Thurs 4/19

Every person probably has encountered some sort of “everyday form of resistance” that is not public to others. This idea of everyday resistance (ER) reminds me of the phrase, something on the line of: if a tree falls in the forest although you cannot hear it, does it mean that the event never happened? Back to the topic, if I do not know about others ER, does that mean the events are not significant, therefore invalid to me? Here’s the plot twist. What would happen if every person starts to capture their ER on live videos so their struggles can be public and therefore considered significant now? It is interesting to tie media into this topic of ER because it makes me question how POWER is not a fixed space solely for the elites, but it is slowly distributed to the public through the transparency of social media. Though, I cannot say that regular people today have power if they do not realize it themselves. Well, the revolution won’t be happening soon till we all educate ourselves first.

Throughout history, this type of resistance had negative connotations associated with peasantry, passivity, institutionally invisible, and quiet according to “historians.” On the positive perspective, I believe that there is some significance within the everyday resistance, but only to the oppressed and not others. So what? I most important thing a person need to possess is a sense of agency, to prove to just yourself and no others of how “rebellious” you are inside there, somewhere deep in your soul. It does not matter how great or massive the resistance is since I understand that the oppressed are derived from knowledge AKA “weapons.” Because of this, the oppressed throughout history could resist based on what they knew from experience or nothing at all (but can we blame them?).

As a sub-marginalized individual, I completely agree that taking in this view where ER as “margins of struggle, inauthentic or unrepresentative of the community’s interests, disregards diversity and conflict within groups and presumes only struggle that count take place through institution” (p. 99) I acknowledge that it is difficult to represent every single marginal group with a community. However, it is not a solution to keep a blind eye it either. To me, social justice movements will never accomplish real revolutions without acknowledging the issues within their own sub-marginalize groups. It is unfortunate that the cycle of oppression is constantly repeated.