Sometimes people accuse me of over-reading, of reading too much into something, of distorting. Making promiscuous texts. Desiring texts (“wishful thinking”). Confusing my sexual and textual politics.
I think you have to, have to twist and make it work for you, have to push it until you find some space for yourself in the cultural imaginary. So I take liberties. Who shall I take liberties with? – with meaning together-. I think Patrick Wolf might be ok with me taking liberties, he once wrote a song called the Libertine.
He has a new album out soon, called Lupercalia, named after a Roman festival of love. The album figures desire insistently, is concerned with how we organise ourselves around public space. Normally we follow the Victorians in thinking in love as private, as properly confined to the bedroom. “Get a room,” we tell over-eager straight lovers (and worse if they are not straight). We don’t want to see or hear it. (Continued)
School is not just a place to gain knowledge but also a place where students can easily be affected by sexual harassment. What a disgrace. How can we progress in our schoolwork if we are impacted and distracted by sexual harassment? -Cindy, Youth Organizer (page 38)
Can we answer that question? Can we provide Cindy with an answer? Can we, as a society, say that we have the tools and strategies to answer this question? Girls for Gender Equality, a grass roots organization based in New York aims to do exactly that. And they wrote a book to tell us how.
Hey Shorty! A Guide to Combating Sexual Harassment and Violence in Schools and on the Streets not only deals with strategies but also points to some painful realities: how a deeply rooted culture of victim blaming and rape apologia hinders the progress of youth; how unsafe environments foster inequality and shatter dreams; how sexual harassment is not only about sex or harassment, but about crushing young people into further oppression. Girls for Gender Equality (GGE) provides programs that develop strengths, skills, and self-sufficiency in girls and women and help them make meaningful choices in their lives with minimum opposition and maximum community support. Hey Shorty! documents, and in that sense, it becomes an extremely important guide in grass roots organizing and activism, the process of creating the programs necessary to fulfill the vision of GGE.
Catching up on the news this morning, I came across this decision from the Illinois Supreme Court in a wrongful birth suit. Wrongful birth suits (recently famously fictionally featured in Handle With Care) occur when parents sue hospitals and care providers because their children are disabled and either the facility failed to anticipate the disability and provide parents with resources, or made mistakes during delivery that led to the disability.
Demonstrators showed up in large numbers for the Hardest Hit march to protest devastating slashes to disability services in the United Kingdom. Many of them had never participated in a political demonstration before.
You might expect that I’d be appalled by such a thing, but the facts of the matter are actually a lot more complicated. On the surface, it sounds completely horrible to say that the birth of a disabled child is ‘wrongful’ and that parents should be able to sue for compensation. But. Here’s the thing. Raising a disabled child is extremely expensive because of the lack of social support, especially when you haven’t had a chance to prepare for it. Jemima Aslana, writing about a different case, points out:
I know we don’t want to be seen as burdens. And to view us as such is incredibly dehumanising. But let’s face it: I’m lucky I live in Denmark, ‘cause that makes me far better off than most Americans. In the US, whether or not the parents understand, love and support their child, having a disability can be bloody costly, and a financial burden of that size is not something everyone can bear, be they able-bodied or not.
Posted on Wednesday, May 11, 2011 by Flavia Dzodan
I don’t think I need to point out the obvious but, a lot of feminist discourse on line (particularly in blogs and news) is very US Centric (with perhaps a few exceptions here and there about Canada and the UK). Even the kind of feminism that is not at the center of this mainstream discourse (like womanism, or women’s rights activism focused on race and racism), it is still very much dominated by narratives that are mostly relevant to the US and its sociopolitical realities.
Probably a good part of this is due to language: those of us who blog in English have to contend with the fact that we are outsiders. I always joke I colonized my own language to play in the international feminist leagues. But that’s not the reason why I did it. It was mainly because I needed words. Words I didn’t know and I had to borrow from somewhere, as I was living in a country where my mother tongue was pretty much ineffectual (few Dutch people speak Spanish but almost everyone speaks English with pretty good degrees of fluency and I needed to communicate before I had the chance to properly learn Dutch). So, I turned to English, particularly because fifteen years ago, the Spanish speaking internet was very scarce, fragmented and had no gender related body of work available.
So while my entire education had been bilingual, my politics were very Latin America specific and only based on practice, as were the words I used. When I finished high school, back in the 80’s, there was not such a thing as Gender Studies anywhere in South America (I am unsure whether there is such a thing now, perhaps under another name). And that lack of theory let me tell you, can put you on pretty shaky grounds if you were to attempt to translate literally from one language to another. Because that’s part of the problem I had to contend with: literal translation would have alienated me from feminist politics in ways that took me years to fully understand.
Reproductive rights is a dominant social issue in the United States right now. No wonder, with an ongoing onslaught against it from almost all political quarters, between the GOP’s straight up attempts to make it impossible to access any kind of reproductive health services to pro-life Democrats. Yet, the discussion of reproductive rights seen in most dominant spaces focuses on a very narrow framework and world view, and is less about full access to reproductive rights and justice than it is about a very specific issue: abortion.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I am a huge fan of abortion access, I think it should be safe, legal, and readily accessible for everybody. But abortion is not the only issue at stake here, and it is critical to be talking about reproductive rights as a whole framework, not a single issue.
Three key things to take away: Reproductive rights is not just about women. Reproductive rights is not just about abortion. Reproductive rights has tremendous intersections with race, class, sexuality, and disability.
I’m going to level with you Beatdown: this piece was almost going to be about how much I still love Lady Gaga, how innovative and interesting and important she still is. This morning I realized that I wasn’t writing objectively about the song, but was instead pushing this really obsequious pro-Gaga agenda. This meant I had to start from scratch. I’m sorry for spending so much time writing a draft intended to pull the wool over your eyes, but this is apparently the year of embracing musical anti-heroes and I feel comfortable with the “douchebag footprint” of my Gaga love. That’s why I wish “Judas” was a lot better than it is.
When I started writing I had this complicated thesis that a part of this video was actually Lady Gaga working through and picking apart the misogyny of the Catholic Church and exploring her relationship with organized religion. She wasn’t just writing racy biblical slash fic, she was creating a space to discuss the way women have traditionally been marginalized and silenced in religious texts and creating a space for her own queer religious identity. Which is probably true to some degree, but my analysis went on for much too long and made some conclusions that I’m sure were motivated by a desire to keep Gaga up on that pedestal she’s occupied in my heart for so long.
But “Judas” is terribly written and the video is boring. It’s like a religious version of “Bad Romance” with more outfits. The only high point comes when you realize that she isn’t ripping off Madonna quite as blatantly anymore, unless you feel the fact that Gaga was raised Catholic and sings songs about religion is de facto musical plagiarism. Setting aside the obvious conclusion that Lady Gaga’s Religious Tableau Extravaganza is shaking out to be The Immaculate Concept Album – it is odd how many people I’ve met that have only one thing to say about the New Gaga. “She’s ripping off Madonna!”
Because, of course, women do not find inspiration in the work of other women. Women steal from each other. Radiohead, Bill Hicks, Jimmy Hendrix, The Beatles, Richard Pryor — men — are innovators. When the next generation contains 100 variations on their sound or their comedy, that is the power of influence and the continuance of tradition. But when two women sound alike, that is coded as cultural theft. Because there is so little real estate afforded to anyone other than men in the realm of Internet music criticism, where dudes compete on Twitter to kiss the asses of other “It” music dudes and pause occasionally to tell ladies the real problem is they just don’t make “GREAT ALBUMS OF GREAT IMPORTANCE” while pointing at the “Auto-tuned Sex Vixen of the Moment” as evidence of this, even if that person is doing interesting, complicated work.
This Dude Music Complex augments the way we look at all music that not made by cis men. And it makes us very quick to hold other music to a much higher standard of originality, so that we know it will be pleasing to the dominant. A lady needs to be without influences to be great, she needs to make no references, pitch no homages; she must work twice as hard for half the attention. There are always going to be the people who want to nail Gaga to The Copycat Cross. But there are also going to always be people rolling around talking about how Laura Nyro really deserves the credit for the best parts of Joni Mitchell’s work, and Kate Bush deserves all the credit for the best parts of Tori Amos because they want to trace a line from Bush to Joanna Newsom, then collapse them into one unit of culture they can carry around in their pocket, like a stick from an Ice Cream Novelty that has a joke printed on it.
However, we do need to talk about the implications of Stephanie Germanotta as Lady Gaga’s various “looks” throughout this video. This is the real critical “gravy” of this particular music video, and we’d be silly not to talk about it.
Most pop culture depictions of Europe are about this supposed socialist paradise where everyone pays exorbitant taxes, works a couple of hours a day and still manages to have free healthcare. However, there is also another Europe, one we do not hear much about in English speaking news and it is the Europe that asylum seekers, mostly people from Africa and the Middle East encounter. A continent not of welfare and high living standards, but one of barbed wire detention centers.
Since last December, when popular uprisings and violent confrontations began to shake the Arab world, some 27,000 refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented migrants have fled by sea from North Africa to the southern Italian island of Lampedusa. Most of the boats that made the journey originated in Tunisia, but increasing numbers are coming from Libya. On April 19, 760 people landed in Lampedusa in one of the largest single landings the island has ever seen.
So Game of Thrones is the new HBO stab at genre fiction—and I do mean stab. Filmed on a budget roughly equivalent to the GDP of a small country or a continent on the World of Warcraft, Game of Thrones is a lavishly realised adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice series of fantasy novels.
The trailer gives you a fairly good idea of what to expect:
Now, George R.R. Martin began writing these novels back in the 90s, but the show so far has struck me as peculiarly attuned to the collective unconscious of the United States at the moment – bleak, foreboding doom, and a vicious culture of death. The fantasy window dressing is extremely sparse with this series; here’s some ominous hints of supernatural baddies in the White Walkers, and some dead dragon’s eggs which are presumably going to spring to life at some point, but basically the “fantasy” boils down to a made-up Ye Olde Medieval Country, a focus on the aristocracy, and some silly names. So far, so bog standard.
Oh, hey, everybody! Remember how we were all upset about that “you only get an abortion if we decide you were really raped” language in H.R.3? And then we were all, “no, stop that, lawmakers, take that clause out right now,” and lawmakers were all, “okay, we will, stop yelling at us, GAH.” Remember that? Well, good news:
(A) They are voting on that bill really, really soon, and It just passed the House, and
(B) They didn’t actually take all of that stuff out.
The committee report for H.R. 3 says that the bill will “not allow the Federal Government to subsidize abortions in cases of statutory rape.” The bill itself doesn’t say anything like that, but if a court decides that legislators intended to exclude statutory rape-related abortions from eligibility for Medicaid funding, then that will be the effect.
Mother Jones had an eyepopping, in the sense that they were both visually stunning and intellectually horrifying, set of charts in their March-April issue. If you want a visual representation of what is wrong with the United States, these charts are a pretty great resource, because they illustrate both the depth of the current income inequality, and the historical trends behind it. 10% of the population of this country controls 2/3 of the net worth in the United States, and the top 1% alone holds 34.6% of the net worth in the United States. 34.6%.
Dave Gilson and Carolyn Perot, who prepared the piece, note that some of these numbers predate the financial crisis, and that the truth is even worse; for the bottom 60%, the housing crash was devastating, because 65% of their net worth was tied up in their homes. For the top 1%, that number was just 10%.
Eleven years ago, I was in Los Angeles for the Democratic National Convention, sweating like a pig and shouting ‘what do we want? Class war! When do we want it? Now!‘ We didn’t get it then and we need it now more than ever, as these numbers illustrate. Even a casual flick of the newspaper provides ample backup for the argument that it is high time for a disruption of the class system in the United States; the system that dare not speak its name has a stranglehold on politics, culture, and human lives in this country.
