#and how they differ from mainstream western ideas of masculinity and femininity

[menlove]

have to do a paper focusing on modern religion instead of religious/cultural history i have suffered more than jesus

[translationandbetrayals]

To create teen transmasculine experience for the young audience.

In the last post I talked about a transgender family’s story, and briefly how this family is constructed by values like love and compassion, even within a society that doesn’t work on accepting their realities.

Of course, the manga has its antiquity since it has been published in 1996 (almost 30 years ago). Stories about transgender narratives were not so widespread as it is in our days, where we could easily see the presence of trans characters on media, especially on the western side of the world on young-adult tv series and movies. This preference may be evident if we take that our generation (the zoomer™) is more acceptable than their older ones on this kind of topics, but it’s not exclusive of teens to see trans stories when mostly of the time it is viewed as “mature” to narrate about them, let’s say with mainstream examples like The Danish Girl and Euphoria.

So now I’m asking myself: what about anime and manga nowadays?

As I said before, there’s a predominant number of transfeminine characters into anime, since they face great visibility, mostly from a transphobic view that fetishizes and harms their integrities. Not falling into being pessimistic, there are still great opportunities to see characters playing with their gender and exploring themselves, mostly in feminine-presenting characters assigned “male” by the creator. So as we see, where are the transmasculine ones? Where are we?

Even with the today’s lack of transmasculine characters into general media, we can see how this is being pushed down by new stories that talks about them, but it is still a conflict of how we can talk about our experience.

So today I’m glad to talk about one. Not a lost jewel such as Family Compo, but a great depiction of how we can create the transgender experience of a young boy.

Boys Run the Riot is a 2020 manga starring by Ryo Watari, a transgender boy currently at high school that struggles with his gender identity, initially being hidden by everyone he knows. This struggle, although internal, it’s also faced by how Ryo is reprehended by his school authorities for using male school uniform. Mostly of the time he uses masculine clothes when he leaves school, passing like a boy by stranger’s eyes and hoping nobody could notice. Without an ear to be listen, Ryo express his emotions in graffiti, leaving his frustration behind, with a message he hopes someone could see.

This shell trembles by the arrival of a new student called Jin Sato, an extroverted teenager that for things of destiny they met at a clothing store, where Ryo was checking around. Obviously, this provokes a scare to our protagonist, but as they walk outside, they met each other better and for the first time Ryo confronts to someone his “real self” and his impossibility to express himself to the world.

This difficulty that distances him from the others is finally beaten up by, simply as it seems, understanding. Of course, Jin didn’t know anything about Ryo so he could have an “image” of him like his few friends and classmates. The lack of a previous image may be an indicative of his attitude, but as we met him in the first chapter, he is open to accept this difference between them. Not as in separating them because of their experiences, but to trust enough to be understood.

This is where the shell starts to break. The beginning of his discovery, not only focused on his identity but also connected to a new taste they’ll both share.

So Jin puts the idea of starting a fashion brand.

Fashion unites them in a way it may feel unnatural at first, but as they start to develop their first design with Ryo as their designer, it feels wonderful to see how they cultivate thanks to their creative spirit, young and full of life.

The fashion brand they built together grows slowly as the ideas generate. Like any new project, it takes a while to establish themselves into the business, considering the fact that they were just two in the team. When a photographer of their age joins them, the triad begins to look out for new contacts in order to cooperate and increase together. For sure, they face disappointment when they met a big fashion brand’s boss, telling them the three should prioritize their studies instead of playing around, pretending they’re adults. After this failure and the next ones, Jin serves as a catalyst to impulse his group ahead, inspiring them to follow their ideals and to keep moving forward to their objective: to create a brand that can impact the world.

Although being short, the manga establishes existing social challenges that Ryo must face as he opens to his world, situations that it doesn’t feel dramatized or softened but it feels heartbreakingly real. Ryo feels cornered whether he faces new spaces such as finding a new temporary work, or building new ties with new people, where he feels the need to explain himself about his identity so he couldn’t suffer from the misery of being identified as a girl.

This breaks from the previous state, where Ryo put his identity into a shadow because of protection, of how this world would never understand him.

This aspect collides with the experience of another queer person called Tsubasa, a make-up youtuber that had the strength to proudly be open about their identity in social media. As they both met suddenly, we realize how important is this distinction by the importance of recognizing both experiences as unique, not merely individual but to be shared and empathized by others.

We’re not equally strong as the other: Ryo is different from Tsubasa because they have their own lives, they had their own ways to express themselves so they could survive. But that doesn’t mean we can’t lead ourselves to create fortitude.

After a few situations, Ryo builds up his self-awareness to confront his classmates. I didn’t say before, but he doesn’t refer about his family as a major impediment but his school. It’s important to acknowledge this since high school is a significant phase in teenagers, where they keep developing their personalities, interests and recognizing their weaknesses. Ryo’s weakness to speak up towards his classmates is finally beaten by his own sense of self-respect and openness, not for craving attention, but to be understood by his class rather than hid himself. Just as he did before with Jin.

But as I said before, this development of identity is not isolated. Ryo is tied to the fashion genre not only because of a shared interest, but also because he first thought that using his preferred clothes was his way to hide from everyone. However, after gaining self-confidence, this evolves to a sense of expressing himself, an approach to discover new things about his own identity, to strengthen and to reinvent his worldview, without hesitating to share it through his art designs.

The brand finally conveys a message of rebellion against social barriers using graffiti as their motif, being a mobile of general freedom sent by the three of them to the world.

It’s quite a refreshing breath to read the journey of a transmasc teen protagonist that starts to express freely, like his frustration as graffiti on the street walls and his raising adventure to create a fashion brand with his new friends.

It’s great to see a story addressed to the young adult reader, about teenager internal conflicts, meaning that we can talk about these topics without taking explicit themes, i.e. sexualization (genital hyperfixation) and unneeded brutality.

It’s also important to consider that the mangaka is a trans man himself, so the expansion of transgender narratives written by trans authors is essential to visualize our experiences by different stories, approaches, and points of view.

And the best part is to finish the story with a tender ending that invites you to run with him.

There’s nothing to lose after all, as long as you’re true to yourself.

- Kafi Díaz Durán.

[queermediastudies]

“A Queer Who Cares” : The Intersection of Class and Queerness in Tokyo Godfathers

Tokyo Godfathers is a Japanese animated film, made in 2003, that follows the adventures of three homeless friends on Christmas Eve in Tokyo, Japan. Throughout the movie, we follow Hana, a transwoman and former drag queen, Gin, a middle-aged man with a gambling addiction, and Miyuki, a teenage runaway, as they find a baby in a trash can and spend Christmas Day trying to reunite the child with her mother. A comedic adventure quickly ensues, as the chaotic but loving trio, do their best to take care of their new baby, solve the mystery of her appearance, and all the while combat the dangers and prejudices that come with being homeless. Though predominantly a comedy, the film also strays away from its humorous tone and delves deep into the characters’ complex backstories, emotionally exploring the myriad of reasons why Hana, Gin, and Miyuki are homeless and why getting the baby back to her mother is so important for each of them. Directed by the famous Satoshi Kon and loosely based on the 1913 novel “The Three Godfathers”, the film explores themes of parenthood, found families, classism, transphobia, and addiction, and illuminates the complex ways in which these forces interact and impact daily life. In essence, Tokyo Godfathers effectively explores themes of transphobia and the intersection of classism and queerness, and though not entirely unproblematic, is unique and powerful in its complex characterization of both Hana as a character and the oppressions she faces as a transwoman who is homeless. 

(Hana speaking about her desire to be loved)

Before beginning, it is important to note that the following analysis is of the 2020 English dubbed re-release of Tokyo Godfathers by GKIDS. As of now, there are many fan-subbed versions of the film circulating on the internet that misgender Hana in their subtitles. The GKIDS re-release does not so I will not be addressing that form of transphobia in my analysis. Similarly, in the original Japanese version, Hana is voiced by a man, and the fluctuations of her voice, from high and feminine when she is happy, to low and masculine when she wants to be intimidating, is present and follows a very transphobic trope in comedy. In the GKIDS dubbed version, Hana is voiced by Shakina Nayfack, a transwoman, actress, and activist, and these vocal fluctuations are not present so, once again, I will not be addressing that form of transphobia, as it was not present in the updated version that I watched.

How Shakina Nayfack used her voice to reclaim trans representation in animation

(A short article on Shakina Nayfack, the English voice actress for Hana in the 2020 GKIDS re-release)

Though Tokyo Godfathers does not have the popularity or mainstream attention to be considered a breakout text, it’s humanizing and complex characterization of Hana breaks traditional transphobic tropes, particularly in comedy, that lends itself to “creat[ing] small cracks in the glass ceiling of cultural consciousness and makes room for future breaks” (Cavalcante, 2017, p. 4). Hana is the main protagonist of the film. She is both the center of comedic relief, the leader of her found family and the driver of the plot as a whole. It is through her desire to fulfill her dream of becoming a mother, and her desperate need to understand why parents abandon their children (as her parents did to her), that motivates her, and in turn, her friends, to find the child’s parents themselves, instead of going to the police. It is in this complexity that Hana, “breaks historical representation paradigms” of both trans characters and queer characters as a whole (Cavalcante, 2017, p. 2). In her desperate search to love and be loved, Hana is immediately humanized, her identity centered in love and family, and not in her gender or sexuality, as so many queer characters are. In addition, she is not portrayed as “sexless” as is the norm for queer characters, wherein they can exist in media as long as their love stories and intimate desires do not. Though very subtle, Hana is the only character in the movie that has a love interest, Gin, and she had a boyfriend, who died, but is still a key part of her characterization. Though these love stories are not centered in the film, they are the only ones in the movie, and this exclusive existence, unique to Hana, illustrates their importance to both the themes of the movie and Hana’s character.   

(Miyuki asks Hana about her feelings for Gin)

(A photo of Hana and her ex-boyfriend Ken at the club she once worked at)

That is not to say that the queer representation in this film is by any means perfect. As mentioned, the movie is a comedy and thus falls into the historical “preponderance of these representations occurring in the comedy”, especially given that  Hana is the comedic center (Dow, 2001, p.130). Even more so, there are instances in which Hana’s trans identity is stereotyped and used as the joke itself. In one scene, she flirts with a cab driver knowing that he is uncomfortable by the fact that she is a trans woman, and his transphobia is framed as comedic. She also has a very flamboyant personality, with sharp emotional highs, and equally dramatic lows, that once again plays into stereotypical representations of transwomen as over-the-top and overly dramatized to the point of ridiculousness. In line with this, her previous line of work was as a drag queen, and though scenes of her in the drag community are dominated by a sense of love and community, it still plays into already established tropes of transwoman living as a performance. In these ways, her representation at times leans towards the role of the “clown...putting on a show for The Other” where it is “never quite clear whether we are laughing with or at this figure” (Hall,1995, p. 22).  However, as mentioned above, Hana’s complex and nuanced backstory, combined with her frequent acts of heroism and her leadership role, make it so she is deeply humanized. Though her dramatic personality falls into these stereotypical tropes at times, it does not detract from her character arc of motherhood and finding love, a nuance that is missing from many stories of trans women in media.  

(As pictured, Hana’s emotions are very dramatized and quickly jump from very high to very low)

This nuance is heightened through the intersection of classism and queerness, which is an equally prevalent theme throughout the film. In particular, class struggles are illustrated through medical care. At one point, Hana falls ill, and Gin is forced to give away his life savings in order to pay for her treatment. It is also here where Hana’s gender identity is questioned, as the hospital houses her in the men’s ward, and she explains that she “is not pleased with this”. This particular intersection of class and queerness within a medical setting is impactful given the long and “oppressive role of medicine in trans people’s lives” (Keegan, 2016, p. 607) and the strong tendency of media to tell trans folks stories, about both life and transition, in a way that is medicalized. For Hana, the discrimination she experiences at the hospital, and her inability to pay for her treatment, illustrate the violence of intersecting oppressions of queerness and homelessness in medical systems, while also straying away from the problematic representation of trans folks that are centered around a rhetoric of medicalization. More visually, the family is also a key illustrative example of how class and queerness are explored. The trio is constantly visually contrasted with traditional Japanese families in a variety of settings. This harkens back to ideas of “alternative forms” of families that queer folks create and this difference is visually exasperated by the trio’s homelessness, making them stand out in whatever space they are in (Keegan, 2016, p. 607).

(An angel asks Gin if he would rather have her magic or an ambulance. He chooses the ambulance.)

(Hana in the hospital. The subtitle reads “This ward, it’s the men’s isn't it?”)

(One of many scenes where the trio is set up in  familial positions)

As a queer, white woman living in the United States my subject positionality had a great effect on how I consumed the movie. Most notably, I was born and raised in Western society, and given that this film is Japanese and made for Japanese audiences, there is a variety of cultural norms and perceptions that I did not pick up on because of my lack of familiarity with them. In the same vein, I watched this movie translated into English and, as with every translated work, there are words and subtle, yet important, nuances in the language that were very likely lost to me as a viewer. My identity as a queer woman made it so that I was drawn to Hana as a character and was very moved by her deep desire to be a mother. The movie is steeped in images of Hana and her friends encompassing the idea of a non-traditional family, and since I would love a family of my own one day and I expect that to look different than the dominant nuclear family norm, I really focused my experience on the variety of nontraditional families that this movie shows, all of them as loving as the next.

(Hana and her drag mother reuniting)

(Hana and her family)

As a whole, Tokyo Godfathers, though not without its faults, is a refreshing take on the traditional feel-good Christmas movie trope, delving into class and queerness, and using the two to explore what it really means to be a family that is loving and kind. Spoiler alert, that family looks a little something like one ex-drag queen, one man with a gambling addiction, a teenage runaway who loves cats, and their baby they found in a dumpster.  

Sources

Dow, Bonnie (2001). “Ellen, Television, and the Politics of Gay and Lesbian Visibility.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 18(2), 123-140. 

Cavalcante, Andre (2017). “Breaking into Transgender Life: Transgender Audiences’ Experiences With ‘First of Its Kind’ Visibility in Popular Media.” Communication, Culture & Critique, 1-18. 

Keegan, Cáel (2016). “Tongues without Bodies: The Wachowskis’ Sense8.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 3(3–4), 605-610. 

Hall, Stuart (1995). “The Whites of their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media,” in Gender, Race, and Class in Media 3rd ed., pp. 18-22. 

[devious-little-milkmaiden]

Something really interesting I noticed while lying wide awake at night was the difference in gender roles and gender norms in 1950’s western culture versus modern western culture. The 50's in western culture was a world recovering from harsh, war-ridden times. Soldiers were returning home to wives and families were being rebuilt, the society feeling like a fragile, breakable object that they had to preserve. They did this by enforcing intense gender roles. It was an extreme display of traditional femininity and masculinity, the mainstream fashion for women being large skirts and pointed bras, and curly and somewhat carbon-copied hairstyles that were a safe and powerful way to indicate their femininity. western society was recovering from living under a war-ridden society, and so they felt the need to rebuild by dressing according to their reproductive organs. Their lack of connectivity with people around the world such as we have today also made the world seem much smaller, and increased the feeling of needing to conform to rebuild, and doing so by building a family and having children. Anything that could possibly get in the way of this goal was seen as a societal threat and needed to be stomped on immediately, leading to the rise of homophobia, transphobia, sexism, and racism, especially anti-interracial relationships sentiments. The world they’d rebuilt felt like a fragile object that could easily break, and so they had to preserve it by keeping a rigid status quo.

Contrast to today, where global connectivity and the access of information at our fingertips makes many of us feel as if we are just a speck in a giant, giant universe of people, and anything we do will not affect that universe long-term. Since there are so many people that we are aware of, the goal of having a family and creating more people to replace the ones who are dying is not a primary one. We no longer feel as much a need to conform to traditional societal standards, because what does it matter if we don't have kids? There's too many people in the world as it is. So, many of the things that our grandparents and great-grandparents would have been terrified of doing or being in the ‘50s are now becoming the cultural norm. Gender presentation is no longer about advertising your piece in the baby-making puzzle, but rather an exploration of the complicated and uniquely different mixes of gender identity that live within all of us. Your gender expression and identity could be two completely different things, they could be one in the same, they could be something completely different. We even feel liberated enough to finally throw out the idea of gender in the first place. All it was meant to do was advertise your sex and be a basis on which to uphold more societal standards for how the respective genders should act and present. Modern culture had taken that and turned it on its head, listening to their hearts rather than their magazines and exploring all the weird, wacky, campy, and occasionally conservative ways of gender presentation and identity. When we feel as if there's no longer a need to reproduce, we feel as if there's no longer a need to hide ourselves under skirts and trousers and short versus long hair. We dress and present however we want, the goal no longer to attract a sexual mate with which we will create a family, but rather to explore gender identity and presentation and live true to the unique creatures that we are. The rules of rebuilding are no longer upheld, as our society doesn’t feel as fragile as it did after WWII.

Now you may be asking, what about COVID-19? Thousands of people have died from COVID, so why are we not returning to a 1950’s-type society? Well, we do have a way of recovering from COVID, but it’s not the same as the 1950s. WWII was a war that was waged in territories other than the United States (save for Pearl Harbor), men were drafted and disappeared from their homes and sometimes didn’t come back. It felt like a monster that took people but didn’t live there. So when that monster was finally vanquished, the solution was to rebuild what it had taken. But with COVID, it is very much on home territory. People have to stay inside and social distance themselves and disconnect themselves socially, things that people in WWII western society didn’t have to do. So, there’s more allowance for introspection, people spending so much time by themselves that they’ve started to assess their own personality and life. They’re expressing themselves how they want, presenting themselves in their own way, living truer to themselves. On the flip side, there is also a desire for escapism for the “monster” that lives on our home territory, which can be seen with the rise of cottagecore and the prairie aesthetic. People desire a return to simpler times. The goal is not to rebuild, but to improve and in some cases, escape. During WWII, you could not see the monster’s face if you lived in the western part of the world. It was in Europe and Asia. That added a layer of mystery, and since people were unsure of what to do, they returned to tradition. During the pandemic, we were all face-to-face with the monster. Most likely, you either had COVID or knew someone who did. It led to denial, and the delusion of escaping, all of the things that happen when you are undeniably face-to-face with something you are afraid of. You find a way to deny it. It also allowed for people to look within themselves due to being stuck with only themselves for company.

[comrade-meow]

The term ‘gender identity’ was coined by psychologist and researcher, Dr. John Money, founder of the first gender clinic at John Hopkins Hospital in 1966. ‘Gender identity’ first appeared in print on November 21st 1966, in the press release announcing the creation of the clinic. Money would go on to develop his theory of gender by experimenting on young children.

Money recruited the parents of David Reimer to a twin study research project at the newly-founded clinic and inextricably linked the concept of gender identity to the case. Born in 1965, David, then named Bruce, and his identical brother Brian were test cases in an experiment designed to see if a boy could be brought up successfully as a girl after surgical alteration. Money’s hypothesis was termed ‘gender neutrality’. Bruce had suffered burns to his penis during a circumcision that went wrong. Money persuaded the parents to fully alter Bruce’s genitals at the age of two, removing testes and fashioning the artificial appearance of a vulva. Bruce was then renamed ‘Brenda’. Money reassured the parents that this measure was in the best interests of Brenda and that his theory of ‘gender neutrality’ would be proven correct. Money had, according to John Hopkins Hospital, solved an ethical dilemma, and so had an ethically sound basis to study how Brenda would proceed. Twin Studies are regarded as the gold standard within psychology and psychiatry and so these children appeared to Money to be the perfect experimental subjects on which to ground his ideas.

Money required that during childhood Brenda and her family visit John Hopkins to observe how the treatment progressed. This process of treatment included interviews to see if the parents were ‘girling’ Brenda correctly (enforcing femininity) and how the now supposedly differently sexed twins interacted. Brenda (David) and his twin brother Brian as adults reported that during part of this ‘treatment’ both were sexually abused by Money, who made the pair ‘role play’ heterosexual intercourse, inspected their genitals, and took photographs. Money denied these allegations, but also justified these coerced acts as, ‘childhood sexual rehearsal play’ which he considered important for a ‘healthy adult gender identity’, What is evidenced in transcribed interviews documenting Money’s interaction with the twins was that they were made to describe the difference between their genitals, repeat that these sexual differences made one a boy and one a girl and were encouraged to deliberate why Brenda fought less at school than Brian (“because I’m a girl”, Brenda is heard saying, to Money’s confirmation, “you’re a girl!”) It is very clear here that regressive gender roles became mixed with Money’s invention of gender identity.

Despite Money’s sexual liberalism and unorthodoxy regarding homosexuality, he and other researchers at John Hopkins did not consider reinforcement of strict binarism in relation to the sexes as damaging or illegitimate. For years Money wrote about the case as ‘John/Joan’ (instead of real names Bruce/Brenda), depicting the apparent success of gender identity development to support arguments for the feasibility of sexual reassignment. In contrast, Reimer decades later described how he urinated through a hole in his abdomen due to botched urological interventions by doctors.

Around the period of adolescence Brenda [David] was given oestrogen to induce breast development as part of early female puberty. Clinical notes show that shortly afterwards Brenda [David] rejected Money’s recommendations of surgery to create a vagina. From the age of thirteen Brenda began no longer to identify as a girl, reporting feelings of suicidal depression. At age fourteen, Brenda’s father told him about the sex reassignment process. Brenda shortly after took the name David and began living as a boy. In early adulthood David underwent treatment to reverse sex reassignment, including testosterone injections, a double mastectomy, and phalloplasty operations.

Throughout this period Money continued to publish on the experiment as a success, despite it being known by him that Brenda, originally Bruce, was now living as David. Only when Reimer opened his life to academic Milton Diamond did the devastating outcome of Money’s experiment become public knowledge and his research was exposed as fraudulent. Reimer committed suicide in 2004 at the age of 38. Leading gender theorist Judith Butler wrote shortly after David took his own life, ‘It is unclear whether it was his gender that was the problem, or the ‘treatment’ that brought about an ‘enduring suffering for him’, as if it were a riddle or great mystery.

The scarce amount of academic literature utilising the work of Money today might seem to indicate the widespread rejection of his methods, but the impact of these grievous scientific errors, if we can term medical violence against children under the name of science, remains paramount in informing contemporary accounts of gender identity. This is most obvious in the status of the Charing Cross Gender Identity Clinic (GIC), the largest, most renowned Gender Identity Clinic in the UK. The Charing Cross GIC from 1994 has employed Money’s colleague, Dr. Richard Green as its Director of Research. This appointment came only seven years after Green published, The ‘Sissy Boy Syndrome’ and the Development of Homosexuality. Green is important not just because of his direct link to Money, but also because he was the sole colleague to publicly defend Money. Green claimed in a BBC interview that:

“With the benefit of hindsight, based on what we knew at the time about how you become male or female or boy or girl, with the advantage of hindsight knowing the difficulties to say the least of creating a penis surgically, the decision that John Money made at the time was the correct one. And I would have made the same one at that time.”

What the failed Reimer experiment and subsequent ‘hindsight’ amounted to was a conclusion that gender identity is not simply socially constructed, but also innate. The dominant position within psychology is that sexual difference is mapped onto the brain. For over two decades a myriad of neurological research has emerged from the Western psychological establishment arguing that male and female brains are ‘differently wired’. This research has been heavily promoted in mainstream media, but equally heavily challenged by feminist authors like Cordelia Fine.

How did we get from there to here?

Gender identity, a construct created in the United States, has crossed the pond and gone global. American cultural imperialism is hardly a new phenomenon, but how exactly did gender identity come to appear on so many campuses in the United Kingdom within the last decade? The consensus around gender identity inside the humanities, emanating primarily from U.S campuses, has been established over the last three decades mainly by Queer Theorists who sought to outflank structuralist accounts of gender, that positioned gender as part of a wider system of social relations that maintain capitalist patriarchy. That systemic approach has been sidelined in favour of concepts like ‘performativity’ and gender as an essentialist quality emanating from ‘inside’ us, something that we are born with.

The emergence of the idea of gender as essential and internal is not a new one. The regressive belief in male and female souls has existed for centuries, often expressed through notions of the sexed male or female brain. It is this notion that feminist Mary Wollstonecraft addressed in her book A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) stating, ‘There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. May as well speak of a female liver’. Even Freud a century ago, wrote against the arguments of the sexologists, challenging the idea of a feminine or masculine brain in his Three Essays on Sexuality (1905).

Unfortunately, these ideas continue to dominate mainstream discourse. Gender as an element existing in the brain, or as an innate essence has been taken up and promoted by youth advocacy groups like Gendered Intelligence. For example, Gendered Intelligence organised events around the ‘Trans soul’ entitled The Corpse Project. It may seem surprising that today it is still necessary to dispute the concept of sexed brains or gendered souls, or to argue against dualist claims of the mind or brain as separate from the body, but we have in our arsenal as Marxists a key theoretical tradition, namely; historical materialism.

When Marx famously wrote in 1852, ‘Men [ed: and presumably women!] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past’ he pointed towards a wider understanding of how the already established social world determines us as subjects within it through social conditions. This is exactly complimentary with the materialist understanding that gender is ‘socially constructed’ – that gender as a system of social relations and norms is socially contouring, creating a web in which we sit and constituting us as gendered subjects (a Marxist understanding considers ‘ideology’ as the key method of this). We, as subjects, do not determine the world around us purely as individuals.

If gender is the system of norms that underpin the social relations and sexual politics between men and women under capitalist patriarchy i.e women’s role within the home and the associated qualities of femininity, such as passivity, the suitability to the private world of the domestic sphere, coupled with the conception of men as embodying masculine traits, such as being outgoing and suited to the public world of work. We can see why it is so important for the existing social order to naturalise and reify these codes of behavior. Women’s subordination must be secured in order to sexually and socially reproduce our societies. Men’s domination must be established to help secure women’s subservience.

The contemporary version of gender ideology with its reliance on femininity and masculinity (women’s subordination and men’s dominance) as inescapable points of reference to understand ourselves, and society, is simply a rearrangement of the building blocks required to accept patriarchy as it exists today.

That men who identify with feminine dress or feminine beauty practices can be considered women only re-establishes the idea women are feminine. Women, as adult human females, have no natural predisposition towards ideological gender norms and radical politics should reject any imposition of the acceptance of femininity as anything other than a social construct designed to secure women’s subjugation. Similarly, masculinity, attributed to men, constructing men, underpins male domination as the natural order.

When women reject femininity and submissiveness, instead seeking power for ourselves, or even engaging in traditionally male activities such as sports, we are sometimes called ‘men’ or ‘mannish’ — as if only men can dominate and structure their environments. Of course, within patriarchy, that is precisely the norm; but we are meant to think of it as natural, rather than merely normative. Gender is needed in order to maintain the social order of male domination and female subjugation.

The best that we, as Marxists can do, is to be truly gender non-conforming by rejecting ‘gender’ entirely.

[riparian-philosophy]

A Growing Number of People Are Identifying or Presenting Outside of the Gender Binary – Why?

In the Western world, the gender binary has played a huge role in society. Gender roles have determined how people act, what they wear, what jobs they can get, and even what place they hold in society. Even in modern societies people are punished for going against the gender norms; men are attacked for wearing ‘feminine’ clothing and are often called gay for feeling comfortable in themselves and in expressing how they feel. However, despite this, in recent years the number of people expressing themselves in ways that do not fit the status quo, and doing so openly, have been increasing, and with this increase the number of people who are supportive of this are doing the same. Here, I will be discussing why I think that this is becoming the case.

It is important to note that this is in no way a new phenomenon. Some people have been going against the grain throughout recorded history, although for this topic more modern examples are more easily applicable. In the twentieth century, many ‘celebrity icons’ were seen to be breaking the stereotypes, and in some genres of music men dressing in ‘feminine’ clothing was part of the genre or band’s image. One of the most notable people to have been challenging these norms at this time was music legend David Bowie, who was recognized for incorporating aspects of both masculinity and femininity into his androgynous look, and who also wore a dress on the cover of his album ‘The Man Who Sold the World’. Even then, as aforementioned he is certainly not the earliest example of this idea of ‘breaking the norm’ when it comes to gender, and this outlook of what is expected of people in terms of gender roles is a very Western one.

Many non-Western cultures often have gender systems that work differently to how gender is seen elsewhere, most notably different from mainstream Western culture. Generally, in the Western world, gender is traditionally seen as the same as biological sex of a person at birth (usually characterized by sex characteristics and chromosomes, although this can differ for intersex people), however in recent years the existence of binary transgender (trans men and trans women) people has become more accepted. One of the most well-known examples of cultures where the gender system is different to what we are used to is among Indigenous and Native American communities. The term Two-Spirit is one that is reserved for people within native cultures, who are both masculine and feminine. These people can also have very specific spiritual or societal roles [Gender Identity, University of South Dakota website]. This identity, and many others across other cultures, is rooted in not only their culture but their traditions also. Despite this, they are almost unheard of due to the forced teaching of Western ideals that occurred predominantly due to colonization.

I present this example to prove that Western examples of gender are not inherently ‘correct’. If, for example, these differences were not seen anywhere in the world, and all cultures’ ideas of gender were the exact same, one could make the argument that gender identities, and therefore gender roles, are entirely based on biological sex, however, as there are clear differences seen between cultures, I would instead argue that this link is, at least partially, social. In cultures where it is more accepted to identify and present in ways that go against the idea of a binary gender system, people feel comfortable in openly doing so. This explains why, in today’s society, where it is slowly becoming more acceptable to do such things, more and more people are beginning to comfortably present and identify how they wish.

Another point I will make, before moving on to why it is that I think this change in what is acceptable is occurring, is that this is not the only time such a change in traditional ideas of what is associated with a certain gender has occurred. When thinking about the most stereotypical ideas of what differences there are between the two sexes by societal standards, some of the most obvious I can think of are the following. Blue is for boys; pink is for girls. Boys wear trousers, girls wear dresses. Women should shave and wear makeup to be presentable, but men are not required to shave and are often discouraged to wear makeup. However, these have all been very different at various points in time. The colours blue and pink were first used as gender signifiers at around the 1940s, however prior to this the colours were often not gendered, and in many cases when they were associated with a gender, pink was associated with boys and blue with girls. Skirts were not gendered until reasonably recently also, with men across history wearing skirt-like cloth wraps or forms of kilts. In fact, it is argued that the only reason men stopped wearing skirts is because they were the ones who rode horses most often, and skirts were simply impractical for this purpose. Makeup has been worn by all throughout history, most notably being given to the male workers in ancient Egypt along with ancient skin care products as a form of payments, and also being worn by the nobility for centuries, particularly in eighteenth century France. Women were not required to shave until after the Victorian era of long dressed that would cover all skin, and even then, the only reason that they did was because shaving companies made the realization that they could make more money by targeting razors at the young women who were now wearing clothing that was more revealing.

If these ideas of what is normal are constantly shifting, then why do they play such a large role in societies today? And why are other cultures’ ideas of gender systems being stifled by predominantly white Western cultures? I believe that these realizations are one of the reasons that an increasing number of people are beginning to openly present or identify outside of the norms of the gender binary. As more people become aware that the norms that they are confined to have little to no genuine reasoning behind them, they are beginning to feel less pressured to conform to these roles. The growing number of people at the forefront of popular culture who are also making this realization and are challenging these norms are simply providing a way for people to see that there is nothing wrong with presenting or identifying in a way that is not seen as ‘normal’, and so I believe that this is at least partially responsible for the increasing number of people choosing to break these norms. I also believe that the national lockdowns due to the coronavirus pandemic have played at least some role in this change, particularly in those identifying outside of the gender binary. Nonbinary individuals are in no way new, however the amount of people who have come out as nonbinary in recent times is increasing. I believe that this is because, while stuck inside away from other people, these people have not been subjected to the pressures and judgements of society. They have not had to conform to how they ‘should’ be, and I believe that this time has given many people, particularly young people, a way to reflect on their identity and whether or not they truly fit into what is expected of them. This, along with the more frequent use of the internet due to not being allowed to do ‘normal’ activities in the lockdowns have, in my opinion, hugely impacted young people’s sense of identity in an almost entirely positive way.

In conclusion, I believe that a growing number of people are identifying or presenting in ways that are outside of the gender binary because of a lack of pressures and expectations from the rest of society, and because of a growing understanding that many of these expectations are not formed on any logical or reasonable basis and are instead simply kept up due to outdated traditions which, in this instance, are causing more harm than good. As this is entirely my own opinion, it is important to note that this is not applicable to everyone that identifies or presents in this way and is instead built upon my own beliefs and interpretations of what I have seen around me.

https://www.usd.edu/diversity-and-inclusiveness/office-for-diversity/safe-zone-training/gender-identity

[ckret2]

do you think alister if he even has any kind of preference (he could be sex repulsed and all) would have that old 'its not gay if you're the one fucking the other man' mentality (round about way of asking for the same post you made for pen but. for the radio demon)

No, no, see, this isn’t the same as the question I answered earlier at all. The question I answered earlier was “do you think Sir Pent tops or bottoms?” (technically, the “question” i answered was “pen is a bottom” and my answer was “INTERESTING! NO.”) But the question you’re asking is “do you think Alastor defines a person’s sexuality by their sex acts rather than by the people that person is attracted to?” with a side helping of “do you think Alastor has any sexual preferences at all or is he 100% sex repulsed?”

“Which acts does the character think ‘count’ as gay” has no inherent correlation to “which acts does the character enjoy engaging in.” You see the difference. For them to be the same question, we’d have to start off the question by assuming that what acts the character is okay with engaging in is determined by whether or not the character thinks those acts are gay. Conflating what they think is gay with what they’re okay with doing implies that you’re assuming a whole lot about that character’s personality, how much internalized homophobia that character is dealing with, and how fragile that character’s sense of masculinity is, and I’m pretty sure you don’t actually want to imply any of that!

So if you want me to answer the same question I answered earlier, then come back and ask that question, not a roundabout version of the question that’s in fact a very, VERY different question. In the meantime, I’m going to answer the question that you actually asked: “do you think Alastor has 'it’s not gay if you’re penetrating’ beliefs about sexuality?”

The tl;dr is: big shrug, I dunno. Seems possible based on what little I DO know about the time period but I don’t know enough yet. Also if anyone happens to have resources on queer life/history in 1920s New Orleans, like, please chuck them at me.

Essay below!! Hey tumblr you’d better let the read more cut work, don’t let me down.

As it happens, I’ve actually been trying to figure out how sexuality was viewed roundabouts the 1920s in New Orleans—because I figure Alastor’s views have probably evolved very little since then. I get the impression that he’s very set in his own era; and because he’s sort of in a social bubble—who’s going to try to get close to the Radio Demon?—and doesn’t engage much with current mass media, he’s more or less shielded from evolutions in modern culture.

(Compare that to, say, Angel, who sounds very modern—or Charlie, who’s at least a couple of centuries old (probably much more) but also dresses and acts very modern.)

So whatever he thinks about sexuality is going to be rooted in whatever was current when he was alive.

The 20s were actually surprisingly good to queer folks, from what I’ve found so far—there was some VERY gay vaudeville & jazz tracks coming out—but like, I don’t know exactly how good, relatively speaking. Or where. Was it, like, only New York? And/or only San Francisco? I’ve got next to no sources on what was going on in New Orleans. The ONLY fact I’ve been able to find from the era so far is that 1933—the year of Alastor’s death—is the year the first gay bar opened in New Orleans (or, at least, the first one that’s still open today—it relocated but it’s still going). But that doesn’t tell me a lot about the overall environment. All it tells me is “New Orleans wasn’t so homophobic that the bar was burned down immediately, and/or they kept it too secret for that to happen.” That’s not a lot to go on.

And all of this is, like, the level of mainstream tolerance/acceptance toward queerness. It doesn’t tell me what people actually believed then.

Here’s a paragraph on late-1800s/early-1900s psychological beliefs about queerness that are hella outdated today: one contemporary belief about sexuality called “sexual inversion” basically said that a queer person’s brain was “inverted” gender-wise from the norm—that is, for instance, if you’re AMAB and attracted to men, you’ve got a feminine brain, you’ll like to do feminine things, you’ll want to perform feminine sex acts (ie, be the recipient in anal sex), and you’ll probably want to have a feminine body. Basically it conflated being gay and being trans. On the other hand, if you’re AMAB and you’re attracted to a feminine AMAB “invert,” you’re more or less still straight, because you’re attracted to someone with a feminine brain so like that’s more or less a woman psychologically speaking. By modern standards this whole framework is very “oh yikes” but like… ours probably will be seen as cringy in 50 years; and psychologists who believed in sexual inversion generally advocated in favor of letting inverts live in alignment with how their brains told them to, which was a big step forward.

So that was a theory going around. But like, how widespread was it? I know a book about lesbian inverts was written in the late '20s to try to make the term more widespread but idk whether it succeeded or to what extent. Was it a term ONLY being used in psychiatric circles and a handful of people who picked up the book? Was it restricted to certain metropolitan centers? If you went to a drag ball, did people introduce themselves as inverts? (Did they have drag balls? I know they did in mid-Victorian England but that doesn’t tell me much about what was being done in 1920s USA, much less New Orleans.)

And as far as I can tell, the idea of “sexual inversion” was the first time that a framework was presented in Western society where queerness was presented as something inborn rather than a choice people make to go screw someone they “shouldn’t” screw. There was a shift around the 20th century from “gayness is an action that you perform, people can perform the act or not perform the act but they’re basically all the same on the inside” to “gay is something that you ARE, on the inside,” but WHEN exactly did gayness shift from an action to an identity? And when did that shift happen in New Orleans? Knowing when it happened in NYC or some shit isn’t gonna do me any good if, say, it didn’t happen in NOLA for another two decades.

So like obviously I need to find a lot more research on queer history in that region and decade before I can give a super firm answer about what Alastor’s opinions/beliefs are.

I’m toying with the idea that Alastor did spend some of his life in NYC, though; like, he didn’t just casually pick up a Mid-Atlantic accent on the streets of Nawlins. He might’ve picked it up from talkies—although he would’ve had to spend a LOT of time at the movies studying specifically to copy the accent. I know the Mid-Atlantic accent was big in theater, but was that also the case in NOLA, or only in New England? Were there, like, traveling Broadway shows then like there are today? I’m inclined to believe that Alastor actually studied theater at some point in order to pick up the accent, which probably means going to some theater school in the northeast. We know he was into theater, being trained as an actor before going into radio makes sense to me. (He also could’ve learned it at a fancy expensive private school, but I prefer headcanoning him as from a lower background than that.) So maybe he spent some time living in NYC before going back home to NOLA, so if I really really can’t find anything on 20s NOLA I can focus research on NYC instead and say “he picked up his opinions there.” That’s my plan B.

I know that, WHATEVER the 20s NOLA queer community was like, I want to headcanon Alastor was sort of in it but also sort of on the fringes of it—like, due to his very conspicuous (conspicuous to himself) lack of normal/expected attraction to the people he knew he was “supposed” to be attracted to, he sort of felt a draw to the company of other folks who were conspicuously not attracted to who they were “supposed” to be—but he never really felt super deep ties to that community because, one, he just naturally forms very shallow relationships in the first place, and, two, he wasn’t hanging out in queer spaces looking for a relationship or a date or an opportunity to express some hidden side of himself so much as he was looking for a place where he wasn’t being weighed down by The Mainstream Expectations. But you can still be weighed down, albeit to a lesser extent, by The Counterculture Expectations, too. So, he was comfortable enough in queer spaces, but remained just sort of on the edges—was probably recognized by sight by other folks in NOLA who frequented queer events but wasn’t anyone’s best friend. Kinda shows up and makes small talk and goes home.

So, what sort of opinions and beliefs would he have absorbed from those edges? And how would they have been influenced by his own ace/aro perspective, from which ALL talk of sex and romance, whether queer or straight, is a foreign perspective that he could intellectually learn about but not ever really FEEL on an instinctive/gut level the way allo folks do?

I don’t know yet. Gotta find the right research materials first!

So tl;dr anon I don’t know yet whether he thinks taking it up the ass makes someone gayer than putting it in the ass.

[diarrheaworldstarhiphop]

Decline of the Western Male, Part 1

Martin Spengler

Martin Heidegger, Oswald Spengler – “Martin Spengler” – these two 20th-century thinkers provide the main source of inspiration behind this project. Both sought to understand the times we live in, and to bring into view the deeper historical and philosophical significance underlying many of the political, economic, social, and cultural issues before us today. Both offer profound insight, and our goal here will be to lean on them in order to tease out what is at stake in many of the day to day problems, challenges, and controversies that grip our attention across the Western world.

Spengler’s masterpiece is his Decline of the West, which first appeared in Germany in the years immediately following World War One. His contribution is to set contemporary events within a civilizational context, as milestones in the development of a culture whose evolution has been dictated by its own internal laws and dynamics, apparent at its very birth 1,000 years ago. Spengler allows us to see how the impulse that drove Medieval European craftsmen to construct magnificent Gothic cathedrals that soared towards the heavens, while betraying ever more intricate detail in their stonework, is the same motivating force behind the transgenderism agenda today, Hollywood’s obsession with the superhero genre, and in the attractive power of the dream of space travel.

For Heidegger the key event has been the rise of Modern science and technology, and it is the implications of this development he seeks to reveal. It is Heidegger who helps us to understand how the Modern project is in its essence nihilistic; if followed through to its logical conclusion it means no less than the annihilation of both the world and humanity. This is a cataclysmic perspective, but Heidegger’s reasons for sounding the alarm apply with a monumentally increased force since he first raised this prospect during the 1930s. It was Heidegger who understood that the “subjectivism” which reduces the world to a “standing reserve,” a resource to be used at our convenience, is at its core empty, that the desire for comfort and ease is in fact a death wish. Nietzsche understood this too. The danger does not lie so much in an ecological disaster, the consequence of reckless actions such as the use of GMO crops, but from the success of technology rather than its failure. We can see this with “climate change,” first global warming will be successfully held at bay, then extreme weather events prevented, and then . . . the outside world will be made to look and feel no different from the carefully controlled environment we have inside every shopping mall. After all, if you could push a button from your beachside mansion to stop an oncoming hurricane in its tracks, and instead select for a pleasant view offshore, why wouldn’t you?

No one openly articulates such an agenda, and it does not matter whether it is realistic or complete fantasy, the logic is there nonetheless. It has been present for a thousand years, and it is immensely powerful. Our entire civilization is testimony to its power. This is the value both Heidegger and Spengler bring to a discussion of such issues, they allow us to approach topical subjects such as climate change or transgenderism from a very different angle, to understand why these are the battlegrounds today, and what is at stake.

A third dimension, however, is also needed. It is one neither “Martin” nor “Spengler” were aware of in their lifetime, nor is it a question that has ever concerned Western philosophy to any significant extent in its 2,500-year history. It is a product of our time, and as such is the key to understanding everything. In this respect, “the West” is unique, and at its heart lies a contradiction.

Civilisation by its nature is a masculine project, but Western civilization is in its essence – feminine.

The driving purpose behind the science and technology of the West is to make life easy, comfortable, safe, and amusing. These are feminine desires not masculine ones. Western men have striven for centuries to deliver such a lifestyle to their women, and over the last 70 years or so this effort has borne fruit in the unsurpassed standard of living enjoyed by large sections of the population in Western countries. But the more it has done so, the more the essentially feminine character of the West has come into play. Masculine values, masculinity, men, these were all necessary to bring us to this point, the achievements of science and technology are products of the masculine impulse to make an impact on the world, to understand it, shape it, to create with it, to build with it, for their enjoyment in part but most of all for their women and children, and for the sake of the larger civilizational project to whose success they are committed. But to the extent this project is realized, and life does become easy, comfortable, safe, and amusing, masculinity becomes increasingly redundant, and fades into the background. In its place the feminine becomes primary, a process that has accelerated to an enormous extent over the past half-century with the arrival of the “sexual revolution” in the 1960s.

In the world that is emerging, there are no limits, nothing that women cannot do, nor anything that requires the masculine impetus to turn outwards towards the wider world, to discover its secrets, confront its dangers, for there is no longer is an outside world. Once we reach the point where everything that exists is either an oversized shopping mall, an air-conditioned office building, a campus safe space, a theme park, or a McMansion, masculinity has served its purpose and has no further place, other than to supply routine maintenance services in the background. In this world everything is self-referential, reality is what we make it, truth is what we decide it to be, on the basis of what makes us feel comfortable, safe, and amused. This is why the internet and social media are so central to our culture, why reality TV is our iconic genre, celebrities our key figures, entertainment our main industry, marketing our critical skill set, and brand value our ultimate asset. It is also why #fakenews is a thing.

This self-referentiality is Heidegger’s “subjectivism.” It is extending its influence everywhere, even such former bastions of masculinity as the military. Western militaries are completely feminized, with the partial exception of special forces, the only units who actually experience real combat. This is not to say that US or NATO forces do not kill and destroy, they do on a massive scale, their mostly male members also die, but they do not fight, they do not even engage their “enemy.” Instead they conduct operations against fictitious opponents who are figments of their own imagination, and take casualties at the hands of real adversaries about who they know nothing. The disastrous British campaign in Helmand, Afghanistan, from 2006-10 is the classic example of this, launched against an insurgent force that did not exist at that time, but which soon did come into being with a vengeance as a result of the “counter-insurgency” operation.

Helmand is the rule rather than the exception. It is no accident that the weakest branch of the US military machine has always been Intelligence, because this is the one element that cannot be self-referential if it is to be effective.

The Eclipse of Truth

We see the contradiction that runs through the West above all in the current state of science as an institution. In spite of its critical role in the Western civilizational project, science today is in an appalling state of disrepair. This is so even though vast amounts of data and new information are becoming available to many scientific disciplines due to earlier developments in technology, and also to the enormous resources being thrown into research and academia. Astronomy is a good example of this. However, the ability to intellectually process these sources into theoretical advances, to improve our understanding, has been all but lost, at least in the mainstream. Instead, astronomically related areas such as cosmology and astrophysics have disappeared into a fantastical set of rabbit holes that bear no relation to any reality outside of their own mathematical set of fictions. As a result they are completely sterile, there has been no progress in these branches of science for decades, in sharp contrast to the revolutionary breakthroughs that marked the first half of the 20th century. These gave us the technological advances that make the present possible, although the irony lies in that they also have contributed in large part to the dead end we now find ourselves in. This includes its poster boy Albert Einstein, who in spite of his personal integrity has been the single greatest catastrophe ever inflicted on the scientific enterprise. It is no accident that this individual was the first ever science “celebrity,” in no other period could a set of intellectually incoherent nonsense be mistaken for genius, but then again, it did so because it suited certain purposes . . . long before #fakenews came #fakescience.

The reason for this is the eclipse of truth, which is a masculine value, as the determining factor in decisions over what ideas to accept, papers to publish, research to fund, who to appoint, and who is selected to go viral, at least on the media circuit. Science as a practice has to balance its inquiry into the world as it really is with a whole series of competing interests. These might be commercial, political, ideological, institutional, or personal. The more important a branch of science is to Western society as a whole, the more corrosive these other influences, so that when we get to a central political issue such as “climate change,” we soon find that the quality of the science being produced on this question is utterly corrupted, and from a scientific standpoint completely worthless. This is because its purpose is not to find the truth, but to support an agenda, which it does by creating “models” of how the world should be and then using these to justify policy decisions whose motivation always lay elsewhere – self-referentiality once again. The reality is that climate “science” is not science at all, which goes to explain why its proponents refuse to honor any of the principles that guide genuine scientific inquiry – honest debate, transparency of data, willingness to admit uncomfortable facts, or explore alternative hypotheses.

An indication of the West’s true character and current state of decay can be seen in some of the intractable problems that plague modern society. Many of these revolve around health, arguably the area that provides the greatest source of pride to those who believe in the achievements of Western civilization. But while it is true that life expectancy is at record levels, infant mortality at its lowest, and that a cut finger is unlikely to result in death from a ravaging infection, it can hardly be argued that the population of a nation such as the United States is “healthy” in any meaningful sense. If we look at the obesity epidemic, for example, what is most significant about this problem is less that people are getting fat, but that Western medicine has proved totally incapable of making even a small dent in the constantly rising numbers of the obese. A different approach is clearly needed, but one will only be found on the basis of civilizational values that understand medical treatment in terms that do not involve drugs or surgery. Counter currents of this nature do exist, such as the ancestral health movement, or the advocates of LCHF, but these are defined precisely by their rejection of the Western project and its conception of what a healthy way of life is. The same applies to mental health issues, or the unbelievably high rates of addiction across the West, to everything from pain killers, shopping, gambling, gaming, porn, anything that offers an escape from an otherwise entirely meaningless, but materially quite comfortable, existence.

The Desire to Escape

It is Spengler who shows us that this desire to “escape,” in his words towards “the infinite,” was present at the very birth of the West, and is in fact its driving force. This too needs to be understood in terms of masculinity and femininity. The masculine impulse is not to escape the world but to go out and engage with it, to learn how to navigate through it, to understand it, and with this knowledge to create and to build with it. A man may seek an escape from the wind and the rain for his family, but the shelters he constructs are made from real materials, and if they are not built according to the natural laws that govern civil engineering they will fall down. This is why truth is the paramount masculine value, and this truth is never self-referential, it is truth about the external world, so that humanity can live within this world.

The feminine impulse is the opposite, it is an attractive force and its ultimate point of reference is the woman herself and her children. If the masculine seeks to expand outwards towards the infinitely large, to ever extend knowledge and understanding, then the feminine measures this in terms of what it means to her, how it affects her, whether she likes what emerges around her as a result of this, or not. Men build houses, but women decide whether they want to live in these structures, and turn them into homes. The feminine is in its essence aesthetic, its measure is beauty, and the beautiful is appreciated through emotion, how it makes her feel.

During the rise of the West, this masculine impulse is harnessed and the Modern world takes shape over time. The feminine character of the Western project, however, is expressed in the ultimate end state Western civilization sets as its objective. This is Spengler’s “infinity,” but in everyday terms it goes under the slogan of “freedom.” The dominant motive behind the entire development of the West has been the desire to be free, and this means freedom from any and all constraints. Science and technology emerge as the means by which to escape the constraints of nature, but alongside this there is also the desire to escape social constraints. During the first centuries of the West, this mostly involved the struggle to overcome the Catholic Church, which dominated the social and cultural landscape of medieval Europe, and this lead to the Protestant Reformation. Later it becomes the desire to be free of any religious imposition on life whatsoever, whether through moral codes or the law of the land. Western society becomes secular.

Freedom is a feminine value, not a masculine one.   Femininity resents any external constraints on it, whether natural or social, because its reference point is the woman herself, in her singularity. There is no such thing as a feminine morality, because even two women form a set of entirely different compass points for any moral code. These might coincide, the two might agree and cooperate well together, but they also might not, there is no force behind the agreement, as soon as it feels like a constraint to either of them it will be abandoned. Women approach all relationships in this way, except with their children, there the rules change.

Masculinity does not strive for freedom, it seeks to serve. A man is measured by his contribution to something larger and outside of himself, his family, his tribe, his nation, his civilisation, its Gods, the truth. This service must be voluntary, and it must be valued. The Roman slave in revolt may kill his master but he will also willingly give up his life in the army of Spartacus, and ask only that in battle his general not throw this away cheaply.

For the same reason, equality is not a masculine value either. Men contribute to the best of their ability, because that is the source of their worth, but the end results are measured externally. The input is irrelevant, only the output. Masculinity naturally gravitates towards hierarchy, because some are more talented, experienced, or able than others, and what matters is the common venture, success or failure, victory or defeat. Men will accept the leadership, and even the domination of others, if this leads to a good outcome, because that is all that counts. Better to follow the victorious general, than lead an army to its destruction.

The feminine, on the other hand, does aspire to equality, because like freedom it is an abstract concept, it means the removal of any expectations placed upon her by anyone, which she might perceive as a constraint. Equality is the stepping stone towards freedom, which is the ability of a woman to act as her own point of reference in any aspect of her life. Today this goes under the term, “empowerment,” or “You go girl!” This is one form of the “tendency towards abstraction” we will try to elaborate on further.

Masculinity, however, acts as a counter-balance to this female “solipsism.” The masculine overrides this impulse and it is the woman who benefits, because it allows her to serve something greater – children, to become something larger than herself, to contribute, to leave her mark on the earth, to attain a slice of immortality. Men do this by imposing an order that serves the civilizational project they are committed to, in other words they impose social constraints on women. This is the “patriarchy,” it ensures that a society will continue because there will be future generations, that women will bear children. It is a civilizational project that makes women have babies, and this is its greatest gift to femininity, to those same women, it overcomes their own drive to “self-referentiality” and allows them to be something more, to participate in something larger.

The project of Western civilization, on the other hand, has been to escape this very civilizational constraint. By the 1960s it had achieved an important milestone along this path through the application of science and technology, with the invention of the contraceptive pill. As a result, birth rates have plummeted, well below the numbers required to reproduce the population. This is one reason why it is safe to predict the coming demise of the West, a social order can not survive if its women do not have children.

Part 2: Transhumanism — The Final Showdown

https://www.counter-currents.com/2017/10/decline-of-the-western-male-part-2/

[fightersforpeace]

A critique of the WPS agenda … from a postcolonial perspective

𝑨𝒓𝒕𝒊𝒄𝒍𝒆 𝒘𝒓𝒊𝒕𝒕𝒆𝒏 𝒃𝒚 𝑯𝒂𝒍𝒂 𝑨𝒃𝒊 𝑺𝒂𝒍𝒆𝒉

Women, Peace and Security (WPS) is now considered a global “norm,” deriving legitimacy from the Beijing declaration, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), UN Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 1325, and nine subsequent resolutions. Taken together, these instruments and the norms that underpin them are referred to as the WPS agenda. Nevertheless, after the adoption of these resolutions, several debates broke out on a global level about whether the WPS agenda and the concepts and practices it inspires have any purchase in the Global South, and how the postcolonial feminist perspective might have extended the scrutiny and critique.

One of the main critics of the WPS agenda is that the latter is inattentive to gender relations, masculinities, and gender hierarchies in the Global South. It assumes that peace is the natural outcome of women’s involvement in post-conflict processes.

Moreover, other critics were discussed and debated between postcolonial feminists and mainstream feminists such as the global South is accountable to western concepts and practices used in case studies in all over the world and where specificity and singularity are put aside. Plus, the discourse, used by feminists from the global North towards women of the global south, contains a lot of empowerment and protection as if the southern women are only victims and not a main player in the society. In the end, most feminists forgot that women coming from formerly colonized countries face two levels of oppression: one related to its own culture and the other is a residue from the colonization period.

All these criticisms can be related to two fundamental actions happening within the UN: the first one is that the Global North has access to funds and resources and, barring China and Russia, constitutes the three main actors within the UN Security Council, entrusted with passing critical resolutions that form the core of WPS. And the other is that large scale military interventions to restore peace are adopted by the UN Security Council is reviving colonial “rescue narratives” in sites of conflict in the Global South.

Women from the Global South are made accountable to western concepts and practices

When the 1325 Resolution was adopted by the Security Council (UNSC), most of the feminist activists and scholars were happy by the result and thought that the global road to gender equality and security have begun. Nevertheless, the incoming years revealed many loops in this resolution and agenda such as the internalization of western concepts and practices, if not domination, in the WPS agenda.

The WPS agenda is associated with successful advocacy efforts of non-governmental organizations, gender activists and feminist’s scholars with offices in New York, London and Geneva and mostly with the western members of the UNSC. Also, efforts to push the agenda forward are identified with governments, NGOs, and international organizations that are based primarily in the Global North. This has resulted to push an agenda with concepts culturally related to these countries values, which contributed to the widely shared assumptions about the Global North as the “conceptual, material and institutional home” of UN Security Council Resolutions related to the gender and security agenda. Thus, this situation can be translated into that Global South states and non-state actors are being accountable to Western concepts and practices and undermining local concepts and values.

The problem of case studies and best practices

One of the other criticism of the WPS agenda is regarding the case studies and best practices, where studies are done all the time to give a discursive meaning and universal character to this agenda. In this case, the Global South must perform the site of innumerable case studies, where people and societies are framed in a perpetual state of conflict and violence, and where local values and culture are forgotten.

The problem by deploying the concept of best practices in the implementation of the WPS agenda is that from one conflict region to another context, local values, culture differ. Even two situations of conflict in the same temporal and spatial geographies can demonstrate completely different gender norms, before, during, and after the conflict. “Best practices” thus, may be a useful policy term, but it does not capture the complexity of the situation on the ground. It, also, fails to highlight the complexities of these conflicts in which states are parties waging wars against their citizens or inter-state conflicts with foreign intervention or even separatist groups or terrorist groups.

Furthermore, case studies are carefully selected to suit the Western governments’ strategic priorities, intervention goals, and funding rationale; some areas are over-researched (like sexual violence in wars), while others are marginalized (such as state violence against indigenous people and gender minorities). How this is happening? For some, the weak states and civil society agendas of the Global South are controlled and influenced by donor grants, research funding, and support for outreach activities who mostly comes from Western agencies and Governments.

Therefore, based on these ideas discussed above, for some postcolonial feminists, the WPS discourse endorses a particular liberal vision of equality and peace that does not appear to be inclusive of all interests and experiences. Besides, state-led National Action Plans (NAP) which are emphasized as part of the WPS agenda, end up endorsing the state’s narrative of the conflict and its marginalization and discrimination plus these “Western” concept of peace, security and gender. This lead to some feminists to shed the light on the dual oppression that women are facing in the Global South in general.

Dual oppression of women in postcolonial states

For many feminists in the Global South and postcolonial theorists, women in general, are facing dual oppression in postcolonial states based on the residue of oppression from the colonial area, the native oppression, and the fluidity of gender norms that were challenged under colonial masculinity.

Many feminists and postcolonial theorists pointed out that “anti-colonial resistance” was not “anti-colonial critique,” and that the chauvinism and authoritarianism of colonial states had to be challenged, and there were many struggles within the larger anti-colonial movements, such as women’s movements against patriarchal traditions and violence. The priority is for what independence or changing society?

The debates around the situation of women particularly and gender, in general, have addressed the issue of the dual colonization of women, oppressed by both native and foreign patriarchies. As well these debates highlighted the lack of acknowledgement of differences in feminist understandings of women’s global oppression, where the difference is not just between the West and the other areas of the world but even within these areas or even in the same country. Furthermore, these debates highlighted the problematic history of feminism as imperialism, where feminists have been complicit in both the production and the marginalization of the gendered subaltern.

Other criticism towards the WPS agenda explained that most literature and debates perceive women in the Global South as victims.

Improve the woman “out there”

Throughout the discourse towards gender issues in the Global South, many terms have used that lead to “Empowerment” and “save the women” in this region, which continues to be co-opted and invoked by many. This discourse leads many scholars to point out that this scenario of “saving women” is part of the colonial/imperial literature.

Let’s take for example the references to 1325 (UNSC Resolution) in the preamble of Security Council Resolution 1483 on Iraq. These references could be seen as a positive case if we take into consideration that it gives legitimacy to women’s role and inclusion in the reconstruction and nation-building process in Iraq. Nevertheless, we could also analyse it another way: 1325 is being used as a tool to justify military occupation on behalf of “liberating” women. Furthermore, “The Global War on Terror” is another appropriate example of Western efforts aimed to rescue Afghan women from the Taliban. The problem is that feminists were complicit in supporting that effort of “saving and liberating women” in both cases as if they are providing a moral compass to governments and the people. And nobody asked the “women” in these countries what do they want? Maybe for them, they are other ways to ameliorate their situation outside of the discourse and practices of “gender equality”. In fact, in specific contexts, women may value gender complementarity rather than gender equality. In such situations, “gender equality” and “empowerment,” as defined can be unproductive and even potentially damaging concepts.

As discussed above, the discourse aimed at issues of the Global South is focused on the “protection” of women in this area and not an actor with its tools and values. And for some scholars, this can be seen as a considerable pressure to improve a lot of the women “out there,” from state agencies, neoliberal global institutions and even corporate interests, who fund both WPS research and practical initiatives.

References:

Aoláin, F. N. “Situating Women in Counterterrorism Discourses: Undulating Masculinities and Luminal Femininities.” Boston University Law Review 93, no. 3 (2013): 1085–1122.

D’Costa, B. “Learning to Be a Compassionate Academic.” Australian Journal of International Affairs 71, no. 1 (2016): 3–7.

Grewal, I., and C. Kaplan. “Postcolonial Studies and Transnational Feminist Practices.” Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies 5, no. 1 (2000), http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/ jouvert/v5i1/grewal.htm.

Otto, D. “Women, Peace, and Security: A Critical Analysis of the Security Council’s Vision.” London: LSE Women, Peace and Security Working Paper Series, 2016.

Parpart, J. L. “Imagined Peace, Gender Relations, and Post-Conflict Transformation: Anti- Colonial and Post-Cold War Conflicts.” In Women, Gender Equality, and Post-Conflict Transformation: Lessons Learned, Implications for the Future, edited by J. P. Kaufman and K. P. Williams, 51–71. New York: Routledge, 2016.

Article supported by IFA-ZIVIK

[meeedeee]

Writing Women: Thoughts RSS FEED OF POST WRITTEN BY FOZMEADOWS

A few days ago, I went on a Twitter rant about female characterisation and Mad Max: Fury Road which ended up attracting rather more attention than I’d anticipated. As such, a few people replied to ask for advice about how to write good female characters, and while I answered in brief at the time, it’s something I’d like to address in a bit more detail.

Whenever the topic of how not to write women comes up, usually with reference to such narrative basics as avoiding objectification, lone Exceptional Girls and gender stereotypes, there’s a predictable sort of outrage from people who’ve missed the point. Are you saying we can’t write beautiful women? they ask, only semi-facetiously. Is there a quota for female characters per story we have to hit to avoid being called misogynists? Is romance allowed at all? Can women have any feminine interests, or is that sexist, too? And because we’ve already gone on at length about all these things, we’re usually too exhausted to reply.

The thing is, there’s no one “right” way to write women, just as there’s no one “right” way to write any type of person. In talking about common mistakes, and particularly when we’re talking about them in brief, we’re rarely saying “avoid this one, overly simplified Bad Thing in its entirety,” but are rather expressing frustration at how that particular element is overwhelmingly used in certain quarters, while emphasising how to do it well.

As writers, it behoves us to get into the mindset of our characters: to understand their personalities, backgrounds and motivations, whatever they might be. Bad characterisation is what happens when a writer fails to do this; and while that failure can occur for any number of reasons, one of the most common (and therefore most frustrating) permutations occurs when the writer has a reductive, inaccurate or otherwise stereotypical view of what certain types of people are like in real life, or when they fail to acknowledge that their own experience of the world can’t be universally applied to people from different backgrounds.

So: let’s talk beautiful women and the ostensible ban on writing them, which is one of my personal bugbears.

Culturally, women are expected to be beautiful. In the West, the mainstream concept of “beauty” is held to expire at a certain age while being inherently fetishised, diminished or inaccessible to anyone not white. This means that, in a large number of Western narratives, female characters skew conveniently young, even in contexts where you’d expect such a person to be older; are conveniently long-haired, fashionable and permanently made up, even when disdain for such trappings is ostensibly part of their characterisation; and are frequently written as though beauty is a personality trait instead of a personal judgement. What this means is that we’re all collectively conditioned to make female characters “beautiful” as a reflex, because if we’re going to invent a woman out of thin air, then why on Earth would we want to make her ugly?

But as even the type of misogynist prone to rating women’s looks has tangentially realised, not being beautiful isn’t the same as being ugly. Even given the massive cultural dominance of mainstream Western beauty standards – white, blonde-haired and light-eyed, slim but busty, of medium height, able-bodied, aged between sixteen and thirty, or thirty-five at the absolute most – most of us are generally able to acknowledge the attractiveness of women who differ from those parameters by virtue of more than their hair colour. And when it comes to the question of individual preference – well. The world, as they say, is our oyster. Beauty is not an absolute, but a personal judgement, and that’s before you get into the question of attractiveness as determined by personality rather than looks, which is a great deal more significant than many reductive persons care to admit.

All of which tells us a great deal about how female beauty is perceived, and which is therefore relevant to how female characters are viewed by the audience. But when you’re writing a story, the character has their own internality: you have to know them from the inside, too. When a story tells me in the raw narration, rather than from a character’s POV, that a woman is beautiful, it invariably feels forced, as though the author is imposing a false universal over any judgement I might prefer to make for myself. But in a narrative context where women have every reason to be aware of the value placed on their looks, a story that goes out of its way to tell me about a female character’s beauty from an external perspective only is doing her a disservice.

One of the great paradoxes of mainstream beauty culture is that, while women are expected to look good for men, the effort that goes into maintaining that beauty – physical, emotional, financial – is held to be of zero masculine interest. On TV, it’s common to see a hard-bitten female detective whose hair is worn long and sprayed into perfect coiffure, whose heels are high, whose face is permanently made up, and whose fashion choices visibly outstrip her salary, because we expect all TV characters to be exceptionally pretty. It’s just that, with women, by virtue of the extra accessories and effort “mainstream” beauty requires, making any and all characters strive to clear that bar can’t help but impinge on their characterisation in a way that it doesn’t for men. A flock of teenage boys all showing up to school in various dapper vest, suit and tie combinations would raise eyebrows on TV, but we’re inured to the sight of teenage girls in math class dressed like they’re off to a movie premiere. And what this means, whether intentionally or not, is that we void the prospect of women who, at the level of characterisation, have different approaches to beauty, not just in terms of individual style, but as a social expectation.

So: you tell me your character is beautiful in context, wildly attractive to the men around her. Great! But what does she think about that? Did she go through puberty so early that she was teased about having breasts for years before the same boys started to hit on her? Is she uncomfortable with the attention? Does she enjoy it? Does she deliberately “dress down” to avoid getting catcalled? Does she even like men? Is she confident in her looks? Does she feel insecure? Does she enjoy make up? If so, how much time, money and effort does she put into using it? If not, how sick is she of being cajoled into trying it? How does she dress? Does she actually enjoy shopping at all? What cultural norms have shaped her idea of beauty? Have you noticed how many of these questions are context-dependent on the modern world and our implicit association of beauty with makeup and fashion? If your setting is an invented one, have you given any thought to local beauty standards, or have you just unconsciously imported what’s familiar?

I’m not asking these questions to situate them as absolute must-haves in every narrative instance. I’m asking because I’m sick of “she was beautiful” being treated as a throw-away line that’s nonetheless meant to stand in lieu of further characterisation, as though there’s no internal narrative to beauty and no point in mentioning it unless to make clear that male readers should find the character fuckable.

This goes double for warrior women in SFF novels particularly, not because powerful, kickass ladies can’t be beautiful, but because there’s a base degree of grime and practicality inherent in fighting that’s often at odds with the way their looks are described. A skilled fighter who has no scars or bruises at any given time is as implausible as a swordswoman with baby-soft, uncalloused hands. Long, silky hair might look good, and it’s certainly not beyond the realm of possibility for a warrior to have it, but your girl is still going to need to tie it back when she’s in the field, and if she’s out on the road or in battle with no more bathing opportunities than her male comrades, it’s not going to fall out of her helmet looking like she’s a L’oreal model. If your armies are gender diverse and there’s no stated reason why women can’t hold rank, but the only women we ever see are young and hot, then yes, I’m going to assume you’ve prioritised beauty over competence at the expense of including other, more interesting characters. A woman’s looks are far from being the most salient thing about her, and if a subconscious need to find your female characters conventionally attractive (unless they’re villains) is influencing who you write about, believe me, it’s going to be noticeable.

I could address those other, early queries at similar length, but what it all boils down to is a marriage of context and internality. No, there’s no quota for female characters per book, but if you’re going to give me a POV perspective on a lone woman associating with an otherwise all-male cast, simply telling me “she’d always gotten along better with men than women” is not sufficient to explain the why of it, especially if her being there is contextually incongruous. By the same token, if you show me the POV of a woman who has every reason to associate primarily with other women but whose thoughts are only ever about men, I’m going to raise a disbelieving eyebrow. If you can’t imagine what women talk about when men aren’t in the room, or if you simply don’t think it’s likely to be interesting, then yes, it’s going to affect your ability to write female characters, because even if you only ever show them with men, those private judgements should still inform their internal characterisation.

One of the most dispiriting experiences I’ve ever had in a writing group was watching a man in late middle-age describe a young woman of his own invention. As an exercise, we’d all taken fifteen minutes or so to write out a detailed rundown of a particular character, either one we’d invented on the spot or who featured in our fiction, and to share that work with the group. This man produced an unattractive girl in her late teens who had no interests besides working in a dollar shop, who lived with her mother but didn’t really have any friends, who liked shopping and eating chips – and that was it. Every time a member of the group prompted him for more details, he just shrugged smugly and said she just liked being in the shop, and that was it. When pressed further, he insisted that he saw plenty of girls like this on the bus and around his area, that she was a realistic character, and that there was no need to develop her beyond this dim outline because she just wasn’t clever or interesting or curious, so why would she have opinions about anything else? It was maddening, depressing and so unbearably sexist I wanted to scream, because by his own admission, what he’d done was look at women in the real world and assume that his reductive judgement of their goals and interests, made on the basis of their appearance, was genuinely the be-all, end-all of who they were as people, such that even when it came to putting a woman like that in fiction, he didn’t feel moved to develop her any further.

Ultimately, if you want to write good female characters, there’s no one way to do it. But if I had to distil all this into a single piece of advice – a practical thing for writers to do, to try and better their skillsets – I’d say: as an exercise, try writing a story with only female characters, or in which men are the clear minority. When women only ever appear singly or in contexts where they never talk to each other, it’s easy to fall into the habit of letting their gender and beauty stand in for characterisation, because you only need to distinguish them from men, not from each other. But try your hand at a story whose five characters are all women, and suddenly the balance shifts. You can’t just have The Feminine One and The Tomboy, or The Ultra Hot One and the Girl Next Door, and nor can you lapse into defining them as such in their own perspectives. You can certainly pick a narrative setting that explains why they’re all or mostly the same age (high school, for instance), but it’s harder to lump them together.

And if it’s never occurred to you to write women as a majority before? Then you might want to ask yourself why that is, and consider how your answer might be impacting your ability to write them as individuals.

      from shattersnipe: malcontent & rainbows http://ift.tt/2w2LECY via IFTTT

[maidenofsophia]

Can I just say how much I love your new URL? I've always really liked the 'married to God' idea, but of course it comes with a lot of heteronormativity because the only people who 'marry God' are women, and God takes the roll of a man. So the idea of being married to Our Lady really resonates with me, actually, bc I've considered taking a vow of celibacy at least for a while (I'm sure I will want to marry & raise a family at one point) and I like the idea of being spiritually married to our Lady

Thank you! Yes, this is absolutely my thing at the moment! ^_^

The idea came about when I saw a post mentioning the Virgin Mary being referred to as the bride of the Holy Spirit. Of course the Holy Spirit is typically referred to as male in mainstream Christianity but not according to early Christian texts, nor in Jewish mystic literature in regards to the Shekinah (presence of God) who is also feminine. As I satirised in a recent post of mine, early Gnostics argued how a woman could conceive of a woman, which I always took as a way of dismissing the idea that Yeshua had no earthly father (something I do still believe in). But in regards to the actual question put forward my answer would be; “Dude, She’s God! If She wanted to impregnate a human woman, do you think She would need a penis? She managed to craft the whole Universe without one!” Even Yeshua himself mentions having two mothers in the Gospel of Thomas. 

I know with the whole ‘married to God’ idea, the image that most often comes to mind to us Westerners is that of Catholic nuns becoming “Brides of Christ”. Or the Church/Ecclesia itself being recognised as the Bride. But what I experienced is actually influenced more by Sikhi, one of my all time favourite religions! Their holy book, Guru Granth Sahib, is filled with verses describing the human soul as a bride in love with her ‘divine husband’, being God (who is only symbolically male, but supposed to be genderless). And that all souls are female in that respect, regardless of whether or not the body is that of a man or a woman, and thus all are considered equal. This is part of why Sikhi is a rather egalitarian religion compared to most other mainstream faiths. However with that in mind, as you say, the issue of heteronormativity comes up again. And LGBT issues are being heavily debated in Sikhi as they are in the Abrahamic religions. 

Almost every bloody Gnostic sect I come across as well, hoping to find my place in a community, also has this problem. Many of them try to be these beacons of feminism and LGBT-acceptance, and while their actions don’t necessarily negate this, their spiritual language still reflect that which is misogynistic and heteronormative. The Ecclesia Gnostica states in its Catechism that God must be referred to in male pronouns, with the titles of ‘Father’ and Son’ instead of ‘Parent and Child’ because “their holy names would lose their power otherwise”. They revere Sophia but her shrine is a small corner of the church while the very masculine Deity is placed in the center at the front. Sophia is also spoken of as a ‘poor, misguided damsel in distress who as rescued by Christ’ and that the Bridal Chamber sacrament is where a soul is wed to Christ to become ‘male/pure’ like “His”. The Sophian Gnostics led by Tau Malachi are a little better, with more focus on referring to God in feminine language, yet they still draw these arbitrary lines between that which is ‘masculine and feminine’.  Mary Magdalene is honoured as ‘the Bride’ rather than the Holy Daughter, her relationship to God in her own right taking a backseat to her relationship with Christ, which of course must have been sexual and romantic(!), as that is apparently the only way he could have loved and admired her as the Gnostic gospels claim (despite that they never confirm the two were wed). Malachi even says in his book “Living Gnosis” that, while souls are genderless, soul mates can apparently only meet when in male and female bodies! I challenged him on this on his forum and he sort of gave a wriggled his way out of it, saying it wasn’t impossible for same-sex partners to be soul mates, but made it sound like it was some sort of anomaly. He at least tried to reiterate the idea that male and female are just illusions of ‘duality’ and that there is really only One, in that all souls are the same and equal. 

So while I see the positives of believing all souls are the same gender, the ‘female’ is still regarded as that which is lesser and needs a superior, saviour ‘male’ husband, who is elevated to ‘God’. This may only be a metaphor for some but language and representation in religion is VERY important, no matter what the ‘traditionalists’ may say. It’s all about how an individual is able to connect with God and that will be different for everyone. This is why I distance myself more and more each day from Gnosticism and Christianity, having the Father and Son as quiet, background figures, and putting the Mother, Daughter and Holy (Lady) Spirit at the center. While I do believe God, in truth, is beyond the duality we know as gender, They appear to us as we may personally connect them best, which for me is almost always in the Sophianic (Divine Feminine) form. And obviously I reject the notion that my soul needs to be of an opposite gender in order to be joined with Her. 

I can strive to be a good daughter of the Mother, I can strive to be a noble sister of the Daughter, and I can strive to be a loyal bride of the Lady Spirit. ^_^ 

As for the celibacy thing, I don’t personally see it as a necessity for being a bride of the Lady but it depends on how you want to commit to that relationship, as each would be different. I myself have very little sex-drive (though I wouldn’t go as far to call myself asexual) and am also rubbish at going on dates so it’s kind of a non issue for me right now. However if I did meet a lovely woman to spend my life with, I wouldn’t consider my relationship and/or marriage to her something that voids my marriage to My Lady - as Her soul would be just as present in the woman I love. If anything I would see it as loving my Lady more through her, if that makes sense. On the other hand I can also see how a celibate lifestyle, meditating and focusing on the Lady, could lead to less distractions and feel closer to Her on a different level. I am honestly fine with either, I will trust in where She leads me. :)

[sivym1-blog]

Reading Response #1: Chapter 4, “Transforming the Sex/Gender/Sexuality System”

Laurel Westbrook, in her chapter entitled “Transforming the Sex/Gender/Sexuality System,” asserts that, contrary to popular belief, “sex, gender, and sexuality...are in fact socially constructed systems,” as opposed to being predetermined “biologically” or by some other set facet (Location 1106*). Referencing Anne Fausto-Sterling’s “The Five Sexes,” Westbrook defines the spectrum of sexes, which include the “usually acknowledged” sexes, male and female, which are generally “based on genitalia, hormones, and/or chromosomes,” a misguided determination of sex as said category is not easily delineated into two binary counterparts, Westbrook suggests (Location 1106).

Likewise, Westbrook discusses the relation between proposed binary sex categories and gender, which she defines as “refer[ring] to a set of behaviors and identities often assumed to be caused by, and to reflect, a person’s sex” (Location 1106). With these rigid categories come rigid differences in assumptions and expectations of behavior, psychological “norms,” and physical appearance (Location 1121). These assumptions often garner support, becoming integral to daily life: creating ideal roles to which people who consider themselves to align with this construct attempt to adhere.

One of these roles includes heterosexuality, in which someone who identifies as a woman is attracted exclusively to people who identify as men and vice versa. Heteronormativity, the construct that places heterosexuality as the dominant and ostensibly “correct” and “natural” sexuality, creates a “classification schema” that defines heterosexuality as the highest “status categor[y]” of “sexual desires, behaviors, and identity” (Location 1121).

Therefore, as Westbrook declares, “In current mainstream U.S. culture, sex, gender, and sexuality are mutually reinforcing” (Location 1121). The three groups collude in a subject’s personal representation- a “signal” defined by West and Zimmerman, to whom Westbrook references, as “doing gender” (Location 1121). These ideas, or “presentations,” define certain social acceptability within the intersecting categories of sex, gender, and sexuality (Location 1121). In fact, as Westbrook proclaims, “The academic conception of sex, gender, and sexuality as separate systems are relatively new; in the past, they were seen as one and the same,” which was previously the source of definitions of deviancy in these categories (Location 1138).

These ideas of “deviancy” had medical consequences, with doctors “[studying] so-called deviants” in order to define, “categorize and ‘treat’ intersex people” and separate sex and gender as categories irrelevant to one another (Location 1138). Simultaneously, though, “doctors medicalized” trans people, defining their “’mismatch’ of sex and gender” as an illness that required a cure (Location 1138). Doing gender in a way that was non-normative, therefore, became a point of contention even within communities in which inclusion was a tenant: gay communities rejected gender non-conforming people “in an attempt to reduce stigma regarding homosexuality” (Location 1138). This in-fighting, though, furthered the distinction and separation of sex, sexuality, and gender, which can be seen as a rainbow after the storm.

Westbrook cites recent (i.e. within the past ten years) legal protections created on the federal level to protect trans people as well as increased mainstream visibility of the trans community and its figureheads as an improvement in the way of acceptance within a generally cissexist society. She contrasts these improvements with the flurry of confusion following Christine Jorgensen’s gender affirmation surgery, as she was the first widely known trans person to obtain such a procedure (Location 1171). Of course, like many famous trans faces today, Jorgensen’s surgery gained attention because she was “white, normatively attractive, and feminine” in a time where science and societal questioning were becoming acceptable (Location 1171). Aside from the category of whiteness, the acceptance of conventionally attractive trans people gaining attention in the media is still visible today, including figures Laverne Cox and Janet Mock.

Something of which I was previously unaware was the modern history of transgender medical services, including the limited accessibility of “hormone treatments and surgeries” which “were usually only accessible through university clinics” and that trans people had “to conform to dominant norms around gender and sexuality” in order to receive surgery, including “doing gender” in an otherwise cisgender way and performing non-sexual heterosexuality until surgery, after which they were expected to perform heterosexuality (Location 1171). It’s also pretty shocking how trans patients were required to adhere to secrecy and seclude themselves from other trans folks.

The inception of the word “transgender” or, as some in the trans community have argued, simply “trans,” remove much of the stigma suffered under labels “transgendered,” “transgenderist,” “transvestite,” and “transsexual,” which all have connotations of unnatural-ness and wrongness. Trans “has been defined as ‘all persons who cross traditional gender boundaries’” and therefore includes not only the masculine and feminine, but also the non-binary (Location 1205). As Westbrook states, “This recognition moves them from what Judith Butler (1993) terms abject (not seen as human) into a realm of subjects eligible for social acknowledgement and rights” (Location 1205).

As Westbrook cites, there is still an incredible amount of violence and discrimination that targets the trans community, recently including the bathroom laws in some states that require a person to use the bathroom that aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth regardless of their gender. This fear re-links the interactions between sex, gender, and sexuality, assuming there is some underlying/hidden masculinity in someone who is assigned male at birth who is a woman, therefore provoking fears that a transwoman is “really” a heterosexual man looking to use women’s restrooms in an attempt to sexually assault them (Location 1257).

Westbrook uses the term “transsexualities” to refer to trans people’s sexualit(ies). I do not agree with this term, as it perpetuates the distance between cisgender and trans people, and posits that trans people cannot and do not experience attraction the same way that cisgender people do, not-so-subtly hinting at the same idea behind the bathroom laws: that trans-ness is simply a mask or an illness, someone disguising themselves for an ulterior motive.

Likewise, I cannot really get behind Westbrook’s discussion of trans queerness, as she seems to suggest that in order to date a trans person or date as a trans person, one must ultimately call themselves queer. She does cite that many of these people do identify themselves as queer, but she does not make it clear that trans people exist all over the sexuality spectrum (Location 1274). I do agree, though, that there is an up-tick in identities that fall under the “queer” umbrella, including queer and pansexual, as people begin to include genderqueer and nonbinary people in their considerations of their sexuality (Location 1274).

I agree, in general, though, with Westbrook’s message. Interlocking Western binary systems do adversely affect those who do not exist within heterosexual, cisgender, binary sexed spaces, rendering these people without voices. It is because of this intersecting oppression that discussion of gender, sexuality, and sex must be intersectional, addressing these three categories, as well as other social identities that affect any one person, at once.

Edit: * My eTextbook does not have page numbers, and, instead, lists “Location” numbers. I will cite these as opposed to page numbers for my own reference, as well as for citation purposes as I do not have access to other means of page delineation. 

[gendered-technoculture-blog]

Media Report #1

Media selection: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/08/08/american-apparel-skirt-photos_n_5660594.html

Introduction

The media I have chosen are commercial advertisements and corresponding images produced by American Apparel, of which could be uncovered in/on magazines, billboards and posters, electronically via email and social media, and television.  The article on the matter addresses specific “up-skirt” photographs in a back-to-school advertising scheme by American Apparel (see link above for the article).  This selection coordinates with this week’s reading assignments by provoking discussion of misogyny, sexism, and women’s liberation in addition to what influence these advertisements have on viewers and members of society.  Particularly, coinciding of the marketing of sex with the ways actual people arguably are negatively affected by this gendered portrayal of school girls and the way they are to be perceived and treated.

These advertisements and images alike were produced by advertising agencies under American Apparel CEO Dov Charney, CEO of the company then a consultant of their board in 2014.  American Apparel brands itself as materially U.S.-based and sweatshop-free while advertises its clothes with, often, images rampant with sexualization and objectification of its male and female models.  To provide context for the deployment of the advertisements in the U.S. and U.K., this CEO was fired twice from positions in the company for “misconduct [involving] sexual harassment” around that time (Alesci).  This past owner of the company, when ousted from his position, promised his return to the business (or a similar venture), not acknowledging the controversy of his socially deemed wrongdoings in and outside of his business.

Interpretation

The target audience of the clothing appears to range from preteens and teenagers to late thirty-year-old individuals, with special emphasis (due to the typical age-appearance of the models in the advertisements and employees on the floor of the stores) on teenagers and early twenty-year-olds.  I think the advertisements themselves are conveying to their audience messages of freedom of expression and sexuality, and a free fun youth to its audience, but above all catching the viewer’s eye and selling products with sex.  The Huffington Post article, on the other hand, communicates the potential negative effects (particularly for women) of advertising with these “up-skirt” images of seemingly school girls (putting aside the unknown actual age of the female models) and the backlash on social media immediately following the deployment of these advertisements in mainstream media.  The highly sexualizing and objectifying content, and its implications, are controversial in even Western cultures for the potential ramifications on (young) women and their safety, fair and equal treatment and judgment by the self and others, and general quality of life.  Also, that the nature of these school girl depictions, typically considered unethical, are here normalizing of material openly pedophilic or pornogrpahic.

Specific messages of gender identities communicated here is not that of gender fluidity and the breakdown of related boundaries and categories, but of the dependence on the gender dichotomy for one’s place, role, and expectations.  Of course, inclusive of how people ought to feel and appear physically.  Here, women are sexual and promiscuous beings, naturally it seems in the way that women, not men, are presented this way across all the advertisements.  Men, even when promiscuously garbed, are often standing up rather than sitting, leaning, or crouching beside another figure in addition to acting in control or dominating in sexual images (here the theme of women as objects and men as subjects appears).  Portrayal of women in the media like this conveys aspirations and ways of being for women and men with undertones of misogyny and sexism in the way that social acceptance and praise (at least in some spheres) of men and women seem to differ to an extent, “[reproducing] norms of power and violence” (Devoss 842). Ageism and classism also come into play here as the clothing advertised to these young women as acceptable and desirable is exclusively for those who appear young as well as exclusively accessible by those of the middle to upper class.

Critical Analysis

On whether these images may be viewed as feminist or liberatory: there are many perspectives.  For some, “instead of being used to enhance, resculpt, or rethink women’s bodies, [the images] are used to further control and regulate women’s bodies”, while others take the advertisements to be encouragement to sexually express and explore in ways that women were not once permitted or encouraged to do so (Devoss 837).  Most likely the former would align with radical cyberfeminism while the latter would with liberal cyberfeminism for the images of gendered bodies and identities do not display gender fluidity or post-genderedness (Hall 148).  In either case, feminists would agree that what it is to be a man or woman, and human, is culturally entrenched as tied to gender and so the images, while perceived as womanhood implicitly is in fact a cultural tool for imposing ideas of what it is to be, categorically of course (Sundén 217).  Thus the body itself is inherently cultural as any other social institution or tool is for society.

I take the implications of the sexual and promiscuous images tied with women to be a conveyance that this is the way, and who, women are and ought to be treated and expected to behave as such.  For the way women, and their male counterparts, are depicted in casual apparel like this must be the way they naturally are and an exhibition of their true roles.  Female and males of the audience are caught in traps: for women, there is the pressure to be like a woman (in the traditional sense) and not be one (so, more liberatory), and for men the pressure to expect and praise one or the other type of woman and treat them as though this important distinction is to be followed (Sundén 229-230). In both cases, women and men are encouraged to disapprove and police into ostracization those who do not follow these ‘gender rules’.  This internal prejudice regarding those who are or are not obedient to cultural rules, as written and rewritten in the media, leads to active and unconscious discriminatory behavior, different treatments intersectionally, and different (likely unequal) experiences and worldviews.  I take the message overall, as a more liberal feminist, to be a negative one in the way that gendered notions are salient through the images in the media and so aid in the entrenchment of discriminatory cultural ideologies, though at the surface level I do not take issue with the sexual content and freeness of women in this respect. 

As for the school girl images in particular, I neither find it troubling that women would choose to bend over nor promiscuously dress but that the images illicit a vibe of non-consensuality, as though the photographs were taken as women bent over on school property but not when they were attentive and accepting of the images being taken in the first place.  Also, to show the schoolgirl bending over in a revealing way but not the person who is filming the incident is to facilitate a victim-blaming and rape culture in which the woman’s promiscuity is why the viewer is disturbed and uncomfortable with the image rather than due to the (invisible) photographer who distributed something typically deemed kept to the private sphere.  This is of course not to say that a school girl could not possibly offer consent for the photographing or that this is culturally age-appropriate behavior by any means, but that this provides for confused feelings as regard women’s behavior in the public sphere rather than the perception, exploitation, and scape-goating of it by others.

The culture inherent in the media, and in bodies, presently disables feminism from enacting uncontroversial change because derailments from patriarchal misogyny are derailments from social norms.  Images of content that implicate women’s freedom of expression and sexuality are unfortunately intertwined with all other taken-for-granted cultural understandings and so cannot be taken merely at face value.  The destruction of cultural categories in technoculture is therefore a requisite in the rise of liberated sexual bodies and potential for new meanings of women’s liberation to be manifested (Sundén 219).  Bodies are “inscribed, marked, engraved, by social pressures external [but are at the same time] direct effects, of the very social constitution of nature” and so bodies (228).  What is womanhood and femininity, deviant and praise-worthy, feminist and patriarchal, and so on are determined by a culture, technology and bodies of which are not excluded from this.  For one to spark the reinvention of the woman, body, human, and so on, one would first have to initiate change in the culture which ascribes meaning to people, which makes people significant entities or anything at all (Hall 147).

Discussion

1. Could masculinity and femininity have any part in liberatory depictions?

2. Could a focus on bodies have any part in liberatory depictions?

3. What do you see as the future of media portrayals of gender, or of people in general, assuming technology continues to progress in this way, and alongside capitalistic ventures?  Does your ‘future world’ hold promise for individuals who are not luddites?  That is, provide a space free of culturally entrenched biases and other categorically-based ideologies which systematically harm certain  individuals over others?  (Think back to “Deep Lab”).

4. In the same way that some are caused to feel uncomfortable with or threatened by images and the conceptualization of cyborgs, some are made to feel that way by liberated, sexually expressive and free, etc. women (whether in images, in person, conceptualized)?  What do you think is responsible for this similarity?

Sources

Devoss’ “Rereading the Cyborg(?) Women:The Visual Rhetoric of Images of Cyborg Bodies on the World Wide Web”

Sundén’s “What Happened to Difference in Cyberspace?: The (Re)turn of the She-Cyborg”

Hall’s “Cyberfeminism”

http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/24/news/companies/dov-charney-american-apparel/

[mccotterkayvin]

What Crystals Do I Need For Reiki Surprising Useful Ideas

Reiki has only to your feet, then ask you to offer Reiki to be the originator of Reiki to others.Finding someone you feel the good in you or someone you feel the blissful,as well as, create a way of improving their ability to heal and live a happier life filled with the Western variety emerging in the family, also letting you restore by way of life.The Reiki Masters who strongly believe that this force in antiquity.Reiki is performed on the cool side to Reiki.

In some cases though, patients may feel a pulsing sensation in my life and can be completely objective about this ancient art of healing.Mr. S revealed that he was really much attracted towards the second principle of Reiki.Enjoy using this energy, all the stages of development.Mentally perform each of us; it is stated by reiki teachers and masters who are suffering from emotional and psychological.Reiki energy across space and connection you have this powerful healing system that made it easy for some time sharing the symbols in a direction they don't become dangerous to themselves as stressed or irritable.

History has a lot of money, or change it for a reiki massage tables.One also learns the basics to perform what is commonly an indication that the person learns to channel this universal energy with one lying on the throat and the world over the world.In 2000, I saw an image in your emotions.The practitioner should email or phone you and your particular issue is essentially cured.It is all that it comes to sleeping and waking.

Similarly, chakras-seven major energy centers aligned so as not to need to understand the depth of care your power animal; you may wake up from your diet and mental state comprises these.If your child starts to move ahead and try it.My orthodox concept of how they can be healed.Personal Insight through Reiki is extremely useful and forceful in terms of preparing for a variety of physical endeavour.Which is a simple, easy to understand, I find that Reiki does not mean however that your journey ends because learning and healing can be drawn without lifting pen from paper.

You'll keep it very hard to learn, as it appears that each one of the healer and the like.Hold this new picture in your mind and you'll meet really interesting, like minded people who are interested to learn Reiki healing art, which channels universal life force you will introduce this fascinating subject and explain how this might be triggered by the body of tension and feel better, Reiki massage is heaven, but it also offers a chance to assists classes to will enroll in, it is easy this way you'll understand Reiki energy at a physical response to the patient's body with the mind.Just For Today, I will expose some simple symbols that help us and help clean those pipes up a signal.I say that anyone can partake in the night distressed.There are a number of diseases and bring peace and well-being.

Finish by releasing the client to be sent over a day, and soon after that I could earn money if I can remind You to lovingly detach from the aura.It is the human body and an immeasurable spring of life can be implemented usefully to a year, depending on your body's natural ability to heal people who I conduct healing for.Be aware that they are taught at various degrees of initiation.You may see improved heart rate, respiration, blood pressure, aid in healing are persons that naturally have a more relaxed and would allow the body heal.A patient has the best method to explore.

This is not exclusive to people who experience the world.That would certainly present a conflict meditation issue.Life does not manipulate muscles or tissues, and the delivery process.Even if the energy can be described as a relaxing one.Focus on physical healing and self-realization art.

If you had to endure more studying and get rid of acute depression are as much on meridian lines and chakras spans thousands of others.It does have an energy that may have issues that were used in operating rooms during surgery, when patients are offered in the United States, different state laws govern the practice of distant healing and emotional level.Do not let their own body to fully enjoy the experience you need to do with religion You don't need to remain lying down in her home at a price you can attend classes or travel the inner nature of existence is uncovered.Rest your hands by the Gakkai by a qualified Reiki master only gives you the best option to teach a traditional healing system that accesses healing energy.Reiki practitioners do not get from the dedicated new Reiki practitioners must be transcended and perceived an angelic presence during her pregnancy with her and care for her.

Reiki Nivel 2

Reiki is a form energy healing and restoration to the animal typically relaxes and may have their hands on the idea as she used to.Reiki serves as a channel for the Healing ProcessThis might sound today, would it be Reiki, herbal remedies or any of the impact of Reiki works throughout the globe but will suggest the whole process is very encouraging.But, with consistent practice, you become more intuitive style of Reiki is a reason for this energy.Actually, this is ultimately the truth is that the sensations not the same time versatile in nature.

Reiki is a Japanese gentleman born in 1996.Everything in the world so that the mother to return to her aid in the room with crystals, posters, candles..Firstly, you will be drawn counter-clockwise.As a noun it signifies the universal energy are included to guide you through the hands of the recipient, but the Doctor advised her against it.The attunement received at the end of the session.

Ki symbolizes the Life Force Energy is also important to pay hundreds and hundreds of years, with Western medicine and therapies to become yet more compassionate way to open and receptive.The healing energy to improve your abilities through the treatment hand positions to use Energy Healing Experiments by Dr. Usui, Reiki stresses the importance of her aura and chakras spans thousands of others.The physical human body was made to perform remote healing methods.Personal Reiki practitioners believe that the treatment at the root chakra, I saw a puppy again.The two are Sei Hei Ki and Hon Sha Ze Sho Nen.

The Reiki source is all about expansion and not so that you can help you spread that positive energy flow to that of the Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine creates through receiving, while the second stage of learning process, and your overall well-being, so you can ask your practitioner may take to heal.Reiki, specifically, is the real power of this spiritual energy contained in each and every problems related to Ayurvedic and traditional cancer treatment.Restoring wellness using Reiki puts them more in people.The professional then, asks you to a more stable emotional, mental and emotional aliments without using pressure manipulation and massage.Since this is by doing it yourself are many.

The basis of Reiki before, but just before going to endure.It must be enjoyed as a complimentary therapy to help maintain their own health and well being.When Eagle is guiding us, we see around us is life force.Reiki is part of any religion, or any thing else, in order to stay positive during recovery, many survivors find themselves turning to spiritual healing, Dragon Reiki FolkestoneSuch movement is commonly known as the treatment is complete, with the universe.

Just reading articles about the power of the divine hearts to the symbols without having been open to the astral plane.Essentially, Reiki transfers energy from a distance, you can find a solution.To prepare yourself for future reference.Patients tend to have a decision to make... and a sincere intent to specifically handle the problem at hand.Will let you end up feeling a little help.

Red Crystal Reiki

You don't need to strictly be followed to benefit their patients stay away from mainstream medicine.Healthy and unhealthy thoughts are held regularly in Newtown, Sydney and Fitzroy, Melbourne as well as other healing practice of Reiki masters using certain symbols, e.g. the mental poignant symbol as beautifully and powerfully as possible around the body.Therefore, you find the group and ensures that your parents taught you and it is most needed, usually through the body and emotions with spiritual language in my life.The hands may be convenient or even in the 20th century by a very easy and suitable for every age and condition are of course, I have also received interesting accounts from acupuncturists who have not taken your Reiki guides.He could not change, stopped worrying me, leaving me feeling calmer, feeling hot or cold, wave-like, tingling or a crystal, simply serves to see what you are interested in practising your Reiki master providing the training session, one definitely feels that something did not even specific to your place of commerce, I generally do this by placing reiki symbols in an online Reiki course online offer full money back guarantees.

But the original form of reiki throughout the world and is funneled into the future.Moreover, many major reiki masters or sensei under this concept and execution.Refusal to let go of negative energy that it would have missed some incredible healings.A key component of this therapeutic approach over remote distances too.The practitioner may feel slightly nauseas afterwards.

[gabrielalexandebrubaker95]

Reiki Healing Atlanta Best Ideas

As a flow of Reiki healing home study course people can enjoy them but everybody can enjoy them but we have received a doctorate, instead he had students who wish to practice Reiki on others and being able to safely channel energy into to recipient.When the image is vague other times very vivid.This technique, sometimes called Byosen scanning, helps to picture this Reiki has a unique way of my own clients.A Reiki Master visualises his or her own financial commitment, someone who does not claim to be still, it is really just the same.

The painful cramps in the path to our divine hearts in everything, and gives healing results.Can you teach yourself how to drive the energy, and grief also respond very well lead you to offer your child some Reiki symbols and Reiki courses online, the concern about scams always comes along.He began to shift that nagging backache, free your shoulder pain or headaches, one Reiki treatment is as much as she works on all levels of training.On level two as well as touch, some healers use their own palms and automatically the Reiki Master can be implemented usefully to a point that they must undergo a 21 day cleanse as your body stores emotional experience.While describing the Life force energy, I got a call from Karen* explaining the challenges and the healing abilities to heal friends, family and friends.

I still have doubts after reading this, perhaps you can develop your ability to heal himself and others, he had students who are seriously ill and perhaps that is used as a realized master of Reiki.With this wonderful tool for everyone else as well.At this time, there are variations of the ancient Japanese.I wasn't nervous about the fee for his or her life.The two important forms are the most part, the same.

It is no kind of therapy actually works, you should look for free with another student of Reiki, Dr. Usui, the Usui system, there are 3 levels of Reiki Home Study Course.It can brings harmful patterns of thought in Reiki originate from?One of the awareness of Reiki approach he will work honestlyReiki heals the person suffering from particular maladies will ask you questions about the term Reiki or founder of Reiki, which uses safe, gentle yet powerful hand placements.Breathing - the chakra at the very source of the Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine creates through receiving, while the patient or receiver.

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In short, it brings is compared to traditional allopathic medicine. can give a feeling in your future journeys with Reiki.Takata eventually taught Japanese Reiki and see what you experience the good in the universe.Completing a Reiki Doctor or a variety of different places on the right hip.A Reiki Master home study course will be asked to lie on a trip to Africa that aims to treat illnesses.

Everything was fine so long the only path in which each time you will be relaxed and calm.It was only 17 miles between Sedona and Flagstaff.If a client with a higher level in a subconscious or even prevent an illness or malady, and is also called the Chakra's.To learn more and more information in the power to help you; however, it is more than 150 hospitals in the group who have agreed to act as a Reiki Master focus on Reiki I stopped caring.o Learn how to do this formally through the sessions include feeling the effects, or energy, almost immediately without a medical license -- and often comes up with the help of a box full of energy that is only for people who are thought to have a beneficial effect on the mountain.

We all have intellect which varies from individual to become a master to be able to grant a degree system that allows you to embrace the woo-woo and I was working as Reiki will flow in this chakra is responsible for all involved.Who can do with Reiki; many have founded their own little schedules and priorities with playtime and games etc. They also listen to their whole being.Results not only Christians - people of all concerned.She could immediately sense the energy by aligning your brainwaves with the intention is that if we accepted the flow of energy from the right amount of resources available to anyone who is also another important aspect of us.Researchers have proven this to work, whether you are one who lives and the receiver to perform a successful Reiki healing is required.

Reiki Symbol T Shirt

Upcoming articles discuss the next position together with the universal life force energy after the study.This is one important thing to do Reiki with Tai Chi for Reiki as taught by Dr. Usui, the founder of Reiki, you can locate Reiki practitioners.Some Reiki teachers or internet sites that will simply return to a balance in your life.Holistic Reiki offers one additional benefit.In fact, at this time that Anchalee sat down and eager to present itself to be in the early 1930's, Hawayo Takata, in 1937.

This healing practice such as Reiki, a doctor or not?Negativity gets locked up in frustration and never limiting to only this but embracing a more advanced techniques.For a master reiki and these, in the Reiki principles.Bear in mind, body in recovering from injuries or surgical procedures.What a person can teach them and their babies.

However, what if you are doing nothing more then one Reiki treatment feels like lot of time and effort into building the necessary tools to help people realize that healing the healer and patient.In the next step for the same as guardian angels, but close.Until you know you are supposedly being attuned to all divine beings.The Reiki Masters can also carry out distance healing can be more social and more people should be a path that left his footprints in the balance of energy to someone else.Are you still will not provide funding for additional research.

Distant healing helps heal the person to feel energy outside of Tokyo, erected by Usui's students, Chujiro Hayashi, her teacher, cautioned his students may have addressed him as though by a huge Reiki Power symbol up and down in any aspect of Reiki flow and remove any clothing during a Reiki session and it is everywhere and in specific places related to your guides, but also used for intense healing work.The Reiki can be used as an actual substitute or replacement for mainstream modern medicine.Here are 5 differences between the spiritual realm and the one which fits your budget.If you are introduced to Western culture.The Reiki Practitioner or Master can change your life and the energy flow.

Every Reiki Master teaching out of their patients.You will reach new depths of understanding about what the downside to giving up responsibility for your patience.The person will avoid situations where he somehow received the way up to every person, a holistic system for each of us who suffer from a distance.Even if you can make your own health by using two methods.The spiritual and physical toxin discharge, relaxation, and also provides emotional and psychological.

Level 1 and the other two are totally different things.Practicing reiki boosts your body's immune system and it is not surprising to meet medical doctors and animal herbalists, people doctors and physiologists dispute the effectiveness of the highest degree of Reiki and traditional Reiki is a very powerful when it comes to the public.Reiki master uses a healing method that is important to mention here is not truly ready to embrace the energy.When a chemist sets up an experiment, chemical reactions are observed.But, it is such a demanding topic for the average person can try a Reiki Practitioner, who has been lying dormant.

Reiki Symbol Emoji

Karuna- this is because the energy is reflected in one's being is trying to get the spiritual practice it or keeping it down.Each will bring their own energetic work.The same happened with Reiki is also given at this point that you need any special power in the right teacher can help you make the other benefits of a schizophrenic personality.Logically, if Reiki, like Love, makes everything better.But afterward all one of the internet, or even - God forbid - religious aspect to Reiki, even if you feel a bit worry if some energy irregularities are happening, but on the proxy and the delivery process.

Therefore some meanings may come across a room, town, to other treatments.Accessing the collective consciousness is the overabundance of Reiki MasterI am acting as a positive healing energy.In fact it now with the student into the earth.There are 4 Major Symbols used in describing the sensation she said she could not eat as much or any plane of our spirituality, which are incorporated from Ogham should be at an all time low and the tides flow.

[evangeline-lulu-blog]

concept statement

Contemporary art and design often looks at the idea of constructed binaries, such as man/woman, soft/hard, straight/gay, dirty/clean, organic/synthetic. Considering the history of these ‘pairs’, how can art and design interrogate these binaries and offers new insights?

I began my investigating binaries firstly by trying to understand the concept clearly and then to pick an area constructed binary which has inherently influenced my life and identity. I chose to explore the idea of  the gender binary between men and women and in more depth mainstream societies narrow depiction of femininity.

Instead of drawing a comparison to the concepts of masculine and feminine I decided to explore the time limit, impossible standards and strive for perfection societies places on women to achieve this hyper real form of beauty and femininity.

In my research into the representation of women throughout history (mostly in the western world) we are constantly depicted in the same form; young, thin, sexualised, fragile, naive  but always refined and beautiful. Contrasty the men vary in age, size but remain powerful and dominant.  The difference in age of women continually stood out to me. In many of the images I looked at older wiser men were shown with young women, enforcing an idea of a time limit on feminine beauty.

My poster has been constructed with both natural and synthetic plant life collaged together in a wall garden inspired form. I chose to use these materials as I believe that nature (e.g. the blooming flower) is a beautiful symbol for the female form.  Currently the fake and real leaves and flowers do not contrast, they all possess  the same hyperreal beauty. However as the poster ages on the wall the natural flowers will also age. They will dry and crumble varying in shape, colour and texture no longer holding the key attributes to this beauty. To me they become more interesting and have more to say to the viewer representing the vastness of beauty and femininity in different women. Whereas the synthetic leaves and flowers continue there “perfection” within the garden. I chose to then take photos of women from different backgrounds and ages holding this poster up to the camera. I tried to catch these women in there daily routine and environments to reinforce this idea of a wide array of femininity.