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

Month: July 2009

Brawn Vs Brains: The Golem & Jewish Masculinity

I’ve been holding off on this post because I didn’t think it was fully fledged yet, but I’ve decided to just accept it as it is. A note: I am not Israeli. This post doesn’t comment on modern Israeli culture.

I’ve noted before that the stereotypes of Jewish men and women line up uncannily with the stereotypes of effeminate men and mannish women: think slight, nebbish men, and loud, overbearing women. Jewish genders are stereotyped as nonconforming (failed?) genders. As a genderqueer Jew, this has had many affects on my sense of self.

These ideas are both antisemitic and heterosexist. I find them offensive primarily on the later count: the idea that, to whatever extent Jewish cultural gender norms or Jews themselves don’t conform to the dominant gender ideal, this is a bad thing. With that in mind, I’ve been thinking — as a queer Jew who performs masculinity — about the ways in which Jewish masculinity in particular is, indeed, very contrary to the prototype that dominates my habitat: the masculine ideal of 21st Century, culturally Christian white US-America.

In the dominant culture, normative masculinity is, in my observation, typified by big, strong, heroic athletes: firemen, lumberjacks, football players, soldiers. This masculinity emphasizes physical skill, brute strength, and physical protection of the weak. It is taught by fathers, coaches, drill sergeants.

Stereotypical Jewish masculinity is typified by educated, successful scholars: rabbis, doctors and lawyers. It emphasizes knowledge and intelligence and protecting the weak with one’s financial means or social connections instead of one’s body. It is is enforced by the nagging mother (think “My son the doctor”).

This has me thinking about the golem story.

Read More…Read More…

today I am thinking about: MIGRATORY CONSENT

My grandparent (my granddad) and great-grandparents came to America in the 1910s and 1920s. They all came from parts of Russia and the Ukraine, as far as I know. They left because there were better opportunities in America; they left because things weren’t great for the Jews. They probably had some choice in the matter, but staying wasn’t great. They came here, and they made lives for themselves, and they made lives that were pretty good. Pretty much everyone in my family has been given all the advantages of a middle class upbringing, even if they haven’t always maintained the cash capital side of the equation.

Ever since Renee’s post about the slave door, I have been thinking about the difference between consensual and nonconsensual immigration. I have been thinking about what it means that my relatives had at least some choice in the matter when they came here; many people’s didn’t. I am thinking about what it means that even within the immigrant narrative, my family is not all “poor extrovert with ambition and no resources comes to America and makes good.” My people, generally speaking, had some money, and they had some class privilege. My grandfathers both went to some higher education — my dad’s dad to the Rolla School of Mines (he took over his father’s scrapyard) and my mom’s dad to college, to get a degree in chemistry. One of my great-grandmas was a dentist, even as a Jewish woman, which speaks to her fortitude but also her access to privilege and resources. My grandparents all grew up speaking English as well as Yiddish and probably Russian as well; none of them have accents to speak of.

I am no immigrant theorist, though; I’m not nearly well-read enough and I don’t have much personal experience. But I am an internet mapmaker, and an artist with a deep nerd for technology, and so I want us to make another map together. The first one was amazing. This one is a little more challenging material.

Here’s your task:

  1. Go to the Google Map below.
  2. Put on three points, with approximate dates of arrival if you have them:
    • Where you call home.
    • Where your parents call(ed) home.
    • Where your “people” are originally from.
  3. Connect them with lines:
    • Green if the move was consensual (ie, “I want to live here! Here I come, even if it’s hard or not fully my own choice for personal reasons!”);
    • Yellow if the move was not forced, but not fully consensual (ie, “I probably would not have made this move aside from very urgent personal or political need, but I did have SOME choice”);
    • Red if the move was nonconsensual (ie, “This move was made because I was either forced to leave or staying was completely and definitively unviable.”)
  4. Tell the story on the point about you — the most current point. (This is for clutter’s sake.)


    5. View Feministe: Migratory Consent in a larger map

    So, for example: I call New York home. A green line connects me to Seattle, where my parents call home. A yellow line connects them to Russia; my people came to America more or less freely, but under the pressure of Jewish persecution.

    I am not strict about rules here, folks; the map should meet your needs, not force you into a box that you don’t fit into. I know that a lot of us come from more than one place — my friend who is half-Argentinian, half-German; my other friend whose parents call two different places home; my friend who is from so many places that I imagine this map will stress her out even thinking about it. It is okay to make paths that diverge and come together, or put more than three points down, if that is what you need to make your map make sense. My story is pretty simple, all things considered, and I want us to make a map that shows and celebrates all of our complications, rather than one that tries to shoehorn us in. Where your parents call home may not be where they live. Where you call home may not be where you live. You may not know where your people are from. This is a structure; do what you need to do to make it work.

    I am also not going to argue about the color of line you use, and I ask that nobody else does either. There are different degrees of consent and nonconsent, and I can anticipate that some people’s “red” is going to be much more personal and less political than other people’s. For the purposes of this, THAT IS OKAY. Or rather, I should say, that’s okay by me and I leave it to everyone else to decide if it is okay by them.

    My ultimate goal with this is to animate it and turn it into some sort of moving story show. I am not yet sure how that is going to happen — Miss Sugardish, my head advisor, clued me into some interesting GIS/map animation software that might make this much faster than the stop-motion frame-painting I was anticipating. I do not think this will be done before I am done guest blogging, and I will post the project, but please only put stories here that you are comfortable having shared elsewhere in some form. I will give credit where credit is due, of course, and if by some bizarro possibility any money ever came to me (the odds of which are ridiculously low, but I know there is concern about who benefits from projects like this) I would donate it, although I am not sure to where. (Critical Resistance? People’s Justice? Audre Lorde Project’s Safe Outside the System Collective? Other ideas?)

    A final note: I am travelling over the next few days, visiting my grandma. Moderation and tech support will be slower. I’ve asked some of the other Feministe folks to keep an eye on the queue, and if you are having technical trouble or want to request an anonymous login please EMAIL ME at interestingtwice AT gmail d0t communism so that I can get back to you quickly.

When the Outside Looks Like The Inside

A few years back, my co-blogger quadmoniker worked for New York City’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, which is supposed to act as a watchdog group for the city’s police department. If a citizen wanted to file a complaint against a police officer, she would do so with the CCRB, who would then dispatch an investigator (like quad) to interview the police officer and other people involved in the incident. Tracking down complainants, though, meant occasionally trekking to some woebegone corner of the city, where “probable cause” was broadly interpreted and which meant that cops stopped and patted down anyone they deemed to be suspicious. In some housing projects, there are police observation rooms, where officers monitor any activity in the complex via video camera. The cops can stop anyone and request I.D.; you can be arrested for being inside buildings where you’re not a resident. For most people, contact with law enforcement is rare, and antagonistic encounters with the police are even rarer. But for many of the people quad had to interview, it was an inescapable fact of everyday life.

I thought about that while reading William Finnegan’s profile of Joe Arpaio in the New Yorker last week. Arpaio is the longtime sheriff of Maricopa County in Arizona and has received (and actively sought) a lot of national attention for his harsh approach toward illegal immigration. Among the most controversial are the sheriff’s high-profile “crime-suppression sweeps,” like the Finnegan one described in the article. Deputies in paddy wagons, on horseback and a helicopter descended upon a largely Latino town — with news crews in tow — and demanded I.D. from “basically every-dark skinned person they saw,” he writes. This exercise was carried out even though it was known that only a handful of people in the town weren’t born in the U.S., and despite protests from the town’s mayor. Arpaio says his department has investigated and detained over 30,000 undocumented aliens in the county, and in his zeal to arrest “illegals,” as he calls them, he has been unique in broadly interpreting a state law on human smuggling, so that not only are the smugglers charged, but the undocumented immigrants being smuggled are charged as “co-conspirators.” (This has exacerbated the overcrowding in the county’s jails, which Arpaio has addressed by building tent prisons in the scorching Arizona heat, and Arpaio brags that his inmates work on chain gangs and receive two cold, 30-cent meals a day.)

Read More…Read More…

Go For the Black Can, Dude!

Campbell’s seems to be outdoing itself in its efforts to create the Manliest Soup in the World. Look at what I found at the grocery store, complete with uber-manly label and everything:

Campbell's Fully Loaded Soup

This line of soups isn’t exactly new; they seem to have been around since last year, along with their super-manly slogan: “When you’ve got EXTREME hunger… go for the BLACK CAN.” I just happened across it because I’m recently unemployed and I have strep throat. These two things combined mean that I’m drinking lots of soup. It’s cheap and it doesn’t make me scream in pain when it goes down my throat. I should probably be drinking broth, not this chunky stuff; my girlfriend kept texting me while I was in the store, “Don’t buy that soup. It sounds disgusting. Get broth and toast.” However, I felt like I owed it to you, dear readers, to purchase a couple cans for anthropological purposes. OK, and I find the idea of “Rigatoni and Meatball Soup” to be weirdly appealing AND disgusting.

Also submitted for your examination, the recent commercial for this soup:

Clearly we’ve gone off some sort of irony cliff here, just like the parasail in the commercial. Let’s take a closer look at the lyrics, shall we?

Read More…Read More…

Win Tickets to Planned Parenthood’s Fundraiser

summersexppnyc

Planned Parenthood’s Summer Sex and Spirits event is this Thursday July 23rd at 8pm, and we have two free tickets to give away. The first reader to email me the correct answer to the following question will get a ticket for themselves and a friend.

An average pair of testicles can produce 150 million sperm in
– one hour
– 24 hours
– One week

You can also buy tickets to the event here. Hope to see some of you there!

UPDATE: Congrats to Melissa for winning! The answer to the Testicle Challenge is 150 million sperm in one day. Wow that is a lot of sperm.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrested

African-American scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr, who teaches at Harvard, was arrested last week by Cambridge police investigating a break-in. Police officers apparently came to his house to question him, and he had trouble unlocking his door, which resulted in some sort of altercation:

He was booked for disorderly conduct after “exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior,” according to a police report. Gates accused the investigating officer of being a racist and told him he had “no idea who he was messing with,” the report said.

Gates told the officer that he was being targeted because “I’m a black man in America.”

Friends of Gates said he was already in his home when police arrived. He showed his driver’s license and Harvard identification card, but was handcuffed and taken into police custody for several hours last Thursday, they said.

The police report said Gates was arrested after he yelled at the investigating officer repeatedly inside the residence then followed the officer outside, where Gates continued to upbraid him. “It was at that time that I informed Professor Gates that he was under arrest,” the officer wrote in the report.

The whole thing sounds… questionable, to be generous, on the part of the police. But if you really want to be horrified, read the comments to the article. The blind deference to police behavior never fails to shock me.

Thanks to Tom Foolery for the link.

today I am thinking about: CLOWN SCHOOL I

The past few weeks I haven’t been around as much as I’d like because I have been busy going to clown school. No, really. What do you learn at clown school, you ask? Character work and circus skills and improv games and how to make bits work and classic clown gags and yes, Virginia, we learned how to get pied in the face. Clown school is single-handedly restoring my love of performance and my committment to this kind of theater work. Just for the hell of it, here is a link about anti-racist clowns that you should read.

Here are some thoughts. More to come but this is getting a little tl;dr.

First, clown school is something of a culture shock. I pretty much live in a progressive queer utopia. No really. I live in a gaywad house, I work a queer job, I practice homosexuality with my homosexual heterogenderous sweetheart, I train unicorns on the weekends. I pretty much piss glitter and shit rainbows of justice and sodomy and intersectional politics and privilege analysis.

Clown school is not like that. This kind of clowning is mostly made up of heterosexual white guys, with just enough women involved that people can now say things like “the year of the woman clown” and totally mean it. Women clowns are still new in clownland, and by clownland I mean circus clowns and mainstream clowns — white face paint, goofy outfits, you know what I mean. It’s pretty dudelike in mainstream big-ticket clowning, even as people who are clowns are super aware of this and working on it.

And while there are clowns of color, they are few and far between as far as I can tell. This program, there is one Latina and one Japanese woman and everybody else is variations on ethnic white — Jewish, Russian, Italian, and a few assorted-white-places people thrown in.

One of the main clown school instructors (white guy) used to run things for the Ringling Brothers Clown College — the Harvard or Yale of clown training, back when it was open — and he says how distressed he was when he realized how few people of color were auditioning. He says he went to talk to people out in communities of color, and the theory that he formed was that folks who were still fighting for their human dignity in the everyday were going to be much less likely to want to make asses of themselves 10 shows a week in front of huge crowds of people — and that he thinks this is also why women do not want to be clowns, because they are not yet in a place where they feel they can be laughed at without it meaning something politically.

This is curious to me. First of all, it has a lot to do with what the gig was — Ringling Brothers, a big public deal. I am no clown ethnographer but I know that every culture has its clowns and I know that there are clown traditions in communities here in the US that are alive and well with no need for white people and our clown colleges. But that’s part of it, right — to be able to be laughed at by EVERYONE, you have to know you’re secure and safe, and if you’re not sure the crowd will respect your dignity, you are going to be a lot more wary about getting up in front of everyone.

Here’s the thing about clowning: it is all about staying open to the moment and thinking on your feet. We are playing improv games and working in slapstick — big picture issues. Today I actually did a gag about peeing on the floor. When you are thinking fast, your brain goes to stereotypes. When you are thinking fast, your brain goes to racist, misogynist, classist places. We were playing with voices today and the instruction was “do the voice of a stupid person” and of course everyone instantly developed speech impediments, lisps, et cetera. If you are coming out and need to communicate something fast and without a lot of talking, it is easiest to communicate something stereotypical — not only for you, but for your audience. This means that if you are a woman, on stage, it’s going to be easy to make it about “woman things” and if you are onstage with a man, it’s probably about to be a love story. And if you are onstage, you have to figure out how to deal with it without killing the scene. It takes a lot of thought to redirect sexism and classism and racism etc at all, let alone to call someone out publicly, let alone to call someone out publicly in the context of a show or scene, let ALONE to do so while not shutting down the whole rhythm but to keep it in the moment. This is something I am still working on.

I am a queer, queer clown. And yet, clown school is probably the first place in a long time where I do not feel my gender is at all remarkable — because I am one of the girls, women, girls, women, ladies, women. Even with short hair, even with a moustache, even with my feygele sugardish, I am just one of the ladies. And the thing is, rather than feeling erased, I kind of love it. I love it because there is something queer about clowning, just a little; there is a certain committment to live and let live as long as you’re funny about it. My clown is a moustache clown; my clown is not a girl clown, or even necessarily that womanly a clown. I feel good about the room that I have, even though I am constantly worried about being called out about it or told I am not being authentic or some business like that. I worry this will stop working — I will do something too transgressive, and I will get kicked out of the club. This is the privilege of passing, or some kind of passing. Passing as normal enough. Passing as part of the group. I’ve been shaving my chin because I am afraid of the stubble somehow pushing it over the edge to not normal enough. I will admit that, because it’s honest, and because I feel lucky I can get away with this.

Today I was working on slapstick with another woman student and we were really getting into it, fake brawling, fake pulling each other’s hair and throwing fake punches and fake kicking each other and slapping each other, and it was so fun. We were really being fake violent, talking shit, having a clown fight. It was delicious, until someone said “catfight!” PLEASE, triflers. There was nothing catty about this fight. We were out for clown blood.

Finally, I want to talk about the Westchester Ladies. These were ladies from the Bronx, now in Westchester, who decided to take class. Italian loudmouth ladies, retired teachers mostly. THESE LADIES WERE AMAZING. They were the funniest I have ever seen, the kind of funny you only get from age and experience and long and tired experience. I hope I am brave enough to go to my equivalent of clown school when I am retired and I hope I am as sincerely joyful as they all were.

Discussion questions if you need inspiration:

1) What clowning traditions are you a part of? Do you like? Do you dislike?

2) Have you performed much? Improv performed much? What have you done about oppressive behavior on stage?

3) Who is your favorite funny person?

4) Are there spaces that have surprised you with how good they felt when you were expecting something oppressive? Where?

5) How comfortable are you making an ass out of yourself publicly? Tell me about that comfort level and how it intersects with your privilege locations.

A Note On Guest-Blogging So Far

My first week of guest-blogging has come to a close, and what a week it was!

Between writing posts and reading comments, I think I’ve nearly exhausted my current reserves for Judaism blogging, so I’m going to switch over to gender blogging for a little awhile (though my next post will likely be about both).

Thank you to everyone who participated in the fascinating conversations we’ve had this week. I learned so much from all of you and I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to come together like we did. I am furious at how much pain so many of us are carrying around — the pain of exclusion from our own communities — but I am awed by the passion, kindness, and commitment to justice that have been demonstrated here. I hope you all will wander over to my blog once in awhile to continue the discussion, and I hope that some of you will pick up this thread at your own blogs, starting new conversations that appeal to you. (If you want to start a conversation but don’t have your own blog, I’d be happy to publish your post at Dear Diaspora anytime.) If and when you start a discussion at your place, please let me know! You can reach me by email at s.lisa.bond [at] gmail.com or leave me a comment at DD. I’m going to set up a static page to tie things together in the next few days, and I want to include any and all future posts and conversations in this vein there (I consider “this vein” to be the future of progressive Diaspora Judaism, but I’m open to expanding or changing that as is fitting).

Cross-posted at Dear Diaspora.

Dear CNN: We’ll Show You Our Slave Roots If You Show Us Yours

First, if you haven’t read the post from Renee at Womanist Musings (reposted here on Feministe) titled “The Obamas and the Door of No Return,” please do. It’s about the Obama’s visit to Cape Coast Castle, a memorial site for the African slave trade in Ghana.

As part of CNN’s coverage of the trip, “Anderson Cooper 360” sent reporters Joe Johns and Justine Redmonds to the site of the North South Carolina plantation where Michelle Obama’s great-great-grandfather is thought to have been a slave. It’s an interesting story–we hope it prompts readers and viewers to think about how, just a few generations ago, our First Lady would have been considered the property of a white man. While we certainly can’t look back what happened on the Friendfield Plantation and think, “Whew! Problem solved! Go team!”, the distance between then and now is certainly a profound one. (Also, a slave plantation called “Friendfield” seriously tests our ability to even deal with irony.)

What we would have loved to see CNN do is to acknowledge that all Americans have slave roots, not just Michelle Obama. We are a country that owes much of our prosperity to our slave labor history. The White House was built by slaves. Thomas Jefferson would not have had the leisure to write one of America’s most treasured documents had he not owned slaves. This country would not be here if it weren’t for slaves. This is not news. Slavery is part of our collective history, and not just the history of Michelle Obama and other descendants of the African Diaspora.

Instead of noting that, CNN presented their trip to Friendfield as celebrity story–like going to Spain with Penelope Cruz!–and thoroughly erased the reality of slavery from their coverage. Describing a former plantation as “Not exactly ‘Gone With the Wind'” is almost laughably offensive, implying that if Michelle’s great-great-grandfather had been lucky enough to be a slave on the fictional plantation of Tara, his life would have been that much better. The piece does detail some of the woes of life at Friendfield, noting that the shacks the slaves lived in were hot in summer, cold in winter, and provided little protection from creatures ranging from chiggers to alligators. However, nowhere does CNN note the other unpleasantries Michelle’s great-great-grandfather and other slaves likely experienced, such as rape, flogging, or having one’s child taken away. The most jawdropping line, to us, is this one: “And unlike the CNN crew, the slaves were not free to leave.” No kidding. But hey, lucky you!

Johns and Redmond–and you too, Anderson Cooper– had an opportunity here. They could have taken the story beyond its “Today, instead of her outfit, we’re talking about Michelle’s folks!” premise and brought some powerful truths to their audience. The piece was ostensibly part of the coverage of the Obama’s trip to Cape Coast Castle, but they never made the connection between that place, “where human cargo was shipped off to a life of bondage,” and Friendfield, even thought it was literally right in front of them.

CNN should have foregrounded the fact that slavery is not a historical quirk in Michelle’s lineage, like a tendency towards twins, but a bloody part of every American’s identity. It is incumbent on all of us to reflect on this history and how it still affects us today.