Laverne Cox was the keynote speaker at the 2014 Creating Change conference, appropriately introduced by Beyoncé’s ***Flawless. “In the face of so much injustice, we are a resilient people,” she declared; “we are a fierce people, we are a beautiful people.”  In her address, she spoke of the revolutionary potential in loving trans women–in a world that too often seeks to eradicate their existence. The 2014 National Conference on LGBT Equality, run by the Gay and Lesbian Task Force, is the premier annual organizing and skills-building event for LGBT people in the U.S.

“This feels so amazing, all this love that you’re giving to me tonight. I have to say that a Black transgender woman from a working class background raised by a single mother, getting all this love tonight, this feels like the change I need to see more of in this country…But I have to tell you I’m not used to receiving this kind of love.”

Cox discussed many pertinent trans* issues: the recent release of CeCe McDonald, Katie Couric’s uncouth question about Cox’s genitalia on her talk show, the criminalization of trans people, racism, healthcare, bullying, abuse, media manhandling and objectification, and shame. Yet perhaps the most important message that Cox relays is the power of love: “Loving trans people, I believe, is a revolutionary act.” She then continued: “And I believe when we love someone, we respect them, and we listen to them, we feel that their voice matters, and we let them dictate the terms of who they are and what their story is.”

Her speech mentions a wide array of grassroots and large-scale activist groups working toward trans equality, justice and empowerment, peppering it with statistics of trans discrimination and violence and pockets of wisdom. One of her most salient remarks bespeaks the injustice in misgendering trans people: “I’ve come to understand that when a trans woman is called a man that is an act of violence.”

The result of such violence?

Some days I wake up and I’m that 3-4-5, 12-13-14-year-old kid in Mobile, Alabama who was bullied.

Some days I wake up and I’m that kid and I’m being chased home from school by a group of kids who wanted to beat me up because I did not act the way that people assigned male at birth were supposed to act.

Some days I wake up and I’m that 6th grader who swallowed a bottle of pills because I did not want to be myself anymore, because I did not know how to be anyone else.

And who I was, I was told, was a sin, was a problem, and I didn’t want to exist.

Some days I wake up and I’m that Black, trans woman walking the streets of New York City, hearing people yell ‘That’s a man’–to me.

…Some days I wake up and I’m just a girl who wants to be loved, but I was told on more than one occasion by a man who told me that he loved me, that he could be seen in public with me, could not introduce me to friends and family, because I am trans, and not only because I am trans, but because people can tell that I am trans. I’m not passable enough by certain standards.

Some days I wake up and I don’t feel good enough because I’ve heard that over and over again, I’ve heard it from men I’ve dated, I’ve heard that from members of my own community who’ve told me that I’m not passable enough, that I should get surgery for this and that and then I’ll be an acceptable trans woman. Some days I wake up and I’ve heard about another one of my transgender sisters who’ve been assaulted, raped, murdered. There’s no justice. Amen.

There will be justice.

Some days I wake up and it’s just too much, it’s too much to deal with, there’s too much pain, there’s too much cultural trauma around being who am I. But then I think, I think we’re resilient people. I think of so many people who’ve come before me that made me being on this stage possible.

Check out the exquisite, poignant speech below.

By Ragnar Jónsson, Blog Managing Editor

Edited Image via Ragnar Jónsson

Up until now Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” was good for blasting on days when you feel bitter about a break up. But thanks to a recent cover compilation of Bush’s greatest hist, the song also symbolizes the difficult uphill battle for reproductive rights. For those of you who don’t know Bush—she was her generation’s Lady Gaga, except less alien and more celestial.

The 80′s Brit pop singer had a haunting soprano, modern dance training, and penchant for over-dramatized music video effects. Her synth sonnets still resonate, and are now the inspiration for a fundraiser to support reproductive rights organizations and low cost abortion clinics in the U.S. All sales proceeds of the CD, featuring 26 musicians, will directly support several  organizations. Conceived by a group called Bush League (I know), the organizers cite Bush as “a symbol…of feminine independence, intelligence, bursting creativity, and remarkable inspiration.” We wholeheartedly agree. You can get the CD here.

By Ana Cecilia Alvarez, Co-Founding Editor

After receiving backlash from a recent interview, Piers Morgan’s claim that he has fallen victim to ‘cisphobia’ is not a satirical response from an Onion article, but a startling display of how not to be an ally.

https://twitter.com/piersmorgan/status/431182316178665472

Following an interview with transgender writer Janet Mock on his CNN talk show, Piers Morgan Live, Morgan faced a barrage of twitter critiques from the trans community, due to Morgan’s insensitive headlines.

Allegedly, this made him feel victimized and abused. After the unexpected backlash, he then invited Mock back for a second interview. Unfortunately, this was not to learn from or acknowledge his mistakes, but to harangue her about past articles, which he believed ‘proved’ that he spoken correctly, and to repeatedly reiterate that he was an abused but steadfast supporter of trans rights.

The issue with this narrative is that it is almost entirely focused on Morgan and his experience as a cisgender male. Like his producer’s choice of headlines, he frames his experiences with gender identity and transgender issues specifically from a ciscentric perspective. He takes up an inordinate amount of space in this discussion, often interrupting and speaking over Janet, in a conversation that should not have been about him in the first place. His ignorance was apparently not his fault; in fact, according to Morgan, he did not display any ignorance whatsoever.

As supporters, we must seek to first listen to those whom we aim to act as allies for. We must listen and heed complaints about the language we use when we speak of each other’s identities. We must refrain from equating these one-on-one encounters with the entire spectrum of similar identities. We’ve got to check our privilege, discern our different stances, and acknowledge when we’ve reached the breaking point of being able to be a supportive ally.

If not, we’ve reached the limits of allyship.

Morgan’s objective in inviting this remarkable woman to his show does not appear to be the promotion of transgender activism, but the immodest elevation of his own standing as an open-minded supporter.

Morgan has largely been criticized for continually referring to Mock as having been a boy, with the on-screen script reading “Was a boy until age 18.” This once again places the focus on transgender surgery and transition, invalidating Mock’s experiences and self-expressions before her gender reassignment surgery, and presenting surgery as the transition moment in which a transgender woman becomes a ‘real woman.’ Morgan’s problematic phrasing insinuates that gender is reduced entirely to the body, propagating the view that biological sex wholly predetermines gender. Morgan asks, “Was there a moment, was it immediately afterwards, was it a month, a year?” A lifetime in the making, Mock patiently answered that the preceding journey was “a bigger validation.”

Trans activists have criticized Morgan’s focus on genitalia, surgical reconstruction and what this all means for Mock’s current partner. These criticisms have resurfaced in Katie Couric’s uncouth interview with Laverne Cox and Carmen Carrera, where Couric remains engrossed in the pudenda of trans women–not in the struggles of the trans community. Even for binary transgender people it can be problematic, for, as Mock elucidates in her interview, it was the journey towards that decision that was of most personal importance, rather than the date of the surgery itself.

Not only that, this decision was one of many to affirm her sense of girlhood and later womanhood. Morgan’s approach to when trans women “become women” privileges binary trans people, because it enforces the prerequisite of surgery for trans people’s gender identities to be considered valid, real, legitimate and authentic. For if a trans woman is not a ‘real woman’ until the completion of gender reassignment surgery, this leaves out those who choose not to, cannot afford to, or are not able to alter their bodies surgically. It also assumes that the only way to “truly” be trans is through bodily modification, which discredits the numerous other trans* expressions of gender nonconformity. Many experiences of those in the transgender community are thus further invalidated by Morgan’s view on transgender bona fides.

Morgan appeared comfortable with Mock in part because she is assimilable to his idea of what a woman ‘should’ look like:

“So this is the amazing thing about you. Had I not known anything about your story, I would have had absolutely not a clue that you had ever been a boy, a male. Which makes me absolutely believe you should always have been a woman.”

This implies that Morgan was comfortable around Mock because she now looks like what he believes a woman should look like. And it is this external appearance that makes him “absolutely believe” that Mock was indeed meant to be a woman. If Morgan would have been able to detect any traces of masculinity, would her identification as a woman have been up for debate? Morgan openly states that Mock’s feminine appearance is what convinces him of her true womanhood. This serves to silence many in the trans community that do not conform to binary gender identities or appearances. Indeed, who is Piers Morgan to validate the authenticity of her gender identity; that, because of her current appearance, he can claim that she “should always have been a woman”?

Ignorance persists today despite extensive efforts by trans activists to dispel the damaging stereotypes and misinformation about trans people. Yet a complete unwillingness to humbly learn from such ignorance in the wake of mistakes and misrepresentations is inexcusable.

In Morgan’s own (tweeted) words:

I agree there should be an apology made re my interview with @janetmock – and I expect her to make it to me on air tonight. CNN 9pmET.—
Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) February 05, 2014

He was not willing to learn, listen and then engage in dialogue; he states: “Explain to me, let me learn something here,” and then does not let Mock reply or speak for another 76 seconds, again privileging his own voice and perspective, dominating the discussion.

Morgan sought only to argue for his own image and reputation as a supposed LGBT supporter, perceiving himself to have been “vilified.” He interrupts Mock constantly, repeating that he has “always been supportive of all gay rights, gay marriage rights, equality, transgender rights” – to which Mock interjects correctly that gay rights are not transgender rights. Morgan’s charming reply? “Don’t interrupt me.”

It is frustrating that Morgan took away such an opportunity for a transgender writer and activist to advocate for her community, and instead made the conversation entirely about his apparent abuse and vilification, rerouting the narrative from her poised response about the state of transgender people in America to his own affronted ego.

The conversation was not even focused on transgender genitalia, it was not focused on transgender relationships; in fact, it was not trans-focused at all. It was a lot of Piers Morgan ardently proclaiming that he is an ally and now a victim, and, as such, precluding the true issue of transgender justice at hand from the space it has yet to receive in mainstream media.

Just to clarify: cisphobia does not exist. Cis people are not killed because they are cis, but trans people are killed because of transphobia.

By Anastasiya Gorodilova & Ragnar Jónsson

You can check out Janet Mock’s recently published memoir, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love and So Much More, to learn more about her struggles with identity, gender, race, class and love in America.

Usually when a musical genre receives criticism for being sexist, it’s rap, hip-hop or sometimes R&B (a heavily flawed discourse—but that’s a conversation for another time). But last year, when Russian house and techno DJ/producer Nina Kraviz was shown in a bathtub for fifteen seconds of her eleven-minute ‘Between the Beats’ video in RA’s series about DJs on the road, all hell broke loose, and the question of sexism in the dance music industry could no longer be ignored.

According to Greg Wilson, a pioneer in the UK dance music scene back in the 80s, the (sexist) criticism Kraviz received for her interview—like from DJ Maceo Plex, who wrote on his Facebook “All i gotta say is i’m so happy blatant uses of sexuality and superficiality can take the place of hustling vinyl and spending countless hours in the studio”—was not entirely unfair. Kraviz, he claims, is ‘the mistress of her own myth.’ Wilson describes her as playing into gender stereotypes for appearing on camera in a bikini—though as Kraviz pointed out, “The party in Bulgaria was on the beach. So you wanted me to be on the beach in winter cloths? Just not to be miss understood?”—and finds it ironic that she would discuss the gender-specific obstacles she faces as a female DJ in this context.

By framing Kraviz’s gender expression as always already a sexual performance, Wilson naturalizes masculinity, as if it is not also a sexualized performance (often based on physical strength), and creates a Catch-22 in which Kraviz is damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t. There is no conceptualized space in which Kraviz can embrace or even reveal a feminine sexuality without it being seen as selling out or cashing in. This issue thus becomes to what degree female DJs have agency in the expression of their own sexuality in a commercial industry in which, it seems, it will likely be manipulated by the male gaze and used as a means of professional invalidation. I’ll leave it at that—this specific territory has been well-covered (Lauren Williams at Fact Mag tears apart Kraviz’s criticism and Wilson’s response beautifully).

The Kraviz controversy revealed how the presentation and actions of female DJs are interpreted through sexism, but perhaps at the core of the issue is the number of women behind the booth in the first place. Out of the hundred who made the cut for Resident Advisor’s recently released annual ‘Top DJ’ poll, a grand total of eight of them were women. This proportion is actually favorable compared to a similar list from DJ Mag, a more mainstream, commercial platform, which included three female DJs. Two years earlier, when the DJ Mag poll results was composed of only men, Peaches wrote on her Facebook “DJ MAG! Your Top 100 DJ boy club list can eat a dick! Where the ladies at???” Her use of this combo homophobic-misogynistic insult notwithstanding [1], she had—and still has—a point.

User Emma Partnow on the Digital DJ Tips forum suggests that this gender gap exists because “women lack confidence in their abilities to succeed; and dressing up and dancing are things they learn early in life; so being out on the ‘floor’ in the crowd is something they feel ‘comfortable’ with; where the thought of being ‘behind the decks’ and ‘failing’ would be a catastrophic event, and something to be avoided rather than cherished.”

Partnow’s observations are not without merit, but this interpretation obscures the structural issues that certainly shape the problem. It is mostly men who are in control of booking and other behind-the-scenes roles, and as DJ Cassie Lane suggests, senior artists are more likely to mentor younger artists of the same gender. In short, the gendering of an industry means that it can change on the surface—in this case, an increased amount of female DJs—without its foundations—production and management—fundamentally altering or becoming more accessible. While Partnow’s description does suggest that a low female self-esteem is a learned rather than inherent characteristic, it does not touch on representation; that is, a lack of confidence in one’s DJing or producing abilities as a consequence of a lack of female role models in the industry, or even of active dissuasion by peers or people already involved in dance music. As Claire Boucher aka Grimes told AUX Magazine of her favorite music growing up, “Aside from maybe the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, there weren’t a lot of female standards. That was something that discouraged me from going into music. The minute I learned to produce and learned it wasn’t that hard was when I started working on music. It was about having the right kind of psychological encouragement.”

Indeed, if a lack of self-confidence rather than a lack of skill can help explain the DJ gender discrepancy, the former must stem at least in part from sex role education in relation to technology. Men are portrayed as naturally more apt at it, women not logical or scientific enough to understand it. User Djam on the same forum wrote that “DJs were more the high school nerds who had plenty of free time and were into technology … the reality is that in the past, DJing was not totally seen as a glamorous thing, but more a ‘geek’ thing.” Women and ‘geeks’ are too often constructed as mutually exclusive and we are misled into believing that the supposed incompatibility of these identities is innate. After all, men and women have different brains—‘science’ said so.

More convincing than this supposed biological difference being the reason is what some have called ‘learned helplessness.’ Women and girls are more likely to blame themselves for an error—that is, internalize failure—whereas men and boys are more likely to seek out an external flaw. Stephanie Peterson at Fairground Media argues that this is why when faced with a technological issue, a woman might ask, “Did I break it?” or “What did I do?” That is, “she is very likely to blame herself– assuming some kind of ‘innate defectiveness’ and that technology isn’t her ‘thing.’ Meanwhile, the man is more likely to blame the program for the error– charging it with being buggy or unintuitive.” (Heidi Grant Halvorson at Psychology Today has an excellent explanation of how this gendered interpretation of difficult is instilled in children.)

But clearly there are women who haven’t internalized these moot discourses, and have in fact gone on to become successful DJs and producers. So what can kind of treatment can a woman expect once she has ‘made it’ in what DJ Cassie Britton aka Cassy called “a male dominated world”?

It’s not hard to guess: the possibility of female DJs is consistently erased even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Fans of Krewella, a group made up of sister Jahan and Yasmine Yousef and Kris Trindl aka Rain Man, have assumed that “a dude does all the work.” A booking agent asked Jack Novak, who goes by her childhood nickname instead of her given name Jacqueline, while setting up for her set, “Are you Jack’s girlfriend?” Annie Mac recalls a night when “the male DJ who played after me reached over the sound desk and start to change the speed of a track for me. Did he think I had sped the track up slightly on accident?” This was by no means an isolated event—Mac describes male DJs interfering with or instructing her on several occasions.

In a rather varied criticism of the music industry, Claire Boucher aka Grimes wrote on her personal blog, “I’m tired of men who aren’t professional or even accomplished musicians continually offering to ‘help me out’ (without being asked), as if i did this by accident and i’m gonna flounder without them.  or as if the fact that I’m a woman makes me incapable of using technology.  I have never seen this kind of thing happen to any of my male peers.”

i am a producer. i find it insulting when guys constantly ask to produce for me. i think i do my job fine, thanks.

— Pixie aka {grimez} (@Grimezsz) September 4, 2012

Female DJs and producers are also delegitimized through the claim that they are booked due to a sort of affirmative action or tokenism, or purely because of their sexual appeal. This is actually framed as an advantage: Chris Alker claimed on Magnetic Magazine that “Female DJs have a few things going for them that men don’t. They are rare, they seem to have been trained since birth to be more style conscious and they are generally sexier than male DJs.” That female DJs are expected to be ‘sexier,’ whereas male DJs don’t seem to be held to any particular physical standards, is somehow spun as a benefit rather than obstacle.

This expectation also speaks to how the sexualization and commodification of women can manifest themselves as barriers in a range of workplaces. That is, women who are a closer fit to conventional beauty standards may receive certain privileges or, on an interpersonal level, will be treated more positively than other women (a system sometimes referred to as lookism, integral to but not synonymous with sexism) but these privileges exist within a power structure that will then value them for their appearance at the expense of recognizing non-physical characteristics and skills.

That a given industry would mimic the power relations of larger society is hardly a surprise. But is there something about dance music culture specifically that produces certain gender relations or norms? In 2001 Stephen Amico theorized that

“The beat is representative of masculinity in its potency; that the beat is positioned as paramount, that it is unremitting, and ‘dominant’ in a visceral form unmediated by thought – pure power as opposed to a lyric representation of such …  By impelling the participants to physical action – dancing which can go on for hours – the beat also engenders a performance of the construction of masculinity through a physical response. Although dance is often associated with the ‘feminine’ in Western (especially American culture)… there is a decidedly, almost purely physical (as opposed to aesthetic) component to this dancing, making it almost like a ‘workout.’”

That is, because the hegemonic ‘man’ is muscular and strong while women are oppositionally constructed as weak, soft and fragile, Amico argues that the physicality provoked by certain forms of dance music as well as the ‘dominance’ of the beat makes it a gendered genre. Another theorist of dance music, Barbara Badby, argued in 1993 that the frequency with which male producers sample female vocalists speaks to an appropriation of femininity used as a means to (racially) sexualize the music. This habit, she adds, has been “of crucial commercial importance in the transition from (underground) ‘house music’ to the mainstream success of ‘dance.’”

Making these overarching trends or structures visible is a key step towards understanding the nuanced gender politics of dance music, but the exceptions are also noteworthy (male vocals are, of course, not entirely absent [2]). I was pleasantly surprised when a friend pointed out to me that in his observations, “even at super-masculine techno parties that are a lot of super-feminine girls.” The way in which individuals engage with the music, then, does afford room for subversion or at least complication of the theoretical.

And indeed, despite the systemic sexism, others have identified more positive elements of dance music. In his 1992 book, A Researcher Reports from the Rave, Russel Newcombe found that “friendliness, sensuality and ‘body language’ are valued more than trendiness, sexual displays or long conversations,” a characteristic largely attributed to euphoria and heightened physical sensations caused by ecstasy. A DrugLink article in the same year found that ”one of the main reasons young ravers are so proud of their club culture is because house clubs are not sexual cattle markets like so many nightclubs where alcohol dominates.”

More fundamentally, the origins of several dance music genres can be located in marginalized sexual and racial subcultures, like the house music scene that began in 1980s Chicago, which was predominantly gay and Black. As Frankie Knuckles, called the Godfather of House, put it, “Like so many things that were born through gay culture, straight people tapped into it, embraced it, and made it their own, thereby crossing it over into the mainstream.” (Luis Manuel Garcia at Resident Advisor provides a detailed historical breakdown of sexuality in club culture).

With three decades between now and then, house and other forms of dance music are certainly do not occupy the same cultural spaces they once did; and, though obviously interrelated, the culture around a musical genre and the industry that produces it are not the same. That is, while gender norms may be challenged on the dance floor, that doesn’t mean similar phenomena take place behind the scenes.

Nevertheless, the question remains: why has the gender identity of the average DJ remained so stagnant? Female:pressure, an international network of female electronic musicians, is pushing back against the excuse that women are simply less interested. With 1300 members from 58 countries, they argue that “women are hardly less active… their activities are less recognized and also easily forgotten.” The same can be said of the majority of industries in which men are the majority, but women who have ‘made it’ are often given less credit or have their work judged by different standards.

So while there are specific ways in which sexism interacts with the dance music industry, such as gendered stereotypes about technology, essentially it is an industry is like most others: male-dominated. That those behind the scenes are mostly men (though there are increasing numbers of female agents and managers) means that those behind the booth will be, too, and creates an environment in which women have to work harder to prove themselves ‘genuine’ rather than flukes.

At the same time, some women would rather not focus on these issues or have their gender highlighted. When asked about how her gender has affected her career, producer and DJ Maya Jane Coles told Crack Magazine “I don’t think it’s that important to think about. I just want to be respected for what I do without my gender being part of the equation,” and Deniz Kurzel, who only plays her own music when she DJs, told the Huffington Post that “I just focus on whatever music I really want to make […] I don’t really focus on the female-male thing.”

And certainly, victimizing all women in the dance music industry would perpetuate a paternalistic attitude that women can’t make it when, clearly, they can. But rather than being posited as representative, artists who hold views and experiences similar to Kurzel and Coles can perhaps more accurately be seen as the exceptions that prove the rule: that ‘DJ’ is preceded by ‘hey, Mr.’

By Sophia Seawell, Co-Editor-in-Chief

Further reading and resources

• New Sound Battling the Fear of Queer: Terre Thaemlitz
• Lesbian Propaganda & Other Myths: Misogyny in Dance Music
• How did feminism go down the drain of a bubble bath?
• Femme Cult: Women in Electronic Music
• Her Beats: a blog about women in electronic music
• Rediscovering the Electronic Music Godmothers
• Is 2013 The Year for Militant Feminism in Music?

Footnotes

[1] that is, in degrading performers of oral sex on people with penises: (mostly) straight women and gay men.

[2] “It’s All Over” by Pional being a personal favorite.

Image via Google Images

This article was originally published in Issue 3 of Bluestockings Magazine.

1990, Ji-Ji, beginning a new life in Toronto

Dedicated to Zhang Qian (1964 – 2008), my mama’s best friend, who passed away before I could tell her she was a protagonist in all the stories I grew up listening to.

It took eighteen hours of anticipation, but time meant nothing because she flew with a purpose: to bring her daughter back.

Hiring a babysitter cost six hundred dollars a month and her bank account didn’t stretch far enough. Letting her parents raise her daughter at zero cost back in Shanghai was a well-reasoned and natural decision.

But logic fled her mind the moment she could no longer see the pink baby carriage through the glass wall separating passengers from friends and family at Pearson International Airport. A gut-wrenching pull and a sharp intake of breath later, she was at the closest travel agency she could find. There, she spent her savings on the earliest possible flight to Shanghai and return tickets for two back to Toronto.

One week later, I returned to Toronto with my mama, Ji-Ji, who soon took on the name Cathy. I go by both Daphne and Young-Young and I grew up listening to my mama’s stories about her youth in Shanghai, told to me from across the kitchen table over hot bowls of rice cake and sriracha in homemade pork bone soup.

Twenty-one years ago, my mama decided Toronto would be my home—but through her stories of Shanghai she raised me to be a Shanghainese woman.

I.

Ji-Ji insisted on moving to North America for a better life. Although Shanghai would soon skyrocket towards its global city status, China was not yet the future in 1989. While others saw hope in their country, daydreaming about the possibility of profits now that its doors were open to the international market, Ji-Ji was plagued by Mao’s influence.

For as long as Ji-Ji can remember, she was afraid of hearing the word “counterrevolutionary” (fan ge ming). Whispered amongst classmates and neighbors, “counterrevolutionary” taught my mama the art of avoidance.

Bullied from the day Mao’s men took her father when she was four years old, until the day she moved away for university, Ji-Ji learned to plan escape routes between her school and her room. They used to yell, “eight zero eight” (ba ling ba)—a slang term referring to the shape of handcuffs—when they saw her on the street. Or “Fan ge ming! Where’s your dad?”

Ji-Ji knew first-hand that speaking against Mao only lead to punishment and humiliation; for over a decade, Ji-Ji stayed quiet. She saw running away as her only option.

II.

The one place Ji-Ji truly felt safe in Shanghai was with Zhang Qian, her best friend.

Every Saturday when Ji-Ji was tasked with writing her middle school’s newsletter on the blackboard, Zhang Qian would accompany her. Afterwards, they would walk around Shanghai together, from Nanjing Road to the Bund and back along Huaihai Road, eating ten-cent popsicles and thirty-cent wonton soups along the way. They even followed a celebrity once, giggling the whole time. He was a famous national basketball player—as my mama recounts, very handsome.

Zhang Qian never asked Ji-Ji about her father, and Ji-Ji knew that while others looked down on her, Zhang Qian would always be by her side.

III.

But that didn’t stop Ji-Ji from running away at her earliest opportunity.

Her chance came in March of 1989. The sister of my father’s classmate in Macau decided to sponsor her in an act of goodwill. As soon as the sponsorship letter arrived, Ji-Ji scheduled an interview at the Canadian embassy in Beijing. It was to take place on June 5th, 1989.

On June 4th, when my mama took her first step off the train in Beijing, she was met with a throng of interrogatory military officials brandishing rifles. From the train station to the hotel, the city was silenced by armed men and their mammoth tanks.

The infamously bloody Tiananmen Square protests had sent the city into agitated upheaval. Pedestrians had disappeared and taxis charged ten times their price. It took two weeks of anxious self-isolation in a cramped hotel room before the coast was clear. Depression hit. Ji-Ji, weakened by the disappointment of a cancelled interview, called her ex-employer in Shanghai to inform him that she’d be going back to work.

But despite the danger and the deaths that racked up during those two weeks in Beijing, my mama, to this day, credits her luck for pushing her to cross paths with China’s history. As soon as she could set foot in the Canadian embassy, looking startled and student-like with her bright red backpack, she was handed a visa. Palms sweating and heart swelling, Ji-Ji accepted. She could fly to Canada the very next day and begin her new life.

Eager and enthusiastic, she found her way to Pearson International Airport to join Canadian city life in Toronto. Ji-Ji flew off towards her new world on July 9th, 1989, imagining sparkling lights and glossy clean streets.

IV.

Ji-Ji landed at night, greeted by an insufficiently-funded grey concrete highway in barren suburbia. With nine hundred dollars in her pockets, Ji-Ji paid a five hundred dollar deposit for a bed-sized room in Chinatown and spent her first night alone readying herself to survive with the four hundred left over. Sitting on the side of her bed, Ji-Ji counted the wrinkled twenty-dollar bills that she had gripped too tightly in her sweaty palms. She thought about the success stories she had heard back home, of other Shanghainese students settling abroad and buying their own houses and cars. That wasn’t possible back in China. If there were any butterflies that fluttered in her stomach, they flew at a steady pace, one behind each other, organized and purposeful.

As a Chinese student, Ji-Ji could fill out an application to obtain the coveted Canadian work permit immediately and thus achieve permanent residency within two years. After Tiananmen Square, Canadians couldn’t bear to witness more Chinese students suffering at the hands of their government. Or at least that was how Ji-Ji made sense of how quickly the documents got processed and the sudden laxity of immigration regulations for her and others like her back home. Luck was on her side. There was no longer a need to enroll in university, and Ji-Ji knew she was in Toronto to stay. Renouncing her Chinese citizenship, my mother intended to plunge head first into a Canadian life.

The next morning, with a Sing Tao Newspaper in hand, Ji-Ji answered classified ads from local Chinatown businesses by phone. Did she have experience waitressing? Of course! Washing dishes? No problem. Cutting hair? Every day back in China. How good was she at English? “I live in Toronto already for half year.” Very soon, Ji-Ji was employed. But because her prior job experience consisted of teaching university-level textile engineering and holding a prestigious secretarial position under the Resident Architect of Shanghai’s new Mandarin Hotel, Ji-Ji’s hands could not bear to wash hair or balance dishes for a living.

Four hours into spreading her fingers around the scalps of Cantonese men, the soaps and shampoos savaged Ji-Ji’s sensitive skin. Two weeks into serving chop suey to Canadian businessmen, she was told to never return because her hands, inexperienced and inefficient, could only balance one dish at a time. My mother was determined but proud. Leaving one job only meant she could, and should, find one better.

More luck came. Browsing through the Sing Tao, Ji-Ji found a secretarial position with Shanghainese employers. Toronto’s Chinatown was a Cantonese man’s world. But in the same way the Cantonese stuck together, the Shanghainese rallied just as strongly, if not more so. Book Art Inc. was Ji-Ji’s ticket to stability. Mr. Benjamin Koo, her new employer, called her Cathy and introduced her to the life of an integrated Shanghainese family in Toronto, complete with invitations to weekend outings at his family’s summer cottage up north in Muskoka. Three months after landing in Toronto, Cathy mailed a check straight to her parents in Shanghai. Nong fang xing haw le. Don’t worry.

V.

It is funny how life cycles around and the memories that stick help you realize what really mattered.

On March 2, 2008, my mama found out via email that Zhang Qian had passed away. Sick with a brain tumor for half a year. Zhang Qian had been on the verge of being admitted to the hospital for an operation the following day. In an attempt to take a walk around Shanghai for one last time before the risky procedure, she had bent forward to tie her shoes and lost consciousness. Zhang Qian never woke up.

The way that I sobbed uncontrollably when I heard the news forced me to question why I was so upset. Having met Zhang Qian once in my life on a two-week trip to Shanghai in 2006, I was in no way close to her. But I realized I was attached to her in a far deeper sense.

In the same way children might imagine themselves to be Disney princesses and learn to fall in love with Prince Charming, or think that they are Harry Potter and see Ron and Hermione as their best friends, my mama’s storytelling made me fall in love with Shanghai through her eyes, with Zhang Qian at my side as my best friend.

Even though Ji-Ji and Zhang Qian didn’t have much as young adults in Shanghai, they were empowered by each other’s presence. My mama developed a sense of ownership over the land she walked on and a love for the city of Shanghai through her memories with Zhang Qian—the memories she continues to treasure most today.

Shanghai is a city my mama ran away from for a better life, but the stories I grew up listening to over hot bowls of rice cake and sriracha in homemade pork bone soup have overwhelmingly been about the adventures of Ji-Ji and Zhang Qian. Behind my mama’s nostalgia for her youth is her desire for a home that she had left behind—and that slipped away the moment Zhang Qian passed.

Love would have kept my mama back in Shanghai to be at Zhang Qian’s side, where she felt most at home—but love is also what kept me in Toronto, where my mama created a home for us on a bridge between Shanghai and Toronto.

By Daphne Young Xu, Contributor

Image via Daphne Young Xu

The Carefree Black Girl (CFBG) in its most simple definition is user-produced and circulated portraiture of black women being happy. This concept and practice has its roots in Tumblr and has been written about at refinery29 as well as on Jezebel. These images depict black women smiling or laughing, often in natural settings such as fields, woods, or bodies of water, but they do not have to be. CFBGs often depict women with natural hair as these images seem to stem from an embrace of the eclectic and convey a “hippie” aesthetic with head wraps and beads. They sometimes feature women with multicolored hair and untraditional sartorial choices such as suits or un-matching prints. Many times they are selfies showcasing new hair and beauty choices but are more often pictures of black women doing things like riding a bike, dancing in the street, or lying happily in bed. An important aspect of the Carefree Black Girl is motion, movement that is un-choreographed, unmitigated, exuberant, sometimes languid, but always full of life. The key here is freedom. Freedom of expression, emotion, and presentation.

When discussing CFBGs, it’s important to acknowledge the historical underpinnings of this phenomenon. Much has been written on the phenomemon of the selfie and recently about how young women’s use of selfies challenge traditional beauty standards. Though the Carefree Black Girl stems from this tradition of self-produced and circulated images, it is also couched in a specific black woman history. It is a direct and public rebuttal of traditional stereotypes and caricatures of black women as constantly angry, unusually aggressive, and always strong. The use of the identifier of “girl” rather than “woman” suggests that black women can and do exist in states of childlike happiness and joy. It does the work of combatting historically rooted images and perceptions of black girls never truly being children because of automated roles of laborers, servicewomen, and Mammies. The CFBG is a burgeoning trope that combats these pervasive narratives of black women in the media.

The image of the CFBG revels in the complexity and multiplicity of black women’s experiences and identities but notably does not do so for the edification of others. These images are intimately self-referential, and it is clear that they exist most importantly for black women to see themselves. To see themselves happy, to see themselves whole (or not so whole but still having fun), to see themselves carefree (but not careless), and to just simply see themselves. The importance of seeing different possibilities of self in the media and in the world in general cannot be overstated. To see someone in a wide range of emotional states who looks similarly to you and may traverse the world in a way that you do, is a deeply humanizing experience.

At the same time, the Carefree Black Girl is more than just image and representation, it is practice and embodied performance as well. As with many modes of visual production via social media such as selfies or mirror pics, the CFBG often involves the performative act of taking or posing for a picture. The selfies most often involve hair, makeup, or styling choices that the subject sees as deviating from normative images of black women. I have encountered Carefree Black Girl images that feature naturally or un-naturally textured hair that is dyed purple, or pink, CFBGs with braids or locs past their waists, or with springy joyful teen weenie afros. These stylistic choices as well as the decision on the part of black girl users to label them as carefree involve a performance of self that is both created and fantastically imagined. Images of CFBGs frequently include those of singer Solange Knowles, Janelle Monae, and various black models in outfits and poses that communicate their comfort in their bodies and happiness being where and who they are. When a black woman labels an image of herself or another black woman as #carefree it is not merely a comment on an image that could be described as looking cheerful, but a radical act of owning the state of being and becoming free. She is enacting, reenacting, and embodying an affective state that was never supposed to be hers. Queer scholars such as Jose Munoz have argued that aesthetic productions play an important role in imagining hope for the future of marginalized populations. The circulation and production of images of Carefree Black Girls creates an inhabitable present that looks towards a future in which they are recognized as fully human.

By Patricia Ekpo, Blog Editor

Images via http://mydamnblog.com/ and http://carefreeblackgirls.tumblr.com/

Elements of a hip “teen girl wasteland” culture saturate the tumblr dashboards for many young millennials. Posts promote a blasé attitude in conjunction with a carefree yet curated style. However, some bloggers tread into what they perceive to be darker territory when their posts include odes to teen suicide on pastel backgrounds à la Virgin Suicides, satirical quotes pasted on images of celebrity “breakdowns,” and stills from films such as Girl, Interrupted.  These entries intertwine “fashion,” celebrity worship, and “breakdown” into a social media phenomenon that callously builds on the existing structural oppression of mentalism: that is, discrimination against people who have or are perceived to have mental health conditions. Tumblr bloggers who post these entries perpetuate an insensitive romanticism as well as a public rubbernecking of people experiencing severe psychiatric episodes.

Perhaps these bloggers seek some kind of cultural catharsis.  Or perhaps they feel completely disconnected from the conditions and experiences their posts portray.  Others too, may have themselves romanticized the mental states that color their daily lives. Whatever the case may be, this reverence for some kind of sarcastic grunge-girl culture both romanticizes and subtly mocks lived experiences of severe mental health conditions.  This trend demonstrates entrenched sanist or mentalist attitudes in a mass society abound with insensitivity, stereotypes, and ignorance regarding people with mental health conditions. These attitudes leave little room for the public to examine sociopolitical structures of mentalist oppression in conversation with those who experience them.

On “Crazy” and Mentalist Semantics

The word “crazy” is often used in many relatively innocuous ways.  For example, in Britney Spears’s beloved pop song “You Drive Me Crazy,” she sings of her experience as a 90’s love-struck teen.  In “Crazy in Love,” Jay-Z raps about his feelings for Beyoncé in describing what friends say about his comportment: “Crazy and deranged/They can’t figure him out/They like hey is he insane.”  Though this song is quite innocent, “deranged” and “insane” are incredibly loaded words and walk a fine line between fun rap and sanism. Employing “crazy” truly enters mentalist territory when one uses it in characterizing someone struggling with a mental health condition.

http://www.bloodymel.tumblr.com

Britney Spears’s highly visible–and summarily mocked–mental issues surfaced on and off between 2006 and 2008.  She went to rehab several times and in January 2008 Spears was placed on a 5150 psychiatric hold.  A 5150 psychiatric hold allows for a hospital to hold a person involuntarily if the individual is deemed a harm to themselves or others.  Using “crazy” to mock a person experiencing a severe mental health condition (such as one that requires a 5150 hold) serves as a sanist slur.

Of course tumblr users are not the only ones guilty of mentalist linguistics.  Besides using words like “crazy,” “psycho,” or  “basket case” to describe both those experiencing mental conditions and those who do not, public figures or news sources like The Atlantic use diagnostic labels such as “bipolar” or “schizophrenic” as descriptors for a variety of topics having nothing to do with mental health conditions.  These diagnoses are never used in a positive way.  In 2010, Senator Lindsey Graham referred to President Obama’s State of the Union address as “a little schizophrenic at times.”  He went on to “urge the President to be more consistent in his tone.”  Here “schizophrenic” describes an erratic way of forming and communicating one’s thoughts in a political speech and has nothing to do with the experiences or actual symptoms of schizophrenia.  In a 2012 article reviewing Nicky Minaj’s album “Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded,” journalist Spencer Kornhaber writes, “Nicki Minaj isn’t crazy, but she acts like she is…. When rapping, she caterwauls from valley-girl scoff to Count Chocula bellow. When singing, she veers from competent croon to a purposefully incompetent karaoke warble. But Minaj’s new album is getting labeled “bipolar” and “schizophrenic” for none of these reasons. Yes, she, as usual, feigns crazy, but the really disconcerting thing is the breadth of the record.” By comparing the elements of a Nicki Minaj album to these disorders and attempting to line up her singing styles to certain kinds of perceived symptomatic highs and lows, the description only perpetuates ignorance on what these conditions involve.  This review draws on metaphoric conclusions between the imagined symptoms of these conditions and—that word again—“crazy.”  These kinds of misguided semantics only underscore the lack of knowledge and sensitivity around mental health conditions in the media and public discourse at large.

Obsession with Celebrity “Breakdowns”

Armed with the semantics of sanism, the media rabidly “reports” on celebrity mental “breaks” and these stories are rampant throughout tumblr.  Images of celebrity “breakdown darlings” Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and Amanda Bynes are presented in the forms of various kinds of collages, photos, or kitsch.

A few examples include:

hardcoresophomore.tumblr.com

hardcoresophomore.tumblr.com

Folks at society 6 call this an “art print” (http://society6.com/HausOfBrandon/Wasted-Youth-Britney-Amanda-Lindsay#1=45)

All of these celebrities have experienced varying kinds of inpatient psychiatric treatment for issues such as substance abuse, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia.  Celebrity gossip is one thing but posting images of t-shirts, iPhone cases, and “art prints” which depict human beings in the throes of a mental health struggle is abhorrent and offensive.  When bloggers gawk and jest about the celebrity’s symptomatic behavior they mock the behavior and severe struggles that millions of Americans experience.

Perhaps the most recently offensive “news coverage” and popular tumblr topic was that surrounding Amanda Bynes’s behavior leading to her hospitalization (following a 5150 hold.)  She was later diagnosed as having symptoms of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.  Tumblr users pounced on the opportunity to create images almost idolizing Bynes’s struggle as a piece of apathetic kitschy tableau.  Users continue to reblog these images today, well after her diagnosis.

fuckyeahcrazyamandabynes.tumblr.com

fuckyeahcrazyamandabynes.tumblr.com

These posts promote a cultural commodization of people with mental health conditions, particularly a cultural commodization of women with mental health conditions. Here mentalism and sexism intersect and play on essentialist notions that female-identified people are naturally prone to more extreme emotional behaviors.  Furthermore, the concept that behaviors such as irritability or delusions stem from one’s female identified status blatantly ignores the fact that some of these behaviors are symptoms of serious mental health conditions.  It is both sexist and sanist to state that these behaviors occur solely due to one’s gender identity.

Examining the intersectionality of sexism and mentalism through the lens of celebrity “break downs” is complicated further when one turns to recent male celebrity “break downs.”  19-year-old singer Justin Bieber was recently charged with drunk driving and a toxicology report revealed a mix of alcohol and prescription drugs.  Many talk show hosts and newscasters have mocked his behaviors, saying, “boys will be boys.”  Bieber’s behavior suggests potential substance abuse concerns but figures in the media brush away any severity of the behaviors. In discounting the possibility of substance abuse issues, the media in this example characterizes male substance abuse as a non-event that both invalidates male experiences of mental health conditions and demonstrates that female celebrities who exhibit similar behaviors receive harsher scrutiny.

Romanticizing Hospitalization and Suicide

In depicting psychiatric hospitalizations, tumblr posters often focus on an aesthetic; those with mental health conditions become stock characters or caricatures of some kind.  In these images we see the fallen starlet, the misunderstood grunge girl, or any number of “troubled” female teen/twenty something tropes (and these being generally straight, white, cis women).  One such example comes from a tumblr account titled “Teen Suicide Superstar” (teensuicide.tumblr.com). Accounts such as this one focus on certain aesthetics associated with individuals with mental health conditions as they appear in paparazzi photos and film stills from movies and novels like The Virgin Suicides, Girl, Interrupted, or It’s Kind of a Funny Story.

The following post from thestylecult.tumblr.com references the bracelets that a character from The Virgin Suicides wears over bandages from self-inflicted harm.  The caption to the post reads: “Here are some totez rad DIY bracelets inspired by The Virgin Suicides, one of my favorite movies of all time. It’s pretty self-explanatory, just some basic preschooler beadwork. They’re super 90z and you’ll be looking kewl when you’re rocking a piece of Cecelia Lisbon’s accessory collection.”

By focusing on the “cuteness” of these troubled, bejeweled virgins, tumblr posters situate themselves outside of the reality of suicide. Last year in the U.S., 713,000 people went to the emergency room for self-inflicted injury, and 38,364 people committed suicide. In focusing on the “grunge” aesthetic of characters played by Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted, visible effects brought on by a mental health condition are painted as a form of “style” of some kind. Outside of these films, a person in a psychiatric facility may look “grungy” due to dangerous self-neglect or harm, or even neglect from staff (as evidenced by recent deaths in Massachusetts psychiatric facilities.)

In this Tumblr film still of Jolie, the hashtags “beautiful, grunge, crazy, and pale” sum up a superficial view of a mental health condition, punctuated by mentalist linguistics.

rainydayspecial.tumblr.com

Emma Roberts in It’s Kind of a Funny Story.  Here she’s pictured in a psychiatric inpatient unit where she meets a crush. 

Idontevenknow-myself.tumblr.com

These examples illuminate the dearth of knowledge amongst a general public that both admonishes behaviors associated with mental health conditions and idolizes them as a foundation for a #beautiful #grunge look.   Furthermore, by focusing on young white waifs and celebrities experiencing psychosis, we never fully explore the rampant nature of mentalism in our society, nor how mentalism interacts with other forms of oppression.

***

Not all discussions of mental health on tumblr (or the internet at large) are detrimental. Blogs and message boards can facilitate empowering conversations among people with mental health conditions.  They can assist in opening up dialogue among the community at large on how to better address stigmas.  However, when we gawk at, laugh at, or even “glamorize” experiences of mental health struggles we perpetuate stigmas, essentialize people according to both their diagnoses and their gender identities, and move away from discussing true experiences of living with mental health concerns. We cannot begin to move forward in dismantling mentalism as a form of structural oppression if we continue to dwell on the outer aesthetics of what we think people with mental conditions look like instead of who they are, the intersecting identities they hold, and the real experiences they have.

by Abby McHugh, Contributor

Image Courtesy of Tumblr

Maggie Hennefeld and Beth Capper are PhD candidates in the Modern Culture and Media department at Brown University.  They have organized a Feminist and Women’s Media Festival, with three other graduate students in the department, Lakshmi Padmanabhan, Brandy Monk-Payton, and Rijuta Mehta.  The FWMF is being hosted at the Cable Car Cinema and Brown University’s Granoff Center in Providence RI from March 13-March 16.  The festival includes screenings of documentary, narrative, and experimental cinema, a photography installation, symposia panels, and a keynote address by Nandita Das.  Screenings, panels and events are free and open to the public. For a full schedule, click here.

The festival begins this Thursday, March 13 with a Magic Lantern program, BODY/VOICE: Women’s Experimental Cinema. For more information, click here.

Cauleen Smith’s ‘The Green Dress.’

* * *

Sophia Seawell: To start with the basics, we were wondering where the idea for this film festival came from, if there’s a particular intention, and how, after you had the initial idea, the concept developed into the FWMF?

 Maggie Hennefeld: In 2010, another grad student in the Modern Culture and Media Department, Matt Noble-Olson and I did a Women’s Film Festival, with all the screenings at the Cable Car Cinema.  I think the programming privileged a kind of feminist avant-garde experimental cinema from the seventies and eighties.  We showed a lot of Yvonne Rainer, Su Freidrich’s work, Maya Deren. And then a couple years ago, Lakshmi Padmanabhan, Brandy Monk-Payton, Rijuta Mehta, and the two of us began talking about doing it again and making it more diverse both intermedially—not necessarily doing just cinema—and diverse in terms of the kinds of programs in the festival.

Beth Capper: Yeah, I think that the curatorial framework for the festival, if I’m right, that you organized in 2010 was thinking through what women’s film is, which is super interesting and an important question. And then one of the things that came up in our discussion in developing the conceptual framework for this festival was instead thinking through the tensions between ‘feminist’ and ‘women’ as frameworks for curating work, and thinking about how both of those frameworks have different histories of exclusion. We’re using the terms in some ways to put tension on one another. Is there now a divergence between what a feminist film is and what women’s film is?

MH: Its worth mentioning that our title has morphed quite a bit in the last year as well. At various points it was ‘the Global Women’s Film Festival,’ and then it was the ‘Crossing the Frame: The Women’s Film and Media Festival.’ A few people have asked about the conjunction ‘Feminist and Women’s’—doesn’t one sort of imply the other?—and again, at first it was just ‘Women’s’ and a few people raised questions about what identities and groups that just privileging ‘women’ as a signifier excluded. Trans* people who don’t necessarily identify as women, for example. These are very much open questions that we hope come up as well during the panels and in between screenings.

Ann Kremen: So what does it mean for you to be putting ‘feminist’ and ‘women’s’ together in this way?

BC: It’s not that we think there’s any definitive border between either term.  Obviously, there’s this model of feminism that sees this progressive narrative in which at a certain moment, African-American and working-class women interrupted white bourgeois feminism and either contested feminism as a frame or said ‘we’re not going to be feminist.’  One of the things to do from the get-go for us, is to problematize even that model of feminism and to say no, there are co-constitutive feminisms happening alongside one another, and thinking through this US-centric model of feminism in particular.  Feminism is going to look very different from all over the place. Lakshmi, who is Indian, was saying, that’s really not a narrative of feminism that I ever grew up with or that I ever thought about.  So there’s that tension that we’re thinking through.

MH: I think feminism, just to historicize the term a little bit, there’s always been certainly a coalition politics between feminism as a movement and women as an identity that’s defined in relation to all of these other identities like men or trans* or just the resistance to identify in terms of sexual categories in general.

AK: With this programming, it seems as though you’re trying to make visible alternative histories of feminist media and politics in order to problematize the American or European narratives about feminism.

BC: Definitely.  About feminism and about the term woman as an identity category, in order to think about the ways that both terms have been used to do violence to people and continue to be used in the name of violence. There are ways in which feminism has become extremely nefarious, especially I guess what we call liberal feminism. in terms of its entwinement with the carceral state. So we’re not just interested in celebrating these terms but also in problematizing them as useful categories.

We’re also interested in problematizing the progressive historical narrative of the idea of waves—this article came out recently about the fourth wave of feminism, which is bizarre, because I didn’t know that we were still using that rubric to think through what is an extremely contested, even within the boundedness of one national frame.

SS: Something I was thinking about when you said an original title for the Festival was a Global Women’s Film Festival is that I think about race as so specific to the place—has there been a tension in trying to talk about race in a more global perspective?

MH: Part of the concern was that we didn’t want to spread ourselves too thin and not be able to do justice to these global histories. So the archives we’re looking at on Saturday are primarily African-American and African; Friday and Sunday there’s more focus on the borders between India and Pakistan and on global circulation between India and the US. We’re focusing on specific places or locations in order to have a more engaged sense of what we mean by the global so that it doesn’t become an empty buzzword.

BC: Again, I think there’s only a certain amount you can do in a festival, which is why we shy away from using the word global as part of our title, because we’re not trying to encompass whatever the global means in relation to global women’s or feminist media, we’re not trying to influence that. We’re trying to strategically bring together certain works to ask particular questions about particular locations and times and places.

SS: I feel like Industry and Borders particularly complement each other, if we talk about ‘global’ in terms of globalization and its effects.

MH: Imperialism, colonization.  What borders aren’t we thinking about?

SS: What other conversations are you hoping that the festival creates or contributes to, in terms of Providence, feminist communities, or conversation about media?

MH: At the Habits of Living conference hosted by MCM in Spring 2013, there were a lot of FemTechNet panels, and the word “feminism,” in some of its fourth-wavey resonances—as this utopian merging between feminist politics and all of the things that new media, digital media, may or may not make available—was coming up.  One guy in the audience just said, ‘why are you using the term feminism, I’m down with the identity politics you’re talking about but I strongly disidentify with that word feminism.’  And even some of the artists whose work we’re curating in this festival, have said, ‘I’m excited that you’re including my work, but just so you know, I don’t identify as a feminist’—and I don’t know what’s going on with that?

So I am interested in, if not destigmatizing the term feminism, raising questions about why it’s no longer seen as a hip or relevant word, just getting that word back in circulation a little bit more, as a politics that actually exists, that is not outmoded, that we need to be thinking about.

BC: One thing also, beyond conversations, is just the fact that some of this work is really not easily accessible or available. It is really awesome that people get to see it—it’s not just things that you can see on the Internet or easily go see in a gallery.  That people get to see this work is in and of itself a really important aspect of this festival.

MH: Sure, that goes back to the first question about how this all came to be. We haven’t mentioned Lynne Joyrich enough, who’s our professor in MCM and has been our main faculty sponsor for doing the festival. The six of us, the five grad students and Lynne, were meeting for the first time, and we were all so on board with the festival. And then you know that moment when you’re like, ‘I’m thinking of a word, let’s all say it at the same time’—and the words, and the titles, and the names for potential guests we were coming up with could not have been more different, and often we hadn’t even heard of the other suggestions.  So I think that this program is radically dialectical and I think it will blow all of our minds, to take on that challenge of sitting through the whole thing and really thinking the relations between all of this vastly diverse programming.

MH: And, you’re going to have to enlist a buddy, because there’s some parallel programming, so unfortunately you’re going to have to say, you go to Granoff, and I’ll go to Cable Car and we’ll report back later.

* * *

Stay tuned for the second part of this interview, in which Maggie and Beth will provide more detailed explanation on the festival’s programming.

By Ann Kremen and Sophia Seawell, co-Editors-in-Chief

Image (source): still from Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi.

And just like that, we have transitioned into the post-Macklemore phase of the “post-racial era”.  Most of us are way over talking about The Grammys, but racism has a way of remaining utterly relevant. Hegemonic, actually.  As one face of white pseudo-allyship falls, ten more emerge or reemerge with characteristic “good intentions” and often egregiously offensive results.

You may think that Macklemore’s post-Grammy apology to Kendrick Lamar was the poorest display of white allyship of the new year. Unfortunately, his antics were just one event in a series of gaffes that display a sad trend in white media’s attempts at appeasing LGBTQ/POC communities. Need some evidence? Here’s a quick run-down from the last two months:

• KTLA news anchor Sam Rubin mistakes actor Samuel Jackson for Laurence Fishburne at the beginning of a live interview, forcing Jackson to explain to Rubin that “we all don’t look alike.”
• In a promotional interview for her new book, Piers Morgan tells transgender activist Janet Mock “she used to be a boy.” The backlash from transgender communities on Twitter prompt Piers Morgan to tweet to the world, “I fear I may be a victim of cisphobia.” Morgan invites Mock back onto his show for a testy showdown.
• White feminist journalist Michelle Goldberg publishes a racially charged piece on the Nation about “Feminism’s Toxic Twitter Wars”, in which she accuses prominent black feminists, particularly Mikki Kendall, of being cyber bullies.  For more information on this conflict, read a pertinent piece on The Wire.
• Katie Couric repeatedly asks transgender activists Laverne Cox and Carmen Carrera about the state of their genitals, despite both women’s obvious discomfort.
• Ta-Nehisi Coates describes Melissa Harris-Perry as “America’s most foremost  public intellectual” in a piece on The Atlantic. Dylan Byers, a white commentator at Politico, asserts that Coates’ piece “undermines his intellectual cred.” His suggestions for top public intellectual are a predictable assortment of white men.

The examples of failure in the white mainstream media are countless.  When taken together they present a clear message: we have a systemic problem. These events are not just blips of casual ignorance to gawk at for the typical five-day news cycle.  They are symptoms of a much larger project: a system of media that values and normalizes whiteness, heterosexuality, and the gender binary.  As each buzzworthy instance of racism or transphobia boosts media traffic and then fades away, the system that supports such behavior persists—and will inevitably produce yet another media disaster to grapple with.

From Couric to Morgan to Goldberg it is clear that white commentators are trying but struggling to include a diversity of voices in their analysis on television and the Internet.  But where and how are they falling short?  And in that process, who is really getting hurt?  (Hint: Not Piers Morgan.)

Together, these seemingly isolated incidents suggest that white mainstream media is dangerously lowering the standard for allyship, adulterating entirely what it means to support and give space to marginalized communities.

***

When Piers Morgan’s first interview with trans* activist Janet Mock aired on CNN, he was clearly proud of himself for making space in his daily talk show for a progressive voice. He repeatedly lauded Mock’s ‘bravery’ but continued to misgender Mock as a “boy” before her surgery.  Morgan also asked Mock questions about her dating life, inquiring into whether men feel duped when they learn about her transgender identity.  After the interview, members of and allies to the trans* community spoke out against Morgan’s sloppy and offensive questioning.  Morgan was stunned.  Then he got pissed. He took to his own Twitter feed to speak out against the ‘cisphobia’ he was experiencing. In the course of heated conversation, Morgan repeatedly attested that he is ‘100% supportive’ of transgender rights and the LGBT community. But his protests were shrouded in an all-too-familiar tone of superiority and defensiveness. He was performing ultimate white allyship failure – inability to admit wrongdoing when being called out.

Janet Mock’s tag on Peirs Morgan misses the point entirely.

Why is this instance of WMM failure important? Only a quick read through any of Piers Morgan’s online presence or a five-minute viewing of his show will demonstrate that abrasiveness and bravado are part of his persona. So why shouldn’t we simply dismiss his antics as business as usual?

Morgan’s debacle is key because it represents white mainstream media’s failed attempts at allyship.  Morgan positions himself as a strong LGBT ally, before, during, and after the messy Mock interviews. But in the course of being called out on poor language, lack of nuance, and clearly not familiarizing himself with Mock’s work, he clings tighter and tighter to his ally title to defend his actions.  In reality, he steamrolls Mock, asking her to explain over and over again why she was not technically a “boy” before her transition surgery.

A key principle of allyship is the ability to listen to the very voices you’re attempting to support through your project of allyship. Listening is how allies can learn what role they can play in moving forward the social justice agendas of marginalized communities they seek to support. Listening is how allies can learn how these communities are experiencing emotional hurt, anger, and damage as a result of systemic oppression and even the actions of the allies themselves. But along the way, many attempted allies will fall short of fully examining their position in such a complex map of political and social realities, and they will cling to partial allyship as a safeguard against any future emotional or political work. As Audrey Thompson notes, sometimes in the course of “seeking out the voices of marginalized Others…[allies] are looking for reassurance, acceptance, and absolution.”

It’s easy to understand how a personal search for absolution does little to address the hurt, anger, and damage done to marginalized communities by structural oppression. Not to mention the addition harm done  in the process of performing poor allyship. And this is the situation we find ourselves in with Morgan. Because of his particular political position as a self-identified ally, he does more damage than good by clinging tight to his personal goals rather than evaluating whether his allyship is actually helping anyone.

And this high-profile performance of poor allyship has something of a trickle-down effect. Most longtime viewers of Morgan’s show probably still don’t quite understand why Mock was so upset about the way she was represented in the two interviews. And that’s a problem. If white mainstream media is committed to presenting (and capitalizing off of) stories of interest to LGBTQ/POC communities, they must also do the work of presenting their audience with models of strong allyship. The consumers of these nighttime talk shows may be learning about gender identity for the first time. Piers Morgan and others of his ilk are professional public educators. If Morgan slips up in his language and refuses to be corrected, viewers, accustomed to seeing him as a guide to issues of relevance to them, will take his side. White supremacist power structures don’t disappear when the network seeks to engage trans* activists. Morgan still holds the political upper hand, and when the viewer perceives his position as reasonable (and when he drowns out the counterargument) they will walk away believing him to be in the right. And this is arguably doing more harm than good to the project of representation in media.

Morgan’s interactions with Mock and her supporters are indicative of a particular moment we find ourselves in with white mainstream media. There’s no denying that issues relating to minority or marginalized communities are trending right now. And arguably, there is some benefit to a heightened awareness of and attention to such issues. But in a media climate that operates on a five-day news cycle, values splashy headlines and high click rates, and limits discourse to 140 characters at a time, we’re treading on thin ice when it comes to respectfully navigating the tricky terrain of discussing oppression.

***

If media is supposed to educate the American public, then it is absolutely crucial that members of the media educate themselves. They must do the work of presenting issues fairly, thoroughly, and respectfully.  Morgan’s interview with Mock could have succeeded if Morgan had worked to understand the nuances of her story and experiences as a transgender woman.  He should have learned about the difference between gender and sex; if he had done so, then he would understand why it is so offensive to tell Mock that she was a boy. Basically, he should have read her book. And Katie Couric failed in similar ways in her interview with Laverne Cox and Carmen Carrerra.  She should have been sensitive to the fact that media narratives about transgender people almost universally focus on their transition surgery rather than their experiences.  It should not be too much to ask for members of mainstream media to understand the impact of their work and see opportunities to break down rather than perpetuate stereotypes.

Laverne Cox and Carmen Carrerra in their interview with Katie Couric.

Morgan and Couric’s dust-ups should be seen as a call to action.  Poor representation of LGBTQ/POC community members in the media means that there simply aren’t very many nuanced conversations going on about issues related to those communities. In order to better understand issues affecting communities outside the white, cismale, heterosexual mainstream, there needs to be more representation of diverse voices in the media.  Not only do we need to hear more LGBTQ/POC stories, we need more LGBTQ/POC writers, producers, directors in charge of telling those stories.  Not surprisingly, Pierce Morgan’s show on CNN has been cancelled due to poor ratings.  CNN now has an opportunity to select a LGBTQ/POC news anchor.  Representation on mainstream media will not fix the problems, but they are an important step towards a more inclusive and anti-oppressive media system.

And even in instances where there is representation of these groups in traditional media, their achievements and accolades are often called into question. This happened notably in early January, when Ta-Nehisi Coates published a piece at The Atlantic describing Melissa Harris-Perry, MSNBC host and Tulane professor, as “America’s foremost public intellectual.” This piece started a Twitter firestorm, fueled by Dylan Byers’ assertion that Coates’ article “undermines his intellectual cred.” Suddenly the internet was aflame with arguments back and forth. What does it mean to be a public intellectual? And who qualifies for consideration?

Byers’ list of more respectable options for the public intellectual title was a predictable list of white men. Coates’ response to Byers’ list implicated his choices as “the machinery of racism” – Byers’ seemingly unbiased take on the question of the public intellectual was of course racially loaded and laden with political consequence. “The machinery of racism requires no bigotry from Dylan Byers. It simply requires that Dylan Byers sit still.” With these words, Coates calls out the most pervasive form of media racism – failing to incorporate the voices of oppressed communities and to validate the achievements of those communities. Whether or not Melissa Harris-Perry is truly the country’s foremost public intellectual is almost beside the point. The question is, why do some people consider it so ridiculous that a black woman be considered for the title?

***

In the course of discussing these incidents, it’s important to remember who is adversely impacted by white mainstream media’s poor performances of allyship. Commentators, writers, and talking heads have measurable impact on public opinion. As thought leaders and educators, their opinions are taken seriously by their audiences. The stakes are high. So who gets hurt when white mainstream media fails at efforts to integrate dialogue around social justice issues?

We need to remember that members of the media have the upper hand when it comes to accessing a national platform. Morgan’s accounts of experiencing ‘cisphobia’ from trans* community members and allies are insulting and uninformed. In reality, the backlash against his interviews is just the type of self-preservation and collective organizing that so many marginalized communities must depend on for their voices to be heard. Perhaps Morgan thinks that Twitter is an irrational hotbed where POC/LGBTQ rant and fight with each other at the expense of white media. This isn’t an uncommon opinion; Michelle Goldberg implies as much in her piece for The Nation. But their sense of victimhood is misguided. Because who really has the power in these debacles? Who has unfiltered access to an international platform?  Who does not have to experience systematic discrimination because of their identities?

And who gets the last word? Morgan, Byers, and Goldberg may have access to thousands if not millions of consumers of white mainstream media. But POC/LGBTQ communities are not sitting idly by, waiting to be called upon to make their voices heard. When they find themselves on the outside of national conversations purporting to address their own experiences, marginalized individuals have the right to use Twitter–or any platform–to respond to the systematic erasure and stereotyping of their communities.  They are not bullying.  Their anger is well-justified.  And POC/LGBTQ are doing more than tweeting in response to mainstream examples of white failure.  They are having extraordinary conversations about race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability.  They are organizing around these issues.  And it’s time for white mainstream media to listen and do better work.

By Kristy Choi and Leah Douglas, Contributors

Images via link, link, and link

This is the second part of an interview that Bluestockings conducted with Beth Capper and Maggie Hennefeld, two of the organizers of the Feminist and Women’s Media Festival in Providence. The FWMF is being hosted at the Cable Car Cinema and Brown University’s Granoff Center in Providence RI from March 13-March 16.  The festival includes screenings of documentary, narrative, and experimental cinema, a photography installation, symposia panels, and a keynote address by Nandita Das. Screenings, panels and events are free and open to the public.

The first part of the interview is available here.

Still from Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years

Ann Kremen: What blueprint did you use to develop the festival? How did the curation process happen; how were things selected?

Beth Capper: In some ways the curation happened quite organically. There’s five of us and we all have very different investments and things that we like, that we know about and wanted to bring in.  So in some ways what happened, happened quite organically and came together nicely.  We had ideas or frameworks for the days, and each day we have a panel. The focus of the first day is questions of Industry:  we originally had Lena Waithe coming to talk about the television industry, and then we have Nandita Das, who is this huge film star and also a filmmaker—

Maggie Hennefeld: —who iconizes a sense of the global film industry beyond Hollywood but also very much extended from Hollywood in certain ways as well.

BC: Then on the second day we have an “Archives and Race” panel, and on the third day is “Borders.”  So these are the three themes we had in mind, but not everything we curated every day falls into those themes.  In the end, I feel like it was a really equal effort in terms of the curating. I come from a Contemporary Art perspective, so I have more of an affinity for experimental film and video—

MH: —so the Depression film screening, and the French Feminist Video program.

BC: And then I was interested in bringing Cauleen Smith, a contemporary, Afrofuturist artist who is on the “Archives and Race” panel and whose work we’re showing on Saturday night. Using archival research, she went around and filmed locations throughout Chicago, tracking the traces of Sun Ra’s presence.  In that process, she was working with the Experimental Sound Studio to find all of these old recordings, and also finding musicians in Chicago and filming them. It ends up as this expansive Afrofuturist crazy tapestry, and at the end of it, it’s amazing, there’s this live performance of African-American brass band performing Space is the Place in Chinatown in Chicago.

And then Lakshmi’s completely responsible for bringing Nandita Das—

MH: There’s a strong Bollywood presence in the festival as well.

I’m really excited about Saturday’s programming and also the panel in Granoff at 4:30pm with Rhea Combs who is an African-American media history curator at the Smithsonian, of course Cauleen Smith, and Portia Cobb who’s an experimental filmmaker who’s worked in West Africa and in the United States and is engaged with questions of time and place as they emerge through film language.  That’s going to be a really great panel!

BC: There’s a lot of other really great stuff that day too, that day is probably my favorite day in terms of curating.

There’s Akousa Adoma Owusu who’s American-Ghanese and she makes really interesting and amazing work.  She made this film called Me Broni Ba from when she went to Ghana and filmed hair braiding salons, trying to think about African-American women’s hair in the US together with hair braiding in Ghana.

Sophia Seawell: Looking through the program, it spans a century. How did you select the early films to screen? Was building or making visible these alternate histories of women’s participation in media and film part of the intention of the program?

MH: Yes. Some of the work that I’m most excited to show is the Saturday morning silent film programs at 11 a.m. and 12:15 p.m. just because this stuff is so vital and shown so rarely. People don’t know how much work Black women and African-American women did in the 20s and 30s in silent film production.  For instance, even though its a very problematic film, the star of Laughing Gas, Bertha Regustus, is one of the few black actresses who’s made visible in silent cinema in that way, and it is in some ways doubly coded; it has a mixed message.

Also, the gospel films by James and Eloyce Gist were just fragments in archives until the 1970s when Howard University professor Steve Torriano Barry unearthed them and undertook a tremendous archival project to restore them into any kind of coherent narrative form.  The Gists were very religious and they used cinema as a spiritualizing medium. They exhibited the films in Churches, as vignettes with reformist educational functions,  to get people to abandon sin and lead a pious life.  But almost no one knows about these and they’re shown so rarely.

AK: All the panelists for the festival are women of color. Was this an intentional decision, or did it happen organically due to the nature of the themes of the panels?

MH: This was certainly not unintentional! We did originally invite Lena Dunham, who couldn’t make it, as a keynote, and at one point also tried to invite Marguerite von Trotta. We certainly never made any kind of hard and fast decision only to invite women of color, but as we were curating the “Archives and Race” and “Borders” themed panels and programming, these were just the guests whom it seemed compelling to bring here for the festival and who we thought would really be in conversation with one another. The main thing we wanted to make sure is that we had a range of artists/practitioners working in a variety of mediums, and then scholars/academics.

SS: Given technological advancements, how have the modes of representing bodies and experiences shifted, and what are the politics thereof?

MH: Early cinema is basically just about the body—or not just about the body, but it’s an incredibly different mode of address than in the classical narrative cinema that seeks to efface its own means of narration.  Early films are called a cinema of attractions often because performers will bow and wink at the camera, and when film was such a novel medium, spectators would actually turn away from the screen or get up and walk around the theatre and marvel at the projector, and do other forms of hanky-panky in the theatre during public exhibitions. So I think the early films represent a radically embodied mode of experience, but one that definitely makes the body visible in very different ways than some of the seventies experimental works about the body.

BC: The “Feminism?” Project by Amber Hawk Swanson responds to a certain kind of sexualized representation of women that has become dominant in both independent and mass media, and thinks through the various forms of femininity that we still associate with mass-consumption or with idiocy. She did these interviews with women in Iowa, where she’s from, asking what they understand by the term ‘feminism.’ Then she stages the interview responses in videos in which she enacts various forms of eroticism: getting spanked, having her dad paint her toenails, all these femme-y or sexualized positions, while ventriloquizing these interviews in a stereotypical ‘Valley Girl’ accent.  It takes on the contemporary ways in which the idea of what feminism is has been so reduced to soundbites or stereotypes as to be kind of meaningless and no longer speak to structural oppression: ‘feminism is about choice,’ ‘feminism is about lifestyle’—it’s lifestyle politics.

And then we have something like Mommy is Coming, Cheryl Dunye’s film, which is this kinky, porn-y, porn-ish, queer film set in Berlin, all about the sex club nightlife in Berlin. Obviously that’s a pretty radical transition from early cinema’s modes of representing.

MH: That’s the dialectic.  Or The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye—

BC: Which is about Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, who is the lead singer of Throbbing Gristle, which was part of eighties electronic music, being a big player. The film documents his love affair with this woman Lady Jaye; they each had cosmetic surgery to resemble the other.  It’s this way of thinking about the body as an artwork or a canvas for creation, and questions of gender and body manipulation. It’s not even about gender reassignment, it’s about crafting and sculpting one another’s bodies to become one another.  It’s a beautiful love story.

MH: Ramchand Pakistani, which is showing on Friday, is a film that dramatizes what happens when a body is on the wrong side of the border.  And Portia Cobb’s experimental work on Saturday is about staging the body in different places and locations. A lot of Sunday’s programming is about what modes of representation are made available when the body is, not just limited to its physical form, but is confined in a certain place, in a certain culture, in a certain physical space, habits, routines, what the body can do as an agential subject.

AK: Can you tell us about where the films are coming from?

MH: A couple of the films come from Women Make Movies, a unique distribution company dedicated to only distributing works made by women.  A couple of things from the Library of Congress, some of the silent films come from the archive of the Library of Congress, The Red Lantern comes from the Belgian cinematheque.

BC: Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years by Dagmar Schultz comes from a minority owned distribution company.  The French Feminist Video Program comes from the Simone de Beauvoir Audiovisual Center in France, it’s a center that’s invested in promoting feminist and women’s filmmaking and video art.

MH: Patricia Cobb and most of the panelists are bringing their own works to show.

SS: It’s amazing that all of this work is going to be in the same place—it’s going to be a special weekend.

For a full schedule, click here.

By Ann Kremen and Sophia Seawell, co-Editors-in-Chief.

Image (source): Mehreen Jabbar, Ramchand Pakistani, 2008

“That’s the tricky thing about this system [capitalism and Hollywood]. It’s not about replacing bodies. It’s about changing narratives” – Laverne Cox

Tonight, we saw Laverne Cox, Aasif Mandvi and RJ Mitte (of Orange is the New Black, The Daily Show and Breaking Bad respectively) at Brown University’s panel “Changing Stereotypes in Television.” They spoke about their experiences of bringing multi-dimensionality to typically stereotyped identities on television. Unique to most well-attended panels at Brown, the panelists were not all able-bodied cis-gender straight white males. In fact, none of the panelists identified as such. (*snaps to Brown Lecture Board*).

And, for the first time, Brown Lecture Board presented a panel rather than a single speaker, allowing for a multiplicity of voices and ideas. The balanced panel of humor, realness and optimism was moderated by Mary Grace Almandrez, the well-loved Director of the Third World Center and Assistant Dean of the College.

Eager to see Laverne Cox, we were the first people to arrive in the auditorium, arriving at least 40 minutes earlier than socially acceptable.

Here’s the highlight reel of quotable moments and our take on it:

• “I am really honored to be a vessel for all of the amazing conversations that have happened because of Orange is the New Black” – Laverne Cox

  • Laverne gave a personal example of how characters on television can change ideas about under-represented identities.

• “The inherent nature of this business is that they want to reduce you down to something they can market and can sell” – Aasif Mandvi

  • The larger problem with mainstream consumer media is the commodification and ‘boxing in’ of individuals. Oh, capitalism…

• “We talk about the character of Piper as the ‘gateway drug’ [in order to sell the show]… The reality is, people love to see white people on television” – Laverne Cox

  • We all laughed, but we know it’s true.

• “I’m the only person that can let me down… People will try to hold you back – but they are only trying. You let them succeed, you let them take your life… The human will is very strong.” – RJ Mitte

  • RJ Mitte on his role model: his own self-belief. Impressive personal strength and accountability!

We were delighted to see the panelists recognizing their different experiences in the acting realm as well as their different relationships towards their responsibilities in their identity communities. (Especially on the part of RJ for humbly admitting that his disability transcends boundaries of race and religion in a way that works to his advantage).

The crowd-sourced questions included: acting as a form of activism, navigating between the necessary representation of marginalized identities in the media vs. tokenization of those identities, and what viewers can do to push for more accurate representations. We were most struck by the Q&A about the role that comedy plays in perpetuating stereotypes. People that are Other-ed are often the “butt of jokes,” as put by Laverne Cox, but the panelists spoke about how a smart sense of humor, recognizing intent, and a critically engaged public can be apt tools for raising awareness.

Aasif Mandvi honestly acknowledged the limits of his reach:  “I hate to use the word ‘activism’ because I feel like what I ultimately do is basically make goofy faces standing in front of a green screen”. While that furthers conversations around representation of South-East Asians and Muslim Americans he does not dedicatedly campaign and organize around these issues. Aasif did not glorify his influence as a famous POC, but rather gave kudos to those engaging in more proactive forms of activism.

This lead to a conversation about the importance of social media in inciting change. Laverne mentioned how it was “that pushback from social media” that caused Katie Couric to publically recognize her misguided line of questioning and identify the experience as ‘a teachable moment’. In answer to a question on what we, as viewers, can do to push for more accurate representation – the takeaway was to just speak up. To voice concerns on twitter, on facebook, on instagram – to mobilize around instances of misrepresentation and call to question those in positions of public authority.

It is when under-represented identities are used to tick a box of inclusivity, that tokenizing and silencing of diverse perspectives occurs. Laverne responded to a question on how to navigate between representing identities without tokenizing them by illuminating the frustration that occurs when trans* activists are used as the token trans* voice  (even in LGBTQ communities). She acknowledged that it is a possible choice to use one’s tokenized position as a platform. Yet she made sure to underline that inclusivity for the sake of a facade of proper representation is not progressive. “The issue is if we just have someone there to say that we are being inclusive, but we’re not listening to their voice. It is a problem,” said Laverne Cox.

After all, they agreed, viewers are in a position to decide what is acceptable and unacceptable because Hollywood exists to cater to the public. We can vote with our viewership, but we can do more than that, and speak out for increased representation. Because when it comes down to it, we all want to see ourselves represented on TV, and in all major forms of media.

And, when it was all over, they all paused for a selfie before leaving the stage.

Photo by Blog Daily Herald

Check out our live tweets from the event: https://twitter.com/BluestockingsM

By Anastasiya Gorodilova and Chanelle Adams, Co-Editor in Chiefs 

What did you think of the panel? Comment below!

 By Marianne Abbott, Contributor

Image courtesy of Marianne Abbott

When we think of consent, we think of dialogue, communication, and a proactive stance on discussing our desires and boundaries when it comes to sex. It requires that we both be able to consent or express volition when it comes to the specifics of sex. Unfortunately, given the difficulty and hassle of constantly communicating what we like and dislike, at some point we cross others’ boundaries and feel as if our limits have been reached. Too often it is difficult to speak of discomfort and disgust when it comes to sex, worrying we’ll spoil the moment. Sadly, most of us have experienced some form of such discomfort, though many might rarely describe their experiences as sexual assault.

Part of rehabilitating rape culture requires that we address the cause of assault: the crossing of our boundaries, the breaching of our limitations, and the disintegrating of bodily and personal autonomy. To be assaulted is to be violated, to have one’s consent disregarded or sidestepped. Consent is the core of a positive, healthy, voluntary sexuality. Consent ensures that we can love one another more fully without sacrificing our emotional states.

These problems become even more pervasive when the individuals in question are not necessarily capable of articulating communication. Lingual diversity renders this process even more impenetrable and tenuous. Since each of us speaks different languages with dissimilar abilities, the romantic communiqué of consent can become complicated, to say the least. Just as children and people with certain disabilities cannot always express consent, asking for permission can easily turn into “asking for it.” Relevant to our inability to fully convey consent and choice when intoxicated, our ability to exercise our free will becomes difficult when we cannot articulate our desires or discomforts when speaking our nonnative languages.

Some of the problems with lingual ineffability is that we tend to simplify our words, constrict our desires, and insufficiently recount our breaking points. We tend to rely too heavily on the visual and corporeal, and we paraphrase the extent of our agreements. We cannot impart our attractions or boundaries, despite the fact that we may have the faculty to consent; we just can’t decode it. Nevertheless, our desires tend to spill into our actions, so the query of consent calls for some manner of addressing our consent. The line between compliance and consent, therefore, must be established to allow for both parties to liaise with full confidence and self-determination. Because we are vulnerable when we cannot wholly voice our approval, we must be careful that we nor our partners do not adopt an unquestioning approach to authority. To translate our wants and wishes, with pleasure, insists on our decipherment of each others’ impulses.

As exoticism thrives within the wake of globalization, these concerns grow more and more salient. As our cultures diversify and our languages multiply, the dilemma of consent continues to to become a transnational consideration. Body language does not necessarily aid these issues, because divergent cultures have contrastive codes of acceptable physical contact, regarding distance, touching, eye contact, and so on. As within medical ethics, the distinctions between expressed consent, informed consent, implied consent and inadequate consent grows strained. It is our ethical responsibility to obtain informed consent. Because enthusiastic consent is sexy.

By Ragnar Jónsson, Blog Managing Editor

Musings of his may be found @raggijons

Cristy C. Road is a Cuban-American zine-maker, writer, illustrator, Green Day fan, Gemini and all-round bad-ass. She has published several illustrated books—Indestructible (2006), Bad Habits: A Love Story (2008), Spit and Passion (2012)—and is currently working on a tarot card deck and making music with her band, The Homewreckers. Road was part of the Sister Spit: The Next Generation Tour in 2007 and the POC Zine Project Race Riot! Tour in 2012.

Recently Bluestockings Magazine’s Co-Editor-in-Chief, Sophia Seawell, had the chance to talk to Road. In the first of this three-part interview series, Road talks zines, publishing, and capitalism; in the next two parts—coming soon!—Road speaks to her relationship to the punk scene and themes of gender and sexuality as they overlap in her life and work. 

To see some of her work visit her website.

***

Cristy C. Road

Sophia Seawell: You started making zines when you were fifteen. Have written and visual expressions always gone hand-in-hand in your work, or do you use them separately and strategically?

Cristy Road: It’s always been very specific to the era of my life. When I started my zine, I was more focused on doing illustrations with every written piece. I’ve always been an illustrator so there’s always been the presence of drawings but I didn’t do comics or art-heavy stuff because I was more focused on the writing, and the drawing was like a decoration or an accent. And when I did Indestructible (2006) and Bad Habits: A Love Story (2008) it was that same idea of writing a piece and then making one epic drawing for one chapter. Drawing is very intentional for me—I don’t even keep a sketch book. I have an image in my head, and I’m going to complete it, and it’s going to exist and that it. It’s a lot more work for me than writing, because I never stop talking so I can just write it all down.

SS: So were you writing a lot before you were making zines?

CR:  I’ve had a journal since I was maybe twelve or thirteen. But before that, I used to write with my sister. I guess it’s what people refer to as fan fiction. It was Disney, Ren & Stimpy, and we would mix in actors from classic TV sitcoms, like ‘All in the Family’ and ‘I Love Lucy.’ So we had this whole project of made-up television shows, which we called Channel One—and we treated it like a job, asking each other “Are you done with the new episode?” This is what I did until I started a zine, so these written, illustrated projects have always been my main thing, but the older I get the more it changes. Spit and Passion was the first project where the illustration was the dominant thing. but I don’t’ come from a comic background. I think that comics are more gestural. I mean, there’s some epic, beautiful comics where every frame is this finished illustration, but I don’t like drawing dialogue, I don’t like drawing a scene.

SS: Given that zines are usually associated with radical, underground communities and movements in the 90s, what do you see happening with zines today, in the era of blogs and Tumblr? How was their role changed, and how important is that role?

CR: I think they’re still relevant and important because it’s important to archive work. You have books that get published by patriarchal writers about capitalism and other movements, but if you’re writing about something that’s more raw or angry, that’s not going to be accessible or marketable—but people need to allow themselves to be young and angry, and if that work only ends up on a blog, it could disappear. So I advocate for self-publishing and making creations that are going to be archived, and encourage people that are bloggers or any kind of culture creator, anyone who has a template or foundation to do that, to archive their work in some way. There are so many ways that people could do that. There are some Tumblrs out there that I would love a book version of–I like holding a book and reading it.

SS: Going back to what is considered marketable, did you find yourself trying to adjust your work to have it published, or did you decide only to work with presses that would take your work ‘as is’? In terms of financial imperative, how does one negotiate the politics of working with various presses?

CR: Well my interest in moving beyond the DIY publishing and working with punk presses specifically started when I went on an all-queer writer tour in 2007 organized by Michelle Tea, Annie Oakley, Eilieen Myles and Ali Liebegott. They had asked a bunch of zine writers, including myself, to come on ‘Sister Spit: The Next Generation Tour’ which was the new version of the Sister Spit tour that had been happening all through the 90s in a really punk way—they were crashing in people’s houses and doing open mics—but this tour was all colleges and bookstores. There were a few bar shows but it was a very well-planned, serious author tour. At the same time, it was still Sister Spit, still a bunch of angry queers who came from punk rock and anger and feminism and slam poetry — from communities that weren’t necessarily marketable. They had an angry feminist riot grrrl background, and they stayed that way and flourished and grew. I remember Michelle Tea read from her book Rose of No Man’s Land and there’s a scene where a girl throws a used tampon at a guy on the subway who’s harassing her, and it was really empowering to see this established writer, whose a professor and has a nonprofit organization, reading about slinging used menstrual products.

That experience made me realize I could move forward, and so I started working with a really awesome agent who helped me out a lot in this era and helped me sell Bad Habits to a press. The experience was really rad—Soft Skull Press, who released it, hooked me up with a bunch of really rad events. I got to read at Barnes & Nobles and huge book festivals. But there was a disconnect between what my message was and what my book was about: healing from an abusive relationship and doing a lot of drugs and being self-destructive, and also finding community and finding love and friends. The whole book is about reconnecting to my vagina, but that’s not marketable, and abusive isn’t marketable, so the book was promoted as a book about drugs and partying. A lot of people bought it and were like ‘What is this feminist crap?’ so there was this moment when I realized I wanted to grow and make my work accessible and not just write about punk—so I want to be an accessible author but I don’t want to compromise what I’m doing.

When I finished Spit and Passion, me and my agent were trying to sell the book to the presses she was working with, like Top Shelf and Phantographics, and there seemed to be a demand for me to change the book to make it less gay, make it less depressing, and so now I work with Feminist Press, who are all about honoring my vision and my goal. There isn’t the fancy publisher lifestyle with a $30,000 advance, which speaks to capitalism in so many different ways because it’s not just that a certain press has money, it’s that this press has money and they are only buying what’s presently marketable. During the Bush administration, everyone wanted to buy my depressing book about drugs. It really reflects on how the world is. Is depression marketable now? Is gayness marketable now? What kind of gay is marketable? A healthy, positive gay or a depressed gay? I can’t make a project to sell it. I make a project because I can’t stop thinking about what I’m writing about.

SS: And in terms of your intended audience, do you see your work being accessible or geared towards readers who are the same age as your character is in Spit and Passion?

CR: Feminist Press really pushed for the book to be available in young adult sections in libraries, but before Feminist Press and I connected a lot of presses who said, “this can’t be young adult, it’s very depressing and there’s masturbation,” but when I was that age, that’s what I wanted to read. I wind up writing for my age group because I’m writing what I feel, for myself, and I’m not thinking of who’s going to read it. But when the project is done I look at it and think “I would have wanted to read this when I was fourteen!”

It’s difficult to get the people with power and the book industry people to market your book as a young adult book. Spit and Passion is usually in the gay and lesbian section—it’s never in the graphic novel section unless you go to an independent bookstore that’s ‘quirky’ but at Barnes & Nobles or Books and Books and other bigger book stores, ‘Spit and Passion’ is always in the gay and lesbian section. It’s never in the comic section and never the young adult section. That’s just something I’m not going to have control over.

I would like to write something that’s geared towards 8 or 9 year olds but I don’t know what that’s going look like—my brain is so dramatic. But I do daydream. I don’t ever collaborate except when I’m in a romantic relationship, so I have this daydream of falling in love and writing this children’s book with the love of my life. And there are other scenarios where I daydream and think, “maybe I could write a children’s book from this stupid thing I just started drawing.”

Right now I love figure drawing and drawing from life but I also love making up stuff and implementing made up-stuff in drawings from life. I love drawing made-up, weird, goblin-looking creatures or alien creatures. I really love drawing very stylized cartoon animals, like rats. The only time I ever do that is for punk show flyers and for my band—there’s a lot of flyers of like rats making out—and I would love to use that energy to create a children’s book.

SS: Yeah—to create an alternate world that they could start envisioning at a young age, so they know that something else is possible than what they see on a daily basis.

CR: Even if the queers are represented by like little goblins with one eye. I’ve thought about doing something about the history of queer oppression but in a language that’s for ten year olds—and without humans. And instead of queerness it’s like ‘some of the aliens have one eyeball and some don’t,’ analogies like that.

SS: That’d be super sweet, I hope that this happens!

CR: Someday! But I’m very tired as far as writing long narratives. I want to write songs and make tarot card paintings. I have been working on a zine since 2008 based off of my last two or three journals. I refuse to look through them and edit them but when I choose to do that there will be a new zine all about my current stuff: racism in the queer community and Occupy Wall Street—stuff that I’ve been writing about over the last 2 years that isn’t a long narrative so it should be in the zine. Zines can be long narratives, zines can be anything, but I like zines that are lots of random short stories that don’t match with each other.

SS: Looking forward to that.

CR: It’s gonna be called ‘First World Bullshit.’ The Gemini life: I’m like, let me tell you about this other project, and this other project… and the restaurant I want to open if all this fails. I want to open a Cuban restaurant. Just make empanadas and chill.

Interview with Cristy C. Road, conducted by Sophia Seawell, Co-Editor-in-Chief

Images Courtesy of Google Images

Untitled by Andrea Crespo

In Bernard Stieglers’s For A New Critique of Political Economy, he introduces the pharmakon as a way of understanding “the proletarianization of the life of the mind” under neoliberal capitalist domination. This process is central to the consumerist model embraced by the current hegemonic order in its ability to colonize the libidinal energies of consumers, and hence integrate them into the consumer economy (25). The pharmakon is the etymological root of the more familiar term pharmacology, which can mean either/both healing drug or poison. Stiegler describes the destructive effects the pharmakon has on political subjects but neglects how these maladies are treated and reintegrated and into the system via pharmacological systems in the biochemical and therapeutic sense we are more acquainted with. The pharmakon, in its deficiencies and deleterious effects on subjects, begets pharmacological interventions in order to recuperate its losses.

Stiegler describes the pharmakon as a hypomnesic technology of the spirit, as an exteriorization of tertiary retention through digital technologies. These technologies of the spirit structure the work practices and desires of political subjects in the consumer economy. It is through these practices that stems the belief that the tendential fall in the rate of profit of capitalism had been overcome overcome at the wake of the “conservative revolution” and the ideological domination of neo-liberalism. Stiegler writes of the functionalization of a new energy in the economy beyond that of industrial production. Rather it is that of the proletarianized consumer, that is “the consumers libidinal energy, the exploitation of which changes the libidinal economy and, with it, the economy as a whole, to the point where the former is destroyed just like the latter, and the former by the latter” (25).

This begins to describe the deleterious, self-effacing effects of such an economy, transformed by its own transformations, feeding back into itself in order to make possible a deferral of the tendential fall in the rate of profit. However consumers do no escape this process unscathed. The harnessing of their libidinal energies into a consumerist model has its pharmacological (poisonous) effects on subjectivity. Stiegler describes the loss of savoir-vivre and savoir-faire (27). This loss of knowledge of the world and adaptability creates conditions of psychic depravity in consumers, they are stripped of access to these things all while their libidinal energies are funneled into consumer desires, devolving from desires and into drives.

What is in question is how these effects are manifested in individuals and how they are dealt with by the system itself. Bifo Berardi explores these pharmacological effects from a somewhat psychiatric point of view in Precarious Rhapsody. He maps the territory of semio-capital and precarious labor in contemporary society (with semio-capital paralleling Stiegler’s hypomnesic, digital technologies of spirit and precarious labor referring to the work practices associated with the consumer economy). Berardi goes beyond the loss of savoir-vivre and savoir-faire under the current regime and discusses the effects in terms of psychiatric pathology, addressing the explosion of the diagnosis of mental illness in the developed world in recent years.

Berardi proposes that mental illness is depoliticized and disconnected from social phenomena precisely when the consumer economy is producing it. He describes the generation native to the neoliberal order and its technologies of the spirit as the video-electronic generation. The psychosphere of the video-electronic generation is swamped with neuro-mobilizing stimuli, affective manipulation, and psychotropic substances as well as well temporal irregularities attributable to the precarious labor of the political economy (85).

The ensuing effects of these mechanisms on subjectivities are disastrous. In Berardi’s analyses the consumer economy perturbs proletarianized individuals and collectives on a psychological and biochemical level, rather than solely through the loss of modes of knowledge like savoir-vivre or savoir-faire. Stiegler and Berardi converge in their discussions on how these technologies of desire liquidate desire in the process, through psycho-power exercised on consumers (Stiegler 65). The minds of consumers are put through symbolic misery and a loss of otium or leisure time that escapes the calculable exchange. This loss of time and enjoyment is characteristic to precarious labor’s irregular temporalities.

Of course one could also argue that the loss of savoir-vivre is constituted by the very symptoms the video-electronic generation expresses. Berardi describes many disturbances in the minds of individuals. He for example describes the loss of empathy, or event he ability to effectively communicate with others. He describes the speed of info-stimuli and the minds inability to adapt (savoir-faire) to these new temporalities. Empathy is lacking because the stimulation produced by the consumer economy has become far too intense for psycho-fragile human beings (86). The vast variety of disregulations produced in the minds of the proletarianized video-electronic generation are subsequently pathologized as panic, depressive, bipolar, and attentive disorders.

Of course the pharmacology of capital is responsive to these conditions, these “side-effects” it produces. It reintegrates these frayed libidinal economies pharmacologically in the clinical sense, therapeutically and biochemically, all while depoliticizing these disorders. Madness is always at fault of the consumer and not the consumer economy. It is under these conditions that the Beatriz Preciado’s pharmacopornographic capitalism operates under and is allowed to proliferate in. Hence, we have a highly profitable mental health industry responding to the psychic casualties of the neoliberalism.

In Testo Junkie, Preciado proposes that we live in the pharmacopornographic era which arises concurrently with the gradual collapse of the Fordism, precisely when the neoliberal order and precarious labor come into play (34). Her exploration of the phenomena is more oriented toward the production of subjectivity under this regime, and in particular the production of sexuality with the advent of pornographic media and pharmacological technologies such as synthetic hormones and birth control. She still includes, however, some mention of increasingly popular psychotropic substances like Ritalin and Prozac, used to target and correct the psychic deficiencies aforementioned. For example Berardi, in resonance with Preciado, speaks of sexual dysfunctions caused by emotional disturbances as being widely treated with drugs such as Viagra (103). The realm of sexuality does not escape the regime. Though her more nuanced and extensive focus on sexuality is outside of the scope of this discussion, it is interesting to note that she includes video-electronic media like pornography as constitutive of consumer subjects.

This attests to the power of these technologies over subjectivity as pharmaka regardless of their deleterious or healing effects. Pharmacopornographic capitalism epitomizes and thoroughly literalizes this condition on a biochemical or molecular level, simultaneously administering disturbances in subjects as well as the solutions that heal the latter in guise of medications and treatments as commodities to be consumed like any other (though they may be often medically administered).

In this sense the system literally feeds into itself, picking up the stray disturbed subjects it produces and integrating their maladies into its circuits of production. The pharmakon of neoliberal capitalism is true to its definition as a cure and a poison, vacillating between the production and medicalization of pathology and its profitable treatment, all while preserving a labor force that is exhausted and psychically overtaxed by consumption and precarious forms of labor. This results in a further deferral of the system’s own collapse, by literally deferring the collapse of the bodies of subjects that are overexerted by the system itself.

By Andrea Crespo, Contributor

“Untitled” Courtesy of Andrea Crespo

This article was originally published in the 3rd Issue of Bluestockings Magazine.

Richie Incognito & Jonathan Martin

There is a hill that lies down the street from my home in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It is around sixty-five yards long and runs upwards at about a forty-five degree angle. My senior year of high school, my father would wake me up at five o’clock in the morning, four days a week, to run up and down that hill five times. I like to think that when I die I will not experience hell, but if I do, I know that it will pale in comparison to that hill. No pain is ingrained into the depths of my nerves quite like the pain my hamstrings and quadriceps had to endure on those mornings. No burn will ever torture me as much as my lungs stung in the cold fall air that year. It was hell. It was pain. It was beautiful.

In early November, Richie Incognito—offensive lineman for the Miami Dolphins professional football team of the National Football League—was suspended for “hazing” fellow offensive lineman and teammate Jonathan Martin. Incognito was apparently told by the Miami Dolphins coaching staff that he needed to “toughen up” Martin, who was not playing well and was considered “soft.” Coaches presumed that Martin, a Stanford graduate, was not physically and mentally strong enough to play in the NFL. It was left up to Incognito to “bring out the man” in Martin, to make him “drop his nutsack,” as some coaches might say. Incognito was charged with the responsibility, like so many teachers, coaches and fathers across the country, of helping a young man grow into himself as a productive member of a team.

Incognito seemed like the man for the job, but did not act like it. Instead of conferring with Martin on what it would take to become a better player in the NFL, he harassed Martin, sending him derogatory text messages and leaving him threatening and violent voicemails. The crux of the abuse came from Incognito, who is white, calling Martin, a black male, the n-word (hard “er”). Martin suffered the brunt of this abuse for an extended period of time. After physically confronting Incognito, he decided that showing up to work to be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for playing Incognito’s childlike game was no longer worth being bullied. He checked himself into a hospital for emotional distress, broken down from the experience.

Through characterizing Incognito’s text messages and voicemails as harmless bully- ing, many media commentators obscured the connections Incognito’s behavior has to present and historic racial violence, framing it as an isolated incident of bullying rather than as part of a deeper culture of pervasive racism. Some commentators, such as Skip Bayless, have gone the opposite direction and blamed the n-word for this situation entirely. He holds the belief that the word should be “eradicated” from the human language. Though this is certainly admirable, Bayless misses the point that the n-word is only a part of the problem. It is a vehicle for racism but not the root of racism. The culture around the word also creates problems, a culture where black people are supposed to be feared, inferior, or somehow less human than whites. Calling this incident “harmless bullying” or blaming the n-word entirely misses the point that how we see and treat difference and race in our culture allows for this type of harm- ful and racist assault on human dignity.

This news (like most news related to the NFL) held the nation’s attention for the obligatory forty-eight to seventy-two hours. During this time, several people of little to no import gave their opinions on the matter. Talking heads at ESPN, former players on the NFL Network, and columnists (oh, how many columnists there are in the world) broke down both sides of the argument. They were fair and balanced for the sake of being fair and balanced. Some condemned Incognito’s actions as racist and wrong. Others questioned Jonathan Martin’s openness in exposing this, since these matters are usually handled “in- house.” As former Baltimore Ravens defensive tackle Tony Siragusa said on the Dan Patrick Show, “They talk about teams being a family. When you’re in the locker room, that’s like your home…Things are handled in there and said in there that shouldn’t be brought out to the media. And plainly because the media, and really the real world, can’t handle a lot of those things and things that happen in that locker room.” Some people wondered why no one in the Miami Dolphin locker room stepped up to defend Martin, while others defended the Miami Dolphins players who circled the wagons around Incognito.

As a former player who has functioned in a locker room, I completely understand the sentiment to keep certain things inside of the locker room. These players are your friends, teammates, and, on a certain level, brothers. You don’t expose inner-workings to an outer world that probably won’t comprehend the dynamics. In sports, and in football in particular, men are supposed to be made of iron and possess an indomitable will. This is correct; football and sports are usually a battle of wills, and the “tougher” person usually wins. But a strong will and passion do not and should not be associated with the kinds of masculinity that abusers use to justify their actions—a masculinity that requires men to hide emotion, to obscure true feelings.

But what if you no longer feel that you are a friend, a teammate, a brother? Would you not expect one of your brothers to stop the bullying from escalating to the point where you feel completely ostracized? Because once you reach that level, you have no one to look out for except yourself.

Jonathan Martin is an educated man, a Stanford graduate who just so happens to play football. Unfortunately, some people equate a Stanford degree with being “soft,” though I doubt Richie Incognito would have the mental and emotional toughness to withstand the pressures of being an African-American man navigating his way through an elitist and rigorous institution such as Stanford. But thinking about this incident, I can’t help but wonder why the Dolphins coaches chose Incognito, who has had a reputation of viciousness on the field, to men- tor Martin. Was there not another veteran on the offensive line who could step in? Did they not think about the type of person Incognito is and how the dynamics of a relationship with Incognito would play out? It should have been clear that Martin, a minority in several senses of the word (not only is he African-American, but Stanford grads don’t usually play in the NFL) would not have responded well to a man like Incognito, who has a history of arrests and bad behavior. Martin was subjected to bullying and abuse from a person with less character than himself, a person who has been kicked off teams time and time again. The Dolphins put Martin in a situation where he showed up to work every day as inferior to an inferior man. But since Incognito—a white male, veteran of the league, arrest warrant champion—had more “experience,” he was put into a position of mentorship. A position one could say that wasn’t earned by merit, but by having the privilege to be born a white man. But some people do not see it like this.

Incognito’s criminality and violence play into hyper-masculine stereotypes valued in football. Incognito’s ability to faithfully display such behaviors gained him the respect of his team- mates. One Dolphins player went as far as calling Incognito an “honorary” black. Because of this, Incognito felt he was in a position to use the n-word with impunity regardless of Martin’s feelings or skin color. This reinforces the problem of associating this type of violent and criminal-esque behavior with African-American men. Incognito probably thought what he was saying was okay; he was violent enough to be considered “down” as his organization and the culture around him allowed him as a white male to think his behavior and language was acceptable. This analysis was expressed by columnists with a critical lens on race. However, the most interesting commentary did not come from the columnists, or the players, or the talking heads. Rather, it came from my football-plebian friends. Transcending class lines, everyone—from the guys I live with to the fantasy football heroes back home—agreed that although the use of the n-word was wrong, Incognito was in the right.

It was in these conversations that I became the most worried. One does not gauge the true pulse of an idea by listening to the columnist— although they often fail (as do I)—it is their job to attempt to be nuanced and learned. It comes from listening to people. When asking male friends about the Incognito incident, the pre- vailing reaction was “Martin is a grown man, he has to step up for himself.” This usually coincided with the idea that Martin had to step up for himself by fighting, and that he seemed weak. Surprisingly, both black and white peers gave me this response. Like the Dolphin coach- es, they all saw Martin as soft, and they agreed that sometimes you have to just have to “be a man” and fight. Incognito should not have used the racial slurs, but Martin shouldn’t be such a “pussy.” “He’s a 300 pound man! He shouldn’t be checking himself into a hospital for emotional distress.” The coaches told Incognito to toughen Martin up, and in the eyes of the masses, Martin is a failing student, but not because Incognito is a bad teacher.

My response to this makes me contemplate questions of masculinity. It troubles me that people think there is only one right idea of being a man. There seems to be this prevailing idea that manliness is measured by faux-machismo signals. I am also concerned that my male peers feel that sending derogatory text messages is a useful and legitimate way to toughen someone up. Somewhere between Teddy Roosevelt and today, manliness was co-opted by tribal tattoos and beer commercials. How is showing great emotion, passion, and vigor in all walks of life—sad and happy— not manly?

In another example, Brandon Marshall, an All-Pro wide receiver for the NFL’s Chicago Bears, was fined $10,500 by the NFL for wearing green cleats during a game. He wore green in honor of Mental Health Awareness Week, having openly dealt with and confronted a per- sonal bout with borderline personality disorder. When Marshall was asked about the Incognito incident, he said to the Chicago Tribune, “Take a little boy and a little girl. A little boy falls down and the first thing we say as parents is ‘Get up, shake it off. You’ll be OK. Don’t cry.’ A little girl falls down, what do we say? ‘It’s going to be OK.’ We validate their feelings. So right there from that moment, we’re teaching our men to mask their feelings, to not show their emotions. And it’s that, times 100 with football players. You can’t show that you’re hurt, can’t show any pain. So for a guy to come into the locker room and he shows a little vulnerability, that’s a problem.” Apparently the masses think Martin should continue to hide his feelings, that displaying them makes him look like an untrained little boy. It takes incredible strength and will to confront problems with yourself, such as mental illness and other inner demons—certainly more strength and will than is required to beat someone off the line.

This brings me back to the hill. My father woke me up at five a.m. every morning to run that hill, as he walked up it by my side. As a captain of my high school football team and senior offensive and defensive lineman, much was expected of me. He and I both knew that a state championship was an attainable goal, but in order for that to be achieved, two things must first be earned. First, a level of physical stamina unparalleled by any of my opponents. Second, a mental toughness that would be a guiding light in my hardest times. The hill helped me gain both of those things. It burned, it hurt, and it killed, but it made me tough.

Football games became easier for me, and much more enjoyable. I took pride in knowing I could climb the hill. The self-esteem gained from conquering it helped me to become a better leader.

Although I was confronted with a literal hill, people are faced with their own “hills” every day. It is important that the mentors of the future have a better understanding of what it means to forge masculinity. Manliness is something that comes about in context, and since every man is different, mentors need to be receptive to an individual’s needs. They should be open-minded to difference and personal history, and strive for a society that embraces different types of manliness. Hopefully, when a mentee reaches the top of their hill they will have achieved characteristics to be proud of, ones that promote human equality and love without sacrificing strength. All young men are unique and face different, but nonetheless difficult, challenges in their lives. The people who care for these young men are charged with a responsibility to make sure that they are supported in becoming men.

Because Incognito did not help Martin get up the hill, he failed Martin, and that is Incognito’s fault, due to his warped conception of what being a man means. Richie Incognito took the easy way out. He could have built Martin up, turning Martin into a better football player by staying late with Martin to watch film, encouraging Martin to run ten extra plays after practice—running the hill. Instead, Incognito thought that it was his job to force destructive stereotypes onto Martin. He took the beer commercial route of masculinity, the one that stifles human expression. Incognito’s actions did not “toughen up” Jonathan Martin; they broke his spirit. The pain of racial suffering is not the pain of a muscle being built, it is the pain of an injury going untreated. The pain made Martin hate the sport he loved. It made Martin want to walk away from thousands of dollars. Incognito resorted to tactics of an abuser, belittling another human being to manipulate their behavior. Maybe this is what Incognito wanted, envious of a man with an education, envious of a younger and better player. Regardless, if anyone in this situation should be labeled “soft,” it is not Martin. Jonathan Martin made the brave and correct decision for himself—he sought help. On the other hand, Incognito displayed just how petulant, childish, and harmful many of these masculine stereotypes can be.

Unfortunately, these stereotypes are prevailing in our culture, as if they are the values that I want placed on the top of my hill. But they aren’t, and when we put these stereotypes on a pedestal to be reached, we cloud out the other—often more productive—types of masculinity worth striving for. Hopefully this conversation will not come to an uneventful and unhelpful end, with Incognito only being sent off to “sensitivity training” and Martin being pushed out of the league. No one wants to talk about what it means to be a man, because for the most part, we don’t know. Whatever it is though, it is certainly not the man Richie Incognito thought Jonathan Martin should be.

By Dillon O’Carroll, Contributor

Image via Google Images

Remember that J.Crew ad of a woman painting her son’s toenails caused a moral panic in 2011? That this could become a controversy was a bleak reminder that a lot of people are still heavily invested in normative, binary notions of gender—boys wear blue, girls wear pink, that’s just how it is and it needs to stay that way. This seems to be the context in which Hana Pesut’s ‘Switcheroo’ series became viral. Pesut photographs (mostly) couples twice against the same background: once, in their own clothing, and the second time in each other’s. The products of this process, we’re told, are ‘gender-bending,’ ‘playful’ and ‘quirky.’

Intentionally or not—Pesut has said she is “just hearing everyone’s own interpretations rather than putting an idea out there of what I think it should be”—the series does have the potential to offer at least a lighthearted commentary on gender roles. After switching clothes, women tended to show as much or less skin than before, whereas several men bear unusually exposed shoulders or legs. Some viewers may realize for the first time that what’s marketed as women clothing tends to be more revealing; that this plays into the sexualization of women’s bodies is hopefully the next step in the thought process.

Moreover, the clothing switch highlights the gendered nature of androgynous presentation. In many of the post-switch photos, the women seemed like they could, in fact, be wearing their own, everyday clothing, because it’s generally considered acceptable for women to wear pants, baggy hoodies, sneakers, or other attire generally coded as more masculine. A man in a dress, far from normalized, produces quite a different effect.

When asked about “tolerance of gender neutrality” in Western culture, Pesut answered that “my mom told me that when she was a kid she wasn’t even allowed to wear pants or jeans; she had to wear a skirt or dress.” She adds, “It wasn’t acceptable then for women to be wearing men’s clothing and vice versa but now it seems that almost anything goes.” But as her photos show, this isn’t the case. While many people wouldn’t look twice at the women in the post-switch photos, some of the men would be hard-pressed to avoid stares or verbal harassment, and could be at risk for physical assault. 

Which brings me to my issue with these photos being paraded through the social media networks and described as ‘quirky’: for many non-binary, genderqueer and trans people, dressing in clothing not marketed to the gender they were assigned at birth is not a fun experiment for which they will receive Internet brownie points. It’s their lived experience and their expression of their gender.

So if ‘Switcheroo’ is ‘playful,’ then who is allowed to engage in this kind of play? If the foundation of the project is what appears to be gender-normative, straight pairs of men and women, then people who do not hold that privileged combination of identities are excluded. Sorry, everyone else—you can watch this round.

Descriptions of the series take this exclusion a step further by solidifying the anxiety around people who actually wear the ‘wrong’ clothing: Colossal, an art and culture blog, notes “the seemingly nervous faces of cross-dressing in public” (Cross-dressing, so embarrassing, hope nobody thinks I actually dress like this!); Margo Mortiz, describing her similar Bold Italic Project, writes that “when the couples came out and saw the other in their clothes, their reactions ranged from slightly nauseated to oddly intrigued” (Because masculine people in feminine clothing are just kind of gross, you know?). She concludes that, “After trying on their partners’ threads, everyone seemed relieved to step back into his or her own, and walked off reminded that they liked each other just the way they were.” 

If this was also the take-away for some of Pesut’s participants, then these projects reinforce rather than complicate binary gender normativity. Which brings us back to the premise of the series—heterosexual couples who present themselves normatively according to the binary gender they identify with. When Buzzfeed presents “significant others [who] begin to resemble one another” as a novelty, they erase the couples who do already resemble each other—which are not only or even necessarily same-gender couples, but any pair in which there is not one person who presents as feminine and one who presents as masculine. My Modern Met writes, “the visual experiment is especially effective when the pairs are extremely different, in terms of gender, height, and style,” reflecting the common fallacy that couples are constituted by this ‘balance,’ and that sexual attraction relies on difference.

It may be tempting to argue that despite its perpetuation of the gender binary, that ‘Switcheroo’ and similar concepts still illustrate Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity within the heterosexual matrix. Butler frames gender as something we are constantly doing to produce the effect of gender rather than something we intrinsically ‘are.’ But what we see in these photos is gender being performed, and the difference is slight but crucial. As Judy B. herself explains, “It’s one thing to say that gender is performed and that is a little different from saying gender is performative. When we say gender is performed we usually mean that we’ve taken on a role or we’re acting in some way.”

Indeed, given that the pairs switch physical positions and often also take on each other’s poses make the ‘play’ taking place here seem more akin to dress-up or drag rather than, as Elle Cananda put it, “a charming fluidity.” Nothing about gender is complicated through these series; most viewers, I would argue, will look at the photos and register them as a man in woman’s clothing and a woman in man’s clothing. The essential, binary categories remain undisturbed.

That’s the crux on my criticism of ‘Switcheroo’—it appears on its face as a progressive, hip social commentary but relies on the contrast between genders, on what is ‘obviously’ still a man in woman’s clothing and vice-versa. J.J. Levine’s 2009 ‘Switch’ series, on the other hand, provides a much more thought-provoking visual experience. Using the trope of the prom photo, Levine switches a pair of models to produce two photos, and in doing so manages to make the boundaries of gender fuzzier rather than clearer. In several of the photos, the same model is barely recognizable from one photo to the other, and it is often difficult to read what the model’s gender ‘really’ is. The discomfort we feel when we find ourselves trying and unable to put someone in a binary category forces us to reflect on the importance placed on, and the criteria that constitutes, the legibility of someone’s gender.

Though Levine was speaking about their series ‘Alone Time,’ in which a single model is used to produce two gendered subjects within the same image, that they described their aim as “to make visually confusing and intriguing images that call ­­into question the legitimacy of the gender binary” remains relevant for ‘Switch,’ as well. Whereas ‘Switcheroo’ and its derivatives rely on an essentialist understanding of bodies as gendered in order to function, Levine aims to demonstrate a “single body’s capacity to engagingly and believably embody either gender.” This is not just an artist’s immaterial vision, but an urgent political imperative as people are assigned to correctional facilities of the gender they do not identify with, denied access to healthcare, and attacked on the basis of the unbelievability of their embodiment of their gender. In this context, ‘Switcheroo’ doesn’t bend gender at all, but keeps it firmly in place.

By Sophia Seawell, Co-Editor-in-Chief

Images from My Modern Met, Buzzfeed and JJLevine.ca

No Justice For Islan Nettles

Cisnormativity: the pervasive assumption that gender and biological sex are one and the same; that cisgender and cissexual identities, where gender and sex align, are more valid, real, truthful or authentic than transgender or genderqueer identities; the belief that transgender people’s identities transgress the norms of gender; the assignation of gender without asking people what their genders are, especially at birth; the assumption that feminine or female-bodied people are women, that masculine or male-bodied people are men, and that people cannot exist outside of this binary.

In Connecticut, a 16-year-old trans teenage girl was recently transferred to an adult men’s prison. Despite not receiving criminal charges, the teenager has not only been placed in a men’s prison as a trans female, she has also been assigned to an adult prison as a youth. This was due to the Department of Children and Families’ alleged inability to house the girl any longer. Sandra Staub, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut, insists this was due to “the result, if not the intent” of her being transgender and, by extension, the government affiliates’ transphobia and cissexism. A sentence of this kind has not occurred in 20 years. The #rethinkmalloy campaign has been trying to raise awareness about this unique situation.

Even though she has previously assaulted staff members for unspecified reasons (i.e., we do not know if these assaults occurred due to cissexist provocation or violence), she does not have a criminal record. Her assaults of other members at juvenile detention centers are not uncommon for youth.  She has not ever been charged with any crimes. Therefore, she is not legally a criminal, though she is an imperfect, flawed human being, like all of us.

As punishment for her untried “crime,” she has not only been misgendered and incorrectly assigned to a men’s prison, she’s been sentenced to live in a facility that is incredibly dangerous for trans female youth.

While the decision is heartbreaking, it is hardly surprising. The vast majority of Departments of Correction base prison placement is on the basis of biological sex (which is not a binary category), instead of gender identity (because of cissexism) or the assumption that gender is not and cannot be assignable (because of cisnormativity.)

Trans women, such as CeCe McDonald, have also undergone incorrect prison placement on the basis of gender due to a lack of understanding about transgender people’s identities. And, like CeCe, who was charged with manslaughter after being called “tr*nny,” *f*ggot,” and “n*gger,” while being assaulted, many trans people, especially trans people of color, receive harsher punishments and sentences for the same crimes as cis, white people. This is not just the case for trans women; race, class, (mental, corporeal, educational, lingual) disability, ethnicity, and other factors influence how we are either charged or acquitted of crimes, as was the case with Marissa Alexander. Even as Laverne Cox of Orange is the New Black is co-producing the Free CeCe Documentary – which addresses trans-misogyny, the epidemic of violence against trans women of color, and prison injustice – the policies have yet to be changed or adequately addressed in mainstream media.

Organizations like the Department of Corrections remain the institutional gatekeepers of trans people, deciding if and when their identities are valid, determining whether or not they should be subjected to augmented violence. While the bodily consequences of cisnormativity are not new phenomena, we have the potential to confront the trauma and violence that trans people experience by amending these policies.

Thankfully, the youth’s lawyers are trying to get her out of the adult male prison, but if they are unsuccessful, her safety may be in jeopardy. Though the exact statistics are unattainable due to underreporting and differences between prison facilities, trans people — and in particular trans women — are disproportionately more likely to be the victims of sexual assault and harassment.

In a study done in California, a whopping 59% of trans women incarcerated in men’s prisons were sexually abused, as opposed to the general rate of 4% for cis men in men’s prisons. What is further troubling about this case is that her vulnerability will be heightened given her young age — as she is 5 years younger than the youngest prisoners in prison. She is at a much higher risk of becoming the subject of sexual and/or physical violence on the basis of her identity. It is also unknown whether or not she is a trans woman of color or a disabled trans woman, and thus potentially at risk of racism and/or ableism factoring into her treatment in jail (both of which have higher rates of abuse.)

Too often, we assume that trans people are deceitful and criminal, and that such “deceit” deserves “retributive” violence, and that such violence is just, appropriate, or understandable because the trans people were “dishonest” about their identities or bodies. The transphobic trope is so rampant that trans people have portrayed the consequences that disclosure of trans status, such as violence and murder, as a creative form of therapeutically working through cultural trauma.

The trans musician Kokomo released her breathtaking song, “There Will Come a Day,” that describes the futurity of trans acceptance and the (perhaps optimistically) eventual eradication of anti-trans* violence that ripples throughout America and the world. In the video, a woman comes out as trans to her partner after a series of vignettes of their loving courtship, ending in him reaching for a knife with the subtextual threat of violence being implied. Just as Laverne Cox emphasized that simply loving trans people is a revolutionary act, Kokomo insists, “I know there will come a day, when our lives aren’t thrown away” and “Hate by definition enslaves me. Love me and set us both free.”

Her age also plays into yet another transphobic trope. Because she is only 16-years-old, she does not have the financial or legal access to diagnostic therapy for “gender dysphoria,” she cannot access hormone replacement therapy or, thereafter, gender reassignment surgery. Worse still, because she has not undergone physical transition, like many other pre-transition binary trans people, she is at greater risk of being categorized as “really a man,” which serves to further justify her placement in a men’s prison. This transphobic trope – that trans people are only really trans* when they’ve undergone transition – serves to erase the self-identification of trans people’s gender identities, ignores the fact that our bodies do not define our genders, and displaces trans identities that do not conform to the either/or gender binary. It installs a hierarchy for trans people: “post-op transsexuals” are “real” trans people, while people who choose not to or cannot afford to undergo transition are not “trans enough,” leaving trans youth without the freedom to experiment with the contours of their gender identity, expression and behavior.

What is truly criminal (in the informal sense of the word, deplorable) is the current treatment of trans people in our world. This case is more than one of a juvenile youth who has assaulted staff members. We do not know the context of the violence, especially given the power dynamics between inmates and staff members. Trans people are all too often presumed guilty before innocent (as part of the deception trope.) This is particularly evident with an interlocking trope, that of a liminal yet constant de/sexualization of trans people (either perceived as porn star-level hypersexual or ‘woman-is-really-a-man’ sexually undesirable.) In New York City, for example, trans women with condoms were presumed to be sex workers in accordance with the racist-cissexist-heterosexist stop-and-frisk policies, and often arrested on the sole basis of having condoms (because practicing safe sex as a trans woman is criminal.) A trans woman in Arizona was found guilty last week for the “manifestation of an intent to prostitute”, and trans women of color are often targeted by the police and, due to the broad inexplicit nature of the laws, many are arrested. And, in this 16-year-old’s case, she was not charged. While she was, certainly, violent, we do not know the mental and medical health of the girl or her background. Trans people undergo a considerable amount of additional stress for simply being trans, from familial abandonment to employment discrimination, increased rates of poverty and homelessness, which is not usually mentioned in the news coverage of this trans girl’s “outbursts.”

As evidenced by the discrimination, the derogatory remarks, the side-eye glances, the violence, and every utterance of “tr*nny,” the criminality of transphobia and cissexism is the real problem here, not this poor girl’s behavior. The point is not to trivialize the aggression she exerted, but instead to show how trans people, like many other minorities, are scapegoated for behaviors that are similar to their privileged counterparts. Trans people receive cruel and unusual punishment for identical “crimes.” As more and more trans women are allotted harsher sentences and unfair treatment, the need to address the matter at hand remains salient in the face of injustice.

By Ragnar Jónsson, Blog Managing Editor

Ragnar tweets @raggijons.

Featured Image Courtesy of Ragnar Jónsson

Cristy C. Road is a Cuban-American zine-maker, writer, illustrator, Green Day fan, Gemini and all-round bad-ass. She has published several illustrated books—Indestructible (2006), Bad Habits: A Love Story (2008), Spit and Passion (2012)—and is currently working on a tarot card deck and making music with her band, The Homewreckers. Road was part of the Sister Spit: The Next Generation Tour in 2007 and the POC Zine Project Race Riot! Tour in 2012.

Recently Bluestockings Magazine’s Co-Editor-in-Chief, Sophia Seawell, had the chance to talk to Road in a three-part interview series. In the first segment, Road spoke about zine-making, publishing, and the pernicious omnipresence of capitalism. In this second installment, Road talks about her relationship with the punk scene as a queer woman of color. In the next segment, she’ll discuss themes of gender and sexuality as they overlap in her life and work. 

To see some of her work visit her website.

***

Sophia Seawell: Your relationship with Green Day’s music is a big part of Spit & Passion. Would you say it’s been a major influence in your own process of making music, or was that relationship specific to that point in your life? 

Cristy Road: No, it’s definitely influential towards my music, because I play in a pop-punk band, The Homewreckers, and it’s the genre of music that I’ve always loved and want to create and be a part of. I learned how to play guitar when I was 15 and started writing music back then—very simple punk songs. I remember me and my friend wrote this song about a guy that was dating her so he could drink her dad’s alcohol and we were so mad at him. It was the first punk song I was super proud of.

I guess I’ve also always known that it was my dream to be in a punk band — not that my dream wasn’t to make art, because it was, but I felt like I had complete control over that. Maybe not complete control, because you need an audience and you need a response, but with music, I need bandmates. and It’s very hard keeping bandmates. With queer bands, bandmates start falling for each other. And people have other projects—I use this term when my bandmates have other bands that are more important to them, I’m like, that’s your primary partner band, and the Homewreckers is my primary partner band, so I want bandmates who can also make it their primary partner band. So it’s a difficult journey.

SS: You said at a certain point making music wasn’t really about identity for you. Would you say it is now? 

CC: Lyrics have always been about identity or queerness or love or race. The very first song I wrote for us is about Cuba, it’s called ‘Oh Fidel’ and it’s all about the embargo. So my identity has always been in the songwriting, but now we’re just being more confident and saying ‘we’re a queer band, and this is what we believe in, and this is who we are.’ The motivation to do that came with the formation of a queer punk community. I noticed after our tour that there was a queer punk scene—it’s just a matter of playing music and organizing an event and having all the queer punks come out. A lot of new bands started forming around Brooklyn, so the scene had this epic moment where there were so many bands, but when people start breaking up and so    bands start breaking up. It’s just life, and no punk scene stays the same for a long time, but it’s still very active.

I’m organizing a queer punk pride event right now.

We just finished our first full-length album, so that is where I’ve invested my drawing and writing energy. I’m not working on a book or zine about my childhood for the first time in ten years, or more. Though even before those ten years I wasn’t totally writing about my childhood, I was writing about punk and being in the activist community, about identity and healing and merging culture with subculture and sexuality identity, all that stuff. I’m proud of the projects but I’m done. I’m working on a tarot card deck now.

SS: Do you feel like between this project and your previous writing projects that one feels more political than the other or that they feel political in different ways?

CR: They feel political in different ways. The art and the writing is way more accessible, and then my band exists in the punk scene. I would love to do more diverse events —I want to play with hip-hop bands so badly and I want to play with other angry political bands that aren’t punk bands. There are a lot of queer and political bands out there, but it’s hard to connect with them especially if you’re a hermit artist. So now how I put energy and focus into diversifying my punk music experience is by playing with punk bands who are queer, who are queer people of color, who are women. It’s just so accepted, the status quo, for a punk show to be predominantly straight white guys. That’s just how it is in so many of those scenes, and that’s how the comic industry is. You can’t get away from it.

All the punk scenes that I’ve looked up to historically have been in different countries or very queer or Latino. All these things have existed even if they only exist for a couple months, but I feel like it’s very important for me to try to continue to create that. There’s so much rad stuff happening right now, there are a lot of bands from around here that I keep hearing about—

SS: Like who?

CR: This band Downtown Boys, they’re really awesome, I’m obsessed with them (over the Internet, I’ve never seen them). There’s another band based in Brooklyn that are really awesome, called Shady Hawkins, I’ll see their flyers and I’m like, “Who are all these amazing QPOC bands from New England? Where are they coming from?” Even my neighbours in Brooklyn, the front person in their band is a queer person of color. And we just played with this band Dirty Circle who are also a very diverse group of punks and women-fronted. I’m just throwing out all these punk band names but there’s just a lot going on in that community so there’s a lot to work with.

SS: Something I’ve been thinking about because I’ve heard you describe communities as ‘punk’ or ‘queer’ but I haven’t heard you describe yourself as being in feminist spaces — 

CR: I think I just forgot! Feminist punk exists, but because in the past it hasn’t been queer enough or POC-centric, I feel like I elevate the queer punk and QPOC punk over feminist punk. As a queer person who’s been in queer communities, I’ve never sought out a lesbian community, or a women’s community—my feminism has never been a cisgender-women-only kind of feminism, ever. So I don’t use the term as casually, but I do use it! I’m all about the bell hooks, “feminism is for everybody.” It’s an umbrella term for queer identities, women—for smashing gender roles, basically.

Interview with Cristy C. Road, conducted by Sophia Seawell, Co-Editor-in-Chief

Images Courtesy of Cristy C. Road via http://www.croadcore.org/

Despite the fact that women have been working with audio technologies (and more broadly electronics and computing) just as long as anyone else, an air of masculinity has taken on a sense of inevitability in spheres of electronic music. As a means of understanding how audio cultures might reify or subvert existing patriarchal structures, I’ll look at some of the ways gender is acknowledged on Muff Wiggler, a message board for modular synthesizer enthusiasts.

Muff Wiggler. Yes, I just said Muff Wiggler.

The name Muff Wiggler comes from a phrase the forum’s founder, Mike, came up with after glancing at the names of two Electro-Harmonix guitar pedals, the “Big Muff Pi” and “The Wiggler.” “Muff Wiggler” later became his handle (username) on the web. Mike bought muffwiggler.com to share some of his music but then started developing it into a forum, not with the intention of starting a community, but simply as a means of strengthening his web skills. Somehow people found their way to the site and over time the community grew. A few years ago, Mike wrote a long post acknowledging that the forum’s name is not PC, apologizing to anyone who finds it offensive, but concluded that he doesn’t really care about who he alienates because “life is too short.” He says, “Luckily it’s a very, very big internet, and there’s lots of other places they can spend their time. I never suggest that ANYONE come to my shitty little corner of the web!” While certainly not his intention to create a community around the semi-suggestive name, the continued excitement surrounding the name and the jokes made about women and women’s bodies on the forum are indicative of the masculine, heteronormative high-fiving that occurs in audio cultures.

Women’s bodies on the forum

The structure of the forum is divided mostly by technology: a section for modular synths with a subsection for different synth makers, a section for other gear, a section for music related discussion, and then a section for off-topic, which is labeled clearly NSFW. Many things are shared here, from silly YouTube videos, MEMEs and GIF threads, arbitrary photo collages, as well as quite a bit of nudity/pornography (some of which I don’t have access to because you have to post at least 50 times to enter some discussions), as well as threads titled “Who’s your favorite Twin Peaks girl?”, “Tips on talking to beautiful women”, and “Miley’s Pussy”. Some of these turn out to be click-bait, but most tend to be photos of nude women posted by men, with commentary made by men. Nudity is not limited to the off-topic section–it is pretty present in other areas of the forum. Some users do speak out against this type of content, stating that it is unnecessary and alienating, and ask why unrelated content needs to be in a synth forum. Some users defend it, saying that “their girlfriends are okay with it”, that there are plenty of other places to go on the internet, that people need to take everything less seriously.  On one thread about this, a user asked if this counted as synthesizer related content:

Suggestive photos and and names also reveal themselves in usernames and avatars (I’ve elected to not include usernames.)

“Synth Babes”

In many instances where a woman composer, performer, or synth builder is brought up in discussion, there is some mention made to her attractiveness or physicality.  Even when the person’s work is treated with a lot of respect and admiration on the forum, her desirability is almost always a part of the discussion.

Jessica Rylan is a prominent synth builder, whose company is called Flower Electronics. One user remarked:

Attractiveness and desirability always seems to be folded into some part of the discussion of how a woman’s work is appreciated.

Women on the Forum

There are a handful of threads asking if there are “any women out there” on the forum. These questions show that participation and involvement (at least visibly) is skewed heavily towards the masculine. While this statistic is not based on a poll, one member guesses that the community must be 95% male. Whether or not this is accurate at all, this is the perception of involvement to the forum users. One frequent user states that he only knows of 4 other posters who outwardly identify as being a woman.

This was one response to a call for any women on the forum to speak up:

 Outing Yourself

To go public about your gender on Muff Wiggler is clearly an acknowledged risk:

Many users, as a result of wanting to be taken seriously, or perhaps to not be the target of any violent or sexual postings, neutralize their gender by choosing ambiguous usernames and avatars. It is a known fact on the forum that here may be more women users than apparent. Many women (including myself) prefer to “lurk” on the site, to look for information but not to create content, such that their presence is not known by the community:

Overt Misogyny

As a means of relaying the things that make me wary to participate, here are some of the more troubling things I have found on the forum:

On an awesome feminist performance:

Moderators and Censorship

Interestingly, the forum’s moderator (“Muff Wiggler”) has responded to several posts with the following message:

I have seen this message appear after *some* queer and trans related comments, but it is still unclear to me what exactly warrants these warnings–  many expressions of bigotry go unchallenged. And I have never seen this warning occur after degrading or violent comments about women or racist comments, generally only in response to queer or trans related content, and usually in defense of specific artists and synthesizer manufacturers. Why is this distinction made? Are particular expressions of sexism and bigotry normalized on this forum or integral to its foundation?

Feminism on the Forum

There are many posters who speak up about the environment created on Muff Wiggler, and how it remains alienating to many people who might otherwise participate. On all discussions about misogyny and sexism, I have almost always found at least one post suggesting that these behaviors skew participation towards the masculine heteronormative crowd.

“given the assumption that most (?) people would like to encourage female participation here, do we want to potentially discourage it by suggestion (strongly, in my opinion) that we (heterosexual males) ONLY view them as sexual objects? Does this suggest that we view them as equals (I don’t think so).  this is simply not about nakedness as a concept. It is about a very basic treatment of 50% of the population – women. If everything were really 50/50 in this environment (electronic music) then maybe the question would be a little different. But it ISN’T. Do we really want to make this community welcome to women as people that we view as people with skills and interests like ourselves?”

Last thoughts

Through looking at this online community, I hope to highlight the ways in which audio cultures continue to be consciously alienating towards the already marginalized, and the reluctance of the community to solve the problem. There are certainly users on Muff Wiggler in visible support of things changing. If some users have discomfort with certain content on the forum, why doesn’t the forum change? Whose opinion gets upheld? The disavowal and invalidation of women’s experiences on the board (“get over it”, “go somewhere else”) only serves to maintain the status quo of this space as male-dominated, such that the privileges and entitlements that come with a boys club are unthreatened. These privileges include the ability to say whatever you want at anyone’s expense: don’t take the user too seriously, except when you should. When offensive, the user is kidding. Whatever he says goes. How deeply rooted is misogyny in the foundation of this community? What is there to be feared in creating an environment that is more comfortable for women?

By Asha Tamirisa, Contributing Writer

Images courtesy of Asha Tamirisa