Review of For Your Entertainment (2009:RCA/Jive)

By Tavia Nyong’o

Adam Lambert talks a hot fuck. When he boasts on the first single from his debut album that “I’m a work ya ’til your totally blown,” he’s not talking about your mind. And even if the album as a whole doesn’t fully deliver, is eponymous single gets things off to a suitably subversive start. An ode to the joys of the power bottom (even if Mr. Lambert is purportedly a top), “For Your Entertainment” flips the script on a seducer who thinks he or she is getting someone “soft and sweet” for their “entertainment,” only to discover, too late, the radical intensity of erotic passivity. The song might be a metaphor for the future role of the out gay entertainer in American culture. This song and its promise “I’m about to make it rough for you” helps drive a nail in the coffin of the sexless, minstrelized images of 1990s “gay visibility.” The insatiable, omnisexual persona Lambert inhabits onstage — from American Idol to the American Music Awards — is a bitch slap at the era of “limp wrist and a shopping list,” as queer punk Ste McCabe likes to call it. Of course, Lambert the L.A. fashion victim and McCabe the “Too Poor to Be Gay” Mancunian are polar opposites. But they share a discontent — really, a disbelief — with the stultifying norms that increasingly pervade what passes for queer culture these days. In their different ways, each are doing something musical about it.

When Adam covered Sam Cooke’s “Change is Gonna Come” during the finals of American Idol last spring, everyone understood the analogy between African American civil rights and gay rights that he was risking. Maybe in that case he was just another “white boy trying to sing tough and black, with gravel and spit in his voice,” but when he’s not overreaching for gravitas, Lambert has chutzpah enough to burn. It’s still too early to know whether or how his particular change is going to come, but the broad outlines of his unabashedly commercial, unapologetically oversexed approach are already visible — and audible.

Adam does little to endanger his appeal to his straight female fan base. He does so in part through exaggerating his bisexual appeal: planting comments in the media about tongue kissing girls, posing with a naked female model in Details, and miming a strutting, preening cock rocker at his shows. At moments, he also enrolls in the “If I was your girlfriend” school of male effeminacy, encouraging shared identifications over an obsession with makeup and clothes, and a readiness to share feelings. And, in relation to rock masculinity, his approach is mainstream, but not necessarily assimilationist. Instead, his rockist calculations — from holding out for the cover of Rolling Stone to holding his own on-stage with Queen, Kiss and Slash — show he wants to compete with, rather than simply service, straight men. He hopes to redefine what counts as mainstream, not fit into it. And while he demurs from seeing his role as political (which, given the lamentable state of a marriage-obsessed LGBT politics, is probably a good thing), Lambert is too canny to be unaware of the cultural politics of being out in the mainstream. What’s thankfully missing from the album is a tearful confessional song about coming out or wistful ballad about gazing into another boy’s eyes. Instead, he opts for a democratic appeal to all freaks, geeks and weirdos. On “Master Plan,” a bonus track to the new album, he dusts off the”face of a new generation” anthem and gives it a few licks of polysexual, androgynous paint. “Your skin is burning at the sight of me,” he boasts, fronting an imaginary brigade of glamorous weirdos storming the barricades of normality. And, legendary as his wail already is, Lambert does seem to push the envelope primarily in the sartorial division. When his album cover art was first released, I literally couldn’t believe it for a moment. And then I had to hand it to him, not for showing me something that was particularly edgy or radical (it wasn’t), but for reminding me how intimidated we’ve all become by our reactionary culture. His simple throw-back image shows us how we need to liberate ourselves, not from our own particular hang ups, but from the self-censoring positions we take whenever we defer to the broader society’s hang-ups.

Ultimately, all Lambert’s poses are improvisations upon a gendered binary that sits with increasing uneasiness upon the purportedly biological given. Their politics reside less in any simple blurring of femme and macho, then in the sharp cultural fault-line they reveal in American youth culture, one deeper and more relevant than the current over-hyped battle between Team Edward and Team Jacob. While gendered, this split is not necessarily between boys and girls. Cowboy-booted Miley Cyrus tsk-tsking “everyone in stilettos; I guess I didn’t get the memo” is on the wholesome, all-American camp of this divide. Lambert, who definitely got the memo, is on the other, primped, corseted and ready to roll. And if Team Cyrus is all about crypto-Christian earnestness (American Idol winner Kris Allen, obviously, plays on Team Cyrus), Team Lambert is for the godless, glamorous diva in all of us (most of the cast of Glee included). To middle America this remains uncharted gender territory to which FYE hopes to be an audioguide: brave and bold, post-heteronormative, and young, sexy and messy enough to enjoy not having all the answers.

Much of FYE, admittedly, is paint-by-numbers. “Fever” would sound like a rip off of the Scissor Sisters, if anyone in the US had ever heard the Scissor Sisters. “Sure Fire Winners” is a brazen attempt to steal fire from the gods, directly emulating Queen’s “We Are the Champions.” Most disappointing is “Broken Open,” surprisingly the album’s single nod to the goth-musical theater continuum that Lambert rode to American Idol success. The song cynically attempts to reconstruct the opening moments of his cover of “Mad World” note for note, on the condescending assumption that its audience will be too dumb to notice or care. Such transparent recycling bodes ill for the larger promise of Mr. Lambert to be a groundbreaker.

But how many pop albums have no filler? At its high points, FYE joyfully harkens back to an Eighties that I never realized anyone was nostalgic for. Not the edgy New Wave sound that keeps “80s Night” dance floors perpetually grooving to “Don’t You Want Me Baby.” But the mainstream, pop of the era, from Heart to Bryan Adams, replete with guitar solos, power vocals, and bombastic lyrics. This big-hearted Eighties — whose last, transformative hurrah might have been 4 Non Blondes “What’s Up?” (Adam covered the song on his pre-American Idol lounge act, and he recruited former 4 Non Blondes frontwoman Linda Perry to write one of the best tracks on FYE) seems to be the musical address where Adam lives.

Primarily a vocalist, Adam can’t really compete with an artist like Mika, who writes his own material, is a multi-instrumentalist, and exerts a strong creative vision over his stage shows and videos. Adam is more the big kid with a huge voice who is having a ball playing dress-up, while trusting in other people to make the important decisions (if in fact, he has much creative freedom all while in the clutches of the Idol machine). It is indeed an ironic reversal that it should be Mika that is the cagey one about his sexuality, and Adam the forthright. For ultimately, it is the Boy in Cartoon Motion who remains at the avant garde of queer pop, while Glambert, for all his raunchiness, remains careful to hit his mark and follow his cues.

Adam and keyboardist swap spit at the AMAs

Which makes the spectacle turned debacle on the American Music Awards last night all the more confounding. After all, if you’re staking your career on being absolutely in-your-face about being a cold, calculating entertainer, you better be ready to bring it. It wasn’t the “lewd” sexual play-acting that got me so much as the out-of-key singing, flubbed lyrics, and general schlocky quality. Like most fans, I assumed Adam was too much of a pro to stumble as much as he did. It stung twice as bad to know that all the people who hated him when he was good would be saying “I told you so,” and I couldn’t really answer back. I hope he can recover from his literal tumble on-stage. I hope he can. But if he does, he better wake up and realize that no army of stylists, managers, songwriters, and choreographers can patch together a rock star. You have to seize the spotlight and make it your own.

By Tavia Nyong’o

What’s more punk than youth in revolt? Fed up with outrageous cuts to staff and faculty salaries — and an unbelievable 32% hike in tuition at a public university that used to be free (thanks Ronald Reagan) — students recently took over a campus building and re-named it after two Black Panthers who were assassinated at the same spot back in 1969. If that weren’t bad-ass enough, the occupiers put out an audio declaration that boldly proclaimed their unwillingness to issue “demands”. Luckily they recognize that listing acceptable compromises with an unacceptable situation is the first step to a crumbling resistance. Someone’s been reading (or more likely writing?) the Communiqué from an Absent Future.

There is no future in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s dream!

By Judith Butler

(originally published in The Guardian Oct. 4, 2009)

The promise of affordable higher education is dying. The University of California’s students and faculty demand answers.

It may seem that the thousands of people on September 24^th who converged on the University of California at Berkeley’s famous Sproul Plaza, home of the free speech movement, were simply upset about money.  Where has all the money gone? Who has taken it away? And perhaps there is no one to blame. The University of California finds itself with a shortfall of $1.15 billion for the next two years, the result of an $813 million cut in state funding and another $225 million increase in costs for student enrollment. Everyone knows that the state government is dysfunctional, that public funding decreased by 40% between 1990-2005, and this year alone brought another 20% reduction, accelerating the abandonment of the premiere public university by a California state government fully paralyzed by minority rule (two-thirds of the legislature is required for sealing any budgetary deal) and Proposition 13 (the 1978 ban on increasing property taxes that strangleholds any attempt to increase revenues for public services).   It would seem like the UC is in the same situation as other public services and institutions: lay-offs, cutbacks, decreased services and the prospect of a seriously compromised education for undergraduates and graduates alike. So what’s the problem?

Mid-summer when no one was around, UC president Mark Yudof invoked “emergency powers” to implement furloughs on staff and faculty, and sent word to campuses that drastic cuts had to be made in operating expenses. Claiming that the UC system has no unallocated or unreserved funds from which to draw in such dire moments, Yudof proceeded after brief consultation with other administrators within the system, to devise a plan, which includes a graduated salary reduction program for all staff and faculty who make more than $40,000 a year. One might have expected faculty and staff to understand the dire circumstances that led to these lamentable cuts. But it became clear that certain cuts actually devastated some programs, while others absorbed the setback with ready reserves.  Any set of cuts to basic funding involve decisions about how to allocate the funds that remain, how to set priorities, including decisions about whose livelihood will be maintained, and whose will not.  The administration did not wait to reach a settlement with unions; the faculty briefly canvassed were certainly not party to the decision.  As a result, the bad news that deans handed down at the beginning of the semester eliminated 2,000 positions, gutted programs that trained high school teachers in science education, closed courses in East Asian languages and advanced Arabic, overburdened classrooms, shut students out of their majors, let scores of lecturers go, and closed the university library on Saturday. In addition, the administration then demanded of students tuition and fee increases of nearly 40%, imperiling the very notion of an affordable public university, forcing many students to leave the university or scramble for  full-time jobs.

UC president Yudof tried to explain himself by speaking on Youtube. But this began a series of public blunders that have only helped to solidify a sense of incredulity and outrage on the part of faculty, staff, students, and the wider public: the result is a profound and growing skepticism about Yudof’s ability to advocate for the future of the public university.  One does not have to be a brilliant logician to understand the folly of his logic:  (a) there are no reserves of money from which we can draw at the present time and (b) our reserves are down by two-thirds.  Those of us who were trying to develop a balanced critique of both the paralysis of the state economy and the questionable governance by University of California administrators were suddenly rocked into enraged incredulity when Yudof inexplicably gave an interview to The New York Times Magazine (9/27/09) in which he bragged about his own $800,000 salary, shamelessly displayed his anti-intellectualism, described his entry into the field of education as “an accident” and then complained that he tries to speak to faculty and staff about the budget, but it is “speaking to the dead.”

Suddenly, the problem was not only fiscal – “we don’t have the money” – but a more profound loss of confidence in the mode of governance and the figure of authority entrusted with making the case for public education to the state and federal government during these hard times.  Faculty, staff, and students are collectively outraged that the University has failed to make public and transparent what the cuts have been and will be, and by what criteria and set of priorities such cuts are made.  Rage also centers on the devastation of  “shared governance”  – the policy that faculty must be part of any decision-making that affects the academic programs and direction of the university. In its place, a “commission” was appointed by the administration with paltry representation by faculty, emphatically missing are those in the arts and humanities.

No answers are forthcoming to a set of burning questions: Why in this age of slash and burn has the administration of the University of California has bloated by 283 percent, as their own public financial reports make plain?  And why does the University of California spend 10 million a year on inter-collegiate athletics and over 123 million on a new athletic center?  During a time of corrosive neo-liberalism and rising doubts about education and the arts as public goods and worthy of state support, the administration ducks and hides when it is not boasting about its own stupidity, fails to take up the task of making its decision making process transparent, refuses to honor the mandate to bring in the faculty to share in establishing priorities, and weakens the safeguards against a rampant privatization of this public good that would undercut the university’s core commitment to offer an education both excellent and affordable.

So many skeptics murmured that the call for a Walk Out and Teach In on September 24^th would come to nothing^. So when over five thousand students, staff, and faculty crowded the open common of Berkeley alone (and several thousand more on the other 10 campuses), every major national and international media outlet took stock.  The vocal and theatrical demands of the demonstration were not, as Governor Schwarzenegger quipped, just noise coming from “another screaming interest group.”  On the contrary, a rare solidarity among unions, students, and faculty sought to “save the university” and their cry clearly struck a chord across a broad political spectrum. Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor, joined other faculty for a pointed speak out the night before. Faculty and students clustered into an array of groups, pursuing strategies from mainstream lobbying to anarchist display.  The administration was clearly shaken, and subtle hints of division among administrators could be detected. Some congratulated the demonstrators, and others hissed.

My wager is that the walls of the university will shake again – and again – until the message is received: this fiscal crisis is also a crisis in governance: the administration needs to make their books transparent, re-engage shared governance, and set their priorities right so that the United States might continue to claim a public institution of higher learning where a student does not require loads of money to receive a superlative education – after all, this is the promise that we see dying at this moment, and the very thought apparently sends us into the streets en masse.

Judith Butler is the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley.

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)

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?

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.

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.

By Jack Halberstam

In the 1980’s I remember watching John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors and other bad boys of tennis throw their racquets around, yell at referees, jump up and down in anger on the court and generally vent like spoiled schoolboys about a missed shot or a lost point. McEnroe’s favorite cry of disappointment – “You cannot be serious!” – even became a popular catchphrase. People thought of this behavior as “passion,” as evidence that white male American players in particular were invested in the game, and on-court outbursts stood as proof of a kind of emotionality that made the player “human” as opposed to the robotic coldness of a Scandinavian player like Bjorn Borg or the explosiveness of an Eastern European player like Ilie Nastase. Last night when Serena Williams was called for a foot fault at 5-6 and 15-30 in the second set, when she was already down a set, she turned to the line judge and directed a few choice words of disbelief her way. Later Serena Williams commented at a press conference that she had almost never been called for a foot fault in her whole career, let alone at such a crucial point in a match at the US Open. After Serena’s outburst, the line judge, an Asian American woman, approached the chair umpire and complained that she felt threatened by Serena! The big wigs were called onto the court and Serena was given a point penalty that, at match point, gave Kim Clijsters the match. This was a terrible call, a terrible moment for women’s tennis and more evidence of a double standard in sports around male and female behavior and in relation to what is perceived as racially specific conduct.

As Tavia Nyong’o commented in his superb blog on Caster Semenya: “World-class female athletes have long made people anxious, particularly gorgeously muscle-bound black ones.” What was true for Semenya might be true for Williams – the public and the media has no neutral language with which to describe and explain the extraordinary performances of Black female athletes. Black female athletic performances that are, literally, beyond the pale have tended to solicit suspicion and disdain while white female athleticism, especially when it is packaged in a Playboy ready form, receives acclaim and respect. It is no secret that the Williams sisters in tennis have had a love-hate relationship with the media and the public, nor that Serena in particular has been berated for her “masculine” physique. In fact, in February 2009, The Huffington Post ran an interesting op-ed on the omission of the Williams sisters from the 2009 Australian Open’s “list of the 10 most Beautiful Women” in the tournament. The list was topped by Jelena Jankovic and included more than one blond Russian. The absence of Venus and Serena from this list spoke volumes about the misplaced emphasis in women’s sports, and women’s tennis in particular, on appearance over performance but it also implicitly referenced the lurking charge of “lesbianism” or “gender transgression” that hangs over many a performance of female athletic excellence. The recent case of Caster Semenya is just the latest in the long history of gender confusion in relation to women’s sports and Serena Williams’ outburst illuminates the treacherous path walked by female athletes who compete at the highest level, blow away the competition and refuse to or simply cannot conform to normative standards of female beauty.

Again, as Tavia noted in his analysis of the freak show attitudes provoked by Semenya’s extraordinary athleticism, virtuosity is both compelling and confusing to people. Many, many athletes who win at the highest level of competition also have some unique physical attribute, what NYT sports writer Maurice Chittenden calls a “freakish advantage” (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article555183.ece).  In an article from 2005 on top athletes and their physical oddities, he notes that Michael Phelps, the US swimming champion, has outsized feet that work like flippers; the same was true of Ian Thorpe. David Beckham has “bandy legs” that help him to put curves into his kicks; Lance Armstrong has very low lactic acid levels so his legs can keep going and going. And so on. Sports champions are often, literally, freaks of nature, so why we would stumble over the spectacle of a woman with a six pack but not a man with size 17 feet? Obviously, the boundaries for female athletic virtuosity must not leave the domain of acceptable femininity where femininity is too often defined in opposition to athleticism, activity and aggression.

So while the female body draws negative attention for athleticism that tips into muscular masculinity, behavior and conduct for female athletes is also judged according to a different set of rules. When Serena Williams cited John McEnroe and his antics as an influence for her own on court passions, McEnroe quickly distanced himself from her and suggested that she had crossed lines he would never have even approached. In fact, almost any kind of showy behavior by athletes of color draws negative attention while almost any kind of bad behavior from white athletes is thought of as “spirited.” When Justine Henin showed terrible sportsmanship at the French Open in 2003 by not backing up Serena Williams’ complaint about an obvious missed call, the French crowd began to boo Williams instead of Henin and Williams became so unnerved that she went on to lose the final set after having led 4-2. The headlines after Serena’s defeat and the hideous display of group racism within the crowd, crowed about the end of Serena Williams’ unbeaten run. When a Williams sister wins easily, it is called “boring”; when she fights hard, she is labeled erratic; when Venus or Serena question a call, they are charged with petulance but when they are don’t, they are pegged as indifferent to the sport.

Tennis has often been cast as the sport of ladies and gentlemen. It is implicitly a class bound activity that favors the kids who grew up with tennis courts in the backyard and expensive coaches. Much has indeed been made of the humble beginnings of the Williams sisters who spent the first years of their life in Compton, LA before moving to Florida and training with other teen tennis stars. Implicit in all of the coverage of the Williams’ family—including their mother Oracen and their father Richard—is that somehow, the Williams just don’t behave properly in the dignified world of tennis. When Venus won Wimbledon in 2000, her father danced in the stands shouting: “Straight out of Compton!” When Venus started a clothing line, it was seen as a distraction from tennis; in general, Venus and Serena’s outfits on court have been seen as unbecoming to the game and they are both characterized as excessive, too much, more spectacle than tennis.

Just to put the focus on Serena Williams’ behavior in perspective, imagine a discussion about Roger Federer’s effeminacy in relation to his designer sports wear or his tendency to cry when he loses. Imagine a real interrogation into the fist-pumping behavior of all kinds of white American tennis players who leave their sportsmanship in the locker room and resort to “mission accomplished” tactics while crushing opponents who have often learned to play tennis in far less rarefied and privileged circumstances. In fact, the most recent fist-pumping, great white hope for US women’s tennis, Melanie Oudin, a nineteen year-old blond pony tailer, has been discussed as a “Cinderella” figure, as someone who will single-handedly rescue US women’s tennis! This Cinderella story consigns Venus and Serena to the role of the “ugly sisters” and promises a new queen, a palatable tennis princess and a return to tennis whites.

By Tavia Nyong’o

World champion runner Caster Semenya returned to a hero’s welcome in her native South Africa last month, where the public denounced the “gender testing” she was forced to undergo after her gold medal in Berlin. Outraged by the racist and sexist comments of rivals who told journalists that you could tell she was  a man just by looking at her, the president of South African athletics, Leonard Chuene, resigned from the International Association of Athletic Federations (IAAF). “This girl has been castigated from day one, based on what?” he told the LA Times “You denounce my child as a boy when she’s a girl? If you did that to my child, I’d shoot you.”

South Africans aren’t the only ones angrily comparing Semenya’s treatment to that of Saartjie Baartman, the nineteenth-century Khoisan woman who was exhibited throughout Europe as a sexualized monstrosity. White audiences guffawed, prodded and poked at her exposed body, which they laughingly demeaned as that of a “Hottentot Venus”: the inverse of European standards of beauty. Challenging Semenya’s femaleness, people now assert, is imperialism all over again. Its an especially shameful and traumatic humiliation, they stress, for a teenager to experience. The South African newspaper, The Guardian and Mail wrote:

At 18, Caster Semenya is quite probably frightened and confused. Her dignity has been attacked, her profoundest sense of self laid bare with potentially damaging psychological consequences. But when she returns home, she seems assured of a special welcome from family and friends who have never sat in judgment on her nature. They have always accepted her simply as Caster, the girl who can outrun them all.

Her case is understandably upsetting, but I for one object to the manner in which Semenya is being spoken for and defended in passages above. Is it her defenders who are perhaps embarrassed and ashamed by her exuberant embodiment, more than her? Semenya, according to her family and friends, is a rough and tough tomboy who excels in sports, scorned skirts for trousers from the very beginning, and shrugged off teasing and bullying about her gender long before the issue exploded in Berlin. Young though she may be, who is to say Semenya cannot know and enjoy who she? Who is to say that her “profoundest sense of self” lies with being considered and treated like a “girl”?

If ever a case called for an intersectional analysis that included queer and trans perspectives, as well as anti-racist and anti-imperialist ones, this is it. Whether indignantly paternalistic, like Chuene, or more “liberally” expressing concern over a fragile, damaged psyche, like the Mail and Guardian, Semenya’s defenders are clearly dealing with a gender panic of their own.

And who wouldn’t be? World-class female athletes have long made people anxious, particularly gorgeously muscle-bound black ones. The splendor of their world, which a bystander like myself can only imagine, must be one in which conventional barriers of the body are left behind in the dust. In the name of protecting African femininity from a western, scientific gaze, Semenya’s defender also disguise their own patriarchal investment in naming and controlling this gender excess. But as her career already illustrates, such gender excess is hard to control.

As From a Left Wing writes, apropos of Semenya and of similar cases in women’s soccer:

What is it we are looking for in a women’s game? Surely not a confirmation of the “femininity” of the people on the pitch. It must be something else – like how the women’s game allows us to escape from narrow ideas about who and what women are. Why shouldn’t women’s football be exactly the game to welcome gender-bending warriors like the intersex athlete, and the transgender warrior?

The real challenge when an ugly, gender-disciplinary inquisition like the one the IAAF has started crops up is not to allow ourselves to be blackmailed into simplistic reassertions of gender normativity for the sake of the vulnerable child. Here Semenya herself leads the way, in her succint response to the ordered test:  “I don’t give a damn.” Instead of making her a traumatized symbol of a violated continent, how about adopting some of her contemporary, wordly pugnacity?

And instead of insisting upon the naturalness of her gender, how about turning the question around and denaturalizing the world of gender segregated, performance-obsessed, commercially-driven sports, a world that can neither seem to do with or without  excessive bodies like Semenya’s and their virtuosic performances?

The rush to compare Semenya to Saartjie Baartman, while obvious for nationalistic reasons, misses something crucial. Baartman was exhibited and castigated for what the imperialist eye took to be her abberant femininity. A better comparison here would be to the many trans bodies (like famed jazz pianist Billy Tipton above) who have been disciplined and punished for their female masculinity. As in Semenya’s case, female masculinity is often associated with forms of disguise and deceit (the stigma of “doping” and of South African Athletics perhaps trying to “pass off” a male runner as a woman is clearly relevant here). But it is also associated, and for related reasons, with the extraordinary. Runners like Semenya are as much virtuoso performers as are players like Tipton. And the virtuoso always risks being scapegoated as a freak, even as they exhibit a skill that is, in a sense, always already in all of us.

We are drawn to the virtuoso, the virtuoso draws us out, but it is that very intensity of response that can lead to the kind of panicked rush to quarantine virtuosity, or explain it away as plain freakishness. Female masculinity like that of Semenya or Tipton can be thought of as virtuosic performances of gender.

We need more virtuosos like her just around now. The long sordid history of considering transgender embodiment an intrinsic hoax is still relevant, regardless of whether one wants to claim Semenya as a trans figure. It reflects the essentialist conviction that bodies must have a stable sex that presents itself in appropriate dress, voice, attitude and behavior, and that anybody who does not must by definition be engaged in a deception. This essentialist imperative to expose, examine and fix the transgressive body is also what is motivating the IAFF’s panic around Semenya. It represents the latest intensification of gender essentialism, in which the body itself — its genetic makeup, hormonal levels, etc. — is taken to participate in a kind of self-deception; one that, we are told, will take weeks if not years to fully unravel. The threat hanging over Semenya — to be “stripped” of her medal — is a clear giveaway that the logic remains one of a deceit demanding forcible public exposure.

The essentialist response to this essentialist attack on Semenya is to reassert the commonsense of the gender binary: “In Africa we know men from women.” The anti-essentialist response is to acknowledge how easily rattled our dependence upon the coherence of that fictional binary is. One such anti-essentialist strategy is humor, which unlike humorlessness can admit that exceptional bodies, in their incongruity, hold potentially important insights into the non-congruence of all bodies to the purported “norm.”

The offensive but infectious “She’s a man” humor all over YouTube (see above) and internet doesn’t get us very far politically. But as a vernacular response it reminds me less of Baartman than it does of another nineteenth-century “freak,” Peter Sewally, who was apprehended in women’s attire in antebellum New York. Like Semenya, Sewally was also forcibly submitted to a genital examination to establish his “gender,” and prints of him as the “Man-Monster” were displayed for sale, much as images of Semenya now circulate worldwide for cheap amusement. (I write about Sewally in my recent book, and so does Jonathan Ned Katz.) The important lesson from Sewally (or for that matter, Baartman, as revisioned by Suzan-Lori Parks) is how unapologetic he remained in the face of public ridicule and legal reprisal. “

In his defiant nonrespectability, Sewally serves as an important historical example of what queer theorists like to call transformational shame. The more ambivalent YouTube responses to Semenya (like the one below) do seem also to dabble in the  shared and public indignity of sex. Lets just say I’m more interested in a somewhat phobic response to Semenya’s physicality that digresses into a speculation about how drag queens he knows tuck their meat than I am in patriarchal threats to shoot anyone who challenges the sex of his child:

I’m tripping, as I finish this overlong entry, about these events having been ignited in, of all places, Berlin, where Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s documentarian, took her famous photographs of African American sprinter Jesse Owens at the Nazi Olympics in 1936. I’m reminded of how modern international athletics is so deeply shaped by its disavowed eugenicist history. Black athleticism, as Paul Gilroy argued in his oft-misread polemic, Between Camps, increasingly stands in for a superhuman commodified physicality that remains, nonetheless, paradoxically attached to what he calls “infrahumanity,” or humanity on a lower spectrum or frequency.

Gilroy presciently warned of a genetic turn in race-thinking, which the current attempt to reinstate the gender binary at a chromosomal or endrochrinal level is reminding us of. Our challenge then, is to think against this ongoing regeneration of eugenic ideals, based on bodily capacities that black people are supposed to possess in excess (to the detriment of our intellectual capacities), while sustaining hope in the immanent possibilities Gilroy also sees in infrahumanity, possibilities which I’ve tried to identify here with Semenya’s virtuosic performance of gender.

Who knows, but on the lower frequencies, Caster Semenya runs for all of us?

***

UPDATE Wednesday: Shortly after posting this, this story came down the wires, ironically confirming just how unforgiveable Semenya’s transgression was:

Like everyone else thrust into the public eye these days, Semenya has got an instant makeover to render her a more suitable standard bearer for national femininity. All I’ll say about this development is that it is just further proof of Judith Butler’s thesis in Gender Trouble, that, while we often think of sex or gender-deviant bodies as failed copies of a natural original, “natural” gender is actually a mimetic attempt to forestall the uncanny prospect of their being no original gender at all, simply copies of copies. This magazine distinguishes itself in the transparency of its appeal to such a strategy. “Look at Caster now” can only mean: refer back from this image, which we present to you as the true, real Caster, to the prior, excessive and disturbing image one, and you will somehow have your perception of gender stabilized. That such stability of gender is never achieved is unfortunately not a good enough reason for people to stop trying.

By Lisa Duggan

The battle royal has now been engaged over the question of whether health care reform will include a public option, with insurance industry flacks and free market ideologues drumming up hysteria and hauling out the loonies to denounce any public option as “socialist” (I wish) and “Nazi” (say what?), while mild mannered liberals defend it for bringing “choice and competition” to the health insurance markets.  It’s a hard war to watch, given that the so-called public option is a pale shadow of single payer–the approach that might provide universal quality care without siphoning buckets of money into executive salaries and profits for the health care robber barons.

But here’s my question for today: Where are the homosexuals?  While all the mainstream gay groups and lgbt media and bloggers are rehashing Prop 8 and planning a march for equality in October, honey, Rome is burning right here right now.  Much of the furor over marriage rights in the United States is fueled by the desire for access to health care–employment and marriage being the primary routes for insurance coverage.  In countries with universal health care, the battle over same sex marriage rights has been much less intense and consequential.  Gaining universal access to health care in the U.S. now would meet the widespread need that is now largely expressed in campaigns for partnership recognition.  In addition, it could address the crying need for adequate health care for masses of queers who have no wish to marry.  In the large balancing scale of benefits–free universal health care, or single payer, would do more for The Gays than marriage equality.  So where are the gay groups and activists?  Where have they been for the past decade when organizing for single payer might have helped push it onto the national political agenda, before it was so unceremoniously replaced by the “public option”? And where are they now that the public option may be replaced by the even paler, more impotent health co-op plan?

Are gay groups and activists serious about gaining concrete benefits for queer constituencies–homeless kids, transgender sex workers, lgbt populations that are unemployed, elderly, migrant or immigrant, disabled and sick?  If so, then it would make a lot more sense to spend $50 million in donor funds pushing for free universal health care, than even thinking about spending that sum to redo the Prop 8 referendum next year.  Should we rename the current organizations to peg them as the Gay Couples Rights Movement?

Access to health care is a national emergency, for queers folks more than most. 

It’s past time for us all to mobilize on the front lines of this political battle–it matters more to more queers than marriage ever will.