as if it were an aside. But this is the kind of aside that matters so she repeats it again, supporting the voice with the fullness of a wail. As she sings this bridge to nowhere, you would have noticed that the lyrics reach melodic resolution, which has been otherwise absent in a song that lingers in the minor key. Siouxsies wail stretches across the lyric, her voice breaking on the word happiness : My happiness depends on knowing / this friend is never alone / on your own.” I can’t help but imagine that as she begs her friend not to cry, applying her signature wail to the lyric and promising “a party on our own,” that she’s singing to a much younger version of you or me or some other teenage queer and trans black and brown boy and girl perched on the precipice of self-obliteration. Her wanting for a commons (to be with and take care of a friend in need) is Siouxsie’s precondition for a life in happiness. It was yours as well. If I follow you, Siouxsie, and Moten in suggesting that the party has some kind of relationship to the making of the (under)commons, I am also following Nancy when he writes that it is death that gives birth to community. After all, our communist party was formed in the wake of your death. “It is death—but if one is permitted to say so it is not a tragic death, or else, if it is more accurate to say it this way, it is not mythic death, or death followed by a resurrection, or the death that plunges into a pure abyss; it is death as sharing and as exposure,” he writes, “it is death as the unworking that unites us.” Our party was born from your death. So in the wake of your death we threw parties to resurrect you. Though yours was a death without resurrection, performance and parties were a way of sustaining you, bringing you back, and keeping you alive. Your death was tragic, brutal in its suddenness. But in spite of what people might think, there was nothing mythic about it. It was mundane. You were another gay brown man dead before fifty. To say that queer and trans of color death is mundane is not to diminish their horror, but on the contrary to name the shocking fact of this kind of deaths everydayness. Trans and queer of color life is lived in constant and close proximity to death. “In any major North American city,” writes Rinaldo Walcott, the numerous missing black women (presumed murdered), the many ‘missing’ and murdered trans-women, the violent verbal and physical conditions of black life often leading to the deaths of gay men, lesbian women, and trans people remain a significant component of how black life is lived in the constant intimacy of violence on the road to death. Death is not ahead of blackness as a future shared with others; death is our life, lived in the present.” For similar reasons Christina Sharpe describes black life thus: "I want... to declare that we are Black peoples in the wake with no state or nation to protect us, with no citizenship bound to be respected, and to position us in the modalities of Black life lived in, as, under, despite Black death.” If I think of your death in relation to the forms of black life and death named by Walcott and Sharpe, it is not to suggest that they are commensurable. This would distract us from the way the history of black death in the Americas from the Middle Passage forward produces a present in which, as Walcott insists, “Black people die differently.” But what I could see clearly in the wake of your departure is that black and brown queer and trans death, like the deaths of women of color, produced by different yet overlapping histories of colonialism, capital accumulation, white supremacy, and cis-heteropatriarchy, share something with each other not in spite of but because of their difference. I want to suggest that black and brown people’s emancipation from these conditions are mutually implicated, not in spite of but in relation to our incommensurability. What we share is that under such conditions, which are far beyond our ability to control them, survival can be hard. So, if I call your death mundane, it’s not to underplay the importance of your life. It’s only meant to serve as a bitter acknowledgment of the ubiquitous and disproportionate distribution of death toward queers, women, and trans people of color. Dying for different reasons, often dying before really living, but dying nonetheless. It can be as hard to survive as it is to live on in the wake of those who didn’t. But you taught me that performance is imbued with a weak power of resurrection, or at least the power to sustain some fragment of lost life in the presence of a collective present. Performance, you wrote, is what allows minoritarian subjects to “take our dead with us to the various battles we must wage in their names—and in our names. And performance is also a way of drawing people together. Throwing parties was a way of resurrecting you and keeping you alive. Being with each other was a way of being with you. In the wake of your death we became common to each other. We became communists.

Histories of biopower deeply affected Native people’s relationship to the body and to sexuality. Being surrounded by discourses of death, annihilation, and conquest, embedded in almost every popular image of Native peoples, negatively affects Native peoples’ self-esteem, contributing to numerous personal and collective challenges. Most images of Native peoples produced by popular culture are of Pocahontas or Sacajawea. Typically, these Native women are placed within narratives that would have them betraying their race and sacrificing themselves and Native lands for their love of white men. Looking at repetitive images of Native bodies ripped apart physically, mentally, spiritually and sexually by settler colonialism reminds Native peoples that the inevitable expectation for them is death. How can Native peoples feel good about their bodies and sexuality when these are the dominant images and historical facts of their lives? Conquest requires learning a new set of rules for intimacy. Despite these negative images, Native peoples continue to survive and feel sexual desire.

Natives, and lots of other folks, like sex but are terrified to discuss it. For many tribes, this shame around sex started in the boarding schools, and sexual shame has been passed down for generations. Native communities have adapted silence around sexuality to survive the imposition of colonialism in the United States. While the silence around sex and sexualities in Native communities is in some respects similar to that found in mainstream U.S. society, this attitude of silence has dire consequences for Native peoples, because of the relationship of sexuality to colonial power. Colonialism constitutes biopolitics, which marks the Native for death because of the biological and political threat they pose to the U.S. nation-state. Biopolitical logics are advanced through sexualization, racialization, and the gendering of colonial and non-colonial subjects. Sexuality is difficult terrain to approach in Native communities, since it brings up many ugly realities and colonial legacies of sexual violence. As Andrea Smith argues, sexual violence is both an ideological and a physical tool of U.S. colonialism. Because of this reality, there is a high rate of sexual abuse in Native communities. Non-Native pedophiles target children in Native nations because there is little chance of perpetrators being brought to justice or caught by tribal police, since non-Natives on tribal lands are not bound to the same laws as Natives. Historically, and arguably in the present, Native women have been targeted for medical sterilizations. In some Native nations, tribal councils have adapted heterosexist marriage acts into their tribal constitutions. All of this proves that the hyper-sexualization and dehumanization of Native peoples negatively affects Native communities. The response to these horrific crimes has often been silence both by the victims and Native communities as a whole. Native nations have also made laws concerning sexual abuse and rape, so conversations regarding inappropriate behavior of sexual expression do occur in Native nations. The problem is that conversations about safe and fun sex rarely happen because conversations about sex usually only focus on what sexual behaviors are wrong and bad. Sexuality cannot be repressed because it is everywhere. Yet the relationship between colonial power and normative discourses of sexualities is not a part of these dialogues. Heterosexism and the structure of the nuclear family need to be thought of as a colonial system of violence.

But you see, I’m really just trying to change the halls of Congress, that meets on the Capitol Hill of debate tournament tab rooms where pieces of legislation or ballots signed by judges enact the policies of our community. My words right here, right now can’t 113 change the State, but they can change the state of debate. The University of Louisville enacts a full withdrawal from the traditional norms and procedures of this debate activity. Because this institution, like every other institution in society, has also grown from the roots of racism. Seemingly neutral practices and policies have exclusionary effects on different groups for different reasons. These practices have a long and perpetuating history.108 Signifyin’ on institutional symbols of American democracy, Jones’ draws attention to the parallels in power structures between the federal government and the decision-making arms of the debate community. The “halls of Congress” represent the halls of debate tournaments. “Capitol Hill” where the laws of this country are enacted is a metaphor for debate tournament tabrooms where wins and losses are catalogued. Tournament ballots metaphorically represent the signing of the judges ballot at the conclusion of debates. In facts, debaters often argue that the “impacts” they identify or the solvency for their plan happens “once the judge signs the ballot,” as if assigning a winner or loser actually results in the passage of a policy. Jones argues that it is the ballot that is the most significant tool in influencing the practices and procedures of the community. In other words, the competitive nature of debate guarantees that teams and coaches remain responsive to trends amongst the judging pool. Ultimately, debate competition is a run to capture or win the judges ballot. That the ballot “enacts” the “policies” of the debate “community,” makes the space of competition a critical arena from which to attempt community change. Up until this point, the policy debate community had dealt with issues of diversity and inclusion outside of tournament competition. Directors, coaches, assistants, and debaters may have engaged in outreach and recruitment practices designed to diversify the debate community, but discussions and support for such actions were not generated from debate tournament competition. Those discussions occurred in collaborative versus competitive settings where stakeholders were encouraged to dialogue without concern for winners or losers. For example, OSI (the original non-profit arm of the UDL) sponsored Ideafests to bring stakeholders in the debate community together to discuss the national expansion of the UDL. Thus, Green’s following argument during tournament competition directly violates the traditional practice of discussing issues of diversity and inclusion in the community, outside of competitive debate rounds: Racism is one of the leading exports of the United States Federal Government and it exploits it on to other countries. It doesn’t acknowledge its problems at home and the debate community replicates those values by playing in this fantasy world that we cannot change. By sitting silent, by not acknowledging, or addressing the problems within this community. It is easy for us to say that there are problems racism and sexism but the problem comes when we recognize those systemic issues and do nothing to change our methods of how we challenge those problems.109 Green is holding the debate community accountable for its failure in significantly increasing diversity and inclusion. They hold teams accountable for their methodological choices in debate participation forcing other teams and judges to consider whether or not the traditional or normative ways of engaging in competition result in an activity and environment hostile to those debate bodies marked by difference.