Tournament: UMKC | Round: 1 | Opponent: CSUF SR | Judge: Aaron Weathers

The Only Woman

The only woman who is able to be
is she who knows that the dawn of her life begins now

she who marks out her own domain
not with tears but with arrows

who resorts to no prayers
who states opinions and lifts her head and moves her body
and is tender without shame and tough without hatred

she who has unlearned the alphabet of obedience
and walks erect
who does not fear solitude because she has always been solitary
she who forgoes grotesque howls of violence
uttering them rather with grace
she who frees herself in bounteous love
she who loves

the only woman who can be one
is she who sadly and simply decides on her own
to emerge from her past history

- Kate Flores

The resolution asks us to defend an example of restricting presidential war powers but does nothing to discuss the ongoing war in debate – the war against difference.
Debate privileges certain forms of knowledge production as legitimate or illegitimate – this is dangerous, denying the reimagining of possibilities that promote rather than negate multiplicities. Debaters experience rejection when they do not conform to traditional argument choice and practices that the dominant community has deemed legitimate.

Eisenberg in 2012
Particular types of argument
judges to a moment of reflexivity.  

The demands that we adhere to the specific rules of debate discount the privilege in which these procedures are grounded. The fact that the community lacks diversity means that the procedures and the topic are not formulated for those that don’t view debate as only a game and are engaging in struggles external to the round.

Warner 2k2 (Ede, University of Louisville, “Go Homers, Makeovers or Takeovers?  A Privilege Analysis of Debate as a Gaming Simulation)

McIntosh (1988) speaks to the notion of both
interested in speaking to those issues.

Education about the president’s powers fails to address the reason each president has power in the first place. Cultural stereotypes influence the way presidential candidates are evaluated by voters which means discussing the way we relate to people and the culture in our communities is a prerequisite to engaging the topic and the political.

Political Parity 2k12 (Political Parity is a platform for a wide field of leaders, researchers, and funders who are dedicated to increasing the number of women serving in the highest levels of government, “Reaching Executive Office: The Presidency and the Office of the Governor,” http://www.politicalparity.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/inventory-executive.pdf)

The presidency—the highest
to a female president.

The debate community is becoming divided into factions that force people into dangerous binaries. Argument choice is one specific example – in which an ideological divide has been created between the calls for pragmatic policy action and each specific identity argument, whether it be gender, anti-blackness, lgbtq, etc. That war that has become divided on such specific lines ignores and systemically excludes discussion about and inclusion of the voices that experience oppression in a multiplicity of ways whether it include class, race, sexual orientation, ableism, or any of the other potential forms. The war was not declared against one specific identity but all others considered to fall outside of the monolithic sameness for each of the debate communities. In addition to argument choice, these communities are exemplified in the social aspect of the way we relate to one another in debate. Different movements are emerging for each specific mode of oppression and with each new division and group – we are left asking – what does that specific community do for people that face oppression for a different reason?

In round arguments spill over to the way we relate to one another in the community – the community has become so ideologically divided that engaged discussion and communication does not occur across social groups outside of the debate round.
This has led to the exact oppressor/oppressed binary in which if you are not with me then you must be against me or if you are against me then you can never be with me that is manifesting itself in debate.

Morrigan writes:
No date (Clementine, writer, poet, essayist and multidisciplinary artist, “Multiplicity: Three feminist texts,” http://clementinemorrigan.com/essays/multiplicity-three-feminist-texts/)

Multiplicity is the occupying
multiplicity and complete humanity.¶ 

But they should not be the basis for a singular movement as that excludes and delegitimizes other forms of oppression

Morrigan continues, stating how:
Morrigan, No date (Clementine, writer, poet, essayist and multidisciplinary artist, “Multiplicity: Three feminist texts,” http://clementinemorrigan.com/essays/multiplicity-three-feminist-texts/)

Anzaldúa’s anti-racist and
calls for “a massive uprooting of dualistic thinking” (256).

Such a discussion of avoiding concrete divisions of the community and promoting multiplicities has fallen by the wayside. This discussion is necessary to break down dualistic thinking in the context of social relations and is critical to end the worst forms of violence.

Anzaldua 87 (Gloria, “Borderlands: The new Frontera,” P78)
The ambivalence from the
of rape, of violence, of war.

The community as a political group needs to think difference positively by making space for all forms of difference but not grounding the community on one particular form of difference. Society is largely already uninhabitable to those on the borderlands – the debate space and community have the ability to be a new open space but that will not happen without recognition of multiplicity and changing the way we relate to one another socially in the community.

Tournament: Kentucky | Round: 1 | Opponent: Binghamton Cepin-Pinchuk | Judge: Vincent

Alimohamad from fullerton

Gregory and Alimahomed 01 (Josh and Kasim, Department of Speech and Communication at California State University, Fullerton, “Narrative Voice and the Urban Debater: An investigation into empowerment,” 2/23/2001)
The narrative debater, working from a rhetoric
AND
often claim as inevitable closer to home.