Circles of Fire

"The mosh pit is ableist. It is a playing field for able bodied persons to demonstrate their able-bodiedness. It’s incredibly intimidating for a differently-abled person to go into them because they are instantly visibly otherized by the fact that they do not function in the same way as an able-bodied person does. This is relevant for as the original poster notes - mosh pits are heavily worshipped in the punk scene. They are its symbol. What does it say about a scene if its symbol isolates those with different abilities? Especially when these shows take places that are inaccessible to those with wheelchairs or other mobility devices? That it’s for able bodied people, meaning that it’s ableist."

vesuvii (via fragmentsofstuff)

[CirclesofFire says:] It’s worth flowing back through the commentary and reading some more of what this quote is a response to, where the dialogue falls apart, where people’s investments and prejudices begin to show, where we fail and #fail and so on. When I first read this paragraph, I found it deeply challenging, and I want to take a few minutes to unpack why I found it so challenging.

I work hard, as a person with several axes of dominant privilege to work with (cis-bodied, white-passing, currently able-bodied, and thin, among other gradations of privilege), to sit with how challenging it is to be called out and named as oppressive. That’s a practice for me, because I think it’s critically important for folks with privilege to stay/get aware of how our privilege is playing out. And similarly, it’s crucial to sit with how it hurts to hear something important to me named as oppressive — and, to be clear, it’s okay that it hurts. I still want to hear it. I still want to think about it. I also want to clarify that this specific thing that we’re talking about — moshing — was only ever peripherally in my life, and so the first thing I’d want to hear in this discussion is more voices from disabled and able-bodied punks about how they relate to the physicality of the scene, and how different radical punk spaces have taken on the problem. With all that said, I want to offer that while punk, moshing, head-banging, and riotgrrl only peripherally touched my teenage life, it left a deep impression. Weigh my words as you will. Punk joined the physical with the musical with oblivion for me. It was among the first consciousness-altering experiences this straight-edge kid ever had — and, for me, moshing and head-banging were about breaking out of the conventional, normative “good little girl” body I had. It was sharp-edged music, music that hurt the way I hurt, and screamed the way I wanted to scream. It made room for me. The physicality of how I thought people engaged with punk was part of my love for it. 

But just because I found punk music’s influence in my life liberating, I want to take seriously the ways that the fucked up shit in the scene shut other people down. I take seriously the urgency of imagining a world where people’s bodies in their multitude are understood, celebrated, and welcomed, and I wonder about the place of moshing in that world. I do not believe that the answer is a world without moshing. Nor can I really get on board with the idea that moshing is symbolically, inherently, fundamentally and irrevocably ableist, and that the answer to that ableism is to eradicate the activity or summarily judge an entire scene of people. I tend to be suspicious of that line of reasoning, because similar logic has been lobbed at me as a kinky dyke who fucks and plays with people of lots of genders that I am enacting misogyny and sexism, and that my identities and activities are inherently oppressive and violent. My intention here isn’t to muddy the waters with this corollary, or to get into a pissing contest about oppression — but rather to take a step back and name my concern and experience with the line of reasoning that names specific activities as fundamentally oppressive, and hence should be purged. I think it gets us nowhere fast.

I think a lot about how my commitment to and experience with kink culture and my understanding of harm reduction inform my analysis of problems like the accessibility of mosh pits. I just read this analysis of moshing, and the thing that sticks with me most about it is the questioning around why moshing has to be centralized in the scene. Does moshing have to take up space right in front of the stage? Could it be put to the side? Could it be fenced in to create more accessible space? Are there other ways to access the effects and experience of moshing? What are the demands and desires of disabled folks for punk shows? How can we take those demands and desires seriously - to name where we fail, when we fail, and not just sweep it under the rug? My experience of grappling with that comes from contemplating accessibility for kink spaces, where so many of the venues are grossly inaccessible — and out of scarcity and fear, a lot of folks insist that’s just the way it has to be. I don’t have answers besides that it will require a shit ton of work and compromise to get anywhere, and that the questions are absolutely worth asking and the work is worth doing. There is so much in punk (and kink, and other “edgy” scenes) that is glorious and worth fighting for — and there’s a lot that’s fucked up, too. That doesn’t mean it needs to be shut down, but it does mean we have to grapple with all of these questions, and more. 

(Source: disabilityrightsstuff, via tgstonebutch)