The Dictionary of Radical Alternatives - User contributions [en]

Contribution:20260908031745

2026-09-08T03:20:53Z

67.230.50.8: Created page with "{{Contribution |contribution:type=New Concept |contribution:newconcept=Harm, Help and Heal |contribution:name=Taitu Heron |contribution:email=taheron@gmail.com }} HARM, HEL..."

{{Contribution
|contribution:type=New Concept
|contribution:newconcept=Harm, Help and Heal
|contribution:name=Taitu Heron
|contribution:email=taheron@gmail.com
}}

HARM, HELP, HEAL Category: Companion Concept · Origin: Jamaica, 2025 · English
Harm, help and heal are three ethical pillars for evaluating how a state treats the humanity of its citizens, based on the acknowledgement of women as human beings. The triad asks three questions of any law, policy or institution: what harm does it cause or facilitate, what help is it withholding, and what healing does it owe? The pillars are inseparable. Harm alone is diagnosis, help alone is service delivery, healing alone is therapy. Together they form a test. The framework was developed from the experience of Jamaican women navigating pregnancy under a criminal abortion law, and its evidence is their testimony rather than the assessments of those who make policy about them.

Harm is taken to mean someone or something, including state and non-state institutions, that causes or facilitates adverse health effects on the individual and affects their quality of life and how they experience being a citizen of a country. This harm may be physical, psychological, social, economic and/or emotional. Harm in a Jamaican environment (but not exclusively) is centuries old and multi-generational, with colonial patterns of behaviour, laws, institutions and political culture determining how people are treated and how women citizens have to navigate their relations with the state and its actors. Jamaica's abortion statute, enacted in 1864 as a reproductive intervention to secure a labour force after emancipation, remains in force and is shielded from constitutional challenge by a savings clause in the 2011 charter of rights. Naming this as harm rather than misfortune locates responsibility with the institutions that produce it.
Help is the act of facilitating a service or providing resources to alleviate someone's personal circumstances. Help is also the exercise of power through a nation's economic, cultural, social and political institutions for the benefit of the citizens. Any failure to exercise such power and resources leads to exclusion, poverty, frustration, violence and economic insecurity. Where a state knows that people will act regardless of prohibition, withholding help is not neutrality. It is a decision to let the harm continue, and its implicit message is that the humanity of those affected is irrelevant and that their suffering is punishment for disobedience.
Heal is a prolonged process that allows a woman or adolescent girl equitable and just access to state-supported health services and economic options that guarantee optimal health and longevity. To heal also means that a woman is capable of making decisions and personal changes to her life and behaviour, of seeking access to services that can assist her in restoring her emotional and psychological wellbeing, and of settling grievances or reconciling anger and resentment towards those who may have caused her harm or offered little support. The state has a role in healing by righting wrongs arising from state harm and making efforts at reconciliation with women harmed by law and state actors. Trauma that is not healed is repeated.
The third pillar is where the framework departs from conventional rights and public-health language. Harm reduction and service provision are already institutionally legible. An obligation to repair is not. Placing acknowledgement and reconciliation inside the evaluative frame moves the state from administrator to party, answerable for what it has done rather than only for what it now provides.

The triad emerged from reproductive rights but tests any exercise of state power over people's bodies and lives: policing, detention, institutional care, land dispossession, deportation, the treatment of migrants and of the poor. Its underlying claim is old and still contested in practice. People are human beings before they are cases, categories or subjects of law, and a state that cannot say what it has repaired has not finished answering for what it caused.

Source: Heron, Taitu. "Honouring the Humanity of Women: Considerations on Moving from Harm to Help and Healing Reproductive Health and Rights in Jamaica." In Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights of Women in Africa and the Caribbean, edited by Z. M. Olaitan et al., 325–346. African Histories and Modernities. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-96029-1_17

Contribution:20260908020921

2026-09-08T03:05:52Z

67.230.50.8: Created page with "{{Contribution |contribution:type=New Concept |contribution:newconcept=Fiminism |contribution:name=Taitu Heron |contribution:email=taheron@gmail.com }} FIMINISM / FIMINIST Cat..."

{{Contribution
|contribution:type=New Concept
|contribution:newconcept=Fiminism
|contribution:name=Taitu Heron
|contribution:email=taheron@gmail.com
}}
FIMINISM / FIMINIST Category: Companion Concept · Origin: Jamaica, 2023 · Jamaican Creole (Patwa) and English

Fiminism fuses the Jamaican Creole fi mi, meaning "for me" or "mine," with feminism. It names the condition in which feminism becomes something owned: a source of standing, authority, funding or advancement for the person or institution claiming it, held apart from the women in whose name it is claimed. Spoken aloud, the two words are almost indistinguishable, which is the argument in miniature. Fiminism is not the opposite of feminism but its near-double, and telling them apart requires looking at what changes materially for women who are not in the room.

The concept has a founding scene. At a community programme on domestic violence in Rockfort, Kingston, Jamaica, a security guard who was attending, packed food into containers for her children heard out an explanation of the gendered division of labour and answered: yu cya cari feminism gu supamaakit — you cannot carry feminism to the supermarket. She was not rejecting justice or refusing analysis. She was marking the distance between a feminism that could describe her life accurately and one that could reach it. Fiminism names what feminism becomes when that distance holds. It operates at two scales through a single mechanism. Institutionally, feminism enters organizations on the organization's terms. It must be sanitised into acceptable policy language, rendered measurable, made fundable and kept non-disruptive. A feminist methodology may be adopted while its authorship is erased, because the name is judged too contentious for approval. Programmes report participants trained and workshops held while shelter, legal representation, childcare, income and trauma support fall outside project scope. Survivors become institutionally legible through injury rather than recovery, because harm classifies more easily than healing. What survives translation is what institutions can approve, measure and be credited for.

Relationally, feminist authority attaches to credentials, rank, publication, donor recognition and international networks, and can be exercised over students, junior colleagues, community collaborators, clerical and ancillary staff while sisterhood is professed. Women who arrive expecting a safe space encounter belittlement, class contempt and the ordinary misuse of professional power, with colonial racial undertones intact. In both registers the pattern is the same: feminist legitimacy accrues upward and inward, while the conditions it names stay where they were. Fiminism, therefore, is feminism turned on itself.
Fiminism is not hypocrisy, insincerity, or an accusation that particular women are not real feminists, and it should not be used as one. Individuals reproduce it, but they do so inside systems that reward respectable, technical, fundable, non-disruptive and individually-led forms of feminism, and penalise the rest. Naming it is a structural claim, not a verdict on character. It draws on but is distinct from neoliberal feminism, governance feminism, NGOization, femocracy and corporate feminism. What it adds is its Creole grounding, its single word for a displacement that operates at both personal and institutional scale, and its measure: relational distance from the women feminism claims to serve. Its underlying question, which it leaves open, is whether a feminism rooted in Western epistemological foundations can travel into Caribbean and other melanated spaces without reproducing the hierarchies it opposes.
The concept is diagnostic and asks for a counterpart. Its corrective is dignity-centred practice: standards defined with those affected, evaluated by material change in safety, income, care, time and decision-making power, with organizations accountable for how they treat the least powerful people inside them. The task is not to abandon feminism but to build a transformative Caribbean feminist praxis that can be carried to the supermarket.

Source: Heron, Taitu A. "What Are We Fighting For? Navigating Feminist Paradoxes and the Search for Dignity in Gender Equality Work in the Caribbean." Keynote, Annual Lecture Series in Black Diaspora Studies, Departments of Africana Studies and Gender and Women's Studies, University of Rhode Island, 15 February 2023. Recording available via URI Panopto. https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4788913

Contribution:20260908020920

2026-09-08T02:44:53Z

67.230.50.8: Plantalogical politics names the survival of the slave plantation's organising logic in societies that have formally left it behind, a logic that allocates space by race and class and withholds full p

{{Contribution
|contribution:type=New Concept
|contribution:newconcept=Plantalogical Politics
|contribution:name=Taitu A Heron
|contribution:email=taheron@gmail.com
}}
PLANTALOGICAL POLITICS Category: Companion Concept · Origin: Jamaica, 2001 · English, with Jamaican Patwa
Plantalogical politics names the political condition of societies built by the slave plantation, in which the plantation's organising logic outlives the plantation itself. Formed from plantation and -logical, the term points not to a period or a place but to a logic: a way of ordering human life that distributes space by race and class and withholds personhood from the majority.

The Caribbean plantation was engineered for capitalist gain. It financed European development and served as the springboard of European modernity, which places it at the origin of the crisis this dictionary addresses. It was never only a unit of production but a total institution of social control, governing labour, movement, worship, sexuality, kinship and speech. Its central operation was the denial of what Rex Nettleford called space: the physical and existential room each person requires to exist as human in a common world. Charles Mills named the counter-movement smadditization, the long struggle of African diaspora peoples to be recognised as smaddy, somebody, a full member of the human family.
Where enslavement ends but its logic does not, politics remains a contest over space: who occupies it, who is deprived of it, who is authorised to allocate it. As the Jamaican proverb has it, two bull cyan rule tha one pen.
What distinguishes plantalogical politics from the wider vocabulary of colonial legacy is where it locates the inheritance: in law, and above all in the constitution. Constitutions written to secure planter and imperial interests were carried across the threshold of independence largely unaltered, preserving colonial statutes, shielding elite property and retaining the former monarch as head of state. Independence in such cases transferred administration to a local elite without dismantling the spatial order it inherited. Later deference to structural adjustment, and the abandonment of constitutional reform under conditions set by external creditors, are continuous with that history rather than departures from it. This is why neocolonial is preferred here to post-colonial: the prefix post implies a completed passage and permits the former coloniser to wash its hands.

Reform, when it comes, tends to confirm the diagnosis. Jamaica's Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms, enacted in 2011 after two decades of deliberation, widened the catalogue of rights while preserving the saving of colonial-era law and leaving the protectionist bias toward economic and political elites intact. Republican reform has since proceeded in phases, with the most contested inheritances, among them the retention of a British court as the final court of appeal, deferred to a later stage. The instrument is amended; the logic that shaped it was not put in question.
The concept is two-sided. It names domination and the refusal of domination together. Denied outer space, people stretch inward, into thought, memory, ancestral knowledge, the bush and the hills, and then reach outward again through whatever opening survival allows. Maroon settlements, provision grounds, free villages, higglering, revival, reggae, dancehall, street protest and the yawd itself are products of this movement. What appears to authority as criminality or disorder is frequently a claim to space never legitimately granted.
Its radical proposition is that reform is insufficient. What is required is constitutional transformation grounded in a revisionist history and culture of the nation, defining who the people are and what they hold in common, so that smadditization may be completed at both individual and national levels. Without this, the flag and the anthem are ornaments on an unchanged arrangement.
Plantalogical politics travels and it offers a lens for any society where the institutional afterlife of racial slavery, indenture or settler colonialism continues to govern who counts, and it insists that the crisis of development is inseparable from an unfinished struggle for freedom over human space.

Source: Heron, Taitu A. (2003) "Plantalogical Politics: Battling for Space and the Jamaican Constitution," in C. Barrow-Giles and D. D. Marshall (eds.), Living at the Borderlines: Issues in Caribbean Sovereignty and Development. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, pp. 493–516.