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.
Sunday, June 23, 2013
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?
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