April 2008 – Feministe

About Erasing …

It has not exactly gone unreported that the casting of 21 is racist. (One widely linked critique is here. I found another here but I feel like there must be a whole body of WOC coverage of this story that I missed. If I did, my mistake and I will gladly update if anyone brings it to my attention.) Since I read the light but fun book on which it is based, Ben Mezrich’s “Bringing Down the House,” I thought I should add my voice.

It’s not just that the film took a bunch of really interesting Asian characters and made them white. That’s the traditional Hollywood racism. This is much worse. Some folks may have already read elsewhere that in Mezrich’s book, that the team was majority Asian worked to their advantage, so it was important to the plot. But it’s even worse than that.

In the book, Mezrich reports the main character’s own view of the interplay of racist stereotypes and his livelihood: that dealers and pit bosses and casino security are creatures of stereotypes and assumptions, so they only see what they believe. They believe only middle-aged white men count cards; they believe that Asians are all basically compulsive gamblers. In order for the team to effectively make money from the numerical advantage that a rich deck offers the player during a blackjack game, the players had to be able to bet heavily while the shoe was full of face cards; the kind of betting that might raise suspicion. But, Mezrich tells us, in the experiences of this team of Asian professional counters, the casino workers don’t see anything unusual about college-aged Asian males betting like they have all the money in the world to lose. Because their lens is racist.

The book doesn’t put a lot of weight on this, but it is a plot element; and more than that, it’s a critique. So Hollywood, by casting the Asian characters as white, has also erased a critique of racism. So that’s, to my mind, several levels of not okay.

Update: Kai, in comments, graciously provided links to work on this story by Jenn Fang of reappropriate and a discussion on NPR. I am particularly remiss in having missed Jenn’s piece; I read her blog occasionally and I thought I searched there but I somehow missed this. I’ll pull out this portion from a post that, if folks have a minute, they ought to read in full:

And though the story of the MIT Blackjack team centres on the Asian American identity of the team members, the movie loses its opportunity to explore this reappropriation of stereotypes by real-life Asian American men who used society’s perception of them — for better or for worse — to steal millions from Las Vegas casinos. Instead of exploring this interesting (and arguably empowering) story of racial identity, the movie becomes yet-another “boy-meets-girl” trifle with Asian American characters existing only as props to further a story about White protagonists.

Finally, in response to Jenn’s use of the word “steal,” I will note that I disagree. Mezrich is clear in the book that the tactics — counting cards, doing it as a team and passing signals about the state of the decks, are within the letter of the law, at least in Nevada. The casinos could bar them temporarily or permanently for any reason or no reason, but could not prosecute. For that reason, they resorted to dirtier tactics, but I won’t post spoilers. The book is a fun read.

FWIW, also, Jenn makes clear that Mezrich himself understood that this was wrong and said so.

Orange Juice That Comes In Juggs

Posting on this at the request of my spouse. At 20 seconds, is that the most transparent metaphor for breasts to sell orange juice? (It might not be so clear if it were not for the voice-over, which contextualizes the images.)

We’re surrounded by the commodification of the female body. The drumbeat is so steady that it’s hard not to tune it out, but it needs calling out every once in a while.

I can see the thinking. Orange juice is a kids’ beverage. Charging a premium requires rebranding. Rebranding requires that they make a sharp break with what people think about orange juice. It can’t be simple and yummy, it has to be sophisticated, sensual … erotic … and, cut to the thinly veiled metaphors for women’s body parts. Not women, not women’s bodies, but women’s body parts.

Some het guy in creative is probably geeking out about how slick this is. But it’s not. It’s annoying.

(While I’m on the subject of ubiquitous women’s bodies as superfluous ornaments: Stop with the “ring card girls.” I don’t need some woman I’ve never met holding a sign with a round number on it; I know what round it is. I’m keeping a scorecard.)

Feminism without fragmentation

When Jill asked me to come on as a regular blogger for Feministe, one question/concern that I had for her was about the type of stuff I could post here. Feministe is, of course, centered around feminism, so I asked whether it’s all right for me to post things that aren’t explicitly related to feminism or women. I think that I asked this more for reassurance than out of any real confusion, since I’ve read (and appreciated) many Feministe posts that don’t focus centrally on feminism. Jill gave me the reassurance that I’d hoped for – that I’m free to post what I’d like – which made me feel more confident about joining the team.

Interestingly, just as I was having this exchange with Jill, some conversations about what is or is not a feminist issue and what should or should not be posted on feminist blogs, specifically with regards to posts about the Sean Bell verdict on Feministing and here on Feministe. I made the mistake of wading somewhat clumsily into the fray and getting told to fuck off within two comments (ah, how I missed the blogosphere…) That wasn’t the most enriching experience, but it did drive home the concern with which I came to this blog.

I’m happy and excited to be joining an explicitly feminist and feminist-centric blog. But I wouldn’t be if my participation was predicated at leaving parts of my self – my identities and my politics – at the door. I live and function in this world in large part a as a woman, but also as a person of color, a Puerto Rican, a queer person, a genderqueer butch. These identities don’t merely intersect; they overlap, and they change each other in the overlapping. As I said over in that ill-fated comments thread, my entire identity is more than the sum of its parts; the overlap creates something new, something intrinsically meshed that can’t just be spliced apart into neat, discrete categories.

Likewise, my politics are interconnected. I can look at my politics and point out some different, distinct threads – “Oh, that’s a feminist politic right there; and that one, that’s anti-racist; and this one here’s trans positive.” But things aren’t always so discrete. I find few issues to be purely feminist, or purely about race or class or anything else. Just as I, as a person, am multi-dimensional and made of many different identities and experiences, my political perspective is a tightly-woven tapestry of the many issues that are important to me. My feminism informs my anti-racism, which informs my anti-classism, which informs my anti-imperialism, which all inform everything else. If I were to try to pull out one pure discrete thread, I think the whole damn thing would start to unravel. Remove one thread and the rest would be incomplete and may not hold together.

I can’t see what would be gained, then, by having me and the other bloggers here set aside all issues that are important to me yet not (obviously, on their face) related to women when blogging at Feministe. Some might argue that it would provide a space more purely and exclusively devoted to feminism; I, however, would argue that it would lop off great big important pieces of what shapes the feminism and larger politics of me and the other writers here.

I also think that if we were made to focus only on what affects women because they’re women, it would be easy to slide into the same traps that drove feminists of color away from second wave feminism, that drove some of them to even separate themselves from the entire term “feminist” and take on a new one, “womanist,” that they could define for themselves. Assertions like apostate’s that feminism must be “race-neutral” eerily echo the sorts of assertions that drove many women of color away from feminism back then, and I think that they’ll only serve to drive many women of color – and other women who refuse to segment themselves or their politics artificially – away now. Check it, y’all – those days aren’t behind us. They’re still here. I’m barely getting clued into the blogosphere again and already I’ve read two women of color talking about how they have already or are considering shedding the label “feminist” (here and here.)

Well, it’s 1:31am and I feel like I’m beginning to ramble. I’d hoped to start my blogging here at Feministe off with something a bit stronger, more cohesive, more focused. But maybe I just needed to get all that off my chest before I could really get down to work here. I hope it’ll at least resonate a bit.

Also, what Latoya said.

Hey, everyone!

I’m happy to announce that I’m the newest blogger on this awesome Feministe team! A big thanks to Jill for inviting me and to my fellow bloggers for welcoming me. (And to Jill, have a good break. I strongly believe in blogging breaks for sanity’s sake. Looking forward to your return.)

A bit about me: I’m a stateside-born Puerto Rican, queer, genderqueer butch, originally from New Jersey and now living in Brooklyn. I’m a techie and tech trainer who works primarily with non-profit progressive community organizations. I’ve been blogging in some form or another for almost 10 years now, most recently over at AngryBrownButch. I’ll be continuing my blogging over there, too.

Before the past week or so I’d been on a bit of an informal blogging hiatus so I feel a bit out of the blogosphere loop, but I’m happy to be back and excited and energized to be blogging here. I hope I can contribute some good stuff to this tremendous community that folks have created here!

Men Who Take Their Partners’ Names

One of my spouse’s college friends, a het woman, married a het guy who took her name. It has been years, but his mother is still bitter. I thought of it because it came up in Jessica Valenti’s new book, He’s A Stud, She’s A Slut, which I am in the middle of.

There are not many, but it happens. I could do research, but that would be hard. I’d rather let the hive-mind do it for me.

One comes readily to mind:

Jack White, who was born Gillis, and married Meg White, divorced, and pretended they were siblings until the Detroit Free Press found the paper trail. On the minus side, he’s nuts. On the plus side, he’s brilliant. (On could say the same about famous-in-Canada fiddle player Ashley MacIsaac, who is Jack White’s cousin. And who is married, but did not take his spouse’s name. And BTW, I’m not ignoring MacIsaac’s history of saying racist things and then saying he was being ironic — he’s done it and I don’t know if he’s tripped over a clue since then or not, but I won’t pretend it didn’t happen.)

I know of no list, but we can make one here.

Update:
Ashley MacIsaac had his say in comments, and I think I should be entirely fair to him. I tossed off an aside about Jack White’s connection to a Canadian fiddle master with a reputation for courting controversy. However, I didn’t feel that I could let it pass without comment that MacIsaac has said things which some folks in the past interpreted as racist. I said above that he has said these comments were irony, and he repeats that below. I had one reported incident in mind: MacIsaac’s May 1, 2003 concert. The Ottowa Citizen reported that he made remarks about an Asian woman in the audience spreading SARS. MacIsaac sued the Citizen; I don’t know the outcome. He maintains (and as far as I know, has always said) that he meant to be ironic. I wasn’t there and I have never seen a verbatim account of what he said.

I’m not assuming that MacIsaac intended anything other than he says. If my remarks above read that way, that was my error. However, the discussion of racism in the feminist blogosphere has underscored that intent is not the only question. People may say things meaning to be ironic or antiracist that are counterproductive. In a world full of racism, and in the middle of a publicity storm about SARS, it’s awfully tough for a white man to pull off a reference to an Asian woman having SARS and have the audience get the ironic intent, have it not feel for some folks like they’ve been punched in the gut. I don’t know what MacIsaac’s audience members thought, but if a friend of mine said he was going to try to pull that off, I’d say, “don’t do it, it’s bound to be a disaster.”

So, unless the comment was completely different from the reporting, I think it was a bad and mistaken shot at irony, one he should not have taken. When I said above that I don’t know if he had “tripped over a clue” since, I didn’t mean a conversion from hate to non-hate; I never had reason to believe he was a hateful person. I meant a realization that that kind of ironic approach generally doesn’t work well, that the remark generally has a negative immediate impact and that explaining the irony later does not undo all or some of the damage.

As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And sometimes with ironic remarks about racism that have the effect of unironic remarks about racism; the strong position of a lot of people I respect (and I confess I can’t find a link to what I’m looking for now, but it has been said over and over), is that saying something racist by screwing up is still saying something racist. And that’s something I hear from people who have to live with the impact, not the intent. So that’s my view.

Taking a Break

I need to leave the internets for a while.

About a month ago, I arranged to have a guest blogger start today so that I have time to prepare for finals. So as you can see from the previous posts, Thomas will be covering for me for a while, and of course the other Feministe bloggers will of course hold down the fort. And the new Feministe blogger will also be starting soon. The original plan was for me to keep blogging, just lightly — one or two posts a day. But I’m going to cut myself off.

It’s probably no big mystery why I’m bowing out for a while, but I’m feeling an unusual confessional urge, so here goes: I am not cut out for this. I have a big bleeding heart, but no guts. And after the past few weeks, I know everyone is feeling shitty and licking their wounds. I sure am. And I feel like every step I take, I screw up. I’m really questioning my own judgment, and every time I try to fix a mess I’ve made, I walk away feeling worse. After putting up this post, which in my head was nothing more than an alert to a feminist event that I was attending, I felt like I sold out an entire community, which wasn’t my intention, of course, but it never is. I thought I would at least feel a little better once I apologized, explained my thought process and tried to set things right, so this post came next. Instead of feeling like I accomplished anything, I feel like an untrustworthy back-stabbing bitch who threw someone she likes and respects under the bus in order to give herself some undeserved moral superiority and undo un-doable wrongs. That wasn’t my intention, of course. It never is. But that’s what it feels like.

And no, this issue isn’t about me, and yes I am being self-indulgent and whiny, but I figure an explanation is in order.

That isn’t to say that I don’t stand by what I wrote in the apology post. I do. I just I feel like I’m spinning in circles and I have no idea what I’m even trying to accomplish anymore. And when I look around, the one thing I’m sure of is that I’m being thoroughly self-destructive (Example A: Writing this at 3am when I have to get up in four hours) and that I’m doing a lot of damage to other people.

So I need to just stop.

I also need to focus on my real life. I need to take exams. I need to write papers. I need to get up in the morning and study. I need to do the job I actually get paid for. I need to go to sleep at night, instead of tossing and turning and obsessing over what I broke today and whether it can be fixed. I need to graduate from law school in three weeks.

So I need to leave the internets for a while. I know it’s time to stop blogging when it’s doing me more harm than good, or when I’m doing others more harm than good. Right now, both of those things are true.

I’m putting a bunch of Feministe Feedback posts, short news pieces and link round-ups in the queue, so those will go up throughout the week under my name, but I probably won’t be checking comments or writing anything else (and definitely not anything analytical or long). I’ll come back in a couple of weeks.

See y’all around.

Now You Too Can Avoid Pain… Just Like Men, but Smoother!

The amazing Julia Serano has contributed a post to Feministing about this Philips ad for an epilator:

All of her points are great, and you should go over to Feministing and read them, and then follow the link from her fourth point to her essay on media depictions of trans women. Personally, I shave my legs about twice a year, and mostly so I don’t have to be aware of disgusted stares from random assholes. So I’m especially glad that Serano pointed out how myopic this portrayal of trans-feminine spectrum folks as hyper-feminine propagators of sexist stereotypes and beauty rituals is. (If you really want more examples of that, just click on the Youtube link and look at all the sex-objectastic “related videos.”)

Joe Francis, Again

I just love to type these words: Joe Francis is in trouble again.

AP is reporting that Ashley Dupre, the sex worker who became famous in the Spitzer case, was in a GGW video. She was 17. She was drunk. She is suing.

Joe Francis, child abuser, might have to seriously consider not filming any more underage girls. But … would the GGW franchise survive?

New Blogger Joining Feministe

And I couldn’t be more excited, because she’s one of my favorite writers on the internets and she’ll be an awesome addition to the Feministe team.

I will let her announce herself, so keep an eye out for the new kid.

How Marriage Inequality Affects Transgender Spouses

There are several things that bug me a lot about this NY Times article on a married couple that stayed together through one partner’s transition as a transwoman. There’s referring to the transwoman, Denise, by masculine pronouns and her birth name to reference past events where she did identify as female but had not yet had sexual reassignment surgery. There’s the very equation of surgery with transition — one is accepted as a woman only through virtue of a vaginoplasty, not only with regards to the law, but also in terms of how her gender is treated by the newspaper (and vice versa for a transman). Since not all transgender people choose to have surgery, and since not all people determine their very identity based off of their genitals, it’s insulting and obnoxious, and a big part of the problem that the paper is trying to examine. (Not to mention how the story is run, of course, in the Fashion and Style section.)

But with all of that being said, there’s some interesting material in there about the legal status of transgender individuals who are married.

The Brunners were already married when Donald became Denise. Transsexuals who marry after surgery pose a different set of questions, and there have been a number of custody, probate and other cases with decisions all over the legal map.

Urging the United States Supreme Court to tackle the issue in 2000, lawyers for Christie Lee Littleton, a Texas male-to-female transsexual suing her husband’s doctors for wrongful death, noted the confused landscape: “Taking this situation to its logical conclusion, Mrs. Littleton, while in San Antonio, Texas, is a male and has a void marriage; as she travels to Houston, Texas, and enters federal property, she is female and a widow; upon traveling to Kentucky she is female and a widow; but, upon entering Ohio, she is once again male and prohibited from marriage; entering Connecticut, she is again female and may marry; if her travel takes her north to Vermont, she is male and may marry a female; if instead she travels south to New Jersey, she may marry a male.”

The Supreme Court declined to take the case.

The New Jersey reference stems from a 1976 case in which an appellate court ruled that a man needed to pay support to his ex-wife, who was born male, essentially saying that sex is determined by current status, not DNA. But a 2004 Florida case took the opposite tack: a female-to-male transsexual who married a woman and then divorced lost custody of the children, as the marriage was declared invalid since both were born the same sex.

In other words, these couples face huge legal hurdles from spousal rights over property and medical decisions to parental rights over the children they help raise. Overnight, they can go from being a legally married couple with full spousal rights to legal limbo. And overnight, two people can go from unable to become legally married to entirely free to fill out a marriage certificate.

Of course, this wouldn’t be an issue if there was marriage equality. While marriage equality certainly wouldn’t solve all transgender issues (or LGB ones for that matter), and wouldn’t solve the problem of ensuring that the government recognizes the correct gender identity of all people, it would help protect already-married couples like The Brunners just as much as it would help same-sex couples who want to become legally married and same-sex couples with civil unions that occupy a legal gray area.

I just so happen to be lobbying at in Albany tomorrow for Equality and Justice Day, and marriage equality is on the table, along with an expansion of anti-discrimination legislation to include gender identity. I’m excited to be going and optimistic that we have an LGBT-friendly new governor in NY. There will be some cool stuff going on, so hopefully I’ll have something interesting to report when I get back.