March 2006 – Feministe

Christian Fundies Hate America

“America is no longer good.”
“Unrighteousness, evil, corruption, perversion and death are now standard operating procedure in the United States of America.”

Imagine if liberal politicians were calling America “evil” and predicting its demise. They’d be labelled as anti-American and contemptable. Hell, all a left-leaning person has to do is say that she wasn’t mistreated by Iraqis and that’s enough to call her a suicide bomber.

But it’s a-ok when right-wing Christian leaders complain about their evil country.

By the way, Christianity is apparently under attack in America. And they have a point. I mean, just look at all the Christ-hating Jews who have occupied the Whitehouse over the past century. And all the Buddhists in Congress. Not to mention all those Hindus sitting on the Supreme Court! Just as expected, atheists are routinely accorded more respect than all religious people. And it’s not like the vast majority of Americans identify as Christians or anything. Clearly, we are an oppressed minority here.

At one point, speaker Herb Titus held up a copy of Kevin Phillips’ “American Theocracy,” offering it as evidence of the putative war on Christians. It was an audacious move, given that Sara Diamond, the preeminent scholar of the Christian right, reported in a 1998 book that Titus was forced to resign his post as dean of the law school at Pat Robertson’s Regent University because he refused to renounce Christian Reconstructionism. Christian Reconstructionism is a theocratic sect that advocates the replacement of civil law with biblical law, including the execution of homosexuals, apostates and women who are unchaste before marriage. Christian Reconstructionists used to be politically radioactive, but a new generation of religious right leaders like Scarborough have embraced them, and some members of today’s GOP apparently see no problem associating with them. This does not mean that America is on the verge of theocracy, but it signals an important shift. The language of religious authoritarianism has become at least somewhat politically acceptable.

Well, at least it’ll relieve the over-population problem.

(Even) More On The Duke Rape Case

There is so much good commentary going on about the Duke rape case that I would be remiss to not point it out. Bloggers have gone at this case from all angles, and it’s been really interesting to read what they’re saying. Head over to their blogs and check out the posts in their entirety.

Quick Cut

This just sort of became a post, and I want to transport it over here just so it doesn’t take over that thread. (Still, some more, again, anyway.) So Amp linked to Chris’s post about why he does not identify as feminist. The thread contains a lot of good comments on when someone may identify as what, including some comments about other terms of affinity.

A commenter called spit wrote as follows:

This became a huge dilemma at dykemarch a while ago when a lot of FTM trannies — who had been members of the lesbian community for years, and who had fought alongside women as women for years, started pushing for inclusion in dykemarch even though they may identify as men. What do you do in those circumstances? If you exclude them, you’re once again basing feminism and womanhood on either “physical sex” or on some “one or the other” oppositional concept of gender, both things that feminism has spent a long time trying to counter.

And I responded:

Spit, while I would err on the side of openness for anyone whose gender identity is complex, I think that people who receive male privilege have a responsibility to opt out of safe space for women. If they intrude upon it, they insult its reason for existing: to provide a haven for people who are _not_ privileged. Ftms are welcome at a great many events focused on queer women, and are welcome to attend all the parties after the march. The dyke march is women-only, not as a nod to essentialism, but as a recognition of the damage essentialism has caused.

And we got into a whole long discussion about ftms and feminist demarcations of women’s spaces and of “woman.”

Basically–and I hope spit comes here to complain if I’m getting this wrong–spit’s position is that these boundaries tend to negate complexity in precisely the way that feminism wants to stop. They divide everyone into “male” and “female,” whether or not that’s an accurate description of their identities or their lives. Concepts like “women-only space” invariably turn on a definition of “woman” that ignores a whole lot of people:

To the extent that not all but many trannies bring the whole categorization scheme into question, feminism and the quest for all “women’s rights” that come out of it is going to have to work to figure out what, exactly, is meant by “woman” — because there will always be some trannies or genderqueers who still identify to some extent with women, even after they’ve transitioned. Any category that tries to have clear lines around it is going to run into problems here — and my inclusion or exclusion from that category, while I agree that it cannot necessarily only depend on how I feel inside, is fundamentally also flawed if it only considers more or less how I pass socially, largely because that will simply wind up reinforcing the social and gender-essentialist norm. And my relationship with the social as a tranny is also often going to be more complicated than a straightforward system will allow for — to the extent, say, that I am out and open about being trans, among other things.

I agree with this–we weren’t really arguing–but worry about a few things. It’s as counterproductive to ignore the dichotomy as it is to uncritically accept it. Spit and I are sort of speaking from different sides of the same idea: a binary that negates people who don’t live within it.

I see a lot of transguys who either do or will live as male and who therefore do or will receive male privilege, but who are incapable of acknowledging their current or future status. They need to believe that they are still vulnerable to misogyny and ill-treatment on a level equal to that of women. This is sometimes because of internalized transphobia; frequently, it’s because of a version of feminist affinity that ends up supporting trans invisibility.

Friday Random Ten

1. Tom Waits – Muriel
2. Sufjan Stevens – Jacksonville
3. The Fugees – Killing Me Softly
4. The Smiths – Asleep
5. Le Tigre – Let’s Run
6. Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane – Sweet and Lovely
7. Pearl Jam – Go
8. Ben Lee – Catch My Disease
9. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah – Details of the War
10. Radiohead – Thinking About You

Random thought: I really wish that I was more interested in big firm work, because then I’d be rich. Damn this bleeding heart.

Once Again, The Damn Dog’s Neurosis Ruins The Shot

I had them all lined up like little piggies at a trough, and Junebug spotted the camera in my hands and got all nervous.

Sigh.

Strangers on the Sofa

A great article on the Haven Coalition, I group I volunteer with and that I’ve written about many times before on this blog (so forgive me in if I’m repeating stories that you have all already heard from me). For those who aren’t aware, Haven is a New York City grassroots organization that provides housing for low-income women traveling to New York for second-trimester abortions. This author examines Haven from a Jewish perspective, and explains why her work is a mitzvah.

What moves us, what made us both instantly say yes when a friend emailed us about becoming Haven hosts, are the Jewish commandments to help and protect our neighbor, to shelter someone who is in—again, liberally interpreted—danger. And the notion of tzedakah, which is not an act of magnanimous charity—”Here, pitiable one, make yourself comfortable in my fabulous Brooklyn home!”—but one of justice: giving the poor their due.

Because for all our fretting about how changes on the Supreme Court and in South Dakota will affect Roe v. Wade, for far too many women and girls the right to abortion already exists only on paper. The legal and economic barriers that make it difficult, even impossible, for women to carry out their own reproductive choices trap the most vulnerable members of society: the poor and working class, the young, immigrants, and those without people around them to bail them out. Access to abortion—access, not just the in-principle right—is a fundamental matter of social and economic justice. The word “choice” doesn’t even begin to cover it. We, the Jews, are the people commanded to take care of the widow and the orphan. Shirley is 41, confident, single, and black; Elena is 19, shy, and Polish—she hasn’t seen her parents in Warsaw for two years. The only things they really have in common are that they are poor, they are pregnant, and they are in my house.

A Million Little Mistakes

Liza commented on the not-James-Frey-again-for-the-love-of-Jesus post:

as to the Frey thing … I’m fascinated by this whole “betrayal” drama. Why don’t people feel betrayed by the falseness of reality TV but with a book like this is different? It’s because people who think of themselves as smart and cool are outraged not by the lie but by the fact they got snookered? I think Frey is not the issue. Snobbery is.

Perhaps because the scare-quotes around “reality” TV are understood by this point? Teevee has been fake fake fake since “The $64,000 Question” scandal. While people might be happy to ignore many of the levels on which they’re being manipulated–and, okay, maybe that’s where the anger comes from–the idea that this stuff is choreographed is an open secret. Plus, reality teevee itself has become more and more literally choreographed–a “reality” obstacle course, or a “reality” game show–as the audience has become less inclined to award it the veneer of legitimacy it may once have had. The real people are thrown into increasingly contrived situations.

I think that “reality” in the sense it’s being used in “reality television” is better understood as a fictional genre attempt to evoke reality than an attempt to be real. I think that part of the lure of “reality” is not the idea that these people will react naturally, but merely that they will react unprofessionally. They’re not actors, just people living anxiety dreams.

James Frey, on the other hand, was not attempting reality literature by telling stories his audience knew had to be embroideries. (Smackdown: My Life and Times as a Pro-Wrestler.) We’re got stories that evoke reality already, including stories that evoke reality by openly mimicking journalistic or autobiographical accounts; they’re called fiction and they call themselves fiction.

James Frey lied knowing that most people would probably not know that he was telling lies. His protagonist was not a clown walking onto a deadfall or even a gladiator in the ring; his protagonist was a real live human being living a real life. Him. Us. We were supposed to empathize, not applaud, when something awful happened.

His subject matter also touched on an actual life, not an experimental hiatus from real life. The scenarios generally presented on reality teevee shows are presented as, well, scenes. They’re controlled environments, and when the show is over everyone gets to go home. You don’t actually get hurt, injured or killed. You don’t actually lose all your money. You don’t actually have to start again from zero. The level of reality that James Frey falsely claimed was more documentary than “reality.” Imagine getting all the way to the end of Thin Blue Line and then finding out that Errol Morris just rounded up a couple of drinking buddies and had them read from a script. Imagine seeing a “reality” teevee show about putting various temptations in the way of an addict so that the audience can see his or her fuckups in all their horrifying glory. (I’m not saying people wouldn’t watch. I’m saying it’s in a different class from The Apprentice.)

If there is a certain amount of chagrin amidst all the rage–and I agree that there is–I think it might have to do with how very easy people were to fool, and how very eagerly they assumed the role of fact-checkers. It got reviews like this:

Anger, hurt, love, and pain are all laid bare; his writing style is as naked and forthright as the raw emotions that life in the rehab center brings to the surface. Starkly honest and mincing no words, Frey bravely faces his struggles head on, and readers will be mesmerized by his account of his ceaseless battle against addiction.

(The reviews also tended to call him a crappy writer.)

People who probably had never struggled with addiction were calling this an authentic account of addiction. A tissue of lies cannot be authentic, but this book apparently cannot claim verisimillitude, either. To hear Heather King tell it, most people with actual experience with alcoholism and drug addiction would immediately twig to its inauthenticity:

I’m not sure where his Hazelden was, for example, but it couldn’t have been more different than mine. When I washed up on its shores, nobody told me I had to believe in God and join a “Program” and that I’d drink again if I didn’t. Nobody gave me a coloring book. Nobody made me do a moral inventory with a priest. Nobody said I had to be on “constant alert,” for the rest of my life, against cross-addictions.I wasn’t thrilled to be there either, but the place where I spent 30 days was acountry club-like facility, manned by an expert staff, and peopled not with Hollywood caricatures, butstruggling, flesh-and-blood human beings like me. The place Frey describes is a combination federal prison, inner city detox and B-movie stage set. Who were these vicious thugs (though never as vicious as the macho James, who, in spite of his supposedly severe physical, mental and emotional degeneration, never once in the course of the entire book comes out on the losing end of a showdown) who have the thousands of dollars and/or health insurance to pay for a state-of-the-art rehab? Who are the gatekeepers who let him leave the premises, rendezvous with his tormented rehab girlfriend at a crack house, and breeze back in? Who are these shadowy Dr. Mengele types provoking screams from the medical unit? The only screams I heard during my stay were of laughter—at people who made lame-ass statements like “I have lived alone, I have fought alone, I have dealt with pain alone.” With two rich parents, a decent education and an array of loyal friends? Please!

(Incidentally, a bunch of transpeople were saying similar things about JT Leroy’s stories and public persona. That and that if JT Leroy were real, she’d probably have exes, housemates, best friends, and nemeses all over the place.)

Way back, before I found out they were making the movie anyway and decided never to mention JT Leroy’s name again, Pam Noles wrote in her blog about this story (follow-up here), which is also discussed here.

And the same dynamic emerges: people who are not only not-Navajo but who clearly don’t know anything about them are calling an account authentic:

The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping was published to more glowing reviews — “vivid and immediate, crackling with anger, humor, and love” (The Washington Post) and “riveting… lyrical… a ragged wail of a song, an ancient song, where we learn what it is to truly be a parent and love a child” (USA Today).

Predictably enough, the people who would actually know are not fooled for a moment:

Morris has suspected for years that Nasdijj is not who he says he is. A full-blooded Navajo and a professor of literature and Navajo studies at Dine College in Tsaile, Arizona, on the Navajo reservation, Morris is among the world’s foremost authorities on Navajo culture. Shortly after The Blood was published, he saw Nasdijj’s name listed on the national index of Native writers. Under the author’s bio, it said Nasdijj claimed his name meant “to become again” in Navajo Athabaskan. This came as news to Morris, who is fluent in Athabaskan. “There is no word ‘Nasdijj’ in the Navajo language,” he explains. “It’s gibberish.”

(snip)

While a non-Navajo may see these gaffes as minor, Morris asserts they add up to a character that doesn’t exist. Like a rabbi eating pork or a Hindu beating his cow, they are culturally incriminating; and the book is littered with them, he says. Nasdijj writes that as a boy his mother used to have sings (a religious ceremony) for him to familiarize him with his culture. “That’s a communal activity,” Morris says. “To have a sing by yourself is highly aberrant behavior. Like holding a church service for yourself.”

More on the Duke Rape Case

It’s not only hit the national media, it’s the fourth-most-emailed story on the Times site.

The incident on March 13, which occurred at an off-campus house owned by the university, has brought into sharp relief long-simmering tensions between the private university and the city. The woman is black, most of the team members are white and law-enforcement officials say they are investigating allegations that racial epithets were shouted at the woman.

Residents, students and faculty members have staged at least five protests in the last four days, including one Tuesday night outside the building where Duke’s president, Richard H. Brodhead, was holding a news conference. They are upset with the silence of team members and the university’s handling of the case.

Mr. Brodhead’s announcement that the team’s season was being suspended came five days after 46 of 47 members of the Blue Devils lacrosse team provided DNA samples to Durham police investigators. The team’s roster includes 26 players from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut high schools. Mr. Brodhead said that he met with the team’s captains Tuesday morning and that they apologized for the embarrassment they had caused themselves, their families, the athletic department and the university. They also denied the allegations made by the woman, who said she had been assaulted in a bathroom by three team members.

It’s running on the Sports pages (thus the references to the local players), but at least it identifies the racial, class and gender issues and the story is getting out there. It looks like the original story from the local paper got picked up by the AP.

Jill Carroll Released

The journalist was freed three months after being abducted in an attack that left her translator dead.

Carroll, 28, was dropped off near the Iraqi Islamic Party offices. She walked inside, and people there called American officials, Iraqi police said.

“I was treated well, but I don’t know why I was kidnapped,” Carroll said in a brief interview on Baghdad television.

I’m going to take a wild guess and say that it was for a couple of reasons. A) she’s an American; and B) she wrote for the Christian Science Monitor. It’s a damned good paper, but the name alone is trouble in a region where the fundamentalist imams are instituting sharia law and consolidating control.

But this is one woman with huevos:

Carroll went to the Middle East in 2002 after being laid off from a newspaper job. She had long dreamed of covering a war.

In American Journalism Review last year, Carroll wrote that she moved to Jordan in late 2002, six months before the war started, “to learn as much about the region as possible before the fighting began.”

“There was bound to be plenty of parachute journalism once the war started, and I didn’t want to be a part of that,” she wrote.

Carroll has had work from Iraq published in the Monitor, AJR, U.S. News & World Report, ANSA and other publications. She has been interviewed often on National Public Radio.

Congratulations, Jill.

Friends and Benefits

This post has been a long time in the procrastinating, because this is a difficult topic and these are some dirty sheets, but I wanted to comment on Hugo’s reference to the racial demographics of his marriage and his attendance roster. It was–it was!–a variant on the tired old “Some of my best friends are…” non-argument:

FYI, I teach at an 80% non-white college and am married to a woman who is of mixed African and Latin heritage; not a guarantor of my progressive bona fides by any means, but part of a larger picture

I’d like to share my own experience with this kind of reasoning. Before I tell my story, I would like to offer a few disclaimers. First of all, this is not meant to imply that I can empathize with or even identify other similar examples, or even that I myself have any idea of what friendship means. Second, this is a minor instance of the things that can be done in the name of friendship–for example, no one’s dead. Third, I am talking dynamics, not comparing scars.