4:37am July 10, 2014

Comparing oppressions in mental institutions.

They told me I was a useless waste of space. They told me directly and they told me indirectly. They told me every day that my spot in their precious mental institution could be better used on someone who would actually get better. Sometimes this implied I was too badly damaged to ever get better. Sometimes this implied that I could get better if I only wanted to enough. Always, they found ways of separating me out from the other inmates. Like putting me and another girl on an empty children’s ward together. Or putting me in the quiet room every day on the flimsiest of excuses. Or finding me a self-contained room where I never had to leave and other patients didn’t have to know I existed.

Why am I telling you this? Because it’s 4:15 in the morning, I feel really sick, and it’s the only thing my fingers will write about. I’m not telling you the worst or anything. Just cataloguing some facts.

Thought: My roommate was a rape survivor who compared forced drugging to rape. If she has made it out, if she was on tumblr right now, I am certain she would be dogpiled by a bunch of angry people who told her not to compare oppressions that way.

In the institutions, when we did manage to connect with each other, we spent all our time comparing oppressions that way. We talked about what it was like to be poor, what it was like to be a person of color, what it was like to be female, what it was like to be trans, what it was like to be LGB, and of course what it was like to be crazy, and we didn’t have any topics where anyone said “Sorry, you shouldn’t compare oppressions like that.” Because of this, we actually stood a chance of finding common ground despite what were often huge differences in our experiences and background. And when we did find common ground, we used it, to the dismay of staff, who would have rather we kept ourselves separate from each other.

It was staff who would have loved if we had adopted the idea that you can’t compare two kinds of oppression because they’re just too different. Staff loved anything that drove inmates apart, that kept us from identifying with each other, that kept us from building up any level of solidarity.

That should tell you a lot.

It’s not that I don’t understand where “don’t compare oppressions, they’re not all alike” comes from. It’s just that I look at its consequences. And then I look at the consequences of comparing oppressions and sometimes getting it wrong but often getting it right. And the consequences of comparing oppressions, even getting it wrong sometimes, are far better than the consequences of refusing to even try because you could get it wrong.

Because being in a mental institution, what they do, is they try to separate you any way they can. They try to make it so that you never identify with each other. They try to make it so that you can be in this big dayroom full of people, and yet feel totally alone and isolated.

And anything that shifts that isolation, shifts the balance of power.

So comparing oppressions? Shifts that isolation. Even if having people pull down your pants and shoot Thorazine in your ass isn’t exactly like rape, people making the comparison are doing something very powerful, especially in a place where this is happening to people day in and day out. Especially in a place where many of the people making the comparison are rape or sexual assault survivors themselves, as is often the case in mental institutions.

In that case, the comparison led to a girl actually trying to pull staff off of someone else who was being restrained. Which had never happened before on that ward, not that anyone could remember. The whole place went on lockdown after that.

Anyway, don’t be afraid to compare oppressions. You’ll get things wrong. But you’ll get things right. Just be careful. Don’t assume you know everything. But don’t assume you know nothing either. There were kids in that ward aged 10 to 18, and comparing oppressions got us further than I’ve seen many adults get who merely tiptoe around the issue to avoid offending anyone.