Yeah, okay, I get it, people like Pacific Rim and are entirely incapable of acknowledging anything possibly problematic about it.
And every movie I've seen this summer fails, soundly, the Bechdel Test. Which, in case you don't know, asks if there are a) two female characters who b) talk to each other c) about something other than a man. As this is something I do EVERY DAMN DAY, it is a wonder to me that we seem to never see it on film.
But here's a thing. Making up a new test so that you can call Mako Mori a feminist is just....eurgh.
Here's what I'm talking about. In case you're too lazy to click, as I often am, here's WORD FOR WORD from the Tumblr post: "The Mako Mori test is passed if the movie has: a) at least one
female character; b) who gets her own narrative arc; c) that is not
about supporting a man’s story."
Wow, it's like NCLB has come to mass media. Test too hard? MAKE AN EASIER TEST. Halve the number of females required, and make her something other than stage dressing.
The irony is, of course, that Mako Mori fails the Mako Mori test.
Because I'm too lazy to scroll down, let me recap Mako Mori's 'narrative arc'.
She has no agency other than what men (Pentecost, Becket) allow her. She doesn't put herself on the candidate list because Stacker wouldn't like it. She fights in the trials anyway, when Becket calls her out, but only when Stacker agrees. Even then, she doesn't suit up until...Stacker gives her permission. Even in the climax of the film, she meekly does what Raleigh wants, leaving him alone to face the danger of arming the reactor, not even putting up a word of protest.
She's the Damsel in Distress for both Stacker (when she's a child) and Raleigh (in the drift when she needs to be rescued from her own memory of...being rescued by a man...it's like damselception). Her 'honor' 'needs' to be defended (sorry about all the airquotes) fistfight style between Raleigh and Chuck Hansen. And she even delivers the Damsel Kiss reward to Raleigh.
So, looking at the Mako Mori test, her narrative arc is...what? I could maybe, in a very generous mood, see her move from scared little girl to fighter...if she had any real fight in her. Compared to Sasha Kaidanovsky, though, she's a silent partner to Raleigh's control of Gipsy Danger. If she'd resisted being sent away at the end, I'd buy it a lot more. But let's just say, cranky old feminist is cranky and old and let's give her an arc.
Which brings us to the third requirement: that her story isn't about propping up a man's story.
This is a solid, resounding, sonic-boom of a fail. She exists to give Stacker an angsty/tender side, she exists as the Love Interest for Raleigh. She exists to show us how dangerous drifting can be, and how Nice a Guy Raleigh is. Everything she does in the movie is to prop up the emotional depth of a male character. EVERYTHING.
I'll take a step back to look at Pacific Rim Tales from Year Zero for a moment, because we have several female characters....who also fail the Mako Mori test.
Caitlin Lightcap, the scientist who invents PONS (drifting) has a clear, identifiable, hands-down narrative arc, going from shy science hottie to confident fighter. But...her story is only told to give Schoenfield depth--he's telling her story to the reporter to highlight his own epiphany. Tamsin Sevier and Luna exist to give depth to Stacker. And Naomi? Oh god. Naomi. The perky, driven Lois Lane style reporter who gathers these stories. She has minimal narrative arc, but serves the (pointless) function of creating drama in the Becket Brothers by being, well, a bit promiscuous. She comes off as a bit of a groupie, just wanting to fuck a jaeger pilot, contrasted with Raleigh's (pure?) interest.
W-wow. Okay, so even when we lower the bar, we can't pass it.
Sidenote: I've become a little obsessed recently with Elysium and so just to be fair, let's poke at that as we wrap up: Elysium: fails the Bechdel test. HOWEVER, believe it or not, Delacourt passes. She has a narrative arc, that doesn't exist to give emotional oomph to a man's story. Yes, she activates Kruger. Yes, she sends him after Max. But it's not personal. A man would have complicated Max's life the same way. Frey fails, but even then, she has agency. The problem is, of course, Delacourt is a stone cold bitch and not a pretty, Asian moe stereotype (yeah, guess who's NEVER going to forgive Del Toro his idea that she can stand in rotorwash and not have that umbrella torn out of her hands.)
What's really funny (or depressing, depending on how you look at it) is that passing these tests didn't USED to be a problem. Star Trek: The Next Generation NAILED both the Bechdel test and this Mako Mori test. Even characters like Seven of Nine (who is the first time I heard the word 'fanservice') had agency, they had their own stories to tell, and their stories WEREN'T subsumed to showing the emotional growth of a 'more important' male character.
My question is...what happened? And why are we lowering the bar instead of insisting we go back to what we used to do so well?
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
Friday, August 16, 2013
Elysium, Politics and of course liminal humanity
The predictable: Straight White American Guy saves the world. If
you've
seen the trailer, you've figured that part out. It also, predictably,
failed the Bechdel test. Again, it has a
LOT of company there: I haven't seen a movie this summer that passed.
So bashing it for either of those? Kind of pointless unless you also
plan to froth about Pacific Rim, Star Trek Into Darkness, Iron Man 3,
World War Z......
However, it was also the best movie I've seen this summer. It's not the best movie ever made, and it certainly has its flaws (some below but just one--how the hell does Max wear that rig with a t-shirt UNDER it when he was bareskinned when they drilled it into him?) but it passed my personal test of "I didn't know 75% of the details of the ending after the first ten minutes". Unlike Pacific Rim, I wasn't writhing in my seat at the gender and race stereotypes.
NOT that there aren't stereotypes. Julio, Max's best friend, is your typical Latino gangbanger, as is most of Spider's crew. Oh boy, Hispanic gang types, covered in weird facial tattoos and wifebeaters and bandanas. I have never seen this before. :|
And there's Frey, Max's love interest. Single mom in a caretaking job who would do anything to save her daughter, who plays nurturer, helper, love interest, and damsel in distress, and the Girl Back Home (the female character for whom the male exposes himself to danger and sacrifice so that she can be safe and happy).
But there's also Max himself, an Anglo guy who is bilingual, an orphan raised by nuns, criminal and tattooed, the working class stiff who gets stiffed by his uncaring corporate job and is compelled, in desperation, to allow himself to be fitted with the exo-suit (truth: I could watch him walk in that thing all day for prurient reasons hnnnnngh). Max straddles the line, then, of criminality/legality, Anglo/Hispanic (Max De Costa isn't the WASPiest name ever and even his name 'from the coast' implies a liminal status, not land or ocean, but the line between), and human/machine.
So there are stereotypes, but even the two above are complicated in interesting ways, similarly, by straddling boundaries: the thug gangbangers are in a sense the techno-elite of Earth--Spider is the one with the real power in Max's life. They have computer and surgical knowledge, as well as combat skills. And Frey? Well...she walks away in the beginning, from Max. He's bad news from her past and she wants no part of it. And there's wonderful UST between them but it is entirely chaste: Max is actually pretty upset to find out she has a daughter. She's too damn good for him, and he knows it, and it's really a nice change. (Looking at you, Pacific Rim, Iron Man, etc etc).
It's obvious that Earth is brown and Elysium is white, except for their token 'President' Patel, who accomplishes very little and is handily hamstrung by Delacourt, who is the 'ice queen' bitch stereotype (which Jodie Foster can pull off in spades).
Which leads us to the political stuff. The Right Wing has launched a virtual campaign against this movie, saying it's pro illegal immigration propaganda, and pro Obamacare propaganda, to which I say....whaaaaaaah? Yes there are themes of citizenship and exclusion and access to health care, but though the access to the medical pods is a central goal in the narrative, it's a maguffin, really, symbolizing healed humanity, instead of some sort of documentary for health care.
Yes it's certainly a metaphor: the rich white elite hogging the best for themselves and destroying anyone trying to climb the ladder to get their share. I think any American knows that--it's nothing new to see on film: we see it every damn day all around us, with the Washington plutocrats. Have some relevant reality: you guys HAVE heard that those politicians who were so gung ho about Obamacare recently passed legislation that exempts THEM and their staffs from having to abide by it themselves? Yup. There's your Two Americas right there. There's your Elysium and Earth. What's good enough for you and I, 'universal healthcare', the Washington types think is not even close to good enough for them, right now, today, 2013.
In other words, what they have on Earth in the movie IS Obamacare! Max has free healthcare, and the overcrowded waiting rooms and almost robotic by-the-book care that is substandard while the wealthy elites get 'Cadillac' health care: no waiting, perfect care, clean and fast. That's what Congress just passed before their August recess. H-how can a movie be pro-Obamacare then?
That scene where Max is talking to his 'Parole Officer' and the robot offered him a pill got an uncomfortable laugh in the theater I was in, because we have all been there: where they'd rather throw medicine at you than actually, you know, deal with you at a human level.
Elysium, with its token dark president who is shunted aside as ineffectual, could just as easily be read as a critique of President Obama and his ineffectual policies and lavish life (isn't he on vacation right now, in fact? ). So for all the Righties wailing it's evil Left Wing Hollywood Propaganda, just saying, the government of Elysium is a real critique of our own. Mind you, for the record I don't think it's the main point of the film to push either to the right or to the left, I'm just debunking the whole 'Left Wing propaganda' hysterics by pointing out it's JUST as easy to read it as Right Wing ideology.
It's also an extension of the cyberpunk tradition. Your standard cyberpunk adventure pits one guy against a dispassionate corporation, which dehumanizes its workers, viewing, really, only other executives as 'real' and caring more about profit and safety of profit than justice or fairness or compassion or...(swap in any human virtue). Cyberpunk heros are male, who straddle boundaries between the human and the technological. And they work to bring down the system from within, even though they are outsiders, working with jerryrigged equipment, triumphing by sheer will and gumption and wits in the face of vast technological superiority.
Sounds like Max, right? Except with less 'cyberspace' and more 'punching'.
There's something to be said for the fact that Max's job is making the droids, the same kind that run elite society, act as police and enforcers. The droids do work, but they don't do the really 'dirty' work (except for the orange robot who pinch and drag pulls Max out of the bay after contamination). Dirty work is for humans, while they get the clean jobs like basic enforcement (again the dirty enforcement jobs go to a human, Kruger, and boy is he unsavory), body guards, serving drinks. He makes them, he becomes half-robot and then, well, let's just say that the point of the movie is that the human part of him is what's really important. It's hard for me to admit, but I cried, honestly watching this movie. Which is something I never thought I'd say about a Matt Damon movie.
However, it was also the best movie I've seen this summer. It's not the best movie ever made, and it certainly has its flaws (some below but just one--how the hell does Max wear that rig with a t-shirt UNDER it when he was bareskinned when they drilled it into him?) but it passed my personal test of "I didn't know 75% of the details of the ending after the first ten minutes". Unlike Pacific Rim, I wasn't writhing in my seat at the gender and race stereotypes.
NOT that there aren't stereotypes. Julio, Max's best friend, is your typical Latino gangbanger, as is most of Spider's crew. Oh boy, Hispanic gang types, covered in weird facial tattoos and wifebeaters and bandanas. I have never seen this before. :|
And there's Frey, Max's love interest. Single mom in a caretaking job who would do anything to save her daughter, who plays nurturer, helper, love interest, and damsel in distress, and the Girl Back Home (the female character for whom the male exposes himself to danger and sacrifice so that she can be safe and happy).
But there's also Max himself, an Anglo guy who is bilingual, an orphan raised by nuns, criminal and tattooed, the working class stiff who gets stiffed by his uncaring corporate job and is compelled, in desperation, to allow himself to be fitted with the exo-suit (truth: I could watch him walk in that thing all day for prurient reasons hnnnnngh). Max straddles the line, then, of criminality/legality, Anglo/Hispanic (Max De Costa isn't the WASPiest name ever and even his name 'from the coast' implies a liminal status, not land or ocean, but the line between), and human/machine.
So there are stereotypes, but even the two above are complicated in interesting ways, similarly, by straddling boundaries: the thug gangbangers are in a sense the techno-elite of Earth--Spider is the one with the real power in Max's life. They have computer and surgical knowledge, as well as combat skills. And Frey? Well...she walks away in the beginning, from Max. He's bad news from her past and she wants no part of it. And there's wonderful UST between them but it is entirely chaste: Max is actually pretty upset to find out she has a daughter. She's too damn good for him, and he knows it, and it's really a nice change. (Looking at you, Pacific Rim, Iron Man, etc etc).
It's obvious that Earth is brown and Elysium is white, except for their token 'President' Patel, who accomplishes very little and is handily hamstrung by Delacourt, who is the 'ice queen' bitch stereotype (which Jodie Foster can pull off in spades).
Which leads us to the political stuff. The Right Wing has launched a virtual campaign against this movie, saying it's pro illegal immigration propaganda, and pro Obamacare propaganda, to which I say....whaaaaaaah? Yes there are themes of citizenship and exclusion and access to health care, but though the access to the medical pods is a central goal in the narrative, it's a maguffin, really, symbolizing healed humanity, instead of some sort of documentary for health care.
Yes it's certainly a metaphor: the rich white elite hogging the best for themselves and destroying anyone trying to climb the ladder to get their share. I think any American knows that--it's nothing new to see on film: we see it every damn day all around us, with the Washington plutocrats. Have some relevant reality: you guys HAVE heard that those politicians who were so gung ho about Obamacare recently passed legislation that exempts THEM and their staffs from having to abide by it themselves? Yup. There's your Two Americas right there. There's your Elysium and Earth. What's good enough for you and I, 'universal healthcare', the Washington types think is not even close to good enough for them, right now, today, 2013.
In other words, what they have on Earth in the movie IS Obamacare! Max has free healthcare, and the overcrowded waiting rooms and almost robotic by-the-book care that is substandard while the wealthy elites get 'Cadillac' health care: no waiting, perfect care, clean and fast. That's what Congress just passed before their August recess. H-how can a movie be pro-Obamacare then?
That scene where Max is talking to his 'Parole Officer' and the robot offered him a pill got an uncomfortable laugh in the theater I was in, because we have all been there: where they'd rather throw medicine at you than actually, you know, deal with you at a human level.
Elysium, with its token dark president who is shunted aside as ineffectual, could just as easily be read as a critique of President Obama and his ineffectual policies and lavish life (isn't he on vacation right now, in fact? ). So for all the Righties wailing it's evil Left Wing Hollywood Propaganda, just saying, the government of Elysium is a real critique of our own. Mind you, for the record I don't think it's the main point of the film to push either to the right or to the left, I'm just debunking the whole 'Left Wing propaganda' hysterics by pointing out it's JUST as easy to read it as Right Wing ideology.
It's also an extension of the cyberpunk tradition. Your standard cyberpunk adventure pits one guy against a dispassionate corporation, which dehumanizes its workers, viewing, really, only other executives as 'real' and caring more about profit and safety of profit than justice or fairness or compassion or...(swap in any human virtue). Cyberpunk heros are male, who straddle boundaries between the human and the technological. And they work to bring down the system from within, even though they are outsiders, working with jerryrigged equipment, triumphing by sheer will and gumption and wits in the face of vast technological superiority.
Sounds like Max, right? Except with less 'cyberspace' and more 'punching'.
There's something to be said for the fact that Max's job is making the droids, the same kind that run elite society, act as police and enforcers. The droids do work, but they don't do the really 'dirty' work (except for the orange robot who pinch and drag pulls Max out of the bay after contamination). Dirty work is for humans, while they get the clean jobs like basic enforcement (again the dirty enforcement jobs go to a human, Kruger, and boy is he unsavory), body guards, serving drinks. He makes them, he becomes half-robot and then, well, let's just say that the point of the movie is that the human part of him is what's really important. It's hard for me to admit, but I cried, honestly watching this movie. Which is something I never thought I'd say about a Matt Damon movie.
Friday, July 26, 2013
So here's a First World Pain for ya
That moment when everyone you know is flailing about a movie, and you go see it, and so badly want to love it and....wow ahahaa hell no.
I'd really love to see a movie and not spend half of it eyerolling at the incredibly dense borderline insulting ethnic and gender stereotypes that make up the entire main cast.
Also I'd like to see a movie that gets basic physics right. Oh no, I'm not talking about combat physics here, those I can suspend quite a bit of disbelief for. But when, ten minutes in, we throw basic aerodynamics in the shitter because we simply MUST without doubt have the Sad Asian Girl Under Umbrella trope (uh, I dunno if any of y'all ever spend time around helicopters but an open umbrella and a close range landing copter...don't mix.
(In B4 'it's the fyooture they have magic wind resisting umbrellas).
I'd like to see a movie where I don't know the end after the first twenty minutes of the film.
I'm disappointed. I really really wanted to like this movie, and all my fandom friends are flailing about it, the ones whose opinions matter to me, and so I see it and I'm just...I think I didn't see the same movie? Because I saw something with offensive stereotypes of Germans, nerds, and Asians, where Russians are Bleached Bitches, and Crimson Typhoon is run by three Chinese triplets.... because, ya know, they all look alike. *headdesk*.
. I saw a movie where MEN win the war, and the one woman who actually gets some rounding is still called a 'girl' not a 'woman'. I saw a movie where once again White American Man saves the universe, with everyone else being supporting players. I saw a movie with a mess of a political message (we caused this with Global Warming, I say, in the middle of July about to put on a sweater), but that in the end entirely supports Western cultural imperialism and appropriation. And of course heterosexual romance. If a female exists and has a personality, she must be romance fodder.
I'm just...I'm tired of it? I'm tired of 'strong female characters' meaning 'female character overcoming some past trauma who is emotionally, therefore, made of spun sugar.'.
And what was with Del Toro giving the definitions and pronunciation of kaiju and jaeger in the opening seconds of the film? What the hell was that about? Does he trust his audience so little he thinks we can't handle foreign words? Is it another signifiier of the cooptation of the alien?
I FEEL A CONFERENCE PAPER COMING ON....
I'd really love to see a movie and not spend half of it eyerolling at the incredibly dense borderline insulting ethnic and gender stereotypes that make up the entire main cast.
Also I'd like to see a movie that gets basic physics right. Oh no, I'm not talking about combat physics here, those I can suspend quite a bit of disbelief for. But when, ten minutes in, we throw basic aerodynamics in the shitter because we simply MUST without doubt have the Sad Asian Girl Under Umbrella trope (uh, I dunno if any of y'all ever spend time around helicopters but an open umbrella and a close range landing copter...don't mix.
(In B4 'it's the fyooture they have magic wind resisting umbrellas).
I'd like to see a movie where I don't know the end after the first twenty minutes of the film.
I'm disappointed. I really really wanted to like this movie, and all my fandom friends are flailing about it, the ones whose opinions matter to me, and so I see it and I'm just...I think I didn't see the same movie? Because I saw something with offensive stereotypes of Germans, nerds, and Asians, where Russians are Bleached Bitches, and Crimson Typhoon is run by three Chinese triplets.... because, ya know, they all look alike. *headdesk*.
. I saw a movie where MEN win the war, and the one woman who actually gets some rounding is still called a 'girl' not a 'woman'. I saw a movie where once again White American Man saves the universe, with everyone else being supporting players. I saw a movie with a mess of a political message (we caused this with Global Warming, I say, in the middle of July about to put on a sweater), but that in the end entirely supports Western cultural imperialism and appropriation. And of course heterosexual romance. If a female exists and has a personality, she must be romance fodder.
I'm just...I'm tired of it? I'm tired of 'strong female characters' meaning 'female character overcoming some past trauma who is emotionally, therefore, made of spun sugar.'.
And what was with Del Toro giving the definitions and pronunciation of kaiju and jaeger in the opening seconds of the film? What the hell was that about? Does he trust his audience so little he thinks we can't handle foreign words? Is it another signifiier of the cooptation of the alien?
I FEEL A CONFERENCE PAPER COMING ON....
Friday, July 19, 2013
collective pitchforks
I'm
sort of struggling with this developing meme in internet culture. This
idea, I don't know how to put it, that if someone has some belief you
find distasteful or if you dislike them as a person, then you should
chuck out all they've done as worthless. This motif has cropped up at
least 4 times in the last two weeks and it keeps making me more and more
uncomfortable. Most recently, the revelation that one of the developers of a game called Flight Rising is sort of a transphobic dick. (Though can I be blunt? Being surprised that a developer of a game whose premise requires the erasure of any sexuality other than heterosexual pair bonding for reproduction is sort of heterosexist is...a bit like being STUNNED to find that a developer of Call of Duty is into guns).
Let's do a thought experiment, okay? Let's take a look at the Western Literary Canon, and let's NOPE anyone who is a misogynist, imperialist, capitalist, racist, anti-Semite or homophobic. OR, just generally an asshole.
NO Greek lit: those Athenians didn't grant women full status, and they kept slaves.
No Roman lit: imperialists, the very model of a culture co-opting the cultures it colonizes.
No Medieval lit: homophobic, misogynistic, viewed any racial other as sub human.
No Shakespeare: no, no oh my no. Racist (Caliban, Othello), Imperialist, capitalist extraordinaire, trivializes rape
No Chaucer, of course: imperialist, sexist.
No Margery Kempe: internalized misogyny, homophobic.
No Dryden: imperialist, racist
No Pope: trivializes rape
No Swift: racist, also an asshole.
No Austen: classist, imperialist, heterosexist
No Bronte: racist (oh god Bertha), heterosexist
No Lawrence: misogynist, major asshole, his depiction of Mexico in the Plumed Serpent's pretty racist, too.
No Woolf: okay I just put here here because she thought birds spoke Greek.
No Joyce: trivializes mental illness, racist, anti-Semite
No Wharton: anti-Semite
I'm assuming you know that no early American lit would make the cut for racism (Jefferson kept slaves, Melville's Queequeg makes Tonto look good, The Last of the Mohicans is just....argh.)
Okay, I think maybe you get the general trend here? Now, in most cases, I can point to places in their works where these beliefs are expressed. In some cases, no. Wharton never discusses religion in her novels, so her anti-Semitism is never 'on the page' as it were. And I've....kind of gutted the entire Western Canon.
Maybe it's, you know, the bias of my job, but I don't think that's quite a good idea? . I find a wonderful coziness in Austen, I adore Wharton, and Pope? Well, he won my heart by his life story (as a Catholic, he was marginalized, not allowed to own property, and was the first writer to earn his entire living from his pen. His friend had to sign for his house. He was also crippled. Also Essay on Man is amazing.) Is there NOTHING good in Shakespeare? Is there nothing good in any American lit? Is there nothing wonderful in Plato or Socrates?
It's the whole 'baby out with the bathwater' thing that distresses me. Because I can look at these people and say whoa, problem, son, but I can still find worth and value and beauty in their works. Maybe I look at my bookshelf and feel like I'm somehow a rotten person for loving these people despite their beliefs that I don't agree with. I feel guilty, like I'm somehow complicit in their worldview. But I know I'm not. I think that no one's perfect.
At first I was going to say, well, you know, they're products of their time. Singling out Wharton or Jefferson or The Bard when the majority of the culture they lived in believed the same thing is kind of unfair.
But then I thought, well, that's true. They were products of their time. And guess what else was a product of their time? Their wit, the beautiful words they created, those fantastic characters that have become, as Shakespeare gives us 'household names'. The time that created the good in them was the same time that created the 'bad' in them.
More than that, I worry about where this leads. Not just the idea that now we throw out the Western Canon and I guess we twiddle our thumbs in lit classes, unable to read anything, but this newfangled censorship. People WILL disagree with you in life. People WILL have opinions maybe you don't like. (My grammy was racist: am I supposed to not love my own grandmother?) I find as I get older I want to look for the good even in the bad. Because someone believes something I don't care for doesn't mean they are worthless. I mean, didn't it make like WORLD NEWS the other week that the Dalai Lama said he'd be okay with a female successor? It was news because, guess what? The Tibetan Buddhists are....oh boy howdy, pretty sexist. Does that mean there's no value in ANY of their teachings?
Good lord, I hope not.
And I worry where this goes, because this strikes me as the thought police, as a form of rage-based censorship, that can only lead to burning books. I mean, they're already wishing this Thrage man dead.
Let's do a thought experiment, okay? Let's take a look at the Western Literary Canon, and let's NOPE anyone who is a misogynist, imperialist, capitalist, racist, anti-Semite or homophobic. OR, just generally an asshole.
NO Greek lit: those Athenians didn't grant women full status, and they kept slaves.
No Roman lit: imperialists, the very model of a culture co-opting the cultures it colonizes.
No Medieval lit: homophobic, misogynistic, viewed any racial other as sub human.
No Shakespeare: no, no oh my no. Racist (Caliban, Othello), Imperialist, capitalist extraordinaire, trivializes rape
No Chaucer, of course: imperialist, sexist.
No Margery Kempe: internalized misogyny, homophobic.
No Dryden: imperialist, racist
No Pope: trivializes rape
No Swift: racist, also an asshole.
No Austen: classist, imperialist, heterosexist
No Bronte: racist (oh god Bertha), heterosexist
No Lawrence: misogynist, major asshole, his depiction of Mexico in the Plumed Serpent's pretty racist, too.
No Woolf: okay I just put here here because she thought birds spoke Greek.
No Joyce: trivializes mental illness, racist, anti-Semite
No Wharton: anti-Semite
I'm assuming you know that no early American lit would make the cut for racism (Jefferson kept slaves, Melville's Queequeg makes Tonto look good, The Last of the Mohicans is just....argh.)
Okay, I think maybe you get the general trend here? Now, in most cases, I can point to places in their works where these beliefs are expressed. In some cases, no. Wharton never discusses religion in her novels, so her anti-Semitism is never 'on the page' as it were. And I've....kind of gutted the entire Western Canon.
Maybe it's, you know, the bias of my job, but I don't think that's quite a good idea? . I find a wonderful coziness in Austen, I adore Wharton, and Pope? Well, he won my heart by his life story (as a Catholic, he was marginalized, not allowed to own property, and was the first writer to earn his entire living from his pen. His friend had to sign for his house. He was also crippled. Also Essay on Man is amazing.) Is there NOTHING good in Shakespeare? Is there nothing good in any American lit? Is there nothing wonderful in Plato or Socrates?
It's the whole 'baby out with the bathwater' thing that distresses me. Because I can look at these people and say whoa, problem, son, but I can still find worth and value and beauty in their works. Maybe I look at my bookshelf and feel like I'm somehow a rotten person for loving these people despite their beliefs that I don't agree with. I feel guilty, like I'm somehow complicit in their worldview. But I know I'm not. I think that no one's perfect.
At first I was going to say, well, you know, they're products of their time. Singling out Wharton or Jefferson or The Bard when the majority of the culture they lived in believed the same thing is kind of unfair.
But then I thought, well, that's true. They were products of their time. And guess what else was a product of their time? Their wit, the beautiful words they created, those fantastic characters that have become, as Shakespeare gives us 'household names'. The time that created the good in them was the same time that created the 'bad' in them.
More than that, I worry about where this leads. Not just the idea that now we throw out the Western Canon and I guess we twiddle our thumbs in lit classes, unable to read anything, but this newfangled censorship. People WILL disagree with you in life. People WILL have opinions maybe you don't like. (My grammy was racist: am I supposed to not love my own grandmother?) I find as I get older I want to look for the good even in the bad. Because someone believes something I don't care for doesn't mean they are worthless. I mean, didn't it make like WORLD NEWS the other week that the Dalai Lama said he'd be okay with a female successor? It was news because, guess what? The Tibetan Buddhists are....oh boy howdy, pretty sexist. Does that mean there's no value in ANY of their teachings?
Good lord, I hope not.
And I worry where this goes, because this strikes me as the thought police, as a form of rage-based censorship, that can only lead to burning books. I mean, they're already wishing this Thrage man dead.
Sunday, July 14, 2013
Charivari of Things
So, for PCA this past spring, I wrote a paper about shadow, empurata and
identity in robots. And it was one of those conference papers that are
like 'hey, it's a thing! look at this thing! it sure is a thing!' where
you know there's something interesting under there, but you can't quite
figure out what it is. Especially not in a 15 minute paper.
Well, so I was thinking more about it. I realize it could so very easily work to explain post-humanism. Our idea of the fractured self, the non-centered subject, is actually pretty clearly exploded in the test. Because it goes like this, very basically: posthuman theory indicates that we are, in a sense, not 'us'. There is no coherent you or me, there is no 'inner self'. This kind of goes against all the Western society's vision of a coherent self, and a coherent self that creates a coherent narrative, a 'life story'. I've often sort of joked that when you're ready to die, you'll look back and see how dots lined up and What It All Meant, that you'll then, and only then, know the 'whole story', the narrative arc, the main plot/theme/conflict of your life.
That kind of structure has kept Western literature alive for two thousand years. The idea that IT ALL MAKES SENSE. Every novel has its denouement, where all the pieces finally rattle into place. Everything happens for a reason. I could pile on the cliches, but you get the idea. The notion of narrative coherence controls Western literature. (If you've ever read any World Lit, especially Asian, you might notice it's...different
Post Humanism chucks all that out the window. There's no coherent self.
In a very basic form, we get this. You have a facebook page, a tumblr, a twitter, maybe a pinterest, etc etc. And you know, you've seen it at least at one point, where someone knows you only from one site, where you're only available in small bits, that the you they know isn't the whole picture. Or you've had something you've wanted to post, an article you found, a joke and you have to stop and say, OKAY, which one do I post it to? Is this something I tweet, or do I save it for my livejournal or on tumblr or, or, or.... That's a tiny internal recognition that the persona you develop for each site is slightly different. It is nearly impossible to be the same throughout all sites--if nothing else because you'd spend half your day crossposting across every site.
Well, there you go, right? There is no coherent you, only a bunch of micro-yous, each of them IS you, but none of them is the totality, each is a fragment, like a hologram, of you. And each of these holograms, curiously, exists in pixels. Each of these yous: twitter you, tumblr you, blog you, facebook you--they exist simply in cyberspace.
Haraway spent pages squeeing that the internet, the computer, the dawning digital age, the age of information would allow us free rein over information, over ourselves, and like the heroes in cyberpunk novels, the self, the 'meat' is the thing left behind. She envisioned that the internet would set us free of the meat (her ideas really cling to that mind/body dichotomy in ways that discomfit me more and more), so that racism, sexism, any sort of prejudice that relates to the body would either simply fall away, or we'd be free to open other doors, try on other identities, embrace this new freedom.
Maybe that is happening, but it's sure NOT happening on Reddit or fandom.
Anyway, back to center: the whole idea of changing out parts of the body, or removing parts of the personality or identity, really say some interesting things about post human identity. What I'd struggled with in the paper was that I was trying to make it all *mean* something, connect it to the Western tradition where it all makes narrative sense. Taking the three--torture (which plants one solidly in the body and turns it into an enemy); empurata, which makes the body alien, othered; and shadowplay, which disrupts/assaults the integrity of the mind--they all call into question the very notion of the coherent, stable self.
Well, so I was thinking more about it. I realize it could so very easily work to explain post-humanism. Our idea of the fractured self, the non-centered subject, is actually pretty clearly exploded in the test. Because it goes like this, very basically: posthuman theory indicates that we are, in a sense, not 'us'. There is no coherent you or me, there is no 'inner self'. This kind of goes against all the Western society's vision of a coherent self, and a coherent self that creates a coherent narrative, a 'life story'. I've often sort of joked that when you're ready to die, you'll look back and see how dots lined up and What It All Meant, that you'll then, and only then, know the 'whole story', the narrative arc, the main plot/theme/conflict of your life.
That kind of structure has kept Western literature alive for two thousand years. The idea that IT ALL MAKES SENSE. Every novel has its denouement, where all the pieces finally rattle into place. Everything happens for a reason. I could pile on the cliches, but you get the idea. The notion of narrative coherence controls Western literature. (If you've ever read any World Lit, especially Asian, you might notice it's...different
Post Humanism chucks all that out the window. There's no coherent self.
In a very basic form, we get this. You have a facebook page, a tumblr, a twitter, maybe a pinterest, etc etc. And you know, you've seen it at least at one point, where someone knows you only from one site, where you're only available in small bits, that the you they know isn't the whole picture. Or you've had something you've wanted to post, an article you found, a joke and you have to stop and say, OKAY, which one do I post it to? Is this something I tweet, or do I save it for my livejournal or on tumblr or, or, or.... That's a tiny internal recognition that the persona you develop for each site is slightly different. It is nearly impossible to be the same throughout all sites--if nothing else because you'd spend half your day crossposting across every site.
Well, there you go, right? There is no coherent you, only a bunch of micro-yous, each of them IS you, but none of them is the totality, each is a fragment, like a hologram, of you. And each of these holograms, curiously, exists in pixels. Each of these yous: twitter you, tumblr you, blog you, facebook you--they exist simply in cyberspace.
Haraway spent pages squeeing that the internet, the computer, the dawning digital age, the age of information would allow us free rein over information, over ourselves, and like the heroes in cyberpunk novels, the self, the 'meat' is the thing left behind. She envisioned that the internet would set us free of the meat (her ideas really cling to that mind/body dichotomy in ways that discomfit me more and more), so that racism, sexism, any sort of prejudice that relates to the body would either simply fall away, or we'd be free to open other doors, try on other identities, embrace this new freedom.
Maybe that is happening, but it's sure NOT happening on Reddit or fandom.
Anyway, back to center: the whole idea of changing out parts of the body, or removing parts of the personality or identity, really say some interesting things about post human identity. What I'd struggled with in the paper was that I was trying to make it all *mean* something, connect it to the Western tradition where it all makes narrative sense. Taking the three--torture (which plants one solidly in the body and turns it into an enemy); empurata, which makes the body alien, othered; and shadowplay, which disrupts/assaults the integrity of the mind--they all call into question the very notion of the coherent, stable self.
Friday, July 5, 2013
Like some bizarre hazing ritual
I finally finished watching The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I keep hearing these papers at pop culture conferences talk about this show, of course, because gynoids, and so I figured that while I'd skipped it when it initially released, I had missed out!
For only being 9 episodes long...it felt like some kind of interminable purgatory. I could discuss its many, many failings, such as the terrible way it 'deals' with the whole timetravel paradox (it doesn't), or how it basically creates a world where it seems like half the key players are robots from the future, or how absolutely painful half of Cameron's scenes are or the utter lack of levity in an attempt to create a gritty deep profound story out of....a mother who is actually pretty creepy (that scene in the last episode where she starts stroking John's head is just....no.), and the TERRIBLE formula of her Thorazined monologues which almost always defer to some greater male authority or, or....you see I could go on. I really do just wonder what in this world John Connor would find worth saving in the future: his youth appears to have been UTTERLY humorless and paranoiac. Having an evil robot overlord can't be much worse than having Sarah Connor and her constant isolationism.
Instead, I want to collect my thoughts as to why I actually watched it: the view of robot vs human. This universe implies that Skynet is rooted in Turk, Andy Good's chess playing computer that is emotionally unstable, which roots Skynet in strategy and logic, but also 'wrong' emotion. Turk shows negative emotions: Good says it's capable of getting angry--but never positive ones. We see other robot-turned-on-creator stories, notably 2001, where HAL is absolutely logical. And I think the idea of an emotional AI is interesting, especially with the current state of cybernetic research, but it sort of makes strange the uncanny emotionlessness of the Skynet androids and gynoids.
Because the robots here are absolutely emotionless. It was wonderful as a foil in T2--Schwarzenegger's 'learning' robot who is in a sense discovering complexity and emotion, and the T-1000's alienness. You know, foils, and the idea of an older model being 'imperfect' in ways that made him more like us.
Compared to that, we have Cameron, or as I started calling her, Small Wonder Grows Up. And Cameron...bothers me. Part of it is the gung ho faux feminism of 'let's have a female Terminator that'll be edgy!' And of course to be different and edgy, they also cast her as a very slight, gracile actress, Summer Glau. Because, you know, skinny starlets can kick ass too! Maybe I'm hypersensitive but I feel sort of patronized.
Her clothing is of course in character for a 'high school' student, which means we see way more of her belly than we ever see of Ahnold's and her jeans are creaky-tight. BUT they could, I acknowledge, have gotten way more provocative with her dress.
What is interesting to me is the way the camerawork basically framed her alienness as beauty. In fact, take any still shot of Cameron from that series and lay it next to just about any runway model, and you'll be startled by the similarities: the poreless perfection, the absolute refusal to emote anything, radiate anything other than 'I am beautiful and you are not'. I'd initially figured she simply graduated from the Wednesday Addams School of Acting, but even Wednesday occasionally does something with her face. So we have the idea of a pet-T-1000. But without the cool liquid metal properties of the T-1000. This is of course retconned as an EVEN MOAR ADVANCED MODEL.
The way the camera poses around her, constantly highlighting her looks, would be less odd if we did the same thing with the male robots in the series. Instead, the only time the camera really lingers on them is when they're damaged, so it's clear to us (as if it wasn't already from their similarly wooden acting) that they are Not Human. In them, the robotness is revealed through the skin, the failure of the mask to hold, the robot/alien rupturing the facade. With Cameron, we almost never get to see her damaged or injured, as though her looks or her gender somehow protect her, or that that gaze is somehow impossible to perform on her.
Of course the series ends (trying WAY too hard to get our attention in a mishmosh kitchen sink season ender cliffhanger) with Cameron possibly blown up and the male Terminator on the run after a scene where we find he can't actually kill his human counterpart....why? He had no problem dunking a bunch of SWAT guys dead in the drink in what must have been half the episode's special effects budget.
And then, of course Sarah Connor herself. I won't pass much more judgment on her as a mother, but I would like to say a few words about motherhood. First, it is kind of terrifying to me, to look at how our society constructs good mother: in short it is a woman who gives up every last vestige of will, independence and identity, melting herself into this perfect nutrient matrix for her child. Any indication that she might want to do other things (not instead of, but in addition to, childrearing) is stamped on as selfish and strangely puerile, like a mother wanting to have more than that one facet to her identity is somehow immature, and clearly not fit.
We see this all-consuming motherhood matrix begin as soon as the woman is publicly known to be pregnant--suddenly, she's no longer allowed to drink alcohol, at all, in any measure. Even the simple pleasure of a glass of wine is seen as selfish and terrible.
Anyway, Sarah Connor is presciently, exactly that kind of mother. Every moment of her life, every thought in her head, is about John, her son. But it's a joyless relationship and there's no real hint they even like each other--it's all about the future of the world. Maternality is coded in our culture as being for the child's future, this just simply raises the stakes.
But more than that (or rather, less than that) Sarah Connor is isolated. It's interesting how very few females there are in this show: all of the antagonists are male. All of the big brains who work on the computers are male. Just about every authority figure is male. And she's constantly invoking male authority, and, of course, male help. She's a strangely isolated figure in all this, 'dating' Andy Good only to learn about Turk, having to use Enrique for ID purposes, and even her former boyfriend/fiance (who I cannot unsee as the Allstate Mayhem man) seems to exist either as a cover story, or when we conveniently need an EMT.
And part of me is reading this over and going, wow I really am falling into that trap of picking on the women, which I kind of dislike, because the whole trope of female bashing female is all too real for most women. I guess my main discontent is about the idea of 'strong female characters'. Because I'm sure the show and its fans think Sarah and Cameron are strong female characters. I...can't agree. And that's because, well, I'll take the 'female' out for a second: they're not strong characters. They're monodimensional and mentally damaged and though resourceful, their emotional stilting (both of them) make them unrelatable and unsympathetic.
Now let's take out the strong and consider the female: they are female, all TOO female, and I think my issue is that that not only BECOMES their sole identity (mother, femme fatale), but that the femininity they perform isn't all that admirable. The stiff beauty. The hard as nails momma bear. Neither of these are aspirational models for anyone.
For only being 9 episodes long...it felt like some kind of interminable purgatory. I could discuss its many, many failings, such as the terrible way it 'deals' with the whole timetravel paradox (it doesn't), or how it basically creates a world where it seems like half the key players are robots from the future, or how absolutely painful half of Cameron's scenes are or the utter lack of levity in an attempt to create a gritty deep profound story out of....a mother who is actually pretty creepy (that scene in the last episode where she starts stroking John's head is just....no.), and the TERRIBLE formula of her Thorazined monologues which almost always defer to some greater male authority or, or....you see I could go on. I really do just wonder what in this world John Connor would find worth saving in the future: his youth appears to have been UTTERLY humorless and paranoiac. Having an evil robot overlord can't be much worse than having Sarah Connor and her constant isolationism.
Instead, I want to collect my thoughts as to why I actually watched it: the view of robot vs human. This universe implies that Skynet is rooted in Turk, Andy Good's chess playing computer that is emotionally unstable, which roots Skynet in strategy and logic, but also 'wrong' emotion. Turk shows negative emotions: Good says it's capable of getting angry--but never positive ones. We see other robot-turned-on-creator stories, notably 2001, where HAL is absolutely logical. And I think the idea of an emotional AI is interesting, especially with the current state of cybernetic research, but it sort of makes strange the uncanny emotionlessness of the Skynet androids and gynoids.
Because the robots here are absolutely emotionless. It was wonderful as a foil in T2--Schwarzenegger's 'learning' robot who is in a sense discovering complexity and emotion, and the T-1000's alienness. You know, foils, and the idea of an older model being 'imperfect' in ways that made him more like us.
Compared to that, we have Cameron, or as I started calling her, Small Wonder Grows Up. And Cameron...bothers me. Part of it is the gung ho faux feminism of 'let's have a female Terminator that'll be edgy!' And of course to be different and edgy, they also cast her as a very slight, gracile actress, Summer Glau. Because, you know, skinny starlets can kick ass too! Maybe I'm hypersensitive but I feel sort of patronized.
Her clothing is of course in character for a 'high school' student, which means we see way more of her belly than we ever see of Ahnold's and her jeans are creaky-tight. BUT they could, I acknowledge, have gotten way more provocative with her dress.
What is interesting to me is the way the camerawork basically framed her alienness as beauty. In fact, take any still shot of Cameron from that series and lay it next to just about any runway model, and you'll be startled by the similarities: the poreless perfection, the absolute refusal to emote anything, radiate anything other than 'I am beautiful and you are not'. I'd initially figured she simply graduated from the Wednesday Addams School of Acting, but even Wednesday occasionally does something with her face. So we have the idea of a pet-T-1000. But without the cool liquid metal properties of the T-1000. This is of course retconned as an EVEN MOAR ADVANCED MODEL.
The way the camera poses around her, constantly highlighting her looks, would be less odd if we did the same thing with the male robots in the series. Instead, the only time the camera really lingers on them is when they're damaged, so it's clear to us (as if it wasn't already from their similarly wooden acting) that they are Not Human. In them, the robotness is revealed through the skin, the failure of the mask to hold, the robot/alien rupturing the facade. With Cameron, we almost never get to see her damaged or injured, as though her looks or her gender somehow protect her, or that that gaze is somehow impossible to perform on her.
Of course the series ends (trying WAY too hard to get our attention in a mishmosh kitchen sink season ender cliffhanger) with Cameron possibly blown up and the male Terminator on the run after a scene where we find he can't actually kill his human counterpart....why? He had no problem dunking a bunch of SWAT guys dead in the drink in what must have been half the episode's special effects budget.
And then, of course Sarah Connor herself. I won't pass much more judgment on her as a mother, but I would like to say a few words about motherhood. First, it is kind of terrifying to me, to look at how our society constructs good mother: in short it is a woman who gives up every last vestige of will, independence and identity, melting herself into this perfect nutrient matrix for her child. Any indication that she might want to do other things (not instead of, but in addition to, childrearing) is stamped on as selfish and strangely puerile, like a mother wanting to have more than that one facet to her identity is somehow immature, and clearly not fit.
We see this all-consuming motherhood matrix begin as soon as the woman is publicly known to be pregnant--suddenly, she's no longer allowed to drink alcohol, at all, in any measure. Even the simple pleasure of a glass of wine is seen as selfish and terrible.
Anyway, Sarah Connor is presciently, exactly that kind of mother. Every moment of her life, every thought in her head, is about John, her son. But it's a joyless relationship and there's no real hint they even like each other--it's all about the future of the world. Maternality is coded in our culture as being for the child's future, this just simply raises the stakes.
But more than that (or rather, less than that) Sarah Connor is isolated. It's interesting how very few females there are in this show: all of the antagonists are male. All of the big brains who work on the computers are male. Just about every authority figure is male. And she's constantly invoking male authority, and, of course, male help. She's a strangely isolated figure in all this, 'dating' Andy Good only to learn about Turk, having to use Enrique for ID purposes, and even her former boyfriend/fiance (who I cannot unsee as the Allstate Mayhem man) seems to exist either as a cover story, or when we conveniently need an EMT.
And part of me is reading this over and going, wow I really am falling into that trap of picking on the women, which I kind of dislike, because the whole trope of female bashing female is all too real for most women. I guess my main discontent is about the idea of 'strong female characters'. Because I'm sure the show and its fans think Sarah and Cameron are strong female characters. I...can't agree. And that's because, well, I'll take the 'female' out for a second: they're not strong characters. They're monodimensional and mentally damaged and though resourceful, their emotional stilting (both of them) make them unrelatable and unsympathetic.
Now let's take out the strong and consider the female: they are female, all TOO female, and I think my issue is that that not only BECOMES their sole identity (mother, femme fatale), but that the femininity they perform isn't all that admirable. The stiff beauty. The hard as nails momma bear. Neither of these are aspirational models for anyone.
Sunday, June 23, 2013
Not So Great Moments in Feminist Irony
I'm searching around for a decent basic gender studies article for a unit I am doing in Freshman Comp, so my weekend has been filled with reading and trying to evaluate comprehension level and how well the article will confront the inevitable student objection: "It's JUST a (movie, tv show, advertisement, etc)" which basically implies that any sort of critical thought, much less critique, about an artifact of mass media is somehow trivial and humorless and taking things too seriously.
It's doubly hard to confront when it comes from a male student, who already may have it in his head that feminism (or the female professor he's talking to who just happens to be a feminist) is a grim, humorless thing designed to punish men and deprive the world of every crumb of fun.
I found a nice article comparing Adorno and Fiske. A quickie recap in case you're not hip to this proverbial trip. Adorno was one of a group of Germans who fled his home country during World War Two. It's not hard to imagine the connection he has, the awareness he learned firsthand, how Hitler and the Nazis had such control over the 'mass' media. (It was not complete control, of course: the movie All Quiet on the Western Front was still screened in Germany, just with vociferous interruptions, including in at least one noticeable instance, the release of mice in the movie theater. But you could argue this supports the idea: if you have to stoop to rodentia, you're trying quite obviously and tangibly to control the media.). Adorno believes in the Culture Industry, that it's not a 'mass' media at all: you and I have no real ability to create the culture. Even if we aspire to do that by, say, becoming a filmmaker or an author, we'll have to face a number of gatekeepers who will limit or diminish our ability to do so: the Hollywood mogul will tell us that our movie won't make box office, and therefore goes unfunded, the editor who tells us that it's not right for 'the market' right now.
When it comes to gender, the mass media is insidious and penetrates into just about all aspects of life. I recently got a prescription for my progestin refilled: they swapped out my (previous) generic for a brand name. The previous pill was yellow: this one is pink. Pink. Really? I need to have gender color in my hormones? Does this make it more effective somehow? (It even has a flowery sounding name!)
My period tracking app has pink flowers all over it (I searched for an app that wasn't swaddled in pink and/or flowers and failed abjectly) because, as we all know, the most FEMININE thing a woman can do is menstruate. Logging my PMS symptoms using kawaii faces and cutesy images seems almost to diminish the stuff, or at least try to make the least fun thing about my gender 'fun'! (Hint: it does not succeed). If I could code and program these things, I'd make an app that had little robots instead. Sure, they could be cute, why not?
Adorno argues that there is no escape from the system, that anything, even a deliberate rejection of the main message is still, in a sense, acknowledging the main message. So the punks with their deliberate DIY style, anti-pretty message, were defining themselves against the mass media message: couldn't, in a sense, have existed without 80s culture.
(The irony is, punk has become ludicrously commodified: just go to Hot Topic and consume and conform....to an anti-consumer, anti-capitalist subculture?)
So I'm knee deep in pondering when I look over at my clock and say, OH, I should get going. Because, you see, I got my magazine subscription yesterday. Which itself is fraught with feminist baggage--how the women in the workout features are less 'fit' than 'cachectic' and have perfect hair and makeup and are even SMILING as they work out--compared to the grunty, sweaty shredded male counterpart.
And I could try to wiggle my way out of this and say OH I like it for the recipes, or the women's health issues features, but I have to admit, what caught my eye this month was a feature on makeup and I wanted to put down my heavy gender theory stuff to go to the drugstore and see if they did, in fact, have a nice pale-green pearlescent creme eyeshadow.
Adorno would be facepalming, but then, I think, he'd sagely nod and say, yes, conformity. No one escapes.
It's doubly hard to confront when it comes from a male student, who already may have it in his head that feminism (or the female professor he's talking to who just happens to be a feminist) is a grim, humorless thing designed to punish men and deprive the world of every crumb of fun.
I found a nice article comparing Adorno and Fiske. A quickie recap in case you're not hip to this proverbial trip. Adorno was one of a group of Germans who fled his home country during World War Two. It's not hard to imagine the connection he has, the awareness he learned firsthand, how Hitler and the Nazis had such control over the 'mass' media. (It was not complete control, of course: the movie All Quiet on the Western Front was still screened in Germany, just with vociferous interruptions, including in at least one noticeable instance, the release of mice in the movie theater. But you could argue this supports the idea: if you have to stoop to rodentia, you're trying quite obviously and tangibly to control the media.). Adorno believes in the Culture Industry, that it's not a 'mass' media at all: you and I have no real ability to create the culture. Even if we aspire to do that by, say, becoming a filmmaker or an author, we'll have to face a number of gatekeepers who will limit or diminish our ability to do so: the Hollywood mogul will tell us that our movie won't make box office, and therefore goes unfunded, the editor who tells us that it's not right for 'the market' right now.
When it comes to gender, the mass media is insidious and penetrates into just about all aspects of life. I recently got a prescription for my progestin refilled: they swapped out my (previous) generic for a brand name. The previous pill was yellow: this one is pink. Pink. Really? I need to have gender color in my hormones? Does this make it more effective somehow? (It even has a flowery sounding name!)
My period tracking app has pink flowers all over it (I searched for an app that wasn't swaddled in pink and/or flowers and failed abjectly) because, as we all know, the most FEMININE thing a woman can do is menstruate. Logging my PMS symptoms using kawaii faces and cutesy images seems almost to diminish the stuff, or at least try to make the least fun thing about my gender 'fun'! (Hint: it does not succeed). If I could code and program these things, I'd make an app that had little robots instead. Sure, they could be cute, why not?
Adorno argues that there is no escape from the system, that anything, even a deliberate rejection of the main message is still, in a sense, acknowledging the main message. So the punks with their deliberate DIY style, anti-pretty message, were defining themselves against the mass media message: couldn't, in a sense, have existed without 80s culture.
(The irony is, punk has become ludicrously commodified: just go to Hot Topic and consume and conform....to an anti-consumer, anti-capitalist subculture?)
So I'm knee deep in pondering when I look over at my clock and say, OH, I should get going. Because, you see, I got my magazine subscription yesterday. Which itself is fraught with feminist baggage--how the women in the workout features are less 'fit' than 'cachectic' and have perfect hair and makeup and are even SMILING as they work out--compared to the grunty, sweaty shredded male counterpart.
And I could try to wiggle my way out of this and say OH I like it for the recipes, or the women's health issues features, but I have to admit, what caught my eye this month was a feature on makeup and I wanted to put down my heavy gender theory stuff to go to the drugstore and see if they did, in fact, have a nice pale-green pearlescent creme eyeshadow.
Adorno would be facepalming, but then, I think, he'd sagely nod and say, yes, conformity. No one escapes.
Thursday, June 20, 2013
there's a mountain here not coming to mohammad
So, the newest edition of the Transformers comic came out and as usual it's full of potboilery melodrama. That's not a judgment statement, or rather, it is if you understand how much I love Victorian potboilery melodrama. Which may, now that I think of it, be informing the dissatisfaction that prompted this post.
Because the response (the people I watch on twitter, tumblr and plurk are predominantly female, but I don't want to make a gender statement about this) is overwhelmingly of the 'ZOMG MY FEELS' variety, judgments on how cute a character is, and how devastated they'll be if a character dies.
What strikes me about these responses is twofold. First, the generic, almost compulsory behavior of it, and second, the way they foreground the reader's emotional response.
There's a sort of competitiveness, a 'first!' in fan culture. The first response to a post, the first response post to a comment. It's just how it is. And every Wednesday (for comics) or Friday (for the tv show in my canon), people flood social media with their response.
It's curious to note the importance of individuality in this (which seems sort of ironically contradictory, considering how generic and samey the responses are): people have to make their own plurk, their own tweet, their own post, instead of commenting on another's.
The generic nature of the responses is also interesting (yet strangely tedious). There's no serious analysis of plot or character or world: discussion is all surface and emotional. There's not even any serious analysis of the emotional response--the 'feels' have taken over. Part of me wonders, but can only speculate, if this is a sign of a growing inarticulacy about emotional state or is it unnecessary to go beyond feels and reaction .gif.
I'm one of the people who don't like 'feels'. It's too generic for me, some sort of shorthand for 'physically powerful emotional response' which I get, but I just..I prefer nuance, I prefer complexity. My 'feels' may be different from your 'feels' and the same generic label elides that, making responses entirely bland. I'd love a 'this made me angry, this made me sad, this made me worry' which I could compare with my own, learn new things, engage in a discussion (why did that make you mad?) but 'glass case of emotion' doesn't....really open that door for me. There is no way to engage, no way to interact on anything beyond a surface level.
The second part is the foregrounding of the reader's emotional response. If a text hits their 'feels' it is judged as good. And it seems many fans stop at 'feels'. Not only do they not discuss their own emotional response beyond that, but discussion afterwards seems to focus only on potential future emotional issues.
NOW, I think I need to state this at least at some point. I am not fandom policing. And I don't, honestly, imagine these responses are that much different than those Victorian readers of serialized fiction. That emotional response, after all, is what's going to make them plunk down coin of the realm for the next issue, right? But I admit I find the parade aspect of it, the nonrelational aspect of it, to be interesting.
But I admit to dissatisfaction, because it's not, it's never been, the kind of discussion I want to have in fandom and with fandom. I want to talk about gender issues, worldbuilding issues, political issues, character issues. I want to talk about, well, anything OTHER than my emotional response.
Of course, because I am a child of the Academy. Feels don't have a place in your senior thesis or dissertation.
I guess...what I really want, what is at the root of my frustration with the ZOMG FEELSstorm, is that there is no place for the kind of discussion I do want to have. There's no cool-down let's talk about X going on. I could, of course (and have) write conference papers about it, but those are to strangers, most of whom are unfamiliar with the canon, and don't have the referential points of contact to really *discuss* back, to make me think or challenge my conclusions.
Which is what I want, it's what I enjoy. I don't enjoy, I can't enjoy a response that is, well, so thoughtless, so emotional.
I know, I know, write it yourself. I just would like to hear OTHER people's takes on the issues, other people's ideas, for a change.
Because the response (the people I watch on twitter, tumblr and plurk are predominantly female, but I don't want to make a gender statement about this) is overwhelmingly of the 'ZOMG MY FEELS' variety, judgments on how cute a character is, and how devastated they'll be if a character dies.
What strikes me about these responses is twofold. First, the generic, almost compulsory behavior of it, and second, the way they foreground the reader's emotional response.
There's a sort of competitiveness, a 'first!' in fan culture. The first response to a post, the first response post to a comment. It's just how it is. And every Wednesday (for comics) or Friday (for the tv show in my canon), people flood social media with their response.
It's curious to note the importance of individuality in this (which seems sort of ironically contradictory, considering how generic and samey the responses are): people have to make their own plurk, their own tweet, their own post, instead of commenting on another's.
The generic nature of the responses is also interesting (yet strangely tedious). There's no serious analysis of plot or character or world: discussion is all surface and emotional. There's not even any serious analysis of the emotional response--the 'feels' have taken over. Part of me wonders, but can only speculate, if this is a sign of a growing inarticulacy about emotional state or is it unnecessary to go beyond feels and reaction .gif.
I'm one of the people who don't like 'feels'. It's too generic for me, some sort of shorthand for 'physically powerful emotional response' which I get, but I just..I prefer nuance, I prefer complexity. My 'feels' may be different from your 'feels' and the same generic label elides that, making responses entirely bland. I'd love a 'this made me angry, this made me sad, this made me worry' which I could compare with my own, learn new things, engage in a discussion (why did that make you mad?) but 'glass case of emotion' doesn't....really open that door for me. There is no way to engage, no way to interact on anything beyond a surface level.
The second part is the foregrounding of the reader's emotional response. If a text hits their 'feels' it is judged as good. And it seems many fans stop at 'feels'. Not only do they not discuss their own emotional response beyond that, but discussion afterwards seems to focus only on potential future emotional issues.
NOW, I think I need to state this at least at some point. I am not fandom policing. And I don't, honestly, imagine these responses are that much different than those Victorian readers of serialized fiction. That emotional response, after all, is what's going to make them plunk down coin of the realm for the next issue, right? But I admit I find the parade aspect of it, the nonrelational aspect of it, to be interesting.
But I admit to dissatisfaction, because it's not, it's never been, the kind of discussion I want to have in fandom and with fandom. I want to talk about gender issues, worldbuilding issues, political issues, character issues. I want to talk about, well, anything OTHER than my emotional response.
Of course, because I am a child of the Academy. Feels don't have a place in your senior thesis or dissertation.
I guess...what I really want, what is at the root of my frustration with the ZOMG FEELSstorm, is that there is no place for the kind of discussion I do want to have. There's no cool-down let's talk about X going on. I could, of course (and have) write conference papers about it, but those are to strangers, most of whom are unfamiliar with the canon, and don't have the referential points of contact to really *discuss* back, to make me think or challenge my conclusions.
Which is what I want, it's what I enjoy. I don't enjoy, I can't enjoy a response that is, well, so thoughtless, so emotional.
I know, I know, write it yourself. I just would like to hear OTHER people's takes on the issues, other people's ideas, for a change.
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Id-policing
I was witness, last night, to a spectacularly incendiary blow up, courtesy of the Social Justice Warriors.
Social Justice is a movement that in theory I agree: pointing out privilege and biases in mass media, hoping to make the invisible visible and give the silenced a voice. I agree with all of these things.
I can't, however, agree with the methods I see them employ in fandom circles: bullying, namecalling, shaming.
Let's just use last night's blow up as an example. One person posted that she felt bad for being judged for liking a certain trope in fanfiction (noncon) and a particular, dysfunctional relationship. (There's been a lot of hostile back and forth about Megatron and Starscream in TF Prime). I'll talk about that in a moment.
Her housemate (so you can imagine the full awkward of this, right?) posted about ten minutes later, the title of her post being 'BULLSHIT'. That set the tone for the content that followed, which basically said that anyone who liked that trope was supporting rape culture and were, and I quote ' ignorant idiots who never learned to, refuse to, or can't think critically about things'.
On an interpersonal note, calling someone an 'ignorant idiot' does not exactly open doors and minds for critical discussion. Honestly, if someone called me an ignorant idiot, I would not be willing to engage in debate, civil or not, with said person, because it's clear that THEY are not open for debate and I have no great love for futility. When you call someone a name like that, it means you are closed against them, have already judged them.
Now, my stance is, and has always been, that yes, there are some tropes I find disturbing, distasteful or that I cannot read. And I wish I lived in a world where they weren't the go-to tropes of narratology. But I don't. This is the world I live in, these are the tropes that surround us. We see rape sexualized, glamorized and sold to us as sexy everywhere. Yet this movement, I suppose knowing that it can't target the real promoters of these tropes, so it goes after the young, the vulnerable, the weak, those beginning writers, beginning fan creators, and making them feel shamed.
I want to go a little deeper here than my usual 'shaming hurts and is not okay'. Let's consider the operation of shame psychologically. Shaming is someone taking the Superego voice to tell you that your Id is bad.
The id is a cellar of desires, that sort of defy morality. Some of the id's impulses are good: without the id, we could not feel pleasure, we could not enjoy the guilty thrill of playing hooky, or the pleasure of a massage. The Pleasure Principle is rooted in the id.
The id's desires get created in the culture that the person is raised in. Thus, in Imperial China, there was the Golden Lotus fetish for women with bound feet. Their ids eroticized the mutilated feet. Ours does not. (Honestly, I find those pictures horrific). Our ids have been shaped in a world with a host of conflicted and contradictory messages (just one example: women are supposed to dress to be 'attractive' and 'sexy' and enjoy the art of self-adornment as a pleasure, but if they get harassed or assaulted, well, obviously, 'they were asking for it'.) That means that the images the id throws up to us are often, well...complex.
And noncon, rape, well, wow, that's a loaded gun. Notice how often rape is invoked in mass media about female characters--in the movie Dredd, both female characters were associated with rape--Ma had been raped and cut, Anderson was subject to an on-screen rape fantasy. The Sword and Sorceress collections I loved as a teen were rife with 'rape and revenge' stories--all written by women, of course! Did the 'revenge' redeem the rape scene? Or was it a way to have the cake and eat it too--write an eroticized rape scene and then erase the complications through the revenge? (The complication not being the issue of consent, but rather the issue of the eroticization, and the weight of the aftermath on sexuality--the revenge was magically going to 'heal' her psychological drama).
Because, I'll point out, that in our culture, heck, I'd say in any culture I can think of, power is 'sexy'. Power is eroticized, and the power/powerless relationship has a certain fascination, as extremes of power spectra we find ourselves inhabiting every day. Those women writing those rape-and-revenge fantasies knew it: they were, in our day of secondwave feminism, powerless, and writing the stories, however tropey, was some sort of fantasy of power. The late 70s early 80s were filled with science fiction by women that explored female only or female on top worlds--fantasies of power, yes?
There's a lot of talk about whether or not writing or reading noncon supports or promotes 'rape culture'. I've wondered this myself, honestly, with the prevalence of the rape is love trope, which is predicated on male lust being simply uncontrollable and thus the sexual violation becomes narratively 'justified' and in fact 'acceptable'. (I find the idea that sexual desire would drive anyone to violate another's integrity to be repugnant, but then again, countries embracing Sharia Law do not agree with me--to them a woman should wear a burqa because the males are literally that incapable of controlling their desire just as much as it is about controlling women--it's a deft 'control by wanting to protect you' move that we'd recognize as manipulative in the microcosm.)
Oh, oops, digression. The thing is, our id throws up dark things at times. It's often the things we fear the most that draw the strongest response: serial killers, death, the undead/inhuman/no longer human, powerlessness. Vampires have been eroticizing nonconsensual powerless sex since Polidori brought them into British literature. Fiction has always provided a safe place to get those things out on the page, to wrestle with them, like St George and his dragon.
Or rather like Spenser's Redcrosse Knight and the dragon that vomits books.
The issue is, that shaming is an attempt to control someone's id. You only need to look at the Victorian era, or the Catholic sex scandals to realize that shaming and guilting the id....kind of backfires? Making someone feel bad because they enjoy fantasies of powerlessness or power does not change their fantasies. In fact, it fuels them, because the id's desires grow in the dark.
So, of course, what if we do think that these fantasies are unhealthy, and they promote a culture that normalizes and validates a culture where people are made to feel unsafe and vulnerable at every moment? I'd start with, well, not making the person who has those fantasies feel unsafe and vulnerable by attacking them, but that's, I hope, common sense. Beyond that, I'd ask them about the fantasy, what it means to them, what it is to them, WHY they like it, and what appeals to them. Ask. ASK. Give them credit for having a brain. If they've never thought of it before, you might just start them thinking. But if they have, their answers--gasp--might make you think that their liking for the trope is quite different than you think.
Social Justice is a movement that in theory I agree: pointing out privilege and biases in mass media, hoping to make the invisible visible and give the silenced a voice. I agree with all of these things.
I can't, however, agree with the methods I see them employ in fandom circles: bullying, namecalling, shaming.
Let's just use last night's blow up as an example. One person posted that she felt bad for being judged for liking a certain trope in fanfiction (noncon) and a particular, dysfunctional relationship. (There's been a lot of hostile back and forth about Megatron and Starscream in TF Prime). I'll talk about that in a moment.
Her housemate (so you can imagine the full awkward of this, right?) posted about ten minutes later, the title of her post being 'BULLSHIT'. That set the tone for the content that followed, which basically said that anyone who liked that trope was supporting rape culture and were, and I quote ' ignorant idiots who never learned to, refuse to, or can't think critically about things'.
On an interpersonal note, calling someone an 'ignorant idiot' does not exactly open doors and minds for critical discussion. Honestly, if someone called me an ignorant idiot, I would not be willing to engage in debate, civil or not, with said person, because it's clear that THEY are not open for debate and I have no great love for futility. When you call someone a name like that, it means you are closed against them, have already judged them.
Now, my stance is, and has always been, that yes, there are some tropes I find disturbing, distasteful or that I cannot read. And I wish I lived in a world where they weren't the go-to tropes of narratology. But I don't. This is the world I live in, these are the tropes that surround us. We see rape sexualized, glamorized and sold to us as sexy everywhere. Yet this movement, I suppose knowing that it can't target the real promoters of these tropes, so it goes after the young, the vulnerable, the weak, those beginning writers, beginning fan creators, and making them feel shamed.
I want to go a little deeper here than my usual 'shaming hurts and is not okay'. Let's consider the operation of shame psychologically. Shaming is someone taking the Superego voice to tell you that your Id is bad.
The id is a cellar of desires, that sort of defy morality. Some of the id's impulses are good: without the id, we could not feel pleasure, we could not enjoy the guilty thrill of playing hooky, or the pleasure of a massage. The Pleasure Principle is rooted in the id.
The id's desires get created in the culture that the person is raised in. Thus, in Imperial China, there was the Golden Lotus fetish for women with bound feet. Their ids eroticized the mutilated feet. Ours does not. (Honestly, I find those pictures horrific). Our ids have been shaped in a world with a host of conflicted and contradictory messages (just one example: women are supposed to dress to be 'attractive' and 'sexy' and enjoy the art of self-adornment as a pleasure, but if they get harassed or assaulted, well, obviously, 'they were asking for it'.) That means that the images the id throws up to us are often, well...complex.
And noncon, rape, well, wow, that's a loaded gun. Notice how often rape is invoked in mass media about female characters--in the movie Dredd, both female characters were associated with rape--Ma had been raped and cut, Anderson was subject to an on-screen rape fantasy. The Sword and Sorceress collections I loved as a teen were rife with 'rape and revenge' stories--all written by women, of course! Did the 'revenge' redeem the rape scene? Or was it a way to have the cake and eat it too--write an eroticized rape scene and then erase the complications through the revenge? (The complication not being the issue of consent, but rather the issue of the eroticization, and the weight of the aftermath on sexuality--the revenge was magically going to 'heal' her psychological drama).
Because, I'll point out, that in our culture, heck, I'd say in any culture I can think of, power is 'sexy'. Power is eroticized, and the power/powerless relationship has a certain fascination, as extremes of power spectra we find ourselves inhabiting every day. Those women writing those rape-and-revenge fantasies knew it: they were, in our day of secondwave feminism, powerless, and writing the stories, however tropey, was some sort of fantasy of power. The late 70s early 80s were filled with science fiction by women that explored female only or female on top worlds--fantasies of power, yes?
There's a lot of talk about whether or not writing or reading noncon supports or promotes 'rape culture'. I've wondered this myself, honestly, with the prevalence of the rape is love trope, which is predicated on male lust being simply uncontrollable and thus the sexual violation becomes narratively 'justified' and in fact 'acceptable'. (I find the idea that sexual desire would drive anyone to violate another's integrity to be repugnant, but then again, countries embracing Sharia Law do not agree with me--to them a woman should wear a burqa because the males are literally that incapable of controlling their desire just as much as it is about controlling women--it's a deft 'control by wanting to protect you' move that we'd recognize as manipulative in the microcosm.)
Oh, oops, digression. The thing is, our id throws up dark things at times. It's often the things we fear the most that draw the strongest response: serial killers, death, the undead/inhuman/no longer human, powerlessness. Vampires have been eroticizing nonconsensual powerless sex since Polidori brought them into British literature. Fiction has always provided a safe place to get those things out on the page, to wrestle with them, like St George and his dragon.
Or rather like Spenser's Redcrosse Knight and the dragon that vomits books.
The issue is, that shaming is an attempt to control someone's id. You only need to look at the Victorian era, or the Catholic sex scandals to realize that shaming and guilting the id....kind of backfires? Making someone feel bad because they enjoy fantasies of powerlessness or power does not change their fantasies. In fact, it fuels them, because the id's desires grow in the dark.
So, of course, what if we do think that these fantasies are unhealthy, and they promote a culture that normalizes and validates a culture where people are made to feel unsafe and vulnerable at every moment? I'd start with, well, not making the person who has those fantasies feel unsafe and vulnerable by attacking them, but that's, I hope, common sense. Beyond that, I'd ask them about the fantasy, what it means to them, what it is to them, WHY they like it, and what appeals to them. Ask. ASK. Give them credit for having a brain. If they've never thought of it before, you might just start them thinking. But if they have, their answers--gasp--might make you think that their liking for the trope is quite different than you think.
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
On Zombies and Capitalism?
So I read World War Z on the train ride home on Sunday, and my reaction got me thinking.
Because of course I got the book because I saw the trailer for the movie. The trailer, I admit, has moments of absolutely stunning visuals, mostly the masses of rushing undead, almost like a tsunami, and absolutely, absolutely inhuman.
Intercut of course with scenes involving Brad Pitt. Which, well, my interest was like a flicking strobe light. OH INTERESTING oh Brad Pitt. OH INTERESTING oh look one man fighting to save his family yawn that's totally done to death.
As is not news to anyone who's read Brooks's novel, the novel is MUCH different and absolutely fantastic. The whole point of the novel, the whole point of the novel's structure, really, is that there is NO one monumental hero, one person who has all the pieces (other than the invisible collator of the documents), who has been everywhere and done everything. It's a book determined to assert humanity in all its forms--the hateful creator of the fake drug Phalanx, the nerdy otaku who finds he has to confront the world outside himself on its own terms rather than his own, the K9 officer, the Chinese nuclear submarine crew, people from all over the world, everyone telling their story, creating a history. The reason it's set up as historiography is the WHOLE DAMN POINT.
But the trailer looks like it's just your typical action movie 'man brings his family some place safe while he goes to fight for them' which is so conservative, so 1950s and dismissive and OH YEAH can I mention it primatizes WHITE MALE AMERICANs as heros? That whooshing sound is the movie sailing past the point Brooks was trying to make and straight for what it hopes is a huge pile of 'we know our demographic is white American men' money.
And clearly I'm angry, lol. Now, honestly, I am not sure how the book's entirety could be translated to film. (But surely at least some of it could? American film viewers are more sophisticated than Hollywood seems to credit us--we can understand interesting narrative structure like in Angelheart or Memento or even Fight Club). (I'd add that for so many years Transformers insisted people wouldn't read a story that didn't have humans in them 'to relate to' and I can gleefully chortle, looking at the successes of RID and MTMTE that AHAAH WOW that was wrong.)
But what I'm wrestling with is why I'm torqued off about this. Because I'm very vocal about The Walking Dead and the people who pooh-pooh the TV series because it's not exactly like the comics. I wonder what would be the point of watching the show if it was just...the comic, which is already a half-visual medium? I thought the neat things happen when you lay them side to side, and see the changes done to, say, the Governor or Michonne, and figure them out, what they add to the narrative they inhabit. Or the differences in V for Vendetta--how the ending is so tight and closed and heavy handed in the movie, but not the graphic novel. (And let's think of the trainwreck of Watchmen, which attempted to be close to the comics and...was pretty incomprehensible to outsiders?)
But here I am getting all Comic Book Guy about the fact the movie seems to be not at all like the book.
I think...I think what it is is that the differences seem so money-driven and so creatively bankrupt. I don't like some of the Walking Dead changes, but at least I have some reason to have faith that they're going somewhere interesting, that it's not a money grab. (Partly because any tv show has to be in it for the long haul and makes money through advertisers--movies can bait and switch you for your ticket price and two hours). Yes, AMC has a history of TV series that panders to the white male demographic (but a fandom that regularly bashes any female character means the women in fandom sure are contributing to that and that's...something else I need to figure out), but I find myself emotionally engaged with the characters in the show, just as much, because they do break type. Rick was 'dad trying to save his family' and....look what's happening to that, right?
Now, of course, I'm getting all fretful about a movie *trailer* and god knows I could be eating my words, but...even so, then the question becomes why would Hollywood try to market the movie that way? (And I saw the trailer when I saw Iron Man 3 AND Star Trek so they're clearly aiming at sci fi nerd types and geez, dude, we're not all white males!).
In the end, I just hope that the movie at least makes people run out and read the book. If it does that, and they do get to read an amazing book out of it, that can't be a bad thing.
Because of course I got the book because I saw the trailer for the movie. The trailer, I admit, has moments of absolutely stunning visuals, mostly the masses of rushing undead, almost like a tsunami, and absolutely, absolutely inhuman.
Intercut of course with scenes involving Brad Pitt. Which, well, my interest was like a flicking strobe light. OH INTERESTING oh Brad Pitt. OH INTERESTING oh look one man fighting to save his family yawn that's totally done to death.
As is not news to anyone who's read Brooks's novel, the novel is MUCH different and absolutely fantastic. The whole point of the novel, the whole point of the novel's structure, really, is that there is NO one monumental hero, one person who has all the pieces (other than the invisible collator of the documents), who has been everywhere and done everything. It's a book determined to assert humanity in all its forms--the hateful creator of the fake drug Phalanx, the nerdy otaku who finds he has to confront the world outside himself on its own terms rather than his own, the K9 officer, the Chinese nuclear submarine crew, people from all over the world, everyone telling their story, creating a history. The reason it's set up as historiography is the WHOLE DAMN POINT.
But the trailer looks like it's just your typical action movie 'man brings his family some place safe while he goes to fight for them' which is so conservative, so 1950s and dismissive and OH YEAH can I mention it primatizes WHITE MALE AMERICANs as heros? That whooshing sound is the movie sailing past the point Brooks was trying to make and straight for what it hopes is a huge pile of 'we know our demographic is white American men' money.
And clearly I'm angry, lol. Now, honestly, I am not sure how the book's entirety could be translated to film. (But surely at least some of it could? American film viewers are more sophisticated than Hollywood seems to credit us--we can understand interesting narrative structure like in Angelheart or Memento or even Fight Club). (I'd add that for so many years Transformers insisted people wouldn't read a story that didn't have humans in them 'to relate to' and I can gleefully chortle, looking at the successes of RID and MTMTE that AHAAH WOW that was wrong.)
But what I'm wrestling with is why I'm torqued off about this. Because I'm very vocal about The Walking Dead and the people who pooh-pooh the TV series because it's not exactly like the comics. I wonder what would be the point of watching the show if it was just...the comic, which is already a half-visual medium? I thought the neat things happen when you lay them side to side, and see the changes done to, say, the Governor or Michonne, and figure them out, what they add to the narrative they inhabit. Or the differences in V for Vendetta--how the ending is so tight and closed and heavy handed in the movie, but not the graphic novel. (And let's think of the trainwreck of Watchmen, which attempted to be close to the comics and...was pretty incomprehensible to outsiders?)
But here I am getting all Comic Book Guy about the fact the movie seems to be not at all like the book.
I think...I think what it is is that the differences seem so money-driven and so creatively bankrupt. I don't like some of the Walking Dead changes, but at least I have some reason to have faith that they're going somewhere interesting, that it's not a money grab. (Partly because any tv show has to be in it for the long haul and makes money through advertisers--movies can bait and switch you for your ticket price and two hours). Yes, AMC has a history of TV series that panders to the white male demographic (but a fandom that regularly bashes any female character means the women in fandom sure are contributing to that and that's...something else I need to figure out), but I find myself emotionally engaged with the characters in the show, just as much, because they do break type. Rick was 'dad trying to save his family' and....look what's happening to that, right?
Now, of course, I'm getting all fretful about a movie *trailer* and god knows I could be eating my words, but...even so, then the question becomes why would Hollywood try to market the movie that way? (And I saw the trailer when I saw Iron Man 3 AND Star Trek so they're clearly aiming at sci fi nerd types and geez, dude, we're not all white males!).
In the end, I just hope that the movie at least makes people run out and read the book. If it does that, and they do get to read an amazing book out of it, that can't be a bad thing.
Friday, May 31, 2013
ain't I a woman?
One of the larger questions to me is the whole definition of femininity and femaleness. It's facile to connect female with fecundity, and 'feminine' with ways that enforce submissive status. But that leaves the issue of what does that mean to biological females (I'm going to shorthand 'female' as a term meaning 'having female biological equipment' as we do to describe other biological entities who appear to show binary gender, like animals. to separate it from 'woman' which can be a social construct) in history, who might have been unable or unwilling to have children? Were they not 'female'?
Of course we have the fairy tale figure of the 'witch', the ugly old hag who exists to disrupt society--that's possibly a reflex of the consequence of un-maternal females. The whole frauenfrage, the social issue of what to do with the 'surplus' of females in population (surplus meaning that there were more females than could safely be combined with men in marriage, the original 'free radicals' of society), indicates a social belief that the 'place' for women is 'wife' if not the ideal 'wife/mother'.
But we can't draw a simple line between woman and fecundity--females who reproduce outside the marriage bond still--STILL!!!--face the possible stigma of 'slut' or 'whore'. (As I write this, I have Terrible Television on in the background, where Maury Povich is currently once again giving us the gender politics bread-and-circuses spectacle of the 'paternity test results show' and hooooboy doesn't that audience like to jeer at women who do not know the father of their baby).
Now, this is all gender studies 101, right? You're probably nodding, going, YUP know this. Where it gets complicated, for me, at least, is when we detach the gender from the flesh entirely. Today, I just want to deal with the obvious example: robots.
And even then, I won't get to all of them.
Up on my reading list, as well as Haraway, of course, is L'Eve Future, the first appearance of the gynoid in literature. I know enough from having read about it to be already a bit intrigued, but we'll go into details as I get to it. But we have Hadaly, there, then of course Maria in Metropolis, the new Terminator in The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the Stepford Wives, and the various females in the Transformers continuities, and the Cylons in the reboot Battlestar Galactica. And I need to expand this list, but let's just work with that. We have 'gynoids' who fall into a few, sometimes overlapping categories: they are programmable to be better companions for males (Stepford Wives, Hadaly), they are dangerous (Sarah Connor Chronicles, Maria, Cylons), they are sexualized/seductive.
A side note about Transformers: The original continuity had a comic book origin for females (that entirely destroys previous continuity but the sheer malice behind this deserves some recognition), where the Transformers had no gender, until they came to Earth and these terrible Feminists complained that there were no women so the Autobots created a female, to placate these harridans. Predictably, she is gracile, pink, and curvy. However, as soon as she's created, the males don't want her to fight, or go into battle. Though it's intended to be a slam against those never-satisfied feminazis, the Autobots' treatment of Arcee is casually sexist, and even the table-turning ending, where Arcee rescues Optimus, the very robot who told her to stay out of battle, comes off as a bit smurfy, a bit of a one-off.
I gave a paper once, at NeMLA, attempting to, hoping to discover what Transformers writers were thinking when they constructed femininity in their robot characters, and Furman's longstanding misogyny aside (it's a lot to push aside, by the way, with his other Arcee origin story in IDW which is honestly...not much better as it falls directly into the tropes of female as 'male manque' and 'female insane rage', I could only conclude that they had...no idea. Without the notion of reproduction, female becomes the tropes we see above--seductive, sexual, dangerous, at worst, and existing to please 'their' men at...uh...best (?). And honestly, I can't resent them for it: I don't think anyone can really answer that question. What IS female? What IS woman? Is it shape of body, voice, the packaging? Is it relations to men, (like MacKinnon argues, in a sense) that the hegemony has only posited the existence of women insofar as they are useful (or anti-useful) to men?
This all seems like, perhaps, pretentious folderol, but I want to suggest a convergence of current events stories that makes me think this question has some urgency. Andy Hines's not-so-funny 'Invisible Burqas', Mohammad Al Dawood's Saudi self-help notion that men should sexually harass women who dare to have jobs, MSNBC's Erickson coming out against female 'breadwinners' they all call into question what female is and what female should be. Notice how several of these reduce women to sexuality, and/or consider the way to 'police' their behavior is through male action, and that uncontrolled womanhood is dangerous....wow.
Of course we have the fairy tale figure of the 'witch', the ugly old hag who exists to disrupt society--that's possibly a reflex of the consequence of un-maternal females. The whole frauenfrage, the social issue of what to do with the 'surplus' of females in population (surplus meaning that there were more females than could safely be combined with men in marriage, the original 'free radicals' of society), indicates a social belief that the 'place' for women is 'wife' if not the ideal 'wife/mother'.
But we can't draw a simple line between woman and fecundity--females who reproduce outside the marriage bond still--STILL!!!--face the possible stigma of 'slut' or 'whore'. (As I write this, I have Terrible Television on in the background, where Maury Povich is currently once again giving us the gender politics bread-and-circuses spectacle of the 'paternity test results show' and hooooboy doesn't that audience like to jeer at women who do not know the father of their baby).
Now, this is all gender studies 101, right? You're probably nodding, going, YUP know this. Where it gets complicated, for me, at least, is when we detach the gender from the flesh entirely. Today, I just want to deal with the obvious example: robots.
And even then, I won't get to all of them.
Up on my reading list, as well as Haraway, of course, is L'Eve Future, the first appearance of the gynoid in literature. I know enough from having read about it to be already a bit intrigued, but we'll go into details as I get to it. But we have Hadaly, there, then of course Maria in Metropolis, the new Terminator in The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the Stepford Wives, and the various females in the Transformers continuities, and the Cylons in the reboot Battlestar Galactica. And I need to expand this list, but let's just work with that. We have 'gynoids' who fall into a few, sometimes overlapping categories: they are programmable to be better companions for males (Stepford Wives, Hadaly), they are dangerous (Sarah Connor Chronicles, Maria, Cylons), they are sexualized/seductive.
A side note about Transformers: The original continuity had a comic book origin for females (that entirely destroys previous continuity but the sheer malice behind this deserves some recognition), where the Transformers had no gender, until they came to Earth and these terrible Feminists complained that there were no women so the Autobots created a female, to placate these harridans. Predictably, she is gracile, pink, and curvy. However, as soon as she's created, the males don't want her to fight, or go into battle. Though it's intended to be a slam against those never-satisfied feminazis, the Autobots' treatment of Arcee is casually sexist, and even the table-turning ending, where Arcee rescues Optimus, the very robot who told her to stay out of battle, comes off as a bit smurfy, a bit of a one-off.
I gave a paper once, at NeMLA, attempting to, hoping to discover what Transformers writers were thinking when they constructed femininity in their robot characters, and Furman's longstanding misogyny aside (it's a lot to push aside, by the way, with his other Arcee origin story in IDW which is honestly...not much better as it falls directly into the tropes of female as 'male manque' and 'female insane rage', I could only conclude that they had...no idea. Without the notion of reproduction, female becomes the tropes we see above--seductive, sexual, dangerous, at worst, and existing to please 'their' men at...uh...best (?). And honestly, I can't resent them for it: I don't think anyone can really answer that question. What IS female? What IS woman? Is it shape of body, voice, the packaging? Is it relations to men, (like MacKinnon argues, in a sense) that the hegemony has only posited the existence of women insofar as they are useful (or anti-useful) to men?
This all seems like, perhaps, pretentious folderol, but I want to suggest a convergence of current events stories that makes me think this question has some urgency. Andy Hines's not-so-funny 'Invisible Burqas', Mohammad Al Dawood's Saudi self-help notion that men should sexually harass women who dare to have jobs, MSNBC's Erickson coming out against female 'breadwinners' they all call into question what female is and what female should be. Notice how several of these reduce women to sexuality, and/or consider the way to 'police' their behavior is through male action, and that uncontrolled womanhood is dangerous....wow.
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
We are the hollow men
I'm particularly perplexed by Haraway's dismissive takedown of MacKinnon. Before I get to specifics, here's my holistic objection: for someone who purports to study epistemology, whose very 'informatics of domination' recognizes an ideological movement from Freud to Lacan, she seems rather limited in the ability to grasp that epistemologies can only be born in the crucible of the culture in which they are created, like the agar in the petri dish. Epistemology can only see the present through the lens of the past, and trace a wobbly, fuzzy vector into a possible future.
Thus, Freud is less a 'pervert' than reflecting the obsessions of the culture in which he was raised, and his future step was the idea of the talking cure, that a medicine theory that structured itself on healing and cure rather than mere quarantine and isolation, could apply to mental diseases as well.
MacKinnon, similiarly, is recording the world in which she lives, the water in which she swims. She is not wrong, or inaccurate. She is, if Haraway is 'right', at best, at most, outgrown.
But honestly, I don't think she is.
You see, the issue Haraway finds so objectionable is MacKinnon's notion of the female as constructed as the subject of male desire, in other words, as a non subject. It's worth perhaps quoting Haraway at length to dissect her objection:
"Ironically, MacKinnon's 'ontology' constructs a non-subject, a non-being. Another's desire, not the self's labour, is the origin of 'woman'. She therefore develops a theory of consciousness that enforces what can count as 'women's' experience--anything that names sexual violation, indeed, sex itself as far as 'women' can be concerned. Feminist practice is the construction of this form of consciousness; that is, the self-knowledge of a self-who-is-not." (159)
To argue that MacKinnon is invalid or untrue makes me want to live in Haraway's world, because I can see at least that segment of MacKinnon's theory as reality, all around me. I see woman either gendered as 'not male' (which becomes vastly complicated when dissevered from reproduction) or constructed by and through male desire.
Because, well, let's look at video games. I won't waste what I presume is your time trying to prove to you that female characters in videogames are sexualized. Even when they're badasses (such as Lara Croft) the vast majority (okay I make a sort of exception for Samus Aran) they are presented as sexual objects, often with gratuitous jiggle physics. More than that, the female gamer is often attacked via her sexuality--online she is sexually harassed, told to 'get laid', etc etc. More even than that, and I feel odd linking to a Cracked article, but honestly, I find this not said better anywhere else: "These offers of anonymous sex don't derail the discussion -- they tie themselves to the train tracks and jam the point-train home with how accurately it hits the target. If you can't have a discussion about gender without declaring whether you'd rub your genitals on the other party, you can't have a discussion about gender. You are the problem being discussed."
That is to say, countering an argument that men have it easier than women by arguing that women can have sex any time they want deliberately constructs sexual access as the pinnacle of human worth that places women as superior because they have all of this sexual attention directed at them. Nowhere is the reverse vector--female sexual desire--a part of this economy. More than that, it sets the a priori assumption that male sexual desire, especially male heterosexual desire, is the only avenue to social identity.
Pictures of women online are unsurprisingly (check reddit) subjected to a sort of 'hot or not' analysis, repeatedly rating women on their 'fuckability'. This turns out to be trickier to achieve than one thinks--a girl who appears 'too' sexually ready, 'too' desirous of gaining male attention, is scorned as a 'slut', because, well, let's face it, if it was easy to get this male currency, if it was a simple formula, all women would be 'rich' in it. We...can't have that because that allows females too much 'power' so we have to create a schema in which the woman is never assured in her performance.
Surrounded by a 'cyborg' world that ruthlessly judges female bodies by their appeal to the male gaze, when a high pitched voice on X Box Live opens you for propositions, it's hard NOT to feel the compulsion to create identity as an object of male desire. Because this isn't simply setting up an imaginary non-victim, someone whom one might tenuously argue has taken the burden of the male gaze as part of a contract--the Sports Illustrated swimwear model, the stripper, the video game character who doesn't actually have feelings--this is 'normal' women. And so, even more than just being surrounded by beautiful women being judged if they have--gasp--pores; these women are themselves susceptible to sexual judgment by their peers.
MacKinnon's wrong to say that culture creates the woman as a null-subject, constituted by her desirability to the male gaze?
I don't know what world Haraway lives in, but I live, unfortunately, in MacKinnon's. I can hope to move to Haraway's, but it seems that cyborg culture, internet culture, isn't ready to let go.
Now, is that all I am? Oh gosh, no. But I find in many ways, that 'labour of self' is an act of resistance, an act of transgression, an assertion EVERY MOMENT that is not always a rebellion, against that culture. As attuned as Haraway is to the idea of transgression and resistance, it seems the resistance I present, as I navigate the gendered seas, to assert an identity often at odds with societal norms....doesn't count.
Thus, Freud is less a 'pervert' than reflecting the obsessions of the culture in which he was raised, and his future step was the idea of the talking cure, that a medicine theory that structured itself on healing and cure rather than mere quarantine and isolation, could apply to mental diseases as well.
MacKinnon, similiarly, is recording the world in which she lives, the water in which she swims. She is not wrong, or inaccurate. She is, if Haraway is 'right', at best, at most, outgrown.
But honestly, I don't think she is.
You see, the issue Haraway finds so objectionable is MacKinnon's notion of the female as constructed as the subject of male desire, in other words, as a non subject. It's worth perhaps quoting Haraway at length to dissect her objection:
"Ironically, MacKinnon's 'ontology' constructs a non-subject, a non-being. Another's desire, not the self's labour, is the origin of 'woman'. She therefore develops a theory of consciousness that enforces what can count as 'women's' experience--anything that names sexual violation, indeed, sex itself as far as 'women' can be concerned. Feminist practice is the construction of this form of consciousness; that is, the self-knowledge of a self-who-is-not." (159)
To argue that MacKinnon is invalid or untrue makes me want to live in Haraway's world, because I can see at least that segment of MacKinnon's theory as reality, all around me. I see woman either gendered as 'not male' (which becomes vastly complicated when dissevered from reproduction) or constructed by and through male desire.
Because, well, let's look at video games. I won't waste what I presume is your time trying to prove to you that female characters in videogames are sexualized. Even when they're badasses (such as Lara Croft) the vast majority (okay I make a sort of exception for Samus Aran) they are presented as sexual objects, often with gratuitous jiggle physics. More than that, the female gamer is often attacked via her sexuality--online she is sexually harassed, told to 'get laid', etc etc. More even than that, and I feel odd linking to a Cracked article, but honestly, I find this not said better anywhere else: "These offers of anonymous sex don't derail the discussion -- they tie themselves to the train tracks and jam the point-train home with how accurately it hits the target. If you can't have a discussion about gender without declaring whether you'd rub your genitals on the other party, you can't have a discussion about gender. You are the problem being discussed."
That is to say, countering an argument that men have it easier than women by arguing that women can have sex any time they want deliberately constructs sexual access as the pinnacle of human worth that places women as superior because they have all of this sexual attention directed at them. Nowhere is the reverse vector--female sexual desire--a part of this economy. More than that, it sets the a priori assumption that male sexual desire, especially male heterosexual desire, is the only avenue to social identity.
Pictures of women online are unsurprisingly (check reddit) subjected to a sort of 'hot or not' analysis, repeatedly rating women on their 'fuckability'. This turns out to be trickier to achieve than one thinks--a girl who appears 'too' sexually ready, 'too' desirous of gaining male attention, is scorned as a 'slut', because, well, let's face it, if it was easy to get this male currency, if it was a simple formula, all women would be 'rich' in it. We...can't have that because that allows females too much 'power' so we have to create a schema in which the woman is never assured in her performance.
Surrounded by a 'cyborg' world that ruthlessly judges female bodies by their appeal to the male gaze, when a high pitched voice on X Box Live opens you for propositions, it's hard NOT to feel the compulsion to create identity as an object of male desire. Because this isn't simply setting up an imaginary non-victim, someone whom one might tenuously argue has taken the burden of the male gaze as part of a contract--the Sports Illustrated swimwear model, the stripper, the video game character who doesn't actually have feelings--this is 'normal' women. And so, even more than just being surrounded by beautiful women being judged if they have--gasp--pores; these women are themselves susceptible to sexual judgment by their peers.
MacKinnon's wrong to say that culture creates the woman as a null-subject, constituted by her desirability to the male gaze?
I don't know what world Haraway lives in, but I live, unfortunately, in MacKinnon's. I can hope to move to Haraway's, but it seems that cyborg culture, internet culture, isn't ready to let go.
Now, is that all I am? Oh gosh, no. But I find in many ways, that 'labour of self' is an act of resistance, an act of transgression, an assertion EVERY MOMENT that is not always a rebellion, against that culture. As attuned as Haraway is to the idea of transgression and resistance, it seems the resistance I present, as I navigate the gendered seas, to assert an identity often at odds with societal norms....doesn't count.
Seductions to Organic Wholeness
It's no secret that one of the things that perplexes me in the field is the canonization of Donna Haraway. Every paper I have seen in the last five years, if they intend to talk about robots or the cyborg at all, in any sense, has the obligatory quote from Haraway, no matter how shoehorned it is.
Can I just say, I think we can talk about robots, especially fictional robots, without invoking St Haraway? Can we realize that the majority of Simians, Cyborgs and Women, which is, after all, over 20 years old, is aspirational only? And while I have no problems with aspiration and imagining new possibilities on a threshold of a new vector, it seems to be used instead in lieu of reality, rather than a measure of possibility against which to regularize or evaluate reality.
Let's face it, most of the promises and hopes of SCW have not come to pass. I am thinking, especially and at first, about social presence online. Haraway promises transgression, that, say, an internet allows one to shed or transgress gender and race and age, to leave aside or behind the human, in lieu of an ultimate postmodern existence: fractured, playful, ironic, mercurial, and by essence undefinable. At one point, she says, "The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust." (151).
However, we, the cyborg's organic root, we are made of mud. And it seems we bring that 'mud' with us wherever we go.
We claim that the internet can free us from, say, gender, but I see, when I throw aside my Haraway-colored glasses, a ruthless inscription of gender, the exact opposite of transgression and playful freedom and irony, in fan communities.
In the Transformers fandom, there is a clear gender divide simply in internet presence. The males gather in the forums, doing their best to make it unwelcoming to 'female' things (not females but things they regard as female), and the women live in other fan communities, on tumblr, livejournal, dreamwidth, tumblr. There was once a conversation on a major forum about, basically. 'why slashfic' and that turned with stunning speed into a hate fest and speedily deleted by the moderators as unacceptable. Not the violent homophobia spewed by the commenters, but the topic itself. Because, of course, relationships between genderless fictional beings is not acceptable for children, but the violent torture they regularly feature in IDW comics...is. Seibertron.com has a 'ladies thread', which very name indicates that that is, in a sense, a corral where the women should be--the rest of the site is, then, not 'ladies' territory, not woman space.
Now, of course, that's not entirely true, women are allowed throughout the site and I've had a number of good conversations about comics and toys and other aspects of canon on that site. But once again, the idea of having to dedicate a space for females speaks for itself--there are certain topics/things they think of as female that are not safe anywhere else.
So what, you say. I can shed my 'mud' and become genderless on those sites and it's all good and Haraway wins!
Well, no. It's not that simple. Because of course 'genderless' as it has been for most of Western culture, means 'male'. I grew up still using the 'universal he' (each student will hand in his paper), simply a vestigial tail of gender non-neutrality. We politically correct this to the agrammatical 'their', but that doesn't do much to break down the insidious part of the gender binary, where everything is a deviation off of the 'gold standard' of educated, heterosexual, white male. To 'pass' for male on a fansite means that I cannot talk about certain topics, like cosplay (though posting pictures of myself in sexually revealing cosplay is an exception, because, of course, I am then offering myself as a sexualized visual pleasure), or slash fiction, regardless of rating. Kitbashing is okay: plushiemaking, NOT okay.
'Passing' on the internet means being dishonest about the totality of my fannish interests. This is fragmentizing, yes, but I don't think it's what Haraway promised, because this sort of fracturing of self requires hiding to pass, requires splitting myself in order to belong, hiding other shards for fear of not-belonging. That's not freedom, that's not transgression. That's the exact opposite.
One other quick hit, because this isn't a rarrrr men and the phallocracy. Women, females, are just as implicated in this sort of gender policing of the other (another post I will tackle self-gender-policing). For example, many online roleplayers in Dreamwidth, InsaneJournal, Tumblr, and Livejournal are female. A large number of them want to RP relationships and sex between their characters. In other words, they want to roleplay sexual relationships with a fantasy projection of themselves with someone else they find sexually attractive. I will go so far as to suggest that many female RPers who fit into this category are less attractive than the characters they play, and many of them express their own infatuation with how hot or attractive their own character is to them. This is seen as normal and healthy and liberating.
Yet.
Yet. When someone is discovered to be male (I am going by secrets on Fandom!Secrets and the defunct RoleplaySecrets blogs on Livejournal), who also wants to roleplay sex with their fantasy attractive character, they are 'basement dwelling neckbeards' who are intruding in what is, apparently, female space. A player who plays an attractive female character is suddenly 'squicked' to discover that the person she has been writing porn with is biologically male.
Now, this scenario is complex and worth unpacking further, because it is a nexus of 'safe' space, sexuality, policing, and identity, but I bring it here this time, only in the context of proof that this sort of gender policing is not simply Oppressive Patriarchy--females do this same behavior as well, discriminating by the gender of what cyberpunk labeled 'the meat'. In other words, the very people Haraway was addressing, the very people whom one would think are the most interested in breaking down gender and identity, who claim to want to destroy boundaries, to express a sexuality that women have often been told to hide or deny, are twisting their sexual liberation to make it an unsafe space for those with penises.
Isn't that...missing the point of Haraway? That 'male', that penis-owning person on the other keyboard, may be a 'cyborg' too, longing for freedom, wanting to escape the biological and cultural determinism of his body, may be trying to explore different identities, explore sexuality free of the pressure of Western gender obsessions.
If the point of the cyborg is freedom, it should mean freedom for EVERYONE, don't you think?
Can I just say, I think we can talk about robots, especially fictional robots, without invoking St Haraway? Can we realize that the majority of Simians, Cyborgs and Women, which is, after all, over 20 years old, is aspirational only? And while I have no problems with aspiration and imagining new possibilities on a threshold of a new vector, it seems to be used instead in lieu of reality, rather than a measure of possibility against which to regularize or evaluate reality.
Let's face it, most of the promises and hopes of SCW have not come to pass. I am thinking, especially and at first, about social presence online. Haraway promises transgression, that, say, an internet allows one to shed or transgress gender and race and age, to leave aside or behind the human, in lieu of an ultimate postmodern existence: fractured, playful, ironic, mercurial, and by essence undefinable. At one point, she says, "The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust." (151).
However, we, the cyborg's organic root, we are made of mud. And it seems we bring that 'mud' with us wherever we go.
We claim that the internet can free us from, say, gender, but I see, when I throw aside my Haraway-colored glasses, a ruthless inscription of gender, the exact opposite of transgression and playful freedom and irony, in fan communities.
In the Transformers fandom, there is a clear gender divide simply in internet presence. The males gather in the forums, doing their best to make it unwelcoming to 'female' things (not females but things they regard as female), and the women live in other fan communities, on tumblr, livejournal, dreamwidth, tumblr. There was once a conversation on a major forum about, basically. 'why slashfic' and that turned with stunning speed into a hate fest and speedily deleted by the moderators as unacceptable. Not the violent homophobia spewed by the commenters, but the topic itself. Because, of course, relationships between genderless fictional beings is not acceptable for children, but the violent torture they regularly feature in IDW comics...is. Seibertron.com has a 'ladies thread', which very name indicates that that is, in a sense, a corral where the women should be--the rest of the site is, then, not 'ladies' territory, not woman space.
Now, of course, that's not entirely true, women are allowed throughout the site and I've had a number of good conversations about comics and toys and other aspects of canon on that site. But once again, the idea of having to dedicate a space for females speaks for itself--there are certain topics/things they think of as female that are not safe anywhere else.
So what, you say. I can shed my 'mud' and become genderless on those sites and it's all good and Haraway wins!
Well, no. It's not that simple. Because of course 'genderless' as it has been for most of Western culture, means 'male'. I grew up still using the 'universal he' (each student will hand in his paper), simply a vestigial tail of gender non-neutrality. We politically correct this to the agrammatical 'their', but that doesn't do much to break down the insidious part of the gender binary, where everything is a deviation off of the 'gold standard' of educated, heterosexual, white male. To 'pass' for male on a fansite means that I cannot talk about certain topics, like cosplay (though posting pictures of myself in sexually revealing cosplay is an exception, because, of course, I am then offering myself as a sexualized visual pleasure), or slash fiction, regardless of rating. Kitbashing is okay: plushiemaking, NOT okay.
'Passing' on the internet means being dishonest about the totality of my fannish interests. This is fragmentizing, yes, but I don't think it's what Haraway promised, because this sort of fracturing of self requires hiding to pass, requires splitting myself in order to belong, hiding other shards for fear of not-belonging. That's not freedom, that's not transgression. That's the exact opposite.
One other quick hit, because this isn't a rarrrr men and the phallocracy. Women, females, are just as implicated in this sort of gender policing of the other (another post I will tackle self-gender-policing). For example, many online roleplayers in Dreamwidth, InsaneJournal, Tumblr, and Livejournal are female. A large number of them want to RP relationships and sex between their characters. In other words, they want to roleplay sexual relationships with a fantasy projection of themselves with someone else they find sexually attractive. I will go so far as to suggest that many female RPers who fit into this category are less attractive than the characters they play, and many of them express their own infatuation with how hot or attractive their own character is to them. This is seen as normal and healthy and liberating.
Yet.
Yet. When someone is discovered to be male (I am going by secrets on Fandom!Secrets and the defunct RoleplaySecrets blogs on Livejournal), who also wants to roleplay sex with their fantasy attractive character, they are 'basement dwelling neckbeards' who are intruding in what is, apparently, female space. A player who plays an attractive female character is suddenly 'squicked' to discover that the person she has been writing porn with is biologically male.
Now, this scenario is complex and worth unpacking further, because it is a nexus of 'safe' space, sexuality, policing, and identity, but I bring it here this time, only in the context of proof that this sort of gender policing is not simply Oppressive Patriarchy--females do this same behavior as well, discriminating by the gender of what cyberpunk labeled 'the meat'. In other words, the very people Haraway was addressing, the very people whom one would think are the most interested in breaking down gender and identity, who claim to want to destroy boundaries, to express a sexuality that women have often been told to hide or deny, are twisting their sexual liberation to make it an unsafe space for those with penises.
Isn't that...missing the point of Haraway? That 'male', that penis-owning person on the other keyboard, may be a 'cyborg' too, longing for freedom, wanting to escape the biological and cultural determinism of his body, may be trying to explore different identities, explore sexuality free of the pressure of Western gender obsessions.
If the point of the cyborg is freedom, it should mean freedom for EVERYONE, don't you think?
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
Shiny new blog.
I hate first posts. I'm the kind of person who collects pretty notebooks and then can't bear to write in them because my words, thoughts, ideas, me, in short, are just unworthy. So let's try to buck that trend with a basic intro post that will hopefully soon be buried under actually interesting content.
What you will find on this blog, o nonexistent reader:
Cyberculture, through a variety of lenses. I am starting this blog to help pace me through my sabbatical project, to have some sort of external accountability, with the impetus that I can't just jot incoherent phrases, but have to try and make my thoughts connect up with something coherently, for you, the fake audience. I'm interested in cyborg theory, robots, fandom, science fiction, fan culture, and the ways they intersect.
I became interested in robots at an early age--not in terms of engineering, but in the idea of the mechanical being, and how a robot with a personality (like Optimus Prime) kind of commented on and destabilized our ideas of humanity. I also loved robots because, honestly, they are without family--they exist and have friends and relationships, but they have no complicated family lineage, no mothers or fathers or pressure to reproduce or mate or marry, things that I felt very much as negative pressure imprinted on me by the culture in which I was raised.
What you will find on this blog, o nonexistent reader:
Cyberculture, through a variety of lenses. I am starting this blog to help pace me through my sabbatical project, to have some sort of external accountability, with the impetus that I can't just jot incoherent phrases, but have to try and make my thoughts connect up with something coherently, for you, the fake audience. I'm interested in cyborg theory, robots, fandom, science fiction, fan culture, and the ways they intersect.
I became interested in robots at an early age--not in terms of engineering, but in the idea of the mechanical being, and how a robot with a personality (like Optimus Prime) kind of commented on and destabilized our ideas of humanity. I also loved robots because, honestly, they are without family--they exist and have friends and relationships, but they have no complicated family lineage, no mothers or fathers or pressure to reproduce or mate or marry, things that I felt very much as negative pressure imprinted on me by the culture in which I was raised.
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