Old

This friend of mine...we go way back. In middle school, I was a tiny thing. Under 10th percentile height and weight. Now, my friend...let's call him Joe, wasn't all that much bigger. But he was fearless.

He saved me from a lot of bullying, and was a true and loyal friend to me. Has been ever since. He was and is a simply nice human being, one whom I'm honored to have in my life. We don't talk all that deeply...he's the kind of guy that doesn't really tip his hand very much. But we're close, as close as can be considering. And I've never doubted that he cares...he's always shown it in his way.

Why are you hearing about this?

The rampant and persistent homophobia that he expresses.

I'm really torn on what to do, but I know that I've reached my breaking point with it all. I've been trying to interrupt his use of gay as insult, and make targeted reductions in the amount that I hear this stuff from him...but I know that I've done little to actually change his thinking. And every time I don't say something, I feel a pang of guilt. For not standing up for my relationship, for hiding behind het privilege, for choosing to stay "safe" from the consequences when there are people who don't have a choice about being safe...

How does a guy with a boyfriend come out to one of his oldest and dearest friends who happens to be a homophobia?

If you know, tell me.

-sly

Hope floats. Upside down and motionless.

Went in to Barnes and Noble yesterday, while on a field trip to Rochester. A political friend of mine (in that she's a professional, and i'm a hack) was down there on business and i tagged along for the ride. And, to watch for deer.

And immediately, my sense of hope for the future began to give off that slow constricting feeling.

I wandered the shelves, noting the utter frequency of the term "Bitch." Why Men Fall for Bitches, Why Bitches Get the Good Men, Why Your Woman is a Bitch, Bitchful Ways to Find Your Man.... I dearly want to place my slightly used lunch on the self-help section, but then i remembered that i hadn't eaten any.

I then skimmed through D. Horowitz's despicable academic Hit List on the 101 most dangerous profs in america. The entry on bell hooks caught my eye. He used her opening line to "killing rage." He intended it as a shocker that would convince his audience of how dangerous a woman she is.

I am writing this essay sitting beside an anonymous white male that I long to murder.

His reading isn't just bad, or faulty, or in err. It is fundamentally dishonest.

As long as black rage continues to be represented as always and only evil and destructive, we lack a vision of militancy that is necessary for transformative revolutionary action. I did not kill the white man on the plane even though I remained awed by the intesity of that desire. I did listen to my rage, and allowed it motivate me to take pen in hand and write...

I went downstairs an bought myself a copy.

David, i hate to break it to you, but bell and i are having a very interesting conversation right now.

-sly

As delivered at the House of Mercy

I talk myself into actually showing up for church last night, after debating the idea of heading home for a nap. It turned out to be a good choice, as Rev. Russell asked me to fill in for Josh by doing prayers of community and serving communion. It's a deep honor, and one made all the more poignent by the fact that this may be the only Baptist church I ever serve in such a capacity.

God of Mercy, pray with us when we become afraid.

For it is not your will that we be afraid, too afraid to love or lose or risk living in the mercy. Pray with us when we cry out, “ too much, too far, too strange”

Your love for us is uncanny. Pray with us.

Amen.


God of Peace, you proclaim a wilderness. Your world is winds, sands, waves, and the drifting snow. Give us ground to stand on, even as all things change. Lead us to a life that interrupts the way things always are. God in your mercy, hear our prayer.

God of Love, you forget no one. Bring light to all of your children that have been forgotten. To the prisoner, the institutionalized, the sick, the starving, the dying. Remind us that your love refuses to be contained. Show us that this is good. God in your mercy, hear our prayer.

God of Hope, our choices seem so small. In world that has such great powers, ones do dedicated to war, greed, and hate, we live tenuously. Speak of a life in which we might be free. Forgive the compromises we make just to get by. Give us hope. Give us courage. God in your mercy, hear our prayer.

God of wonder, we thank you for your irrevocable love, promised in baptism. Teach us to love in who you made us to be, and help us to confess our sins of ingratitude for your creation of our lives. Let us rejoice in the pride you have in all your children. God in your mercy, hear our prayer.

God of Grace, we are a broken people in need of forgiveness. Show us that our hope is in you. Come in to our lives to build up and to tear down, that new life might take root. Hear our confessions in this silence.

-As you have spoken, our name from you is Forgiven. Your love is our healing. God in your mercy, hear our prayer.

God of Mercy, you are all in all. Let us come to you in this silence.


Amen.

Happy Pride, Y'all

Spent most of yesterday out in the rain/sun combination that is lovely Minnesota weather...at Loring Park, home to the nation's third largest Pride festival.

Many folks have spoken critically of Pride as a concept, Savage doing so with perhaps the most visability. So here's the reply i'm going with...

You can't discuss the public implications of gay pride without understanding a historical perspective. Thirty years ago, when these celebrations were in their infancy, our community was invisible. I repeat, invisible. Mainstream news organizations did not cover our community; our civil rights struggles had no legitimacy; and if we were covered, it usually focused on negative or stereotypical images.

Indeed.

I'm lucky, and i know it. I attend a school whose offical policy is one of protection and affirmation. I live in a town that holds the 3rd largest Pride celebration in the nation (Note to other major urban areas. Try holding yours for free, and see what it does for attendance.)

But even then, Pride is a welcome relief. I'm with my people, and it's all good for a while. We forget our internal struggles for a while (a few Michigan Womyn's Space t-shirts notwithstanding). We let our hair down.

I'm lucky. I carry a very small burden indeed, especially in contrast to my queer fore-mothers, fathers, parents...who came before me and rightously declared that there would be no more silence. But i still breathe easier when i take that weight off, when i am in space that feels so free.

Excerpted from recollections of a impromtu speech given by a fitness instructor/go-go dancer from last year's parade (read with approximatly the same conviction as Mel Gibson's "Freedom Speech" from Braveheart):

And when you go back home tomorrow, when you go back to work tomorrow...you will not go back in to the closet. Do you hear me? We've gotten out. Pride, people. Pride doesn't end tomorrow. Pride three hundred sixty five days a year.

I smiled, and the church ladies of St. Paul Ref cheered.

-sly

374? Really?

So, I somewhat took a break for a week there. Which was very good...the boy and I spent a lot of time together, and I've started in on my Greek for the summer.

The bad news is that i have 374 275 RSS articles to read. A fair amount of that can be skimmed through very quickly (Queerty), but it basically means i'm woefully behind in reading all y'alls stuff. Comments might be thin, but I am determined to catch up.

Otherwise what ideas would I steal write about?

-sly

On Sight

From the frontpages of the local paper this morning...

Have Cash, Will Bid.

The basic premise here is that people who need credit and can't get bankloans submit proposals, which are bid on by investors. The site is here...

What's the wierdest thing that's going on...and i don't mean the usurious interest rates that they can only justify as being better than a payday loan or loan shark...

They ask borrowers to post a picture. Because after all, a just and important part of the loan process is seeing what the applicant looks like.

This moment brought to you by American Racism.

-sly

No Answer

As i wrote yesterday, i managed to break my two most enshrined rules of blogging recently. I posted the results of one, so here comes the other, by virtue of several key quotes.

BitchPhD responds to Puffin (in italics)

it’s also damn degrading work when you think about what cleaning toliets actually entails.

But the problem here is, what is *inherently* degrading about putting your mouth on someone’s genitals? It’s a loving act.

your own unexamined support of blow jobs

I’d be surprised if anyone here has failed to think about the feminist repercussions of oral sex.

what they’re enjoying is the act of pleasing their (male) partner,

Yeah. So? For those of us who are straight, pleasing our (male) partners is as much a part of sexuality as pleasing a (female) partner is for those of you who are lesbians. And yes, if you’re straight, this is a little more complicated inasmuch as one has to think about and work through the distinction between pleasing men as a class, and pleasing a particular man as a partner/lover. But I don’t think that the conclusion is that pleasing a man in any way is inherently anti-feminist.

Can you name a degrading and dangerous sex act men are asked to do to show “trust”?

Sure. Being fucked up the ass. Putting your dick in someone’s toothed mouth. Being tied down and beaten. Whatever. Hell, arguably giving a woman head is degrading, and potentially dangerous, since STDs do exist.

But for the record: I didn’t claim to be an “aficionado” of anal sex, though as I think I’m the only one here who said it can be enjoyable, I suspect you’re talking to me. Nor, by the way, do I think that most of the women here are talking about “how much they love sucking dick,” as Puffin insists on reading what are in fact pretty thoughtful explanations of why, despite our recognition that sucking dick is widely seen as degrading and our own dislike of some aspects of it, we nonetheless find other aspects pleasurable. I merely said that yes, I’ve had anal sex, and I’ve enjoyed it. That doesn’t mean, as you imply, that I’ve EVER conceded to a “demand” that I do it–nor that I’ve ever conceded to a demand that I do jack shit in the bedroom. I, personally, have a major hangup about sexual demands, in fact.

But that doesn’t mean that I, or anyone else who believes firmly that sex should be, as Puffin puts it, about my own “SEXUAL pleasure (i.e. what happens when you are SEXUALLY satisfied)” cannot, like any normally healthy human being, find sexual pleasure enhanced by the pleasure of my partner. I would not fuck a man who did not find my sexual pleasure important to him. I don’t think it’s super feminist to refuse to take pleasure in a (male) partner’s sexual pleasure–EVEN THOUGH I realize that there is a long and fucked-up history of convincing women that the MAJORITY of their sexual pleasure should be vicarious.

I think Dr. Bitch wins this thread so hard that it's not even funny (apologies for the pun). There were many interesting contributions there, but she took the argument being presented and responded to it. As Piny pointed out, one of the real problematics of this discussion was that Twisty kept moving the goal posts.

The bathroom stuff really has me wondering, so i'm going to get back to that. Degrading? Again, it depends on context. Like some of the commentators there, i enjoy cleaning the bathroom. Maybe not the smell of windex. But I like my space clean and orderly, and as a participant in a household, i do my part in providing for that. Scrubbing isn't terrible work in small doses, and i rather enjoy the time to think. The problem isn't cleaning a bathroom. The problem is the narrowing range of socio-economic opportunities that designate entire classes of people as bathroom cleaners and nothing more, devaluing their work at the same time as we become more dependant on it. Maybe Puffin thinks it's possible to live in a world without cleaning bathrooms. Maybe it is for her. But it's not for me.

So for the love of the Holy Thing on Top of the High Place, can we please, oh, pretty please stop turning these discussions in to something that sounds like a Phelps family reunion, and stop waxing poetic on how damn nasty anal sex is? As i've said before, anyone who has intimate relationships with men, no matter their gender, has a stake in feminism. But I for one, can't be involved in conversations that hinge on how disgusting(or impolitic) other people's sex lives are, especially when it comes to "sodomy." I know. It is not Twisty's, nor any other feminist's responsibility to create space that is safe for any man, regardless of orientation. But conversely, I've got no obligation to refrain from self-protection from any and all hate speech directed at me. So can we cease fire?

As BelleDame has reminded us, quoting Gayle Rubin: We should remember that porn is not legal; by this definition material that has no focus but to arouse is not legal. In other words, a sexual aim is not considered legitimate in this country.

This is why I get so wound up by these posts. The position of oral and anal sex in this society is of supreme importance to women working to enact their liberation from patriarchal systems. They are also a bellweather of the position and status of (male) queers. To slap on labels of Victorian prudery is a gross oversimplification. The critique of these sex practices is being made in terms of how the Patriarchy imagines women as degraded, subservient, secondary. But when we talk about these issues, the image of the effeminized gay man is never far behind.

There might be some feminist critics that can see their personal sexual expression being fufilled in a world that does not recognize these practices as normal, much less as normative. I cannot. Lawrence v. Texas is too recent a memory. So you'll pardon my overreaction, as Puffin and Twisty said, against the imaging of male oriented sexuality as nasty. Because I exist between laws. Queers are not entirely legal persons in this nation. And if we're going to be recognized, it has more to do with our ability to mimic a kind of straight culture. Nothing about the bedroom. Because in this country, a sexual aim is not considered legitimate.

-sly

PS: I'm trying this kind of post out, though i think I will try to keep them more infrequent in the future. My main issue here is that i forget where i posted comments, and will lose little pieces of writing off in to the ether. My apologies if these are repetitive for those already reading these other blogs.

I desire

For some unknown reason, i woke up this morning, and realized i wanted to write about desire. Actually, i've been reading some very interesting things on this question, and so i wanted to chime in. I don't have time to do actual citations, so just realize that i've been reading Bitch Lab and AntiPrincess a lot lately.

Edit: Go read B|L here who just went on a wonderful fieldtrip with Lacan's discourse of desire. And brought back cookies.

I had this exchange over at BB's place (don't ask me why, but i broke my read/don't comment rule with her and Twisty yesterday.) Her piece opens...and i respond:

"I really DO want to have sex with a child but I know that there are consequences for that action that I may not be willing to take." [Sly: Note that this is a quote of BB writing for a constructed voice in context. Also note that i'm entirely unwilling to take on the ridiculous charge that pro-sex feminism likes teh kiddy pr0n.]

This is the statement that gets me thinking. What if one of those consequences of fantasy involving harm/etc... is "harming a living human being which I don't actually want to harm." We tie rubber bands to our ankles and jump off of bridges, but i don't think i'd take bungee jumping as suicidal intent. I really do want to feel like falling, but there are consequences i don't want to take. Namely, the part where i actually hit the ground.

You're right...people are often *terribly* uncritical about their internal life, and will cop of out responsible self-examination. At the same time, i do think its possible to have a fantasy for something that one does not actually wish to see occur in real life, precisely because the fantasy can interact with an object that has no other interior content, and is simply an empty projection.

I think your argument lies in that those projections inevitably get brought back around to the perception of real women. Is that a pervasive malady of the Patriarchy, or is it a logical inevitability?

Her response was based on the claim that it is "[im]possible to have a fantasy for something that one does not actually wish to see occur in real life...Because you WOULD like to see the fantasy occur in real life, as long as the consequences for that action were something you were able to deal with. " She follows with a discussion of acclimatization, and finishes: "The simple fact of the matter is that masturbating to violent images or even images that you are ashamed of is playing with fire. The logical conclusion of this mindset is that some people will actively engage in the behaviors that they are masturbating to and ALL of the people who are masturbating to those images are at risk of acting out if the consequences shrink to an 'acceptable' level."

Note, I would have included her entire response...i don't usually cut people's words up like that, but the kind of spacing employed there didn't really permit entire inclusion. Go read the comment thread for the full version...

My response, and the close of the discussion, afaik.

"Because you WOULD like to see the fantasy occur in real life, as long as the consequences for that action were something you were able to deal with. "

I did see that part of your argument. But we've obviously got a different evaluation here. Rejection of action based on consequences does not have, IMO, a strict moral valence.

It does not necessarily follow that one *really* wants to see it happen, becuase *really* is an empty term. For example. A man visits a professional Domme. Does he *really* want to be subordinate? Or does he enter in to a space of unreality and fiction (the contractual relationship that returns power/status) in order to explore without residing? I would think very few men who do so would really enjoy this relationship full time if they could accept the consequences, rather they enjoy the "fictiousness" in that it has no durable social reality. Now, you're absolutely right to note that many productions of fantasy, this example included, are not empty and in fact often depend on the use of an Other as object.

That's my objection to "really" as an evaluation of desire. Rejection based on consequences is still rejection. It may not be enough. But it is not necessarily an essential and immutable expression of what a person "really" wants.

Obviously, it may have been impolitic to mention the dreaded Four Letter Acronym For A Set of Sexual Practices at the Den...but the simple fact is that BSDM views desire both seriously and as fiction, and makes a rather good explanation. I'm not too vain to note here that Belledame and I appear to have gotten the same memo on this (check the comments).

Which brings me to my grand point. Desire is a place of negotiation.

It is not:

• An unrejectable, totalizing experience that overrides all other expressions of the self
• Unrelated to the evaluatory framework that surrounds it
• A window in to the otherwise inscrutable soul

Why do i say these things? I've often heard about self-hating gay men (think Brokeback) really want to have sex with other men. I'm going to contest that. They have constructed their experience of desire, in conversation with society, that their primary sexual expression is homophobic. So who am I to say that their truest self is to be found in something that they hate? We might see faulty logic or reliance on cultural assumptions in their evaluation, but we cannot rename their desire.

We are evaluatatory animals, who make choices. Our ideas and desires are never entirely separated to how we evaluate and respond to them. Which is why I get rather disturbed by the confusion of desire with idenity. In affirming or rejecting desire, a person exhibits moral agency, a power they may not have over the content of their desires. (Think of the impulse one might have in anger or frustation.)

So how can we see desire as both reality and fiction? By taking seriously the limits and extents to which we will enact it. I don't mean to place a strict "real world" test here, as i think extended consideration and mental energy constitutes a form of enactment. But what are the preconditions and surrounding contexts that have to be in place?

I'm at the very beginning stages of a relationship right now, so this is all on my mind a great deal. I've got a million and one ideas of what needs to happen (and i don't just mean sexually), and a million more realities and complications. My desire is both reality and fiction. They have not come true, and these ideas do not leave my mind readily. They are checked by other desires, found in my developing knowledge of my partner as a full, rich, and complex human being. They are reality, and form my interior content in conversation (and even agonism) with each other. They point to a future space of relationship in which they can be fufilled, even if that space does not yet exist.

What do we really want?

It's not that simple.

-sly

management

The summer. A lovely time of rest for those of us on the academic calendar, where rest is defined as hardcore work or research if you're past your Bachelors.

Or something like that. It's also been a weird little thing in that it's been my time to most directly spend in management of my mental illness. Taking time off to actually rest, working ahead on things i know will come up in the year, trying new medicines, looking for a therapist, getting in to a workout schedule...all the things great and small that make a difference in how i function day to day.

This summer is going to be a little different. I'm going to be taking more medicine, and finding a doctor.

The drug in question is my lovely and patient friend, Xanax. While i've had a script for it for some time, and used it during some particularly bad attacks...I've been quite stingy with my use. Partly because no doctor that sees me less than once a year is going to hand out a large script for it, and partly due to my fears of addiction.

The doctor in question isn't going to be doing a whole lot more (as far as i know) than writing said perscription. Ze will be most useful in writing documentation that i will be submitting to Yale as record of a disability.

So yes, a little different. My point is this. I need to reject my internalization of the idea that it's better to suffer through this, or to "be strong" about my condition. One bad night can quickly turn in to one bad week in to one bad month. It's about time that i start catching my episodes in the bud, instead of stoicly waiting for the Big One to take my pills. Yes, they can be habit forming, and i will be watching myself carefully. But i know now that i can handle subtances with addictive potential, espeically with the support and guidance of friends and family. I refuse to be scared of my medication anymore. In fact, despite being an opiate, i'm more comfortable with Xanax than any of the SSRIs or neurochemical reuptake inhibitors. It forms an adjunct to my natural coping mechanisms of relaxation and sleep.

The documentation is going to be there for me next year, and I want to be working with the knowledge that I don't just have the ability to get extensions or adjustments (based on the good will of faculty or our infamously helpful Associate Dean of Students) but on my legal right to do so under the ADA. I've heard my last self-rationalization as to why I haven't filed formal paperwork before, and have told myself that it has ceased to be professional to avoid recognition of the legitimate demands that I make for accomodation.

I realized I hadn't done a post on mental illness in a while, and I wanted to make sure I kept up with that part of my blogging. I might do a short run on this, as there have been some good prompts in the media lately. My premise is that a society that is accepting and affirming of people with disabilities will be aware of the fact that social requirements are constructed and may not reflect the goals or abilities of all members of the community. Flexible and humane revisioning of these requirements will be a value to all persons, especially those who have been marginalized by dominant discourses. This isn't just about mental health.

-sly

"Suicides an act of war" Bush administration says...

The insanity of this is mindblowing. I'm going to go back to a quote i had from Bhabha the other day...

The refusal to return and restore the image of authority to the eye of power has to be reinscribed as implacable aggression...coming from without: He hates me. ...The frustrated wish 'I want him to love me.' turns into its opposite 'I hate him' and this through projection and the exclusion of the first person, 'He hates me.'

-sly

risk

I've seen a couple discussions of harm reduction and idealism recently, and i wanted to try some ideas out in response.

The question I put to myself when I want to get idealisitic and take a hard line has been lately:

Who gets hurt? Who is risking the most by this stance?

If the answer isn't me, i start to get worried.

I think of the discussion of harm reduction at GenderGeek. Without getting too far into the debate of if ending sex work or reforming it to give agency to those who participate in it is the legitimate goal of feminism...my challenge to anyone making choices about how to react is to examine how much we personally have at stake in this. The culture of objectification has broad implications, but there are very specific and individual risks being taken on by sex workers. Without their consent, a hardline stance on harm reduction might look suspiciously like throwing someone under the Revolutionary Bus, a seemingly endlessly amusing pastime for the liberal crowd. Pie Fight, anyone?

Falsifying the assent of a minority party for the purposes of power is not just a shortcut, it is a betrayal of the ideal of liberation to which end these manuvers are supposedly serving. I think of BitchLab's discussion of McKinnon here, and the cynical use of a few WoC voices to overrule third wave criticisms and marginalize other feminisms..

But this defense, “Look, see, there’s black women here and Asian women here and two working class broads, too. We can’t possibly be essentialist. We can’t be engaged in ahistorical, universalizing Grand Theory. See all the different peeps of the world we got on board Dworkin’s Ark?”

Edit: B|L responds here...i've also posted it in comments, despite HaloScan being awfully goofy right now.

Consent has to be real, active, and found in mutual relationship...so that our advocacy is grounded in knowledge of the reality of the world we are trying to unmake. If you're not scared shitless of contracting AIDS from dirty needles, I'm not sure I want to hear your views on government supervised heroin rooms. If you're not risking assault and mistreatment in sex work, I'd urge you to think about how your criticisms of legalization and unionizing sex work might be expressing power.

And because the the rule of this blog is that I shall not leave my own pontification untouched by my critique...

I'm forcing myself to drag my mind back over the civil union/marriage debate, and my rhetoric with that. It's been my longstanding policy that civil unions are the barely acceptable placation of queer communities, and strongly risk the codification and solidifaction of second class status.

But when i look at stories about people being denied visitation rights, losing medical and legal battles with homophobic familiy members, no medical insurance, and all the daily dehumanizations of a system that won't recognize our families...

How urgent are my critiques of what is obviosuly an imperfect response to queer demands for equality? Are people who buy into civil union taking the rest of us backwards? Am i responsible for the backlash that pro-marriage talk might create?

There is a delicate balance here. The guideline that I am trying to adopt is that if I am going to insist on purity of position, I had better be in the front of the line of people who will be taking a risk. I'm blessed to have access to medical care, support for my education, and the ability to make choices about how to negotiate my queer idenity. But for others, civil union might be the only way to hold things together in a hostile world.

I will make it very clear, especially to my community and allies, that i beleive that civil union is a patch fix and must not be allowed to become a permanent marital segregation. But i will simotaneously be more careful in making broad critiques of the system, and be especially judicious in regards to my discussion of those who chose such compromises. It's not my place to judge the measures other queers take to survive this fucked up culture of ours. For those with national voices, leadership roles, and the privildge to make more complex chocies with out facing financial ruin, healthcare nightmares, and legal dispossesnion...

Of those voices, i will be more demanding.

It is right to be demanding, perfectionists even, in the name of ending every last bit of oppression. It is also our duty to be careful in extending our work with the full particiaption and consent of the people that are to be liberated by our work.

-sly

One Drop

One Drop

A while ago, Dust Daughter featured the homophobic remarks of Phonte and the discussion of the crisis of indetermininacy around bisexuality. In the comments, I stated that the belief that bisexuality does not exist is the one drop rule of sexuality.

I wanted to come back to that, especially in light of recent post from Max Julian. (I have one reservation in linking favorably here, as what I take to be reasonable anger with Racial Realsit’s commentary on his personal life, he calls her a Jezebel. Now, the application of a racialized and sexualized insult to someone who doesn’t believe in intersectionality is ironic, but it’s still unfortunate.) Onwards...

He describes the reversals and consistancies in Black self-images in America, moving from the status granted to lighter skinned blacks to moderns concerns over being in any way white-identified:

Blackness as privilege, rather than birthright. Interpreting the requirement's these SUPERBLACK gatekeepers of racial conformity espouse in order to be accepted as black are similiar to the qualifications necessary to join 'Skull and Bones:' A Mystery, Wrapped In a Riddle!

Obviously, interracial identity and bisexuality have some clear divergences. In many cases, it’s a matter of being read as. For someone like me, my presentation is largely compatible with cultural concepts of heterosexuality and masculinity (I dress like a preppy, and talk like a grad student), This goes double if I’m in mixed company, and I don’t know if it’s safe space. I’m self-conscious enough to monitor how many gayisms come up in conversation or how my body language changes. Racial Realist notes that she is perceived as Black, and this might be part of the reasoning by which she holds race to be the Ur text of oppression, the substance by which discrimination begins its work. I don’t want to disregard that. She has less of a choice of appearing white than I do of being read as “straight.” But white-identified or straight-identified…each is a case of hybridity, the acceptance and even internalization of the domination system. Each has both a level of choice, as well as a denial of agency by the powers that be.

That’s why I keep coming back to the idea of fictive kinship. As I wrote a while ago, describing queer communities in this way, it’s a risky strategy. By de-ontologizing our view of the liberation community, we have some problems. One possibility is the rush to integration that means one sided acceptance. White/Straight/Male Idenitification, and the diffusion and loss of self-conscious culture. RR is not wrong to be concerned with problems in creating unified Black resistance to white supremacy. Ontological idenitify (think "gay" gene and we're born this way arguments) can provide one of the few recognizable sources of legitimation and idenity in the face of oppression. The word choice implies the ability to chose to conform, en masse, and disband as a subversive group, idenity, culture. This is scary stuff. But I think there are some payoffs.

Fictive does not mean false. But it does exist on a different basis than ontology. It is the tension between saying that race is a socially constructed concept while simultaneously holding that racism is real in every sense of the word. Social construction is not a false reality that is easily shattered by the application of truth. It is a complex system of gesture, language and action that legitimizes itself, erases its particularly, and claims to be natural. It demands clarity of gaze, asking such questions as the one drop rule, so that it may ascertain and assign privilege. While there may be legitimate concerns in identifying the potential group for the liberative community, such as RR expresses, I believe that ultimately such clarity comes at a cost. It can fail to adequately address the question of agency. One drop rules might have utility in addressing the anxiety of uncertainty, but they leave us with brittle categories, and ones that look suspiciously like they are defined (or agreed upon) by the people most responsible for keeping us down.

I want to be clear that I do not think that the future of progressive thought is in an “end” to race, gender, queerness, or other markers of identity. But I am openly questioning how we assign those qualities. I am arguring for a broader sense of affiliation, based on the communal recognition of the participation of the individual that in turn mirrors the individual’s choice and effort to strive with a community of liberation. Because i don't know if i was born this way. Because i don't care if i wasn't. I choose to love regardless of gender, and i don't recognize any good in anyone telling me I ought to sleep with men for the good of the revolution, or that I have to marry a woman for Truth, Freedom and the American Way. To paraphrase Luther's reaction to the Pope, "Fuck that shit."

My hope is to lessen our anxiety with self-haters, to create a deeper critique of those who speak for us but do not stand with us, and to get to a point of regnition how important and difficult it is to express resistant choice in a society such as ours.

Max Julian puts it thus:

And yes, as a black person in this culture, I have struggled with confusion, self-hate, self condemnation, shame, pride, self-love, etc. But, HELLO - I live in America; WTF do you think its gonna be like here, Nirvana? And any nigga that plays holier than thou, as if their shit don't stink, who acts like they've overcome all of that self hate stank, or never had to deal with it - is full of shit. This culture pumps HATE at us every day like a 24/7 sprinkler system - everybody's at least a little damp and most are soaking wet. And I'm not talking about keeping your "message" or "rhetoric" consistent, sucka! I'm talking about that depleted uranium potent self-hate traversing the nooks and crannies of your muthafuckin' marrow!!!!

In the American hegemony, liberation is not an all or nothing prospect. It is not the shattering application of truth. It is the careful, deliberate, and lengthy process of building an alternative social construction. It might not have “natural” borders, or a metaphysical essence. Ye, fictive can still have great reality. The US is an arbitrary chunk of land, but it’s also the most powerful nation on Earth. So as we build, we recognize the choices that bring us into community, and the agency involved in choosing to liberate ourselves.

-sly

Blargh

That was a very long drive.

The midwest should really be closer to NYC.

i've got posts for y'all when i wake up.

-sly

Alone in a crowd

The following is an undeveloped musing of mine, borrowing heavily from some other sources.

Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, describes the intensity of torture by a function of reversal and destruction. Through the application of pain and fear, the torturer literally destroys the capacity of the victim to imagine or articulate resistance. Their world is unmade, physically and semantically. A bed is not a bed anymore, it is a place to be strapped down and hurt. Any imaginative link with the past is severed as everything signifies the victim's powerlessness. In this state, the victim is both completely cut off and alone, yet always under watch.

[Ze has] all of the solitude of privacy, with none of its safety, and all of the self-exposure of the utterly public with none of its possibility for camaraderie.

When I read a bitch's powerful juxtaposition of the Lord's prayer and a story of a young woman facing an unplanned pregnancy, I thought of the above.

Does responsibility have weight when the one responsible has nothing? …and she is 14 years old and choice-less.

And then i thought of BFP's words...

those careful glances that bore deep into our children, past their laughter, their missing teeth, their syrupy warm necks, their fat pink lips, remind us every time we go to the store, we pick up our kids from school, we watch our babies play at the playground, remind us even when you're not around, of our sin.

and it's that shake of the head, the one filled with such pity, such remorse, such disgust, after you pull your judging eyes out of our kids bodies, that cements the verdict--a life of punishment, generations of punishment, for our sin, a brown mother's sin.

It all seems so very connected to me. The way white America looks at poverty and race issues is not just unhelpful, it is direct substantiation of oppression. Like the torturer, the dual application of pain and gaze removes choices, isolates, and begins to unmake the world of one so watched. Baby ceases to signify child, blessing, family...and is thrown about in the semantic whirlwind, becoming sin, punishment, failure.

Scarry tells us of a prisoner who finds a piece of paper baked into bread given in a Red Cross package. It has one word. "Corragio!" There is no prescribed meaning to what courage will be...she is very explicit that specific resistance to the demands of torture is not moral or immoral. To cast it as such acedes to the frame of the torturer, and legitimizes their demands while eliding the pain that they are responsible for. It is the human act, to remind them that there is a world outside of the control of the oppressor. That there is hope.

Bfp again...

but with out being told, without being asked, mi hermanas come anyway, in emails, in phone calls, at break time, on the bus--una hermana, will offer a joke, a look, a hug, a comforting word, and for just a moment, the wieght of my breasts eases it's tight grip on my back. for just a moment, my kid is a human and i am a good mother.

Courage!

-sly

Is it homophobia?

From the comments at Feministing...

My discussion with NoName...

I don't know if he fears homosexuals (I always thought homophobia was a politically loaded, inaccurate term), but he definitely seems to dislike them. Either way, Bush is an ass and people should be able to marry whoever they want (assuming they are of age).

I reply

And seriously...when can we stop debating homophobe? Since when did we actually give the oppressor the choice of names that we'd label them by? It's like the insipid "i'm white and i benifit from priviledge and systematic racism, but i'm nice to black people so i can't be a racist" claptrap. yes, fear reactions are not exhaustively explanatory of all anti-gay rhetorics, but they do form the core of this oppression, and to drop the term because people don't like being called on their shit...

would be cowardly and wrong.

The discussion proceeds from there. But the outline is in place. NoName, and others, decry the "loaded" and "inaccurate" nature of the term, and are certain that phobia has nothing to do with the anti-queer sentiment they run across.

First of all, as i said there, the liberation community is under no obligation to share, discuss, or agree upon terminology with our oppressors. The language of compromise here, as it is so often, is one of equivocation and concealment. Anti-queer violence comes from somewhere. We know this. In order to kill or harm, you must first see someone as a non-person. Homophobia, and it's ugly cousin, Transpanic, is that process of dehumanization...from person to threat. (The adjective ugly, btw, is in reference to the continued legal use as an affirmative defense.)

It isn't just that. In a large number of conversations I have been a part of, I have heard subtle to overt suggestions that being gay is a threat to children. A church I was a part of as a child made the decision not to become openly welcoming to queer persons, in large part due to the concerns of parents. As someone who has worked in childcare for many years, I have often been told that parents would feel more comfortable hiring me if I remained closeted.

This is fear. Fear of the individual. Fear of the group. Fear of the change queerness might represent.

Oh, i'll be mincing no words.

It's homophobia.

-sly

Reappropriation

Bouncing off the very interesting discussion from Reappropriate, later taken up by El and others....

I wanted to think about a few things here, taking a slow circle around the question put forth by the Sasha Frere Jones/Stephen Merritt fight, and read that against Jenn's observations.

Is it racist for a white person to not like hip-hop? Is it racist for a white person to like hip-hop?

A lot of the frustration i see from the cultural appropriators in the discussion, especially at Jenn's place, focuses on this double bind. We'd be racist if we didn't read anime, drink green tea, etc... All of which elides how this cultural contact takes place, and the conditions of power that exist surrounding that encounter. What's even more frustrating is that they make such hay over the instances in which Japan copies us. I don't know that it's really such a great defense of Western orientalism to point out that a culture that we forced at gunpoint to Westernize did in fact, adapt many facets of Western culture. These latter day Adm. Perrys seem to have little awareness of the framing of their encounter. Always in the blugeoning first person, where I starts nearly every sentence, the argument goes that personal appreciation of another culture is just that.

Itunes is telling me to get to the point, as Common has come up. How do I relate to black music as a white person working to be anti-racist?

First, it's not about the music. One of the things that struck me about Jen's descriptions of her frustration is the way in which Orientalism takes a cultural resource, and removes it to a Western context. It's beyond silly to claim that extensive appreciation of black music makes a person "not a racist" or gives one any sort of credentialing. I can listen to music all day long, alone. And one thing I've noticed is that every room I'm alone in has been entirely segregated.

Anti-racism is active, and relies on community. It's not about liking the music, drinking the tea, or a cultural practice. It is about sustained and active participation in a culture through interpersonal relationship. It's about what I can't do on my own. The risk and the pitfall that so many of these cultural appropriators hit is the subtle suggestion that Whiteness can do it better. Tom Cruise is the Last Samurai...

When Hegel was trying to explain all of history as a Euro-Centric progression towards perfection, he had trouble with the Jews. He can't insult YHWH, but he has to elevate Christianity to prove his racialized hypothesis. So he states that indeed, the Jews were technically correct, but that they lacked the proper "spirit." With a quick slight of hand, Hegel introduces and elevates this geist as the sina qua non of freedom, progress, and all things good. It resides in the West, and makes the Europeans the true Sons of Israel. It's still at work today, making whiteness disappear as a canvas on to which we paint other cultures. Geist and "West does it better" mentalities make cultural appropriation the Promethean gift...where whiteness supposes that it is doing another culture the ultimate favor by paying attention, bringing the precious spirit of Whiteness to complete and perfect. The best other is the White other. Tom Cruise. Motherfucking Last Samurai.

It's a funny thing. Over this last year, I participated in Yale's Gospel Choir (I'm pretty sure it's getting easier to figure me out the longer I write...) It wasn't about teaching me to soul clap, though I did finally learn. It wasn't about teaching my ear to recognize and follow the patterns and rhythms that made familiar songs sound strange. Indeed, it would be high folly to suppose any of these things could grant magical access to the experience of blackness in America. Happy Sambo, minstrelry, and a host of racist images were built of the premise that music was the defining cultural trait. Yet, personal taste is not just personal. It is one marker (of many) of exposure and familiarity.

For me, my cultural interaction comes in part through music. I'm a church dork, and a Baptist. If i'm going to relate even with in my denomination, it would be rather difficult if I didn't have knowledge or appreciation of Gospel. Entering into this doesn't make me black. And it certainly doesn't wipe away my white privilege. It is one way in which I try to be a good visitor, one who comes to seek relationship, not entertainment. Other cultures do not exist to alleviate my boredom or alienation. The true meaning of the discontent of urban music is not fully realized in suburban angst. Tom Cruise is not the Last Samurai.

-sly

Carnival Against Sexual Violence #1

is posted over at Marcella's blog.

-sly