“Access Means It’s Not For You” Utopias of Inclusion and Exclusion Harry Josephine Giles

1. “Access Means It’s Not For You”Utopias of Inclusion and Exclusion Harry Josephine Giles

2. Writer and performer in poetry, theatre and games PhD: “Minority languages and speculative poetics” Speaking more as practitioner than researcher Activist affinities: environmental direct action, antifascism, no borders, trans health Will cover Accessibility policies Disability in the arts Safe spaces conflicts A politics of exclusion Where I’m coming from

3. Access Liberalism

4. https://www.strath.ac.uk/media/ps/cs/gmap/academicaffairs/policies/Strathclyde_Disability_Policy_Final_March_2014.pdfhttps://www.strath.ac.uk/media/ps/cs/gmap/academicaffairs/policies/Strathclyde_Disability_Policy_Final_March_2014.pdf • “Full participation in the university experience” • For whom? And what experience? • “Where reasonably practicable”, “an experience comparable” • Reasonable and comparable are pliable non-specifics • Makes half-visible the contradiction of liberalism: both “full participation” and an admission that that’s impossible • Is a non-performative statement, defining what it won’t do

5. https://www.open.ac.uk/students/charter/sites/www.open.ac.uk.students.charter/files/files/student-accessibility-policy.pdfhttps://www.open.ac.uk/students/charter/sites/www.open.ac.uk.students.charter/files/files/student-accessibility-policy.pdf • Some of the problems are better unpacked here • All, all, all: what happens when “all” meets the limits of what Higher Education is? And what happens when the University meets the limits of society? • Juridical and managerial in orientation: policies and strategies

6. "A system of compulsory able-bodiedness repeatedly demands that people with disabilities embody for others an affirmative answer to the unspoken question, "Yes, but in the end, wouldn't you rather be like me?" (Robert McRuer, Crip Theory, p9) • Ideologies of "accessibility" maintain an abled view of the world: what is required is allowing groups of people access to what already exists, within reason, and managed by appropriate institution, rather than processes of transformation • What would education centred on disability look like?

7. "For the ideal of toleration we have inherited embodies two incompatible philosophies. Viewed from one side, liberal toleration is the ideal of a rational consensus on the best way of life. From the other, it is the belief that human beings can flourish in many ways of life." (John Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism) • A definition of liberalism accepted by many positions • Right: requires a recentreing of specific principles • Centre: justification for intervention & limits on liberality • Left: critique requiring an upending of the state • What happens when liberalism meets its limit? • Deny, exclude, accept, adapt, assimilate

8. "[Late liberalism] make[s] a space for culture to care for difference without disturbing key ways of configuring experience – ordinary habitual truths" (Elizabeth Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment, p26) • Accessibility tolerates enough disability to maintain the habitual truth of abledness (“compulsory able-bodiedness”) • Accessibility policies are non-performative utopias of inclusion: a happy no-place where everyone gets the experience that everyone should have, the imagination of which hides everyone who’s not there and the experience that could be

9. Disabled Presenting in Artspace

11. Anatomy: a multi-artform cabaret • “Anatomy believes that art is better the more different the people are who are making it. We want to highlight the work of marginalised groups, and artists who frequently face oppression” • BSL at all events, 5-10% D/deaf audience • Aesthetic presenting of alterity • ...but look at those music stands

12. Accept no art that isn’t D/deaf-accessible? That doesn’t have a D/deaf-accessible component? • Adapt all art to be D/deaf-accessible? • Include art that isn’t Hearing-accessible? • And what about e.g. a blind audience? Incorporate audio description into all acts? • Proper integration of interpretation requires complete aesthetic overhaul and resourcing • Where are the stairs in every theatre? What curb-cutting does art need?

13. Chill Out Corner

14. Communication Badges

15. “Being professionally social (or socially professional) is a form of advantage in the art world. But equally, many artists are reclusive, shy, awkward, anxious, uncertain, or neurodiverse. How can the art world provide social space to many different kinds of people, together?” • Uses autism-centred design to create alternate social space alongside and abrading against neurotypical sociality • Communication badges: a requirement that all attending, autistic or not, make clear their communication preferences, and that these boundaries are respected

16. Centreing design on one minority population shifts the possibilities for all populations and exposes the compulsory able-bodiedness of the received space • All spaces are already exclusive, so we can make conscious design choices about what and who is excluded • When you exclude particular people, behaviours and norms, other people, behaviours and norms can emerge • What different possibilities are presented by “disability arts” and “disabled presenting in the arts”?

17. Unsafer Spaces

18. Origins in “transformative justice” movements, led by North American women of colour (e.g. “Colour of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology”, 2006) Disseminates from there through various anti-authoritarian activist movements (e.g. “The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities, 2011) “Safer spaces policies” begin to become commonplace in student movements and youth-aligned arts events: note shift from the processual to the juridical Become a reactionary trigger A Partial History of Safer Spaces

19. http://thequeermafia.com/events/safer-spaces-policy/ • Names the problem, names the politics, is process-oriented • Excludes behaviours, talks about who is centred

20. https://playbyplay.co.nz/safe-space-policy/ • Focussed on one type of problem only • Shorn of politics • More a signal than a process

21. https://www.thestudentsunion.co.uk/pageassets/union/constitution/Safer-Spaces-Policy.pdfhttps://www.thestudentsunion.co.uk/pageassets/union/constitution/Safer-Spaces-Policy.pdf • “All” is back: who is everyone? • Notice also the pliable “boundaries” • Juridical in orientation

22. “Such speech acts do not do what they say: they do not commit a person, organisation or state to an action. My argument is simple: they are non-performatives. [...] For Austin, a performative refers to a particular class of speech. An utterance is performative when it does what it says: 'the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action' [...] I want to suggest that non-performative speech acts work by not bringing about the effects that they name. [...] In my model of the non-performative, the failure of the speech act to do what it says is not a failure of intent or even circumstance, but is actually what the speech act is doing. Such speech acts work as if they bring about what they name. Or to be more precise, such speech acts are taken up as if they are performatives (as if they have brought about the effects that they name), which has its own effects.” Sara Ahmed, ‘The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism’, 2005 Performative or Non-performative?

23. Whether or not any given safer spaces policy is non-performative depends on conditions not legibile in the text: people, processes, expectations. A space is always a contest of powers. The policy acts as a performative (virtue?) signal that starts the process of making a safe space, but if left as merely a policy it is clearly non-performative: what happens when something goes wrong? Non-performative Safety

24. Hyperliberal Safety “For liberals the recent transformation of universities into institutions devoted to the eradication of thought crime must seem paradoxical. [...] It would be easy to say that liberalism has now been abandoned. Practices of toleration that used to be seen as essential to freedom are being deconstructed and dismissed as structures of repression, and any ideas or beliefs that stand in the way of this process banned from public discourse. Judged by old-fashioned standards, this is the opposite of what liberals have stood for. But what has happened in higher education is not that liberalism has been supplanted by some other ruling philosophy. Instead, a hyper-liberal ideology has developed that aims to purge society of any trace of other views of the world.” John Gray, ‘The problems of hyperliberalism’, 2018

25. Gray’s liberal frame conditions him to interpet “safe spaces” as a (hyper)liberal problem His analysis (and the conservative reaction in general) exposes the transition of “safe spaces” from radical to liberal and the contradictons therein, and also the uncomfortably porous boundary between radical and liberal The radical demand of safe spaces (making space unsafe for oppression) is masked in a liberal policy of inclusion: has it become the mask, or has it been smuggled in beneath? Hyperliberal Safety

26. Trans Protocols

27. Let me tell you about my operation • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ2_2BFaf8chttps://soundcloud.com/onefromthevaultspodcast • Rae Bourbon: “Her life story has been so embellished, not least of which by herself, that telling fact from fantasy is now impossible. A Broadway actress, singer, convicted murderer, novelist and all round entertainer, this person may or may not have been trans.” • “Of course I won’t tell you all of my secretsJust enough to let you find a hint inBut I can do more in a gown by DiorThan I can in a suit by Jim Clinton”

28. What’s he building in there?We have a right to know... • Trans life depends on multiple moments of disclosure and non-disclosure • Do you tell a potential partner or not?Silence = Death vs Silence = Sex • Trans autobiography as stripteaseor trans art as concealment • Replayed on Twitter and in Time Magazine:“Let’s go round in a circle and say our pronouns” • How do you get information to people who need itwithout damaging our access to services?

29. Iqhiya: The Plenary

30. South African black women’s art nework Opening night of GI exhibition: dinner for women and non-binary artists of colour, publicly declared, remnants visible in the exhibition Showing in public that the conversation happened, refusing the public access to all the conversation entails Iqhiya: The Plenary

31. Cultural Protocol as Infosec • What life is made possible by excluding access to information and participation? • The ceremony may not be recorded, the dinner may not be attended, the meeting may not be declared: you know it’s happening, but you don’t know what’s happening • Information doesn’t want to be free: against the total global commons as a universalising liberal project of borderless capitalism • Defining our own borders and boundaries to destroy the state’s borders and boundaries: anti-utopian idealism