A Note from the Unicorns: A Cultural Studies PhD Program responds to Michael Berube September 23, 2009
Posted by bullybloggers in Uncategorized.5 comments
By The Cultural Studies Graduate Group, UC Davis
As students and faculty in one of the only PhD-granting cultural studies programs in the nation, we are prompted to respond to Michael Bérubé’s recent opinion piece, “What’s the Matter with Cultural Studies?” Located in the University of California system where we face dramatic program cutbacks, faculty and staff furloughs, a 40% tuition increase, and a general hiring freeze, and we know firsthand how the trend toward privatization systematically devalues scholarship that critiques profit rather than produces it and threatens the future of programs like ours. The timing of an attack (couched as a lament) on something Bérubé calls “Cultural Studies” couldn’t be worse–our graduating PhD’s face not only hiring freezes but skepticism. A PhD in cultural studies: what can you do with that?
Bérubé described the effect of cultural studies in higher education in the United States as equivalent to the “carbon footprint of a unicorn.” We disagree. On the one hand, we want to highlight the dangerous ways in which Bérubé’s critique obscures the more pressing issues facing scholars working in cultural studies. On the other hand, we hardly recognize the field described at some length in Bérubé’s piece and that cannot pass without comment. Through claims unsupported by evidence beyond the anecdotal, Bérubé sketches out a caricature of a field as opposed to a set of dynamic, complex intellectual and institutional practices. We have five main concerns:
1) By starting with the conventional account of the Birmingham school, a truly interesting and important aspect of what has become known as “cultural studies,” we lose the opportunity to account for the innovations of film studies in the 1920’s and 30’s, Black intellectual thought in the United States, the development of American studies in the inter-war and post-war period, and the emergence of ethnic studies and women’s studies. In fact, what gets called the “Birmingham School” is itself a reworking of British Marxist social theory in response to critiques from these fields.
2) Centering cultural studies in the U.S. and the U.K. erases any trace of the vibrant cultural studies programs and scholars at work all over the rest of the Americas—(there are degree granting programs in Colombia, Mexico, and many other countries). Cultural studies programs exist in Western European countries such as Germany, France, and Spain, and there are many programs all over Australia, New Zealand, and Asia. Significant versions of what we can term ‘”Cultural Studies” exist in the Middle East and Africa as well. In our own program, students have attended Cultural Studies graduate seminars in Columbia and Japan via teleconferencing, and many have been to conferences and participated in other scholarly events beyond the borders of the U.S. and the U.K.
3) Bérubé seems to pit cultural studies as an insurgent field against a monolithic and totally institutionalized women’s studies. We view cultural studies as a field of debate that takes a broad understanding of power relations, including but not reducible to class or race, in all spheres of life including the quotidian and not just the “popular.” Approaches such as transnational feminist cultural studies have brought new areas of inquiry into conversation with gender and sexuality studies as well as international area studies. Further, cultural studies has been instrumental in shifting research away from “identity” per se and towards analyses of the ways that being, feeling, acting, and belonging are made possible by the cultural practices of law, economics, medicine, industry, and government.
4) The claim that cultural studies has not affected positively the disciplinary fields seems especially strange to us. Any caricature of a discipline or interdiscipline as a discretely bounded entity is ahistorical and almost nonsensical. All fields go through transformations and changes, and they are linked to the world at large. There are vast differences in how the field is experienced and practiced between institutions, but we regularly interact with more than 20 other degree-granting programs at our university, including sociology, history, anthropology, and the School of Law . Certainly, cultural studies experiences friction with many disciplinary locations but this friction is intellectually productive and transformative for all sides. Even the disciplines most resistant to cultural studies have already been transformed by debate and exchange with cultural studies scholars. That said, it is unrealistic—and, in fact, it would be counterproductive to the progressive and egalitarian politics Bérubé ascribes to cultural studies –to expect a diverse and flexible field to singlehandedly bring the disciplines and even the university itself to its knees! A monolithic cultural studies that governs all intellectual practice would be an oxymoron. Cultural Studies programs, like all university endeavors, can influence students and scholarship but only in coalition with broader social and political movements.
5) We also do not recognize cultural studies as a field characterized by weak treatments of television shows and pop stars. Our field, as we know it, addresses such topics as the “war on terror,” nanotechnology, the visual culture of medicine, immigration and asylum, the corporatization of the university, tourism, the cultural history of food and wine, the science and technology of textiles, environmental racism, psychic formations, transnational media, militarization, memory and genocide, the production of knowledge outside the academy, histories of visual culture, and many many others. While these topics can be studied in other disciplines and fields, what differentiates our practice of cultural studies is a deep historicization of these instances in relation to questions of power.
The cultural studies we practice does not exist only in the world of ideas but in a world that has material constraints. If we are unicorns, perhaps we are invisible to the more privileged practitioners of cultural studies in some of its institutionalized variations. But we work with students and scholars across a large number of fields and in locations around the world. We are not invisible, but we are endangered; not by a “scathing, freewheeling, and woefully underinformed critique of the field,” whether it comes from McChesney or Bérubé. Rather, we face the undermining of the public education mandate not only in California but around the country, one aspect of which includes the devaluing and underfunding of the humanities and allied social sciences. Our interdisciplinary field gives us the tools to study, teach, and write about the current crisis. An indictment such as Bérubé’s ignores the larger institutional structures surrounding processes of knowledge production and directs attention away from the economic catastrophe currently threatening public education on a national scale.
Signed,
Toby Beauchamp, Abbie Boggs, Marisol Cortez, Cathy Hannabach, Caren Kaplan, Liz Montegary, Magali Rabasa, Ami Sommariva, and Eric Smoodin (for the students, faculty, and staff of the Cultural Studies Graduate Group, UC Davis)
What’s the Matter with Michael? September 23, 2009
Posted by bullybloggers in Uncategorized.Tags: Cultural Studies, Michael Berube, whimpering, whiny men
11 comments
Guest Blogger: Ira Livingston, Chair of Humanities and Media Studies, Pratt Institute
Michael Berube’s \”What\’s The Matter With Cultural Studies?\”– subtitled “the popular discipline has lost its bearings” (in the Chronicle of Higher Education, 9/14)– is a familiar version of what my friend George Cunningham calls a “ritual lament.” Berube’s is so familiar– especially in my own demographic of just-beyond-middle-aged men– that it actually interests me: what makes this stultifying rhetorical stance so enduring?
The main content of Berube’s lament seems to be that cultural studies has not delivered on much of its activist political ambitions, and that it has failed to convince a still mostly vanguardist left that people are not simply dupes of mass media and in need of demystification. This is reasonable enough, though it seems to rely on reductive notions of what counts as the left, as activism, and as politics, but let’s let that pass for the moment. More of the story begins to emerge when you attend to the structure of feeling that shapes the lament.
Cultural studies pioneer Stuart Hall is Berube’s primary foil in the essay—the one alongside whom all others fail to measure up– but Berube also cites approvingly the hard-hitting early work of Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson; the unflinchingly reflexive work on academic labor by Marc Bosquet, Cary Nelson, Andrew Ross, and Jeffrey Williams; and the work of cultural-studies emissaries into other disciplines; Berube mentions Mike Davis and Edward Soja in urban studies.
Notice anything about the scholars in this list? Yep, they’re all men. Journalist Ellen Willis is the only woman who gets a look in, presumably because her work can be considered real-world writing about hard-core politics (and not namby-pamby theorizing).
The rest of Berube’s essay follows suit. He complains that Hall’s work on “race, ethnicity and diaspora is routinely and reverently cited” while his work on Thatcherism– in other words, his “real” political work (presumably as opposed to merely cultural politics)– “is thoroughly ignored.” He regrets the common equation of cultural studies with scholarship on popular culture, that typically feminized realm of the shallow and sensational (at least since the 18th century, when male poets and others started railing about the success of female novelists). And he laments that cultural studies has had more impact in English departments– the realm of the warm-and-fuzzy– and less in sociology, one of the “harder” disciplines. Alas, a once swaggering and virile field is forced to come to terms with its own relative impotence.
It becomes even clearer when Berube says he wants “to throw some cold water on the intellectual . . . history of cultural studies in America,” but he acknowledges that the headiest predictions for cultural studies as an institutional force have long seemed overly optimistic. In light of the ongoing struggles of young cultural-studies scholars to break into the deeply conservative and discipline-bound terrain of universities, it just doesn’t seem like triumphalism is the main problem. So what’s going on here?
Berube’s phrase “throw some cold water” is telling. It signifies the notoriously libido-dampening effect of which Berube symbolically complains on behalf of cultural studies– a displaced lament for a loss of sexual drive and potency. But why throw cold water on the rest of us? Just because misery loves company?
The message with which Berube ends is that the whole field should not be condemned, only that it could “do a better job.” This is a gesture only a patriarch could mean as a show of generosity.
There is something disingenuous about the ritual lament: if you really want to inspire people to do a better job, to light a fire under them, then the last thing you should do is to throw cold water. So if he doesn’t really mean to exhort, what does the lamenter want? I’ll get to this in a minute. Meanwhile, it seems that Berube’s lament is part of the classically melancholic formation of masculinity, in which the stance of more-or-less heroic and stoic failure is enshrined as one of the leading character types, one of the approved ways of being a man. It helps to have an attributive style in which, for example, rather than acknowledging that your own historical conjuncture may have passed, you simply accuse everyone else of missing the boat. The more melodramatic version of this stance is that classic role, the disregarded prophet. I’m sure some people must find this level of self-ignorance and disavowed neediness poignant.
"I AM big, it's the pictures that got small!"
If it weren’t so familiar, the irony would be positively surreal: a senior professor at a major research university complaining in the Chronicle of Higher Education, that most mainstream and legitimist of academic venues, that cultural studies has not lived up to its radical potential?!
But finally it is the emotional demand made by the lament that trumps whatever content it may carry, and I come to understand this more fully when I try to imagine myself as Berube’s ideal reader; that is, when I think what of kind of response Berube’s ritual lamentation dreams of eliciting:
Daddy, you poor thing! You’ve done so much for us, and we’ve never loved you enough! You tried to deliver us, but we fell back into worshipping the golden calf! But now we see the error of our ways! We love you daddy! And we promise promise promise to do a better job.
But meanwhile, can you please, PLEASE stop whimpering?
On Becoming Alien – District 9 September 19, 2009
Posted by bullybloggers in Uncategorized.Tags: aliens, District 9, racial dystopia, South Africa
4 comments
Jayna Brown – Guest Blogger
The day this film came out I couldn’t wait to see it and I rushed to a matinee at the Mann Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. My expectations were high. I thought for sure that some kind of explicit conversation around race was going to happen. And in the form of my favorite genre: a dystopian allegory, and with aliens no less! I was looking forward to some damning criticism of post apartheid oppression, or an assessment of the truth and reconciliation hearings, or at least a bleak critique of white racism/human kind with some alien resistance and revolutionary possibility. My expectations were kept in check just a bit by the knowledge that Peter Jackson was the film’s producer. As can be seen with his King Kong debacle, Jackson’s race politics transparently cling to an earlier, simpler time for white men. Jackson’s racial politics, in fact, seem to be born of a time when boy scouts meant playing Indian and learning survival skills from a guide written by Robert Baden-Powell, Lieutenant General in the British Army during the Boer War. No doubt he read adventure stories as a small boy, filled with needle teethed Black African cannibals. I was also alert to the fact that the film’s director, Neil Blomkamp had directed short film versions of this narrative for XBox’s most popular video game Halo. He was all set to direct the film version with Peter Jackson producing until money fell through. Anyway, I worried about the video game influence and the Jackson effect much less than I should have and made my way happily into the theatre that afternoon for some alienating fun.
Original District 9 Short Film by Neil Blomkamp
Reader, watching District 9 I was crushed with disappointment. Here was another science fiction film with progressive pretensions that turns out to be yet another white man’s liberal redemption tale. As usual, a white man finds himself in the uncomfortable position of ‘becoming’ the oppressed, reluctantly has a change of heart, and becomes the champion of our victims, freeing them from captivity or danger or whatever. Ironically, it is when he is the most alien that he becomes the most ‘humane.’ Versions of this tale abound in film and literature (Shawshank Redemption, Children of Men) in which the white man’ noble self-sacrifice not only wins him back his humanity but allows him to transform into a savior figure. Why is it that on such potentially expansive conceptual grounds, from which we can imagine entirely new paradigms of existence, with anything possible from cross-species love to alternative forms of cooperation, technology, travel between worlds, etc. we get only the most bafflingly unevolved narratives with little or no exploration of political possibility? Of course I know the answer to this question, it is to re-stabilize, and/or recalibrate existing racial narratives in a new moment, but in this instance I still had hopes.
I saw District 9 again with two good friends and, after hearing their very different responses to the film, I tried to calm down a bit, which is hard for me to do when faced with images of ravenous Nigerian war lords drooling for alien flesh. But I managed to gather a productive set of thoughts about this film. A more sophisticated skeletal narrative must have ended up on the cutting room floor, the no man’s land of so many potentially excellent films. Before I continue, here’s a bit of a plot summary for those who haven’t seen the film ( adapted from IMDB):
Through a documentary-style series of interviews, we learn that twenty years earlier an alien ship arrived above Johannesburg, South Africa and hovered for three months without any contact. Cutting into the ship, humans discover a large group of aliens who are malnourished and sick; one ‘expert’ gives the assessment that these are all ‘workers,’ with their leadership mysteriously missing. The creatures, called ‘prawns,’ are segregated apartheid style into a heavily militarized shantytown camp (shot in a Soweto township) called District 9. In the shantytown are a Nigerian gang, who as well as running an interspecies prostitution ring also trade in Alien weaponry, which can be used only by aliens and cannot be operated by humans.
The movie takes place in 2010 when Multi-National United (MNU) is contracted to relocate the aliens. MNU is really just interested in the aliens’ advanced weaponry. An MNU field operative named Wikus van der Merwe is assigned the a task of relocating the aliens to another camp. While raiding an alien residence, Wikus handles an alien device that squirts a dark liquid into his face. Shortly after exposure to the liquid Wikus’s left arm mutates into a claw exactly like that of a prawn. Wikus is taken into custody by MNU, escapes, and seeks refuge with the alien, Chris Johnson. They agree to help each other.
Wikus steals some alien weaponry from Mumbo and his gang, with Mumbo vowing to capture Wikus and eat his mutated arm, (we have learned in the mocumentary that the Nigerians are avid practitioners of ritual cannibalism) Wikus and Chris then launch an assault on MNU and successfully retrieve the fuel sample. Wikus and Chris fight their way back to District 9. Wikus is captured by the mercenaries and then recaptured by the Nigerians, but escapes. He then protects Chris as he escapes, making his way to the alien ship. In the final battle, a showdown between the lead mercenary and now almost completely alien Wikus, aliens burst out of the surrounding slums and dismembering the mercenary.
After two viewings I remain ambivalent about this film. The film does have a level of political self-awareness; perhaps, I am willing to concede, the film is taking a tongue in cheek approach to the familiar narratives it follows (action film, the civil rights buddy film, video game trailer), perhaps it is nodding to popular demand on the one hand but critiquing it on the other. I still think the film is ultimately about modes of white masculinity, it does not manage to reach much beyond that. But I now feel that it both calls into question and reinstates the white male human.
And as a good film based upon a video game should be, it is about manhood. Besides the talking heads, here is only one recognizably female person in the film, Wikus’ blonde wife, who is his anchor to the hetero-normative world he is forced to leave behind. In fact he is poised to be representative of this world: His wife’s father is head of MNU and the patriarch of the film; Wikus is set up to be the heir to the throne. Wikus must suffer greatly the pains of his transformation, but as he becomes a champion of the aliens, he will redeem White South Africa from the sins of the fathers. The aliens as far as we know are all male, or dual sexed, although Chris is explicitly described as the father to his son. At one point in the beginning of the film, we see aliens emerging from their shacks in women’s undergarments, when evicted by the MNU military. But they do not stand as females, but as signs of cross-dressing deviance, or at best the ignorance of the aliens about civilized customs. This scene as do others are quite reminiscent of the police reality show Cops, not only for the extreme violence of the officials (here mostly black South African) but also for the camera work; the wandering, shaky handicam and the quick, staccato segmentation of the shots.
Much can be said of this film aesthetically; the world it presents is totally militarized, razor-wired, and surveilled; it uses surveillance camera footage in the body of the film. The film is grimy, filthy, with an acidic color palate; an aesthetic critique of the usually sterile, smooth shininess of action films.
There are three explicit racial/political analogies in the film. The first is between the aliens and the subjects of South African’s apartheid regime. The title is actually a reference to the apartheid regime’s District 6, a black and coloured section of Cape Town from which over 60,000 people were forced out in the 1970’s to make the area all white. The second analogy for the aliens is the recent waves of African immigrants seeking asylum in neighboring African nations from poverty and war torn regions like Zimbabwe. It references the waves of anti-immigrant violence that swept through the poor townships in South Africa last year. This is reflected in the film, with the obvious anti-Alien sentiment amongst the black South Africans that we meet or that are interviewed in the film’s mockumentary. A third racial/political analogy runs alongside these: the history of the Dutch Boers in their struggle against British Imperialism, indeed, the relocation camps provide a direct reference to their forced relocation during the Boer wars. As the story goes the British were the first to employ both the term and the practice of the ‘concentration camp,’ during the second Boer War. With our main protagonist a Dutch Afrikaaner, Wikus van de Merwe, and his two main assistants black South Africans, the film seems to say that the oppressed can become the oppressor, drawing allusion also to Israeli apartheid system in the Palestinian territories. This does another kind of subterranean work: the Dutch Afrikaaner actually occupies the space of the racialized/colonized other, by evoking the histories of the Dutch Boers fighting Britain’s imperialist conquest. This is an interesting sleight of hand, making a film ostensibly about racial apartheid not about blackness at all, but about disgruntled whiteness. Perhaps this is an underlying white South African tendency, a grumbling resentment of some sort over a potential nationalist tale.
Still and all, the film levels damning criticisms of multinational corporate greed, war culture, and global capital’s effect on Africa. Once Wikus is infected and grows an alien arm, he becomes priceless to the government, the ‘most valuable piece of hardware in the world.’ The MNU representatives are truly heartless, as they experiment on alien bodies. It gives a darkly humorous critique of the ways segregation is sexualized; when Wikus escapes the MNU’s grasp, they immediately pathologize him with the story that he was running rampant, promiscuously having sex with aliens. The cover of the tabloids runs a photo of him and an alien in a doggy style position. As the aliens all appear to be male, it is not clear here whether this is the enactment of the film’s homoerotic anxiety, as is present in most action films, or if indeed it could be a self-aware moment of critique of homophobia.
But something bothered me about the thorough way it castigated black South Africans for their anti-immigration/anti-Alien behavior. And the unquestioning way the Nigerians were booked as the savages of the film. This is to cynically ignore that inter-group violence of poverty is bred by scarcity and the forced competition for scant resources. In addition, there is little to no political intelligence on the part of any of the black South Africans, Nigerians or the aliens, except Chris, and he becomes Wikus’ ‘buddy’ in the section of the film reminiscent of The Defiant Ones and all the buddy films that followed, especially Lethal Weapon.
So I am still ambivalent in my assessment of the film. Where were the truth and reconciliation hearings in this? Why didn’t the aliens rebel? “Workers” have been known to organize, after all. I can’t decide whether it has any value as a progressive critique, or if its utility is purely what it is symptomatic of; the film with supposedly good politics that really remains held hostage by all-too familiar liberal narratives. What could have been a clever insightful quirky comment on the mutability of biology (See Caster Semenya) became instead simply another singing affirmation of (white) humanity’s capacity for renewal.
Kanye Speaks Out, ACORN Goes Down and the RAF Lives On… September 17, 2009
Posted by bullybloggers in Uncategorized.Tags: ACORN, Beyonce, Kanye, Red Army Faction
2 comments
By Jack Halberstam
In a country inured to lies and half truths, Kanye West’s intervention at the MTV Video Awards the other night, could be received as a breath of fresh air. The night was already old due to the stale humor of Russell Brand and his sneering schoolboy sex jokes and the Michael Jackson tribute was wearing thin, so I, for one, was sort of relieved when Kanye grabbed the mike from poor bland Taylor Swift as she tried to make off with Beyonce’s award for Best Female Video. And when he told her and the crowd what we all knew – that Beyonce was robbed – you might have thought, from all the twittering critics afterwards, that he had just said something really controversial… that Dick Cheney was a war criminal, or that we all pay for the bailout or that Russell Brand needed to shut the f**k up about Lady Gaga’s gender ambiguity. But no, it was just Kanye, being Kanye and pointing out the truth about Best Female Video. He has now apologized to all parties concerned; he has shed tears on Jay Leno’s new show and he has been parodied and mocked on youtube. Beyoncé, meanwhile, won for Best Video of the Year (raising the perplexing question of why you would have made the best video of the whole year but NOT the best female video) and turned her airtime over to Ms Swift to make nice. The Kanye-Beyoncé-Taylor ménage a trois had the media grumbling and groaning about Kanye’s “tirade” and left Taylor in a much bigger spotlight than she would have earned by herself with a tame little acceptance speech. And as for Beyoncé? Well we can only imagine – check out one youtube comedienne’s hilarious version of the morning after for the diva:
Of course a world where Taylor Swift can beat out Beyoncé for best female video is an upside down place, one where, perhaps, right wing nuts can get people fired up about a community organizing group that gives legal and financial advice to poor low and middle income people seeking mortgages. As you know, this week, conservatives were jumping up and down on the grave of community organizing group ACORN after entrapping ACORN employees in a series of video interviews. The videos show ACORN employees offering advice to self-declared prostitutes and pimps about how to get tax breaks.
The people funding the campaign to smear ACORN claim that it gets federal dollars to advance a “liberal agenda.” And of course, we all know that giving poor and middle income people advice on how to get mortgages at a time when banks have gone belly up after selling bad ones is a “communist plot” or something! As usual, Republicans are casting informal laborers as the real drain on the economy and ignoring the more obvious burden: the banking class. Why don’t they take their cameras to the offices and boardrooms of high-finance investment bankers to tape their numerous consultations with overpaid lawyers about how to funnel their ill-gotten gains into unmarked bank accounts in Switzerland in order not to pay taxes on it? Whatever the truth of the matter might be in relation to the ACORN videos, we can be sure that ACORN is truly not at the heart of this country’s economic woes (http://www.acorn.org/)
“The abuse of power,” as Jenny Hozer aptly noted in one of her aphoristic art pieces, “comes as no surprise” and so the smearing of ACORN is par for the course in a bizarro world where rich people steal from the poor and then enlist the poor to worry about organizations committed to helping them. This bizarro universe is also willing to bail out banks and fraudulent insurance companies but not willing to offer universal health coverage or real welfare assistance. We pay lawyers more than teachers, we require our politicians to be millionaires, we cast suspicion on groups geared towards helping poor people and we support a religious industrial complex with mega churches and renegade preachers. And we truly believe that Taylor Swift could out dance or out sing Beyonce!
These are confused and confusing times – we have been robbed, manipulated, cheated and lied to by a combination of Republican leaders, big banks, hedge fund daddies and the religious right but the right wing media wants to warn the very people who have just been ripped off by big business against small time crooks. Small time crooks have not drained your savings account; prostitutes, generally speaking, at least the kind with pimps, are not overly concerned with tax shelters; community organizations are not manipulating poor people. But guess what: bankers have spent your money; investment bankers do need tax shelters and right wing churches and media are most certainly lying to poor people.
When Joe Wilson yelled “you lie” during Obama’s address to a joint session of congress, he was about a year too late. President George W Bush and his scary crony Dick Cheney most certainly did lie to the nation about their motives for going to war, their use of torture in the process of justifying an illegal war, their ties to big business with interests in Iraq and so much more. Lying has been a Republican sport for about two decades now and in a country with inadequate public education and no real plan for improving it, politicians can get away with all kinds of misinformation and conspiracy theories can pass for truth. Still, when progressive activists sign on to conspiracy theories, they get smeared for it: and so, Van Jones, a White House environmental official, had to resign a week ago because conservative media revealed that he had once signed a petition implicating Bush’s government in the September 11 attacks. But the many Republicans who have circulated the inflammatory and conspiratorial rumor about the infamous “death panels”–a rumor that seemed to link an Obama sponsored health bill to Nazi eugenics—have not been asked for their resignation.
Living in a country where potentially affordable health care can be compared to social Darwinism, where rich people sneer at poor people’s efforts to make something of nothing, where community organizing is held up as cheating and big business is celebrated as the American way makes one almost ready for a new phase of political resistance, perhaps of the kind captured in the German film, The Baader-Meinhof Complex, which was just released in the US.
The Baader-Meinhof Complex looks back to Germany in the 1970’s when a generation of activists reckoned with the Nazi pasts of their fathers and mothers and decided to take arms to make sure such a time never came to pass again. Whether the time for armed revolt is past or still to come, and whether it is more likely to come nowadays from the right than the left, questions raised by the film, I will leave for another blog, but in the meantime let’s not confuse survival with crime or banks with charities or health care with socialism. Let’s make the appropriate connections between ruling financial elites and fascism and between right wing media manipulation, religion and lying. And let’s all be willing to admit that on any given night, in any given competition Beyonce’s hips that don’t lie will always beat the wispy wimpiness of a Taylor Swift. Kanye was right.
Life Off the Leash July 10, 2009
Posted by bullybloggers in Uncategorized.8 comments
Or, Confessions of a Petophobe
By J. Jack Halberstam
(Under the topic: Freedom to Marry Our Pets)
I never wanted a pet when I was growing up. The few odd rodent-like creatures we did try to domesticate (desert rats and guinea pigs) would either die quickly or shed their tails when rudely grasped by childish hands or, in one horrible incident, a particularly vicious mamma hamster ate her young. Animals, I strongly believe, belong outside. I no more want to see a dog on my kitchen floor or a cat on my bed than I would like to spot a cockroach settling in on my sofa. Bunnies look cute in the pet shop but they stink after sitting in their own pee in an over-heated bedroom for a few days. Birds are beautiful in flight but honestly, they shit too much to sit in a cage. And so, with no romantic memories of a beloved family dog or cat to draw upon, with no reservoir of human-animal relation to lure me into sentimental petophilia, I remain an out and proud petophobe. But, as someone who has moved through the category of “lesbian” in many forms, I have of course, lived with petophiles – cat people, dog people and, in one unfortunate case, hairless rat people. I have been allergic to every kind of animal brought into my vicinity and I have usually insisted that either the pet goes or I go. It is a lonely road for the pet phobic queer.
But I am not just here to tell my own sad story about living on the outside of a pet-maniac society, I would actually propose that far from marrying our pets, we should be liberating them. The intimacies between people and pets are not pretty to observe and they are usually the stuff of vivid fantasy on the part of the human partner. While the pet sees the human as a source of food or exercise or maybe comfort, a cross between a nanny and a jailor, the human sees the pet as uniquely hers, as a romantic partner, a trusted companion, an uncomplaining spouse. In fact, as many people in animal studies have suggested, there may be a much thinner line between pet owning and beastiality than we like to imagine when we curl our lips at the very suggestion of a sexual exchange between man and beast. But of course, the slobbery kisses exchanged between many a dog owner and his dog could easily fall into the category of “sex.”
The very language of “ownership” in pet-dom might alert us to the fact that in an age of designer pets we might be investing our domesticated companion animals with a kind of misplaced value. The trophy dog/cat/reptile may look great on a leash as you walk through the park and may indeed attract all kinds of other petophiles to talk to you, but let’s not mistake this for companionship or romance; let’s call it by its proper name – commodity fetishism – and then let’s admit that the narrative of “love” between man and beast is a bit of a cover-up for a much more base economic relation; that done, let’s move on, far from marriage, far from petophilia and, as Tavia Nyong’o suggests, let’s move queerly back to the wild. But while we are at it, let’s not follow our pets back into the wild – let’s not be like Timothy Treadwell in Grizzly Man, believing that we are communing with nature while in fact the loving looks cast our way by bears and lions are in fact the prelude to a magnificent feast that the beasts are planning with us as the main course. It’s an eat or be eaten world out there and while petophiles may plan organic meals for their precious over-bred, high pedigree, eugenically engineered animals, and may even claim a queer relation to their furry friends, the rest of us might feel that the companion species model harbors more heteronormativity then one might think. I personally prefer my animals in animated form or as robodogs or toys; I can live with an inauthentic pet while leaving the “real” animals to roam free. So, while we may all want to work for more humane practices in the meat and fish industry, we might also want to free our pets and learn to live off the leash.
Freedom To Marry Our Pets July 4, 2009
Posted by bullybloggers in Political Rants and Raves, Uncategorized.Tags: Gay, Marriage, Pets
3 comments
Freedom to Marry Our Pets or What’s Wrong with the Gays Today? A Midsummer Blog in E-epistolary Form
Announcing the Engagement of Karen K and Mabel
Dear Lisa-
I just walked by some of those kids with binders shucking and jiving for HRC on a NYC sidewalk. “Do you have a moment for gay rights?” “Do you have a minute for gay marriage?” This time I didn’t have the energy to let them know that I, a gay, had serious reservations about HRC’s agenda, especially its emphasis on gay marriage. Of course I, like you, am old school and think marriage rights have hijacked the gays. I still think the goal is to create and sponsor an emotional situation where marriage itself was no longer the model of ideal relations between people. Call me a crank but I think abolishing marriage altogether is a better agenda. This isn’t exactly a pragmatic political agenda but I think gay pragmatism has not gotten us much. Certainly nothing approaching the real political gains that previous in-your-face gay politics have given us.
The inescapable counter-argument of course boils down to marriage rights equaling tax breaks, insurance and other real material advantages for gay couples. My response to that has always been to poke fun at Evan Wolfson’s website “FreedomToMarry.org.” My favorite response to this particular use of the word “freedom” is to mock it in a little dinner party/bar routine where I declare that none of us will ever be free until we are allowed to marry our pets! Freedom to Marry Our Pets! Here I am adopting the right’s argument that gay marriage is a slippery slope to bestiality. I recently tried this bit out at a fancy lesbian dinner party in San Francisco when talking to an acquaintance who is a dyke activist and filmmaker. She really wasn’t having my line and didn’t seem to see the humor or the strange truth to it. I get this response all the time. I ask you Lisa, from my cranky lefty position, what’s wrong with the gays today?
Yours in Struggle,
José
Dear Jose,
I remember, back in the day, when the gays and especially the lesbos were asking the state to butt out of our sex lives. We were against state regulation of sexuality and love. Joni Mitchell was singing that she didn’t need no piece of paper from the city hall….. Freedom meant breaking out of social norms and conventions, to connect in new ways. Those were the days. But these young people today, what are they doing Jose? Asking the state to legitimate their utterly conventional couplings? WTF? I shake my head.
You are right about all the benefits that come with marriage, that so many homos would like to have. But gee, why should those benefits be tied to state legitimated monogamy? Why aren’t the young ones on the barricades for universal, single payer national health care, rather than hoping to get private insurance through marriage? Why not march for more open immigration policies rather than hope to bring just their legal spouse into the country? Why not allow everyone to choose their next of kin for medical decision making and all that, regardless of the nature of the relationship? And why enshrine the couple form at the top of the gay agenda, when we used to want to mix things up in the world of possible significant intimacies. So yeah, why not get rid of the churchy sanctified idea of “marriage” all together? FreedomToMarry.org argues that having the homos get married will lead to separation of church and state. Say *what*? If we want to separate church and state, let’s have non conjugal and/or polyamorous next of kin recognition for the hospitals and all (call it, um, Best Buds or Golden Girls status?), and universal social benefits not tied to sex or love or jobs! Wouldn’t that be fun? Why that would be almost just like……social justice!
But it looks like we’re stuck with this stultifying marriage movement for awhile. What to do? How about we lobby for Same Sex Adultery, Bigamy, Gold Digging and Divorce–aka Real Marriage Equality! Or, if we want the state to legitimate our deepest love and intimate relationships, I’m with you on Freedom to Marry Our Pets! Love Makes a Family, Jose! And Scully, Mulder and I are worthy of inclusion in the glorious diversity of our narrowly pursued legal relations. I am who I am, I love who I love. I demand the Freedom to Marry Our Pets, because the slippery slope is a fun ride when you’re bored to death on the narrow “high” ground of conventional normality and conservative policy goals.
Yours in struggle,
Lisa
Dear Lisa-
Totally. I hear you. I know that friends who we once felt we were squarely aligned with have expressed reservations about our cranky hard line. I was recently on a panel where one friend in the audience, an artist and writer who I deeply respect, closed the panel’s hour and a half Q & A/gripe session (mostly about the normative politics of marriage) by saying we should not make “marriage the straw man for our collective sense of self-righteousness.” He went on to explain that he went to weddings, that he went to his friends’ weddings and that he even read poems at weddings. My panel fatigue meant I was going to let him have the last word but looking back, had I been made of sturdier stuff, I would have quipped that my own personal sense of self-righteousness and those of my dearest allies like you, Lisa, expands far beyond marriage. (It seems like it is hard at this moment to have politics and not open oneself up to the charge of self righteousness.)
But seriously, I know all sorts of people have all sorts of different relationships under the sign of marriage. Some of them are cool, some of them are progressive, some are lame, some are fun, some are boring, some are repulsive, and some are cute. That’s not our issue. It is more nearly the unbearable monolithic focus on marriage as the gay agenda or at least its primary concern. All the broader economic issues you mention around universal health care and immigration seem a lot more urgent to me than marriage. Some of our friends who where there for the nastiness of Prop. 8 in California remind us that we didn’t see how hateful the anti-gay marriage campaign became. Point taken. But I also see that kind of organized mass hate routinely aimed at poor people in this country every day of my life.
But let’s get back to Freedom To Marry Our Pets or the families we really actually super choose. Like you, I find real joy in what I call the companion species good life. Let’s roll with the pro-marriage gays for a minute. If marriage is the way you can be sure that our bonds count in the world then I might as well be married to my princess of a bulldog Dulce. And along the way I would like to marry a whole bunch of my friends and maybe even some objects that I cherish like favorite books or my new pair of age-inappropriate Vans. It would be nice to be able to marry some our own feelings and thoughts that we feel especially attached to. Maybe even marry a very vague yet poignant sense of hope for a future in which all our relations will matter and marriage itself will eventually become irrelevant. Why not? Once we leave Adam and Eve behind it really becomes everything goes and that’s actually a good thing. Right?
Yours in struggle,
Jose
Dear Jose–
Alice and Eve, Adam and Steve–they should all get a room and stay out of the city hall! Unless they are there to lobby for …. Freedom to Marry Our Pets! About material interdependencies, we can be serious. We need the state to offer benefits and recognize relationships (only when needed, as in child care and medical situations). But if we’re out there yammering about wanting the state to recognize “love,” a patently ridiculous and reactionary goal, then let’s be democratic about it. Who and what do we love? With whom do we have the deepest intimacy? For some of my friends, I think it may be reality TV. But for many of those who are dykes, it is definitely the companion species. We must demand the Freedom to Marry them! Petco needs a gift registration system and a special wedding outfit section, next to the leashes and harnesses of course! We want to be part of the industry as well as the legal system! My own wedding will need to be polyamorous as well–I love *both* my cats (even though they don’t especially love each other, so it’s complicated, as they say on facebook). And while we’re on the Slippery Slope, we can go ahead and advocate consensual incestuous and intergenerational marriages too! What *is* the age of consent for a puppy, do you think?
I worry that gay marriage proponents will feel that our campaign demeans theirs. They will want to write in and say so. But we don’t mean to demean the marriage campaign, we mean to ridicule it in order to expunge it, yes? Fat chance we have, but we can vent a bit trying.
Yours in (seemingly endless) struggle,
Lisa
Mormon meets the eye June 25, 2009
Posted by Tavia in Uncategorized.add a comment
Salt Lake City drag icon and activist, Sister Dottie S. Dixon.
Bully blogger Lisa Duggan writes on the surprising spike in queer activism in Utah post-Proposition 8 in The Nation: “What’s Right with Utah.”
Last fall I lived in Salt Lake City. As a leftist and New York City dyke, I had expected to find a conservative city and a quietly assimilationist gay community. Instead, I was repeatedly blown away by the progressive politics and outright queerness of the capital city, which is about 40 percent Mormon. Read more …
