#“race” is used here as a political term rather than a biological term

[junipershouse]

rrikrik and karra... they don't get along at all.

Rrikrik is from the Rikka cultural group, which belongs to the wider Western Flats "race". Karra, however, belongs to the Mikrikka cultural group, belonging to the Central Kkariko "race". Historically, there has been great conflict between these two cultures, with Mikrikka conquerers ravaging the Great Flat for resources and pillaging Western Flats homes. Whilst the astral colonization of Rika by the Company of Kha-Forick theoretically provided a theoretical "equalizing" of Kkariko cultures, in reality, the Company used the previously-existing power structures on Rika to their advantage.

Karra glorifies the preCompany past of Rika to a great degree. They believe that the old Central empires are a shining symbol of Kkariko greatness. Rrikrik feels like this belief is rather reductionist and harmful to the Kkariko (and Grik Krog) who suffered under those empires. Karra also has many preconceived notions about Western cultures which Rrikrik finds offensive. To Karra, the idea of a Western Flats cosmonaut is ridiculous, because they can't imagine a Western Flats Kkariko having the education to do it.

Karra was appointed as an external representative of the ICDCI on the Goodway, to make sure they don't continue their smuggling. So, whilst Karra has no actual authority over ship matters, they do have the authority of being directly from the ICDCI. Even though Rrikrik is superior to them, they use this excuse not to listen to them.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Frederick R. Prete

Published: Apr 18, 2023

In a recent article for FAIR Substack, David Ferrero argued convincingly that school programs designed to view their subject matter through an “ethnic studies”— rather than an “ethnic histories”— lens can be “reductive, tendentious, divisive, and doctrinaire.” He also pointed out that this narrow approach, which includes indiscriminate references to putative ‘racial’ groups (“black”, “Asian”, “white”, etc.), is antithetical to the ideal of bridging our “ethnic and religious differences in the service of forging a shared civic identity.”

While I am in complete agreement with Ferrero, I would go even further. I believe that there is a fundamental conceptual flaw in using current racial categories in any academic analysis. These categories have become so hopelessly ambiguous that they are virtually meaningless, and they now function as terms of convenience, used only when they serve a political agenda. This is true throughout academia, but is most evident in discussions about academic achievement.

In biology, “race” is a taxonomic term, and like all biological terms, it can be ambiguous. Sometimes it’s used as a synonym for subspecies. Most often, however, it refers to a group of organisms that is biologically or geographically distinguishable from other groups within a species but is still able to reproduce with them. 

On the other hand, when referring to humans, most contemporary scientists consider ‘race’ a social construct based on societal definitions without any inherent physical or biological meaning. That point of view is based on the understanding that there is more genetic variability within human racial groups than between them. In other words — to paraphrase the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins — whereas human sex is binary (there are only two), race is a spectrum.

Ironically, despite the fact that most academics consider human racial categories to be socially constructed, they continue to use them enthusiastically as if they represented well-defined, homogeneous groups of people. Think of the controversies over college admissions, disparities in academic achievement, or ethnic studies curricula.

The problems with grouping students in terms of contemporary racial categories are most evident — and most instructive — in how we interpret their academic performance, especially on standardized tests like the ACT. I’ve argued (here, here, and here) that racial categories are virtually useless in explaining student performance differences because the categories are largely arbitrary, often contrived, and always confounded by self-reporting biases and socio-economics. Nonetheless, a race-based narrative continues to dominate our discussions despite the fact that thinking in those terms perpetuates a host of inaccurate, deleterious stereotypes.

The ACT is a standardized test that predicts the likelihood of student success in the first year of college. The overall score is based on the results of four, multiple-choice subject tests, English, math, reading, and science. The number of correct answers for each subject test is converted into a scaled score and averaged. Thirty-six is perfect.

In 2022, approximately 1.35 million students took the ACT. Overall, the average score was 20, about one point lower than the average between 1990 and 2021. In terms of the ACT’s racial categories, the highest 2022 scores were earned by students identifying as Asian (25), White (21), and Two or More Races (20). The next three groups were Hispanic/Latino, Prefer Not to Respond/No Response, and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (18). The two lowest-performing groups were American Indians/Alaskan Native, and Black/African-American (16).

This ranking by race has remained virtually unchanged for a decade, and when viewed in terms of these categories, the ranking seems to support the divisive and inaccurate belief that the test is racially discriminatory. However, there are two problems with viewing the scores in this way. First, it’s impossible to know exactly how students sort — or choose not to sort — themselves into racial categories, and there is no way of knowing the ethnicity of those in the Two or More Races (first introduced in 2012), or the Prefer Not to Respond groups.

Second, the categories, themselves, have always been somewhat arbitrary. For instance, in 2012, the ACT separated the so-called, Asian-American/Pacific Islander category into two cohorts that turned out to be completely different in their test performances. In that year, there was a 13% increase in the number of students in the Asian group, and a 12% decrease in the number of Pacific Islanders who met the ACT’s College Readiness Benchmarks compared to 2006. That remarkable divergence has continued. Since 2012, the Asian group’s ACT scores have steadily improved while all other groups have steadily declined. This clearly demonstrates that the original Asian-American/Pacific Islander group was a demographic of convenience with little external validity and which masked dramatic within-group differences. Further, because the two newly created groups are so diverse, it would be virtually impossible to determine precisely why the group performances are so different. Assuredly, the same thing would happen if any of the other racial categories were similarly subdivided.

Then, in 2006, the ACT began analyzing student scores in terms of Postsecondary Educational Aspiration (what students planned to do after graduation). This parameter included seven categories: Vocational-Technical Training, Two-Year College Degree, Bachelor's Degree, Graduate Study, Professional-Level Degree, and two which I won’t consider here, Other and No Response. When the data are considered in terms of these categories rather than race, a very different picture emerges.

In 2006, 2012, and 2022, across all racial groups, ACT scores were 31-51% higher for students aspiring to a professional-level degree compared to students planning on vocational-technical training, and scores were 12-17% higher for those aspiring to a graduate degree compared to a bachelor's degree.

The effects of postgraduate aspirations have been even more dramatic within racial groups every year since 2006. For instance, in 2022, students in every category who aspired to a professional-level degree had ACT scores averaging 47% higher than those planning on vocational-technical training. The largest differences — 53% and 61% — were in the Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander and Prefer Not to Respond/No Response groups. The smallest (but still significant) difference — 35% — was in the American Indian/Alaska Native group.

More importantly, in 2022, students in the four (overall) lowest-performing racial groups who aspired to graduate study or a professional-level degree earned scores as much as 39% higher than students in the (overall) highest-performing groups who aspired to vocational-technical training or a two-year college degree. In other words, Black, American Native, Hispanic, and Hawaiian/Pacific Islander students with high educational aspirations outscored Asian, White, multiracial, and non-identifying students with lower aspirations.

Unfortunately, no one seems to have noticed that aspirations are more important than race in predicting academic performance on the test. I guess that doesn’t fit the popular narrative.

Over the past 15 years, educational aspirations have consistently had a greater impact on ACT performance than self-reported race. This suggests that by doing what we can to elevate student aspirations, irrespective of their race, we will benefit their academic performance. One way to do this is by teaching students that they can and will succeed if they work hard, rather than telling them that they are at the mercy of uncontrollable external circumstances. This will also give the lie to the worn out, race-based tropes about academic performance that are so psychologically damaging to students.

As a Biological Psychologist — and someone who taught standardized test prep for over a decade — I understand that the factors influencing student performance are complex and often the result of long-term trends that vary within and between groups, regardless of how the groups are defined. However, using anachronistic, ambiguous, or contrived racial categories to interpret educational performance is misleading, unhelpful, and divisive.

Racial categories have external validity only to the extent that each represents a meaningfully homogenous and distinct group of people. However, none of these criteria are met by the colloquial categories currently applied to people. Distinguishing students by, for instance, family or socioeconomic demographics, internalized cultural beliefs, personality traits (such as resilience or aspirations), school district, or ZIP code would all be more informative and useful in improving educational policy than the current crude racial categories. Further, to paraphrase Ferrero, refocusing our conversation on aspirations — rather than on our perceived ethnicity — will help us bridge our imagined racial differences, recognize our shared humanity, and encourage us to pursue our goals together.

==

@madwriterscorner You might find this interesting.

This demonstrates the problem with univariate takes, like those of Kendi, whose entire academic output sits precariously atop the fallacy of Causal Reductionism and his complete lack of interest in understanding a problem before pretending he does.

[lgist]

Dying in our lifetimes.

Dazed, our heads colliding with a ceiling. Trapped by ideations, where do we belong? Fueled by ego, we deserve to belong. As if every life is divine, as if every life is extraordinary, expectations of success. Pit against each other in a race for “votes” and “capital”, opinions weaponized and used to infiltrate our humanity. The politics, it’s all broken, systematically set up to speak for the people, rather than the people speaking for themselves. The journalism is in a sea of greed as they lust for the next click, the next advertisement slot, the next apathetic opinion to distill within the masses. Each generation using its own form of propaganda to enlist their militias of thought.  Lost in hierarchies and self-actualization, we yearn to progress, forgetting those we step on to reach our self-fulfilling goals. As if every success is lined with a dark and twisted fate for somebody else, the exploitation keeps itself hidden. “Story of life” we tell one another as we accept our terms and conditions blindly. It has been long accepted, this way of life, this way of living. With no clear method of changing our dispositions, we turn to violence, chanting change as we defile the aforementioned, way of life. We turn to substance, to distract our minds from the act of being present, for there is no worse place to be when suffering. We turn to survival, telling ourselves once every night that tomorrow will be better until we are left hopeless and numb, dying in our lifetimes, our hearts barely beating. With all of these factors combined, its a wonder we function at all. Its a wonder we still get together, we still worry for each other, we still care for each other, it begs the question, why? What makes us strive for connection? Is it the biological and evolutionary reason to duplicate ourselves? Is it to avoid that lonely feeling? Where no one can you hear you, where you are subject to your own undying criticism with no escape route in sight. It is clear that it is natural amongst us, no matter the reason, to connect and empathize. That is how they are winning, disconnecting the parts in our minds that need connection, that need conversation to keep running, that need constant growth in order to be our best selves. For no longer can the wings on this aircraft operate in unison, to steer us high above the clouds, where we are light and carefree. Instead, when one goes up, the other must come down, until we are whirling down into a descent all of us expected. 

It is this very divisive agenda that will be the downfall of all of us. Where we cant agree, we must hate. Where we cant express our true human nature to engage with each other, with respect and with honesty. Where we are put into boxes and categories, like banners in the military, we know who lays on our side of the line. At each others’ throats for insignificancies, we are glued to our screens watching every move of the opposition. History, set to constantly repeat itself as our eccentric leaders deepen their pockets at our expense, at our division. For all of this is a distraction from those stripping away our humanity, one little speck at a time, grinding us down until we are all “different”, until we are all “unique”. For without opinion, without expression, who are we? What separates us from somebody else besides physical features? So we indulge in their games, barley finishing thoughts as we move on to the next one, engaging with the inhumane to feel special, to feel a part of something bigger than ourselves. When, in reality, this bickering is hindering our progress and placing a smoke screen in front of those who put us here. The rule deciders, the fate etchers, the capital captains, those who only wish to see a number increase year by year. Those who cannot love, who cannot feel for anyone besides themselves, who are still an anomaly when it comes to psychiatry. The sociopaths who ironically dictate society, such is the system we are in. Divided by those who hold themselves higher, accepting their rulings as words from god, how they would look down in shame as the world is covered in false prophets and idols who tarnish what it means to be human, what it means to connect. 

Truth be told, this system is well oiled, well indoctrinated within every aspect of living. The musts and shoulds have never been louder, resonating with young people who are lost in a sea of accomplishments. Floating adrift as we search for any sign to continue, for what good is an accomplishment that means nothing to you? A promotion at an empty job, graduating a degree you never wanted, moving into your own home where you must slave away to keep within its walls. Every accomplishment, attached with a question, “where will it bring you?”. Contentment be damned for there must be more than this, than what is offered as soon as we leave the hospital. A life of imaginary virtues, imaginary values, imaginary consistencies. Struggling to find what is real, we no longer care if it is artificial. Perhaps, we will realize who we must place the blame on but what will we do about it? Already disenfranchised, our mental health is the worst its ever been, from where can we derive hope in a world of hopeless accomplishments? Our lives so far characterized by a magnifying glass as we scrutinize our actions and deny one from their chance of change, from becoming a better person. Instead we are quick to vilify, to create enemies with those who disagree with us. If only we could remember what is was like, to be human, to feel connected, to draw hope from each other, to boost one another's drive for change, drive for a better life. Dying in our lifetimes, the heart can beat again. 

________________________

Much Love - S

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

so i am back on the grima train and i was reading through your posts (absolutely quality, for which i can only thank you !! 💓) and you mentioned in one about his use of magic that you have a Lot of Feelings about grima in relation to gender and plz i need to hear them!! (if you want to share? 👀)

LOTR: Grima & Gender 

Oh man, so Grima and gender. My favourite topic. Other than Grima and magic - but they’re linked! So, that’s a bonus for us.

I want to thank you so much for asking this question. I have wanted to rant about this for Forever.

This became incredibly long, but the long and short of it is that Grima undermines social expectations of masculinity in Rohan through his disdain for martial achievements, his occupying a more private/passive role within the king’s household rather than the expected “masculine” public/active, his use of spells and potions being an “unmanly” and “cowardly” approach to problem solving, and his reliance on language and soft-power approaches to politics.

All of this works to position Grima within a more feminine role and character - at least within the context of Rohan’s hypermasculine performativity of manliness.

[It does allow us to read Grima as trans with greater ease in terms of fitting into the canon than the usual favourites, other than Eowyn. So, you know, do with that what you will. Eowyn and Grima both want to be queen. Let them be in charge! I’m going to get my ass bit for this.]

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Grima’s gender performance needs to be quickly situated within the broader context of masculinity in Middle-Earth. Gondor’s ideal of masculinity is the gentler masculinity that everyone focuses on when they talk about men in middle earth being good models of what masculinity can look like. It’s a nurturing masculinity, it’s gentle, it’s healing-focused. Aragorn and others try and take the first off-ramp from violence or conflict whenever they can. There is no enjoyment in warfare or soldiering. It’s done because it’s necessary. Dick-swinging is limited to non-existent etc.

Rohan is different.

Faramir touches on this when he speaks to Frodo of how Boromir was more like the men of Rohan and how he thought that wasn’t a good thing as it meant he was seeking glory for glory’s sake, relishing war and soldiering as an occupation rather than an unfortunate necessity.

Of course, Faramir was also making (some very dubious) racial commentary, but race and gender are often bound up together (e.g. hyper-masculinization of black men and the feminization of East Asian men in the North America).

As R.W. Connell says, “masculinities are congurations of practice that are constructed, unfold, and change through time” — and, additionally, masculinity must be defined in opposition to femininity but, also, other masculinities.

For Rohan, there is a strong, militarized hyper-masculinity that threads through their culture. One of the reasons Theoden was seen as a failing king was his physical decline and inability to continue being a physically strong king. His aging emasculated him, more so when compared to Theodred and Eomer. (Something Theoden believed of himself and Grima capitalized on.)

For this, I’m going to speak of masculinity of the upper classes, since that’s what we see for Rohan. Masculinity, and how it’s to be performed, is contingent on social variables such as, but not limited to: age, appearance and size, bodily facility, care, economic class, ethnicity, fatherhood, relations to biological reproduction, leisure, martial and kinship status, occupation, sexuality etc. and as we never see lower class Rohirrim men it’s impossible to say what the “acceptable” and “expected” forms for a farmer or cooper would be.

Upper class men of Rohan are expected to be militarily capable - ready to ride and fight when called by their king or marshal. They are to be men of action over word, and when language is in play, it’s to be forthright and plain. No riddling. Marriage/Husband-ing is an expected part of manhood. Being strong minded, and capable of taking charge and making decisions is important. Fatherhood is also clearly prized, especially fatherhood that results in son(s).

(Theoden only having one child could be read as another “failure” in living up to Rohirrim ideals when compared to the older kings of his family who were far more prolific.)

The appearance of an “ideal” man is tall, fair, and handsome. Physically strong and capable in all ways (martially, sexually, fertile etc.).

Men should be able to demonstrate that they are capable of being in charge, taking control, defending and protecting families and homes. This slots in with more generalized expectations around bravery, honour and glory.

[Eomer: And that, in summation, is how you are to Be A Man.

Grima: Well that sounds utterly exhausting.]

-

So, with all of that in mind, let’s talk Grima.

First, let’s address the name and character construction as this is the least bound up in how he acts and its tension with Rohirrim ideals of Being a Man. It’s also interesting in that it can give a glimpse into Tolkien and the possible thoughts he had when constructing Grima.

Grima’s Name & Beowulf Stuff

Grima’s name is from old Icelandic Grimr, which is a name Odin takes during the Grimnismal saga.

Here are some lines from Odin in the saga:

I have called myself Grim,

I have called myself Wanderer,

Warrior and Helmet-Wearer,

[...]

Evildoer, Spellcaster,

Masked and Shadowed-Face,

Fool and Wise Man,

[...]

Rope-Rider and Hanged-God.

I have never been known

by just one name

since I first walked among men.

Not only is Grima’s name from Odin, more importantly, it’s the feminine version of that name. No man in the eddas or sagas goes by Grima. Only women. And most often they were seidr-workers or healers/magic practitioners of some kind.

"Other healers include Gríma from Fóstbræðra saga and Laxdæla saga and Heiðr from Biarmiland in Harald’s saga Hárfagra." 

- “Hostile Magic in the Icelandic Sagas,” Hilda Ellis-Davidson

And

"There was a man called Kotkel, who had only recently arrived in Iceland. His wife was called Grima. Their sons were Hallbjorn Sleekstone-Eye and Stigandi. These people had come from the Hebrides. They were all extremely skilled in witchcraft and were great sorcerers." 

- Laxdæla saga

This is most likely something Tolkien was aware of — I would be flabbergasted if he wasn’t. However, did he fully appreciate the implications in terms of gender and subversion of masculinity? Impossible to say, of course, but he certainly knew he was giving his male character a name that has only been used by women in historical texts.

It would be akin to naming your male character Henrietta instead of Henry. It’s a deliberate, explicit decision. And while I don’t think Tolkien expected most readers to track down the origin of Grima’s name, the --a ending, to most anglophone readers, signifies a feminine name, more often than not. At least, it rarely, if ever, signifies masculine.

So the name alone brings in, at a subconscious level to readers, feminine qualities.

Alongside this, Grima is loosely based on Unferth from Beowulf. The entrance of Gandalf et al into Meduseld directly mirrors Beowulf’s into Hrothgar’s hall (complete with Grima lounging at Theoden’s feet the same as Unferth at Hrothgar’s). Indeed, it was clearly Tolkien’s intention to make a call back to Beowulf with that scene. (He was being all “look how clever I am. Also these are Anglo-Saxons on horses. As a general fyi”).

Unferth is a fascinating character in his own right ,and there is much scholarly debate around his role within Hrothgar’s hall, as well as the text more broadly. While there isn’t enough time/space to get into Unferth, I will quickly note that he is another character who subverts his society’s ideas of manhood and masculinity — particularly with regards to expectations of heroism and bravery. Yet, at the same time, Unferth is noted for being very intelligent, cunning, good at riddling, and overall quick witted (also, a kin-slayer. Dude murdered his brothers for Reasons).

Unferth’s contrary behaviour that flies in the face of Anglo-Saxon norms and ideals of masculine bravery is clearly reflected in Grima. Particularly in Grima’s fear of battle and lack of interest in taking up his sword when called by his king.

This leaves us with a character who was given a woman’s name and who is loosely based on another character who is known for his inability to follow through on his society’s expectations for masculine behaviour. 

Grima, from the first moment we meet him, clearly reads more feminine than masculine - this is amplified when he’s contrasted with the likes of Theoden and Eomer. And, not only is his aligned with traditional femininity more than other male characters, he is specifically aligned with the more negative tropes of femininity (i.e. lack of bravery, unreliable, dubious morals etc.).

-

That is a brief overview of the bones of Grima’s construction: name and inspiration. Now for actions and characterization within the text. This will be subdivided into comments on his use of magic and how that interfaces with Rohirrim masculinity then we’ll get into power and language.

Grima’s key point of power is his ability to weave words in so powerful a way he could convince Theoden of his own infirmity and weakness thereby securing control over the king. Alongside this, we know that he was using certain “potions and poison” to further weaken Theoden. Most likely to amp up the king’s physical weakness so it coincided with Grima’s mental magic games.

Magic for Anglo-Saxon and early medieval Scandinavians was heavily rooted in the power of the spoken word. Runes were probably used but the historical support of this is vague. Which is to say, we know they were used, we’re just not certain how and to what extent.

We do know that rune staves were a thing. They were most often used to send your landwights after opponents or wreck havoc on enemies from afar. To make one, a magic-worker would carve the prescribed runes onto a large stave and position it in the ground facing the direction of their enemy. On top of the stave was added the head of a horse. (Lots of horse sacrifice happened for early medieval Scandinavians, alongside some human sacrifice.)

But, the brunt of magic for Anglo-Saxons and early medieval Scandinavians was spoken word. Which makes sense as their society was, like Rohan’s, predominantly illiterate or, at least, para-literate (though, there has been some recent archeological evidence that is starting to call that into question, for what that’s worth).

In particular, Grima’s spellwork aligns most closely with seidr, a fact I’ve gone about ad nausea. And, again, something we can assume Tolkien was aware of, which means he was also aware of the gendered implications of a man practicing the craft.

The mainstay of seidrcraft is, but not limited to, the following:

making illusions,

causing madness and/or forgetfulness,

brewing of potions and poisons,

prophesying,

channeling the dead,

channeling gods,

removal of elf-shot, and

recovering lost portions of someone’s soul.

The first three bullets are things Grima does to Theoden. That kind of magic — the kind that fucks with your mind and your sense of self, the kind that is subtle and quiet and lurks beneath the surface so you don’t know it’s happening, that’s cunning — that kind of magic is what women do.

It was considered unmanly/effeminate for a man to partake in it as it undermined the hypermasculine militarized culture of the time. Winning a battle or a fight through spells and poison was cowardly.

Therefore, in Rohan where we have this hypermasculine culture that so prizes military glory and grandeur and martial might, Grima pursuing his goals through spellcraft and potions/poisons is Grima pursuing distinctly unmasculine, effeminate modes of action.

Indeed, within Rohan it could call into question the entirety of his masculinity. It would make him ragr (adj. unmanly) because his actions are the epitome of ergi (noun. unmanliness).

"In the Viking Age, homosexual men were treated with extreme disdain and a complex kind of moral horror, especially those who allowed themselves to be penetrated. Such a man was ragr, not only homosexual by inclination and action, but also inhabiting a state of being that extended to ethical and social qualities. This complex of concepts has been extensively studied, and in the words of its leading scholar, "the unmanly man is everything that a man should not be with regard to morals and character. He is effeminate and he is a coward, and consequently devoid of honour". [...] What we would call sexual orientation was, in the viking age, completely bound up with much wider and deeper codes of behaviour and dignity, extending way beyond physical and emotional preference." -Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

Though Price references specifically homosexuality in this passage, a man could be considered ragr for more than just that — and one of the other ways was through practicing seidr.

We see this with Odin, who learns how to do seidrcraft from Freyja, and is then mocked by Loki for how emasculating the practice is for Odin to undertake (as if Loki has any room to talk). Odin’s made himself effeminate, he’s made himself unmanly, he’s allowed himself to learn spells that could enable him to take a cowards way out of a situation, to be dishonourable etc.

Which is a neat tie-back to Grima’s name being one of Odin’s names, particularly when he is in disguise and using seidrcraft and wily ways to escape various unfortunate situations that he ends up in during the Grimnismal saga.

(As Odin says: I have been called Evildoer, Spellcaster, Masked and Shadowed-Face, Fool and Wise Man.)

It also mirrors him to Gandalf - another character who bears an Odinnic name. Gandalf very much represents the masculine, “acceptable” aspects of Odin. Grima embodies the darker, more dubious, and more effeminate, aspects of the god. As I’ve said in other posts, they are two sides of the Odin coin.

Though both are temperamental as fuck.

-

Alongside the spellcraft and potions, Grima’s performance of power does not align with Rohirrim traditions and ideals. He relies on his wits and his skill with language to navigate the world. Succinctly captured in the epithet bestowed upon him: Wormtongue. This is the modernization of Wyrmtunga, or, Dragon’s Tongue.

Wyrm can translate to worm, sure, and we see Saruman doing this on purpose when he refers to Grima as a worm, a creature that crawls in the dirt. But Wyrm, of course, is actually a form of dragon. And in Middle Earth, wyrm is used interchangeably with dragon (Smaug is called both wyrm and dragon), rather than denoting a specific species/categorization of dragon as it does in our world.

Grima’s approach to power is that of a gentle touch. He speaks softly, but doesn’t carry a large stick. He’s not Eomer or Theodred, who are much more traditionally martial, aggressive and forthright in their responses to a situation. Grima is clearly all about influencing those around him either through persuasion/use of words, or through spellcraft. He manipulates, he uses linguistic trickery.

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Additionally, how he undertakes his role as advisor to the king places him more within the private world of Meduseld and the king’s household than the active, public world of marshals and thanes. And, of course, the private world of households was traditionally considered the woman’s domain while men were expected to occupy the public spaces of the world.

Of course, being involved in court politics is a public role as opposed to existing within a wholly private space (such as Eowyn. Who, in the books, takes a mostly private role until she is required to rule in her uncle’s stead while he and Eomer are off at war, and even then it is clearly considered a temporary situation and part of her duty as a woman). But the manner in which Grima occupies that public position is a more “feminine” one.

We can assume that if Eomer or Erkenbrand or Elfhelm occupied the role as advisor to Theoden, they would have a very different approach to the position. A much more aggressive, active and probably military-focused approach. Less carrot, more stick.

A quick note on his appearance in the film, aside from being entirely in black with black hair in a land full of blonds because he needed to be visually distinct as the Bad Guy. He is dressed in longer tunics and robes compared to Eomer and other Rohirrim men (aside from Theoden, but as soon as he is “healed” of his possession(?) he returns to the Proper Masculine shorter tunics than the Weak and Effeminate longer robes and tunics of before). Grima’s hair is longer than Eomer’s and Theoden’s, he wears only a dagger and not a sword, the furs and quilting of his clothes indicate wealth and status, of course, but also decadence and effeminacy.

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All in all, Grima’s performance and actions undermine and subvert Rohirrim expectations of masculinity. If not outright transgressing gender norms. He uses spellcraft to achieve his ends which is cowardly and effeminate. When it’s not that, he relies on language and manipulation to ensure his position and rarely, if ever, willingly takes on an active, martial role that would be expected of a man who is in the king’s household and serves as an advisor and a quasi-second-in-command.

Here is a man, occupying a man’s role, but doing it like a woman. Subversive! Scandalous! Underappreciated by fandom!

Grima lives in a liminal, marginalized space that is at once gendered and ungendered but is absolutely Othered.

-

As for my note on Grima and being trans - absolutely a trans woman. Grima suffers from that thing of “I want to be you and sleep with you” re: Eowyn. That’s my hot take. (Similar to me and Alan Grant from Jurassic Park - I want to be him and sleep with him.)

But no, in all seriousness, a strong argument can absolutely be made for Grima being not-cis, however that might look for Grima. Grima and Eowyn are the two, within the trilogies, that have the strongest arguments to be made for not being cis.

(Grima is a bit of a foil for Eowyn, I think, while also being a foil for Gandalf.)

[woman-loving]

Who is a Malaysian lesbian?

Selection from “Queering the State: Towards a Lesbian Movement in Malaysia,” by Rais Nur and A.R., in Amazon to Zami: Towards a Global Lesbian Feminism, ed. Monika Reinfelder, 1996.

This selection from a 1996 book discusses lesbian identity in Malaysia from a lesbian feminist perspective. It acknowledges a range of meanings that “lesbian” can have, and selects one defined by sexual practice. Note that many women didn’t identity as “lesbian” themselves, and that the term was defined and applied here according to the authors’ goals. The authors also touch on multiple “butch” identities, “femme” identity (“femmes” weren’t seen as unable to be with men), and potential political dimensions to lesbian identity.

We felt it was necessary to give our definition of the term ‘lesbian’, given the multiplicity of definitions in currency. These range from extremely broad definitions of the word, which include metaphorical[2] (e.g. notions of ‘lesbian’ as a space or positionality) or emotional dimensions (e.g. a woman whose primary emotional attachments are formed with other women, though she may not necessarily have sex with them), to definitions which are strictly narrow and literal, and which have sexual intimacy between women as their lowest common denominator (i.e. a woman can be called a lesbian only if she has sex with other women, whatever the other dimensions of her relationships with, or the depth of her feelings for, them). However, despite the diversity of meanings of the word ‘lesbian’, and the rich range of experience it can be said to cover, we believe that our purposes in this essay would best be served by limiting our use of the term to apply to any woman who has sexual relations with other women.

This definition is not unproblematic, as such a narrow definition necessarily excludes many people who consider themselves lesbian but do not practise lesbian sex, such as lesbian celibates or other women-identified women. In fact, early on it our research, we wanted to include women who identified themselves as lesbian as part of our definition, and therefore hinge our definition on the self-identification of the woman concerned. This, however, became untenable, because as we progressed we came across many women who have sexual relations with women but do not use the word ‘lesbian’ to describe themselves. For some of these women, such a word was alien to them, and in some cases they were hardly aware that other lesbians existed. Others were familiar with the concept of homosexuality, but used words other than ‘lesbian’ to identify themselves. Thus we decided that our use of the term would refer to women who have sexual relations with other women, regardless of whether or not they used the word to describe themselves.

Our knowledge is primarily of urban and middle-class lesbians, although we have made attempts to access the experiences of others. Lesbianism is a phenomenon which exists very much underground, in the sense that there is very little public discourse about it (and what little there is frequently pathologizes it) and very few safe spaces in which lesbians can be out or come together to share their experiences. Furthermore, the experience of being a lesbian in Malaysia is heavily influenced by ethnicity and class. These two factors make it difficult to extract an account of lesbian experiences which can address lesbian existence in both urban as well as rural areas, and apply across class and ethnic divides.

Unlike gay men, who have been united through work against HIV/AIDS, there has been no similar phenomenon which has sparked this move towards a sense of community for lesbians, so that by and large there are many tight-knit groups, based on race or class, which do not intermingle with each other: Malay lesbians generally have a different network and socialize at different places from Chinese and Indians, working class from middle class, urban from rural, etc.

The players

In as far as it is possible to generalize, one aspect which can be said to be common to all these different subcultures is role-playing, or the construction of lesbian identity around notions of the ‘butch’ and the ‘femme’, with their attendant ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ traits. While Western countries like the UK and the USA have recently seen a resurgence of the butch and the femme in lesbian culture, this has mainly been dictated by fashion and the ‘lesbian chic’ trend, which in the UK saw many straight women dressing like dykes and lesbian characters suddenly appearing in various soap operas, and partly by postmodern notions of parody, irony and ‘genderfuck’. That is to say, while some lesbians do take butch/femme roles seriously in these countries, many others see adopting these roles as a fashionable thing to do and/or a way of subverting essentialist notions of sex and gender, and parodying notions of identity/sexuality as stable and immutable rather than fluid and constantly changing. So a lesbian who dresses as butch one day may very well decided to dress as a femme the next, and vice versa.

In Malaysia though, butch/femme roles are taken very seriously by the majority of lesbians, and there is no element of playfulness or parody to them. The word ‘butch’, though generally used to refer to a lesbian who adopts or exhibits traits and behaviour socially deemed to be masculine, in fact covers a continuum of identifications or definitions. At the lower end of the scale is the ‘tomboy’ who dresses in a boyish manner, generally looks like a cute boy, and yet is still possible to tell that she is female. The tomboy figures in all cultures.

‘Peng-kids’ occupy the middle of the continuum, and are generally associated with Malay working-class lesbians. The word ‘peng-kid’ is derived from ‘punk kid’, as they are deemed to have borrowed heavily from punk culture in terms of their attire. Peng-kids often feel that they are men trapped in women’s bodies. They bind their breasts as well as use men’s underwear and aftershave. They are renowned as very loyal and extremely attentive and generous to their girlfriends. The peng-kid phenomenon, which can be traced back to the 1970s, is now very widespread and exists in both rural and urban Malay communities. The term has also been adopted among some Chinese lesbians, who abbreviate it to ‘PK’.

Finally, there are the ‘hardcore’ butches. In the West, what is known as a ‘bulldyke’ or ‘bulldagger’ would be the closest equivalents to the local hardcore. Whereas peng-kids feel that they are men trapped in women’s bodies, and thereby acknowledge their femaleness to some degree, in many cases, these hardcore butches do not even perceive themselves as women, and pass as men whenever possible. Many consider the idea of sex-change operations seriously as some stage in their lives. Hardcores exist in all cultures in Malaysian society, but appear to be predominately working class.

Butch identifications in Malaysia are therefore multiple and complex. Things become simpler when we come to femme identity. Generally, femmes are perceived to be straight women in disguise, or women who, although they might be involved in a lesbian relationship, have the option to ‘become normal’ and conduct relationships with men. A femme’s lesbianism is therefore not seen as essential or fixed; whereas butches see themselves, and are perceived, as having no choice about their sexuality--they are definitely and incontrovertibly lesbian. Many femmes have lesbian relationships in order to avoid the complications of becoming pregnant, which might happen in heterosexual relationships. Another reason why femmes prefer butches to men is that they believe they are more secure in a relationship with a butch, since it is not as easy for butches to abandon one woman for another as it is for men, given the relatively small lesbian subcultures which exist in Malaysia.

In many senses, this emphasis on roles is very restrictive, and those who resist defining themselves in such a way often find that they are treated with distrust and hostility by their peers, as are lesbians who change identifications. There is some degree of policing within the lesbian communities in Malaysia, and what is acceptable in terms of clothing and appearance, sexual practices and roles is clearly defined and strictly enforced. This means that lesbians who reject such pressures and constructions of identity are excluded. More importantly, in their insistence on butch/femme identifications such lesbians reinforce the stereotypical notions of lesbians and lesbianism harboured by society at large, rather than challenging them or presented alternative constructions of identity, alternative ways of being lesbian.

Partly, this dependence on roles has to do with the fact that lesbians feel beleaguered by the homophobia and hostility of society as a whole, and therefore do not trust people easily--choosing a role and sticking with it signifies a willingness to belong, to play by the rules, and indicates that one is an ‘insider’ rather than an ‘outsider’ and therefore can be trusted. But we feel it is also partly to do with the lack of any political dimension to lesbianism in Malaysia, restricting it solely to the sexual dimension.

Lesbians in the West have played a prominent role within feminist campaigning since the 1960s, and have contributed greatly to, and learned a lot from, feminism and its insights. Lesbian and queer theory, as it exists in the West today, has its roots in the feminist movement, and has built upon feminism’s interrogation of the categories of gender, its assertion, for example, that, as Simone de Beauvoir put it, ‘one is not born a woman, one becomes one’. ‘Masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ were shown to be states of being which were socially constructed and therefore avoidable, rather than biological and inevitable.

While, on the one hand, many feminists made the political decision to become lesbians in the light of feminism’s analyses of gender relations, and as a logical extension of their politics, on the other, many lesbians used and extended the analytical foundations laid down by feminism to challenge and deconstruct the institution of heterosexuality--to expose it as an instrument of patriarchy or, at any rate, something which is neither more natural nor more inevitable than any other sexual preference or tendency. Lesbian feminists, in line with the early feminist tenet that ‘the personal is political’ therefore identified the realm of sexuality and sexual practices as the locus of much patriarchal power and oppression, and proceeded to problematize heterosexuality and politicize lesbianism, arguing that it represented a subversive force in its refusal to fall in with dominant/patriarchal concepts of what is natural or permissible in society.

This perception of lesbianism as having a political dimension rather than simply a sexual one, of being not simply something restricted and limited to the bedroom, but having wider implications and political resonances, is, however, largely absent in Malaysia. There is very little sense (or perceived need) here that lesbianism is or can be a political force, or that it can be used to critique or challenge dominant patriarchal and heterosexual ideologies and institutions. We believe that his has to do with the fact that feminism, which is closely connected with the lesbian movement in the West, has not translated well here, nor has it had the impact which it had in the West. As a newly industrializing country, Malaysia faces different challenges and has different priorities to that of ‘first world’ or Western countries, and often feminism is not perceived to be, or made relevant to, the needs and lives of women here.

At any rate, without feminism’s insights on how patriarchy works to oppress women and how gender roles function to reinforce patriarchal power, many lesbians simply adopt heterosexual notions of gender and replicate heterosexual relationships without questioning or problematizing them. It may, of course, be argued that these lesbians adopt butch/femme roles as a conscious eroticization of difference.[3] But we believe that it is rather a case of a lack of alternatives. The invisiblizing of lesbians in society, and the lack of roles models who practise alternative ways of defining themselves or conducting relationships, of course reinforces the above.

[antoine-roquentin]

If every language is acquirable, its acquisition requires a real portion of a person’s life: each new conquest is measured against shortening days. What limits one’s access to other languages is not their imperviousness but one’s own mortality. Hence a certain privacy to all languages. French and American imperialists governed, exploited, and killed Vietnamese over many years. But whatever else they made off with, the Vietnamese language stayed put. Accordingly, only too often, a rage at Vietnamese ‘inscrutability,’ and that obscure despair which engenders the venomous argots of dying colonialisms: ‘gooks,’ ‘ratons’, etc.12 (In the longer run, the only responses to the vast privacy of the language of the oppressed are retreat or further massacre.) Such epithets are, in their inner form, characteristically racist, and decipherment of this form will serve to show why Nairn is basically mistaken in arguing that racism and anti-semitism derive from nationalism – and thus that ‘seen in sufficient historical depth, fascism tells us more about nationalism than any other episode.’13 A word like ‘slant,’ for example, abbreviated from ‘slant-eyed’, does not simply express an ordinary political enmity. It erases nation-ness by reducing the adversary to his biological physiognomy.14 It denies, by substituting for, ‘Vietnamese;’ just as raton denies, by substituting for, ‘Algerian’. At the same time, it stirs ‘Vietnamese’ into a nameless sludge along with ‘Korean,’ ‘Chinese,’ ‘Filipino,’ and so on. The character of this vocabulary may become still more evident if it is contrasted with other Vietnam-War-period words like ‘Charlie’ and ‘V.C.’, or from an earlier era, ‘Boches,’ ‘Huns,’ ‘Japs’ and ‘Frogs,’ all of which apply only to one specific nationality, and thus concede, in hatred, the adversary’s membership in a league of nations.15 The fact of the matter is that nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal contaminations, transmitted from the origins of time through an endless sequence of loathsome copulations: outside history. Niggers are, thanks to the invisible tar-brush, forever niggers; Jews, the seed of Abraham, forever Jews, no matter what passports they carry or what languages they speak and read. (Thus for the Nazi, the Jewish German was always an impostor.)16 The dreams of racism actually have their origin in ideologies of class, rather than in those of nation: above all in claims to divinity among rulers and to ‘blue’ or ‘white’ blood and ‘breeding’ among aristocracies.17 No surprise then that the putative sire of modern racism should be, not some petty-bourgeois nationalist, but Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau.18 Nor that, on the whole, racism and anti-semitism manifest themselves, not across national boundaries, but within them. In other words, they justify not so much foreign wars as domestic repression and domination.19 Where racism developed outside Europe in the nineteenth century, it was always associated with European domination, for two converging reasons. First and most important was the rise of official nationalism and colonial ‘Russification’. As has been repeatedly emphasized official nationalism was typically a response on the part of threatened dynastic and aristocratic groups – upper classes – to popular vernacular nationalism. Colonial racism was a major element in that conception of ‘Empire’ which attempted to weld dynastic legitimacy and national community. It did so by generalizing a principle of innate, inherited superiority on which its own domestic position was (however shakily) based to the vastness of the overseas possessions, covertly (or not so covertly) conveying the idea that if, say, English lords were naturally superior to other Englishmen, no matter: these other Englishmen were no less superior to the subjected natives. Indeed one is tempted to argue that the existence of late colonial empires even served to shore up domestic aristocratic bastions, since they appeared to confirm on a global, modern stage antique conceptions of power and privilege. It could do so with some effect because – and here is our second reason – the colonial empire, with its rapidly expanding bureaucratic apparatus and its ‘Russifying’ policies, permitted sizeable numbers of bourgeois and petty bourgeois to play aristocrat off centre court: i.e. anywhere in the empire except at home. In each colony one found this grimly amusing tableau vivant: the bourgeois gentilhomme speaking poetry against a backcloth of spacious mansions and gardens filled with mimosa and bougainvillea, and a large supporting cast of houseboys, grooms, gardeners, cooks, amahs, maids, washerwomen, and, above all, horses.20 Even those who did not manage to live in this style, such as young bachelors, nonetheless had the grandly equivocal status of a French nobleman on the eve of a jacquerie:21 In Moulmein, in lower Burma [this obscure town needs explaining to readers in the metropole], I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was sub-divisional police officer of the town. This ‘tropical Gothic’ was made possible by the overwhelming power that high capitalism had given the metropole – a power so great that it could be kept, so to speak, in the wings. Nothing better illustrates capitalism in feudal-aristocratic drag than colonial militaries, which were notoriously distinct from those of the metropoles, often even in formal institutional terms. 22 Thus in Europe one had the ‘First Army,’ recruited by conscription on a mass, citizen, metropolitan base; ideologically conceived as the defender of the heimat; dressed in practical, utilitarian khaki; armed with the latest affordable weapons; in peacetime isolated in barracks, in war stationed in trenches or behind heavy field-guns. Outside Europe one had the ‘Second Army,’ recruited (below the officer level) from local religious or ethnic minorities on a mercenary basis; ideologically conceived as an internal police force; dressed to kill in bed-or ballroom; armed with swords and obsolete industrial weapons; in peace on display, in war on horseback. If the Prussian General Staff, Europe’s military teacher, stressed the anonymous solidarity of a professionalized corps, ballistics, railroads, engineering, strategic planning, and the like, the colonial army stressed glory, epaulettes, personal heroism, polo, and an archaizing courtliness among its officers. (It could afford to do so because the First Army and the Navy were there in the background.) This mentality survived a long time. In Tonkin, in 1894, Lyautey wrote:23 Quel dommage de n’être pas venu ici dix ans plus tôt! Quelles carrières à y fonder et à y mener. Il n’y a pas ici un de ces petits lieutenants, chefs de poste et de reconnaissance, qui ne développe en 6 mois plus d’initiative, de volonté, d’endurance, de personnalité, qu’un officier de France en toute sa carrière. In Tonkin, in 1951, Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, ‘who liked officers who combined guts with “style,” took an immediate liking to the dashing cavalryman [Colonel de Castries] with his bright-red Spahi cap and scarf, his magnificent riding-crop, and his combination of easy-going manners and ducal mien, which made him as irresistible to women in Indochina in the 1950s as he had been to Parisiennes of the 1930s.’24 Another instructive indication of the aristocratic or pseudo-aristocratic derivation of colonial racism was the typical ‘solidarity among whites,’ which linked colonial rulers from different national metropoles, whatever their internal rivalries and conflicts. This solidarity, in its curious trans-state character, reminds one instantly of the class solidarity of Europe’s nineteenth-century aristocracies, mediated through each other’s hunting-lodges, spas, and ballrooms; and of that brotherhood of ‘officers and gentlemen,’ which in the Geneva convention guaranteeing privileged treatment to captured enemy officers, as opposed to partisans or civilians, has an agreeably twentieth-century expression. The argument adumbrated thus far can also be pursued from the side of colonial populations. For, the pronouncements of certain colonial ideologues aside, it is remarkable how little that dubious entity known as ‘reverse racism’ manifested itself in the anticolonial movements. In this matter it is easy to be deceived by language. There is, for example, a sense in which the Javanese word londo (derived from Hollander or Nederlander) meant not only ‘Dutch’ but ‘whites.’ But the derivation itself shows that, for Javanese peasants, who scarcely ever encountered any ‘whites’ but Dutch, the two meanings effectively overlapped. Similarly, in French colonial territories, ‘les blancs’ meant rulers whose Frenchness was indistinguishable from their whiteness. In neither case, so far as I know, did londo or blanc either lose caste or breed derogatory secondary distinctions.25 On the contrary, the spirit of anticolonial nationalism is that of the heart-rending Constitution of Makario Sakay’s short-lived Republic of Katagalugan (1902), which said, among other things:26 No Tagalog, born in this Tagalog archipelago, shall exalt any person above the rest because of his race or the colour of his skin; fair, dark, rich, poor, educated and ignorant – all are completely equal, and should be in one loób [inward spirit]. There may be differences in education, wealth, or appearance, but never in essential nature (pagkatao) and ability to serve a cause. One can find without difficulty analogies on the other side of the globe. Spanish-speaking mestizo Mexicans trace their ancestries, not to Castilian conquistadors, but to half-obliterated Aztecs, Mayans, Toltecs and Zapotecs. Uruguayan revolutionary patriots, creoles themselves, took up the name of Tupac Amarú, the last great indigenous rebel against creole oppression, who died under unspeakable tortures in 1781. It may appear paradoxical that the objects of all these attachments are ‘imagined’ – anonymous, faceless fellow-Tagalogs, exterminated tribes, Mother Russia, or the tanah air. But amor patriae does not differ in this respect from the other affections, in which there is always an element of fond imagining. (This is why looking at the photo-albums of strangers’ weddings is like studying the archaeologist’s groundplan of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.) What the eye is to the lover – that particular, ordinary eye he or she is born with – language – whatever language history has made his or her mother-tongue – is to the patriot. Through that language, encountered at mother’s knee and parted with only at the grave, pasts are restored, fellowships are imagined, and futures dreamed. 12. The logic here is: 1. I will be dead before I have penetrated them. 2. My power is such that they have had to learn my language. 3. But this means that my privacy has been penetrated. Terming them ‘gooks’ is small revenge. 13. The Break-up of Britain, pp. 337 and 347. 14. Notice that there is no obvious, selfconscious antonym to ‘slant.’ ‘Round’? ‘Straight’? ‘Oval’? 15. Not only, in fact, in an earlier era. Nonetheless, there is a whiff of the antique-shop about these words of Debray: ‘I can conceive of no hope for Europe save under the hegemony of a revolutionary France, firmly grasping the banner of independence. Sometimes I wonder if the whole “anti-Boche” mythology and our secular antagonism to Germany may not be one day indispensable for saving the revolution, or even our national-democratic inheritance.’ ‘Marxism and the National Question,’ p. 41. 16. The significance of the emergence of Zionism and the birth of Israel is that the former marks the reimagining of an ancient religious community as a nation, down there among the other nations – while the latter charts an alchemic change from wandering devotee to local patriot. 17. ‘From the side of the landed aristocracy came conceptions of inherent superiority in the ruling class, and a sensitivity to status, prominent traits well into the twentieth century. Fed by new sources, these conceptions could later be vulgarized [sic] and made appealing to the German population as a whole in doctrines of racial superiority.’ Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, p. 436. 18. Gobineau’s dates are perfect. He was born in 1816, two years after the restoration of the Bourbons to the French throne. His diplomatic career, 1848–1877, blossomed under Louis Napoléon’s Second Empire and the reactionary monarchist regime of Marie Edmé Patrice Maurice, Comte de MacMahon, former imperialist proconsul in Algiers. His Essai sur l’Inégalité des Races Humaines appeared in 1854 – should one say in response to the popular vernacular-nationalist insurrections of 1848? 19. South African racism has not, in the age of Vorster and Botha, stood in the way of amicable relations (however discreetly handled) with prominent black politicians in certain independent African states. If Jews suffer discrimination in the Soviet Union, that did not prevent respectful working relations between Brezhnev and Kissinger. 20. For a stunning collection of photographs of such tableaux vivants in the Netherlands Indies (and an elegantly ironical text), see ‘E. Breton de Nijs,’ Tempo Doeloe. 21. George Orwell, ‘Shooting an Elephant,’ in The Orwell Reader, p. 3. The words in square brackets are of course my interpolation. 22. The KNIL (Koninklijk Nederlandsch-Indisch Leger) was quite separate from the KL (Koninklijk Leger) in Holland. The Légion Étrangère was almost from the start legally prohibited from operations on continental French soil. 23. Lettres du Tonkin et de Madagascar (1894–1899), p. 84. Letter of December 22, 1894, from Hanoi. Emphases added. 24. Bernard B. Fall, Hell is a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu, p. 56. One can imagine the shudder of Clausewitz’s ghost. [Spahi, derived like Sepoy from the Ottoman Sipahi, meant mercenary irregular cavalrymen of the ‘Second Army’ in Algeria.] It is true that the France of Lyautey and de Lattre was a Republican France. However, the often talkative Grande Muette had since the start of the Third Republic been an asylum for aristocrats increasingly excluded from power in all other important institutions of public life. By 1898, a full quarter of all Brigadier-and Major-Generals were aristocrats. Moreover, this aristocrat-dominated officer corps was crucial to nineteenth and twentieth-century French imperialism. ‘The rigorous control imposed on the army in the métropole never extended fully to la France d’outremer. The extension of the French Empire in the nineteenth century was partially the result of uncontrolled initiative on the part of colonial military commanders. French West Africa, largely the creation of General Faidherbe, and the French Congo as well, owed most of their expansion to independent military forays into the hinterland. Military officers were also responsible for the faits accomplis which led to a French protectorate in Tahiti in 1842, and, to a lesser extent, to the French occupation of Tonkin in Indochina in the 1880’s . . . In 1897 Galliéni summarily abolished the monarchy in Madagascar and deported the Queen, all without consulting the French government, which later accepted the fait accompli . . .’ John S. Ambler, The French Army in Politics, 1945–1962, pp. 10–11 and 22. 25. I have never heard of an abusive argot word in Indonesian or Javanese for either ‘Dutch’ or ‘white.’ Compare the Anglo-Saxon treasury: niggers, wops, kikes, gooks, slants, fuzzywuzzies, and a hundred more. It is possible that this innocence of racist argots is true primarily of colonized populations. Blacks in America – and surely elsewhere – have developed a varied counter-vocabulary (honkies, ofays, etc.). 26. As cited in Reynaldo Ileto���s masterlyPasyón and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840–1910, p. 218. Sakay’s rebel republic lasted until 1907, when he was captured and executed by the Americans. Understanding the first sentence requires remembering that three centuries of Spanish rule and Chinese immigration had produced a sizeable mestizo population in the islands.

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities

[lesbianfeminists]

There’s More Than One Way to ‘Erase’ Women

On 28th May Hungary’s Parliament signed a bill into law which ends legal recognition for transgender people. The votes of rightwing Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party pushed the legislation through by a majority in the context of a pandemic in which he is ruling by decree indefinitely. The changes to Hungary’s Registry Act will restrict gender to biological sex at birth, a status determined by primary sex characteristics and chromosomes. All other forms of identification are tied to birth certificates in Hungary so these too will reflect birth sex.

Trans advocacy and human rights groups argue that it will lead to more discrimination because Hungarians are required to produce identity cards on a frequent basis. This means that they will, in effect, be ‘outing’ themselves in everyday situations which may be humiliating, at best, and dangerous at worst. The government say they are merely clarifying sex within the law; a disingenuous claim in a political context in which the traditional family is increasingly being placed at the heart of a ‘white’, Christian nation.

Julie Bindel recently argued that it was unwise of Pink News to look at Orban’s policies in relation to transgender people in isolation. They should instead be conceived of as part of a broader attack on women’s rights and the rights of minority groups.

But Bindel’s advice applies equally to those gender critical feminists, albeit small in number, who are responding positively to the news from Hungary, on the basis that Orban recognises the immutability of sex. Whilst Baroness Nicholson might see no problem in adding Hungary to her list of causes for celebration, feminists shouldn’t lose sight of a much bigger picture.

In 2013, Orban introduced a constitutional reform which enshrined the idea of ​​the family as the foundation of the nation in the Basic Law. Although abortion was legalised after the Second World War, since 2013 the Constitution has stated that “the life of the fetus must be protected from the moment of conception”. Orban has yet to move on abortion but he publically supports anti-abortion organisations and in 2017 he opened The World Congress of Families conference in Budapest. The WCF is a United States coalition is a virulently anti-abortion organisation which promotes Christian right values globally.

By 2018, he was setting out his plan for a new “cultural era” which included amending the kindergarten curriculum so that it would promote a “national identity, Christian cultural values, patriotism, attachment to homeland and family”. (5) In 2019, the government announced a series of pro-natalist measures which included a lifetime income tax exemption for mothers of four children and free IVF treatment for married heterosexual couples. These policies aim to reverse demographic decline and curb immigration, at one and the same time. Orban argues that “it’s a national interest to restore natural reproduction. Not one interest among others – but the only one. It’s a European interest too. It is the European interest”.

In essence, he subscribes to the white nationalist “demographic winter” theory, which claims that the “purity” of European civilisation is in peril due to the increasing numbers of non-white races, in general, and Muslim people, in particular. Orban’s draconian measures against migrants and refugees dovetail with this belief system.

Such policies also cast women in the role of wombs of the nation, echoing the eugenicist policies of Hitler, who also provided financial inducements to bribe Aryan women into motherhood. As Anita Komuves, a Hungarian journalist, tweeted, “Can we just simply declare that Hungary is Gilead from now on?”

Homosexuality is legal in Hungary, but same sex couples are unable to marry and registered partnerships don’t offer equivalent legal rights. Orban’s government has made the promotion of patriarchal family values so central to its cultural mission and policies that anti gay rhetoric amongst politicians has become commonplace. Last year, László Kövér, the speaker of the Hungarian parliament, compared supporters of lesbian and gay marriage and adoption to paedophiles. “Morally, there is no difference between the behaviour of a paedophile and the behaviour of someone who demands such things,” he said. (9) In 2017 the annual Pride event was attacked by violent right-wing extremists hurling faeces, acid and Molotov cocktails at the marchers and police.

Just as Orban has sought to eliminate the notion of gender identity within the law, so too has he gone to war against what he describes as “gender ideology”. In 2018 he issued a decree revoking funding for gender studies programmes in October that year. (10) At the time, this move was welcomed by some gender critical and radical feminists on the basis that postmodern feminism in the academy has contributed to a dogmatic sex denialism which is unable to analyse the basis of female oppression. (11) But, as with the changes in relation to the legal recognition of transgender people, Orban’s reasons were anything but feminist. As one government spokesman explained: “The government’s standpoint is that people are born either male or female, and we do not consider it acceptable for us to talk about socially constructed genders rather than biological sexes.” (12) Gender studies is seen as promoting too fluid an understanding of male and female roles in the place of a fixed social order in which women’s biological destiny is to be married mothers. The decision to withdraw funding from gender studies didn’t come out of nowhere. At a party congress in December 2015, László Kövér, one of the founders of the Fidesz party, stated:

“We don’t want the gender craziness. We don’t want to make Hungary a futureless society of man-hating women, and feminine men living in dread of women, and considering families and children only as barriers to self-fulfilment… And we would like if our daughters would consider, as the highest quality of self-fulfilment, the possibility of giving birth to our grandchildren.”

Orban’s war against “gender” also led to Hungary’s National Assembly recently passing a declaration which refused to ratify the Istanbul Convention, the Council of Europe’s Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence.It was claimed that the convention promoted “gender ideology” and particular issue was taken with the section that defined gender as “socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for women and men.” Hungarian politicians object to an understanding of gender which recognises that women’s ‘role’ can change, even improve (!), as societies change, an unwelcome thought to those wishing to uphold men’s power in the family and discourage homosexuality. As with a number of Orban’s other policy decisions, there was also a racist element to the refusal to ratify the convention. The fact that it would have afforded protections for migrant and refugee women was in direct contradiction to Hungary’s anti-immigration policies. As one far right, Hungarian blog put it:

“By refusing the ratification of the Istanbul Convention, Hungary, says ‘Yes!’ to the protection of women but ‘No!’ to gender ideology and illegal migration.”

(Women’s groups in the UK have long suspected that our government refuses to ratify the Convention as it would bind them to properly funding the VAWG sector.)

Orban’s concern about “gender” and “gender ideology” is shared by other states with a socially conservative programme for women. Some gender critical and radical feminists use this term, as well, which can be confusing when our respective analyses have so little in common. Here, it refers to a set of beliefs that conflate sex with gender and deny the material reality of sex-based oppression. This is a far cry from the definitions shared by the growing “anti gender” movements in Central and Eastern Europe.

These movements privilege biological understandings of what it means to be a man or a woman but only do so in order to insist that our biology should determine (and restrict) our lives.They want to hang on the man/woman binary because they believe that gendered roles and expectations, ones which place women below men, are determined by sex. In short, they deny that gender is a social construct. “Gender ideology”, as a term, has become something of a dustbin category, deployed variously to attack feminism, same sex marriage, reproductive rights and sex education in schools. Trump’s administration is engaged in an ongoing fight to remove the word “gender” from United Nations documents.

In this context, we need to remember that “gender” is still most frequently used as a proxy for women/sex in UN Conventions like CEDAW (The Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women). The term is also increasingly – to our concern – conflated with gender identity with all the risks that this entails.

But that fact shouldn’t blind us to the main motivations of those who oppose the use of the word gender at UN level. When conservatives say they want to replace the term “gender” with “sex”, it’s invariably to oppose women’s equality with men and to enshrine patriarchal understandings of women’s place in society. Replacing the language of gender with the language of sex is, in their terms, a route to a biologically driven and restricted notion of reproduction as women’s only fate. Replacing the language of gender with the language of sex is not necessarily a feminist enterprise.

Unless we establish very clear lines between ourselves and rightwing, religious fundamentalists, we are in danger of being swallowed up and used by the most anti-women, global forces, the canniest of which offer themselves as ‘partners’ in the fight against gender ideology: witness several events hosted by the Heritage Foundation, a hugely powerful Christian Right think tank which has platformed radical feminists.

The Heritage Foundation has particular chutzpah. Whilst claiming to be an ally in the feminist fight to preserve female only spaces and sex-based rights, it opposes reproductive rights, lesbian and gay rights and any measures to counter discrimination against women, notably the Equal Rights Amendment. In fact, it blames feminists for the current state of affairs – though Ryan Anderson would never be rude enough to say so at their shared events. “Transgender theories are part of the feminist goal of a sexual revolution that eliminates the proprietary family and celebrates non-monogamous sexual experiences.”

When it’s not cynically partnering with (a small number) of radical feminists as ‘cover’, the Heritage Foundation enjoys the company of the Holy See, the universal government of the Catholic Church which operates from Vatican City State. (20) The Vatican has opposed the notion of gender since the early-2000s, arguing that males and females have intrinsic attributes which aren’t shaped by social forces. Recently, they published an educational document called “Male and female he created them”.

Woman’s Place UK has consistently stated an opposition to working with, or supporting the work of the religious right (and their female representatives). Not simply because it is strategically disastrous but because it is wrong in principle. (22) When we look at what is happening in Hungary it is well to remember that there is more than one way to ‘erase’ women. Andrea Pető, a professor at the Central European University of Budapest, commenting on the official reports that Hungary (and Poland) send to the UN CEDAW Committee, noted, “we see that they replace the concept of women with that of family, women as independent agents are slowly disappearing from public policy documents, behind the single word family.”

https://womansplaceuk.org/2020/06/18/womens-rights-under-attack-hungary/

[writingwithcolor]

Half Romani, Half Caucasian Bisexual Woman

notice: racial and lgbt slurs mentioned from a woman within the groups.

I’m an author of YA fiction and long-time lurker on this page. Thank you so, so much for creating and maintaining this resource. I finally decided to submit my profile because IF I HAVE TO READ ONE MORE USE OF THE WORD “GYPPED” IN A PUBLISHED NOVEL, I WILL SCREAM.

Ahem. So.

I’m sorry this profile is so long, but I’m assuming the reader here is starting from zero. Romani are in a unique position in the United States right now. Our ethnicity and customs are treated like lifestyle choices. Even the most liberal, politically-correct allies think of us as unicorns.

A quick few quick notes about terminology:

“Romani” refers to the race—our people as a whole. “Roma” or “Romni” are the terms used for women, depending on your family tradition. (We use “Roma” in my family.) “Rom” is universally used for men—you would never call a man “Romni.” You will see people use “Roma” to refer to the entire race, and particularly to one extended family, because we’re a patriarchal society but a matrilineal people.

“Gypsy” is a word given to us by our oppressors. Like the word “Indian” for Native Americans, it assigned us a race that had nothing to do with us—Ancient Greeks and Romans once thought we were from Egypt. The word refers to both Romani peoples—of which there are hundreds of subcultures—and the Irish Travellers, who aren’t related to us ethnically or culturally.  We do use this word to describe ourselves, but that’s in an effort to reclaim its power.

In the USA, the word “Gypsy” is used like an adjective instead of a noun… whenever that happens, it’s racist. Just like using the word “Indian” or “Native” to describe a rug pattern, or using the words “African-style” to sell a dress made in China. There is no excuse for calling something Gypsy if it is not made by or related to a Romani or Traveller person. Remember: the dictionary has more than one meaning for “f**got,” too. These aren’t overt cruelties, but rather the casual racism we all fall prey to when we aren’t paying attention. It’s just gotten extreme because, in the United States, you’ve all forgotten that the noun form of “Gypsy” even exists.

About me

My mother is Sinti Roma and German. My father is English and German.

Ethnically, I am one quarter Roma (or thereabouts—it’s difficult to measure with so much intermarriage). Culturally, I’m half Roma as my mother was my Romani parent. If my father had been the Romani one, I would be considered “less Romani” than I am now. Biologically (according to my DNA test), I am 40% English/Welsh, 32% German, with the remaining divided up between Norway/Sweden, Ireland/Scotland, the Indian subcontinent, and Russia.

I have red-auburn hair and blue-gray eyes. My skin is extremely pale—paler than any of my relatives, on either side. I don’t freckle. I’m average height for an American and wear a US size 12 dress.

I identify as a cisgender female, and I am bisexual.

I’m 33 years old.

Beauty standards

I pass for white. I mean, I think I technically am “white,” since that word refers to color and not culture. My entire Romani family passes, and that is typical of our race. My ethnic heritage is Sinti Roma, which is a Central European group. My mother always says we are “white” the way Jews in America are white—we have defining features and practices, if you know what to look for, but the burden/blessing of identifying as “other” usually falls to us.

Romani don’t have one particular “look,” per say, because we have intermarried with our neighbors all over the world. This is a massive misconception in popular culture, where the “Esmerelda Look” is considered the standard of beauty for our women: tall, tan, svelte, with giant breasts and SO MUCH black hair. And incongruously blue eyes? Not that the combination is impossible—anything is possible—but I’ve never actually met a Roma person who looked like this.

Representation for all non-white races was limited in the 1980’s and 90’s, but for Roma women it was basically just Esmeralda, Scarlet Witch, and the mystical Trash Heap on Fraggle Rock.

While I was growing up, the “Esmeralda Look” became the absolute beauty standard for Roma in the USA. Women started dying their hair black, getting fake tans, wearing colored contacts. I know many with breast implants. If you’ve ever watched My Big Fat Gypsy anything, you’ll know exactly what look I mean. (If you haven’t seen it, please don’t seek it out. It’s the actual worst.) This is an example of the incredible and sometimes devastating power of representation. We had one—just one—positive role model in the media, and we were desperate to meet that standard.

I don’t. Never have. Other women in my family, though, have worked hard to get pretty damn close.

Of course, on top of all this, we aren’t immune to the universal standards of beauty in the countries where we live. I was born blonde and blue-eyed in a sea of dark-haired cousins, so I was the automatic beauty of the family, even though my hair shifted to gingery auburn in childhood. My reign lasted until my youngest cousin stole the title when she was born—you guessed it!—blonde and blue-eyed. Before the two of us, no woman in our Romani family tree had ever been naturally blonde. It was a Big Deal.

Despite being the baby beauty, my sibling and cousins are considered better looking by current American standards. There are almost all taller than I am, and they are all thinner. They mostly have dark hair and tan easily. Many people in my family, men and women, have tattoos—this includes my mother and my grandmother. My grandma got her eyeliner tattooed on! And they are all incredibly well dressed and immaculately groomed. I am the family “hippie” because I regularly go without makeup and nail polish.

Clothing/grooming

Romani traditions put a lot of emphasis on cleanliness and grooming. The stereotype of the unwashed gypsy couldn’t be falser—we are pretty much always the cleanest people in the room, because we have cultural rules about hygiene. Part of the reason that stereotype got started was because Romani were forced to live in the worst parts of town, where water wasn’t safe to drink or bathe in. That’s still true in many countries.

Roma women wear makeup, get their hair done, paint their nails. I’m generalizing, but that’s because we’re talking about “standards” here. Those are ours. I do very little of that on a daily basis, and ALL OF IT for big family events. I married a Gadjo (non-Romani), so his expectations of my appearance are very different from my family’s. I wear much nicer, fancier clothing when with my Romani relatives, and I make sure my daughter does, too. It’s important that my family see my husband as a good provider, and this is a major way to demonstrate that.

Religion/holidays

The ancient ancestors of Romani people were Hindu, and there are some who still practice. Every Romani I know in the United States is either Christian, Agnostic, or an Atheist, but that is because we live in the United States—there is no “Roma Religion,” and we are master chameleons. Most Romani people practice the dominant religion of the region they live in. We celebrate the same holidays, attend the same churches/temples/mosques, and our traditions look a lot like everyone else’s. My great-grandfather was a Presbyterian pastor.

The exceptions to this are cleanliness and generosity: They are the central tenets of our daily lives, and treated with the seriousness of religious practice. The home and person should clean at all times. The Romani kitchen is expected to be spotless (although not everyone lives up to this, myself included). You might notice that some Romani don’t shake hands upon greeting—this is because it’s considered unclean. Anything you have should be available to someone in need, but particularly food. We eat often and well, and sharing food is an important part of Romani life.

Culture/identity issues

The first rule of being Romani is: You do not talk about being Romani.

Secrecy and assimilation have, literally, kept us alive for thousands of years. There is no part of the world where Romani have settled that has welcomed them. There’s a misconception that Romani are travelers by choice, but the reality is that we had no other option for most of our history. We were major victims of slavery in the medieval era, forced into assimilation throughout the 17- and 1800s, and targeted for genocide during the European Holocaust.

In the modern era, our children have been taken by the state “for their own safety” at rates higher than any other ethnic group in the United Kingdom. Since the end of the Kosovo War, Romani communities in that country have been systemically annihilated. Our women have been forcibly sterilized as recently as the 1970s. In 2008, two Romani children died at a crowded Italian beach while onlookers stood around doing absolutely nothing. There were witnesses quoted saying things like, “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”

France 2010: the government demolished at least 51 Romani communities because they planned to “repatriate” them—to send them back to their “countries of origin.” Except France was their country of origin. This led to years of violence and illegal deportation.

Why am I telling you all this?

Because I’m not going to tell you much about our culture. My family has spent their entire lives blending in with US mainstream culture, and blatantly lying about their ethnic origins. We don’t want you to be able to recognize us. We don’t want what happens to Romani in other parts of the world to start happening to us here. If you have a Romani friend or coworker, you probably do not know it. I’m considered a dangerous radical for even admitting I’m Roma to outsiders. 

If you’re interested in Romani cultural customs, I suggest reading/watching:

American Gypsy: A Memoir by Oksana Marafioti

We Are the Romani People by Ian F. Hancock

Ceija Stojka: Even Death Is Afraid of Auschwitz

That’ll be a good start.

Dating and relationships

Most of us date like any other American would, although I have noticed a tendency to marry younger. I married at 25, which was considered old in my family and very young in the rest of my community. I’d been with my husband for five years when we married, and this is also typical—we don’t “date around” as much as our Gadjo (non-Romani) neighbors. This has started to change in the new 20-somethings, I think, but my brother and similarly-aged cousins all followed this pattern.

I will mention that boys have more dating freedom than girls do, but less marital freedom. There is a lot more pressure for a boy to marry a “good Roma girl” than for a girl to marry a Rom. I think this is because Roma mothers handle most of the child-rearing, and therefore a child is thought to be “raised Romani” if its mother is Roma. (You can research the concept of “Romanipen” to understand this better.) That said, my brother married a non-Roma, and that was totally fine.

Divorce is really rare for traditional Romani couples, but not as uncommon if you marry an outsider. Probably about the same as the national average. For reference: My mother has only married Gadjo men, and she’s been married three times. HOWEVER, all three marriages occurred before she was 25, and she’s been with her third husband for 30 years. They actually lived in separate homes for years rather than divorce. There’s a strong stigma against it but, again, I think this is fading for the new generation.

As a bisexual Roma, I didn’t come out to my parents until after I married my cisgender male husband. HOWEVER, this wasn’t because I thought my parents would react badly—the only girl I was romantically involved with in high school was deeply closeted, and it would’ve immediately outed our relationship if I were known to like women. I kept quiet to protect her. When I did tell my parents, they were supportive and sad that I’d waited so long to tell them. None of my aunts, uncles, or cousins cared at all. Some of my extended family are bigots, sure, but definitely not more than in non-Romani families.

Daily struggles

People wear my race as a costume EVERY FUCKING YEAR. At my neighborhood Halloween party, the storyteller told my daughter she’d dressed as a “Gypsy Roma"—complete with coin belt and head scarf. She said this to a Roma child. Not that she knew that. I honestly wonder if she’d care?

Every Gypsy I’ve ever seen on TV or in movies is either a) magical or b) a criminal. Sometimes both. That’s a really hard thing to take in as an adult, and heartbreaking to explain to my child.

Country music really sucks for us. We are blamed for everybody else’s shitty behavior. Remember that Zac Brown song? “You gotta gypsy soul to blame and you were born for leaving.” That’s the usual sentiment.

Because my family doesn’t want to be outed to their communities, I’m under pressure to keep quiet about my race. That means, as a writer, that I can’t openly call myself a Roma in my biographies or press releases—if I do, I out my entire family. People still lose jobs over being Romani. They still have their families targeted by Child Protective Services. And, of course, most of my relatives have been lying to the people around them about their ethnicity for years. If they’re caught at it, it will only reinforce the stereotype that Romani people can’t be trusted.

Secrecy is always a struggle. It’s hard to bite your tongue as a kid when people mock and denigrate your family, without even realizing they’re talking about you. We don’t educate ignorant outsiders, the way I’m trying to do now. We don’t tell our own stories. Most of us don’t even want to.

Micro-aggressions

1)      The word “gypped.” This is a word meaning “cheated or swindled,” and it is a racial slur. STOP USING THIS FUCKING WORD.

2)      Seeing the word “Gypsy” slapped on everything from travel trailers to face wash, none of which is EVER being created or sold by a Romani or Traveller person. I cannot fathom an actual Gypsy putting that word on their products, unless they were an author or entertainer of some kind.

3)      “Can you tell fortunes? Was your grandmother a psychic?”

4)      When non-Romani people wax rhapsodic about their “Gypsy souls.”

5)      “Do you live in a caravan?” Ugh. Some people do, sure. I never have, but my grandfather did for a while. My great-great grandparents lived in a traditional wagon, or “vardo”—they were forced to live in them from birth to death because it was illegal for my ancestors to buy property pretty much anywhere in Europe.

6)      So, bonus micro-aggression: Seeking to recreate a “Gypsy wagon” for fun is racist.

7)      People name their pets Gypsy all the time. When is the last time you met a dog named Chinese?

8)      Assuming our elders (parents, grandparents) are racists, homophobes, or under-educated.

Things I’d like to see less of

1)      The MAGICAL GYPSY WOMAN™

2)      Similarly, The ROUGISH GYPSY CRIMINALS™

3)      Romani living in caravans—the majority of us live in permanent homes and travel for fun

4)      Anything where we steal/find/get handed a baby that isn’t ours

5)      Undereducated Romani children

6)      Romani women who sleep around or walk out on relationships—everybody’s an individual but, culturally, Romani are expected to be virgin brides and grooms, and divorce is frowned upon

7)      Super-hot Romani men and women in revealing outfits, dancing

8)      Roma child marriages—yes, they happen, but this is a VERY OLD-FASHIONED practice that makes most Romani cringe, and the “children” are 16-19

9)      Our incredible singing voices and instrument playing (although, full disclosure: my family is extremely musical, and I don’t personally know any Romani people who aren’t)

10)   Submissive Roma brides and domineering Rom men

11)   Violent Romani athletes—particularly in regards to boxing, which was something Rom did in the past as a way to make money in communities where they couldn’t legally work

Things I’d like to see more of

1)      College-educated Romani

2)      Romani characters married to non-Romani (we call them “Gadjo”)

3)      Romani love interests who aren’t Manic Pixie Dream Gypsies (I see you, Johnny Depp)

4)      Unmarried adult Romani

5)      Romani working in fields other than physical labor or the arts—science, for example, or education; hell, even a coffee shop

6)      Modern Romani who are mixed-race (as most of us are)

7)      Romani with horses! Because that’s a real, significant cultural legacy!

8)      Romani leaders of non-Romani people

9)      LGBTQA+ Romani (we exist! And our families don’t hate us!)

10)   Teenage Romani exploring their own culture and history

Check out more POC Profiles here or submit your own.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Anonymous asked: Your blog isn’t what I expected for someone who champions conservative values because it is very rich in celebrating culture and strikes a very humane pose. I learn a great deal from your clever and playful posts. Now and again your feminism reveals itself and so I wonder what kind of feminist are you, if at all? It’s a little confusing for a self professing conservative blog.  

I must thank you for your kind words about my blog and your praise is undeserved but I do appreciate that you enjoy aspects of high culture that you may not have come across.

My conservatism is not political or ideological per se and - I get this a lot - not taken from the rather inflammatory American discourse of left and right that is currently playing itself out in America. For example my distaste for the likes of Trump is well known and I have not been shy in poking fun at him here on my blog. Partly because he’s not a real conservative in my eyes but a .... < insert as many expletives as you want here > ....but mainly he has no character. My point is my conservatism isn’t defined by what goes on across from the pond.

Rather my conservatism is rooted in deeply British intellectual traditions and draw in inspiration from Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott, Roger Scruton, and other British thinkers as well as cultural writers like Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Waugh. So it’s a state of mind or a state of being rather than a rigid ideological set of beliefs.

Of course there is a lot of overlap of shared values and perspectives between the conservatism found elsewhere and what it is has historically been in English history. But my conservative beliefs are not tied to a political party for example. I wash my hands of politicians of all stripes if you must know. I won’t get into that right now but I hope to come back and and address it in a later post.

As for my feminism that is indeed an interesting question. It’s a very loaded and combustible word especially in these volatile times where vitriol and victimhood demonisation rather than civility and honest discussion so often flavour our social discourse on present day culture and politics.

I would be fine to describe myself as an old school feminist if I am allowing myself to be labelled that is. And in that case there is no incompatibility between being that sort of small ‘f’ feminist and someone who holds a conservative temperament. They are mutually compatible.

To understand what I mean let me give you a potted history of feminism. It’s very broad brush and I know I am over simplifying the rich history of each wave of feminism so I’m making this caveat here.

Broadly speaking the feminist movement is usually broken up into three “waves.” The first wave in the late 19th and early 20th centuries pushed for political equality. The second wave, in the 1960s and 1970s, pushed for legal and professional equality. And the third wave, in the past couple decades but especially now, has pushed for social equality as well as social and racial justice. It is the first wave and bits of the second wave that I broadly identify my feminism with.

Why is that?

Again broadly speaking, in the first wave and overlapping with the second wave legal and political equality are clearly defined and measurable, but in the third wave (the current wave) social equality and social justice is murky and complicated.

Indeed the current feminist movement - which now also includes race and trans issues in a big way - is not a protest against unjust laws or sexist institutions as much as it is the protest against people’s unconscious beliefs as well as centuries-worth of cultural norms and heritage that have been biased in some ways against women but also crucially have served women reasonably well in unwritten ways.

Of course women still get screwed over in myriad ways. It’s just that whereas before it was an open and accepted part of society, today nearly all - as they see it - is non-obvious and even unconscious. So we have moved from policing legalised equality opporttunities to policing thought.

I understand the resentment - some of it sincere - against the perceived unjustness of women’s lot in life. But this third wave of feminism is fuelled in raw emotion, dollops of self-victimhood, and selfish avoidance of personal responsibility. Indeed it bloats itself by latching onto every social and racial outrage of the moment.

It becomes incredibly difficult to actually define ‘equality’ not in terms of the goals of the first wave of feminists or even the second because we can objectively measure legal, civil and political goals e.g. It’s easy to measure whether boys and girls are receiving the same funding in schools. It’s easy to see whether a man and woman are being paid appropriately for the same work. But how does one measure equality in terms of social justice? If people have a visceral dislike of Ms X over Mr Y is it because she’s a woman or only because she’s a shitty human being in person?

The problem is that feminism is more than a philosophy or a group of beliefs. It is, now, also a political movement, a social identity, as well as a set of institutions. In other words, it’s become tribal identity politics thanks to the abstract ideological currents of cultural Marxism.

Once a philosophy goes tribal, its beliefs no longer exist to serve some moral principle, but rather they exist to serve the promotion of the group - with all their unconscious biases and preferences for people who pass our ‘purity test’ of what true believers should be i.e. like us, built in.

So we end up in this crazy situation where tribal feminism laid out a specific set of paranoid beliefs  - that everywhere you look there is constant oppression from the patriarchy, that masculinity is inherently violent, and that the only differences between men and women are figments of our cultural imagination, not based on biology or science.

Anyone who contradicted or questioned these beliefs soon found themselves kicked out of the tribe. They became one of the oppressors. And the people who pushed these beliefs to their furthest conclusions — that penises were a cultural construction of oppression, that school mascots encourage rape and sexual violence, and that marriage is state sanctioned rape or as is now the current fad that biological sex is not a scientific fact or not recognising preferred pronouns is a form of hate speech etc— were rewarded with greater status within the tribe.

Often those shouting the loudest have been white middle class educated liberals who try to outcompete each other within the tribe with such virtue signalling. Since the expansion of higher education in the 1980s in Britain (and the US too I think), a lot of these misguided young people have been doing useless university degrees - gender studies, performing arts, communication studies, ethnic studies etc - that have no application in the real world of work. I listen to CEOs and other hiring executives and they are shocked at how uneducated graduate students are and how such graduates lack even the basic skills in logic and critical problem solving. And they seem so fragile to criticism.

In a rapidly changing global economy, a society if it wants to progress and prosper is in need of  valuing skills, languages, technical knowledge, and general competence (i.e critical thinking) but all too often what our current society has instead are middle class young men and women with a useless piece of toilet paper that passes for a university degree, a mountain of monetary debt, and no job prospects. No wonder they feel it’s someone else’s fault they can’t get on to that first rung of the ladder of life and decide instead that pulling down statues is more cathartic and vague calls to end ‘institutional systemic racism’. Oh I digress....sorry.

My real issue with the current wave of feminists is that they have an attitude problem.

Previous generations of feminists sacrificed a great deal in getting women the right to vote, to go to university, to have an equal education, for protection from domestic violence, and workplace discrimination, and equal pay, and fair divorce laws. All these are good things and none actually undermine the natural order of things such as marriage or family. It is these women I truly admire and I am inspired by in my own life because of their grit and relentless drive and not curl up into a ball of self pity and victimhood.

More importantly they did so NOT at the expense of men. Indeed they sought not to replace men but to seek parity in legal ways to ensure equality of opportunity (not outcomes). This is often forgotten but is important to stress.

Certainly for the first wave of feminists they did not hate men but rather celebrated them. Pioneers such as Amelia Earhart - to give a personal example close to my heart as a former military aviator myself - admired men a great deal. Othern women like another heroine of mine, Gettrude Bell, the first woman to get a First Class honours History degree at Oxford and renowned archaeologist and Middle East trraveller and power breaker never lost her admiration for her male peers.

I love men too as a general observation. I admire many that I am blessed to know in my life. I admire them not because they are necessarily men but primarily because of their character. It’s their character makes me want to emulate them by making me determined and disciplined to achieve my own life goals through grit and effort.

Character for me is how I judge anyone. It matters not to me your colour, creed or sexual orientation. But what matters is your actions.

I find it surreal that we have gone from a world where Christian driven Martin Luther King envisaged a world where a person would be judged from the content of their character and not the colour of their skin (or gender) to one where it’s been reversed 360 degrees. Now we are expected to judge people by the colour of their skin, their gender and sexual orientation. So what one appears on the outside is more important than what’s on the inside. It’s errant nonsense and a betrayal of the sacrifices of those who fought for equality for all by past generations.

Moreover as a Christian, such notions are unbiblical. The bible doesn’t recognise race - despite what slave owners down the ages have believed - nor gender - despite what the narrow minded men in pulpits have spewed out down the centuries - but it does recognise the fact of original sin in the human condition. We are all fallen, we are all broken, and we are all in need of grace.

Even if one isn’t religious inclined there is something else to consider.

For past generations the stakes were so big. By contrast this present generation’s stakes seem petty and small. Indeed the current generation’s struggle comes down to fighting for safe spaces, trigger warnings and micro aggressions. In other words, it’s just about the protection of feelings. No wonder our generation is seen as the snowflake generation.

A lot of this nonsense can be put down to the intellectually fraudulent teachings of critical theory and post colonial studies in the liberal arts departments on university campuses and how such ideas have and continue to seep into the mainstream conversation with such concepts as ‘white privilege’, ‘white fragility’, ‘whites lives don’t matter’, ‘abolish whiteness’ ‘rape culture’ etc which feels satisfying as intellectual masturbation but has no resonance in the real world where people get on with the daily struggle of making something of their lives.

But yet its critical mass is unsustainable because the ideas inherent within it are intellectually unstable and will eventually implode in on itself - witness the current war between feminists (dismissed uncharitably as terfs) who define women by their biological sex and want to protect their sexual identity from those who for example are championing trans rights as sexuality defined primarily as a social construct. So you have third wave feminists taking completely different stances on the same issues. For instance there’s the sex positive feminists and there’s also anti-porn, sex negative feminists. How can the same thing either be empowering or demeaning? There are so many third wave feminists taking completely different stances on the same exact topics that it’s difficult to even place what they want anymore.The rallying cries of third wave feminism have largely been issues that show only one side of the story and leave out a lot of pertinent details.

But the totality of the damage done to the cultural fabric of society is already there to see. Already now we are in this Orwellian scenario where one has to police feelings so that these feminists don’t feel marginalised or oppressed in some undefinable way. This is what current Western culture has been reduced to. I find it ironic in this current politically charged times, that conservatives have become the defenders of liberalism, or at least the defence of the principle of free speech.

To me the Third Wave feminism battle cry seems to be: Once more but with feelings.

With all due respect, fuck feelings. Grow up.

I always ask the same question to friends who are caught up in this current madness be they BLM activists or third wave feminists (yes, I do have friends in these circles because I don’t define my friends by their beliefs but by their character): compared to what?

We live in a systemic racist society! Compared to what?

We live in a patriarchal society where women are subjugated daily! Compared to what?

We live in an authoritarian state! Compared to what?

We live in a corrupt society of privileged elites! Compared to what?

Third-wave? Not so much. By vast majorities, women today are spurning the label of “feminist” - it’s become an antagonising, miserable, culturally Marxian code word for a far-left movement that seeks to confine women into boxes of ‘wokeness’.

For sure, Western societies and culture have its faults - and we should always be aware of that and make meaningful reforms towards that end. Western societies are not perfect but compared to other societies - China? Russia? Saudi Arabia? - in the world today are we really that bad?

Where is this utopian society that you speak of? Has there ever been one in recorded history? As H.L. Mencken memorably put it, “An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.“

I prefer to live in a broken world that is rather than one imagined. When we are rooted in reality and empirical experience can we actually stop wasting time on ‘hurt feelings’ and grievances construed through abstract ideological constructs and get on with making our society better bit by bit so that we can then hand over for our children and grandchildren to inherit a better world, not a perfect one.

Thanks for your question.

[yokelfelonking]

Welcome to Tumblr!  You may have noticed that there are some terms used here that do not mean quite what you thought they did.  This is because the majority of site users are infected with brain worms.  However, here is a handy guide to help you translate these terms into normal human language!

Bootlicker:  a generic term used to automatically win any argument.  Just call someone a “bootlicker,” and you win!

Capitalism:  any time I have to pay money for something.

Coded:  any time my brain worms make me associate a fictional character with a racial or ethnic group, sexual orientation, or neurological status.

Colonialism:  a negative term for any time there is any interaction whatsoever between white people and non-white people.

Cultural appropriation:  see “colonialism.”

Degeneracy:  anything I, a traditionalist, don’t like.

Dogwhistle:  whenever I read my own stereotypes into a statement about a group; this somehow makes the statement-maker, rather than me, a bigot.  See “coded.”

Fascist:  anyone who criticizes or disagrees with me, a progressive, about anything, or happens to agree with something that someone who disagreed with a progressive may have once said.

Genocide:  any time anything happens to more than one member of a race or ethnic group.

Intrusive thoughts: any thought I have that is not immediately related to my current task at hand.

King:  a man who does anything whatsoever that I vaguely approve of.

Misogyny:  any time: A.)  someone disagrees with anything I, a feminist, have to say about anything; or B.) a man does anything whatsoever, including exist.

Nazi:  see “fascist”.

Pedophilia:  any time there is romantic involvement between two people of any age, be they real or fictional, who have any age difference whatsoever between them.

Pornography:  any time a woman does anything remotely sexual outside the confines of either Christian marriage or political lesbianism.

Sex trafficking:  see “pornography.”

Socialism:  any time: A.) the government does anything; or B.) people share.

Transsexual:  who fucking knows at this point.

Transphobia:  any time someone thinks a “transsexual” is not exactly the same as a typical member of one of the two biological sexes.  Since no one on this hellsite can agree on just what a transsexual is, this can, theoretically, mean anything.

White supremacy:  any time a white person does anything, including exist.

Whitewashing:  Any time a character’s skin is not shaded as the darkest possible skin color shown in any type of official artwork.

This list is far from comprehensive.  Feel free to add your own, as the variations in mental and spiritual disease on this hellsite are wonderful and magnificent to behold, like watching someone’s skull explode in slow motion!

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

Dangerous Foundations: an Argument Against the "Identity" in Identity Politics

I believe that Identity — always mythical and invented — is in itself oppressive, and that a politics founded upon one or another particular Identity is a dangerous strategy. These dangers are numerous, and include: the creation and policing of arbitrary boundaries of Identity, rigorous essentialism, the intensification of the norms associated with the Identity, the suppression and homogenisation of difference within, and the failure to recognise commonalities across boundaries of Identity.

In line with Judith Butler and Donna Haraway, I want to suggest that a politics of affinity, rather than Identity, has vastly more potential to transform the myriad of oppressive relations that we are subject to, and participate in, every day. And though this essay is primarily argued through the lens of the sex/gender/desire matrix, the implications for other struggles based around Identity are thoroughly implied.

. . . . .

The ‘Identity’ of identity politics requires some investigation. It isn’t the more mundane aspects of our identity such as our name, our age, or perhaps the car we drive, though all of these could become the basis for capital-‘I’ Identity. Rather, the idea of Identity used here includes sex/gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, nationalism, sometimes class (when it defines who one ‘is’) or even political allegiances (‘anarchist’ included). Identity in this sense is an extrapolation from some personal aspect of our selves — parts of our body, our desires, beliefs, etc. — to a social category. In turn, being a member of such a social category is deemed to say something important about ourselves. One boy being attracted to another boy, for example, is one desire among the thousands of everyday desires we have. But in contemporary society, this desire becomes something much bigger: it locates the boy in a social category, that of the ‘homosexual’ (and, thus, not a heterosexual), which then implies a number of things about the boy, a number of essential qualities. Perhaps he is a sissy, or artistic, likes shopping, or any other number of homosexual stereotypes.

It says something else too: in being homosexual, the boy becomes located within a social hierarchy. He is lesser than heterosexuals, perhaps on par with bisexuals (or perhaps, as half-bloods, they are lower still?), and no doubt above transsexuals. Identity is essential to these sorts of hierarchies. Racism, sexism, compulsory heterosexuality, and so on, require that an otherwise unique individual become Identified, given an appropriate placing within the various hierarchies of Identity, and treated in accordance with the value, traits and norms associated with that Identity. Those Identities deemed of highest value are usually considered normal, and deviations beyond its boundaries are considered lesser and subservient, or sometimes even abhorrent (and in need of rectification).

Despite this hierarchy, the different identities actually need each other to make sense: the heterosexual only makes sense in relation to the homosexual, defined as its opposite, its relational ‘other,’ and likewise man and woman only remain stable categories of identity when they have each other to be defined against: I am a woman because I have a vagina which a man does not have.

In being the basis for founding much of our behaviour, and our conceptions of the world and each other, these identity categories need a certain solidity, a foundation from which they can be asserted. And, obviously, simply being relational to one another doesn’t provide this foundation. Identities are therefore deemed as natural, as biological or god-given. In having a penis one joins the identity group of ‘men,’ being like them in several very important ways, and exercising the power attributed to them; and that this is natural therefore puts it beyond question. The fact that these identities constantly change in meaning or are simply invented, that the homosexual identity, for example, was only invented in the last decade of the nineteenth century, must therefore be forgotten or else history rewritten.

Identity works in two ways. It firstly locates someone within a social category, and thus within a particular hierarchy: it shapes how people relate to one another. In this operation, social identities are applied to ourselves from an external source, and we are judged and treated accordingly. What is more insidious, however, is when identity categories become internalised. They become standards to which we aspire, and we seek to take on and enact these categories based on what we consider to be their essential qualities. And so in being located as a man one becomes attributed the power granted to the social category of men (in those situations where this power is recognised, that is), but one also becomes subject to the norms of masculinity. To be a man, one must constantly act as a man, must properly perform their masculinity, and re-establish their identity in new situations. Identity, therefore, is a prescription; it defines how people should act. And it is a cause of much pain when people who are identified as a particular identity fail to perform that identity properly: they must constantly monitor their movements, their speech, their interests, and so on, or else face retribution from those around them. In properly performing their identity, however, they simultaneously recreate the norms associated with that identity, subtly but effectively policing the boundaries of the category. And of course, people can, and often do, police the boundaries of identity much more explicitly in employing a continuum of violence, from non-verbal and symbolic gestures of disapproval, verbal taunting, social isolation, physical violence and even death.

. . . . .

It’s a peculiar thing that most all of the movements seeking to overcome identity-based hierarchies have sought not to dismantle the founding identity, but have instead asserted it ever more strongly, demanding equality of identities. This is identity politics, and it has been the dominant method of approaching these struggles for well over 200 years.

The Identity part of identity politics has such appeal partly as a result of the ‘existential solidity’ Identity provides. Or, put differently, it gives us a concrete foundation for our place in the world, our position within the natural order of things. It helps put to rest any number of niggling questions about ‘who we really are.’

The dominance of identity politics itself is no doubt in part because there is a very real sense of solidarity to be found amongst people subject to a similar experience. In coming together, and in realising that individual experiences are shared across a number of people, there is a great sense of strength to be gained. One of the first moves I made in coming to terms with my obviously deviant sexual desires was to seek out and talk to other guys my age, who had come out or were coming out, to share stories and learn survival strategies from one another, and to simply provide support. Building a political strategy upon these linkages isn’t such a leap.

There is possibly a second reason for its dominance as a strategy, in that it is particularly well suited to liberal politicking. The liberal paradigm of equal rights before the State requires, firstly, recognition before the State. This cannot be achieved without a well-defined ‘special interest’ or lobby group, whose boundaries are clearly delineated, and with leaders or organisations that can speak on behalf of the group, that can represent it before the State. Within this liberal logic of recognition and representation, Identity therefore becomes the bedrock upon which it is based, and it is not politically sensible to question this foundation.

In any case, identity politics has dominated, based upon the familiar strategy of oppressed identity groups asserting their Identity, demonstrating the common condition of oppression and the unity across that Identity, and demanding equality alongside other Identities.

. . . . .

So what is wrong with identity politics? How could it possibly be dangerous? I want to use Judith Butler’s ‘matrix’ of sex/gender/desire to make my points here. In this matrix, sex and gender are separated in the classic (but problematic) division between the biological body (sex) and the social/cultural body (gender). The French feminist Simone de Beauvoir’s famous line from The Second Sex makes this separation quite succinct: ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.’ Gender in this sense is the identity given to the biological body, including the prescriptions and norms given to specific bodies, the knowledge about those bodies, and so on. Desire is the last aspect of this matrix and describes sexual desire, whether for men or women, young or old, or any other number of sexual desires. The only two truly accepted sex/gender/desire matrices are male/man/hetero and female/woman/hetero. Jumbled matrices are obviously of a lesser status, and matrices which cannot be clearly described, such as hermaphrodite/neither masculine nor feminine/asexual, are abhorrent, or ‘abject.’ Drawing upon this framework, I want to try and illustrate some of the dangers of identity politics.

Identity politics reinforces (binary) divisions and is essentialist. In choosing not to transcend, but rather found their politics upon the boundaries of existing identity formations, identity politics tends to reinforce these divisions. Defining and redefining the nature of the identity upon which these strategies are founded results in a policing of the borders of that identity, and this often takes the form of controversies about where precisely the boundaries lie (are transgendered men to be considered alongside women? are bisexuals our allies or sexual traitors? etc.).

The unproblematic use of the identity categories of men/women and heterosexual/homosexual gives these categories a new life; it treats the categories as natural or biological, thus hiding their ‘invented’ nature. In doing so, the use of these categories engages in an often rigorous essentialism, entertaining the idea that there are indeed universal and ahistorical properties associated with sex, gender and sexuality, for example. This is particularly strange given the widespread feminist concern with detaching gender from sex. Judith Butler has commented that this separation should have radically destabilised the binary categories of gender, creating a proliferation of gender scripts (since male ≠ man, and female ≠ woman), but instead gender is talked about in the very same terms as sex, where gender and sex become one and the same again (and never mind that biological sex is itself not dualistic).[1] The same applies to the use of homosexual and heterosexual categories. Rather than seeking to reveal the multiplicity of desires within each of us that certainly transcend these categories, ‘gay pride,’ for example, has revelled in its distinct and separate identity to heterosexual culture.

Identity politics further entrenches individuals under the respective regime of identity. In calling upon individuals to embrace a particular identity, the individual either enters for the first time the regime of norms associated with that identity, or else has the norms brought upon them with renewed strength. Engaging in homosexual relations, for example, did not necessarily make one a homosexual prior to the gay rights movement (and still does not, of course). In the rise of homosexual identity politics, however, large numbers of people were called upon to ‘come out’ and be proud of being gay, to embrace the homosexual identity. Those who came to identify as gay found themselves brought under the norms of gay identity; they became subject to the homosexual discursive regime, and the stronger the insistence upon this identity, the stronger its norms came to bear.

When people don’t fit with these norms — for example, are hopeless at artistic endeavours, aren’t beautiful and slim, are macho, or are not hopelessly intrigued by shopping — the gay identity becomes either strongly alienating or, more commonly, works so as to transform them according to those very expectations. My personal experience of first identifying as gay and watching TV shows like Will and Grace was one of alienation (and disgust), followed by an attempt to bring myself into line with those expectations.

The assertion of identity within the gay rights movement also had the effect of creating an entirely new commercial market, where a large group of otherwise disparate people could now be collectively called upon through advertising to buy or partake in a variety of gay-oriented commodities and services. This was a similar operation to that of homosexual norms.

Identity politics homogenises and overrides difference within. In asserting a commonality across an identity, those that fall outside these descriptions have their voices silenced and actual differences are suppressed. This is especially true of identity politics when it engages in representation, where individuals or organisations who presume that their experiences are generalisable speak on behalf of all members of that particular identity. The dominant versions of second-wave feminism, for example, were regularly opposed from the 1960s up until the 1990s first by working-class women whose experiences were altogether different to the then-dominant middle-class feminists, then by black women, lesbian women, transsexual women, and a number of other intersections of identities and experiences. Another way of saying this is that identity politics often imposes a unity upon what are clearly divergent experiences.[2]

The dominant articulation of a particular identity not only silences those who fall outside its parameters, but also works to create new norms of identity. It was not just in watching Will and Grace that I came under the norms of homosexual identity, but also in the dominant voices of homosexual organisations, in the voices of ‘my own people.’ The media that they produced, the ‘help guides,’ and the stories that they told, had a much bigger effect than heterosexual media on creating the standards to which I believed I had to aspire. This was a form of internal control and regulation, though it was internal only with respect to the arbitrary boundaries of homosexual identity.

Identity politics reduces ‘internal’ power plays to secondary concern. This is very closely related to the last issue, because of course those doing the silencing were precisely those who were higher in other hierarchies, whether straight, white or upper/middle-class, for example. There is a very real and justifiable fear that these internal differences and hierarchies will shatter the supposed commonality of experience given to an identity. Therefore, equality is often sought first and foremost for the primary identity, and intra-identity hierarchies are suppressed for the sake of unity, to be dealt with as a secondary concern (such as at the annual conference). It thus encourages a piecemeal approach, ignoring that concrete relations of oppression and domination are experienced within a single field of experience.

Identity politics masks commonalities that transcend the boundaries of identity. Identity politics often frames oppression as singularly and uniquely experienced by one particular identity to which others, at most, can act as allies. This masks the shared interests some within an identity category may share with others designated beyond its boundaries. Gay rights, for example, frames homosexual oppression as something only experienced by homosexuals. But what of the sissy boy who fails to live up to the norms of masculinity, who may in fact be largely heterosexual in desire but nonetheless gets pounded into school walls and jeered as a faggot? The same sex/gender/desire regime is clearly at play, but the closed boundaries of homosexual/heterosexual identity mask and obscure this commonality.

Identity politics often encourages limited models of power. It frames power as ‘them’ versus ‘us,’ as one identity group dominating another. Heterosexuals oppress homosexuals, men oppress women, sex-dominants oppress intersex/non-sex people. As a general description this is often true, but by itself it misses at least two further aspects. It misses how power is also created bottom-up, which is to say there are generalised practices that occur across identities that re-create norms and further entrench identity formations. Where, for example, do the norms of masculinity and femininity come from? who polices their boundaries? who exercises violence when norms are broken? The production of these norms and their maintenance cannot be reduced to one group, not even in a general way.

The second aspect often overlooked in identity politics is when the general oppressor/oppressed relation becomes conceived as a hard-and-fast rule, a totalising form of power where all relationships are re-coded in this way. When, at the concrete and everyday level, these relations are reversed or otherwise broken, identity politics often tends to treat them as anomalies, and thus sidelines the experience completely.

. . . . .

These problems around founding a political strategy upon identity have been well known within feminist and queer theory for some time. The fear was that, without asserting a central point of commonality and unity in Identity, there was no other way to continue the feminist/queer project. And so the notion of ‘strategic essentialism’ was developed, which posed a project based around ‘womanhood,’ for example, which was conscious of its mythical founding principle, but which used it nonetheless as a necessary point of unity. While strategic in its intention, the project rapidly digressed towards explicit essentialism only to be renounced by one of its original theorists, Gayatri Spivak.

Can we imagine a politics against Identity-based oppression that is not itself founded upon Identity? But if not Identity, around what do we come together? One answer to this has been what has been called a ‘politics of affinity.’ A ‘politics of affinity’ is politics that seeks cooperation between people based upon similarities in political project, in vision, and in methods. It is a series of associations formed not upon who we are today, but based on how we desire to change and what we desire to effect, whether that be a dismantling of gender scripts, the creation of practices that encourage egalitarian relations, and so on. This is therefore not a project founded upon existing categories of Identity, but instead ‘marks out a self-consciously constructed space that cannot affirm the capacity to act on the basis of natural identification, but only on the basis of conscious coalition, of affinity, of political kinship’ (Donna Haraway, 1991: 156).

A politics of affinity seeks to abandon Identity as its founding principle, and seeks in its methods not to maintain and reinscribe the boundaries of Identity. It does not, however, pretend Identity doesn’t exist. Indeed, Identity is so thoroughly pervasive that it is difficult to imagine a politics without it. A politics of affinity therefore embodies at least two moments. The first moment is a recognition and interrogation of existing categories of Identity, their boundaries, their essential properties, their myths of legitimacy, and the mechanisms through which they are deployed so as to create oppressive relations. In doing this, it also seeks to destabilise them: it is necessary to show the boundaries as arbitrary and overflowing, the myths of legitimacy as false, and to describe the changing history of how those Identities have been understood or created.

This second moment involves a process of ‘disidentification,’ which is both a rejection of existing categories of Identity as a lived practice, and necessarily the creation of new performances, new scripts, perhaps even new Identities (to be abandoned and undermined the moment they take hold). Identities maintain their grasp only partially through ideas; the more substantial component to Identity maintenance is in the practices and performances of our everyday lives.

The rejection of Identity therefore means the rejection and concomitant creation of new ways of living. It means behaving differently, trampling scripts of Identity (and not simply inversing them either) and creating ourselves anew with one another through collective experiments. These experiments in living must seek to confront existing practices of domination, but they also allow for a positive conception of freedom not possible within identity politics: the creation of practices that further extend the possibilities of living for everyone.

In doing so, in seeking to spread a project of disidentification, the hope is that the foundations for Identity-based oppressions will be undermined, and new egalitarian practices developed in their stead. Judith Butler has ironically suggested that more might be achieved by searching for points of disidentification than identification, and that in this process a politics of affinity, and not identity, may be forged.

* A politics of affinity… is about abandoning the fantasy that fixed, stable identities are possible and desirable, that one identity is better than another, that superior identities deserve more of the good and less of the bad that a social order has to offer, and that the state form should act as the arbiter of who gets what (Richard Day, 2005: 188)

Endnotes

1. ‘If gender is the cultural meanings that the sexed body assumes, then a gender cannot be said to follow from a sex in any one way. Taken to its logical limit, the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders’ (Judith Butler, 2006: 9).

2. ‘These domains of exclusion reveal the coercive and regulatory consequences of that construction, even when that construction has been elaborated for emancipatory purposes. Indeed, the fragmentation within feminism and the paradoxical opposition to feminism of ‘women’ whom feminism claims to represent suggest the necessary limits of identity politics’ (Judith Butler, 2006: 6).

[arcticdementor]

When I think of the Waverly Diner on 6th Avenue and Waverly Place in Greenwich Village, I am moved by romantic nostalgia. By that I only mean that when I think of the Waverly I feel, in some way, what it was like to be young and in the rush of the conversation. The conversation was everything. It flowed all around us, in the subways and the streets, in the diners and the high-rise apartments, and if you could master it, it could take you anywhere. You could still smoke inside of diners back then and sometimes we spent whole days around an ashtray and a plate of disco fries, getting refills on the coffee. I’m not saying all the arguments were good, but sometimes it was thrilling.

Perhaps that’s a uniquely New York thing, to place so much faith in talking. But it once felt very American, too; the diner-booth yapper animated by argument, one version of the big city fast talker who reflected an aspect of the national character right there alongside the taciturn cowboy, the trapper frontiersman, and the Puritan. American because, if you could think it and you could argue it, then maybe you could be it, too. It was at least possible. And it was democratic in the best sense. You could talk to anyone, butt into any stranger’s conversation, as long as you had something interesting to say.

I don’t know how to argue in America anymore, or whether it’s even worth it. For someone like me, that is a real tragedy and so I would like to understand how this new reality came about.

There are distinct and deep-rooted traditions of rational empiricism and religious sermonizing in American history. But these two modes seem to have become fused together in a new form of argumentation that is validated by elite institutions like the universities, The New York Times, Gracie Mansion, and especially on the new technology platforms where battles over the discourse are now waged. The new mode is argument by commandment: It borrows the form to game the discourse of rational argumentation in order to issue moral commandments. No official doctrine yet exists for this syncretic belief system but its features have been on display in all of the major debates over political morality of the past decade. Marrying the technical nomenclature of rational proof to the soaring eschatology of the sermon, it releases adherents from the normal bounds of reason. The arguer-commander is animated by a vision of secular hell—unremitting racial oppression that never improves despite myths about progress; society as a ceaseless subjection to rape and sexual assault; Trump himself, arriving to inaugurate a Luciferean reign of torture. Those in possession of this vision do not offer the possibility of redemption or transcendence, they come to deliver justice. In possession of justice, the arguer-commander is free at any moment to throw off the cloak of reason and proclaim you a bigot—racist, sexist, transphobe—who must be fired from your job and socially shunned.

Practitioners of the new argument bolster their rationalist veneer with constant appeals to forms of authority that come in equal parts from biology and elite credentialing. Have you noticed how many people, especially online, start their statements by telling you their profession or their identity group: As a privileged white woman; as a doctoral student in applied linguistics; as a progressive Jewish BIPOC paleontologist—and so on? These are military salutes, which are used to establish rank between fellow “az-uhs” while distinguishing them as a class from the civilian population. You must always listen to the experts, the new form of argument insists, and to the science. Anything else would be invalid; science denialism; not rational; immoral.

Because of the way it toggles back and forth between rationalism and religiosity, switching categories by taking recourse to one when the other is questioned, the new form of argument-commandment, rather than invalidating itself or foundering on its own contradictions, becomes, somehow, rhetorically invincible—through the demonstration of power relations that the arguer denies exist, but are plainly manifest in the progress of the argument.

…

Argument itself requires that certain fundamental questions are settled and beyond dispute. In order to argue over whether the sky is blue, we’ll have to agree on what the sky is. The new argumentation has not only vastly expanded the number of subjects that are supposed to be beyond argumentation, it has, by a sleight of hand, reversed the nature of the matters that cannot be questioned. Now, it is precisely the most contentious issues—is biological sex a valid concept? Is racism and abuse so widespread in American law enforcement that we should immediately defund the police?—that must be accepted a priori.

To insist that the conclusion that the arguer wishes to reach, with its implied corollary commandment, must be accepted by his or her opponent as a premise before the argument begins is not the move of a person who has confidence in their truth. It is the opposite of any form of reasoned argument. It is coercive. Except the people who argue this way claim that they cannot possibly be coercive, because you must accept the premise that they don’t have power—even if they are editing The New York Times Magazine, or threatening to get you fired from your job. You say they can’t have it both ways? They say, why not—and then accuse you of opposing the powerless, which, it turns out, is a form of authority that cannot be trumped.

The reason we cannot argue about certain things is because they have already been proven true and the truth they have established is such a significant moral advance—like ending child sacrifice—that to question the rational basis on which the truth rests is to risk eroding a foundation of the moral progress that separates us from encroaching barbarism. If you want to argue about those things, then you are a barbarian—which means that argument with you is impossible, because the only argument that barbarians understand is being put to the sword or sent off to a labor camp.

Do you need me to give you an example of this kind of argument? Not really, because such arguments have become the norm. But here are a few recent examples:

…

Here are the two parts of the argument by commandment. There is the empirical assertion—let’s call it X. And there is the moral claim suggested by, or perhaps even mandated by the evidence of X—let’s call that Y. Empirical evidence shows that there is an epidemic of sexual assault against women, that epidemic requires a drastic corrective, and that corrective enshrines a moral claim and a commandment—American women are sexually victimized, egregiously and without the protections of a justice system that systemically discriminates against them. Therefore it is virtuous to “believe women” and to encode that belief formally in new procedures of law and justice.

Only it turns out the rational argument was wrong. The evidence did not actually show that 1 in 5 women would be sexually assaulted on a college campus, a statistic repeated by President Barack Obama himself to justify “sweeping changes in national policy.”

…

But if you were clueless enough to point out the flaws in rational claim X, even if just to wonder over matters of degree, then wham!—you were whacked in the face with moral claim Y. Evidence X isn’t evidence; it’s window dressing. And if you’re too stupid to understand that, then you’re probably an even worse person than the arguer supposed.

Because—think about it—who else but a fervent, drooling misogynist, or a rape apologist, or a real live rapist, namely someone both ideologically and emotionally invested in actively disbelieving women, would be so interested in picking apart the evidence that supported such an obviously virtuous and necessary claim—especially now, at a moment when people are literally dying? What basis would anyone have to question X aside from the desire to violate the moral value of Y?

…

The organs of reason and expertise have one by one, pledged their cultish loyalty to this new faith. A group of doctors wrote an article in Scientific American explaining why the mentioning or reading of the results of George Floyd’s autopsy was a racist act. Public health officials across the country, who had in May condemned public demonstrations in the strongest terms, now fully endorse the protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd. In a petition signed by some 1,200 health officials, they declare that it is incumbent on others in the profession to offer “unwavering support” to the current protesters as a matter of both moral and medical hygiene. They all together elide the difference between empirical claim and moral commandment by declaring that, “White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19.” And so, the merger of pseudorationalist discourse with the new American religion of anti-racism is completed.

America’s elite institutions now routinely make statements and use language that empirically is false. Indeed, they have taken the making, propagation, and enforcement of such language as their central mission. Because these statements are false, they make solutions to the real problems that are being gestured at impossible—while turning people who may want to actually address those problems into evil rape apologists and racists.

What we are witnessing, in the rapidly transforming norms around race, sex, and gender, is not an argument at all but a revolution in moral sentiment. In all revolutions, the new thing struggling to be born makes use of the old system in order to overthrow it. At present, institutions like the university, the press, and the medical profession preserve the appearance of reason, empiricism, and argument while altering, through edict and coercion, the meaning of essential terms in the moral lexicon, like fairness, equality, friendship, and love. That the effort wins so much support speaks to the deep contradictions and corruption of American meritocratic institutions, and of the liberal individualist moral regime it seeks to replace.

[racefortheironthrone]

Thoughts on House of X #4

Over the halfway mark!

Look At What They’ve Done Infographic:

Suprisingly for an issue that, in retrospect is the climax of the standard superheroics part of House of X, this issue starts with an infographic, which turns out to be one of the more controversial in HoX/PoX.

Foreshadowing what’s going to come at the end of the issue, the tone is already different from the pseudo-academic objectivity of earlier infographics, although the term “mutant erasure” evokes the activist-inspired, post-cultural turn work of critical race/gender/sexuality studies, which is something of a stepping-stone. 

By contrast, describing Wanda Maximoff as both “the pretender” (does this mean “not-really-a-mutant” or “not-really-Magneto’s-daughter” or both?) and as associated with the Avengers is incredibly politically pointed, which speak to a particular kind of mutant nationalist identity that bears a good deal of grievance towards even benevolent human institutions.

Similarly, the term “human-on-mutant violence” is way too evocative of real world debates over racism and police violence to be accidental on the author’s point. It’s a depressing thought, but the 616 probably sees a lot of “what about mutant-on-mutant violence?” derailings, maybe as many as creep up in threads about HoX/Pox here...

So let’s get at the controversy: can Bolivar Trask be blamed for the Genoshan genocide? Contrary to a few voices in the fandom, I would argue strongly for the affirmative. As we see from his initial appearance, Trask created the Sentinels entirely out of racial paranoia/hatred; moreover, Sentinels have no purpose other than A. destroying all mutants and B. subjugating the human race along the way. Cassandra Nova’s actions on Genosha absolutely followed the Trask playbook of both father and son, and indeed relied on Larry Trask’s assistance to carry it out, making it a Trask affair from beginning to end. 

On a final meta note, this infographic really speaks to the outsized impact that Morrison’s New X-Men and Bendis’ House of M had on the X-line for the last 15-20 years. 

Observation-Analysis-Invocation-Connection:

But before we get to the punching, we get one burst of Hickman’s fascination with singularities and transhumanism, where for the first time we really get an example of how the Krakoan biological approach is going to work, showing us a surprisingly complicated biomachine:

Trinity (who runs the Secondary/External Systems part of Krakoa) uses her technopathy to gather intelligence from human mechanical systems: the Aracibo Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, “re-tasked SETI radio telescopes," both of which are real things, and the “Dyson solar observatory,” which isn’t. 

Beast (who runs the Overwatch/Data Analysis part of Krakoa) uses Krakoan biocomputers and his own scientific genius to “extrapolate that data into an actionable forecast,” to deal with the delay caused by the immense distances between Krakoa and Sol’s Forge.

Professor X and Cerebro handle the direct Connection between Krakoa and the away team, while the Cuckoos link Trinity, Beast, Storm into a psychic link with Xavier, which means all of the parts of the system work seamlessly even as Storm handles the Invocation of visually representing Jean Grey’s thoughts.

If you step back and think about it, this is an astonishing technological feat: with minimal reliance on machine technology, Krakoa has established a NASA “KASA Mission Control” that can send data across half a solar system almost(?) instantly. 

That’s before we even get to the whole secondary purpose of the system, which is to allow Professor X and the Five to resurrect an up-to-date version of anyone who dies on the mission, which is one hell of a life-rope. 

Thematically, we see a really sharp distinction between biological and mechanical transhumanism/singularity: “KASA Mission Control” is described in biological terms, “function[ing] as a singular organism,” and also in religious terms, with “eight of us acting as one” explicitly labelled as “Communion.” And yet...the eight people involved retain their separate personalities and identities and no separate, artificial intelligence is created. 

Should We Fear the Worst?

 And across five hundred million miles, all Krakoa gets is bad news. Archangel and Husk, the redshirt’s redshirts on this mission, are dead before they do anything; Nightcrawler has some level of “internal injury,” and Wolverine almost had his arm blown off.

Incidentally, page 7 is where something of a problem crops up with Jean Grey’s characterization. As people have noted, Jean Grey starts off in the passive communications role (indeed, she’s even reliant on Monet to do that job) and doesn’t really improve from there. With the added context of her wearing her Silver Age miniskirt costume, it’s all a bit sus, especially if you’ve been reading a much more self-possessed, confident, and all-around more powerful version of Jean Grey in X-Men: Red. For a while, many of us were thinking that Jean is a younger backup, but that seems to have been Jossed by the resurrection ceremony in House of X #5. 

Better characterization abounds for the men: following their conversation from the previous issue, Cyclops and Wolverine have different perspectives about the question of whether to continue on with the mission (another key element of the special ops/espionage thriller genre). Cyclops emphasizes pushing on to make Warren and Paige’s sacrifice meaningful, Logan agrees but rather because of the existential stakes of the mission. There’s an interesting parallel there between Xavier and Magneto and means vs. ends. 

Following the catastrophe, Nightcrawler successfully inserts the struje team, while “Jean and Monet will stay to maintain our connection with Krakoa;”we know know that part was crucial in more than one way, but it is a continuation of some troubling gender dynamics.

Meanwhile, despite being “technically...just an observer” (and doesn’t that ring of all kinds of Cold War proxy wars), Omega Sentinel takes action to prompt Dr. Gregor into retaliation, similarly playing to the nationalistic theme of “if you don’t, he will have died for nothing.” 

Orchis’ retaliation doesn’t go so well, as we see Wolverine carving his way through an AIM securtiy team and Nightcrawler bloodlessly tying up two scientists (note the further emphasis on differing personalities and values; whoever these X-Men might be, they’re not mindless followers) towards popping two of the four constraint collars.

Unfortunately, this is followed up by a couple pages of more Jean Grey being awfully Damselly: yes, she’s holding open the connection, but she’s coded as way more helpless and indecisive than Monet (who gets to go out like a badass defending the shuttle), and the line “I dunno what to say, Marvel Girl. Try harder” really sums it all up. So far, this is reading a lot more like Stan Lee’s Jean Grey (but not Jack Kirby’s) than Chris Claremont’s. 

With the tension ratcheting ever-higher, we see Cyclops succeeding at his mission, while Mystique...doesn’t and then gets promptly blown out an airlock. The “habitat” connection and the odd business with her getting “turned around” despite having the plans for the base in her head like everyone else is highly suspicious (it might suggest the use of a Krakoa flower, but no one’s ever suggested what her motivation would be for doing so), but it’ll have to go on the list of plot threads that weren’t resolved in House of X.

In a development that really ought to be troubling to more people, Dr. Gregor throws away whatever moral compunctions she has about waking up a potentially violently insane A.I because “I don’t let them stop us. No matter what,” a potentially existential downside to Omega’s strategy. 

Do Whatever It Takes:

Having reached the “darkest moment” in the story diagram, Professor X orders his students to “do whatever it takes” to prevent Mother Mold from coming on line. This prompts Cyclops to give the order to Nightcrawler and Wolverine to jump out into unprotected space to sever the last constraint collar. All in all, we’re following the traditional beats of the special ops/espionage genre pretty closely, down to the team leader’s moral anguish moment.

Appropriately, we then get a quiet moment where Kurt and Logan contemplate whether or what will be “waiting for us on the other side.” Even knowing what we know now about the resurrection system, there’s still a good deal of weight to this moment, because in a way this Kurt and this Logan are going to die and whether they’re the same Kurt and Logan who will be reborn is a matter I’ll take up in Powers of X #5 along with the difficult topic of the philosophy of identity. (I’m going to leave aside the question of them having gone to literal Heaven and Hell in the past, because my Doylist position is that those story threads were probably a bad idea and my Watsonian No Prize is that you can’t remember the afterlife once returned to earth.)

Surprisingly, things get only more metaphysically weird when the two teleport outside and Wolverine starts chopping his way through the last arm. Mother Mold wakes up and immdiately starts talking about Greek mythology. Mother Mold’s interpretation of the Titanomachy is a little choppy (as we might expect from an insane A.I): on the one hand, if humanity are the Olympian gods as the creator of the Sentinels and the mutants are the Titans because of “their spoiled lineage” (this doesn’t quite work, because the Titans preceded the Olympians), then the Sentinels being “Man” makes sense. And as someone who’s written his share of college papers about omniscience/predestination/free will in Greek myth and drama, there’s a plausible anti-theist position whereby human beings might “judge and find you both wanting.” (Although that language is too Book of Daniel for the Greeks.) On the other hand, if the Sentinels are man, them having “stolen your fire” doesn’t work either - humanity was given fire by the Titan Prometheus - unless the argument is that Wolverine is Prometheus because he yeets Mother Mold into the sun?

Regardless, it’s a very ominous note for Mother Mold to go out on, because the consistent anti-human/Olympian tone suggests this insane A.I might hate humans way more than it hates mutants. 

With the day seemingly saved, we transition into the Rogue One scenario where Cyclops is murdered by a vengeful Dr. Gregor and Jean is torn apart by Sentinel drones. 

As gruesome as all of this is, I think it does play a very important role in explaining a good deal of Charles Xavier’s change of mind with regard to human-mutant harmony and assimilation. While this incident didn’t prompt any of the decisions that he’s made along the way - this mission is happening post-Xavier’s announcement and a day before the U.N vote, making it quite late in the X^1 timeline - I think it does a good job of showing us the kind of thought patterns that have led Xavier to this conclusion. In addition to everything he’s seen from Moira’s past nine lives, which only lend a greater sense of urgency and the fear of inevitability, Xavier himself has experienced the deaths of “our children” over and over again as the founder of the X-Men, and clearly both the direct trauma (keep in mind, he’s hooked into the minds of all of his X-Men as they die) and the pain he feels at humanity’s apathy/atrocity fatigue, goes a long way to explaining why he’ll make the decision that integration and assimilation are no longer viable options.

For all the crap that people sometime sling at Hickman over his use of charts, I will say that the way that “NO MORE” weaponizes them by extra-textually demonstrating the breakdown of the facade of calm objectivity is incredibly effective.

[transmedicalism-saves-lives]

I am pretty sure I was blocked by the OP of this post, so. 

tervenwitch

the brain sex theory is inherently misogynistic and was debunked years ago. Try reading Cordelia Fine for a change instead on blindly clinging to the delusions of misogynists

@tervenwitch You mean the feminist philosopher? Why would I get any information on neurology from her, she’s not a neurologist? Studying the philosophy of science does not equate to studying science itself.

Also, we’re a sexually dimorphic species. Down to a cellular level, our organs are different between males and females. As a transsexual I am extremely aware of the female-ness of my body, it’s in my vocal chords, my fat distribution, and the size and thickness of many body parts. Why is acknowledging that one of the things that’s bigger in males is the brain stem “misogyny”? Brain sex isn’t about how smart you are, or whether you’re naturally emotional, or anything of the sort- it’s just about the physical differences between the physical organs, and there are several of those. I’ve compiled a list of sources for this claim, and if you’d like to read what actual neuroscientists, not philosophers, have to say on the topic of brain sex, feel free to give it a look.  

realwomenarewomen said: @transmedicalism-saves-lives Firstly its not possibly to be “neurologically a woman” because there is literally no such thing as a “female brain”. Brains are not gendered. The only human organs that are gender are sexual reproductive organs. The idea of “lady and gentlemen brains” is antiquated Neurosexism akin to eugenics or phrenology. So just stop that nonsense.

I can’t tag her, unfortunately, so apologies for that. I’m not sure you understand that, as stated above, we are a sexually dimorphic species. Voices, for example, aren’t at all related to the reproductive system and yet, in males, vocal chords are thicker than in females. Most organs have a differentiation between sexes. Now, maybe when you think “brain” you think “intellect,” but that’s only a small part of what brains do, how they function. The brain is a physical organ, and there are many small differences between male and female brains. It’s been shown, in transsexuals, that our brains are the same as those of the opposite sex. Here’s my list of vetted sources again. 

realwomenarewomen said: @transmedicalism-saves-lives Women’s historic and continued subordination has not arisen because some members of our species choose to identify with an inferior social role (and it would be an act of egregious victim-blaming to suggest that it has). It has emerged as a means by which males can dominate that half of the species that is capable of gestating children, and exploit their sexual and reproductive labour. This is why Title IX protections exist.

No, it’s got a lot to do with the fact that testosterone makes you a lot more physically strong and in less advanced societies that matters quite a bit. However, in the current first world countries, women are absolutely not oppressed. Women graduate every level of education at higher rates than men, are imprisoned far less frequently for the same crimes, are more likely to be hired, and have every legal right that a man has, plus a few that men don’t have, such as the right to refuse genital mutilation, and human rights that are not contingent on signing up for the selective service. As a matter of fact, most Title IX violations this year have been all-female groups that don’t allow men in. Ohio State was sued this year for discriminating against men, and Title IX was the reason. 

realwomenarewomen said: @transmedicalism-saves-lives The term “terf” is a manipulation intended to reframe feminist ideas and activism as “exclusionary”, rather than foundational to the woman’s liberation movement. In other words it as an attack on women centered political organizing and the basic theory that underpins feminist analysis of patriarchy.

What “feminist ideas,” exactly? Because first off, y’all never actually proved patriarchy theory, so if we’re going after antiquated theories here... 

But I digress. What exactly would you call yourself? You have an entire blog dedicated to the exclusion of a small minority of people. You seem obsessed with trans people, and our exclusion from your group (well, at least, trans womens, I’m not sure your thoughts on me, but it’d be a bit funny if it was only the straight guy you found to be acceptable, all things considered). Why do you put so much time and effort into excluding trans women, and then get upset when people point that out? It’s ridiculous to me. 

realwomenarewomen said: @transmedicalism-saves-lives ‘Cis’ is a term that has been hijacked from the field of chemistry. It basically refers to isomers of the same molecule on the same side of a plane. This term was never meant to be used to erase the differences between biological women and biological men who want to be biological women, whether from a dysphoria or anything else.

No, it hasn’t been hijacked. It’s a prefix. It’s Latin for “this side of,” and the opposite of the prefix “trans,” which means “across” in Latin. “Transsexual” means “crossing sexes,” whereas “cissexual” means “remaining on the same side of sex.” It’s not altogether that deep. 

Also, believe me, we’re aware of the differences. We wouldn’t go through all the trouble of getting surgery and taking hormones for the rest of our lives if we weren’t very much aware of the differences. However, those differences can be altered to a pretty dramatic effect, and ignoring that seems dishonest at best. I highly doubt you’d look at me, for example, and think “woman,” and I haven’t lived socially as a woman for years. There’s also the fact that my brain is physically male, but we’ve already covered that... 

realwomenarewomen said: @transmedicalism-saves-lives No one – women, men, children, or transgendered persons – should be subjected to any form of exploitation or targeted for discrimination. Transsexual and transgendered persons are entitled to the same human and civil rights as others.

Thanks, I agree. Everyone should have human and civil rights, no matter what, and I believe everyone should be as kind as possible to everyone else. That includes you. 

realwomenarewomen said: @transmedicalism-saves-lives Recognizing these rights, however, does not mean that we must accept that hormones and surgery transform men into women and women into men; or that persons who self-identify as members of the opposite sex are what they subjectively claim to be. So stop suicide baiting.

Where did I suicide bait? I’m sorry if that seemed to be apparent in anything I said, but I’m very much against any kind of suicide or self-harm. If you’re feeling suicidal, I’d recommend calling a mental health hotline: 1-800-273-8255 is the number for the American National Suicide Hotline. 

That said, HRT and surgery aren’t completely perfect, but they can get us pretty far- by the end of transition, I’ll be closer to biologically male than biologically female, for example. Not entirely biologically male- I’m still going to have a lot of sexual difficulties, and to have biological children will require an invasive surgery involving bone marrow- but closer. 

realwomenarewomen said: @transmedicalism-saves-lives “Cis” implies that women—lesbians, call center workers, single mothers—have an inherent privilege over trans people. Again, let’s not forget that trans is an umbrella term. A gender non conforming male is not more ‘oppressed’ than a lesbian. The cis/trans dichotomy obscures that and allows men to shout ‘oppressor’ at women. Sex change is impossible and unnecessary. Stop using trans activism to perpetuate your misogynistic internalized homophobia.

I don’t believe any group has an inherent privilege over any other group. Being a member of certain groups might change your probabilities of experiencing specific forms of oppression, but no group is entirely full of oppressed people, and no group has no oppressed members- except, perhaps, the billionaire class. When it comes down to it, privilege is based in money, and there are people of every race, sex, sexuality, and religion living in poverty, and people of every race, sex, sexuality, and religion in the ruling class too. The percentages, however, are a bit different.

So no, being trans doesn’t make someone oppressed, and being cis doesn’t make someone not oppressed. However, being trans does increase chances of oppression, particularly being a trans woman, as they’ve almost all been forced into sex work up until the late eighties to early nineties, which is closely associated with poverty and low quality of life in countries where it’s not regulated legally, such as America. 

And for the record- transsexual is not an “umbrella term.” Don’t lump us in with drag queens or GNC people in general. Trans means someone suffering from gender dysphoria, nothing else. 

Sex change is not impossible, and it’s absolutely necessary for trans people to have any quality of life at all. We have a serious neurological disease. We cannot physically change our brains yet. I’d love to be able to be a normal female woman, that would be a great thing for me, it’d be a lot easier than this, and to be honest, I made a damn pretty girl, life is very easy for pretty girls. Unfortunately, my chest tissue makes me so dysphoric that I’ve taken a knife to it multiple times, can’t concentrate if I don’t bind, and as for my genitalia, well, let’s just say that I really wish that was in a better order because being a teenager with a sex drive and dysphoria is extremely, unendingly frustrating. 

As for internalized homophobia on my part- I genuinely thought I was bisexual until I started taking HRT. I didn’t even know I only liked women before. Maybe I didn’t. Who knows? But yeah, if you actually believe I’m a lesbian, or that I’ll be a lesbian next year... well. Have fun with that. 

Have a nice day!

[sabrinacaramico]

Queer Theory: A Space of Inclusion

In her revolutionary work “Epistemology of the closet”, Eve Sedgwick takes a deconstructionist approach to the study of queer theory, emerging most prominently in the 1980s and 1990’s, suggesting that gender and sexuality today are both constructed and enforced by culture and dominant ideologies. “Introduction: Axiomatic” is foundational to her work in queer theory as her examination of the historical construction of gender and the reductive binary fixations employed by cultures shows how free and genuine expression of gender can be hindered. Social binaries force homosexuality to navigate a culture in favour of heterosexuality, thus denying it of its own proper ‘category’; this, I argue, is problematic. Sedgwick uses a gay-affirmative motivation to challenge mainstream assumptions about gender and sexuality, aiming to break down the strong metaphorical divide between homo/heterosexuality (3). Queer theory, as discussed by Sedgwick, attempts to challenge the ways in which heterosexuality has been socially constructed as ‘normal’ and actively regarded as a comparative term for all else which is ‘devious’ or falls outside these confines; as subordinate and as part of, but not its own separate category of identification.

Throughout this course, I have come to understand the quintessential importance of language and its capacity to express and qualify not only knowledge, but also the representation and identities of social subjects. Thus, I argue that there is importance, especially in Sedgwick’s body of theory, in analyzing more critically the title of this work: “Epistemology of the Closet”,  and how it directs readers to understand the correlation between the history of knowledge concerning homosexuality and queer theory and the social construction of gender. The term “closet”, in my opinion, is used to connote an experience that places homosexual or queer identity in a space that limits its freedom, reducing it to a universal way for the world to classify and understand sexual identity. In the context of queer theory, imagery associated with the term “closet” delineates a confined, hidden experience; a dark and isolated space in which whomever is placed inside longs only to escape or ‘see the light’. Sedgwick explains that “modern western culture has placed sexuality in a more and more distinctively privileged relation to our most prized constructs of individual identity, truth, and knowledge…”(3), here, I would agree that the use of the term “closest” suggests a sort of hierarchization of power and gender in that fear and guilt is associated with homosexuality solely because it does not comply with mainstream heteronormativity. Sedgwick builds upon Foucault’s writings on sexuality and his theory that knowledge and meaning is bi-product of social discourses that fix gender into rigid binary categories. Sedgwick argues that political and social discourses and “…major nodes of thought and knowledge in the twentieth-century Western culture as a whole are structured…by a chronic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition.” (1). Although classifications such as male/female, gay/straight merge into dominant societal ideologies and discourses, gender identity should be fluid — queer theory then, aims to see gender as a continuum rather than a rigid categorization. Thus, “world-mapping” and “institutionalized taxonomic discourses” that assign individuals a homo or heterosexuality in addition to an assigned a male/female gender, is in fact problematic (Sedgwick 2).

Sedgwick explores seven axioms which support her queer theory and provide a starting point to a better understanding of the cultural construction of gender identity in mainstream society. In this section, I will expand upon two axioms I found particularly interesting in order to closely examine how personal identity is hindered when binaries are systematically institutionalized as common-sense principles and used reductively to group individuals. I will focus on axioms one and two and provide contemporary examples to elevate my analysis.

In addition to the ideas highlighted above, Sedgwick lists numerous ways in which individuals are different — not just biologically, but also in the ways they choose to identify and express themselves (23). She proposes that although identity markers — race, class, gender, nationality — may suggest that people partake in similar roles, they do not accurately represent, nor fully encompass uniqueness and individuality(24). For example, I am a student, but I am not only a student, nor do I consider myself the exact same type of student as all other students in my class. Similarly, Sedgwick lists that in terms of sexuality, genital acts mean different things to different people, also, just as some people may spend a lot of time having or thinking about having sex others may not (25). From this, it is apparent that deconstruction by means of difference is a good starting point at recognizing individual potential beyond the confines of universal binary assumptions. Earlier this year Mattel toys came out with a new set of gender neutral dolls with their tagline reading “Lets Toys Be Toys, So Kids Can Just Be Kids”. Mattel recognizes the importance of inclusion despite differences in gender expression and sexuality, and attempts to lessen the divide between traditional male/female roles, showing kids that it is okay to be or feel ‘different’, because there is a toy for that too!

Mattel Gender Neutral Dolls: 

https://time.com/5684822/mattel-gender-neutral-doll/

Moreover, Sedgwick looks at the differences between gender, sex and sexuality, defining them as separate terms that are not telling of one another. Sedgwick makes three definitional distinctions: gender refers to cultural meanings that influence personal identities and self perception — seen as variable and highly relational (27), sex refers to the innate, immanent and biologically based composition of chromosomes in correspondence with physical genitalia (28), sexuality refers to sexual attraction, practices and pleasures independent of biological sex and gender (29). This distinction, in my opinion, is of immense importance because the lack of clarity prompted by the overlapping of these terms is what strengthens societal construction of mainstream identities. A better understanding of these divisions will allow for a more informed society that veers from offensive terminology and assumptive language. The YouTube Channel “Queer Kids Stuff” is a platform that features LGBTQ+ educational videos for people of all ages. This is a great way to inform individuals of differences in terminologies, expressions, sexualities as well as intersectional oppressions, so that societies can work against restrictive binaries. Furthermore, Sedgwick notes that not only gender, but “a variety of forms of oppression intertwine systematically with each other…the person who is disabled through one set of oppressions may by the same positioning be enabled through others ” (32). She provides the example of a married woman noting how her use of a married name shows her subordination as a woman while also showing her privilege as presumptive heterosexual.

Queer Kids Stuff:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCecsVoeJcsXbAra7Sl4mOPw/videos

Overall, I believe that effort should be taken in working towards minimizing stereotypes, grouped classifications and binary extremities of gender in society. In order to create a more gender fluid spectrum better care must be taken in choosing constructive terminology that address queerness and homosexuality in an inclusive and positive manner.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistomology Of the Closet. Berkley, California, University of California Press, 2008.

[echoes-of-realities]

hello! this is completely random but i saw in your bio that you have a BA in anthropology. I'm currently trying to figure out what I want to do with my life and anthropology sounds really nice. Are the jobs opportunities good when you graduate? I'm also from Canada! Thank you!

Hey! I’m going to put all this under a cut cause it’s, uh, a Lot of information lmao.

So I don’t know how much you know about anthropology, but the cool thing about it if you’re going into research, is that you can do basically anything with it tbh! At its most simple, anthro is the study of humanity, so that includes literally anything to do with humans. What to study residential school experiences of Indigenous people in Canada? There’s a plethora of research opportunities about First Nations people, usually under the sub-discipline of Indigenous anthropology. What to study the effects of the lack of media representation for LGBTQ+ people? Queer Theory is a huge aspect of modern anthropology. What to study human evolution in the Horn of Africa? Paleoanthropology is a huge field. What to know Far Too Much about projectile points across the prairies? Archaeology is for you. Want to study RV-ing retirees? There’s literally a book on it.

Anthropology is broken down into four sub-disciplines: 

Linguistic Anthropology: Studies relationship between culture and language; everything from language revitalization to how language usage can further oppression. This field is closely tied to linguistics, but is actually very different to it. Linguistics generally studies the structure of language, while linguistic anthropology studies how language can produce/maintain culture, and vice versa.

Biological Anthropology: Sometimes called physical anthropology, it’s the study of humans and non-human primates in terms of biology, evolution, and demography; paleoanthropology and primatology both fit here, as does forensic anthropology. I.e., the TV show Bones, except actually accurate lmao. Don’t get me wrong, I love Bones and it’s actually what got me interested in anthropology in the first place, but literally every time I watch an ep now I’m like “You can’t estimate sex from that. That’s wrong you can’t estimate race. Age estimates range from 24-82 not within two years. You can’t do that!” ff

Archaeology: There’s a Whole Bunch of specializations in arch like bioarchaeology or lithic analysis or pottery analysis; archaeology is kind of….. lagging behind the other subdisciplines in terms of feminist theory and queer theory and treating PoC respectfully. (Especially Indigenous people, NAGPRA exists because archaeologists continually dug up Indigenous graves and then refused to give the Native Americans and First Nations the remains back so……) But! There are a lot of younger archaeologists reforming the discipline and making feminist and queer theory more common in the field. Black Feminist Archaeology by Whitney Battle-Baptiste is the first archaeologists that comes to mind off the top of my head in terms of including more PoC voices in archaeology, but there’s Many others doing good work!

This is totally a self-plug lmao but if you want to know more about homophobia and sexual harassment in archaeology, which is unfortunately rather commonplace, here’s a link to my final project for my Gender in Archaeology class about the topic, it’s a narrative video game and I’ve Very Proud of it.

Cultural Anthropology: Just like it sounds, this is the study of cultures. “Culture” is a Really Contentious term in anthropology and there’s no way I’m getting into the decades of debates here lmao. But essentially, cultural anthropologists study all aspects of different cultures, from the Big Men of the Indigenous peoples in Papua New Guinea to gender relations in small fishing villages in Portugal to homeless drug addicts in urban centres. Often issues of cultural appropriation, racism, homophobia, gender vs. sex (spoiler: they’re Very Different and completely depend on the culture), and oppression fall into this subdiscipline, but they can be explored in every field of anthro.

If you Really want a taste of Cultural Anthropology, watch Ongka’s Big Moka, which I’ve watched no less than seven times because basically Every Intro level anthro class plus second year classes without prereq’s show it. My best friend who’s also in anthro and I joke that we know more about Ongka than we do certain family members, which is 100% true.

So, as you can see based on the subdisciplines, there’s a Whole Realm of possibilities when it comes to jobs. The most common is basically going into research (which includes ethnographies), becoming a professor at a post-secondary institution, or going into applied anthropology.

Research: Research can be done on basically any topic, but anthropological research is rather unique (some sociology research uses the same practices, but not as commonly as anthro). Of course, there’s the research that archaeology and paleanthropology do that falls closer to a “hard science”, but cultural anthropological research is different. Ethnographic research is holistic and includes living in the community for an extended period of time (usually over a year), learning the language, and participant observation (you must participate in the community you’re studying; this is where researchers in “hard sciences” usually scoff and accuse anthropology as being subjective and not objective, which is true, but what most scientists don’t like to acknowledge is that all science is subjective because it is done by imperfect humans).

Professor: In order to become a prof, you need to have a master’s degree (people with masters can teach undergrad, people with a doctorate can teach graduate courses), so you do need an area of research to do your thesis on. Most anthropologists eventually become college/university profs once their research days end, or they teach during the school year and do their research during the summer. One of my fave profs does bioarchaeology in Tanzania every couple summers with some grad students so!

Applied Anthropology: Applied anthropology is probably the biggest area of careers tbh. Technically applied anthropology is just anthro applied to practical problems, so it can technically be anything. Most often, it includes medical anthropology (which is one of my areas of research studies how cultural ideologies of health and wellbeing go into healing, Lots of interesting commentaries on Western medicine and traditional medicine and how one culture’s idea of “healthy” is often Very Different to another’s), work with NGOs or activism organizations, archaeologists, museum or archive work, ecological or environmental anthropology, political anthropology, economic anthropology, forensic anthropology, and so many more tbh.

So yeah, that’s a rundown of anthropology and the ways your career can go. Honestly—and this isn’t me being all “my field is the Best Field” or anything lol—I think everyone would benefit from taking a couple anthro courses. I took The Anthropology of Sex, Gender, and Age in culture my first semester of my first year, and it’s still one of my favourite courses ever, and honestly I think that everyone going to college should take that course. Not only do you learn about how sex, gender, and age all culturally determined (no, sex is not biological because “biological” is culturally determined; most Papua New Guinean tribes have no concept of chromosomes, so “sex” isn’t based on chromosomes for them), but you’re also taught empathy in that class. Same with the Anthropology of Race and Racism class I took. Being uncomfortable is the most important part of unlearning toxic ideologies, and those two classes really embrace the uncomfortable. The biggest thing you need to be an anthropologist is empathy imo. The main goal of anthropology is to gain an emic perspective (i.e., an “insider’s” perspective) when doing research. I was always Really interested in social studies as a kid because I loved learning about different cultures so anthro is basically the “adult” version of that lmao and anthropology is essentially an extension of that.

I will say, that it’s pretty hard to do anything in anthro without at least a masters degree, so you have to be prepared to do A Lot of schooling. As for job prospects after grad, it depends entirely on where you live and what field you wanna go into. There’s far more job opportunities for anthropology in Toronto than in a small town with 7,000 people. And the fields really matter too. For example, if you want to practice forensic anthropology in Canada, you essentially have to wait for the current forensic anthropologist to die or retire, whichever comes first, before you even have a chance at a job. But as for medical anthropology or anthropology that involves working with or researching for Indigenous peoples, especially in Canada, there’s basically always job opportunities because they are in high demand of research or of people who can act as consultants.

Anyways, this is Long but I hope it helps, and btw, this basically only scratches the Surface of anthropology. I didn’t go into anthro’s long, uh, let’s say shitty history, for simplicity’s sake, of racism and colonialism here, not because I’m ignore it but just because it’s Long and I don’t have the time right now lol. But most modern good anthropologists don’t shy away from criticizing anthro and being vocal about it’s past and current issues, as well as advocating for how to fix them. Anyways. If you have any other questions feel free to send me another ask, or just PM me too! I’m happy to give information about anthropology!!