The Serpent's Wisdom

For me the question of cultural appropriation, especially when it comes to, "Where does the inter-cultural exchange of ideas stop and misappropriation begin?", is endlessly fascinating. The thing is, there isn't a monolithic answer to these questions, and we can't come up with an easy answer or template and just tack that on whenever the question arises.

How such an exchange, or misappropriation, occurs has to be seen in the historical context of how it came to be. As a jumping-off point, there's this interesting video of Jennifer 8 Lee talking about Chinese restaurants in America (seen in debunkingwhite):



From the point of view of a merchant, trade between nations and cultures is a good thing -- because it means more potential buyers, more potential profit, more potential opportunities. So it may have seemed to restaurant owners or merchants in Chinatown when white folk started coming in greater and greater numbers to see what food or decorations they could buy that were unlike anything else they or their neighbors had.

And so i think the notion of cultural misappropriation feels to white people like a glass of cold water thrown in the face when a friend accuses them of it because they have a statue of Buddha sitting on their fireplace mantle. Well, hey, they might reply, i bought it in Chinatown from a woman who seemed happy to sell it to me; if *she* doesn't have a problem with it, why should *you*? Or, taking it a step further, doesn't it foster understanding if the people of different cultures who live side-by-side sell things to one another? It makes them less alien, and therefore less scary... doesn't it?

And on their own these are perfectly valid points, IF and only if you exclude the macropatterns of racism in our society. On the micro-level, it's not necessarily a huge deal; where it becomes a problem is when it's enough people in the privileged class who partake of the "exotic" that it starts to drown out the voices and living cultures of the minority.

What i've seen in the last couple of years is that awareness is starting to spread among white people that there's this thing called "cultural misappropriation" and if you're not conscientious you could be doing it too, and ZOMG i don't want to be an oppressor so how can i make sure i am not a cultural misappropriator?

It's gotten to where i've seen people say they're only comfortable with seeing white people exploring the religious traditions of their ancestors. Anything else is too close to cultural misappropriation. So, what, someone has to get a mitochondrial DNA test before they know what religions they are allowed to explore? And isn't this in its own way a restriction on people of color, in that it prevents them from potentially sharing their faith or beliefs with white people?

And yet, i don't mean to deny that cultural appropriation of religious ideas and imagery is very real, and very detrimental. Where it concerns me most is (1) when cultural motifs are reduced to "entertainment value" or "diversion" to the extent that their original meaning is obscured; when this happens, people of color can no longer express their own ideas or criticisms using those motifs without white people hearing "entertainment" when they encounter it; (2) when cultural motifs are stripped of any political implications, especially those which are critical or subversive towards the dominant paradigms; and (3) when people of privilege are turning a profit by stripping the meaning away from cultural motifs. The motif in question becomes an element of the larger culture, and the meaning the larger culture attaches to it drowns out the original meaning attached to it by the smaller culture.

In short, it is a part of the greater pattern of commodification and of misappropriating the language of dissent, the process by which meaningful utterances which pose any threat of causing people to question the authoritarian ideology are rendered harmless.

So, the question becomes, how can people of different cultures share ideas, motifs, food, relics, without them losing their meaning in the context of the original culture? The only way, ultimately, to share ideas in a truly free way is in a world free of hegemonic dominance... which is a tragedy, because humans have so much to share with one another.

The goal of meta-neo-inquiry is to answer, as well as possible, the question: "What is going on here, and what is the most just way to respond?"

Response is an indispensable element because meta-neo- ethics demands more emphasis on right action than on right words or right belief. It's not what you say or feel, it's what you do that matters. I can forgive errant words if your actions put you on the side of conscience.

A lot of the time the answer is pretty straightforward. Someone is beating up someone else; the most just way to respond is to stop the fight and find out why it started. Someone stole someone else's car; the most just way to respond is to recover the car and return it to its owner.

Sometimes though the answer is not straightforward at all, often because the truth has been occluded.

Discourse tends to be dominated by those in power; and so where conscience leads us into opposition with the power paradigm (on those fronts where the people in power are committing injustices and warping the cultural discourse to legitimize or cover it up), discourse itself becomes territory to be fought over.

Dissidents are kept off-balance by having even their very language pulled out from under them like a rug. One generation of dissidents comes up with a way to vocalize what is happening to them and what is wrong with their condition; it's an organic process which starts with art and fashion, or other kinds of consciousness raising. Political changes are demanded, and a few concessions are made. But by the time the next generation comes along, when it comes time to pass on this knowledge, all of the groovy terms and images they came up with to communicate their dissent have been misappropriated and commodified by the power paradigm. They've been rendered useless; their meaning has decayed.

It is fair to ask, of every text you encounter, what is the author's agenda? As time passes it becomes harder and harder to answer this question, because one's agenda in writing a text is a response to the culture to which she belongs. Cultures change but texts tend not to. So any text older than, say, 40 or 50 years, can easily be subverted by the power paradigm and people can be educated to read it a certain way; afterwards, one requires a specialized awareness of historical context to have any hope of recreating the original agenda of any text, especially if the text had any degree of subversiveness to it.

My contention is that this line of inquiry will demonstrate that many spontaneous movements over the centuries -- whether political, religious, philosophical, or artistic -- can be demonstrated to have their origin in subversion against the injustice of the power paradigm. The products of a "culture industry" established by the power paradigm itself tend not to endure because they carry remarkably little meaning to begin with, and most of us carry an innate recognition of that even if our consciousness has not been raised.

Clogging the arteries of discourse about racism (and sexism, though for the specifics here i'm going to stick to racism) is this notion that people who work against racism, by bringing it up, are preventing us from having a "truly color-blind society."

Here's a couple of examples.

The first stems from a recent incident in Arlington, Texas. Silk Littlejohn was hit with a two-by-four by one of her white neighbors, who also spray-painted racist slurs on her garage door. While she's in the hospital recovering from the attack, neighbors began to ask her husband, Roland Gamble, to paint over the racist graffiti. Their comments include things like, "Everyone knows what happened. They get the drift. It's time to take it down.", and "We understand that someone got hurt, and we understand that someone's feelings got hurt. But our kids don't necessarily have to be exposed to it."

The second example is seemingly disconnected. Ron Paul, who has been a member of Congress off and on for over 30 years, was the only one who voted against a 2004 measure recognizing and honoring the 40th anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. LewRockwell.com praised him as "heroic" for doing so.

There was a lot i could say in response to Paul's justification - and i have a long entry on this in the works. But for now, what i want to draw attention to is this: "The Civil Rights Act of 1964 not only violated the Constitution and reduced individual liberty; it also failed to achieve its stated goals of promoting racial harmony and a color-blind society."

What these examples share in common is a fundamental misperception among many (all?) white people that discourse about racism is, at heart, an intellectual or ideological undertaking. We whites don't feel racism in our gut; we don't deal every day with the exhausting effects of racist trauma or the health effects of economic disadvantage. We can walk away from thinking about it and our lives will go on just as they have.

And so even if we say something like, "We understand that someone got hurt," we don't really understand the depth and breadth of it.

From that mistake, it's easy enough for white people to think that the solution is just simply creating a world where "race doesn't matter," which in turn is simply a matter of declaring it so, holding a few parades touting equality and giving black people a federal holiday named after one of their activists -- and then aferwards accuse anyone pro or con who discusses race of perpetuating the problem.

Fighting racism takes more than simply declaring it to be over. It requires more than talking about racism. It requires material measures to stop the violence - including the weapon of mass destruction known as poverty - and right the economic inequalities. Racists have to be held accountable. Real, tangible things in the world have to be done, on large scales, for a long time.

The neighbors of Silk Littlejohn and Roland Gamble got a teensy-itsy-bitsy taste of how persistent and invasive racism is, by having to see a reminder of it every time they drove down their street - and their immediate response was to demand that it be hidden away so they and their kids don't have to look at it anymore. "Don't make us face this!" But what are people of color supposed to do when they don't want to face it anymore? They don't have the privilege of removing reminders of it from their lives by simply repainting a garage door.

(For more on this, i refer you to my earlier post the bizarro-world of misappropriation.)

This is the second part of my first entry a couple of weeks ago on the decay of meaning over time as reflected in scripture. It ties together a number of things i've written over the last year or so on my ever-evolving relationship to religion, belief, faith, meaning, discourse, scripture, doctrine, and compassion.

A little over a year ago i wrote about the tension between my own few encounters with the numinous, and my inability to describe them to anyone else without employing religious terminology. This is a concern to me because of all the agendas, past and present, inexplicably tied to these terms; but it would be useless for me to create my own words, because any new words i coin would not resonate in the minds of any listener the same way as will happen if i use the word "goddess."

And so uneasily i refer to my raw experiences using terms that will make it all too easy for someone else to hijack them, to make them into simultaneously more and less than they are. I could remain silent, taking the position that the only way to ensure that my mystical utterances do not carry any unintended religio-political connotations is to make none at all. Or, i can struggle to untie the knot as i use these terms, an effort in which i have been engaged off and on for at least the whole time i have been keeping this journal.

I have long believed that this struggle resides at the heart of all faith traditions - on one side, mystics who set out to distinguish their expressions of faith and numinous experience without being misunderstood, and over against them the functionaries and legalists, people whose relative lack of faith or mystical experience drives them to latch on to scriptures, traditions, and concepts, in the hopes of capturing some of that faith for themselves.

And all of us are, to one extent or another, driven by self-interest; there are those who use positions of influence in the edifices of religious institution to benefit themselves at the cost of someone else's suffering. This is what i mostly mean when i refer to 'agendas' within religious doctrine, practice, or law.

To make this even more complex, there is no one who is 'pure mystic' and no one who is 'pure legalist.' Each of us who participates in the grand struggle of faithful expression carries a bit of both. I don't want to couch this as a clear-cut "us vs. them." But in general we can distinguish between people who primarily project a mystical outlook, and those who primarily project a legalistic approach.

I have described legalism and the agenda of self-interest as causes for the decay of meaning over time. It is hard to define what i mean by that phrase, 'decay of meaning over time,' and unless i am certain that you know what i mean by 'meaning,' i'm not sure my purpose in writing this will be grasped.

So, to revisit: 'meaning' is, for this purpose, the intended reaction one has when contemplating an utterance. That encompasses all aspects of your reaction: your interpretations of the definitions of the words employed, your emotional response, any changes to your ways of thinking or acting which result directly or indirectly from it. Meaning decays over time because a lot of our reaction is rooted in the cultural context of the moment when the utterance was made.

For example: For those of us who were children when the movie "Jaws" was released, the movie possesses a lot more meaning than it does for those who had not been born yet. A lot of that meaning relates to our cultural environment at the moment we first saw the movie. Someone who first sees the movie ten or fifteen years later may see an enjoyable movie, but wonder what the fuss was about. The meaning of "Jaws" has decayed over time.

Most mystical utterance is the attempt to resurrect the spirit of meaning which a mystic perceives was once carried by a prior religious utterance. All mystical utterance is, in some way, an act of religious reconstruction. The fullness of mystical meaning comes from having grown up in or spent a lot of time immersed in a living faith tradition.

[ETA: to illustrate i offer some of my previous attempts to reconstruct what i believe was the meaning of utterances attributed to Jesus (culminating for example here and here), which were in turn his own attempts to reconstruct the mystical and spiritual heart of his own Judean tradition and to respond to the realities and injustices of his day.]

So when i use words like "god" or "spirit" or even "compassion," i am speaking to people who live immersed in a culture and faith tradition more or less like my own. Someone twenty, fifty, a hundred years from now will only understand anything i've written to the extent that they can reconstruct my contemporary cultural experience. They also, in commenting on what i write, will add their own new meaning to it. This is okay; this is the way the mystical tradition operates. Spirit is not dead, it is life and breath; so too, attempts to describe it should live and breathe.

Frequently, mystical utterances bear political and religious implications. Any utterance which may tend to subvert the status quo - which i would assert is typical of mystical (as opposed to legalistic) religious utterance - can be perceived as a threat by anyone in a position of authority, who stand to lose if the underpinning of that authority is undermined. They will then attempt to silence the mystic (by labeling them a heretic), or they will misappropriate the religious utterance, stripping it of political meaning and leaving only an 'approved,' authority-safe version.

Anywhere you have a mystic, you have people calling him or her a heretic - and this is why. It is not accidental. It is not mere resistance to change. The people at the bottom of a stratified society greatly outnumber the people at the top, and nothing can rile the masses like religious fervor can. The struggle for the heart and soul of religion is one of the great theatres of the ongoing struggle against tyranny.

One of the most eye-opening books i have ever read is Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Elliott Friedman. Even though i have long since lost my enthusiasm for biblical exegesis, the insights i gained from that book stick with me and still deeply inform my thought.

The most stunning thing about that book, i think, is its clear demonstration of just how much the writing of scripture reflects the political agenda of the person or people who wrote it. It's one of those things that seems natural and honest when you think about it: it can't help but be the case. Everything i write reflects my various views and agendas. The same is true for all of you, and everyone else out there. So why should ancient people have been any different?

The answer often given to that question is that the ancient people were writing under the influence of spirit, but think about that. Does spirit take over your body and mind and give you word-for-word dictation? Did the ancients have a better connection to spirit than we do today? Unless you're prepared to claim this (and in doing so you'd have to answer a lot of questions about the obvious redaction and editing of scripture), then you must concede that scripture is at least in part the product of the human mind. And as such, it can only reflect the views of the person who wrote it.

Many people have heard of the Graf-Wellhausen Documentary Hypothesis, but Friedman went beyond this to demonstrate, quite convincingly, what the various original documents tell us about the agendas of the people who wrote them. As an example, i posted an extended excerpt here. He paints a picture of conflicts between different factions in the priesthood and royalty, and conflicts between the center of power in Jerusalem and the countryside, culminating in a divided nation with different religious practices.

Generations later, these factional divisions were meaningless in the face of the conquest and scourging of Israel and the forced reunification of Israelite refugees with the people of Judah. Their scriptures were blended together into a single document to mark their reunification - the end result being a script which reads like a mosaic. Further redactions were made several hundred years later in the wake of the return from exile in Babylon.

A couple of weeks ago, i proposed this general hypothesis of meaning: "Images and text will lose their meaning over time, in part because meaning is anathema to the power paradigm." The fusing of the previously antagonistic scriptures of Israel and Judah into a single unifying text is only possible because much of the original meaning had been lost.

At least two or three generations passed between the original writing of J and E. Other theorists place the interval at 200 years. Either way, this is enough time for a lot of the political meaning of the texts to be washed over.

The collection of words that make up scripture though still bear meaning, even though much of it seems cryptic. People of later generations, examining these texts (which have also tended to be appropriated by people in power, but that will come in part two of this post), attempt to recreate the power these words had over their ancestors. It is these attempts which result in the vagaries of religious doctrine.

Originally published at Monstrous Regiment. You can comment here or there.

A couple of months ago, before the New York Times made it fashionable, i wrote about J. Michael Bailey and his claims about autogynephilia. Now, as Marti points out, Bailey has written on ScientificBlogging about the criticism he’s undergone since his book about transsexualism came out four years ago.

In this blog post he summarizes the argument of his book as follows (emphasis added):

Canadian scientist Ray Blanchard conducted a number of studies in the 1980s and 1990s supporting his theory that there are two, and only two, distinct kinds of males who decide to become women.

Members of one type are best conceived (before they become women) as very feminine homosexual males. They have been extremely and recognizably feminine since early in life. They are exclusively, strongly, and unambiguously sexually attracted to men.

… Members of [the second] type are not overtly feminine (at least prior to taking steps to become women), and they are not primarily sexually attracted to men. Rather, they are sexually aroused by the idea of becoming and being women. Members of this subtype, whom Blanchard has called both “nonhomosexual” and “autogynephilic” male-to-female transsexuals, are best conceived as a type of heterosexual male. In their unusual heterosexuality, their primary erotic target, or sex object, is not an actual, external woman, but rather, a woman that is fantasized, and ultimately created inside the self. That is, the primary sexual orientation of autogynephilic males is toward themselves as women.

…Although it is possible that another kind of male-to-female transsexual exists, no good evidence exists that this is the case.

He writes to say that some gallae have contacted him thanking him for helping to clarify what it is that they experience. So, there is no doubt that what he’s describing is true for at least some gallae.

But, no good evidence of there being other kinds of gallae? Except, perhaps, for the objection of many countless gallae who do not easily fit either description. But let’s not forget that Bailey is well-known in some circles for his prior claim that, despite the protestations and first-hand accounts of thousands, bisexual men do not exist.

He knows this how? Through the magic of watching what your privates do when you are asked to look at various kinds of pornography. That’s right, despite what you may think about the many dimensions of your life which inform your sexuality — your emotional connections with other people, your desires for relationships, your plans, your dreams, even your reactions to scents and textures — all of that means nothing compared to what makes your privates twitch when you look at naughty pictures.

While he claims that he only wants to promote support for transsexual people, at the same time he argues that we are liars:

[A]mong apparently autogynephilic males, those who denied their autogynephilia scored high on a psychometric test developed to detect the tendency to respond in socially desirable ways. Thus, among the transgendered, denial of autogynephilia is apparently related to the desire to give a good impression. Both of these studies suggest that denial of autogynephilia should not be taken at face value.

In other words, “Shut up, i’m speaking up for you.” Our accounts are not to be trusted.

As Joan Roughgarden wrote in her reply,

The dispute and acrimony will not end until transgendered people are permitted to voice their own narratives without being filtered through the lens of psychologists. Transgender narratives must be honored as primary data, first class evidence, and not subject to tampering, manipulation or subversion. Transgendered people cannot concede the meaning and definition of their lives to medical authority.

The past few days i've been watching a controversy in the trans and feminist blogosphere about a movie called "The Gendercator."

( Read more... )

It's unfair to jump to conclusions about a film without seeing it, so what follows carries a caveat: it is a reaction to what has been written about the film which may be shown to be moot, incorrect, or off the mark by the film itself.

Does anyone think there's anything strange about transsexuality being portrayed as a tool of reactionary Christianity? I mean, take a peek behind the cut to see how reactionary Christians are portraying transsexuality right this minute:

( Read more... )

Conservatives think our proper place is not in the world, trying to figure out how to play the hand we're dealt, but "howling" in a padded cell, straitjacketed and dosed with thorazine for our whole lives.

These people are in a very literal way out to get me.

And yet this director, Catherine Crouch, like me a member of the queer feminist community, makes a film in which she directly insinuates that transsexual treatment is indistinguishable from patriarchal gender normativity. She comments:

Things are getting very strange for women these days. More and more often we see young heterosexual women carving their bodies into porno Barbie dolls and lesbian women altering themselves into transmen. Our distorted cultural norms are making women feel compelled to use medical advances to change themselves, instead of working to change the world. This is one story, showing one possible scary future. I am hopeful that this story will foster discussion about female body modification and medical ethics.

Maybe this comes from a place of concern that hormones and surgery might not be the best thing for me. I have my own doubts in this regard, and have a conversation with myself every day of my life about this.

But does this statement reflect any genuine concern about what is best for me? Is there any indication that the director is willing to admit or even consider that maybe for some of us, being androgynous or "just doing our own thing" is not going to cut it? That it is not quite the same thing as having a boob job? We can talk all we like about feminist utopias where gender has been abolished but that is not the world we live in.

Furthermore, does this statement reflect any acknowledgment of our experience as transfolk, as recipients of horrific ongoing discrimination? It is irresponsible to blend in transsexual issues with misogynistic beauty standards and those who take advantage of it for profit. There are similar forces and patterns at work, but these are not the same issue.

Her idea for transfolk is that we should eschew medical treatment and "work to change the world." That's great. What in the holy hell does she think we've been doing? The image of transsexuals as ex-GI-June-Cleaver-wannabees is a little out of date. In between taking hormones, many of us have been actively railing against oppression. She thinks we're part of the patriarchal status quo. The same status quo who equates us with caricature 6-foot-5 drag queens in 6" heels and howling asylum inmates.

Thanks. Thanks a lot.

Okay, done howling now. Time for my thorazine.

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, feminist blogger, has chosen to resign from the presidential campaign of John Edwards after being embattled (by certain right-wing zealots) for several weeks. The final straw, in the eyes of the Catholic League's head, Bill Donohue, was this comment in her review of the movie Children of Men:

The Christian version of the virgin birth is generally interpreted as super-patriarchal, where god is viewed as so powerful he can impregnate without befouling himself by touching a woman, and women are nothing but vessels.

This apparently qualifies as a "vulgar" and "intolerant" anti-Christian comment. To say that critique is intolerant shows an utter misunderstanding of the concept of intolerance, which seems, from the perspective of people like Bill Donohue, to mean, "any act or utterance which offends our oh-so-delicate sensibilities."

The right has tirelessly labored to misappropriate the idea of intolerance, so that people think it refers not to efforts to counter structural power imbalance in our society, but to improve the niceness of language. By focusing on language they hope to take the focus off of actual oppression.

There is absolutely no measure whatsoever by which Christians are oppressed in this country. Keep that in mind. Christians run this country; they utterly dominate the public discourse, the cultural institutions, the laws, the mores, the standards of decency. Isolated instances of anti-Christian discrimination (which do occur) do not constitute institutional or state-sponsored oppression, exploitation, or disenfranchisement of Christians.

So, in order to accomplish the seemingly impossible task of misappropriating the idea of intolerance, they have to make people think that saying mean things (or things you claim are mean) in your blog is the equivalent of a pogrom, or a gay-bashing, or a clinic-bombing.  It is insulting to anyone who is working to end real intolerance in the face of violence and numerous other obstacles.

All that said, i also happen to think Amanda is absolutely right about the Christian idea of the virgin birth.

The gospels' authors must have felt some pressure to distance themselves from Pagans, who depicted divine impregnation of mortal women in a sexual way. In fact, Mary herself had to have been immaculately conceived, so that she would not bear the stain of Adam's sin -- because, apparently, sex itself befouls and stains your soul.

Amanda's comment about women only being a vessel applies too, because this was a widely-held belief about pregnancy in the ancient world: women were only a vessel through which men brought children into existence. This desire to cut women out of the picture is the very essence of misogyny. This view is most obvious in the account of the Gospel of John, whose author claimed that Jesus existed long before Mary did, making Mary's womb nothing more than a tunnel through which he passed into this world.

Two different news items which on the surface couldn't seem less connected, and yet i saw a similar thing going on in both.

A restaurant trade group says it is insulted by an insurance company's planned Super Bowl ad that stars Kevin Federline as a fast-food worker. Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co.'s 30-second spot shows Federline... performing in a glitzy music video. However, the punch line is that he's daydreaming — while cooking french fries at a fast-food joint.

The ad amounts to a "strong and direct insult to the 12.8 million Americans who work in the restaurant industry," wrote National Restaurant Association President and Chief Executive Steven Anderson in a letter to Nationwide CEO Jerry Jurgensen.

The commercial "would give the impression that working in a restaurant is demeaning and unpleasant," Anderson wrote.

from Restaurant group objects to K-Fed ad

::struggles to stop laughing long enough to write again::

Where to start, where to start... okay, first of all, the ad won't give people the impression that working in a restaurant is demeaning and unpleasant. Working in a restaurant gives you the impression that it is demeaning and unpleasant. Oh, you mean the execs enjoy it just fine? Some of them probably even "got their hands dirty" flipping burgers during a summer or two, in between terms at their Ivy League college. They have fond memories from that wild and carefree time of their life.

But here's what gets me about the first part of their statement. People who work in restaurants aren't going to be offended by the ad. THEY'RE they ones who are offended. But they'll expose themselves as the whiny self-righteous jerks they are if they don't make it sound like they're sticking up for the poor exploited underdogs (you know, the underdogs they employ whom they're hoping won't get a minimum wage boost this year).

And now the second story, considerably less funny.

"Hounddog" is the story of Lewellen, a girl played by 12-year-old Dakota Fanning, who is growing up in the 1960s South. ...

The disturbing scene lasts a few minutes but is not graphic. There is no nudity, the scene is very darkly lit and only Fanning's face and hand are shown. Kampmeier said it took her a decade to get the film made, largely because of the rape scene, but cutting it was a compromise she was unwilling to make.

"This issue is so silenced in our society. There are a lot of women who are alone with this story," she said.

... Ted Baehr, chairman of the Christian Film and Television Commission and publisher of the Web site movieguide.org, claims "Hounddog" breaks federal child-pornography law. He said the law covers material that "appears" to show minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct. "Even if they're not actually performing the explicit act, we are dealing with a legal issue here," he said.

Baehr said Fanning is being exploited in the film, and that it should be considered an outrage. "Children at 12 do not have the ability to make the types of decisions that we're talking about here," he said. "If we're offended by some comedian's racial slur, why aren't we offended by somebody taking advantage of a 12-year-old child?"

from Film's child rape scene causes stir

::not laughing this time::

Do you see the parallels here? Again, we have a group claiming to speak on behalf of the oppressed -- in this case, survivors of childhood rape -- when they are really only attempting to further their own agenda. In fact, they are claiming to speak up on behalf of abuse survivors while at the same time trying to silence them. How perverse is that?

Secondly, last time i saw any legal definition of pornography, it involved the word "prurient." I don't find rape scenes to have anything to do with prurience -- do you?

Lastly, it's obvious that Baehr did not even ask Dakota Fanning for her thoughts on whether or not she was uncomfortable about the whole thing. Here's what she had to say about it:

Fanning said she and Kampmeier talked for months before the film was shot and spent a day painting pottery together and discussing the story.

"It's not really happening," Fanning said of a rape. "It's a movie, and it's called acting. I'm not going through anything. Cody and Isabelle aren't going through anything, their characters are.

"And for me, when it's done it's done," she said. "I don't even think about it anymore."

Among the transphobic stuff from a couple of weeks ago, one thing that sticks in my memory is the accusation that transsexuals (male to female they mean of course, because FTMs are invisible) are deliberately misappropriating femininity, diluting it so that it has no real meaning anymore.

I want to tackle this head-on because i can see how someone with feminist sensibilities would be concerned about this. I've been to enough drag shows to see how this concern would develop. Myths and stories concern me too: why, for exampe, in Hindu mythology the most beautiful woman who ever breathed is a man in disguise, and why did Dustin Hoffman's Tootsie become a better advocate for women's rights than any of the women around her?

Perhaps what underlies this portrayal of transgenderism is a largely unconscious attitude that if men did take on 'women's work' -- whether that be seducing men or standing up for women's rights -- that they would do it better. But fiction is not real-life, and the real-life attitude of most men towards transwomen is vastly different.  My belief is that this attitude is inserted by the dominant culture into media portrayals of transgenderism.

It seems to me that if transsexualism were a patriarchal plot to undermine femininity, then transwomen would be highly prized, be celebrated in the media, have more privilege than women, and be more highly valued than women as sex partners and spouses.

The charge of misappropriation only works if transwomen are "really men" who retain men's privilege in some form even after finding ways to cover the expense and cope with the pain of transition. It presumes that there are no parallels whatsoever between what women experience and what transwomen experience. It presumes that the men who line up for "undermining women duty" are rewarded or celebrated in some way. None of this holds up to any actual scrutiny:

• GenderPAC's "50 under 30" project assembles data on the murders of young transpeople, a statistic the FBI can't be bothered to track, and demonstrates that the rate of hate-motivated murder of transpeople rivals that of racist murder.
• It is not known what percentage of the transgender population is homeless and/or prostituted, but it is disproportionately, even shockingly, high. Advocates around the country argue that 35% to 42% of all homeless youth are GLBT -- from a segment which makes up about 4-5% of the general population. Homeless shelters are particularly unsafe for transpeople, who are typically segregated into shelters by birth gender, and some cities are finally, finally responding to this with special shelters for transfolk.
• Employment discrimination against transwomen continues even in parts of the world where people "should know better."

I can offer an alternate hypothesis for the positive portrayal of transwomen in myths, stories, and media: it is indeed misappropriation -- of transgenderism. The dominant culture dips into the expression and experience of the oppressed transgender culture and borrows what it likes, treats the entire subject as humorous, inserts what it thinks is important about being transgendered without any concern for our reality, and overall conveys the impression that transgenderism is merely the wearing of a disguise. This is why every portrayal of transwomen in the dominant culture's media focuses overmuch on "applying makeup and strutting around in frilly dresses". To paraphrase Kate Bornstein, if i thought that's all there was to being transgendered, i'd be suspicious too.

ETA: after consideration, i've decided to crosspost this to feminist.