Fluid Frames

I have chosen a method of writing that allows me the openness and momentariness and changeability that I need in order to think "newly". Thinking "newly" means seeing what was not evident or seeable before, seeing what was formerly unknown, seeing what might happen next. So thoughts meander as they need to and should; are concluded and then reappear; are exposed and then become shadows and whispers. My mind's wanderings and meanderings began early on when Barack Obama declared his candidacy for president of the United States. I wondered if there was a formerly unknowable kind of politics emerging: a new set of political possibilities to discover and find. And my wondering continues to this day.

As such, this book is random and unpredictable, but only in the way that life itself is so. The way one person survives the massacre in Mumbai, and another dies. The way one sister is born with a genetic mutation, and another is not. Often it is simple curiosity that leads me one place rather than another. I sometimes write in diary form in order to expose the variability of my thinking. Instead of creating an enforced coherence, I show the back and forth of my political thoughts as they emerge. The story narrated here has no clarifying beginning because each present moment is already connected to previous histories and realignments. My earlier books also map the journey I have taken to establish the many ongoing dialogues found in these next pages.

The inside story of this book — an unconventional storytelling of the 2008 US presidential election — has just begun. The outside story — written with added context of the economic and military crises of the globe — unfolds daily. Media-ted election noise drowns out the complexities and multi-vocal viewpoints of both inside and outside, often creating a global monologue, rather than the needed multiple dialogues.

I describe leafleting in the north side of Philadelphia, in predominantly black and poor neighborhoods during the primaries, and I end in Liberty City, Florida, helping to get out the early vote the week before the election. I share ongoing discussions with friends and colleagues in the US who speak with their various identities — Pakistani, Iranian, Ghanaian and so on — and with friends and activists on my visits to South Africa, Spain, France and Sweden. While interrogating the anti-Islamic narrations at home and abroad, I ask people in the US to listen to Chinua Achebe's guidance. Gay marriage, gender bending, Turkish and Iranian feminisms, new notions of the secular/ religious divide, the Chinese Olympics, and the global economic crash, are threaded and webbed together in idiosyncratic fashion.

I reconfigure and reframe the complex engendered and racialized historical trajectory of Obama's victory. The 25 different frames, or chapters, presented here form an unlikely porous grid through which to examine the economic excesses of capitalism at present while the price of oil ebbs and flows, and the price of food skyrockets across the globe. Each frame seeks to expose the particular way that sex, race and class interweave with and without regard to nation.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world watched the US 2008 election thinking they should have a right to vote given that they will live by the new rules, or lack of them, that the next administration puts in play. But the election is part of the embedded systems of power and cannot be understood without its global context, as nations and their "patriotism" pretend they are self-contained within their own borders.

A key thematic of this book is that sex, heteronormative gender, and race — specifically its white privilege — in their specific class definition are historically routed/rooted constructs and are more fluid than they are static. There are cross-cultural vectors of contact that both statically encrust and also reframe and change them. So politics and political possibility remain in flux with the shifting meanings and new constructions of race and gender. Because the racializing of gender and the engendering of race are in continual process it is not always easy or possible to know the truthfulness of these categories. It is why gender and race can pose in decoy fashion: a female body that does not believe in women's rights, or a black person who denies the significance of race. In this fashion, misogyny and white privilege are continually formulated through newly strange locations and configurations.

Global flows of labor are changing gender and racial constructions; the newest militarism of the US also does so. As these structural needs of power change, gender and with it its white privilege morphs. The 2008 primaries tell this story as it is written with and on the bodies of Hillary Clinton and Barack and Michelle Obama. New racial formations both subvert earlier forms, and reinscribe them with established heteronormative gendered meanings. Yet the newest constructions of race and gender and their class realignments also chart unknowable new trajectories.

The effects are hardly linear. Progressive possibilities emerge alongside possibilities that are incredibly anti-democratic. White privilege and gender are not static biological constructions, so they shift and change with class formations. Therefore, I am always looking for their newest formulations and intersections. As race and gender often expose their own malleability and fluidity they undermine the normalizing of biological gender and race. So it was pretty clear to many that Sarah Palin was being used as a decoy of sorts; one vagina is not necessarily exchangeable with another, even though Sarah was offered up as an alternative to Hillary.

Although gender and racial white privilege change they also are unchanging, or in part stagnant. These categories often reproduce themselves without a newly clear articulation and then frame our thoughts in outmoded ways. Patriarchy, misogyny, and their racialized forms...