In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Category: Art

Do you remember the time

I don’t remember a world without Michael Jackson.

I was born in 1983, a year after Thriller came out. It was still the #1 album on the Billboard charts when I was born. As a little girl, my neighbors — older girls who I worshipped — let me listen to their MJ albums; when I was a little older and went to Disneyland and saw Captain EO, they gave me their old Michael Jackson posters, since they had long ago moved on to George Michael. I saw the Thriller video at a friend’s house years after it came out, but still found it terrifying — and wanted to watch it again and again. When I was eight or nine, a close family friend was stricken with brain cancer; she was six or seven, and best friends with my little sister. Her older brother and I were born three days apart, and our moms had been friends during their pregnancies. She adored Michael Jackson, and toward the end of her life, her parents bought her a karaoke machine so that she could sing his songs with her family. She died when she was eight. There are a few MJ songs that I can’t hear without thinking of her. I wasn’t allowed to watch MTV as a kid, but the older neighbor girls (who by this time were old enough to babysit me) convinced my parents to let my sister and I watch Black or White, arguing that it was a positive message that we should be exposed to. Not long after, we spent most of a family vacation watching the television coverage of Michael’s child molestation charges. None of us had any doubt that he did it, and I have a very clear (and strange) memory of my mom theorizing that maybe Macauley Culkin was somehow involved. Through middle school and high school, Janet began to eclipse Michael as my favorite Jackson, but I still bought HIStory and thought the Scream video was one of the cooler things I saw on MTV. When I went to college, I bonded with the woman I would live with for the next four years over a shared love of Michael’s music — or more specifically, a shared love of memorizing every move from his videos. My affection for the Billy Jean dance carried over to future friendships, and my current room mate and I still break into it whenever that song comes on — it’s common enough occurrence where we took to calling Billy Jean “our song.” In law school, I went to Egypt to see someone I was involved with, and we spend eight long hours driving across the Sinai, sharing his ipod and listening to Michael Jackson albums.

I don’t believe that Michael Jackson was a great person; I think he probably did molest children, or at the very least had inappropriate interactions with them. He had serious and fairly well-documented psychological issues; “man-child” seems to be the favored description, and it’s pretty widely accepted that he had the psycho-social development of a boy. He was an abuse victim, and very possibly an abuser. His childhood and his own suffering certainly isn’t an excuse for the choices he made as an adult, but it is important context when looking back at a life that was tragic, damaged and damaging to others. I don’t think any of that should be overlooked or whitewashed. But as Holly points out, “I don’t think we have to have outlandishly complex thought processes in order to hold multiple, conflicting things about Michael Jackson in our minds. We’re human beings, we have really powerful brains capable of complexity and nuance.” Natalia’s post addresses some of that complexity, and she’s right about holding onto the music rather than the musician. For me, in my life, his music was important. I loved it, even while I found the man sometimes repulsive but mostly sad — and I found the man sad even while recognizing his profound influence on racial and gender presentation.

There are a lot of posts up around the internets today about Michael Jackson. This one at Juan Cole’s place, about Michael, Islam and the Middle East, is one of my favorites. And this one about Michael Jackson’s influence in Albania is also a must-read.

It’s not that I’m “grieving,” or that I’m heartbroken over the death of a larger-than-life musical icon (“celebrity” feels too small a word), even though I’ll admit that my voice cracked a little when I poked my head out of my office to tell my supervisors at work that MJ passed. It’s more that, possibly more than any other artist, Michael Jackson provided a soundtrack for some of the more personal and notable points of my life. I still love his music. I loved hearing it blasting from car windows and stereos while I walked down the street yesterday. I love listening to it as I write this post. For that, I will miss him.

The Survivor Mural Project

I have just learned of a great project going on called the Survivor Mural Project.  The goal is to eventually create a patchwork mural of hundreds of works of art by sexual violence survivors to travel and serve as a reminder of the impact of sexual violence.

From the site:

We believe that collaborating with many survivors from all around the world will provide a powerful visual reminder of the staggering statistics and the devastating impact that sexual violence can have on people’s lives.

Participants can choose to remain anonymous. You do NOT need to be an artist! This is your opportunity to be heard, and to offer inspiration and hope to others.

At this stage there is no deadline for mural piece submissions.

All survivors of any form of sexual violence are welcome and encouraged to submit.  Judging from those pieces already in the gallery, the statement that contributors need not be artists seems very genuine — while many are visually stunning, others resemble PostSecret postcards, and are made up largely of text.  It’s really amazing seeing so many different survivor viewpoints and experiences being collected all in one place, and I can’t wait to see the finished product.

Check out the site for details on how to participate, and spread the word.  I imagine that this will be a truly stunning work of art and activism once it is completed.

h/t Marcella’s Twitter

Why Do You Speak?

SPEAK! by the SPEAK! Women of Color Media Collective
(Liquid Words Productions)

When I first listened to SPEAK!, the spoken word collection put out by the SPEAK! Women of Color Media Collective, I shied away from reviewing it. I was too biased, I worried. I couldn’t be objective. Some of the contributors read (and have written for) this very blog! It was fairer, I decided, to review works by people I’d never met or spoken to.

Blah blah blah. Fuck that. This collection is wonderful.

“I speak to live into my skin… I scream for my family, for my life, for your life, and for the ones to come,” says Adele Nieves in the CD’s opening track, “Why Do You Speak?” She sets the tone for the entire collection, tying personal histories to entire nations, connecting people to peoples. These voices whisper, yell, sing, rhyme, ponder, call, muse (think of the double meaning of the word “muse” – think of a muse channeling her inspiration through her own voice instead of silently bestowing it on someone else). There are so many great moments that it’s hard to figure out which ones to highlight.

Aaminah Hernandez’s piece, “When I Speak,” was one of my favorites. It begins with a telephone ringing and the beep of an answering machine. From the format, one might expect a sort of epistolary piece, but in a striking move Hernandez seems, at first, to address no one in particular. She ruminates on those who seek out Muslim perspectives, but panic when a Muslim woman – or, even more frightening, a Muslim woman without a college degree, or a Muslim mother – opens her mouth. “Surviving isn’t education… and being well-read only matters if it was guided by professors and resulted in something to frame,” she says, her voice measured almost to the point of monotone. The format is slyly appropriate for the subject Hernandez is tackling; one gets the sense that after being shut out of mainstream discourse, she’s entering it through the back door. But who is she speaking to? Whose answering machine is this? Perhaps she’s speaking past her listener, just as other speakers have done to her. Both her and Lisa Factora-Borchers’s criticisms of academia are incisive – why, their pieces ask, do you need a degree to talk about your own experience, your own truths? Why are you a sought-after commodity if you have culturally-sanctioned credentials, and a voice on an answering machine if you don’t?

Nadia Abou-Karr contributes two pieces on the Palestinian experience, “We Will Never Forget” and “Genocide.” In the second piece, she explores the role of the US mainstream in appropriating, repackaging, and mass producing the Holocaust as a tragedy like no other in the history of the world – in other words, the only “real” genocide. I was of two minds as I listened. On the one hand, I thought of the rage I felt at hearing John McCain and Sarah Palin chirp, “We don’t want another Holocaust!” in order to win an election – as if they gave even the tiniest damn about the members of my family who were disappeared after Germany invaded Poland. On the other hand, I couldn’t escape the visceral suspicion and discomfort I feel when any non-Jew appears to suggest that we talk about the Holocaust too much, or in the wrong way. I could feel myself bristling – but healthy bristling will happen when raw subjects are discussed frankly. And even that discomfort is minor when you consider the main point of the piece: that if we agree that each group has the most expertise on their own oppression, then Palestinians need to be able to use the term “genocide” to describe the ongoing erasure of their culture, land, and lives. (Think of this idea in relation to Hernandez and Factora-Borchers’ critiques of credentials and degrees. One of the main themes running through this collection, whether it’s Palestine or privileged feminism or the Song of Solomon, is the subversion of hierarchies and the questioning of accepted narratives. The Israeli government knows what it’s talking about; Palestinian civilians don’t. Academics and men and white people know what they’re talking about; everyone else does not. Meanwhile, the people who supposedly don’t know what they’re talking about are living and hurting and dying.)

Most of the pieces rely on minimal sounds – light percussion, synthesizers, background noise – if there’s any sound besides the speaker at all, so E. Rose Sims’ “On Cartography and Dissection” is a jarring change of pace, with an orchestrated score that matches the dark tone of her exploration of monsters. The piece is a brilliant series of connections between colonialism and transphobia and racism, with mapmaking serving as a metaphor for the naming and conquering of the human body. Flags are planted, already-established realities are ignored, and healthy, natural identities are twisted, by colonizers, into “a wrongness, a distortion.” Sims’s voice brims with sadness and anger as thunder crackles behind her and she ponders what Medusa felt the first time she saw her own reflection.

There are delightful moments of humor in the collection, too. BabyBFP, giggling, reads a poem about her cats, and the CD begins to draw to a close with a spirited rendition of “I Feel Pretty.” When I saw the title on the track listing, I was afraid it would be corny, but these ladies pull it off.

“What is this thing called ‘love’? And what does it mean to radicalize it?” BFP asks at Flip Flopping Joy. The idea of radical love is, as usual, being appropriated and twisted beyond recognition by mainstream “movements,” but SPEAK! is – I think? I feel? I’m new at this and the term resists definition – a work built from real radical love. It’s beyond the romantic or the superficial. “We don’t get to say, ‘I am woman, hear me roar’ – we say, ‘I am woman, dear God, I hope you find my sister today,'” Black Amazon says in “Something Else to Be.” In many ways, it’s beyond analysis.

Oh! And if you need any more evidence that you should procure a copy of this CD, all proceeds go towards helping single mothers attend the Allied Media Conference in Detroit this July. Listening parties, workshops, and a zine are options available to you.

So get it already! Get this CD posthaste. Listen, learn, and love.

ETA: Looks like Cara and I posted about this at the same time!

I Cried As If I Were His Daughter

This video comes with a VERY STRONG TRIGGER WARNING, as the poem performed here by Jasmine Mans contains graphic descriptions of rape.  But like Renee, who led me to the video, I feel like it must be shared.  I do in fact believe that while sharing our stories about sexual violence can be deeply triggering, it can also be deeply healing.  And they’re stories that need to be told.

Just wow.

UPDATE: Transcript below.  Big huge thanks to Renee for doing it.

I Cried As If I Were His Daughter  (transcript)

He held my fingers to my mouth and said hush little girl because right now only me and you exist in this world. He took off his pants and began unzipping mine. I cried while thinking this isn’t the way I envisioned my first time but when I saw the blood pore from my legs, I thought if it wasn’t me the tears another girl would shed. I looked him in his eyes and realized that he was old enough to be someone’s father, so I cried as if I was his daughter, as I felt my insides being slaughtered. I cried like she cried at night, locking her door praying for the illuminating existence of sunlight because when night came he came, pain came. Hoping that a bath could wash away the shame, hoping that a bath could wash away the sores that her vagina bore when her hymen was torn. Her bath washed away the semen but it didn’t wash away the memories of when he forced her to get on her knees and suck his – so I cried as if I was his daughter because of that rage and that possible AIDS between my legs, it could never add up to her pain, her distortion and her three different abortions and that one suicide not that she wrote saying mom, “I gotta go, don’t find out why I did this I love you. Even though I felt all alone just find a way to continue to be strong.” As he rammed his fingers in me I thought of reaching in my heart and pulling out my soul, now my ninety-eight point six degree body turned cold. I cried as if I was his daughter, lying there trying to hide her privates. This gave her reason to believe that God didn’t exist. Her mother knew that she heard sounds in the other room but she forced herself to believe that they were only cartoons as he licked my body up and down. I hope that he would ejaculate enough that in his own semen he would drown. He carved his name in my uterus so that my first born child could on be as cursed as ..inaudible.. thinking that this only happened in movies, she was the main character in the (inaudible) when she cried and he opened her credits. Too scared of the night, that is why she wished for ongoing sunlight. When he got off me I swear, I stabbed myself like his daughter cried because another pain wouldn’t feel good right now. I stabbed myself like his daughter cried because I could no longer look in the mirror. I stabbed myself like his daughter cried for him making me want to be gay. I stabbed myself like his daughter cried over the 160 babies that would be raped the next day. I cried as if I was he daughter because of that rage, that possible AIDS between my legs it could never add up to her pain, her distortion her three different abortions . That one suicide note that she wrote saying, Mom I gotta go. Don’t find out why I did this, I love you. Even though I know all along, but honestly nothing more tragic could help me write a better poem . I looked him in his eyes and realized that he was old enough to be someone’s father, but I looked him in his eyes and realized that he was old enough to be someone’s father, so Mom I died because I was his daughter.

Ink Meets Craft

Check out this photo gallery of dolls turned inked and embroidered ladies, where the artist finds

cloth bodied baby dolls at thrift shops and send them to tattoo artists who then draw original tattoos directly on the dolls. They send the dolls back to me and I hand embroider the images on the cloth bodies. Twelve of sixteen dolls have been completed to date. The dolls, like their artists, are of different races, religious and sexual orientations, and cultural backgrounds. Each collaborating artist is asked to consider her response to tattooing the doll along with my feedback and response to embroidering the doll. From there she is encouraged to name and then write a short statement or story about her doll.

I kick myself for not thinking of this first.

In Which Solnit and BFP Split Some S*it Right Open

So it’s an era of content overload, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how to apply a sort of slow-food/deep-economy/earth-democracy ethic to media making and consumption, and that has me thinking about what kind of media really moves and disrupts and changes and inspires, and I find myself most valuing writing that is rigorous and processed, that simultaneously makes connections between often separated parts and adds layers to seemingly simple conversations, and/or that provokes readers to care about something they haven’t been caring too much about. For instance, on all three points, BFP on the John Edwards drama and Rebecca Solnit on the Olympics.

Brownfemipower starts by saying, “all the angles have been covered beyond to death, pretty much. but there was one thing that i did want to say…” — and then she proceeds to just rip that whole conversation open, revealing how tired and limited the discussion has been pretty much everywhere else and forcing me to remember that, no matter how little I tend to care about electoral politics or marriage or parlor dramas or anything else they’re talking about on TV, every single story is a social story, a political story, with all kinds of deep and layered context and implications.

Which reminded me of Rebecca Solnit’s column about the Olympics (that other presently televised drama I haven’t been watching) in the current Orion, and the way it is both eloquent and critically politicized (as she pretty much always is, as so few writers are), bringing the usual critiques around the Olympics (displacement of local communities, human-rights violations, nationalism) full circle to face the central myths of the Olympics head-on, which makes the critique that much more substantial and devastating:

the Beijing Olympic Games will begin, and television will bring us weeks of the human body at the height of health, beauty, discipline, power, and grace. It will be a thousand-hour advertisement, in some sense, for the participating nations as represented by athletes with amazing abilities. In reality, the athletes will be something of a mask for what each nation really stands for…

It serves the nations of the world to support the exquisitely trained Olympian bodies, and it often serves their more urgent political and economic agendas to subject other bodies to torture, mutilation, and violent death, as well as to look away from quieter deaths from deprivation and pollution. In the struggles for land and resources … bodies are mowed down like weeds. The celebrated athletic bodies exist in some sort of tension with the bodies that are being treated as worthless and disposable.

Hair-pulling and braid-weaving

Ever since the minor kerfuffle over Titan Games’ Fat Princess, I’ve been wanting to write some more criticism of games, and not just because I love attracting defensive trolls who hallucinate de jure censorship and gamer-reviling boycotts whenever something problematic about a game comes up.

Fat Princess is basically a decent-sounding game concept that tragically hinges on one demeaning stereotype as a central metaphor. Only the concept for that game has been released to te public, so we weren’t able to talk much about the game itself. On the other hand, there are plenty of already-released games out there that deserve criticism too. And guess what? I don’t mean criticism as in bashing, I mean criticism as in “the kind of analysis and commentary that films, books, plays, and other media receive.” Games need criticism in order to evolve as a medium.

As a game designer, I love the rare moments when my games are picked apart at a level that transcends the usual “should I buy this” review revolving around fun, explosions, and how many hours of play the consumer gets. Unsurprisingly, I’m very keen on feminist perspectives on gaming as one lens of criticism and analysis. A lot of gamers looked at Valve’s amazing game Portal in this way, the standout being Joe McNeilly’s over-the-top psychoanalytic reading of the game, pushing the signifiers and comp-lit speak as far as he could.

With all that said, I present Braid, one of this year’s most hotly-anticipated and rave-reviewed games, but one that hasn’t received much attention outside of certain kinds of gamer circles. It’s a short but elegant game, a homage to and deconstruction of classic platform games like Super Mario Bros, and a moody meditation on time, memory, and relationships. Braid is a fascinating game for many reasons. Most of them are described in this preview, which I recommend reading if you want excuses to buy and play the game.

Seeing as this is a feminist blog, I’m going to talk about the game’s take on relationships. You see, in Braid you have to rescue the princess. Sound familiar?

Before we go any further, here is a warning. I am going to have to spoil the entire plot of this game, including the twist ending. If you have an Xbox 360, I recommend you download and play the game instead of reading any further. It’s definitely worth $15. If you like jumping on little round uglies, listening to vaguely Celtic music played backwards, and feeling like your perception of causality is being bent into pretzels, you’ll love Braid. In fact, if you hang out at a friend’s house who has an Xbox, I recommend you go over there before reading this. And if you really don’t like spoilers and own a Windows PC, you can even wait for the PC version to come out… probably in a few months. If you’re sure you won’t ever finish this game, or just don’t care that Jon Blow will weep salty tears and gnash his teeth in anger that I’m spoiling everything for you, read on.

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Breaking through the “Celluloid Ceiling”

I haven’t been posting as much as I’d hoped to these past two weeks, but I have really enjoyed guest-blogging and participating in the Feministe community. Part of my distraction from blogging is my commitment to volunteer work in my community. One of my newest and most time-consuming endeavors has been joining the executive board and heading the special events committee of ImageOut:The Rochester Gay and Lesbian Film and Video Festival. I absolutely adore this film festival and am so thrilled to be immersed in (and sometimes overwhelmed by) it. We are the 2nd largest queer film fest in New York (second only to NYC) and one of the best in the country, in my opinion. If you live in or near Rochester, NY, I really suggest that you make the trip OUT to see us this fall (October 10-19, Save the Dates!). Clearly, I love this fest. Shameless self-promotion aside, I am blogging about ImageOut as an example of my disappointment with the lack of representation and participation by queer and allied women in the work of our festival and the greater film community internationally.

For example, on our board, there are currently four seats out of thirteen held by women. I’m one of them and two of them are ending their board term next year. I hope we will try to fill those seats with women and people of diverse cultural backgrounds (There are two people of color on the board, both Asian-American, and there are no reps of the low-income or deaf communities that we do our best to reach out to during the festival.). I have faith that we will and you better believe I’ll be encouraging it. Our membership is also fairly homogeneous, with middle-upper class white gay men taking the lead both in membership/sponsorship and event turn-out. And the lack of participation by queer women in ImageOut is not for a lack of “women’s” programming. ImageOut tries to keep an even balance of movies about queer men and queer women. (Last year, Itty Bitty Titty Committee was one of our opening night films.)

Our programming chair is constantly whining about the lack of good films by and about LGBTQI women. And while he is probably being a snotty brat (just kidding, MG), he is speaking to a serious inequity between male and female filmmakers. While women are doing better in the indie and queer film industries, there are truly fewer films out there by and for women than by and for men. This is greatly because it’s much harder for women to break into the film industry than men.

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