“X-Ray of Civilization”: David Wojnarowicz and the Politics of Representation

by Leon Hilton

Untitled still from the film "Silence = Death" (1990)

David Wojnarowicz often said that he wanted his art to be an “X-Ray of civilization.” Eighteen years after his death, at the age of 37, from AIDS-related complications, his work has apparently lost none of its radioactive power. When Martin E. Sullivan, the director of the National Portrait Gallery, caved to demands from the Catholic League and several prominent Republican congressmen—including soon-to-be House Speaker John Boehner—to remove a video piece by Wojnarowicz from public exhibition, it was as if he had inadvertently exploded a time-bomb loaded with the shocking affective charge of a bygone era of queer expression. An event that, for many, felt like an acid flashback to the bad old days of the 1990s Culture Wars has actually revealed a much more far-reaching—and disturbing—discursive constellation of political agendas. What might have been dismissed as a wearingly familiar debate about censorship and government funding of the arts has turned out to reveal a lot about the still-uneasy status of queer representation in the national political imaginary.

The offending video, a four-minute excerpt of a thirty-minute work called “A Fire in My Belly,” was displayed as a part of a temporary exhibition on the theme of American portraiture and sexual difference called “Hide/Seek,” organized by the National Portrait Gallery. Wojnarowicz completed work on the video in 1987 after spending several years gathering research material and images in Mexico and Latin America. Dedicated to the memory of photographer Peter Hujar, Wojnarowicz’s close friend and former lover whose death from AIDS marked a decisive turning point in his artistic and personal life, the video is assembled out of a rapidly inter-spliced collection of footage, some intentionally staged, some found and repurposed. Crafted in Wojnarowicz’s signature raw, quasi-punk aesthetic, the video is a discomfiting mélange of quickly shifting images: a white porcelain bowl fills with blood; two hands attempt to sew a bisected loaf of bread back together; the lips of a face are pierced by a needle and thread, sealing up the mouth; a young man removes his shirt, then his pants and underwear. The full-length video also includes harrowing footage of Mexican street life, a bloody cockfight, and a brutal wrestling match: the violence of the filmic cut resonates and amplifies the violent thrust of a proliferation of bodies smashing into each other on screen. (Art critic Holland Cotter has written an interesting take on the piece for the New York Times’s Arts Blog). In the version of the video displayed at the National Portrait Gallery, Wojnarowicz’s video is accompanied by excerpts from experimental musician Diamanda Galás’s Plague Mass, in which the singer shrieks verses from the Book of Leviticus enumerating Biblical laws regulating the treatment of the “unclean.”

The Catholic League’s Bill Donohue honed in on one image in particular—a shot of a crucifix and wood-carved Christ figure, blood dripping from its wounds, a black smear of swarming ants covering over its prone body. “It would jump out at people if they had ants crawling all over the body of Muhammad,” Donohue protested in an interview with the New York Times, “except that they wouldn’t do it, of course, for obvious reasons.” Shamelessly insisting that the display of this image constituted “hate speech” against Catholics and Christians more broadly, Donohue’s bizarre logic was reiterated by Rep. Eric Cantor, who told Fox News that the display of the video was “an obvious attempt to offend Christians during this Christmas season.” The video was taken down on November 30, the evening before World AIDS Day.

Despite Donohue’s and Cantor’s almost willfully asinine contention that “A Fire in My Belly” is anti-Christian, Wojnarowicz’s video—and indeed his artistic project as a whole—both draws from and radically reconfigures the centuries-old representational tradition of Christian martyrdom in Western art. Wojnarowicz’s imagery takes clear inspiration from both high Renaissance tableaux of Christ’s suffering on the cross and the colorfully gory vernacular depictions of religious figures he encountered while traveling and working in Mexico. The beautifully composed Christ image in “A Fire in My Belly” combines the artist’s longstanding appropriation of religious iconography with another of his frequently evoked subjects: ants and insects constitute one of the most striking formal motifs in Wojnarowicz’s artwork, crawling over the surface of paintings, looming ominously in enlarged close-up photo-collages, and traversing video frames. But ants here also play an important aesthetico-political role: they manifest the artist’s sustained and rigorously developed interest in finding beauty in the abject, the marginal, and the subterranean. Minuscule organisms teeming beneath the surface of the visual world, ants in Wojnarowicz fervent imagination signal a kind of return of the repressed: a simultaneously mesmerizing and repellent reminder of the primordial origins of the social itself. Viewed in this context, the ant-covered Christ is less a desecration than a political intervention, a reorientation of the visual field that lends the iconicity of the crucifixion a newly recharged corporeality.

But what seems to be truly unconscionable for critics of Wojnarowicz’s art is its forceful imputation of the analogy between the Biblical torment of Christ and the contemporary suffering of queer bodies and subjects. Far from a reductive or simplistic attempt at shock value, as Donohue and Cantor would have it, Wojnarowicz’s ant-covered Christ fires on a number of representational and figurative levels at once and becomes the locus for a range of intersecting cultural imperatives. In its abject prostration, the figure calls discomfiting attention to the parallels between Christ’s tribulations and the stigma and paranoia surrounding the queer body during the initial flare-up of the AIDS crisis. Wojnarowicz’s Christ image also functions as a visual reprimand to the viciously disingenuous response of the Catholic Church to the epidemic, and its refusal to countenance the use of condoms to prevent the spread of the disease. Christ, here standing in for the penetrated and vulnerable queer body, bears witness to the damage inflicted by the paranoid fantasies propagated by church, state, and the mass media. Wojnarowicz’s ant-covered Christ is thus simultaneously an icon of queer identification, and a castigation of the institutions and individuals who so uncannily reiterated the humiliations visited upon Christ in response to the threat he posed to the stability of the social order.

Responding to the recent controversy in a letter published in the Washington City Paper, Diamanda Galás herself underlined this point in her inimitable fashion: “What the Catholic League and certain members of the House presumably wish to remove from their consciousness,” she writes, “is thirty years years of death sentences handed down to their parishioners and citizenry, who were told not to wear condoms, and the mistreatment of those stigmatized as miscreants and sinners by their viral status and/or homosexuality and/or status as drug addicts. They wish to remove the UNSEPARATE CHURCH AND STATE conduct throughout the epidemic, which this film articulately reflects.”

* * *

Inevitably, far from eradicating “A Fire in My Belly” from the visual field or the national consciousness, the Portrait Gallery’s action has instead produced what Michel Foucault would call an “incitement to discourse”: suddenly Wojnarowicz’s haunting, beautiful, and wholly unique vision is everywhere, his name making headlines and snapshots from his work traveling widely across newspapers and the web. The Washington Post, the New York Times, and New York Magazine posted links to the banned video on their websites. Expressions of outrage quickly circulated across the Internet—through Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms—often accompanied by links to the video’s YouTube page. Transformer, a Washington DC gallery located not far from the National Mall, announced that it would screen “A Fire in My Belly” on a 24-hour loop in its front window until the piece is reinstated at the NPG. In an action reminiscent of a similar response to the controversy surrounding a planned exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs at the Corocoran Gallery in 1989, a group of activists projected Wojnarowicz’s work on the NPG’s walls. And on December 4, two agitators were detained by police and then expelled for life from the Smithsonian after showing the video on their iPads inside the “Hide/Seek” exhibition itself.

Considering the outpouring of support for the banned video, it would be tempting to conclude that the usual suspects on the Right had fallen for Wojnarowicz’s bait. In seeking to censor his images, it might be argued, Donohue, Boehner, Cantor and company actually wildly increased the visual purview of the work and redoubled its political potency. Wojnarowicz, of course, was no stranger to run-ins with state authority, and cannily used his work’s provocative formal qualities and subject matter in order to promote both his career and the his political agenda. In 1990, he successfully sued the American Family Association’s Frank Wildmon for copyright violation when the AFA used out of context snippets from his work in a pamphlet they circulated to lobby against funding the National Endowment for the Arts. (Interestingly, that case also revolved around Wojnarowicz’s queer redeployment of religious imagery). In one sense, the latest imbroglio around Wojnarowicz’s incendiary images simply confirms the hypnotic power they seem to hold over the would-be moral custodians of the visual field. Certainly as a student of Wojnarowicz’s work and the period in which he lived, it has been perversely gratifying to witness his singular vision return with such urgency to the front lines of the contestation over the questions of sexuality, art, and state power.

But both the censorship of Wojnaworicz’s work and the response it has engendered also indicates—and, perhaps, diagnoses—the pernicious conditions under which representations of non- or anti-normative sexual identities and politics are produced, circulated, and regulated. And the furor provoked by the incident suggests the extent to which ongoing tensions surrounding the inclusion of certain queer people and bodies within the national imaginary are largely played out within the order of “representation” as such. The piece was, after all, displayed in the National Portrait Gallery, a part of the Smithsonian and hence, in a very official sense, an institution whose federally mandated mission is to preserve and visually represent the nation to and for itself. The familiar mantra heard from conservative complainers—that the video was “in-your-face perversion paid for by tax dollars” (as Georgia’s Rep. Jack Kingston would have it)—has simply cemented and reiterated the association between the politics of (visual) representation and the entrenchment of neoliberal economic imperatives at every level of the political system. While the wholesale decimation of public support for the arts and humanities in any form has been a bedrock of the conservative agenda since the Reagan ascendancy, the invocation of queer, “anti-Christian” artwork as a justification for slashing public funding as such has attained scary new mouthpieces in the era of the Tea Party and Sarah Palin. As NPG director Sullivan put it in his interview with the Times, “Obviously the Portrait Gallery is a part of the Smithsonian. It’s just one of many, many players in this new discussion or debate that’s going on in Congress about federal spending, the proper federal role in culture and the arts, and so forth. We don’t think it’s in the interest, not only of the Smithsonian but of other federally supported cultural organizations, to pick fights.”

Beyond the economic register, we might also be prompted to consider the ways in which the contested image of the suffering queer Christ covered with ants—created at the height of one moment of particular “gay panic”—now resonates within the broader context of the ongoing debate surrounding the legalization same-sex marriage and the open acceptance of gays in the military? And what of the heightened national attention now being paid to the vulnerabilities of queer youth to bullying and suicide? The reappearance of Wojnarowicz’s work within the political present serves as a depressing reminder of just how impoverished the vision of queer politics has become since the height of the AIDS epidemic in the US. Wojnarowicz’s (and Galás’s) deeply unsettling, politically uncompromising words and images render even more stark the emaciated political imagination of the mainstream LGBT rights movement. The focus for the past decade on marriage and military rights once again exposes the degree to which the fantasy of the healthy body (most often white, most often male) serves as a regulatory norm for the kinds of citizens deemed worthy of representation and rights (a notion that Jasbir Puar has so forcefully developed in her work on the biopolitics of what she has termed “homonationalism”). Indeed, we should wonder if it was purely coincidence that this controversy erupted the very same week that the Pentagon released a study concluding that the repeal of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Policy would not have any significant negative effect upon military readiness.

More distressingly still, certain voices from within the gay community itself have voiced their disapproval of both the display of the video and Galás’s response, contending that both “make us look bad” or “prove [Donohue’s] point.” This anxiety, of course, only confirms the power that privileged modes of visual representation have to determine who and what is deemed worthy of national inclusion. And ultimately it reveals the way certain queer subjects and representations—healthy, aspirationally middle-class, white, and married—are easily assimilable into the discourse of the nation, while the freaks so beautifully invoked in the work of Wojnarowicz and Galás become figured as threats to the coherence and impermeability of the national body itself.

For my part, I wonder if what we can learn from this incident is that the unstinting work of artists like Wojnarowicz and Galás should be viewed not as moribund artifacts from a more radical queer past, but, as José Esteban Muñoz helps us to imagine, visionary invocations of a future whose time has yet to come. In this sense, perhaps we can read “A Fire in My Belly” as a wake up call addressed, precisely, to us—illuminating an alternative route through the treacherous present, and providing an X-ray of a civilization that was, and still is, yet to be.

Kenya: A World AIDS Day without Queers?

Guest blog by Keguro Macharia.

I am tempted to title this post A Series of Unfortunate Events, to disavow an insidious homo-killing logic. But I am a proper Kenyan. Raised on the milk of paranoia, I cannot ignore the proximity of coincidence. Three is a magic number.

On November 16, 2010, Kenya joined 78 other countries in a UN vote that elected to un-protect sexual orientation. The vote was on a resolution to investigate “killings based on discriminatory grounds,” a resolution designed to recognize a “non-exhaustive” range of vulnerable groups that includes human rights defenders, indigenous communities, and street children. As noted by the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (ILGHCR), “[f]or the past 10 years,” sexual orientation has been included in this grouping, understood as a category based on which individuals are targeted for “extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.” It’s worth noting, “The amendment removing the reference to sexual orientation was sponsored by Benin on behalf of the African Group in the UN General Assembly and was adopted with 79 votes in favor, 70 against, 17 abstentions and 26 absent.” Kenya could have chosen differently.

On November 22, 2010, David Kuria, manager of the Gay and Lesbian Coalition of Kenya (GALCK) and one of Kenya’s leading gay activists, announced that GALCK had not been invited to participate in World AIDS Day events arranged by the National AIDS Control Council. Since 2006, GALCK has been invited to join other health providers and NGOs engaged in HIV/AIDS activism. World AIDS Day events have provided an important space in which proximity and association suggest possible political and social coalitions. As I note elsewhere:

In Kenya, LGBTI activism has taken place, most fruitfully, as a strategy of association rather than an articulation of identity. There are no pride parades, as one might find in New York or Madrid, and no public celebrations of LGBTI identity. Instead, LGBTI activists have mobilized around HIV/AIDS activism. December 1, World AIDS Day, has become an unofficial Pride day, and LGBTI activists march with other HIV/AIDS activists.

The decision not to invite GALCK has important implications for the public life of Kenya’s LGBTI activists.

On November 28, 2010, Raila Odinga, Kenya’s Prime Minister, ordered the Kenyan police to “arrest gay couples.” While “unnatural offences” and “indecent practices between men” are illegal according to Kenya’s Penal Code, no legal basis exists to arrest “gay couples.” Identity is not a crime, as Kenyan columnists reminded the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister has since released a press statement that claims he was quoted “out of context,” a too-common Kenyan defense. Strange how often Kenyan politicians never really say what we hear them say.

Three dates. Three seemingly unrelated events. A paranoid (il)logic of coincidence.

Unlike Malawi and Uganda, both infamous for their attempts to legislate a range of queer intimacies, Kenya is considered relatively liberal. Tourist agencies promise discretion as they pursue pink currency. Kenya has a robust online queer presence. LGBTI-friendly initiatives are well-funded by a range of international NGOs. LGBTI-themed seminars are held in Kenya’s numerous conference centers. LGBTI individuals have been profiled in the national newspapers. Kenyan-based human rights organizations support queer rights. And, recently, Esther Murugi, Special Programmes Minister, defended gay rights.

LGBTI activism is as sutured by economics as it is by politics. Kenya’s official and unofficial policies toward LGBTI activism are as influenced by regional and continental politics and allegiances as they are by international social and economic factors—Kenya’s tourist economy, for instance.

Over the past two years, LGBTI issues in Kenya have received an unprecedented amount of press coverage. Public spaces are opening up in remarkable ways. Simultaneously, as the Prime Minister’s comments suggest, there is an equally strong backlash that is as much about economics—how NGO money flows into the country—as it is about politics.

For instance, during the recently-concluded national referendum on a new constitution, opponents of the measure tried to incite LGBTI-panic by claiming the constitution permitted gay marriage. It was the first time that LGBTI politics had been used as a wedge issue, and it said something significant about their social and cultural capital.

The struggle for LGBTI rights in Kenya, as elsewhere, is a struggle over claiming public space. It is a struggle over what opinions can be aired in public and how they will be covered by the press; it is a struggle over which writers have access to opinion pages, radio programs, and TV shows—it’s easier to publish pro-queer, anti-homophobic articles in the Guardian than in the Daily Nation; it is a struggle over which public spaces and events are open to LGBTI organizations; it is a struggle over the possibilities for economic, social, and cultural visibility.

It matters that GALCK was not invited to participate in World AIDS Day events. It matters that LGBTI organizations, many of which are dedicated to working with MSM populations, have no public presence during World AIDS Day events. It matters that the criminalization of gays has important health consequences. It matters that LGBTI lives in Kenya can be pawns in someone else’s chess game. It matters that World AIDS Day can be the occasion for anti-LGBTI actions, even as the logic that claims African AIDS is primarily heterosexual makes such an action unsurprising.

It is morning on the East Coast, early afternoon in Nairobi. Multiple threads converge and snarl here. One wants to believe in the comfort of coincidence, or the accidents of calendars. And that a series of unfortunate events do not mask a more insidious homo-killing plot.

Touch the Junk

by Tavia Nyong’o

Constitutional Pat Down Protection (recto)

“Hysteria,” says downtown New York queer performance legend Justin Bond, “is the wave of the future.” Two recent events in the news — the new pat-down policies of the Transportation Security Administration, and the release of Kanye West’s fifth album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy — strongly hint that the future may be now. From the wall-to-wall cable TV coverage of the federal government’s latest iniquity to the hoopla over whether to co-sign or berate Kanye for acting out grandiose and abject male fantasies, we are all speaking the hysteric’s discourse now. But if that’s the case, then who are we speaking it to?

George Condo's artwork for Kanye West's latest album

On the track “Gorgeous” off of Dark Fantasy, Kanye complains about being pulled out of line at the airport for a bag check, jeering at the claim that this treatment is “random,” and consoling himself with thoughts of receiving oral sex and of spreading piles of cash around like AIDS. Mild mannered software engineer John Tyner contented himself with a different kind of viral message when he too was subjected to the TSA’s tender mercies. His blog post and YouTube, painstakingly documenting the perceived humiliation of a “groin check,” rapidly ignited a nation into a rage not seen since the government tried to slip “death panels” into the healthcare bill. “Touching our junk,” apparently, is the only fate worse than death at the hands of terrorism or a lack of health coverage.

Tyner believed himself to be speaking to his fellow citizens in the newly democratized public sphere of the internet, just as Kanye imagines his role in hip hop to be continuing, as opposed to simply sampling, what he calls “soul music for the slaves.” Too bad that the very technological terms through which both men produce themselves as exemplary male rebels are the very ones that render that counter cultural public sphere increasingly virtual.

It takes no genius to notice the sharp increase in public grievance, anxiety and aggression. But more critical attention is required to trace these latest waves of symptoms back to to their systemic cause. In the wake of 9-11, Cornel West annoyed many Talented Tenthers like myself by saying that now white Americans knew what it felt to be “niggerized.” The (very white) John Tyner’s outrage when confronted with the sort of treatment black women and men have been accustomed to ever since they were pawed and poked on the auction block, suggests that West may have been right, if for the wrong reasons. It wasn’t Osama bin Laden that punked America, but then-president George W. Bush, with his permanent global war on terror and illegal war in Iraq, his indefinite suspension of civil liberties at home and in Guantanamo Bay, and, as we are now witnessing, his reluctant creation of a TSA that his party opposed as an expansion of federal government, and whose staff they subsequently left underpaid and un-unionized even as they were called upon to do the increasingly impossible for the ungrateful, and with a smile.

President Obama shouldn’t get off scott free in all of this. But it was Bush who left America’s junk as exposed as was the president’s own during the notorious Mission Accomplished aircraft carrier photo op, clad in a flight suit that, as Mark Greif noted at the time, presented “his crotch tightly cupped in nylon, secure as a flyer in someone else’s plane.” That military codpiece fairly screamed America’s back, bitches, with balls.

Balls are also on Kanye’s mind on Dark Fantasy, and never mind for the moment that he’s pretty sure by now that George W. Bush doesn’t care much about him. The symmetries between Bush’s conservatism and Kanye’s consumerism are increasingly hard to deny, and no, having Gill Scott Heron on your album does not a revolution make. The “people that tried to black ball me,” Kanye raps on “Gorgeous, “forgot about 2 things, my black balls.” Dark Fantasy recycles balls out braggadocio on song after song, most pornotopically on “Blame Game” with Chris Rock, performing the declension of black soul into what Paul Gilroy called the “biopolitics of fucking.” Gilroy got a lot of grief back in 2000 for calling out rappers and R&B singers for reducing the soulful apex of 1970s transfigurative love and redemption into a privatized fantasy of consumption and freaky sex. Ten years later he looks pretty spot on.

On “Dark Fantasy,” Kanye asks, via a Mike Oldfield sample, “can we get much higher?” and gives that classic soulful question a plaintive propulsive thrust that is undeniably compelling. But it is the very virtuosity with which Kanye points out the obvious on that track — “you’ve been putting up with my shit for far too long” — that makes him such a bellwether of the hysteria of our moment.

If Kanye’s frenetic lyrical, self-promotional, and all caps textual production could be reduced to a single question it would be that of the hysteric’s: why am I who you say I am? This question has undeniable traction in the current moment, not the least because it anticipates and, as it were, folds into itself, the predicted objection. There is he toasting himself as a douchebag, asshole, and scum bag, before we get to it. But lets notice the last proviso: he is also a “jerk off” who never takes work off, that is to say, who has internalized the obscene imperatives of capitalism to labor, accumulate and expend endlessly. Here is the rock star as mogul, a brand obviously perfected by co-producer Jay Z, but one whose hysterical, spastic, obverse Kanye is determined to hype.

Bush visits the Oprah Show

Bush on book tour recently told Oprah that the most disgusting moment of his presidency was being insulted by Kanye West in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Why was that the worst moment, and not the mountain of invective that the world threw at him for all his many, many crimes, all of which he remains unrepentant of? Perhaps there is a twist to the hysteric’s discourse that Kanye is perfecting, insofar as it clearly got to the president in a way that all the ordinary hysterical protest, by which I mean all our chants in the street, our slogans, and our abuse, did not. Perhaps it was the discomfiting proximity of Kanye West to the ideal subject of Bush’s America, not his oppositionality, that made his acting out so unnerving. West was in fact out shopping like we were all supposed to be doing, as he himself admitted on air, when the levees broke and for several days after. His famous declaration that George Bush doesn’t care about black people only came after several stammering moments of an attempt at a coherent political critique, pointing out the uneven media coverage of black and white victims, and so on, before shifting cadence and flatly, perversely, condensing it into his immortal dictum.

It is for his innovations in our public language or what’s left of it, that Kanye is truly virtuoso. And in this he is again like Tyner, whose riposte to the TSA “if you touch my junk I’ll have you arrested” has elevated what was apparently gay slang for genitalia into a cri du coeur for injured white manhoods everywhere. Kanye got at Bush because he intuited that the hysteric’s discourse is no longer enough. We need new idioms, which is why we need musical geniuses like Kanye, however ambivalent we feel about them for any number of legitimate political and ethical reasons.

Censored Dark Fantasy Cover, courtesy of Apple iTunes

The copy of Dark Fantasy I downloaded from iTunes has Condo’s cover art pixellated and the (more obscene) Parental Advisory Label. I guess the censors at Apple don’t want me touching the junk either. Like most efforts at censorship, this one only makes the artwork more titillating: the pixels reduce the details of the two figures engage in sex into a miscgeneous blur of browns and pinks. But what is so dangerous about showing the cock? Much rests here on the question of what orientation we take to the innovative and dangerous creativity of virtuosos like Kanye in an era’s whose hysteria seems attached to the decline in reliable figures of authority. Let the attacks on the TSA stand in as evidence: isn’t there a quiet craving for a return of state authority? Behind every exercise in citizenship in the age of the Tea Party seems to be a not so covert longing for something like fascism, based on the fear of difference. The fringe blog Americans for Truth about Homosexuality (sorry no link, go google them if you can stomach it) raised the “urgent” concern of gay TSA employees touching the junk of male flyers, or looking at their naked bods in the new scanners, and has proposed they be fired. Such absurd logic in fact makes manifest the moves through which hysteria opens a path to authoritarianism.

But opportunism and even cynicism are politically ambidextrous. Tyner’s panicked recourse to every technological appendage he could lay hold of to disseminate the news of the feds touching his junk is the Everyman counterpart of Kanye’s privileged victim. Both are virtuosos of the new communicative media that promise greater sociability even as they reduce us to gadgets. But where Tyner seeks to restore a certain modicum of privilege for the male genitals, quietly ensconcing them back in their protective coverlet, Kanye has cock, balls, and indeed, asshole dangling in the wind, admitting he’s a monster, and daring us to do something about or with it.

The Kanye/TSA mix tape thus presents us with a seemingly stark opposition. Do we, understand the underlying motivations behind the hysterical outburst against authority to be good and authentic, and endorse the gauntlet thrown down to state and censor? Or, admitting these motivations to be possibly destructive and harmful, do we throw our critical weight behind a good enough establishment that is working overtime to keep us from hurting each other? It’s this question that makes the seemingly pointless debate over whether we should call Kanye a genius or not matters. At stake is the definition of what genius is, and, to be blunt about it, what admixture of our darker natures we can admit into our definition of it.

The Italian philosopher Paolo Virno reminds us that this stark opposition between our good self-governing natures or our bad ones, requiring governance, may be a false choice. We may want to admit or even insist upon our darker fantasies, and ground our cruel optimism in a society of more freedom, less scrutiny and oversight, more liberty and more justice within those fantasies nonetheless. We could insist upon what Virno calls the fundamental ambivalence of virtuosity, an ambivalence he suggests that we seize upon. The critical demand to proclaim thumbs up or down or otherwise rank music gets in the way of this harder, but I think, more promising path, which is to hold on to the ambivalence, hold on to the questions, and just the touch the junk if, in touching it, we can dispel the illusion of male mastery and abjection that our fear of touching sustains.

Constitutional Pat Down Protection (verso)

Don’t Enlist, Don’t Serve

by Troy Williams

http://queergnosis.com/2010/11/11/dont-enlist-dont-serve/

There are many things worse than discrimination. Being hit by a mortar blast, losing a limb, living with post-traumatic stress disorder or killing another human all come to mind.

These are just a few of the deadly realities queers will face if Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is ultimately repealed. The one upside to a Republican-controlled House is that we may be able to maintain the protections of DADT indefinitely. However, if the pro-military faction of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender political movement succeeds in repealing DADT, closeted soldiers will lose the opportunity to easily escape the horrors of war. DADT has saved an untold number of queer lives. We should praise President Clinton and award every politician who works to keep it in place.

Now, I agree that DADT is discriminatory. It makes liars of soldiers who have sworn oaths of honor and integrity. But war is much worse than discrimination. The ongoing WikiLeaks revelations continue to expose what progressives have argued all along: war brings out the worst in humanity. We see clearly now how politicians, commanders, rogue soldiers and private mercenaries employ torture and thuggery to enforce American hegemony.

Yet I have absolute empathy for these soldiers. I don’t blame them for fighting to stay alive. Few go into the service because they want to fire a weapon at another human being. Most are inspired to enlist by genuine patriotism. Many who are economically disadvantaged need the military to finance college. When a soldier finally acknowledges her sexual identity she may be struck with the fear of losing her rank, career and college fund. Not to mention the shame of being dishonorably discharged.

Yes, it’s horrible to be discharged for being gay. But it’s even more horrible to be tortured by your fellow soldiers.

The culture of the military encourages hazing, misogyny and homophobia. Sexual assault against women and gay servicemembers is frighteningly common. Dr. Mic Hunter, the author of Honor Betrayed: Sexual Abuse in America’s Military lays out the ugly facts: one-third of all the females seeking services at the VA report experiencing an attempted or completed rape. Thirty-seven percent experienced more than one. Four percent report being gang raped. Not by insurgents, mind you — by fellow soldiers. Between 20 and 24 percent of female veterans and 10 percent of male veterans report being raped. Research on civilian rape regularly concludes that only 60 percent of sexual assaults are reported. This number is presumably much lower in the military.

People who do report are often stigmatized and possibly retaliated against. Hunter writes, “Only 12 percent of those who had been sexually harassed used the formal complaint system, because they believed the reporting system was merely in place to protect the chain of command.” (p. 187)

How well do you really think an out gay soldier will fare in this military? Honestly?

War fucks people up. When you kill you lose a piece of your soul. When a soldier dehumanizes people in order to kill them, the effects are equally devastating on that soldier’s psyche. The gay community is rightfully concerned about youth suicides. But suicide rates for veterans are also escalating. The Wall Street Journal reported, “A 15-month-study on the rise in suicides over the last two years found 160 suicides among active-duty personnel, 1,713 suicide attempts and 146 deaths from high-risk behavior, such as drug abuse, in the year ended Sept. 30, 2009.”

And the numbers are rising. The Army reported a record number of suicides for June 2010 — at least one per day. Today we have more vets dying of suicide than in combat. Returning soldiers experience high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder. Divorce rates have also soared. Drug and alcohol abuse is rampant among Iraq veterans.

Homelessness is also increasing among them.

Yes, there are worse things than discrimination.

Again, I don’t blame individual soldiers. They make the ultimate sacrifice. Our country should give them absolutely everything they need, including free medical and psychiatric treatment, full-ride scholarships, job training and abundant financial reimbursement. We should hold back nothing.

Our gay leaders have little to say for the plight of veterans. Their only plea is, “Let us in! Let us in so that we can be equal!” I respond, “No. Keep us out! Keep us out of the corporate war machine. Don’t let gay kids kill other gay kids in foreign countries. Protect DADT so queer soldiers have a way to get the hell out of the military when a future hawk president like a Mitt Romney decides to invade Iran.

I get what military service means to the marginalized gay community. It is the ultimate symbol that we are at last “good” Americans. We want to prove that we will bleed and die for this nation. Our desire for inclusion has made us silent to the fact that the military structure itself is a corrupt and corrupting force. National gay leaders may personally denounce war but they won’t mobilize against militarism. They won’t defend queer Iraqis who have lost their lives because they were on the receiving end of a U.S. cluster bomb. Rather, they actually insist that gay people deserve the right to deploy the same cluster bomb. Have we all gone insane?

Repealing DADT will not be a progressive victory for human rights. It will not be a step forward for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality. Rather, it will mean that we will perpetuate the same system of violent oppression. Worse, we will be fodder for future wars. Queers will fill bloodied body bags and flag-draped coffins. For which war profiteer are you willing to die? Halliburton? Bechtel? The Republican Party? They are not worthy of our sacrifice.

My advice to enlisted queer Americans is to get out while you still can. To those of you thinking of serving — don’t! To professional gay lobbyists, stop militarizing our politics. Instead, redirect the untold millions you spend on repealing DADT to college educations for low-income queers. Fund full health care for queer veterans. Encourage lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans to denounce war and proclaim peace. Let’s get back to the work of social justice. Long Live DADT.

Justifiable Matricide: Backlashing Faludi By Jack Halberstam

The front page of Harper’s October 2010 issue says it all: “American Electra: Feminism’s Ritual Matricide” by Susan Faludi. http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/10/0083140

Apparently, according to Faludi, American feminism has a mother-daughter problem: daughters keep fighting with mothers, mothers keep undercutting daughters, and this, ladies and gentlemen and everyone else, is the real reason that feminism never quite gets its revolutionary interventions right! Trotting through some rather predictable and tame histories of feminism (first, second, third waves; sex wars; women’s suffrage; temperance movements; Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her daughter Harriet Stanton Blatch as founding mothers; the Miss American Beauty pageant of 1968 etc.), Susan Faludi remarkably, ends up somewhere in the vicinity of our contemporary moment and winds down to a drearily pessimistic conclusion—feminism is dead, we killed it—and punctuates this sad insight with a kind of amusing send up of yours truly, bullyblogger and professor, Jack Halberstam! Well, I have kept my weapon in its holster until now but upon receiving a few emails wondering what I thought of the Faludi piece, I thought I would respond with a bit of matricidal anger – actually, though, Faludi, though she may sound like your grandmother, is actually my age, so I guess this is sibling rivalry if one must stick to familiar metaphors…

How did I come to be the bad guy in “feminism’s ritual matricide”? Well, after drifting around various feminist venues like a NOW convention for example, Faludi ended up at a conference at the New School where both she and I were speaking. The conference, “No Longer In Exile” consisted of huge panels (sometimes with 8 or 9 speakers), a couple of on point presentations (by Ann Stoler, Nancy Fraser, Val Smith and others), and a lot of slightly random talks which failed to add up to any kind of state of the union event on feminism. Susan Faludi spoke on the mother-daughter dynamic and how it undermines feminism but I honestly cannot remember much of what she said other than that she seemed to have missed several generations of theoretical works by feminist theorists. She clearly felt no need to comment on the instability of gender norms, the precarious condition of the family itself nor upon the many challenges made to generational logics within a recent wave of queer theory on temporality. Instead, as I recall and as she does in this article, Faludi cast conflict in the mother-daughter bond as transhistorical, transcultural, universal and she situated its toxicity as the reason for internal rifts in the feminist project. She never once mentioned Freud or the Oedipal, she did not differentiate by class or race, she made no mention of queer challenges to the normativity of the family and of generational thinking. Faludi had clearly missed all the other big feminist conferences in the last few decades on the theme of generationality and she thought the mother-daughter thing was big news when in fact feminists have moved on and are more likely to speak of rhizomatic schemes of association, assemblages, ruptures, and performativity than about passing the torch of knowledge from one generation to the next, from mother to daughter on into perpetuity.

The event at which Faludi and I appeared seemed loosely organized around questions about generationality, institutionalization and activist and theoretical legacies and it celebrated some institutional milestones at the New School, many pioneered by Ann Snitow, the conference organizer, herself. Like many such events, there were good talks, bad talks, indifferent talks – there was the obvious, the painfully obvious, and that was just the social science stuff…and so when I had my turn to speak, on one of the last panels of the day, I tried to mix it up a little, try a bit of humor, try a bit of provocation, make some comments about what we had heard and make a bridge to the many young people who were in attendance but seemed bored out of their skulls.

While Faludi characterizes me as a glib twit who proposed Lady Gaga as the answer to what ails feminism, I actually had tried to show that Lady Gaga’s duet with Beyoncé in “Telephone” provides an exciting and infectious model of Sapphic sisterhood that moves beyond sentimental models of romantic friendship and references a different kind of feminism, one more in line with the imaginary bonds that animate violence in Set It Off and Thelma and Louise. 

While no one is proposing that there is some kind of clear feminist program for social change in the world of Gaga, activists of all stripes have looked to popular culture for inspiration and have refused facile distinctions between culture and reality. The Gaga piece of my talk was just a humorous ending to a lecture that covered changing notions of gender, evolving models of institutional relevance and argued for an improvisational feminism that kept up with the winds of political change.

Why is Faludi so insistent on beating the dead horse of Oedipal conflict? First, Faludi seems to be stuck in a pre-1990’s understanding of feminism and moreover her world is a resolutely white world of middle-class women who just want the recognition they deserve. While very few academic feminists would characterize NOW as the bastion of contemporary feminist action and definition, Faludi is committed to a reform model of feminism, to the idea of feminism as a politics built around stable definitions of (white) womanhood and as a ladies club of influence and moral dignity. The mother-daughter bond, which for her is exemplified in the dynamic between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her daughter Harriet, allows for the gains of one age to be passed on to the next. But never does Faludi question whether the gains of white women in one era actually benefit women of color in the next, or whether the goals of white middle class women reflect anything beyond their class interests.

Faludi’s blindness to race is on display in the Harper’s article in the section where she reports on a shift in leadership at NOW while attending their annual conference. As she herself puts it, the leading candidate for president of NOW at the annual meeting she attends is a young Black woman, Latifa Lyles who is a “charismatic speaker attuned to a youthful sensibility, a black woman who insisted on a more diverse constituency, a technologically savvy strategist who had doubled the organization’s Internet fund-raising and engaged the enthusiasm of a host of feminist bloggers.” Lyles’ opponent is Terry O’Neill, a fifties something old style feminist who embodies the frustrations and fears of a group of older white women who see younger feminists as ungrateful, apolitical and unresponsive to the generation who came before them. While Faludi implies that this presidential contest may have something to do with race, ultimately she seems to think that racial struggles always give way to generational rifts and when the young woman loses the election and charges that O’Neill had “recruited older Hillary Clinton turned-Sarah Palin supporters to throw the vote at the last minute,” Faludi quickly shifts the blame back onto Lyles and her supporters and implies that their lack of insight and the callous indifference to the concerns of older women had led to Lyles’ defeat.

Even though the defeat of Lyles is a filicide and not a matricide, suggesting that if generational struggle is the real problem with feminism then it goes both ways, Faludi doggedly pursues her thesis that “a generational breakdown underlies so many of the pathologies that have long disturbed American feminism.” Billing me, in the article’s final section, as the butch matricidal maniac who casually dismisses early models of feminism and then blithely offers up Lady Gaga in exchange, Faludi tidily but not very convincingly wraps up her vapid take on “ritual matricide” with an apocalyptic image of an older woman sitting in the emptied conference room wondering what happened to feminism. Depicting this woman as the last living feminist at the New School and characterizing her as “knowledgeable and enthusiastic about recent developments in critical feminist theory” (which is more than one can say for Faludi), but still rendered redundant by the recent moves against gender studies at The New School, Faludi gives the misleading impression that a) there are no gender studies professors at The New School and b) that the expulsion of this lone older woman was the main chapter in a story of institutional erasure. Anyone who has read Jacqui Alexander’s excellent chapter in Pedagogies of Crossing, however, about a coalition of faculty, staff, students and security guards who led a political protest at the New School in NYC in the mid 1990’s, knows that there have long been struggles at the New School about politics, practice and theory. Jacqui Alexander was at the heart of the mobilization to protest the contradictions between the New School’s rhetoric of diversity and its practice of creating and supporting structural inequalities. The decision made by the New School not to hire Alexander as permanent faculty after employing her as an adjunct professor sparked the creation of a protest movement and allowed the protesters to make structural and historical links between the New School’s employment practices in regards to service employees, its past history of radicalism and its current failed promises of diversity. These are precisely the connections that Faludi fails to investigate, probably does not know about, probably does not want to know about and with their omission, she is able to clear the ground of all distractions from the big event of the momma-daughter fight that bloodies the daughter, slays the mother and brings all of feminism down with it.

If I hadn’t taught work by Faludi in the past and found her insights into gender often illuminating, I wouldn’t be so annoyed by the complacency and myopia of this article in Harper’s. I did try to talk to Faludi at the end of the New School conference to explain why I thought the mother-daughter conflict was a red herring but she just takes one piece of this interaction (where we discuss rumors of Lady Gaga’s hermaphroditism) and leaves the rest (where we discuss the redundancy of familial metaphors, the chaos of all generational transmission and the need for better models of both change and consistency). Mainstream feminism deserves better spokespeople than it currently has  – the Camille Paglia’s and Susan Faludi’s, the over-paid, under-experienced phalanx of elite ladies to whom the press returns again and again. Honestly, if these are the contemporary “mothers” of feminism, then matricide might be justifiable.

School Daze

Hint: Skip forward in the above video to 3:10.

By Tavia Nyong’o

A closeted middle-aged man obsesses over good-looking college gay and launches campaign of pathetic vitriol against the object of his prohibited desire. He is interviewed on TV by a smirking good-looking anchor who is not himself entirely out. The mind reels. America: do we queers have to ALL the work of alchemizing your confused Ids into infotainment? Oh good, here comes a tweet from 50 cent:

“If you a man and your over 25 and you don’t eat pu**y just kill your self damn it. The world will be a better place. Lol.”

Why 25 I immediately wondered? Was a pussy like a rental car, to be handled only by those who’ve reach a certain level of maturity? My mind leapt back to Bad as I Wanna Be, Dennis Rodman’s biography, where that particular above-25 year old bad boy notoriously refused to eat out Madonna. His loss. But maybe it was just punks like Rodman at whose 50 Cent’s vitriol was directed? Probably, but that didn’t stop The Advocate from crying foul and linking him, with arch unfairness, to the recent rash of gay teenage suicide.

No one can possibly be against the children in this society, of course. So appeals to the effects of culture on our most vulnerable simply shut the conversation down when it ought to get going.

As an adult I admit to finding news of teenage suicide heartbreaking. But I am young enough to remember a time when I confess to finding the phrase “teenage suicide” hilarious, reeking as it did of concern. That is, of the condescending, sentimental and moralistic attitude parents, teachers and adults take to the aggravations and ambiguities of being an adolescent, which you kind of have to survive in spite of their help. Heathers (1989) was my generational call-to-arms against both high school bullying and the inept adult response that halfheartedly steps in to confront it, only to see, reflected back, a less compromising mirror of its own determined hostility to queers, youth, and other marginal types.

Reflecting on the lifesaving black humor of Heathers now, and it’s over-the-top bad taste anthem “Teenage Suicide, Don’t Do It,” I realize that it modeled for me a set of disidentifications with high school hierarchy that were never simply about “growing up” and “getting out,” as seems to be the case with Dan Savage’s undoubtedly heartfelt “It Get’s Better” campaign:

I’m not sure my 13 or 14 or even 18-year-old self would have been able to identify with Savage or his hubby. And my 35-year-old self isn’t so optimistic that it does just “get better.” Another member of this blog once criticized the LGBT obsession with saving gay youth as perpetuating the general American idolatry with youth over aging, and that is a valid point. It’s not that there aren’t vulnerable young people, but there are vulnerable people of all ages. Lots of folks, particularly the gender nonconforming and/or trans, never “grow out” of the kinds of social reprisals for being physically different the hubbies talk about. Lots of people’s families of origin never accept them, or are too damaged and fucked up for anyone to want to go back to, even if they could. And then there is that little issue of aging. Who’ll spare a thought for the old queen?

I appreciate the thought, but maybe it shouldn’t be our business to try to paper over the contradictions of our society with salvific images of the family, which queers always seem to believe we can win back from the Christian right, and which the Christian right keeps so effectively beating us over the head with, even and especially when the person doing the beating happens to be a closeted homo.

Which brings us to Bishop Eddie Long.

Eve Sedgwick and Michael Moon once quipped that celebrity culture is all about the pleasure of watching people tell transparent lies in public. I thought about this as I watched Bishop Eddie Long’s statement this past Sunday, responding to charges that he sexually coerced young men he had selected to be his “spiritual sons” in the unwisely named LongFellows Youth Academy, where commandment #8, I shit you not, is “Be Physical.”

I’m not religious, so I guess its alright if I throw the first stone here. Bishop Long’s masculinity academy strikes me as mighty problematic in precisely in the way all covert covens of male bonding tend to be. For us black people, masculinity has a particularly magnetizing appeal, insofar as — a raft of critics from Phillip Harper to Mark Anthony Neal have shown — being denied manhood makes the appeal of unvarnished masculinity all the more glittering. That’s glamor is what’s behind the braggadocio of someone like 50 Cent, and its very much this kind of male energy that Long has been openly trying to tap in his version of muscular Christianity, to square the circle of manhood and masculinity rather than, as feminist and queers have been calling for for years, rethinking and perhaps abandoning the whole patriarchal kit and caboodle.

Much ink has been spilled over Long’s alleged “grooming” of boys, from as early as 14, to be his favored “spiritual sons,” (although charges of statutory rape or child molestation cannot be filed against him because the age of consent in Georgia is 16, and no one has yet alleged any sexual activity prior to that age). I’m more interested however, in how this horrific nightmare of the seduction of the innocent operates as the flip side of a powerful fantasy around the redemptive power of education, Christianity, manliness and the family that continues to exert its magnetism on all Americans, but especially I think on African-Americans.

I was a teenage Jack and Jill “beau,” so I well recall being hazed into the correct deportment of the Negro bourgeoisie. Its effects were more lasting than the peer bullying I (very luckily and through no virtue of my own) did not receive. Particularly stinging in this education was a moment we boys were chastised for goofing off in rehearsal with the reminder that there would be white people at the debutante ball. If we muffed things up what were they going to say? “What more can you expect from a black person?” of course.

This burden of being a role model and a savior for the race, to represent is felt, I should think, particularly punishingly on young black men. Not because they have it harder than women (au contraire mon frere) but because they were held up by institutions like Big Daddy’s Muscle Academy as the sole people able to restore gender normativity to the race, regardless of whether or not you are one of the “select” to make it onto the private jet.

Literary theorist Candace Jenkins discusses the “salvific wish” black people can get trapped in, which is the fantasy that if we just regulate our own conduct and affairs properly, we can somehow save our people through the example of our moral fortitude. I think there is a bit of a queer salvific wish going on in the “It Gets Better” videos, which exhibits a similarly melancholic refusal to work through the grief that might come with the recognition that it doesn’t always get better, that in many ways its gotten a lot worse in this country, and that making a YouTube video, reaching out a hand, each one teaching one, or any of the other individualizing modes or participation which sentimental culture makes defines as “doing something,” isn’t always going to cut it.

When it comes to the state of adolescence, and of getting queers and minorities out of it unscathed, I guess we are all Waiting for Superman. But can schooling really be saved? Maybe the secret truth we repress is that school sucks, even when we find a way to make it work for us. Maybe that assistant attorney general in Michigan is simply acting out demons that still bedevil him from his college days when he was clearly not invited to all the frat jock parties. And he’s taken it all out on the gay kid who has the gall to be actually popular. The civil servant’s cyber-bullying blog, http://chris-armstrong-watch.blogspot.com/ has unfortunately been taken private during the time its taken me to complete this blog entry. But trust me, his accounts of gay nazis assaulting defenseless freshmen at decadent college secret society parties read like something cut and paste directly from satirical site ChristWire.org.

Screen grab of Chris Armstrong's Facebook page, grabbed off Andrew Shirvell's cyber-stalking website.

And, from the looks of it, Chris Armstrong is indeed just the sort of overachieving, All American college stud that strikes fear and loathing in all us dweebs and nerds. He is excelling in precisely the way that gay men — gender-conforming, educated white gay men — increasingly get to in contemporary American society (at least once they make it out of the charnel house that apparently is our high school system). It’s fascinating to me how much Andrew Shirvell appeals to the weakling in all of us, how so much of the cyber-bully’s rhetorical energy is devoted to “exposing” Armstrong as a racist who abuses and looks down on decent working class and African-Americans. Here is the much lamented American victim culture on ersatz display, and it’s another reason to suspect the filaments of self-pity and resentment that so tantalizingly undulate around each new pop cultural hot button issue.

Naturally, I hope Armstrong gets his restraining order against his fevered “admirer.” But when American masculinity is driving into a rut, and not even 50 Cent at the helm of the Pussywagon can stop it, what’s a poor schlemiel to do?

Go Blue!

A Big Step Forward for LGBT Rights in Jerusalem, But At A Price

from Gender & Sexuality Law Blog

by Katherine Franke

….  Marriage rights in the U.S. should not be secured for same-sex couples at the expense of a viable life for those who choose not to marry, and civil rights for lgbt organizations should not be recognized in Israel at the expense of Palestinians and other Arabs/Muslims, or as part of a larger state-based campaign to justify military action elsewhere.  Many progressive Israelis get this, but the pro-homo rights community in the rest of the world may not, and it ought to take notice.

For full text click here.

What’s Paglia Got To Do With It?

By Jack Halberstam

Oh no! It was just as a new semester began, as the football season kicked off and right when Jersey Shore moved to Miami…right when Justin Bieber was adjusting his diaper for the VMA’s and the Jackass crew had figured out new ways to showcase male moronism in 3D…indeed just as Gaga chopped up her filet mignon to wear the next night at the VMAs, just then, someone let Camille Paglia out of her box: http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/public/magazine/article389697.ece

Once a decade, Paglia, an acid tongued Susan Sontag wannabe, rents space in some national newspaper to tell us that we are all wrong about everything. Usually we are all wrong about a cultural icon we all love…or else we are all wrong about an entire movement of theory and philosophy, or we are simply wrong about our historical moment, the meaning of sex, the politics of gender, Madonna, Italians, John Donne, lesbians, drag queens, the economy, universities, cultural revolt…and now, we find out, **newsflash** we were all wrong about Lady Gaga. Yup, we were wrong. We all thought that Lady Gaga was actually doing something interesting, cultivating new combos of avant-garde innovation and popular recycling. We thought she sounded good, looked even better and straddled the divide between Warhol and whimsy while flashing her notoriously ambiguous meat purse. Many of us found her musically interesting, culturally thrilling and inordinately fabulous. We liked her in leather, in chains, in a wheelchair, in bed, in a sandwich, in a pussy wagon, on the phone, in jail, under meat, we liked her but then we found out that, well, we were wrong.

Lady Gaga, I learned from Camille Paglia, is just a copycat who latches onto a generation of glazed eyed internet clones and exploits its incapacity to think without an Iphone app at hand or to know anything without a twitter feed. She is a rich girl playing at being marginal, “a diva of déjà vu,” less sexy than a drag queen, less talented than Elton John, less charming than Lily Allen (is that possible??), and a “rootless” pretender who manipulates her fans, the “little monsters,” into pathetic displays of fanatical admiration. Gaga, for Paglia, represents the end of culture, the end of civilization, the end of truth, values and meaning, the end of sex, and the triumph of a kind of Baudrillardian age of the simulacra (only she wouldn’t cite Baudrillard because he is French and therefore…wrong).

In a kind of counter-Haraway move (think Haraway of “Cyborg Manifesto” rather than Haraway of “Companion Species Manifesto”), Paglia argues that we have lost touch with what is real, true and good in our mania for media manipulation, video games and cell phones. If Haraway recognized an interpenetration of humanity and technology in the digital age that was exciting and wondrous (even as it was also exploitative and dangerous), Paglia, sees, predictably, a manufactured public realm populated by media puppets and their passive and stupid fans. If Lady Gaga’s supporters have recognized in her a newish formula of femininity, phones and desire, Camille Paglia sees only same-old same-old or, in her words “the exhausted end of the sexual revolution.”

Like a bad drag queen imitation of Allan Bloom, the prophet who preached the end of culture just two decades ago in The Closing of the American Mind, Paglia worries that “the younger generation” is missing out on all the really important cultural texts that made up her own education. The Iphone generation take pleasure in cheap imitations when they could be thrilled by “real” culture, i.e. canonical English literature; they are literate in texting but hopeless at real expression and they are not even original in their forms of rebellion. Paglia has always seen it all before and she never tires of sending her readers back to school circa 1950 to bone up on their John Donne, Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson. Like a manic T.S. Eliot guarding the “great tradition” and prowling around its archive with claws out, Paglia reminds one of the schoolmarm host of the British quiz show The Weakest Link. Ann Robinson became famous for dispatching her victims on the show with the immortal words: “you are the weakest link, good bye.” And it is this tradition of learning (rote memorization of the tried and true authors memorialized by new criticism) that Paglia returns to time and time again. Why the popular media returns to Paglia time and time again is another question! But probably the answer has something to do with a kind of media masochism, a desire to be spanked for not paying attention or for succumbing to banal mind candy. But at any rate, when Paglia does come out of her box, we get to watch a completely unselfconscious right-wing libertarian blurt out high-minded nonsense while thumbing her nose at all the other academic drones who believe in crazy shit like “the construction of gender,” the blurred boundaries between fact and fiction and the mediated nature of reality.

Paglia knows better. She knows that women are women, feminists are stupid, communication networks have replaced real intimacies and Madonna was ripped off. What she doesn’t seem to know is that all cultural production consists of wild combinations of the new and the old, the borrowed and the bold, the real and the fabricated. She also doesn’t seem to know that every generation must have its icons and the tired cycle of oedipal denunciations within which older people sneer at younger people’s tastes never does change anything. She also does not seem to know that Madonna was the queen of rip offs and that her cultural borrowings were almost never acknowledged and often fell within a long tradition of white absorptions of Black cultural innovations.

Many people have noted that Lady Gaga lives in the long shadow of Madonna but noting this is not the same as totally collapsing two performers from very different historical and cultural milieux. Weird then that Paglia condemns Lady Gaga for her “poker face” when she adored Madonna’s performance in 1990 in “Justify My Love” because it confirmed that “we are nothing but masks.” Strange that Paglia charges Gaga with “obsessively trafficking in twisted sexual scenarios” while casting Madonna’s Christian upbringing as inspiring because “without taboos, there can be no transgression.” Bizarre that Paglia is so taken with Bowie’s androgyny and Warhol’s relation to the marketplace but can find not a single shred of glamour or talent in Lady Gaga’s gender-blending and articulate performances.

Ultimately, what Paglia thinks about Gaga is about as interesting as what Sarah Palin thinks about feminism or what Glenn Beck thinks of Eminem. More important is the issue of what narratives about the popular, the avant-garde, innovation and cultural appropriation make it into the mainstream media. And somehow, Paglia always seems to find an open page ready to receive her rants, her crazed generalizations (“most of Gaga’s worshippers seem to have had little or no contact with such powerful performers as Tina Turner or Janis Joplin”), her nutty projections about a generation, a culture, a movement. While Paglia is stuck in 1990, still spinning her narratives about atrophied affect, cultural decline and sexual inertia, we have actually entered new debates, developed new vocabularies and in creative interactions with new media, we have all of us become little monsters, chasing our own gaga urges and moving steadily further and further from the modernist splits between high and low, good and evil, sex and death.

The Girl Who Played With Queer Utopia

By Jack Halberstam

Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander

So, once the commotion about the lesbian non-event of the year – the release of The Kids Are All Right – blows over, and the dust settles, and those who want to defend it are now stuck with it, the rest of us can finally move on to something bigger and better. Indeed, those of us who were searching for something more in terms of representational drama, narrative excitement, queer fantasy and edgy cinema would do well to look to Sweden and to the rapidly unfolding global phenomenon of Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander in the Millennium series. For those of you who don’t know who Lisbeth Salander is, or anyone who has spent the summer in a cave, Salander is the awesomely queer, righteously violent and stunningly smart anti-heroine of a brilliantly plotted crime series by the late Stieg Larsson, now made into a series of films. Larsson, author of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, died in 2004 and he never knew just how mega-successful his mini crime franchise was to become. Larsson left a mess in his wake involving his estate and his long-time girlfriend, Eva Gabrielsson, has been pitted against his brother and father in competing claims for the money that comes pouring in from the books. Larsson himself was an intriguing character: a part-time journalist, a socialist, a libertarian anarchist, a feminist and a writer, Larsson spent considerable time researching Sweden’s right-wing extremist groups and uncovering a longer tradition of Swedish Nazism. This research makes its way into the Millennium trilogy and ties contemporary corporate greed, sex trafficking and domestic violence, in really interesting ways, to the long aftermath of European fascism.

The crime novel and its contemporary cousin the techno-thriller tend not to be vehicles for lefty politics and more often, in the last few decades, these have been fairly conservative genres pitting good guys (Americans) against bad guys (Russians, terrorists, etc.). This is a vast simplification of these genres and yet conservative writers like Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton tend to dominate the field with conspiracy theories and leftover Cold War politics. And the movie-plexes are similarly full of action features pitting double or triple American agents against bad Russians or nefarious middle-easterners. In fact, in this summer’s dreadful Angelina Jolie blockbuster, Salt (byline: Who Is Salt? Answer: Who Cares?), the twists and turns of the crazy Russian brainwashing plot are laughable and Jolie’s anorexic frame and mono-syllabic acting made her seem less like a high-powered super agent and more like jet-lagged, starving and washed up super model …especially after seeing Noomi Rapace bring Lisbeth Salander to life in the first of the Millennium books to hit the big screen: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Stieg Larsson’s heroine and her sidekick, the cool Mikael Blomkvist (played by Michael Nyqvist), are not fighting imaginary commies or North Koreans, they actually have some real fish to fry. In the first novel in the series, Blomkvist goes after a fraudulent businessman and then he gets hired to investigate the murky past of a prominent Swedish family who have murder, incest and Nazism hidden in their family closets. In the second novel (and then film), Salander becomes more central and the scene shifts from international finance and domestic violence to international sex trafficking and patricide.

Mån Som Hatar Kvinnor

The original title of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo in Swedish was Men Who Hate Women (Män Som Hatar Kvinnor) and indeed this title, one to which Larsson was totally committed, could easily be the master title for the whole series. Salander, a slightly autistic hacker with a violent past, repeatedly goes after the individual men who have screwed her over in her own life but also the organizations and institutions that support them (psychiatry, banks, the law just to name a few). Indeed, these novels seem to thumb their noses at the ridiculously elaborate conspiracy theories of a Dan Brown novel and they seem to say that if you want a good conspiracy theory, just start with a radical feminist take on patriarchy! Critics have debated just how feminist the Millennium series actually is given how much rape and violence and incest is represented here but Larsson’s point in showing so much violence against women is to underscore how ubiquitous the violence really is. The feminist component to the trilogy rests partly with the character of Salander and partly with the complex plotting which repeatedly links family violence to larger systems of political and economic violence and which implies that any resolution to the plot has to seek social justice by connecting the intimate and personal politics of the home to the public and transnational politics of the economy. The Swedish films made from the novels retain all the complexities of the plot but apparently American versions of the films are in the works and who knows how that will go – maybe they will star Angelina Jolie and the corporate criminals will suddenly all be Russian double agents!

Anyway, while we have a moment to revel in the manic, caffeine induced mayhem of Millennium before the American versions appear, let’s celebrate Salander, a queer utopian and feminist vigilante. In Valerie Solanas style, Lisbeth Salander tries to take down the men who hate women one at a time and with a variety of tools and weapons. Noomi Rapace, who plays Salander in the Swedish films series, shares a very slender build with Angelina Jolie and like Jolie, she does a lot of scowling and pouting (although Jolie often tries to do both at the same time to hilarious effect in Salt). But Rapace as Salander brings a genuine sense of rage to her role and in The Girl Who Played With Fire, she channels her rage into a few well-executing scenes of punishment! Indeed, in the film version of The Girl Who Played With Fire, in addition to a truly feminist plot, we also see excellent lesbian sex between Salander and her hot femme girlfriend, kickboxer Miriam Wu. We also learn about the intricate connections between government, police forces and international sex traffickers, and there is some good old patricide thrown in for good measure. Like I said, The Kids Are All Right begins to look like an after school special in comparison!

The real appeal of both the Millennium books and the films made from the books is definitely the queerness of Salander. And while Salander has sex with men as well as with women, her demeanor, her politics and her attitude in the books and the films is determinedly queer. What’s more, she manages to hate men (as in the meaning of men in a male-dominated world) without losing the ability to have interesting friendships and occasional sex with men (as in individual people living in masculine gendered bodies). Salander is a perfect queer heroine in terms of the intensity of her commitments, the flexibility of her sexual orientation and her gender and her complete commitment to a world beyond the conventional family. In moody scenes of Salander staring out of her Stockholm apartment window, drinking coffee and kicking her boots up onto the window seat, Salander seems to be rooted in the real world of corporate crimes and domestic violence but always looking across the cold city towards some other realm of vigilante feminist violence, queer dark clubs and cyber worlds of misfits and loners. Like Neo in the Matrix, Salander knows that the line between the real and the virtual is fast disappearing; like Ripley in Alien, Salander imagines herself as the last line of defense between masculinist corporate greed and the little people; and like a queer comic book hero come at last to save the world, Salander reaches into her bag of tricks and always manages to pull out the right tool for the job. In his depiction of Salander and her struggles, Stieg Larsson has single-handedly redirected the techno-thriller away from conspiracy theories about incipient world socialism and away from narratives bashing the very idea of global warming, and he has pointed clearly to the true potential of the genre: the techno-thriller, after Larsson, can be and must be a vehicle for some weird customized combination of postmodern radical feminism, queer sociality, anti-fascist anti-capitalist neo-anarchist ass-kicking, and some “in your face” doses of what Jose E. Munoz in Cruising Utopia calls “critical idealism.” And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to the last book in the trilogy…

ONLY The Kids Are All Right

By Lisa Duggan
(with Kathryn Bond Stockton)

I saw The Kids Are All Right here in Salt Lake City, Utah with my pal Kathryn Bond Stockton. We expected it to be bad, given Jack Halberstam’s review here and other reports. But we had no idea how bad. As Stockton quickly quipped, “Congratulations to Lisa Cholodenko for this entry in the lesbian horror genre!”

My revulsion was visceral and immediate. I already knew the plot was going to annoy me–that cliched Threat to the Marriage, Overcome story. The old disruption by outside sexual desire, and restoration of the marital bond thing, this time featuring a couple of privileged white lesbians. I knew the racial representations were going to be offensive. Yet I was inclined to accept the view that Hollywood movie making required this kind of plot, and that the director would have had to negotiate the plot points to get the film made and mass distributed. I came with low expectations, expecting to be basically curious but indifferent. I thought the director would work counter to the lame plot in ways I was hoping to observe. But I was shocked, shocked at the terrible direction of this film. Not just the script, but Lisa Cholodenko’s direction was, I can only say, absolutely vile.

OK, so vile how? Annette Benning’s Nic was a cartoon andro dyke (they clearly didn’t try for butch). Not just her scripted role as a priggish, controlling, condescending asshole, but……her gestures, her facial expressions and the way she held her mouth, her stance, her movements. These, one may argue, are questions of acting–perhaps Annette Benning just tried too hard and turned herself into a caricature? But she had a lesbian director (!) who finally guided her gestures and expressions and movements and decided which versions and edits would make it into the film. But if Benning’s Nic was bad, Julianne Moore’s Jules was horrifying, offensive and repulsive (I could add more adjectives, but maybe that’s enough?). As the somewhat more femme partner, she nonetheless manufactured the same cartoon mouth thing that was supposed to look “dykey,” similar gestures and movements and….they made her look really bad in order to make her lesbian. (My pal Stockton began to fear coming home to her lovely girlfriend Shelley White in overalls and a bad sun hat.) Has Cholodenko never seen Wanda Sykes move or Portia de Rossi smile? Every dyke in the audience, wherever located on a butch-andro-femme scale, should consider throwing drinks at the screen.


These screen lesbos made me long for the ridiculously over glamorized L-Word!! And they truly made me appreciate Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly in Bound–straight actresses as utterly persuasive dykes, with the styling and directing assistance of Susie Bright. Hollywood–next time you want to make a lesbo film, call Susie Bright!!

But if the two lesbians were a kind of dyke-face minstrel show, they were far more nuanced than the representation of the Chicano gardner. The director went beyond the offensive script, and guided the actor to play that character broadly for laughs, exactly minstrel style. The big eyes, the broad grin, the stance, the whole gestural thing….absolutely crudely racist. And note that the only two characters of color were both employees of the white folks who dumped them one way or another–Paul dumps his gorgeous black employee/mistress, as Jules fires the gardner. Another round of drinks at the screen, please!

Here I would like to interrupt this regular blog post to share the insights of KB Stockton, who noted that:

1) The only good thing about the movie–though it’s big–is the utter liberation of Julianne Moore’s oft-closeted freckles.

2) The film demonstrates that heroin addiction and the inescapable attraction to an addict (as depicted in Cholodenko’s earlier “High Art”) is fun, sexy, and interesting compared to the relations in “The Kids Are All Right”; this is obviously Cholodenko’s message, and the two films clearly
work as a diptych.

3) The movie shows the problem for women with men: as indicated by meathead Clay (Laser’s friend), inevitably men want to pee on your head.

Finally, I would like to invite all readers to send your entries for Worst Lesbian Sex Scene in Cinema History, because I nominate the one in this movie. If I thought that was what I had to look forward to, I’d exit lesbiana and start sucking dick tomorrow. Please enlighten me if there are worse dyke “sexual” scenarios in film history.