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lesbianfeminists · 4 years

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#rightwing #gender

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tumlbrtumlbr · 3 years

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Woman as alien: Angela Carter's Heroes and Villains.

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"Woman as an alien, the non-patriarchal alien in a patriarchal society, the patriarchal alien in a non-patriarchal society, the non-patriarchal alien experiencing the stress of positioning as a patriarchal subject - all are strategies used by feminist science fiction writers to deconstruct patriarchal ideology and its practice." (1) This quote taken from an essay by Anne Cranny-Francis is for me a very suitable starting point for a discussion of Angela Carter's Heroes and Villains (1969). Written from within the counter-culture of the 1960s, this novel is Carter's excursion into the disaster story convention, a literary sub-genre which was very popular during the period of the Cold War. (2)

Heroes and Villains is a very interesting and unsettling early book, and yet, surprisingly, one that has received "far less critical attention than one might expect." (3) Apart from a few interesting essays, (4) the existing studies of the book (primarily sub-chapters of monographs devoted to Carter) focus almost exclusively on the way the novel reverses gender stereotypes and undermines cultural codings of female sexuality as passive and masochistic. My point is different: I would like to show how, by having a female protagonist (and focalizer) who revolts against cultural stereotypes, Carter revitalizes the disaster story convention that in the late sixties seemed an exhausted and repetitive sub-genre of pulp fiction.

In order to do this I am going to briefly present the British disaster story tradition, place Carter within its context, and then discuss Heroes and Villains as an atypical disaster story that, thanks to a woman-alien who disrupts mythical frameworks that people are confined by, points to new ways of constructing narratives. I will show how the female protagonist of the novel matures and gradually learns that her post-holocaust society is based on a set of false binary oppositions it has inherited from pre-holocaust Western patriarchal society, and that her world is slowly giving way to entropy. I will then prove that Heroes and Villains indulges in descriptions of chaos and decay in order to show the deterioration of once potent symbols and thus of the mythical order which they represent. Only then, once the old order disappears, can the female mythmaker create a totally new civilization, one that does not repeat old and static social paradigms, but is dynamic and mutable. Similarly, Heroes and Villains shows that, in order not to degenerate into pulp disaster, the story should refrain from recreating already known historical epochs (for example, a new post-holocaust Middle Ages), opting instead to create radically new societies ruled by women-aliens.

Though it is rather difficult to state exactly what disaster stories are, a fair working definition of the genre seems to be the one given in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: "stories of vast biospheric change which drastically affect human life." (5) According to John Clute and Peter Nicholls, the British disaster story was born at the end of the nineteenth century when the first anti-civilization sentiments were being felt, and people began to mistrust the idea of the white man's Empire standing for reason, progress and science. In 1884 Richard Jefferies, a Victorian naturalist and journalist, published After London, a novel describing the ruins of the greatest city on Earth; in a post-cataclysmic future our civilization inevitably succumbs to nature, savagery and non-reason. In the following years such writers as H.G. Wells, Conan Doyle and Alun Llewellyn published numerous fantastic ac counts of natural- or human-provoked disasters, the retrogression of humankind, new ice ages, barbarian raids, the destruction of Europe, etc. (6)

Though dating from the nineteenth century the genre did not flourish until the 1950s and early 1960s during the Cold War, when young British writers revived the old tradition by incorporating a new influence: that of American pulp magazines. American stories of the time were very pessimistic, as the recent war left many with a feeling of despair and fear of the nuclear bomb, political systems based on unlimited power and culture's imminent doom. In England there was a strong native tradition of gloomy fiction concerning authoritarian societies (George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Burgess), and thus the young authors of disaster stories belonging to the so-called "New Wave" of British speculative fiction (J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss and others) had examples to follow. (7) Their older colleagues Walter Miller (in the United States) and John Wyndham (in Britain) were writing their post-holocaust bestsellers at that very time.

Heroes and Villains seems to belong to the same tradition as the disaster story classics: Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibovitz or John Wyndham's The Chrysalides. (8) Miller and Wyndham describe the beginnings of a new civilization; their prose demonstrates how the deadly heritage of our times (pollution, mutations, decline and chaos) serve as the basis for another better world. In A Canticle monks of a second Middle Ages try to gather and preserve the records of our knowledge by rewriting all kinds of texts (just like the caste of Professors). Though they no longer understand what they copy, still there is hope that one day civilization will be regained. Wyndham's post-catastrophic society, in turn, is obsessed with the idea of purity and the norm. His characters want to recreate civilization in such a way as to make it immune to self-destruction. In its fear of deviations and mutants (bringing to mind the Out People) Wyndham's society is cruel and fanatical, but his novel is, just like Miller's story, full of hope for the future. Human folly and cruelty evoke terror and pity in order to improve the reader's mind. Carter's procedure in composing Heroes and Villains is to allude to Wyndham and Miller's tradition. Both Heroes and Villains and her other post-holocaust novel The Passion of the New Eve show to what extant literature today is repeating already known tales. Yet disaster fiction, a very commercial genre, enables Carter to reuse the stock motifs and to create her own often times shocking pieces. Her disaster novels may therefore be read as modern Menippea: a mixture of heterogeneous literary material. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, Menippea was the genre which broke the demands of realism and probability: it conflated the past, present and future, states of hallucination, dream worlds, insanity, eccentric behaviour and speech and transformation. (9)

Heroes and Villains juxtaposes overt allusions to nuclear fallout and mutations caused by the self-annihilation of technological society with counter-cultural poetics: subversion of the social order, new hippie-like aesthetics, alternate lifestyles, and concentration on entropy, decay and death. Carter is no longer interested in the bomb--she does not warn against the impending holocaust; but instead describes in detail the gradual dissolution of social, sexual and cultural groupings which follows the inevitable disaster and which makes room for a new female-governed future. Thus, she deconstructs the markedly masculine tradition of after-the-end-of-the-world fantasies which deal with the creation of a new order, strong leaders and outbursts of violence (as is the case in the above-mentioned novels by Miller and Wyndham). In stock disaster stories women are either commodities or breeders who are fought for and whose reproductive abilities are to amend r the drastic decrease of population.

In Heroes and Villains the Cold War motif of a post-holocaust civilization allows Carter to create an exuberant world of ruin, lush vegetation and barbarism. Three groups of people live among the crumbling ruins of a pre-nuclear explosion past: the Professors, who live in concrete fortified villages and cultivate old science and ideology; the Barbarians, who attack them and lead nomadic lives in the forests; and the Out People, radiation mutants cast out by all communities.

The Professors are the guardians of this order, and they try to uphold standards and attend to appearances such as dress and accent. Marianne, the novel's focalizer, is the daughter of a professor of history brought up to live in an ordered patriarchal society and to study old books in trying to preserve knowledge. The futility of the Professors' work - abstract research done in white concrete towers, editing what nobody would ever read - demonstrates the arbitrariness of post-apocalyptic social roles. The caste of Professors, in wanting to be different than the irrational Barbarians, must devise artificial attributes of its individuality.

Unable to cope with an existence devoted to cultivation of the past and attracted by the colourful and seemingly romantic Barbarians, Marianne helps one of them--an attractive young Barbarian leader named Jewel. He is very beautiful and he wears an exuberant savage costume, making him look like a Hollywood film star who plays in a wilderness film. For Marianne he embodies her desire and fantasies --on one occasion she even calls him the "furious invention of my virgin nights." (10) Moreover, his name might be considered an allusion to the beautiful savage girl whom Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim made the queen of his little kingdom. (11) Marianne's name might well be read as an allusion to Jane Austen's too-romantic heroine of Sense and Sensibility. (12) This canonical echo is contrasted with the association with pulp fiction: Marianne, a professor's daughter lost in the wilderness, evokes the character of Jane in the Tarzan stories. (13) It is by such literary allusions that Carter constructs her self-conscious pastiche, thus demonstrating the whole range of possibilities offered to a female character by romance and, at the same time, she points out the exhaustion of these conventions. John Barth in his Literature of Exhaustion postulates that "exhausted" literature might be saved by coming back to well-known classics and by echoing their extracts in new shocking contexts. (14) In this way Carter mingles her generically heterogeneous "prior texts".

Wounded in an attack, Jewel escapes from the village and is followed by Marianne. He then takes her to his tribe and, despite her protests, proclaims her his hostage. Marianne is a total stranger among the Barbarians; they find her repulsive and unbearably alien; like a creature from outer space in a B-grade science fiction movie she provokes fear and hostility. An educated and self-assured woman in a tribe "caught in the moment of transition from the needs of sheer survival to a myth-ruled society," (15) she is thus a woman-alien. Interestingly, as early as the 1960s Carter used a science fiction stock character to talk about women in a society that is undergoing changes: in the 1990s Donna Haraway, in her famous "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century", in a similar way makes use of the science fiction concept of a cyborg. (16) Haraway follows Carter's footsteps, and indeed makes her point even stronger, as her "cyborg" comes from the social outside and is alien to traditional gender structures. As Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger explain:

Haraway develops her "Manifesto" around the cyborg--product of both science fiction and the military-industrial complex--as an imaginative figure generated outside the framework of the Judeo-Christian history of fall and redemption, a history that unfolds between the twin absolutes of Edenic origin and apocalyptic Last Judgment. Like Derrida, Haraway warns that (nuclear) apocalypse might, in fact, be the all-too-possible outcome of our desire for the resolution of historical time. Haraway too is wary of cultural discourses that privilege resolution, completion, and totality. (17)

Marianne is alien to the tribe as she refuses to adopt traditional female roles. Thus, Carter uses science fiction literary conventions to talk about gender as performance much in the same manner Judith Butler will some twenty years later. (18) Elisabeth Mahoney in her above-mentioned study of Heroes and Villains reads the novel in the context of Butler's thesis, that "fantasy is the terrain to be privileged in any contestation of conventional configurations of identity, gender and the representation of desire." (19) This is a very good starting point and an interesting comparison but, as Elaine Jordan notices, "Carter did this sort of thing before Butler, so her work could just as well be used to explicate Butler." (20) The same is true for Haraway, Gordon, Hollinger and a number of other feminist critics often referred to nowadays in order to validate Carter's argument. But Carter turning to science fiction for her metaphors predates them.

The tribe (whose descriptions bring to mind a 1960s hippie commune) is apparently governed by Jewel and his brothers, but Marianne soon realizes that the real source of power is Donally, an escapee professor of sociology, Jewel's tutor, and the self-proclaimed shaman of the tribe. For Donally the tribe is a social laboratory where he tries to perform an experiment: to wit, to introduce a new mythology designed to be the founding stone of new type of post-holocaust society. (21)

It seemed to me that the collapse of civilisation in the form that intellectuals such as ourselves understood it might be as good a time as any for crafting a new religion' he said modestly. 'Religion is a device for instituting the sense of a privileged group; many are called but few are chosen and, coaxed from incoherence, we shall leave the indecent condition of barbarism and aspire towards that of the honest savage. (22)

When Marianne meets Donally she immediately recognizes his professorial descent: "his voice was perfectly cultured, thin, high and soft ... He had a thin, mean and cultured face. Marianne had grown up among such voices and faces." (23) Seeing in his study books which she remembered from her childhood (Teilhard de Chardin, Levi-Strauss, Weber, Durkheim) Marianne discovers Donally's attempts to rule the Barbarians according to the outdated formulas written down by pre-apocalyptic sociologists.

Disappointed by the tribe, Marianne runs away only to be recaptured by Jewel, who rapes her, brings her back, and then ceremoniously marries her according to a ritual devised by Donally. With the tribe again on the move, Donally quarrels with Jewel and has to leave. Marianne gradually learns how to manipulate Jewel, her quasi-royal power grows, especially once she becomes pregnant and is to be the mother of Jewel's heir. When Donally sends a message that he has been caught by the Professors, Jewel goes to rescue him and both are killed. In the novel's finale Marianne decides to become the new female leader of a new society.

This brief summary reveals that, in parallel with the action-adventure narrative, the novel also depicts Marianne's gradual psychological change. She learns how to articulate her own fantasies and to objectify the man she desires: Jewel. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that when her romantic illusions disappear she discovers her own deeper motivating desire in her relationship with Jewel: it is her newly awakened sexuality that counts, not the male himself. Though a tribal leader and a future patriarch, Jewel is in fact a passive object both Marianne and Donally struggle to possess. Linden Peach writes:

In the relationship between Marianne and Jewel, Carter also rewrites a further traditional story, that of a demon-lover, of whom Jewel has many characteristics--he is powerful, mysterious, supernatural; and he can be cruel, vindictive and hostile. However, in her description of him, Carter challenges the male-female binarism which ascribes so-called masculine qualities to men and feminine characteristics to women. In discovering the nature of her own desire, Marianne finds that male-female attributes exist within each individual. The demon-lover is also reconfigured as part of her own eroticisation of the male other. (24)

New ways of looking at herself and others set Marianne free and empower her. Towards the end of the book she feels ready to construct a new narrative for herself and make the world around believe in it. A woman-alien dissolves the tribe's patriarchal structure and commences a new phase in its history. The old order based on binary oppositions (hero/villain, passive/active, natural/civilized) and a number of taboos that originated in pre-holocaust times are abandoned. Carter does not do what a standard disaster story author does: she does not establish a rigid binarism between the Professors and the Barbarians, i.e., the civilized and the savage. The post-holocaust narrative is for her a space where she "explores the blurring of conventional boundaries and binarisms and the way in which such artificial boundaries are maintained." (25) She re-uses existing narrative patterns of disaster fiction in order to break the "Wyndhamesque" formula and instead create a new and radical vision of the end of the world.

Moreover, these post-holocaust times are shown to be not a new version of the old order, but an unknown epoch typified not by stability but by creative chaos. Step by step, Marianne realizes that the entire distinction Professors\Barbarians is as false and naive as the children's role-playing game called "Soldiers and Villains". As a female child growing up in a Professors' village she always had to play the part of the Barbarian, the villain, the other, while the boy she played with, the son of a professor of mathematics, always wanted to be a male civilized hero who shoots her dead. As a small girl she was brave enough to refuse to play such a game; now as a young woman she realizes that in the real world the basis of the division between the Professors and the Barbarians is a set of myths and superstitions. (26)

The stay in the Barbarians' camp proves to Marianne that there is no other difference but old wives' tales: to her surprise (and in opposition to what she was told in the Professors' village) the Barbarians do not represent instinct, folklore and savagery alone. They do have a lot of superstitions; they do sport ridiculous tattoos, hairdos and costumes and they do believe in folk cures--but at the same time they are very far from unreflective "nature". When Marianne first sees Jewel he seems the embodiment of the wilderness: a man fighting to survive among hostile wildlife. But he immediately destroys this impression by quoting to her a relevant bit of poetry: Tennyson's poem about Darwinism. (27) Jewel is very well-educated by Donally and likes to boast of his knowledge of philosophical theories and the Latin names of beasts, which seems as irrelevant in the dirty Barbarians' camps as the Professors' lore in their concrete towers.

The Professors and the Barbarians need each other to define themselves. Both tribes work hard to impress the opponent (the Barbarians wear tattoos and facepaint, the Professors organize armies of specially-equipped soldiers to defend their villages). They also blame each other for the hardships of post-holocaust life. Marianne's father, in explaining to her the reasons of the war between the tribes, asks at one point: "if the Barbarians are destroyed who will we then be able to blame for the bad things?" (28) Aidan Day remarks:

The Professors, failing to recognise their own repressions, have sought to hound that which is not gentle and ordered outside themselves. They have committed the crime of finding external scapegoats for realities within their own hearts and minds that they find problematical. (29)

In a world where the Barbarians discuss philosophy and shamans comment on being shamans, even the seemingly biological distinction human\inhuman is not stable and fails to structure reality. While roaming the jungle Marianne encounters mutants whose bodies and minds transgress the human norm. What is worth noting is the origin of the Out People motif: mutants and deviations often populate the worlds of post-apocalyptic stories, the above-mentioned example of Wyndham's The Chrysalides being the best known; but the way they are described is usually quite different. By transgressing the norm Wyndham's mutants reinforce the notion of being human, of possessing some mysterious human factor along with all the rights and duties, while Carter's Out People are just strange, speechless bodies:

Amongst the Out People, the human form has acquired fantastic shapes. One man has furled ears like pale and delicate Arum Lilies. Another was scaled all over, with webbed hands and feet. Few had the conventional complement of limbs and features. (30)

Their appearance shows that overwhelming entropy is not external scenery the human race has to live in, but that it touches and alters the very essence of humanness: what humans are and what humans create is falling apart. Carter is re-writing an iconic disaster story motif (that of humans genetically altered by radiation), but she gives it a new ideological meaning. In classic male post-holocaust narratives mutants are disfigured humans who suffer for the sins of the fathers: civilization should start anew, albeit preserving its essential features (humanism, liberalism, traditional family values and consequently, patriarchy). Carter's Marianne, in watching the Out People, does not believe in re-establishing the old social order with its norms and values. Heroes and Villains is not about the rebirth of humankind, but about apocalypse itself.

In this chaotic world--where there are no more essential differences between phenomena, and the randomness of things does not allow for any conventional divisions--race, species, gender and even time cease to exist objectively. David Punter comments:

The conflict ... is a multivalent parody: of class relations, of relations between the sexes, of the battle between rational control and desire.... There are, obviously, no heroes and no villains; only a set of silly games which men play. (31)

Each entity possesses its own characteristic features; but on their basis no classification can be made as, gradually, all the points of reference are destroyed. Such a process is particularly striking as far as temporality is concerned--in the world of the novel there is no objective measure of time; everybody lives in the temporal dimension of his biological rhythm without calendars or chronometers. In Heroes and Villains the flow of time is stopped forever, as shown by the beautiful though useless chronometers that for Marianne are merely souvenirs from the past, elements of pure decoration. The book starts with a description of her father's favourite heirloom:

[A] clock which he wound every morning and kept in the family dining room upon a sideboard full of heirlooms.... She concluded the clock must be immortal but this did not impress her ... she watched dispassionately as the hands of the clock went round but she never felt the time was passing, for time was frozen around her in this secluded place. (32)

Time itself has become an heirloom, a peculiar reminder of bygone days. For Marianne the ticking of the clock has no relation to the rhythm of life. Its ticking proved to be the sound of her childhood and her father's old age. She left it behind without regret as it had never served for her any purpose. The next chronometers she saw (dead watches worn by the Barbarian women for decoration) were signs of an even greater degree of timelessness as nobody remembered their initial function. The last clock in the book, a gigantic and dead apparatus, welcomes Marianne in the ruins of the old city: (33)

Prominent among the minarets, spires and helmets of wrought iron which protruded from the waters was an enormous clock whose hands stood still at the hour of ten, though it was, of course, no longer possible to tell whether this signified ten in the morning or ten at night. (34)

The gigantic size of this clock and its absolute deadness create the image of the total arbitrariness of any measure of time. Exhaustion and entropy know no time but the vague "now" which for a fraction of a second can at best turn into "a totally durationless present, a moment of time sharply dividing past from future and utterly distinct from both." (35) The post-holocaust landscape of ruined cities near the seaside adorned with dead clocks brings to mind a visual intertext: Salvador Dali's The Persistence of Memory. (36) In this surreal painting, influenced by psychoanalysis, gigantic dead clocks are melting down, showing that clock time is no longer valid. Dali and Carter (who adored the Surrealists and often wrote about them in both her fiction and non-fiction) are both trying to recreate inner landscapes: their critique of the contemporary world takes forms of fantastic neverlands.

Carter's great admiration for the Surrealist movement results from the fact that, as she holds, theirs was the art of celebration and recreation. Their techniques haphazard and idiosyncratic, the Surrealists attempted to create combinations of words and images which by analogy and inspiration were supposed to evoke amazement; such art was based on a strong belief in humankind's ability to recreate itself. The world shown in their works is "deja vue", as in a nightmare we recognize separate elements which we have already seen as they date back to diverse moments of the past. It is a world deprived of time experienced in the mind. In surrealist art: "It is this world, there is no other but a world transformed by imagination and desire. You could say it is a dream made flesh." (37) In Heroes and Villains Carter attempts to use a similar technique to depict the post-apocalyptic world in which past, present and future intermingle.

For Carter's characters the future offers no escape: they are doomed to inhabit the ruins and repeat social scenarios from the past. Living in such a world has the haunting quality of a nightmare: the self-conscious characters feel oppressed by the same surroundings, similar activities and repeated words. What is the worst is the fact that there is no escape in space either, as there cannot be anywhere to go: "There's nowhere to go, dear,' said the Doctor. 'If there was I would have found it". (38)

Madness, drunkenness and paranoia seem to be the only ways out of the grotesque post-apocalyptic wilderness where everything is falling apart; indeed, the wild world Marianne enters (and finally renews) is entropy-ridden. The story's characters can hide only inside their troubled egos, as the outside reality is nothing but an everlasting nightmare. A stifling atmosphere of exhaustion and oppression is created by numerous images of overgrown vegetation, desolate ruins, half-destroyed houses full of fungi and rotting furniture, detailed descriptions of dirt and disease all in the atmosphere of sexual fantasy and paranoid visions. These images are too vivid and drastic to be mere scenery; it is the power of death and the different faces of decay that constitute Carter's style.

Carter treats bits and pieces of old discourses (the above-mentioned allusions to Conrad and Austen, as well as to Edgar Rice Burroughs and John Wyndham) in the way the Barbarians use old garments and broken down pieces of machinery found in the ruins: apparently to adorn but, at the same time, to take delight in dissolution, destruction and death. Metatextually, Heroes and Villains depicts the de-composition of traditional modes of writing; Carter follows the example of such New Wave authors as Pamela Zoline (39) for whom the key narrative term is entropy. In the short story "The heat death of the universe" Zoline defines the entropy of a system as "a measure of its degree of disorder." (40) The "system" is post-capitalist affluent society, and in order to capture the experience of living within the contemporary mediascape she both depicts the chaos of her character's life and introduces chaos to her narrative.

Zoline's "The Heat Death of the Universe" ends with the scene when the protagonist methodically smashes all pieces of equipment in her kitchen, thereby creating an irreversible mess of destruction; all forms give way to chaos. Carter's novel has a totally different post-apocalyptic setting, yet chaos and entropy are equally important. The narration of Heroes and Villains describes decay almost with pleasure and most certainly with great precision. The text changes into a study in decomposition, the anatomy of both our civilization and the disaster story genre: they both are killed in order to be examined. "For I am every dead thing"; (41) this quotation from John Donne would best summarize the world of the novel, which does not allow for any hope. The only emotion left is curiosity: Marianne the focalizer takes some pleasure in scientific observations of decay.

Among the ruins and scattered heirlooms of the past a prominent place is given to old symbols, which at the moment of the world's death, change in significance. Deprived of their contextual power the symbols die, creating ephemeral constellations and gaining for a moment a certain new meaning. The anatomy of signification becomes a favourite pastime of Donally and, later, Marianne; but the way the two of them interpret signs differs. Donally seeks to maintain patriarchal mythical frameworks: the sharp unequal antagonism between male and female; civilized and uncivilized; reasonable and wild. Marianne tries to dismantle these oppositions: for her signs are reduced to aesthetics and the old signifying system dies. The moment she starts to observe signs for their own sake marks her growing understanding of the world around: she lives surrounded by the debris of a bygone civilization which one may study--but only for scientific purposes. New myths are yet to be created. The last conversation between her and Jewel best shows the difference between them. Jewel is still naive enough to believe in symbols, while Marianne analyzes them:

But when he was near enough for her to see the blurred colours of his face, she also saw he was making the gesture against the Evil Eye. Suddenly she recognised it. "They used to call that the sign of the Cross,' she said. 'It must be handed down among the Old Believers." "Did you call me back just to give me this piece of useless information?" (42)

The anatomy of symbolic meanings and their changes is best seen in the example of clothes. Both the dress and decoration worn by the Barbarians come either from the ruins (and thus from the past) or are stolen from the Professors' villages. Worn in new and shocking combinations, old garments gain new meanings. A similar process was described in one of Carter's fashion essays from the Nothing Sacred collection. The essay entitled "Notes for a Theory of the Sixties Style" analyzes the nature of apparel. According to Carter clothes are the best example of the decadent fashion of the sixties, as in those years they "become arbitrary and bizarre ... reveal a kind of logic of whizzing entropy. Mutability is having a field day." (43)

The term mutability is the key notion for this essay, one written two years before the publication of Heroes and Villains. In this text Carter defines style as the presentation of the self as a three-dimensional object. Wearing eclectic fragments of different vestments "robbed of their symbolic content" (44) is a way of creating a new whole whose items are not in any imposed harmony. The theory formulated in the essay seems to be the key to understanding the symbolic meaning of clothes in Heroes and Villains, where mutability is not a matter of individual choice, but the condition of the whole dying civilization.

In broader terms, symbols have meaning only in reference to the mythical structures behind them--and clothes are a perfect example of this process. In a patriarchal society, where the law of inheritance makes men value female chastity and pre-nuptial virginity, the wedding ritual has a deep mythical sense and the white wedding dress becomes a potent symbol. Donally makes Marianne wear an old deteriorating white robe during her marriage ceremony in a vain attempt to reestablish patriarchy in the tribe. For Marianne the dress is just an ugly relic of bygone epochs. Lost in the exhausted reality of dead symbols she feels she has to create their own future: first to escape the old symbolic order and then to devise a new mythology herself.

Thus, paradoxically, the novel combines the symbols of entropy and mutability; it shows the world in the moment of its disintegration, and yet the disintegrating elements are constantly being re-used to create changeable structures. In one moment we read a "Wyndhamesque" end-of-the-world-fantasy, in another Carter deconstructs this tradition. Roz Kaveney writes:

The formalist aspects of Carter's work--the extent to which she combined stock motifs and made of them a collage that was entirely her own--was bound to appeal; sections of the SF readership discovered in the course of the 1970s and 1980s that they had been talking postmodernism all their lives and not noticing it, and Carter was part of that moment. (45)

Kaveney reads Heroes and Villains in the context of the science fiction readership in the late 20th century, and discovers how Carter makes use of SF conventions. Eva Karpinski in her essay "Signifying Passion: Angela Carter's Heroes and Villains as a Dystopian Romance" refers in her reading of the book to the utopian tradition:

The dystopian romance proves to be a suitable vehicle for Carter's didactic allegory of the relationship between the sexes, an allegory, one might add, that uses the utopian ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in order to re-write the myth of the Fall as it structures Western representations of the social and sexual difference. (46)

Other critics, for example Elaine Jordan (47) use the label "speculative fiction," (48) and Carter herself in the famous interview given to John Haffenden calls her fiction "magic mannerism." (49) Thus, one can think of diverse generic formulas to describe the novel, although none of the labels is final, as the narrative itself is unstable and mutable.

The novel also celebrates new feminist myths in order to playfully laugh at them on the next page. Having got rid of Donally and having won her mental struggle with Jewel, Marianne decides on a scenario that suits her best. She has found her identity and now wants to take control over the tribe and to become a post-apocalyptic leader, which she declares by paraphrasing the Bible: "I will be the tiger-lady and I will rule them with a rod of iron." (50) In this sentence she alludes to Donally's attempt to tattoo one of the tribe's children into a tiger-girl, something which ended tragically, as the baby died in the process. But the idea of the artificial creation of a "natural" tiger-human had some appeal to the Barbarians and thus Jewel wanted to get the tiger tattoo himself.

When Jewel learned that at his age it was impossible, he planned to tattoo his and Marianne's baby. And now it is Marianne who is going to symbolically possess the tiger's strength and beauty: not by getting a tattoo, but by ruling "with a rod of iron" over the tribe. Her "rod" is probably going to be her knowledge and education, the love of reason her father taught her, combined with her ability to reconcile binary oppositions and blend nature with nurture, reason with instinct, the Barbarians and the Professors. Only a woman-alien can do this by creating a third, reconciliatory way between the two patriarchal societies. Marianne is aware that she is not yet living in the post-apocalyptic order, but still within the Apocalypse itself, that is, amidst the bits and pieces of the old world which is falling apart. Thus her declaration "I will rule them with a rod of iron" echoes Saint John's Revelation:

and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born. And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron: and her child was caught up unto God, and to his throne. And the woman fled into the wilderness. (51)

Marianne misquotes St John for a purpose: she aims to give old patriarchal texts a new meaning for new times. At the end of the book Marianne is, physically speaking, "ready to deliver", as her baby is to be born very soon. But here the similarities with St John end: who can be identified with the devouring dragon? Perhaps patriarchal attempts to remodel the child so that it serves a purpose? After all, Donally and Jewel wanted him tattooed and ruling the tribe according to the old pattern of power. Moreover, Marianne (in contrast to Donally and Jewel) is not so sure the baby is going to be "a man child", and so she plans the future regardless of its sex. Finally, her flight into the wilderness is in fact an act of usurping political power herself: it is she who is going to become a tiger-lady and to rule the new "wilderness", the world outside the villages of the Professors and the camps of the Barbarians.

"People kept wild beasts such as lions and tigers in cages and looked at them for information. Who would have thought they would take to our climate so kindly, when the fire came and let them out?" (52) which is how Marianne's father once explained to her why the exotic beasts roam the countryside devouring smaller creatures. After the apocalypse carnivorous cats once again become the king of beasts; they are the only ones that gained power instead of losing it. Predators could survive and rule. As this is true of tigers, perhaps it can also be true of people?

Tigers and lions are very prominent in the novel; we very soon learn that Jewel is attracted to wild cats, which is perhaps the effect of his own weakness. One of his most vivid memories is the scene when, as a teenager, he met a lion face to face and survived only because the beast ignored him. This story (which he told to Marianne) anticipates the end of the novel: when Jewel gives up and goes to seek his death he encounters another lion and again fails to attract its attention. Marianne sees the animal and cannot but admire its fearsome beauty:

She had never seen a lion before. It looked exactly like pictures of itself; though darkness washed its colours off, she saw its mane and tasseled tail which flicked about as it moved out of the edge of shadow on to the dune. (53)

Marianne is not disappointed; the lion looks "like pictures of itself": the thing and its representation for once go together. The mythical meaning of wild cats is going to survive the end of civilization and shall remain a handy metaphor. Marianne decides to rule over the tribe as its tiger-lady not in an act of imitating a queen of the wilderness fairytale motif, but in an attempt to start a new epoch with its new myths. (54) As Margaret Atwood puts it in her essay on Carter's stories "Running with the Tigers", as the tiger will never lie down with the lamb, it is the lamb the powerless female--which should learn the tigers' ways. (55) By the same token, Marianne wants to create a new definition for a power system in which the oppositions male/female, intellect/desire or civilized/wild are of no importance. (56)

When Marianne gets to the Barbarian camp for the first time she finds herself imprisoned by the patriarchal myth of a new Creation. Both Donally and Jewel want her to act out a new Eve role in order to secure a re-enactment of history which would result in a repetition of the old social and political order. Jewel advises her at the time of her trouble in adapting to the tribe to pretend to be Eve at the end of the world. The original patriarchal myth of Eden is re-enforced by a tattoo Jewel has on his back whereby Eve offers Adam an apple, and by a number of metaphors and allusions. This myth is thus very prominent in the novel and suggests the strength of patriarchal ideology--parallel to the strength of the tribe's male leaders (and also of the Professors' village: both societies are exclusively male-governed). The rival mythical intertext--the Revelation of Saint John--appears not until the end of Heroes and Villains and marks the beginning of a genuinely new epoch when Marianne, a woman-alien, takes power.

A woman-alien sets out to create a genuinely new social order and the question is whether she is going to recreate the hegemonic power-relations of patriarchal order in both the Professors' villages and the Barbarians' camps. In science fiction narratives aliens often perceive human civilization in a new way, one that enables us to see "normal" social order in a defamiliarized manner; Marianne is a stranger to her own world, she is not interested in the reversal of binaries, but in their liquidation. Carter does not celebrate her political victory as a birth of a genuinely feminist paradise: the very concept of "tiger-lady" cannot be taken too seriously. Marianne the Queen is demythologized from the very start of a reign which is going to prefer mutability to stiff order.

Marianne the tiger-lady has a long road to power behind her. Heroes and Villains tells a story of her maturation in a world full of bits and pieces of old symbols and power structures. Marianne learns to see that these binding discourses are giving way to entropy, and that in her world of total chaos new myths have to be created --and that a new, post-patriarchal epoch is yet to be commenced. Moreover, a similar procedure might well be applied to the old literary genre Heroes and Villains pertains to: the British disaster story. By having an atypical protagonist, a female-alien strong enough to destroy patriarchal social structure, Carter manages to revive the exhausted convention and to create a genuinely new story.

(1.) Anne Cranny-Francis, "Feminist Futures: A Generic Study," in Alien Zone. Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette Kuhn (London and New York: Verso, 2003), 219-228, p. 223.

(2.) To call Carter a "feminist science fiction writer" would perhaps be an exaggeration (though the most influential science fiction lexicon, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction edited by Clute and Nicholls, does have an entry "Angela Carter"). Nonetheless, in some of her novels she purposefully uses fantastic literary conventions.

(3.) Elisabeth Mahoney, "'But Elsewhere?' The future of fantasy in Heroes and Villains," in The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter, ed. Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton (London and New York: Longman, 1997), 73-87, p. 73.

(4.) One has to mention Eva C. Karpinski, "Signifying Passion: Angela Carter's Heroes and Villains as a Dystopian Romance," Utopian Studies 11.2 (2000) 137-51; and Roz Kaveney, "New New World Dreams: Angela Carter and Science Fiction," in Flesh and the Mirror. Essays on the Art of Angela Carter, ed. Lorna Sage (London: Virago, 1994), 171-88.

(5.) John Clute and Peter Nicholls, ed., The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (London: Orbit, 1999), p. 338.

(6.) Clute and Nicholls, pp. 337-339.

(7.) For details concerning the New Wave of British speculative fiction, see Judith Merril, England Swings SF, Stories of Speculative Fiction (New York: Ace Books, 1968). The most important disaster novels written by the New Wave writers are J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World (Harmondsworth and Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1974) and J.G. Ballard The Wind from Nowhere (Harmondsworth and Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1974).

(8.) Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibovitz (Philadelphia, Lippincott and London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1960) and John Wyndham, The Chrysalides (London: Joseph, 1955).

(9.) Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, tr. by R.W. Rotsel (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973), p. 96.

(10.) Angela Carter, Heroes and Villains (London: Virago, 1992), p. 137.

(11.) Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

(12.) Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (Harmondsworth, New York, Ringwood and Auckland: Penguin Classics, 2007).

(13.) Tarzan's adventures were originally created by Edgar Rice Burroughs and published in the years 1914-1950.

(14.) John Barth, The Literature of Exhaustion and the Literature of Replenishment (Northridge: Lord John Press, 1982).

(15.) Karpinski, p. 138.

(16.) Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149-181.

(17.) Veronica Hollinger and Joan Gordon, ed., Edging into the Future. Science Fiction and Contemporary Cultural Transformation (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), p. 162.

(18.) Butler talks about gender in terms of ritual practices, a role one adopts thus excluding other modes of behaviour. What is excluded forms the "constitutive outside" the zone of the suppressed from which gender roles can be challenged, much in the same way Marianne challenges social norms in the tribe. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 23.

(19.) Mahoney, p. 75.

(20.) Elanie Jordan, "Afterword," in The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter, ed. Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton (London and New York: Longman, 1997), 216-219, p. 219.

(21.) Carter's numerous shamans, for example the character from Nights at the Circus, are usually totally different. They are given a role similar to that of a writer: they believe in the magic they perform, therefore what they do has the mystical quality of a true primary text. In their context the comments and analysis by Donally seem artificial and exhausted.

(22.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 63.

(23.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 49.

(24.) Linden Peach, Angela Carter (Oxford: Macmillan, 1998), p. 96.

(25.) Peach, p. 87.

(26.) For example, according to these beliefs, the Barbarians sew up cats in the bellies of the Professors' women, while the Professors in turn bake Barbarians alive "like hedgehogs".

(27.) Alfred Lord Tennyson, "In Memoriam A. H. H.," in Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 1992), Canto 56.

(28.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 11.

(29.) Aidan Day, Angela Carter: The Rational Glass (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 45.

(30.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 110.

(31.) David Punter, The Literature of Terror--A History of Gothic Fiction from 1795 to the Present Day vol. II The Modern Gothic (London: Longman, 1996), p. 140.

(32.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 1.

(33.) The city is probably London and the clock Big Ben; the tribe is traveling south to spend the winter at the seaside and finally reach the gigantic ruin. Descriptions of London after various cataclysms are very common in disaster stories; examples are: Jefferies' After London, J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World and The Wind from Nowhere and Wyndham's The Day of the Triffid. Once again Carter rewrites a canonical disaster fiction motif in a new way.

(34.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 138.

(35.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 148.

(36.) Painting by Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory, 1931.

(37.) Angela Carter, "The Alchemy of the Word," in Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992), p. 70.

(38.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 95.

(39.) Pamela Zoline, "The heat death of the universe," in England Swings SF, Stories of Speculative Fiction, ed. Judith Merril (New York: Ace Books, 1968), 313-328.

(40.) Zoline, p. 316.

(41.) John Donne, "A nocturnall upon S. Lucies day, Being the shortest day," in The Complete English Poems of John Donne, ed. C. A. Patrides (London and Melbourne: Dent, 1985), p. 90.

(42.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 148.

(43.) Angela Carter, "Notes for a Theory of the Sixties Style," in Nothing Sacred (London: Virago, 1988), 85-89, p. 86.

(44.) Carter, "Notes for a Theory of the Sixties Style," p. 86.

(45.) Kaveney, 175.

(46.) Karpinsky, 137.

(47.) Elaine Jordan, "Enthrallment: Angela Carter's Speculative Fictions," in Plotting Change: Contemporary Women's Fiction, ed. Linda Anderson (London: Edward Arnold, 1990), 19-40.

(48.) "A kind of sociological SF which concentrates on social change without necessarily any great emphasis on science or technology" (Clute and Nicholls, p. 1144).

(49.) John Haffenden, "Angela Carter," in Novelists in Interview, (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 80.

(50.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 150. This is uttered in a conversation when Marianne describes her plans for the future of the tribe: " 'they'll do every single thing I say.' 'What, will you be Queen?' 'I'll be the tiger-lady and rule them with a rod of iron.'"

(51.) St. John's Revelation 12:4-6 in The Holy Bible: Old and New Testament in the King James Version (Hazelwood: World Aflame Press, 1973).

(52.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 9.

(53.) Carter, Heroes and Villains, p. 140.

(54.) Sarah Gamble suggests that the moment Marianne becomes a tiger-lady symbolically "implies that Marianne has now broken free of the stereotyped roles--daughter, victim, wife and whore--in which she has been complicit from the text's beginning." Sarah Gamble, Angela Carter: Writing from the Front Line (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), p. 79.

(55.) Margaret Atwood, "Running with the Tigers," in Flesh and the Mirror, ed. Lorna Sage (London: Virago, 1994), 117-136, p. 358.

(56.) A. Day elaborates upon Marianne's future reign: "But while, as tiger-lady, she is going to draw on primordial Barbarian energy, Marianne, it must be noted, does not give up her purchase on reason. It is this emphasis on maintaining reason that separates her from the Donally-inspired Barbarian cult of the irrational. At the same time as Marianne stops being a stranger to her own id during her sojourn amongst the Barbarians, reason emerges as a cardinal feature of her discovery of herself.... In Marianne's case reason may order, like an iron rod, the inchoate energies of the id, while the energies of the id--the energies of the tiger-lady--may enrich reason. This synthetic model is identified as specifically feminine, in contrast with the masculine insistence on self-definition through opposition to an other" (Day, pp. 51-53). COPYRIGHT 2010 Eotvos Lorand Tudomanyegyetem, Department of English Studies

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targaryen-stronghold · 5 years

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What’s worse about this shit show finale as a female fan is that I feel tricked because I used to think I was watching the rise of women to power on a patriarchal society when in truth this has been an incel fantasy all along. All those feminists’ critics of the show deserve an apology, they were right.

I heard you, anon. Many female fans feel this way and we are absolutely right and justified. I used to think so as well, but guess we were wrong, it was never about women navigating power, it was about demonizing women in power. Actually, the only women who remained in power (Sansa and Yara) in the end were allowed to so do because (1) there was no one else (2) a man let them. So whenever people say Game of Thrones is a “feminist show”, I have to laugh because no, it isn’t. At all. And Season 8 proved that.

Dan Weiss had the nerve to say about the critics on Season 8:

It’s not really up for us to decide what people feel about it. Hope people watch and like it in the future. There’s no way to tell how things are going to be perceived in 10, 20, even five years. These things change so fast. The landscape of television changes so quickly, it’s changing as we’re standing here right now. It’s so gratifying to have reached this many people. I hope people a little too young to watch now will grow up to learn about it and watch it as well.

Is this guy fucking serious? Does he really think this show will age well? In a time where television and cinema are getting more progressive and representative of women, POC, LGBTI+, etc., he actually believes a show about white men in power and the demonization of pretty much every character that isn’t white or male will sit well with audiences?

1. Reinforcement of Sexist Tropes

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek from the University of Ljubljana Faculty of Arts did an whole essay on why Daenerys and the mad queen narrative is a strictly male fantasy. He’s one of the most important cultural critics of the century and an academic with years of research on Philosophy and Sociology so he knows what he’s talking about.

Dangerous Characters has also written a very interesting essay about why Dany’s ending is such a toxic and dangerous narrative:

Because in that moment, when Daenerys goes nuts, and becomes a wicked genocidal dictator who must be deposed, I am remembering her rape scene. Basic story logic: That was the beginning of her arc, this is the end, and we are being asked to see what has changed. It was a journey from powerlessness to power, but now we know this makes it a journey from good to evil, too. What you are telling me, when you make Daenerys a power-mad despot, is that it was better for her to be powerless. It was better for her to be on her knees, with a stranger’s dick forced inside her, than it was for her to be a queen. Power turns Dany bad, and her badness hurts everyone, so it was better for the whole world for that little girl to get raped, over and over and over, than it was for her to find her power.

Message: Women can’t be trusted with power

I also did a post about why “mad queen Dany” perpetuates sexist tropes and draw parallels with real-life women. But Dany isn’t the only female character who suffers with sexist tropes, it applies to pretty much every other female character in the series.

We also got:

Rape of women used as a plot device to make them “stronger” in both Daenerys and Sansa’s characters: as if it wasn’t bad enough that some people in this fandom refuse to acknowledge that Khal Drogo repeatedly raped Dany, Alex Graves referred to Ramsay as Sansa’s “love interest” when he was telling Sophie about her Season 5 arc, and Bryan Cogman called Sansa’s forced marriage and rape as “a hardened woman making a choice”;

Fetishization of lesbians, bisexuals and women of color;

Perpetuation of violence against sex workers;

Internalized misogyny and constantly pinning women against each other: Arya “most girls are idiots” Stark, Cersei “I should have been born a man” Lannister and Sansa “men are easily manipulated (by women)” Stark;

Perpetuation of toxic notions of womanhood such as upholding motherhood as women’s ultimate endeavor: villainous Cersei is redeemed because she’s pregnant and loves her children and is presented as a victim of the now-villainous infertile Daenerys;

Justifying and romanticizing domestic violence with Robert Baratheon slapping Cersei (actually erasing all the abuse Cersei suffered at Robert’s hands) and both Tyrion and Jon murdering Shae and Dany;

Vilifying of every women in power, except for Sansa (but even she was only allowed to take power over the North because King Bran let her);

And so on.

Yikes. My girl Sansa deserved better.

2. Validation of Racism and Xenophobia

The true heroes of the story - the Starks - live in an openly racist and xenophobic space and its habitants give the side-eye to (and literally run away from) the only black characters on the cast, providing us with gems like this:

And then Arya kind of forgot she befriended foreigner people in previous seasons.

Daenerys is not one of them because she’s neither a Stark nor a Northerner: she’s foreign, an immigrant, who doesn’t know the westerosi ways (something her haters like to bring up to justify why she doesn’t deserve to be queen of the seven kingdoms). Not only that but she mostly associates herself with black and brown people: her best friend, her advisors, her captains and soldiers.

In the end, all this behavior is justified and validated because Dany has been the true villain all along and her armies have committed terrible crimes against the innocent white people of Westeros, especially in the capital. Meaning: the North was right in their prejudice against Dany and her armies. In the end, the Unsullied and the Dothraki return to Essos because there is no place for them in Westeros.

Message: POC immigrants are a threat to white people

I would say Game of Thrones dig it’s own grave.

#anti game of thrones #anti game of thrones season 8 #daenerys targaryen #anti dan weiss #anti d&d #ask

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padawan-historian · 4 years

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Racial violence is historically linked to the preservation of white womanhood. After the CW, white mobs throughout the South targeted black individuals, particularly men, often under the pretense that they had "raped" a white woman. Perceptions surrounding black sexuality claimed that not only were black men hypersexual, but they had a fixation on white women -- the ultimate "symbol" that established white Southern masculinity and dominance. The narrative of the "black male predator" not only worked to dehumanize black men and justify the lynchings, burnings, and castrations of black men, but also to reinforce the social hierarchy of the changing South.

Rural white farmers, free laborers of color, and newly liberated black slaves flocked to city centers seeking employment opportunities. The diversified labor pool presented both an economic and social challenge to white workers. Due to the exploitative nature of many of these industrialized jobs and limited opportunities – not to mention the threat of imprisonment that came with unemployment – many emancipated blacks were willing to work for lower wages and longer hours. In this new environment, one’s social status was less known and less fixed and traditional forms of authority—the patriarchal household, the church, the planter elite—were called into question.

Not only that, but, for the first time, black men had a modicum of power at the ballot box (at least on paper) and could join the workforce as skilled employees. This new order meant the possibility of whites and blacks coexisting and competing on equal footing – a reality that disrupted and dislocated long-held racial systems.

Prior or during lynchings, many black men were further brutalized with castration and dismemberment. This emasculating practice has its roots in slavery when the white patriarchy propagated images of black men as abnormally virile and lusty to the point of violence. However, this condemnation of black men was often accompanied by a peculiar, almost obsessive, fascination with black male bodies – especially their sex organs. Scholar Winthrop Jordan muses that the “conflicting messages embraced by Anglo-American culture as it sought to control and circumscribe the bodies of enslaves men and women, on the one hand voice repulsion for Africans, framing them as beastly, ugly, and unappealing, while on the other hand viewing them as hypersexual.”

While white men of all classes actively – and often violently – engaged sexually with black women, the thought that white women could operate with the same level of agency was wholly radical. For the white patriarchy to uphold power and superiority over enslaved black bodies, black male sexuality could not be allowed to flourish, or even exist. So instead of tackling the reality of black male desirability, they instead painted enslaved men as bogeymen who were incapable of controlling their sexual urges and natural desire for white women (put a pin in that). White women were framed as helpless and wholly dependent on their white male protectors who defended and avenged them in equal measure against the “savage black man.”

While, on some levels, this imagery was also meant to deter white women from joining the workforce and becoming socially (and financially) independent from their patriarchal families, many white women played a role in the ritualized violence of black bodies.

Weaponizing their femininity + backwards perceptions of racial superiority, they pointed out "suspects" who were then brutalized publicly (and privately) as a way of "avenging their honor and affirming their racial dominance over black bodies." They attended public executions and burnings alongside their husbands, brothers, and fathers, often brought their children along. At home, they framed the destruction of black communities and black life as the only way of preserving their economic and political dominance over blacks (and to a lesser extent immigrant communities). Integration and reconciliation were not solutions, but forms of oppression against the white race.

While we've steered away from lynchings as a society, the remnants of white supremacy and racial violence exist in police brutality and weaponized FALSE accusations like #AmyCooper.

Commentators and talking heads will argue whether or not she was justified in her actions. Even if she was intimidated (I'm 5'2 and can probably be tossed like a football) but the tactics she resorts to (raising her voice, her change in body language, even the look on her face) the same ones used by racists women of the late nineteenth and mid twentieth century. She, like so many women before her, thought that her whiteness (and womanhood) entitled her to point her pale finger and lie without a thought about the implications or consequences. We will likely never know if she truly meant to cause harm or simply make him “leave her alone.” But her actions reveal that she saw no problem lying - a lie that could potentially lead to the death of black man. If that happened, how could she ever reconcile her privilege and racism?

This is why antiracist education in schools and work places is essential work. Racism isn't about someone being triggered by shitty jokes or tweets about how the Confederate soldiers were patriots (they were not). Racism shapes our interactions and access and, sometimes, whether or not we'll make it home. To support the actions of people like #AmyCooper is not only dangerous but sets a precedent that validates the restoration of white supremacist policies all for the sake of white economic, political, and social control and dominance over black, brown, and indigenous bodies.

The only way to reconcile this reality for white Americans to unlearn their ideas that “we’re all equal” or “race doesn’t matter.” We are all human and deserving of respect, empathy, and equity . . . but do not mistake that for us being equal. We are not and race does matter. It matters so much that our very lives depend on it. Once you recognize this reality, you must educate yourself, teach your children, and activate your activism.

#late night musings #Amy cooper #black freedom studies #this is america #padawan historian #ecosystem of white supremacy #archived thoughts

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somerandomg33k · 4 years

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I still don’t know who to vote for?

This election is going to be a weird and frustrating one. It is the first presidential general election where I am an Anarcho-Syndicalist. And this election in the darkest timeline has a Fascist as the incumbent. But the candidate that is opposing Donald Trump is Joe Biden. Almost everyone's last pick in the primary. The only worst candidate during this primary was Michael Bloomberg, who was trying to buy his way into the election. Possible to take votes away from Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, but that is damning with faint praise that Joe Biden is better than Michael Bloomberg.

The most likely results of this election are either the continued reign of a dictatorial Fascist, causes and continuing chaos and mayhem, or just straight up Neo-Liberalism. We are going back to a normal under Obama, which was terrible as well. Just not as awful as under Fascism. And we won't fix the problems that allowed Trump to rise to power. Since those are core systematic problems that the current Democratic Establishment is not interested in correcting. And the Republican party is just worse as they are OK with Fascism. Some of them want Fascism.

And let's not forget, serval people have very good personal reasons not to vote for Joe Biden. Joe Biden helped co-wrote the 1994 crime bill. In some issues, he was to the right of Regan on drug enforcement of the Drug war. He was always the most conservative Democrat in the Senate during his time there. He voted against busing 19 times. That is why many Leftists say that Joe Biden is Republican-lite. He is just the 'correct' color for Liberals and is the candidate the Democratic party chooses. So yea, there are two Republican tickets this election. The difference is one is not Fascist. Liberals know this. They are just in denial or flat out refuse to believe it. Because boy, don't say that Joe Biden and his running mate are anything but Progressive to them. Because they really hate that. "I think it is unfair to Joe Biden to judge him by International standards. I would prefer that he is judge by American Political standards," one Liberal said. Why can't Liberals admit that America's Political standards are shit?

Liberals have to believe that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are progressives because they can only think of voting for progressives and progressive causes. They can't accept they are voting for a Conservative on the Democrat ticket, because they would have to admit that the Democratic party has moved towards the right as has American's Overton Window. Joe Biden is against Medicare 4 All. On that issue, he is to the right of Boris Johnson and other conservatives of the UK and Canada. Liberals have to believe they are voting for progressives on the Democrat ticket. Because if they didn't, they would lose faith in the whole Ameican Electoral system as well as Reform. It is almost like Capitalist Realism. People can imagine the end of the World before they can imagine the End of Capitalism. Liberals probably have an easier time visualizing the end of the World before they could imagine a different system than the current governance of Liberal Capitalist Democracy.

Let's not forget, something we already know, that Joe Biden is a bit creepy. He is a Patriarch and treats women differently than men. Whenever he meets families at the White House who have sons and daughters, he would say to the sons, "You have a critical job. You got to protect your sister from all of the boys. That is something my Dad told me." The women must be protected, and it is the men who must do the protecting. Joe Biden has a habit of creepily smelling women and girls' hair and touching their bodies on the waist and shoulders. Serval women have said that Joe made them feel uncomfortable. And this was all before Tara Reade allocations. #IBelieveTaraReade.

As for Kamala Harris, she did put trans women in men's prison, which resulted in one of them getting killed. "Kamala Harris couldn't do a thing." Is something Liberals need to stop saying. What they really mean is, "Kamala Harris choose to uphold an unjust system by blindly following rules instead of using her power and influence to change them." She attempted to block two Trans women's requests to get gender confirmation surgeries. Which, as far as I know, she hasn't really made amendments for. She wasn't good about slowing down The New Jim Crow. She was fierce to Sex Workers too. One of my comrades said, "As a trans woman and a Sex Worker, how should I feel about voting for Kamala Harris." She increased convictions for things like merely drug procession. She also wanted to jail parents for truancy. She has been called the Democrats Top Cop. Someone who is "Tough on Crime." Just like how Bill Clinton and Joe Biden were in the 90s. And that still has devastating effects on Black and Brown communities.

So many people have many good reasons not to want to vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. And Liberals want to think that they simply "have their flaws." Again, I think it is just all to make it easier for them to be excited to vote for them. All of those issues, including their voting record on increasing Military spending too, are "merely flaws." And they will also shame people into voting for Biden/Harris with, "It is the lesser of two evils." Which again, is more of an indictment of the system we have. "But we have an election, and we should all vote." So we can't talk about changing the system right now during an election. So when can we talk about change this entire system? And Just like with 2016, "A vote for a third party or a no vote is a vote for Trump."

Further shaming us into voting for Biden/Harris. "Do you want four more years of Trump?" FUCK YOU AND SHOVE THAT DISINGENUOUS QUESTION UP YOUR ASS!!

Merely bringing up all of these complaints are being associated with supporting Trump. Another by-product of the binary way of thinking with the Two-Party system and First Past the Post voting. Liberals have 'accepted' Biden/Harris is the ticket. And they honestly wish we do too. And since we are vocal with our complaints, they hate us for not 'accepting' Biden/Harris is the ticket. They hate us for not 'accepting' the way the system is as it is. "I have accepted all of this. Why haven't you?" This can explain how so many Liberals would go "URG" at the thought of Joe Biden as President back in January during the Primaries to skipping to the polls to vote for Biden for the General Election. "Well, he won the primary." "I get to vote Trump out of Office" is more what it is about and not how great Biden is. They tell themselves how great Biden and Harris will be as a recon.

And with all of the shaming us into voting for Biden/Harris, instead of voting for the Green Party or not voting, it completely ignores the fact we did vote for Hillary in 2016. She 2.8 million more votes. But it is the Electoral College that gave Donald Trump in the win. Plus, in Washington State, my state, four of the Electors didn't vote for Hillary Clinton when they were 'supposed to.' Washington State is likely to go blue again. So I don't know if it is essential for Me to vote for Biden/Harris. The fivethirtyeight poll from Sept. 22 shows Washington voting for Biden at 58% vs Trump at 36%. A 22 point difference. I think I can safely vote for Howard Hawkins and feel like I didn't help Trump win. But that won't be what Liberals think.

Now with all that said, Donald Trump is still a Fascist wannabe Dictator. He is almost the worst. His administration is just letting massive amounts of people died because of Covid-19. He is encouraging people to shoot BLM protestors. He told the Proud Boys to "stand back and stand by," at the first Presidential Debate. He said there wouldn't be a peaceful transferal of power because there won't be a transferal, but a continuation. Donald Trump has sewn doubts about voting by mail. He will doubt any kind of election results where he doesn't win. So Liberals argue we most vote in such high numbers to show that it is the will of the people they want him out of office. To which he can easily say "Fake News." He did doubt the 2016 popular vote results claiming 3 million "illegals" cast fraudulent votes.

Another convincing argument is we most show that Trump's ideas can't win elections. Because if it continues to win elections, more people will adopt Trump's views and policies. It is sort of convincing. But since a Qanon supporter will win a seat in the House of Representatives, becoming a rising star in the GOP Party. The GOP Party has backed Trump throughout his time in office, Trump's views and policies will continue whether he wins or not. Even if Trump loses, we are not out of the woods yet. Not by a long shot. Trump base will still be here in this White Supremacist CisHetro Patriarchal Ableist country of the United Corporations of Imperialism. Who will always vote for the GOP and are not going away. Many Democrats will even speak highly of them. Nancy Pelosi prays for the Republicans. Liberals believe having an opposition is part of a functioning Democracy. Will the GOP no longer be Fascist? I doubt it.

"We have to get rid of Trump at all costs." I understand that urge. But the system gave us Trump and protected him. So how is voting and participating within the same system supposed to help? I know that Liberals think voting is very powerful because "So many people had to fight for their basic right to vote." And that is all true. The GOP only wins because of dirty tricks like gerrymandering and voter suppression. Hence, Trump is encouraging his base to watch the polling stations for "suspicious people wanting to commit voter fraud" and "rig" the election. It is straight voter intimidation and is happening already in Virginia. Part of the convincing reason to get Trump out of the White House. Biden will not encourage White Supremacist of all types to commit acts of violence against "The Radical Left terrorists" and "Antifa." Antifa is not an organization; it is an idea. Even Biden got that right.

Knowing how terrible Trump is, brings me back to Biden and how bad he is. Not as bad. Trump and Biden aren't the same. Trump is a Fascist while Biden is a Neo-Liberal, and Neo-Liberalism isn't Fascism. Neo-Liberalism just leads to Fascism, as we have already seen with Trump. I simply see Neo-Liberalism worse than how Liberals see it. Not enough to make a false equivalent, but still. Remember, if Trump loses, he could pull a Grover Cleaveland and run again in 2024. Imagine that.

What bothers me the most about Liberals changing their opinion of Biden, by the mere fact he won the primary, is that Biden is granted votes from Democrats and Leftists. I am sure Democrats do love old Uncle Joe. There were a lot of memes from the Obama years. And many Liberals just love Obama. Even though they fully well know about his War Crimes. It is that acceptance that I don't have in me. "Well, he is the candidate. So I will support him to get rid of Trump." And what makes it worse, Biden isn't really offering anything as well. He is against the Green New Deal. He is against Medicare-4-all, even during a Pandemic. What is Biden/Harris offering? Even Biden, when asking these questions and about his record, says, "If you are questioning whether to vote for me or not, you ain't black."

So Leftists will get nothing and will receive all of the blame for of Trump winning if we don't vote for Biden. "If you are questioning whether to vote for Biden or not, you must want Trump for four more years."

Remember, I live in Washington State. A super blue State. If I live in any battleground state, even within a ten points difference, I would vote for Biden/Harris. But since Biden is ahead by 22 points in my state, and I don't see that changing anytime soon, I am considering voting for a third party. Howard Hawkins of the Green and Socialist party is closer to my position. I would prefer there is no State at all and no President at all. Especially no single person having that much power, especially being the 'leader of the "Free" world' by virtue of being the President of the United Corporations of Imperialism. If the President of the United Corporations of Imperialism is the 'leader' of the 'free world,' then how come the World doesn't get to vote in this election. The UCI, Imperialtopia bombs the hell out of the middle east so much, I think the middle east has a right to have a say in our elections.

I do have to acknowledge those platform holders, people with a Youtube channel, a Podcast, or have a large following on Social Media, feel the need to tell people to "to out and vote. Vote as if your life depends on it because for some, it actually does matter." Although for some people, much won't change materially for their lives, like the impoverished and the disabled. For some, it is life or death. For others, it is a shit show, regardless. But platform holders want Trump out of the White House. They don't know who lives in what state. They don't know if their audience's votes matter or not. Since they are speaking to a vast audience, and they must keep it simple, they have to say, "VOTE! VOTE! VOTE!"

But, I am thinking, if they acknowledge that some votes are more important in some states than others, they will have to admit the whole in the United Corporations of Imperialism is unjust. Votes are weight more heavily in some states than in others. The whole system has to change. But that can't happen in a year. However, folks can vote on Election Day. So, it is easy to encourage people to vote instead of organizing to abolish the Electoral College. It would take too long to do it. It would take a lot of effort. So even bother trying. Liberals would rather pretend that isn't the case and just badger and shame people into voting for a candidate they have 'accepted' won the primary, even though Biden was one of the worse candidates in that field. Everyone's tenth or so pick.

With all that said, vote for whoever you want to or whoever you feel comfortable voting for. I won't vote shame anyone. Except if you vote for Trump and the GOP. Then you are a Fascist because you are voting for a Fascist and the Fascist party. Pure and simple.

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contemporaryfeminsthistory-blog · 5 years

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How has feminism changed over the course of the 20th century, and into the 21st?

Theory, and how that theory is then put into practice as “action towards changing society” - i.e. praxis - forms a regular syllogism, that being, they are not two separate entities, but one-in-the-same, a constant back and forth, like tides crashing in and out onto the beach of historical change, as they so self-inform further developments, growing and changing one another as two points in the process of a greater whole. Consciousness of this process is at the very core of Marxism, it being the “philosophy of praxis”. Feminism, both in theory and in praxis, has seen a dramatic and brilliant rise, from its formalised inception in the late 19th century, right the way through the 20th, up until to today, into the 21st. Yet in general, feminist theory has sought to distinguish itself from Marxist understanding to the world, so leading to obfuscation in praxis, in the worst cases, to self-detriment and harm … Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the 2016 Grammy’s a pertinent example to this on a popular scale, while her intentions positive, this less a victory for feminism, more a personal victory for Taylor Swift, white bourgeois feminism, and most crucially, her record label Universal Records, which today holds a clear monopoly over the recording industry, and with a long history to the systematic mistreatment of female artists beyond those few artists, such as Taylor Swift, capable of selling millions of records.

In short, this is nothing but a co-opting of feminism ideals to serve a greater agenda in the pursuit of profit motives: corporate Pink-washing.

It is with an understanding of this distinguishment - between those branches of feminism, which have gained the most popular traction, to Marxism - totally historical in nature, that I so hope to show, not only are the two wholly compatible, but their struggles are so one in the same; how feminism so needs Marxism, and vice versa, if feminism is ever to be realised for those who stand to gain the most out of their struggles against patriarchal and class oppression.

Over the course of feminism’s history, that being its history as an organised movement (acts and theories we might now consider today ‘feminist’ obviously long precede such formalised states), various “waves” have so emerged. The wave of today, the fourth, emerged immediately after the turn of the 2010’s, and stands on the shoulders of three preceding. The first’s inception, from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was concerned particularly with struggles on a basis of legality, primarily with those most overt issues, namely: voting, marriage, and property rights. Beyond its successes, the suffragists and suffragettes struggles finally winning 8.4 million women the vote in Britain in 1918, its initially bourgeois character underpins the class-limitations so afforded in the success of this praxis: voting extended only to householders, wives of householders, occupiers of property with an annual rent of £5, and graduates of British universities.

The implicit nature to patriarchal oppression extends its reach from beyond mere legal decrees however, most importantly, into impacting lived experiences, in turn shaping how we so conceive of all genders. Living under a system of patriarchy, it established parallel to the development of class-distinctions by the formation of state-machines, “the key to male dominance [being] military prowess … only when fighting becomes a systematic feature of society does women’s reproductive capacity become a handicap”, historically enforced through a series legal codifications. Beyond the successes of these initial first-wave struggles, suitable groundwork was therein laid for feminism to so build upon in attacking this system of patriarchy more more broadly, diverging into a great many directions, with an eye beyond that most overt, into the implicit, more insidious ways patriarchy manifests its oppression out of such legal codifications.

Beyond the second war - its impact bringing drastic change to relations of class, race, and gender - women were first thrust into the workforce, then on return of men from war, robbed of such opportunities granted only to ensure productive drives continued in fuelling the war, and resigned back into the realm of the household, reinforced through massive propaganda campaigns to conceive of a women’s role only as homemakers. Second Wave feminism, arising after the war in the 1960’s, primarily concerned itself with gender-discrimination, which still vehemently persists to this day. While the second-wave’s battles to overturn the effects of this campaign, freed women from the house-hold jail, and reclaimed their positions within the workplace, Marxist-Feminists have sought to identify how the damaging effects of this campaign have already been sown … women now occupy both work and home as realms of labour, the private sphere’s work of reproductive-labour (that of cooking, cleaning, washing, child-reading &c.) goes totally unrecognised as exactly this, acts of labour, to which women are expected to burden the overwhelming responsibilities, while in the public sphere, women face sexual harassment, are paid less for the same work as men - noted in the gendered wage gap - and are systematically held against for speaking out on such issues, for fear of them being the ones to feel repercussions by stigmatisation, a lack of any action taken, and in the worst cases, to lose their jobs.

This results in a “double-day”, to come home from a grinding day’s work, only to then be expected in immediately pick up at home where they've left off at the office. This is turn is confounded even-more by issues of race, for it cannot be understated that while white-women are at systematic disadvantage compared to men, women of colour face this oppression and discrimination on an even greater and more violent level; the prevalence of sexual assault against women in the United States (as but just one example of systematic discriminatory violence) being almost double that amongst women of American Indian heritage (34.1%) when compared to White women (17.7%). On this double-day, Silvia Federici argues that the emancipation of women cannot be achieved until they are free of such burdens of unwaged labour, which will only arise out of systemic change to economic system which creates and perpetuates these binds upon women - of Capitalism itself - through a praxis of eliminating the wage gap and implementing child care programs in the workplace: a recognition that the wage-labour of both private and public sphere are rendered upon women but one in the same toils of labour.

The family’s role under Capitalism therefore - noted by anti-psychologists Deleuze and Guattari - is recognised as a central pillar underpinning capitalism’s privatisation of labour. What initially served as means to ensure the bourgeois transmission of wealth through inherence, has been transformed under capitalism to reflect its wider societal configurations, an axiom of how we are so expected to exist socially under capitalism with one another: a jigsaw of “daddy-mommy-me” renders the family a wider microcosm of patriarchal oppression (“Mister capital, Madame Earth and their child the Worker”). The result, by narrow, predetermined formation, is that we are no longer conditioned to recognise the desire to form families out of what they are, in their familial unity of loving bonds, but now, rather, we are co-opted into begrudgingly going along with the functions they serve in upholding under capitalism, an anchor to the enforcement of sexual and gender divisions therein.

Material Feminism, one such strand of feminism to appear out of the need to addressing this problem, is grounded between the civil-rights advances of this second wave and the individual-centrism of the third. This compulsory, legally-codified heteronormativity of the family, attacked by Monique Witting’s “The Straight Mind”, uncouples Feminism from Dialectical Materialism in address, while retaining materialist tendencies. In her work we see an obfuscation of the biological and social; in arguing the essentialist categories of “men” and “women” only exist directly under capitalism, economic classes are overturned by gender-classes as the basis to gender-oppression, the outcome a call to Political Lesbianism. From this we so trace the origins of TERFS, trans-exclusionary radical feminists. Expounded later by Adrienne Rich, Lesbianism is seen the only conclusion by which women may achieve political freedom, thus escaping man’s grip of heteronormativity through a mass reformulation of women’s sexuality. This promotes nothing but a deranged rigidity to the inclusivity of gender, failing to consider both the historical origins of sexual-divisions out of state-formations, and its lack of a meta-philosophical basis in turn ignorant to the vast historical scope of gendered human subjectivity: “How ridiculous it would be to see the Sheep Endeavouring to walk like the Dog, or the Ox striving to trot like the Horse; just as Ridiculous it is to see One [wo]man striving to inmate another. [Wo]man varies from [Wo]man more than Animal from Animal of different Species.”

This Materialist Feminism, so centred to the question of marriage and lesbianism, really gathered its head of steam at the turn into the third-wave with Sheila Jeffrey’s 1981 “Love Your Enemy”, seeking to uncouple sexuality from capitalism in first ridding men "from your beds”, then “from your heads”… “Feminism [being] the theory; lesbianism […] the practice.” This emphasis on the individual oppression over systematic generated greater manifestation into cultural spheres, notably exemplified by the DIY Riot grrrl movement, rooted in subcultural expressions and carving out of safe spaces for female artistic expressions. At the same time, in representation at the highest echelons of political power, women finally began to reap the rewards those previous waves had so carved out in their struggles, beginning to crack the shell of male dominated saturation, notably within legal positions: The 1990s saw the first female US Attorney General and Secretary of State appointed, as well the second women ever on the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, winning the chance to shape policy in favour women writ large. Yet these advances only go so far, seeking to infiltrate and transform from inside-out, rather than an irrevocable and systematic uprooting of the patriarchal systems … given its historically rooted character, is it not better to replace, rather than simply fix what is irrevocable ‘broken’ by design. This broken, albeit ‘perfectly functioning’ systemic oppression, vehemently persists into the 21st century. Advances and strides so made against this are now seen to be under threat. History repeats itself, “first as tragedy, then as farce”… self described “third-wave feminist” Anita Hill’s sexual harassment charges levied against Clarence Thomas, (himself a staunch critic of Affirmative Action) being overturned in the proceedings to his appointment to the United States Senate, now sitting as the most senior associate judge of the court and its longest serving of current members; Brett Kavanaugh’s similar appointment in 2018 - despite allegations from multiple women of sexual assault - after the farcical proceedings by patriarchal ‘scrutiny’ of The Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee, and a long and decrepit round of supplemental hearings questioning of Christine Blasey Ford and FBI investigations, echoes through history this mount of systematic oppression women are up against. The Fourth-Wave, against the inclusivity and essentialist characteristics of previous, breaches this gulf with exclusivity, leaving Radical Feminists resigned to the past as decidedly un-radical for today, while utilising the material developments in technology of today to these ends: it being hard to imagine #MeToo (as well as other hashtag led movements) birthed of any historical epoch but our own. The Human Life Protection Act, seeks to eradicate the monumental Roe v. Wade precedent, with a near-total ban on abortion rights in Alabama, and as of time of writing, has only continued its expanse into numerous states thereafter. The focus to exclusivity has seen positive strides to the recognition of privilege amongst subsets of women, confounded by race and class, yet radical-feminists present a thorn to this trend, cleaving off any such greater alignments to a common cause: ‘woman’ seen by them exclusively cisgendered and non-intersex as part of a larger conspiracy to the ‘erasure of women’. One need only recall Simone de Beauvoir’s ontological stance: “one is not born a woman, but becomes one”. The sooner these theories are the ones to be cleaved off, the sooner feminism may rally in its progressions to praxis.

With this I’ve attempt to highlight both the major developments in feminism throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, while elucidating what major problems contemporary feminism still faces recourse to overcoming. The Fourth-wave marches in its battles against reactionary patriarchy, yet so much work still remains. Feminism is more popular now than ever, yet no more self-conflicting than ever out of present diversity. Those who hold the most power now claim to align themselves with its movements, yet their praxis undermines its theoretical basis as a whole; Theresa May’s resignation speech but one example to this - stressing her role as “the second female prime minster, but certainly not the last” - the absolute hypocrisy and self-serving nature in emphasising this is totally evident given her record as Home Secretary, directly facilitating state sponsored patriarchal violence at Yarl’s Wood immigration detention centre, infamous for its sexual brutality towards women. Given the means to praxis of today, Feminism should so seek to rally with Marxism and wider inclusionary movements, along similar modes of praxis as Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition, in destroying the instruments of capitalistic state power that imbue patriarchy in the first place, out of which new ones can be built that do not fundamentally seek to keep women in ontologically lower positions, but raise them up out of their historically oppressed states.

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#feminsim #intersectional feminism #marxist feminism #me too #materialist feminism

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maooids · 6 years

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Proletarian feminism: more than just proletarian and feminist together

Proletarian feminism is the theoretical and practical development of the struggle against patriarchy from the perspective of the proletariat and revolutionary communist politics.

It was first put forth by Indian revolutionary and communist Anuradha Ghandy. Like other trends within feminism, proletarian feminism sees the existence of patriarchy and the need for its overthrow – the difference lies in how proletarian feminism views patriarchy theoretically, and how it mobilizes in practice for its overthrow. Ghandy’s seminal article “Philosophical trends in the Feminist movement“, is perhaps the first coherent proletarian feminist text to lay out the differences with other feminisms. From this article’s criticism of the weaknesses of other feminist trends we can draw what are the dialectical strengths of a proletarian feminism, or at least the areas it has to tackle and the direction that Ghandy argues it should take. This is our summation of her argument for a proletarian feminism:

Adherence to a Marxist, historical materialist, and dialectical materialist framework of analysis. Proletarian feminism makes a criticism, however, of Socialist and Marxist feminism as philosophical trends that make the same claim. The main difference is on how to approach the question of emancipatory practice and the rejection of a commonality between women regardless of class, nationality, race, etc, while at the same time upholding the centrality of the class struggle for the destruction of patriarchy. Patriarchal oppression is part of class oppression, not a separate or complementary oppression, and has its root in class society as a historical materialist fact, neither born with capitalism as a mode of production, nor merely a residual or vestigial feudal remain, but rather an intrinsic part of any class society regardless of mode of production. As such, only communism can destroy patriarchy once and for all. Any attempts to separate patriarchy from class society as whole ultimately lead to strategic dead-ends for feminism.

Rejection of biological determinism in defining women, sex/gender roles, and of the implications of the sex/gender system for all people. This includes a rejection of sex/gender differences existing as a biological fact in any degree of independence from social, economic, and political relations. It doesn’t deny biological difference among people – these are obvious – it just rejects the claim that sex/gender ordering is principally related to biological differences, or the view that sex and gender stem from some biological essence. Not all women can or do get pregnant, for example, and yet they remain women. Not all women are assigned womanhood at birth, yet they are still women. This is not to say the gender binary is beyond criticism, just that the criticism of this binary based on biology is wrong. There is no female and male brain, but there is indeed a female and male social existence into which people fall – either forced into it, or because of identity.

Emphasis on the non-antagonistic aspects of the contradiction between proletarian men and proletarian women, rather than posing the contradiction as mainly antagonistic. Emphasis is placed on struggling against systemic oppression along with microaggressions and oppressions generated at the level of individual interactions, rather than only on the individual oppressions. Instead of men in general being the enemy, it is patriarchy, as part of class society and capitalism-imperialism, who is the enemy. Likewise, women are not simply the revolutionary subject: many women are defenders of the class system and thus are in the reactionary camp, even when they purport to seek to emancipate women.

An embrace of large-scale, mass mobilization of society as a whole, and proletarian masses specifically, as the method of struggle for liberation, as opposed to separatism, small group, “safe space” emphasis in other trends – as well as a rejection of the underlying theoretical frameworks that these separatist trends represent. While not hostile to trade unionist frameworks, it does advocate the formation of cadre and mass formations of a proletarian feminist nature as an exercise of self-determination within a wider proletarian and revolutionary movement.

Anti-imperialism and a global focus on patriarchy, rather than a focus solely on the needs of white, affluent, Euro-American women. This includes inserting into the conversation on sexuality the consequences of the sex trade, sex tourism, and pornography for poor, non-white, and oppressed nationality women, specially in the internal colonies, neo-colonial, semi-colonial, and colonial world. It also includes a rejection of unproblematized support for women’s emancipation for the purpose of supporting imperialist plunder, such as the advocacy by some feminists of equal opportunities in imperialist armed forces. The only army we fight for gender equality in is the People’s Army.

Advocacy of revolutionary organization and mass political activity and a rejection of reformist organizing and affinity-based activity – but not reforms themselves – and of the belief that organizational hierarchy is inherently patriarchal, masculine, and otherwise alien to women and thus opposed to feminism. A revolutionary party that contains people of all genders as cadre and leaders is not only seen as necessary, but advocated centrally as part of proletarian feminism. And this Party leading a People’s Army in which patriarchy is struggled against at any level, in which women develop as leaders and soldiers is also central to proletarian feminism.

Advocacy of all means of struggle, nonviolent and violent, in advancing the struggle against patriarchy from a proletarian and revolutionary perspective. This rejects all claims of violence being patriarchal as biological essentialism. This also recognizes the capacity of women to be as ruthless as men when it comes to being oppressors – the fact that men dominate society is not an issue of biological capacity or inherent nature of women. Cultural feminist claims of women being less violent or more loving are in fact based on patriarchal notions of sex/gender roles, which mirror male chauvinist arguments about the incapacity of women compared to men.

A historical materialist recognition and embrace of the experiences in the struggle against patriarchy and women’s oppression in the socialist movements and socialist revolutions in Russia, China, and others, as well as within movements exercising dual power today. This stands against the rejection by many feminists of proletarian and socialist contributions to feminism, either because of anti-communist propaganda or sectarian denialism. A very relevant example of this erasure by bourgeois feminism is the capture and erasure of proletarian women of the International Working Women’s Day into the International Women’s Day. Another example is the ignorance of the advanced nature of the practices and rules within existing people’s armies, such as the New People’s Army having marriage between people of all genders since the late 1990s.

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cowboylikedean · 2 years

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I get why you're annoyed, but I think you could also make the point that a lot of men put this kind of pressure on each other. They uphold toxic masculinity and boys or men who are deemed inadequate ("too weak/feminine" etc) will be put in line with verbal jabs or physical violence. And cis women can actually also play a part in that.

Women can actually be assholes (equality win!), for example if they body shame someone for having a small dick

Even though cis men are the most privileged group und patriarchy, they can still suffer from it. And race plays a role, too. White women hold a lot of dangerous privilege over black men.

I have no idea if it was your intention or not, maybe I misread some points... But saying that women mocking men for not fitting certain masculinity ideals is actually not a problem at all feels like the radfem rhetoric that Women Are Angels, Everything Good in the World and They Can't Hurt Anybody uwu

A woman being an asshole and saying "omg ew you have a small dick" is not the same at all as oppression

look, replace this message or that post with literally ANY other axis of oppression.

"When I started hanging out with straight people, I realized that when we make jokes about them not being able to make music or dance or dress themselves, it hurts their feelings and their confidence. Those jokes are just.,. Really harmful and we shouldn't do them" is RIDICULOUS

"When I started hanging out with white people, I realized that when we paint them as monsters and tell them that all white people are racist, we make them feel ashamed. A lot of white people are just scared that we'll hate the and that's why they don't talk to us or stand up for us. We really need to be nicer to white people! most of them are not that bad!!" IS A FUCKING MORON BAD RACIST TAKE

but somehow "When I started hanging out with cis men, I realized that when you call them trash and make fun of them, it hurts their feelings and that's really harmful. Men deserve to feel good about themselves too! and feminism sets them back!! Stop with the feminist sayings!" is somehow a GOOD take?????

Feminism will HELP men. Because the patriarchy hurts them too. That doesn't mean that men, as a class of people, are not trashcan oppressive dickholes. Saying "I hate men" and generalizing about a privileged group while you discuss societal problems regarding said oppression is literally.................. A good thing.

You cannot discuss societal problems without generalizing groups. You cannot discuss the patriarchy without generalizing men. They are the privileged group who defines this axis of oppression and it is impossible to discuss the patriarchy without generalizing men. That's what the #YesAllMen hashtag was. It was about discussing the patriarchy's rape culture, and explaining that it is impossible to discuss without generalizing men. If we cannot generalize, we can only talk about specific instances.... And that's not helpful to creating cultural change... Because the culture that needs to change happens in the connection between specific instances.

Furthermore, this message, and that post, generalizes about women!!!! In a very sexist way!!!!!!! The vast majority of times that women (or non-men) say "Men are trash" they do not mean "all men should have a big penis." They mean "Men's power in the patriarchy is bullshit and they shouldn't have it." But y'all have taken a few women making comments about men not being masculine enough (which is also a part of the patriarchy, because it is really the cishetpatirarchy and these axes cannot be truly untangled because they are the same thing) and taken it it to mean that women saying "men are trash" are all making those unfair statements. Which, by the way, are generally hypothetical and honestly, most women do not want the power fantasy. This has been studied TIME and TIME again and is not a fair generalization. This generalization IS patriarchal propaganda and has never been anything but.

Your brain rot convincing you that men are the victims and women are the enemies to gender equality is literally fucking evil! I meant every word I said, including this is why Johnny Depp was able to control y'all so well. Because y'all have decided that WOMEN are the bad guys and they attack the poor innocent men, who need our protection. That it is our responsibility to fight feminism because it hurts men. And you can see this in the way you, anon, personally discuss feminism. The sarcastic quip "equality win" dismisses and looks down at feminism as a bad thing. You literally have now decided that FEMINISM was a BAD THING because MEN are OPPRESSED by WOMEN's beautity standards.

And you think that I'M wrong?

Honey, wake up.

#tumblr's not all men phase #it's so misogynistic #just say you hate women and move on

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transtrenders4600 · 4 years

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* For my presentation if you watch any video please watch this one above any others linked as this video presents the argument in my paper beautifully*

Youtuber Natalie Wynn acts out a dialectic debate in her video essay titled Transtrenders. The debate is set up as an interview between a “transtrender” named Baltimore Maryland and a trandmedicalist “Tiffany Tumbles” on a made-up show called The Freedom Report. It is not explicitly stated, but Tiffany Tumbles represents transmedicalist youtuber Blaire White, while Baltimore Maryland is a symbol for the nonbinary and gender non conforming people they berate online. Natalie does a great job showing the disagreement between transmedicalists and trenders. Transmedicalists like Tiffany Tumbles state that they have a medical condition and that one must have gender dysphoria to be “truly” transgender. Throughout the discussion, Tiffany Tumbles accurately represents the attitude of the medical model and the pathologization of gender. In my paper I argue that the medical model alienates those who can not conform to the cisnormative apparatus. I use Foucaults idea of power to illustrate the reproductive nature of the medical model. The medical model posits that those who do not have the means to pass as a binary gender are cast out. Those who simply do not wish to transition, do not have dysphoria, are racialized, do not have access to healthcare, do not have a means to change the gender signifiers on documents have a strained relationship with citizenship within the neoliberal state. The neoliberal state normalizes those who pass and have the means to participate in the free market. By prioritizing the free market over identity, neoliberal capitalism creates an atmosphere where white, cis-passing and financially stable people regardless of gender are considered “normal” and those who do not are cast to the fringes. This idea goes back to our class discussions on queer liberalism and the negative consequences of rights-based activism and identity politics.

In my paper, I use the notion of a “subjectless critique” introduced by Eng., at al., that states that “queer has no fixed political referent” Queer is especially of use now, as an ethos of identity politics has resumed in leftist spaces. The prominence of trans-medicalist Youtuber’s can be seen as evidence for an online push for a return to “the normal.” Trans-medicalists use biological essentialism to resist queer in an effort to uphold the patriarchal, heterosexist and cisnormative order of things. A subjectless critique is needed to bring focus to the oppressive institutional forces at work, rather than identity politics causing in-fighting within a minority group.“A subjectless critique establishes, in Michael Warner’s phrase, a focus on “a wide range of normalization” as the site of social violence. Attention to those hegemonic social structures by which certain subjects are rendered “normal” and “natural” through the production of “perverse” and “pathological” others, Warner insists, rejects a “minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation in favor of a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal” (p. 3) Is it possible that transtrenders are a cause of what happens during violent normalizing processes? The social structures that now deem passing binary trans people as “normal” and “natural” although still pathologized, in contrast to the “perverse” transtrender who refuses to pass, refuses to use binary pronouns and loudly claims their trans identity? Should the LGBTQ+ movement follow a subjectless critique approach and fight against the regime of cisnormative society rather than gatekeeping an identity that causes material harm to those it rejects?

After the debate at the freedom report, viewers see the character Tiffany Tumbles visit her friend Justine who is also a transwoman. Justine and Tiffany spend the rest of the video in a heated discussion about what happened at the Freedom Report. Justine and Tiffany have a heartfelt talk about Tiffany’s reservations about nonbinary people, building up to an eventual cathartic release at the end where the two women reconcile that Tiffany’s reservations come from a deep place of self-hate and as a response to the pain she felt throughout her life for being trans. Tiffany expresses repeatedly that she uses transmedicalism as a justification for her existence. “We need to have reason, science and logic and facts on our side so that we can explain to society that we are real!” Justine replies by validating Tiffany’s concerns, and also explains the shortfalls of identity politics while also explaining to Tiffany the harm of biological essentialism. They agree that gender is a social construct, citing Butler’s gender performativity.

I think this is a extremely well done video that encapsulates the essence of my paper.

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browngirlwisdom-blog · 6 years

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“Hurt People, Hurt People” on Junot Diaz’s piece on Silence & Childhood Trauma by @BrownGirlWisdom__

Cw: sexual violence, mention of suicide

I've had some time to process Junot Diaz’s piece on silence and childhood trauma. I laid in bed, listened to the audio recording because I really had no energy to visually read it. If you have not read it, find the article here. In the presence of Sexual Assault Awareness Month and the #MeToo movement it is quite the time to really invest, revisit the reality of sexual violence and how it impacts folks of color. Many points resonated with me in his piece. My intent is not to discredit the pain, trauma and courage it took for him to be vulnerable in a patriarchal world that is not kind to vulnerability. I intend to provide my reflections as a survivor, a recovering Catholic, Mexican identified, non-Black, queer girl on masculinity, mental health, sexual violence, the familial structure as potential toxic site and religion as an oppressive institution that were brought up in Junot Diaz’s piece.

Interrogation of Catholicism as an Oppressive Structure and Tool of Conquest

What happens when praying isn't enough?

Religion is not always the cure for mental illness. Junot states, “Of course, I never got any kind of help, any kind of therapy. Like I said, I never told anyone. In a family as big as mine—five kids—it was easy to get lost, even when you were going under. I remember my mother telling me, after one of my depressions, that I should pray. I didn’t even bother to laugh.” First, families of color just do not have the language to put into words what depression is so they resort to calling us “locas/locos” and tell us to go “pray” which continues to stigmatize mental illness within our community. I often think about how religion is usually the mode of “healing” for many. It is important to interrogate how religion can be an oppressive force. Specifically in the context of Catholicism on the island of the Dominican Republic, Junot Diaz in an interview states that it is important to critique, be more “transparent” about the “syncretic” religion that has a history rooted in the plantations and a dictator as he states in a Youtube interview titled “Junot Díaz talks religion, Dominican identity, and writing.” on his reflections on The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wilde. He advocates for a democratic Dominican Republic and states he is “not here to comfort anyone”. Religion, specifically Catholicism has a history of being used as a tool for manipulation, coercion, displacement, forced assimilation of native folk to whiteness and enslavement of Black people. Religion then becomes a place of isolation, dehumanization, ostracization and massacre. Catholicism has been used as a form of indoctrination of the gender binary and gender roles. Which again, reinforces the dichotomy that men must always be strong and women must be fragile and passive. I feel like many of you who really rely on religion as a form of healing space please take this in slowly. I do not suggest to completely get rid of religion in itself because I used to rely on Catholicism as a form of escape and healing. Now I identify as a “recovering Catholic” for many reasons of my own. I will push us as a community to continue to think about the role of Catholicism as a hegemonic force that continues to uphold much of the systems that hurt us as a community. How can we push the church to recognize its power, misuse of power as an institution, as a socially accepted religion as opposed to practices rooted in the Quran, Santeria, Brujeria, and other spiritual and religious practices? Religion is not always a cure for mental illness within our community, especially given it’s violent history. Connecting this back to sexual violence, what happens when the church demonizes sex, promiscuity without taking into account sexual violence and it’s history of abuse of power? What happens when praying isn't enough?

Addressing Rape Culture

All this to say that sexual violence exists within our communities and we must not remain silent or complacent in rape culture. Here are ten reasons why rape culture is so bad in the Latinx community according to Mala Munoz in “10 Reasons Why Rape Culture is So Bad in the Latinx Community”. These are some of the reasons: the risk of deportation, difficulties seeing sexual assault for what it is, age and generational trauma, lack of family support, family unity takes priority, community supports the perpetrator, lack of consequences and accountability for abusers, negative responses are psychologically damaging, lack of support means high likelihood of revictimization, and survivors forced to create their own support system.

Accountability Now: Men of Color Need to Hold Men of Color

Boys and Men of Color Create Spaces to talk Masculinity!

I also believe that Junot Diaz’s piece is a start to a conversation that men of color should start to invest more time in their feelings, trauma, healing so we can collectively combat systems like the patriarchy, misogyny culture that continues to silence us and enables us from being our authentic selves. Junot Diaz describes his sexual relationships and failed relationships with women which is important to note. We must think about how Junot’s promiscuity and act of using women to move along the world with his trauma was harmful. I think that this is also an opportunity to talk about how men of color need to take accountability of the trauma they cause women of color, while having experienced trauma. Men of color should be having a conversation among themselves about the realities of toxic masculinity and trauma that womxn of color have to experience due to the lack of spaces that allow men of color to work through their trauma. Men of color should hold space for other men of color to be vulnerable. In short, men of color hold other men accountable and make space for each other to process and own their experiences and be honest. And womxn of color should not have to be there to process, but the reality is that many womxn of color do do that emotional labor to support the men of color in their life. So men of color, if you have womxn of color in your life that love and support you, say your Thank You’s.

Womxn of Color Can We Stop Making Excuses For Men of Color

So I also invite womxn of color to reflect on how we possibly navigate the world internalized and how we can move beyond that to really challenge these larger structures like sexism

We as womxn of color need to also stop apologizing for men of color. Internalized patriarchy and misogyny that convinces us to continue to protect and hold delicately the men of color in our lives. And the reality most of of us are not in a place to do that work due to violence we have felt from men of color and/or we can potentially put ourselves in a violent situation due to retaliation. All these concerns are real. Where do we start? Connecting with each other and building solidarity among one another and not pitting against each other for men of color that treat us like trash and waste basket for their toxic coping mechanisms. So I invite us womxn of color to reflect on how we possibly navigate the world internalized and how we can move beyond that to really challenge these larger structures like sexism, patriarchy, and misogyny. Have a conversation among each other. Check-in with each other at a family event, work space, within academia, in the streets, at a party setting and etc. We also need to address transphobia that is deeply embedded in our culture. I invite us to think critically about the gender binary and not only support our cis-ters but all of our sisters. Just like...”We deserve more complexity in these narratives. As corny and played out as the phrase is, it is true that hurt people hurt people. One can both be a survivor and a perpetuator of harm, especially if their trauma compacts with patriarchy. I would love for more attention, gratitude, credit, agency and space be given to those women who helped or loved or were hurt by those hurt men along their way, especially Black women. We deserve it.” as stated by Briana L. Urena “In the darkness men leave behind the women and emerge in the light clean and free”.

Moving forward:

I appreciate Junot Diaz’s vulnerability and became very emotional closer to the end since again, I resonated with a lot of what he expressed. It became sort of a mirror to feelings I have been carrying within myself. I also imagine how men of color can use this as an opportunity to lean more into their vulnerability. Of course, Junot Diaz is not free from critique but also it is a honest way to reflect on his reality to hopefully begin to own the harm he caused along the way. This becomes a larger conversation around addressing rape culture within our community, cultural stigma and inaccessible mental resources within the Latinx community, the need for informal spaces for men of color to address toxic masculinity, and for women of color to invest in each others wellbeing. How can we move forward with Junot Diaz’s vulnerability to change the culture of silence among the Latinx community? This is a start and I believe a platform to address sexual violence, mental health, and religion is always vital and much needed moving forward.

And I still have questions, so I ask: What is the impact when our Latinx families keep trauma silenced? What does it mean when we are unable to unpack what hurts us and who hurt us? What does it mean when we continue to uphold and reinforce toxic structures that lead many of our community members to call it quits? Where do we start? How do we move forward as a community? Towards a more healing and nurturing place? How do we take into account inequities that our communities face and also hold each other accountable for the damage we may have inflicted? How do we hold space for one another? Who should be holding that space?

Finally, I end with this quote by the one and only Gloria, “Why am I compelled to write?... Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and anger... To become more intimate with myself and you. To discover myself, to preserve myself, to make myself, to achieve self-autonomy. To dispell the myths that I am a mad prophet or a poor suffering soul. To convince myself that I am worthy and that what I have to say is not a pile of shit... Finally I write because I'm scared of writing, but I'm more scared of not writing.”

Resources:

http://ocrcc.org/the-intersection-of-sexual-violence-and-disability/

https://www.amnestyusa.org/pdfs/mazeofinjustice.pdf

https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/posts/colonial-history-creates-religious-syncretism-in-the-dominican-republic

https://www.schoolhealthcenters.org/healthlearning/boys-and-young-men-of-color-bmoc/

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/03/16/feminism-glossary-lexicon-language/99120600/

https://eji.org/history-racial-injustice-sexual-exploitation-black-women

https://www.rainn.org/articles/sexual-assault-men-and-boys

https://transequality.org/issues/anti-violence

#junot díaz #sexualassaultawarenessmonth #sexualviolence #mentalhealth #mentalillness #writersofcolor

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