MTV, Fanon, and Rubin…Who Knew?

The ideas of Gayle Rubin and Franz Fanon are applicable to the first episode of MTV’s “The Real World: Denver.”  A group of people who have never met are thrown into the same house together, and personalities and perspectives clash almost immediately.  One of the rommates, Davis, announces to the rest of the group that he’s gay, and Stephen confronts him.  He’s astonished–the first thing he says is, “That’s weird.”  He tells Davis that he’s not used to it because he’s very conservative, and then he proceeds to ask, “Are you sure you’re gay?”  Davis counters by saying he’s known for years, and that his mom had enrolled him in Christian counseling because of it.  Davis claims he’s a religious man, to which Stephen replies, “That baffles me.  That just doesn’t match up.”  In his mind, someone cannot be both gay and a devout Christian.  Stephen is exercising his prejudices, which have been perpetuated by society’s definitions of sex and gender.  Society reproduces these conventions, says Rubin, and leads people to believe that its established perceptions are what we need to emulate.  “Sex is sex,” she says, “but what counts as sex is culturally determined and obtained” (1668).  Stephen only sees the gender roles of male and female, and only sees sexual arrangements as heterosexual.  The old definitions of gender are using him–he believes that “gender entails that sexual desire be directed toward the other sex,” and that the sexes should be “divided into two mutually exclusive categories” (1675, 1674). 

Brooke, another roommate, mentions to Tyrie that she wishes she could live with someone gay.  “Why?” he asks.  In an aside, Tyrie confesses that homosexuality is “something that is not discussed in the black community.”  Tyrie and Stephen are defining Davis by their own standards and are lumping him into the category of “gay” without learning of his identity as an individual.  Though Fanon’s theories show the black man as the “Other,” they pertain to Davis as well.  “Everything is anticipated,” he writes, “thought out, demonstrated” (122).  Just as he says there will always be a world between blacks and whites, so will there be a schism between heterosexuals and homosexuals in Tyrie’s and Stephen’s eyes.  “At the very moment that I was trying to grasp my own being,” Fanon continues, “Sartre, who remained the ‘Other,’ gave me a name and shattered my best illusion (137).  The two of them start off on a bad note with Davis, and Davis knows that the name given to him–”the gay one”–will most likely not dissolve as their stay in the house unfolds. 

Even in a mindless show such as this one, Fanon and Rubin are easily applicable.  Their theories take the text from specific to general–from an instance between three roommates to the worldwide, timeless issue of having your individuality taken away from you.

Cyborgs and Feminism…Like Peanut Butter and Jelly, Clearly

You know what I kind of like about Donna Haraway?  She’s so freakin weird.  Okay, so pretty much every theorist we’ve encountered is a little bit off the rocker.  But who the hell likens feminism to cyborgs?  I feel like she’s probably a harcore Trekkie.  Anyway, the conclusion that I came to after reading her piece and skimming my notes–and this is the painfully boiled-down version–is that feminism itself is the oppressor of women.  And the reason for this is that the forms of feminism we’re used to are too Western, and not “borg” enough.  In the introduction to Haraway’s piece, the editor writes, “The old forms of domination endemic to an industrial society–to white patriarchal capitalism–are rapidly being rendered obsolete by new technologies” (2267).  Likewise, the old way of looking at the role of women in society, the old feminism, is becoming obsolete.  Haraway brings this up when she discusses Marxian feminism and radical feminism.  Both ideologies claim that they’re the one–theirs is the correct perception of women’s oppression, and both pose the only workable solution.  She writes, “neither Marxist nor radical feminist points of view have tended to embrace the status of a partial explanation; both were regularly constituted as totalities” (2280).  She sets up what she calls a caricature of both forms of feminism, where she outlines the critical points of Marxist and radical feminism.  At the end of each caricature, Haraway writes, “by addition race” (2281).  It’s clear that the two perspectives fail to take into account each other, but to add insult to injury, race is a marginal issue for both.  Even aside from the scientific and technological aspect of cyborgs, this is why Marxist and radical feminisms–the “Westernized” versions–must give way to cyborg feminism, which envelops several different factors in the oppression of women.

Haraway says that “science and technology provide fresh sources of power, [and] we need fresh sources of political action.”  She continues with this idea: “Some of the rearrangements of race, sex, and class rooted in high-tech-facilitated social relations can make socialist feminism more relevant to effective progressive politics” (2286).  Haraway illustrates how this works using what Richard Gordon calls “homework economy.”  This calls for a “restructuring of work that broadly has the characteristics formerly ascribed to female jons” (2287).  She explains that robotics and technological advances are causing unemployment among men worldwide; this, in turn, places more emphasis and pressure on the woman’s job.  I’ve read about it before, and Haraway stresses the urgency of what this does to the family’s economic situation.  The “feminization of poverty,” as it is called, is due to the pressure of sustaining the family’s lifestyle on the “woman’s wage.”  What I don’t understand about Haraway’s argument, however, is her almost absolute discrimination when referring to jobs.  Studies have shown that, for the most part, men in the workforce earn higher wages than women for the same occupation and with the same skills.  That doesn’t mean, though, that women aren’t just as likely to be affected by the increasing use of technology as a replacement for skilled and unskilled labor.  While we’re on the subject, did Haraway pay attention when she read Butler?  Not all families are headed by the “Western,” patriarchal heterosexual couple.  And it’s not exclusively women that may end up taking care of the children.

Baudrillard and Simulacra

Baudrillard insists that simalcra is disctinctly different from signs.  Which is funny, because the entire time I was reading, my mind kept jumping back to Saussure and the signifier and signified.  On the precession of simulacra, Baudrillard writes, “No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept” (1733).  What is real is made from things that are not real–in other words, from memories, words, icons.  Simulacra is a “hyperreal,” as Baudrillard calls it, something that, “since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all” (1733).  Okay, now I get how simulacra is different from a sign–signs act as representations for a concept, and can often replace the concept if overused.  Baudrillard outlines the phases of the image in terms of becoming a simulacrum: in order, the image “is the reflection of a basic reality, it masks and perverts a basic reality, it masks the absence of a basic reality, [and] it bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum” (1736).  With each succeeding step, the image becomes less and less the reality which it is supposed to represent.  Baudrillard mentions nostalgia, which is exactly what I thought of when reading the creation of a simulacra: “When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning” (1736).

Can nostalgia occur if there was never a past reality?  If the image in question is not and never has been concrete?  I’m thinking of the concept of God.  Baudrillard mentions God a few times in regards to signs and simulacra, but again, the line between them seems blurred.  He discusses icons as a method of portraying God and divinity, saying that they are simulacra that are “substituted fro the pure and intelligible Idea of God” (1735).  He proposes the idea that there has never been a God, but that the simulacrum of a God has always existed in its place.  But how can there be an entity that bears no relation to reality at all when the reality didn’t exist in the first place?  I found that I was better able to grasp the concept of God in terms of signs.  Later, Baudrillard refers to signs, asking, “What if God himself can be [...] reduced to the signs which attest his existence?”  If this is the case, he explains, then religion itself is not real; it is a simulacrum.  Elizabeth Johnson wrote a book called She Who Is which focuses on the lack of feminine aspects in theological discourse.  She mentions that when people say the word “God,” most automatically think of a patriarch, and rarely do people associate “God” with a woman.  “Goddess,” by contrast, is almost a taboo word, and never is it substituted for “God,” even though the spiritual and religious will insist that God is neither male nor female.  On the flip side, though, we can’t exculsively refer to God as “she” or “Mother,” because this would also reduce God into a sign, thus creating the same simulacrum.

H&A

What would Horkheimer and Adorno say about reality TV?  About staged competitions?  About television itself?  Although when they discuss modern art and the culture industry, they’re mostly talking about movies, most TV programs fall into the category of subservience to capitalism.  Probably an overused example, but American Idol was on tonight, so I guess I’ll resort to that.  Horkheimer and Adorno write that the culture industry claims that its ”standards were based in the first place on consumers’ needs, and for that reason were accepted with so little resistance” (1224).  Shows like American Idol are supposedly set up so the viewers–”America”–have the only say in who the next hot entertainer will be.  But even though we vote, and even though we think Fox is being all democratic with this show, there are so many underlying factors that decide who wins.  We don’t get to vote during the first round, where the three judges travel from city to city weeding out the potentials from the embarrassing.  They choose people based on singing, yes, but also on their appearance, and whether or not that person can hold up a pop image.  Factors like how the judges react to a performance, what the media portays of a certain contestant, and even what order they sing in skews the process.   Furthermore, Horkheimer and Adorno observe that in this type of “art,” the audience sees a “mechanical reproduction of beauty” and a “methodical idolization of individuality” (1231).  “American Idol” purposely chooses attractive people, but does not always select those who are cookie-cutter images of what’s already out there.  But that’s because they want the winner to be the image after which other, “less original” cookie-cutters are made.  This idea, in itself, is the idolization of the individual.  The endorsement of the individual for the advancement of capitalism.  These standards that were “met with so little resistance” are finally being recognized.  We wonder why Sanjaya’s still there (ugh…he thinks he’s hot shit).  Turns out there’s a group of people out there who want to screw up the Idol system of cranking out “stars” and raking in ratings.  votefortheworst.com has a little slogan: “Are you in on the joke?”  Here’s the message on their homepage:

“We’re back! Votefortheworst.com was started in 2004 to support voting for the entertaining contestants who the producers would hate to see win on American Idol. Why do we do it? During the initial auditions, the producers of Idol only let certain people through. Many good people are turned away and many bad singers are kept around to see Simon, Paula, and Randy so that America will be entertained.

“Now why do the producers do this? It’s simple: American Idol is not about singing at all, it’s about making good reality TV and enjoying the cheesy, guilty pleasure of watching bad singing. We agree that a fish out of water is entertaining, and we want to acknowledge this fact by encouraging people help the amusing antagonists stick around. VFTW sees keeping these contestants around as a golden opportunity to make a more entertaining show.”

 I think Horkheimer and Adorno would be proud. 

You Know You’re Famous When You Have 57634 Myspace Friends…and Your Own Cross Stitch

I found it on the official Margaret Cho website.  They have an online store where you can buy DVDs of her tours, t-shirts…and the valuable item showcased above.  Seriously, though, I’m going to give credit where it’s due; Cho is no idle star.  She’s a woman after my own heart–not only is she a sharp comedienne but a hardcore gay rights activist and a destroyer of Asian-American stereotypes.  That’s what this hippie likes to hear.  During her “I’m the One that I Want” show, she illuminates these stereotypes by setting them up in an almost affectionate way. For instance, she relentlessly pokes fun at her mother.  Cho scrunches her face up in a tight scowl, creates a double chin, and speaks poor English in a loud, shrill voice.  This is what her mother looks like to Cho and the rest of America, and Cho knows it appears ridiculous.  But it’s who her mother is, and Cho knows and respects that, too.  And gays–Cho loves gay men.  Loves them.  And gives props to her lesbians out there.  She plays on gay and lesbian stereotypes too–not to make fun of them or patronize them, but to say to her audience, These things that you’ve been hearing about them, yeah, they might be true.  And it’s what I love about them.  “Gay men,” she quips, “Love ass and Judy Garland.”  Gay porn, not straight porn, is where you find the hot men.  Lesbian women all love whale watching, and while imitating her mother, Cho shrieks, “I knew you were lesbian.  I say, one day you grow up to be P.E. teacher.”   In American society, gay men are constantly being feminized, lesbian women masculinized.  It’s as if we say, Okay, if you’re gonna screw up your assigned gender role, we’ll just assign you the one opposite your anatomical sex.  And Cho is smart enough to pick this up and subtly present both its truth and ridiculousness.

Cho’s TV show “All-American Girl” was canceled for a few reasons: her “round face,” her less than svelte figure, she was too Asian, she wasn’t Asian enough.  And then “The Drew Carey Show” took AAG’s spot.  “Because Drew Carey is so skinny,” she says.  And it’s true.  Cho makes a joke out of it but knows full well the ugliness of the double standard.  Like Butler says, gender is a pastiche, a fabrication based on a series of repeated acts.  Cho dredges up and rejects the gender role of “woman” as society–particularly, the media–has constructed.  A producer insists that Cho sleep with him, and only then will he consider her screenplay.  I doubt he’d say the same to a male screenwriter.  Building off of Foucault, Butler writes, “the cultural inscription…the historical mode of signification, requires the destruction of the body…it destroys the body on which it writes” (2592).  The body before, she says, is “stable and self-identical.”  That’s how Cho was before the media got to her, and that’s where she has ended up after coming full circle.  She’s funny but poignant.  She jokes about the darkest times in her life, but she uses her art to convey the message.  She’s a “fag-hag,” a self-proclaimed slut, a non-violin-playing Asian.  In allowing herself to be these things, she is reclaiming her soul.  Butler observes that the soul, the prison of the body, is the machine through which society can get the individual to ascribe to gender roles.  To stay dormant, in a sense.  And Cho sure as hell isn’t made to lie dormant.

I Heart Drag Queens

It’s true, I do.  I got upset that I had to work the day that St. Rose had the drag show.  I didn’t go to it last year; I had gone home for the day and when I came back, Jenna was outside my room.  She rushed over to me excitedly and gushed, “You have to meet my new boyfriend, Donny!” She pulled me by the hand and just as I was wondering how she could have found a boyfriend in the span of a few hours, she opened the door and there sat Donny.  Pretty cute, I thought.  “Hey, I’m Kellie.”  Donny and Jenna started cracking up.  Turns out Donny was Danielle dressed in drag–she had performed earlier in the show.  They’re still not letting me live it down. So I suppose I should amend the title of my blog to declare my love for drag kings too.  Kings?  That the right word?  Kinda funny that I don’t think twice about “drag queen” but I’m uneasy with what to call women who dress in drag.  Ironic that even when gender boundaries and definitions are skewed, the (biological) women are still shorthanded.  

Sorry.  I really am a feminist at heart.  I’m happy to be discussing another feminist/woman theorist, even if she does confuse the shit out of me at times.  I feel as though Butler should have made a clearer distinction between sex and gender.  Oh, and between “anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance” (2498).  As I’ve always understood it, sex and gender go like this: sex is the biological difference between men and women, and gender is the social/cultural expectation and role linked to these biological differences.  (Indiana.edu can back me up).  So what’s the difference between gender identity and gender performance?  Bulter seems to define the performance aspect in terms of drag–but I see drag as gender identity.  To me, gender performance is more of an act, a show put on for the rest of society.  Not the gender you really are, but the one you’re “supposed” to be.  A simple example: someone who isn’t out of the closet yet decides to “play the part” of a heterosexual male or female in order to acquiesce to the gender norm.  Gender identity, to provide another simple example, is when a woman who associates with the male gender dresses as a man.  But wait–the gender norm, Butler says, doesn’t actually exist.  It’s a fabrication, a “fantasy of a fantasy.”  “Because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender,” she says, “create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all” (2500).  I understand it, but it reminds me of an M.C. Escher work.  It all depends on a dependent variable, it all goes in a circle, it’s physically impossible.  This is similar to the question I’d asked the other day about Foucault: If the monogamous, married, heterosexual couple is fast becoming the minority, then why is it still held as the norm for sexual relations?  Why is homosexuality so despised and scorned still?  There’s no actual gender norm, just like there’s no sexuality norm.  Then why do we still hold them to be the standards by which we act in society?  Another M. C. Escher question, I guess.

Public Speaking is One of the Most Common Fears

About that…why are people so afraid of public speaking?  When you get up to the podium, something happens.  For a long time, that was my biggest fear.  And when I say fear, I mean that when I so much as had to say something in class, I’d become almost paralyzed.  I figured out why because, well, because I have a tendency to overanalyze myself.  I not afriad of the actual act of standing in front of people and speaking.  I was afraid of being the one upon whom all the attention was focused; I was afraid of screwing up.  I was afraid that people would see my mistakes, and that I’d have to admit to myself that this was one thing I couldn’t do perfectly.  Talk about self-desctructive, right?  Anyway, I was talking to a few people that had read their pieces aloud at the symposium, and each one said that he or she was a little nervous.  Probably not to the extent that I had once been (I hope), but nervous nonetheless.  Because we’re so averse to judgement.  Because we like people to like us–we want to be accepted. 

Standing at the podium, you’re the person we’re all looking at.  Doesn’t work that way while you’re in the audience.  We can see what you look like.  We can hear your voice, and how you speak.  And, of course, we take into account the piece that you’re reading.  For many people watching you, this is a one-shot deal, a first-impression opportunity.  And while we’re conscious of it or not, we, in the audience, are going to judge you based on how you look up there and on what and how you read.   In Black Skin White Masks, Fanon says that he is “not a slave to the ‘idea’ that others have of me but of my own appearance” (116).  The same is true for readers at the Symposium.  What’s funny (ironic, conincidental, can we say?) is that Kim’s short short called “Time For Talking” emulates Fanon’s idea of being defined by appearances and by the other, while in the bigger picture we see that readers at the symposium are under scrutiny, just like the character in her story is.  The story is written in the second person.  The narrator is a woman on a train trying to make conversation with her fellow passenger.  The trouble is that the woman is raggedy and old, while the man she’s talking to is younger and business-like.  In the beginning, the listener could tell that the man wasn’t receptive at all to this woman; that he thought her crazy and annoying.  She says, “I won’t hurt you.  I’m just talking.”  She guesses as to his aversion.  “Is it the coat?…What do you expect from a park lady?”  She defines herself as a park lady, but this definition most likely wasn’t her own invention.  It’s the name given to her–the identity or the being given to her–by those who pass judgement.  But as she’s talking to the man, he gets to know her beyond her appearance–for instance, she had a daughter, Anna, whom she loved dearly.  He can relate, because he has a child, too.  At the story’s conclusion, the male passenger ends up offering her money, presumably out of compassion for her.  But, unfortunately, Fanon would say that the male passenger still cannot shed his preconceived notions about her.  “When people like me,” he writes, “they tell me it is in spite of my color” (116).  I wonder if the man would say this to the passenger next to him once the woman got off the train–that she was a good woman, a lively and interesting spirit, even if she was a little scruffy on the outside. 

Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby

I apologize for the cheesy title.  But you knew it was coming.

Maybe it’s because for the past week, I’ve been working on our Theory Carnival that I’ve got Rubin and Althusser on the brain.  But while perusing Foucault, I couldn’t help but draw connections to these two.  Dragging Rubin into it, I noticed that Foucault wrote this piece in 1976.  Why, then, didn’t he so much as mention the Women’s Liberation Movement and the Sexual Revolution?  Even then, women’s sexuality has been discussed as a socially misunderstood topic well before these movements.  The movement for women’s suffrage, for instance, even though it didn’t overtly deal with women’s sexual choices, revolved around the fact that women, having different sex organs than men, were thus resigned to a world with much fewer choices. If Foucault is so sure that the discourse of sex is a tool for manifesting power, then the Liberation Movement is the perfect example with which to support this.  Women were protesting the power a male-dominated society had over their bodies, and over personal decisions like abortion, birth control, and choice of partners.    

Foucault mentions the Church’s role in the discourse on sex, and it matches up to Althusser’s observation that for a while, the Church was the dominant Ideological State Apparatus.  It used its ideologies, its moral upstanding, to gain for itself the “power on bodies and their pleasure” (1666).  “The important point no doubt,” says Foucault on the Church’s requirement that its members confess their sexual sins, “is that this obligation was decreed, as an ideal at least, for every good Christian” (1650).  The Church wanted sexual acts and yearnings to be transformed into words–this, it claimed, was the only way someone could be absolved.  It didn’t make sex right, but at least talking about it would make you a penitent, and morally good, person.  Please.  Foucault says that the Church’s “carefully analytical discourse was meant to yield multiple effects of displacement, intensification, reorientation, and modification of desire itself” (1651).  But I don’t think it’s necessarily the discourse, the conversation, that makes someone “repent.”  It’s the shame of being an outsider, a deviant, to an institution that is so widely perceived as an ethical guidepost in society. 

Bodywork

The body is a powerful and sometimes dangerous thing.  We’ve all heard of how important first impressions are, and how people make snap judgments based on what’s on the surface.  Not only can people judge you but they can own you, claim you, by using the body as a tool of manipulation.  If the black man weren’t blacck, if his face structure were akin to a white man’s and if his skin color were lighter, he would not be defined through the white man’s eyes because he would be a white man.  Fanon says that he is responsible for his own body and, at the same time, does not own it.  “My body, he laments, “was given back to me, sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day” (113).  He continues, “I am the slave not of the ‘idea’ that others have of me but of my own appearance” (116).  Lucy’s body does not bellong to her anymore, either.  It belongs to Petrus, to her rapists, to her father–and to her unborn child.  Lucy’s identity or being is defined now by her baby; she is the white mother of a black child.  The fetus, in turn, doesn’t own its body either–the stigma of the stereotypical violent, sexually aggressive black man is imposed upon it.  Not only is the child a product of rape, it is a product of racial friction, of the aftermath of the emotional scars of apartheid. 

Lucy is the mother of a black baby.  Her body and the baby’s body are connected, are feeding into and off of each other.  Because of the baby’s race and because of the identity of the baby’s father, Petrus and David are allowed to justify their personal claims on Lucy’s body.  David thinks the child was “meant to soil her, to mark her, like a dog’s urine” and is shocked to learn that she will keep the shild.  Petrus uses the pregnancy to manipulate a union between Lucy and himself–he wants to make a lesbian woman his third wife. In doing so, he guarantees himself a stake in her land.  Lucy is forced into a binding contract, an unwanted exchange because she needs to survive.  “I am without protection,” she admits, “I am fair game” (203).  As a woman, her desicions about her body are molded by the male-dominated society she lives in.  

The Aftertaste

She was raped.  Rape is a crime against humanity—inexcusable, a pure violation.  Right?  For Lucy and the residents of Grahamstown, it’s a lot more complicated.  They’re living in a different place from
Cape Town, and the social rules there are different.  If apartheid has just ended, then there’s most likely a bitter aftertaste amid the social and political reconstruction.  Lucy acknowledges the injustice of the rape, but she does not file a report or pursue her attackers to procure justice.  She is afraid of them still, but admits that she can do nothing: “I think I am in their territory.  They have marked me.  They will come back for me.”  David doesn’t understand—he tells her to leave, as he thinks this the rational thing to do.  “What if that is the price one has to pay for staying on?” Lucy asks.  “Why should I be allowed to live here without paying?” (158). David thinks he’s beginning to understand.  “They want you to be their slave,” he says (159).  “Not slavery,” she replies.  “Subjection.  Subjugation” (159).  Does she feel like she deserved this?  That she had to “take one for the team,” so to speak?

            In no way does Fanon condone rape or violence as a solution to racism.  But his essay helps explain the possible motives for the rape and for Lucy’s reaction.  The black man, according to Fanon, wants to reclaim his “negritude” and to hold onto his past.  That past, however, is scarred and painful.  It’s the painful part that the white man won’t let go—the remnants of Jim Crow laws, of segregation, of racist remarks.  Fanon points out that “there will always be a world between you and us…The other’s total inability to liquidate the past once and for all” (122).  Perhaps Lucy recognizes that these men have hearts that hold a past of oppression and violence, and knows that the violence finds an outlet through herself, a white woman.  Fanon proclaims, “My cry grew more violent: I am a Negro, I am a Negro, I am a Negro…” (138).  The rape could also be an assertion of the black man’s presence.  We are here, they say, We exist, and we’re human.