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

Month: December 2010

And… she’s Muslim

So this article by Nick Kristof isn’t actually as bad as it could be. He honors Dr. Hawa Abdi, who is a pretty amazing woman. He points out that it’s totally fucked up that there are going to be Congressional hearings on American Muslims, led by the Republican party (although Kristof’s contention that it’s “the extremist side of Islam that drives Islamophobia in the United States,” which leads to these kinds of hearings, is… naive, to be generous). Anyway, for the most part, good story. Great woman. Wonderful to give her and her work more publicity.

But really, New York Times headline writer, “Heroic, Female and Muslim”? Am I the only person who thought of the “But… he’s gay!” YouTube video that circulated a while back? (For those who haven’t seen it — spoiler — it’s a news segment where the newscaster is discussing a man who bravely climbed Mt. Everest and, with a great dramatic pause says, “BUT… he’s gay.” Aaaand then immediately corrects herself to say, “I mean, he’s gay, excuse me, he’s blind.” The whole thing is just yikes.

The Kristof article is kind of like that. It basically goes, “Islamic fundamentalists do terrible things to women, and so American Christian fundamentalists hate them, but look here’s this woman who did something awesome… but she’s Muslim. Bet you didn’t see that coming!” Yuck.

Hospital saves woman’s life; is told by Catholic leadership not to do it again.

File under “You know you’re an asshole when…”:

A Catholic hospital saved the life of a young mother of four. The woman was pregnant and suffered from life-threatening pulmonary hypertension, which caused her heart to begin to fail. Doctors determined that she would almost definitely die if she did not end the pregnancy immediately, and the woman agreed to terminate. Surgeons and physicians acted quickly and saved her life.

Soon after, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Phoenix started squawking — it would have been appropriately “pro-life,” they said, to stand by while the woman died. It was wrong, in their view, to terminate the pregnancy even though that was the only way to prevent the woman’s death. The nun who acted as a liaison between the hospital and the ethics committee was demoted for her role in saving the woman’s life.

That was a year ago. Now, Bishop Thomas Olmstead of the Diocese has written a letter to the hospital in which he doesn’t deny that the procedure saved the woman’s life, but nevertheless deems it morally wrong and asks the hospital to promise that a life-saving abortion “will never occur again at St. Joseph’s Hospital.”

That’s right: A religious leader wants a hospital to promise that it will not take measures to save the life of a patient if those measures conflict with what this religious leader believes is morally correct. Patients have a right to care — and especially to life-saving emergency care. The fact that a Catholic hospital is the closest one to your home, or the one that the ambulance drops you at, shouldn’t mean that you receive sub-par care and that your life is deemed unworthy of saving simply because you’re a woman or because you’re pregnant. Doctors who refuse to save lives should have their licenses revoked. And hospitals that refuse to save patients should lose all recognition and funding, and should absolutely be legally liable for the harm they cause.

Man-Repelling

Maybe I will have something more intelligent to say about this later, but: I appreciate women who are able to have a sense of humor about fashion, and who recognize that for a lot of us, clothing is wearable art and not just a way of making ourselves look attractive (or covering our butts). Maybe I’m just biased because I really like a good jumpsuit (although I’m not such a fan of how hard they are to get off when you have to pee).

NYPD Fakes Statistics, Downgrades Rape Charges

Anyone who’s seen The Wire knows the drill here: There’s political pressure to have lower crime rates, and so crimes are downgraded and not fully pursued. Which, in New York, has let serial rapists go free.

An investigative report by the Village Voice uncovered nothing short of a scandal. A series of articles exposed the New York Police Department’s practice of consistently “undercharging” crimes in an effort to meet “performance measurements” (quotas are illegal) and make crime statistics appear more palatable. The manipulation of statistics was caught on tapes in which NYPD higher-ups can be heard telling street cops to downgrade crimes or simply not to report particular crimes at all.

Numerous courageous police officers have come forward to tell their tales of questionable police policies, such as retired detective Harry Hernandez, who details a harrowing account of police misconduct related to serial rapist Daryl Thomas. While NYC sexual assault prevention groups say that the issue of under-reporting and undercharging of crimes has been a “growing problem” over the last two years, these “shady police policies,” writes Alex DiBranco on the Women’s Rights blog, had particularly devastating consequences when Thomas was able to sexually assault six different women in a single neighborhood over a period of two months. He was on his way to a seventh when a “lucky break” fueled his capture by police. The brutal spree should have triggered alarm bells, but went unnoticed for so long because the NYPD kept downgrading the assaults to “criminal trespassing.”

Read the details here, and in the Village Voice.

What gay marriage opponents have in common with gay French philosophers

This is a guest post by Rachel Hills. Rachel Hills is a London-based freelance writer on gender issues. She blogs at Musings of an Inappropriate Woman, and is currently writing a book on young people, sex and identity.

Recently I wrote an article for a ladymag on gay marriage. The article in question being Proper Journalism rather than a blog post in which I can opine at will, I was briefed to cover both sides of the argument accurately and fairly.

As a twentysomething leftie for whom same-sex marriage is a clear cut matter of equality and human rights, this at first left me feeling kind of stumped. I understood that a lot of people didn’t support gay marriage for religious reasons, but there were also plenty of religious people who did support it – or who at least didn’t feel the need to push their beliefs onto other, non-religious people.

Like many who share my views, my instinct was to automatically dismiss those who actively oppose gay marriage as fearful, bigoted and homophobia.

But even fear and bigotry exist for a reason, so I looked at their arguments a little more closely. And I amused to discover that, beneath the surface, the view that marriage-is-between-a-man-and-a-woman-and-a-man-and-a-woman-only can probably be made sense of by the work of a famously gay, leftie French philosopher. Michel Foucault.

In fact, when it came to the political logic underlying their arguments, Foucault and gay marriage opponents had a fair bit in common.

Don’t believe me? Consider the below.

1. They both believe that sexuality is a social construct.

That is, that our sexual preferences and practices aren’t inbuilt, but can change according to the norms and ideals of the day.

Sure, the anti-gay marriage lobby say that married, heterosexual love is only “natural”, but if it was so natural, same-sex marriage wouldn’t be such a threat, would it?

To you and me, it probably seems kind of crazy to suggest that allowing same sex marriage would turn people gay in droves. But maybe we’re just not taking a long enough view.
If you agree that despite all the progress of the last 30 years, we still live in a society that makes it easier to be heterosexual than homosexual, it’s not that great a leap to say that there might be a portion of the population who currently identify as straight who might get a little bit more flexible with their sexual preferences if we lived in a society that was truly free of homophobia.

Marriage equality wouldn’t eradicate homophobia entirely, nor would it undo years of romantic conditioning from Disney films and rom-coms. But it would be a significant stamp of social approval that we currently lack, not to mention visible and culturally viable family model.

This is what anti-gay marriage advocates are really talking about when they worry that allowing same-sex marriage will “encourage” people to “turn gay”. Not that it will automatically flip a switch in every straight person, but that by decreasing homophobia, it might make future generations of young people more comfortable with coming out as gay or bi.

I don’t think they’re entirely wrong on that front, and Foucault probably wouldn’t have thought so either. The difference between them and Foucault, is that they think this is a bad thing.

2. They both believe that sex is a site of power and politics.

Foucault argued that the everyday sexual norms we take for granted actually served a deeper regulatory purpose: to incentivize married, straight reproductive sex amongst the bourgeois set, and boost the number of bourgeois babies in the process.

The anti-gay marriage lobby also believes that marriage-between-a-man-and-a-woman-and-between-a-man-a-woman-only serves a deeper regulatory purpose: to incentivise heterosexual unions formed with the intent of producing children. And how do they incentivise these unions? By endowing them with unique social and economic rewards that people who aren’t in said unions are unable to access.

One point that is often glossed in debates around same-sex marriage is that supporters and opponents are working with different definitions of marriage. And not just in the religious sense, either. There is a fundamental mismatch in how and why the two groups value the institution.

While liberal, secular types view marriage as the coming together of two people who love each other and want to spend the rest of their life together, anti-gay marriage lobbyists view it as a union for the production of families and children (never mind that a growing number of same-sex couples are building families and having children of their own).

In their view, heterosexual couples with kids genuinely are superior to deliberately childless heterosexual couples and to gay couples, and genuinely deserve to be awarded privileges other couples aren’t.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying these views don’t constitute homophobia. They absolutely do. And like all homophobia, they’re grounded in fear and prejudice. They’re just not grounded in mindless fear and prejudice.

To the contrary, they have a pretty clear political logic to them, even if we disagree with their conclusions. And understanding isn’t just the first step towards empathy and engagement: it’s also the first step to having a useful debate.

Happy Birthday, Jane Austen!

Jane Austen, observer of the minutiae in Regency English life, is fundamental reading in many a lady’s library. She would have been 235 years old today. I can never quite decide if my favourite of hers is Emma or Sense and Sensibility.

Oh right, Bradley Manning.

So the big Julian Assange news today is that he’s being released on bail, and Michael Moore is contributing. In fact, Moore went on Keith Olbermann’s show last night to encourage other progressives to donate to Assange’s bail — the accusations, they agreed, are “hooey.” Because Assange is a flight risk, his bail was set at $315,000, and he was released with a monitoring device to a 10-room mansion on a 650-acre estate owned by Vaughan Smith, the founder of a journalists’ club in London.

Now, I’m glad Assange was released on bail — there’s no reason to hold people in prison (especially in solitary confinement) if they don’t pose a threat to others and if they can be reasonably guaranteed to show up at their trials. Bail away, I say. Does Assange have a target on his back, and is the US undoubtedly trying to get him into the best possible position for extradition? Yessir, I would guess yes. Is that totally fucked? Yes, yes it is! And does Michael Moore have every right to contribute to Assange’s bail? Sure he does.

But let’s not pretend that contributing to Assange’s bail is a neutral act, and that Moore is only contributing because he can. Bail doesn’t help Assange fight extradition. It doesn’t do anything to forward his WikiLeaks-related plight. It gets him out of jail for the rape accusations. Moore also can contribute that $20,000 to RAINN, but as far as I know he hasn’t gone on Olbermann to tout that giving spree.

Moore could also use his platform to stand up for, say, Bradley Manning — who is also being detained, by the way, in pretty deplorable conditions. Manning, though, doesn’t have a name that has become synonymous with the WikiLeaks project; he doesn’t have the same cult of personality surrounding him as Assange. In fact, you can’t even blame lying bitches for his incarceration. To talk about Manning, we’d have to talk about the actual content of the information posted by WikiLeaks; we’d have to get into whether states ever need secrets, and what degree of transparency we should be demanding, and how much the public has a right to know, and whether anything should be obscured from public view. We’d have to address a figure who did some complicated things, and who doesn’t have the enormous support that Assange does. We’d have to talk about the fact that WikiLeaks is way, way bigger than just Assange. We’d have to muddle through conflicting ideals of transparency and safety and freedom and security. We’d have to do the hard stuff, in other words, the stuff that doesn’t fit as cleanly into back-patting blog posts and one-time donations. Moore, to his credit, publicly supports the release of Bradley Manning, and spread the word about pro-Manning protests on his website. But Manning certainly hasn’t gotten the attention from the left that Assange has; he hasn’t become the poster boy for free speech and transparency. The accusations against Manning — stuff that actually relates to WikiLeaks — have been largely obscured.

I’m glad that some people — Glenn Greenwald, for example — are doing the hard stuff. I certainly can’t claim that I have been, at least not in any public platform. But it’s disheartening to see someone like Michael Moore, who claims to be the champion of the little guy, so quickly forget that there are a lot of little guys here who are in a lot of trouble and who don’t have the world watching. There’s Bradley Manning. There are all of the rape survivors who are hearing the same old shit about how women ask for it because we went here or we talked to him or we consented to something sexual or we fell asleep in his bed or we wore that or we must have wanted it because he’s so important. There are the two women who accused Assange of rape, who have had their names and addresses and personal information distributed across the world, and at least one of whom has fled Sweden.

Oh, right. Little guys.

Sadie has more on this, and has started a Twitter campaign. Go read.

Cultural Constructions: An Interlude

Time for a bit of reflection, I think. In Part 1, we started to think about how race and racial difference are constructed in different contexts. In Part 2, we talked about how contextual figuration of whiteness. In Part 3, we spoke about assimilation and shifts towards whiteness. It’s gone surprisingly well.

Surprisingly? Well, yes. There have been some horrible moments in the moderation queue, but the series has gone much better than most of the responses to work I do about race at Feministe have gone. I have to spend a lot of time explaining that reverse racism is not actually a thing, that talking from an anti-racist perspective doesn’t mean I hate white people. This, as the non-white/POC writers who have gone before me at Feministe could tell you, is not a space in which writing about race is particularly welcomed by readers.

But there’s something that bothered me even more than the loudmouthed attempts to shut down anything and everything I wrote about race using those played out tropes. I’ve been writing here since October 2009 and it’s now December 2010. In that time, I’ve been called white more times than I can stand to recall, because commenters have expected to find white writers. (I guess white people are supposed to be the ones doing all the writing, telling all the stories, speaking all the English, doing all the work.) When I point out that I’m not white, the response sometimes is to assume that I’m African American. And that set of assumptions about who writes, who exists and who one (a white “one” from the United States) might expect to find on the Internet was really telling.

The other thing was that any time I tried to talk about race, here or in the feminist blogosphere in general, I had to refigure everything I wanted to say according to US logics of what race is. It can be really painful to engage with writing about racism such that only acknowledges only two or three racial identities, and assumes that race is constructed in US ways the world over. I shouldn’t have to separate out the things that form my racialisation and my understanding of race in order to have a conversation on a dominant culture’s terms.

I was sick of it. I decided to write about race again and again, until I didn’t have to put up with being misracialised and such on my own blog. I wanted to hit something really important home. The logics that lead you to expect to encounter (or not) particular kinds of people in particular ways do not hold most of the time.

I’m really glad to have helped, along with those who have commented and otherwise responded, in shifting racial consciousness. Thank you to everyone who has commented, tweeted, posted, and talked about this series so far.

I’ve directed us to talk about whiteness a lot, because I think it’s important to turn the lens on that which is constructed as invisible or neutral. But there’s so much more to talk about regarding how people are racialised across contexts and so forth. I was pleased to get a load of responses from mixed race people, which is something I’d been hoping for even though I haven’t really spoken to mixed experience in my posts.

But I want to take a little break now and give us all some time to reflect. Don’t worry, I’ve got another, parallel series planned out, too. In the comments, I’d so like if you’d share what you’ve gotten out of the conversations we’ve had so far in Cultural Constructions, and any ideas you might have for future conversations in the series.

Troll of the Day

I had to share with you this hi-larious piece of trollery from joe on Cultural Constructions, Part 3:

Why do you complain about whiteness when you live in countries founded and fought for by whites? Maybe you should stay in your own countries with your beautiful people.

I’ve been giggling at the comment too hard to break down how very, very wrong joe is, but you lot should feel free to have a go.