season of the bitch

Well, it’s not really that simple. But Matttbastard has a post up at Shakesville about the “Genocide Awareness Project” visiting the University of Calgary.

I had my own run-in with these assholes at Temple last year. My first reaction was shock at the giant display (no, I’m not finding pictures to subject you to). My second response was to do some quick searching on Temple’s Web site and the Temple News to find out exactly why I was stuck dealing with pictures of people dead in concentration camps or hanging from trees, next to the usual shots of the fetuses.

Apparently, since my university is publicly funded, it counts as a public forum for speech, and so even massively-funded outside groups like the “Genocide Awareness Project,” whose plan appears to be to completely alienate Jews, African-Americans, and anyone with good taste by comparing abortion to, y’know, actual racialized violence and genocide.

That said, the people behind the displays at Temple were pretty quiet, staying behind their hideous images unless someone tried to engage. And the radical cheerleaders came out to protest, which is always awesome.

I defend their right to speech and expression for sure. I believe in free speech, and though I think Woodrow Wilson was often a wanker (and no friend to women’s rights), I agree with him when he said:

I have always been among those who believed that the greatest freedom of speech was the greatest safety, because if a man is a fool, the best thing to do is to encourage him to advertise the fact by speaking.

But I believe that right stops when it becomes harassment, and I don’t think that a time, place and manner restriction on these displays (for instance, do they really need to have ten-foot dead fetuses? Just sayin’) would be too much of an infringement on their rights to be factually wrong and offensive to boot.

I would LOVE to know where these groups get their funding to take their traveling picture show on the road, apparently across the US/Canada border, too…

Ms. Pop Feminist has, as always, an interesting take on the Bitch magazine “bailout,” which sounds so much stranger after the rash of bailouts of the financial sector. She makes excellent points about the way the campaign was conducted, the nature of print, and the nature of the Web, and I wrote her a small novel in return, which I’m reprinting here, since it was giant, and rather interesting.

As always, I love you for your willingness to put shit out there.

And here, you’re absolutely right.

The death of old media is in part the death of our need to be talked at. I say this with three print copies of The Nation next to me (home of several of my fave “public intellectuals,” including Naomi Klein and Barbara Ehrenreich).

A friend and I were discussing the lack of liberal public intellectuals a few weeks back. It was in the context of television and how well the conservative movement has done in funding think tanks and providing “experts” for television.

But especially in the feminist movement, you’re quite right that the desire to conserve print is the desire to conserve some form of authority. One that we simply don’t need.

Blogging is not journalism, but neither, for the most part, is what Bitch does. It’s also opinion writing.

The largest problem that I can see with the move to the Web is that it is harder to monetize. Much as I hate the word, the fact remains that Virginia Woolf’s argument from “A Room of One’s Own” remains true. I’m broke, I have to work to make a living, and that leaves me less time for actual journalism, blogging, reading, research, and creative work. If I cannot make money doing any of those things, then I have to find another way.

But rather than clinging to print as the last way we can make money (sort of) as writers and therefore dedicate ourselves to being if not public intellectuals, at least stimulators of the discourse (yeah, that sounds pretentious too, but I can’t think of a better word), we need to be figuring out how we can make a living as writers and artists in a world that gets its media primarily over the Web.

I’m still recovering from driving home for the holidays, and am drowning a bit in things I need to get done, but I have a few things up at other places that I wanted to cross-post here in case anyone was interested.

My piece on Gaza, at GlobalComment, which took me far too long and far too much agonizing to write.

I’m an American Jew, and when I state that fact, I invite a wealth of assumptions, not all of them anti-Semitic in nature. Renee Martin recently addressed the conflation of criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, so I don’t have to (though I would like to note that Modern Mitzvot has a very good point too).

Daniele Archibugi pointed out that upcoming elections in Israel and Palestine most likely have something to do with the timing and force of the Israeli attack. But being in the U.S., I have to see it through the lens of the election we just had, here, and one of the Republican party’s favorite anti-Obama attacks.

And on a slightly lighter note, I’ve found the definitive piece of Bush-era fiction, and it’s a comic.

I picked up DMZ #1 way back in 2005 and reviewed it for Best Shots (wow, I’ve been doing this way too long). Since then, I’ve read and dropped many other monthly comics, but DMZ has stayed on my pull list. I’ve given it as a gift, made my professors read it, and flogged it mercilessly on this very site.

But aside from being an excellent story, it’s a story that at its core is about all the major questions of the Bush era.

DMZ picks all of us up and drops us into the middle of a war zone. But Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli (and some excellent guest artists) transfer that war back home, to a place we all know. New York City is the most familiar landscape in America even to people who haven’t been there, and it was the central point of the crises we’ve dealt with in the last eight years…

DMZ holds us all responsible for the failures of our government under Bush. No one gets a free pass. Each time you think you know who Wood is pointing the finger at, you find it twisting around to point squarely back at you.

I promise to write something for you guys soon. I miss you.

Bloody exhausted, possibly getting sick, and have mountains of research papers to write these next two weeks.

But because I don’t have enough to do, I’m blogging over at Blog@Newsarama now, in addition to Best Shots and various and sundry other stuff. I’ll be cross-posting some stuff from here, babbling about comics, movies, pop culture, and whatever else crosses my mind. Come join the fun.

In the midst of the rampant speculation and debate about policies, I’ve tried to stop a few times in the last couple of weeks and remember a few women who were killed recently because they were transgender.

The sad fact remains that this happens all too often.

A few others have put this far better than I can.

Transgender Day of Remembrance is not a once-a-year deal. You don’t show up for services, murmur “lest we forget” and then promptly forget for the rest of the year. Today lives within us, because we cannot afford to forget.

Still. Today most of all, we remember those who were killed. Because we die violently, unmemorialised, and are mocked after our deaths.

Because the world sees us disposable, less than human (and who can mourn that?). Many of the dead lost their lives because they were trans women of colour, doubly disposable.

Who would mourn a thing, a that, an it?

-queen emily

The Day of Remembrance is ours, and it is sacred. It is the one day we set aside to honor those in our community, overwhelmingly poor trans women of color, who were killed due to bigotry and hatred. It is a single day in the year where we make certain that the names of the murdered are heard and held up, so we can all remember that these people mattered, were real, were loved, and are missed. It’s a day to gather the community together and call attention to the violence directed against us and the caring we have for each other. It came from us. It was built by us. It was never supposed to be flashy or glitzy. It is a solemn mourning for the dead, a place to hold hands, and a promise to those who violence took away from us that we who are still living will hold together, take care of each other, and push forward together into a world where that violence is only a painful memory.

–little light

I will never understand what motivates someone to kill another human being when their life is not in danger. I will never understand what it is inside someone that makes them pick up a weapon instead of simply walking away. I will never understand how human life can have so little value to some people. But I know that there are people in this world, far too many people, who can kill. Who can pick up a gun or a knife or a rock and strike out. For what? Because someone doesn’t meet your expectations? Because they live their life in a way you don’t approve of? Which god tells you that you can do that? Which god gives you permission? And how can the world, how can so many otherwise decent people, simply nod and say ‘well, what did you expect? Not guilty!’?

–Butterfly Cauldron

Bastard Logic has some links that you should really look at. NOW.

OK, so one of these is my article. But still: my take on the VP debate.

Also, read Natalia’s piece here. Really. You must.

Latoya has an excellent post up at Feministe about Sarah Palin and Condoleezza Rice, the similarities between the two, and the need for voting based on a person’s policies, not their anatomy.

I feel like I should have some deep political insight right now, less than two months from the election, but the only insight I have is that this shit has gone on for way too long and wasted way too much money.

So instead, I have a couple of beautiful posts to share with you.

I’ve been thinking about love a lot lately. At first when I escaped my relationship I just wanted to get out, be alone, have time that was entirely my own and I really didn’t care to try and think about it, or at all feel anything. I wanted to play.

I still enjoy my alone time and I frankly don’t think I have the time or the emotional capability to deal with love right now. At least not the way it’s commonly thought of. I wonder if I really do want that–ever.

But there are bits of love all over the place in my life, however strange and unruly and improper they may be. And it is still the strongest thing in the world.

Love is radical, and its tears will extinguish Hell, but only if we burn with it. It is not enough to love quietly, mousily, in the safe spaces, because love is radically unsafe. Love will throw you through Hell and walk with you on the hike out. Love does not let you hide behind walls, it will slice you open, it will make you bleed.

Love is an act of blood. Love is an act of bone. It is your breath.

I don’t want to love someone again until I can really throw myself into it. Until I meet someone willing to throw themselves into it as well. To admit that there are no rules.

I say let’s call down the thunders, then. Let’s stand and fight. Let’s own that our love is a matter of artillery, and fire salvo after salvo. Let’s hold hands and kiss and fuck and dance while all over, rock shears from the cliff-faces of their shuddering world and it frays at the seams. Let’s defiantly exist, exist hard, right next to them, public, brazen, beautiful. Let’s drill and march and right on their doorsteps let’s have unacceptable bodies and loud music and food whose aromas they find foreign and offensive. Let’s fucking sing.

And love can be itself a political act. But that’s too narrow. Too little and petty a word for it. It can be revolutionary.

Not like this is the first time I’ve posted about this.

But see, this is the thing. Natalia wrote in response to Twisty’s comment that women should repudiate femininity if they can, because they will never have equality unless they are de-otherized.

Because butch women are apparently never raped or treated with sexist scorn. Because I’ve never had my ass grabbed when I was wearing pants or not wearing makeup. I mean, should we all transition in order to get rid of Class Woman? Well, wait, clearly that’s not allowed either.

I have breasts. I have curvy hips and an ass that next to no one is going to confuse for male. Should I lose a bunch of weight in order to make my body as boyish as possible, in order to repudiate femininity and more easily what, pass as a man?

I know I’ll be accused of oversimplifying, so I’ll pull out my own Advanced Blamer card here and quote Susan Bordo, talking about anorexia.

“On the other hand, even as young women today continue to be taught traditionally ‘feminine’ virtues, to the degree that the professional arena is open to them they must also learn to embody the ‘masculine’ language and values of that arena–self-control, determination, cool, emotional discipline, mastery, and so on. Female bodies now speak symbolically of this necessity in their slender spare shape…Our bodies, too, as we trudge to the gym every day and fiercely resist both our hungers and our desire to sooth ourselves, are becoming more and more practiced at the ‘male’ virtues of control and self-mastery. The anorectic pursues these virtues with single-minded, unswerving dedication…
Explored as a possibility for the self, the “androgynous” ideal ultimately exposes its internal contradiction and becomes a war that tears the subject in two–a war explicitly thematized, by many anorectics, as a battle between the male and female sides of the self…
Protesting the stifling of the female voice through one’s own voicelessness–that is, employing the language of femininity to protest the conditions of the female world–will always involve ambiguities of this sort…
As her body begins to lose its traditional feminine curves, its breasts and hips and rounded stomach, begins to feel and look more like a spare, lanky male body, she begins to feel untouchable, out of reach of hurt, “invulnerable, clean and hard as the bones etched into my silhouette,” as one student described it in her journal…
Through her anorexia, by contrast, she has unexpectedly discovered an entry into the privileged male world, a way to become what is valued in our culture, a way to become safe, to rise above it all–for her, they are the same thing…
To reshape one’s body into a male body is not to put on male power and privilege. To feel autonomous and free while harnessing body and soul to an obsessive body-practice is to serve, not transform, a social order that limits female possibilities. And, of course, for the female to become male is only for her to locate herself on the other side of a disfiguring opposition…
For if femininity is, as Susan Brownmiller has said, at its core a ‘tradition of imposed limitations,’ then an unwillingness to limit oneself, even in the pursuit of femininity, breaks the rules.

The fact is that since “masculine” has been constructed as the neutral form for so long in ‘patriarchal’ society, for women to “repudiate femininity” doesn’t give them a neutral option. It mostly leads to the embrace of masculine bodily and clothing signifiers–thus, you catch women comparing how long it’s been since they’ve shaved, when body hair has been socially constructed for so long as a signifier of manhood. Women congratulate themselves for not dressing in a feminine manner, when the opposite is to adopt clothing gendered masculine.

So to “repudiate femininity” is not at all to do away with a gender binary. It is instead to adopt the other half of it–the masculine half.

I know there will be people who read this and say “That’s not what Twisty meant!” And of course a certain picture of femininity is valued in our culture above others. I have written and linked above about the changing creation of masculinity and femininity across (Western) culture, and how maintaining masculinity requires as much discipline as femininity.

But I am merely illustrating the fact that policing women’s bodies is NOT a feminist act. Policing women’s femininity is not helping women. It is still playing into the same double bind that Bordo is talking about when she writes of anorexia. Being able to dress and look how we want and still be respected as intelligent individuals capable of all the things men are capable of–THAT would be liberation.

Of all the options out there, all the drag I could wear, I choose several options. My closet is a costume chest full of personae for me to play with. Today I have to meet my students for the semester for the first time–the rest of the semester they will see me in the lab and so in jeans and clothes that I won’t be too sad if I get photo chemicals on. So today I put on a skirt and a nice shirt and I play teacher. Later I’m going out for drinks with a friend, so I will play pretty. Right now I’m writing, so I am lounging in my PJ’s. All these things are options for me. Options. Some are feminine, some are not. And I require people to treat me with respect and listen to me no matter how I am dressed. Which, to me, seems to be a better way of teaching them that feminine /= stupid or unworthy, rather than having to disavow anything sparkly or femme because it might make them take me less seriously or “other” me.

After all, isn’t repudiating femininity what patriarchal culture was all about?

Bordo, Susan. “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity.” From Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, taken here from Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Conboy, Katie, Nadia Medina and Sarah Stanbury, eds. Columbia University Press, 1997