sophiaserpentia | Entries tagged with othering

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

Last week i wrote a long post in response to the online posting of an essay by Dr. Paul McHugh of Johns Hopkins. Then yesterday i encountered again the idea of ‘autogynephilia’ among transsexual women, this time in the context of J. Michael Bailey’s work.

Yes, THAT J. Michael Bailey. A number of people far more capable, connected, and knowledgeable than i have undertaken the task of demonstrating the holes, shortcuts, and ethical breaches in Bailey’s research, so i’m going to take a different tack — to explore the subtext and presumption behind this controversy.

When i wrote that post my reaction was fueled by indignation at seeing my life and experiences, and those of many people i care about, reduced to something immoral and pathological. But my reaction assumes the same moralistic paradigm. To respond properly, i need to take that paradigm head-on because i believe that moralism and respectability were self-servingly constructed in order to suppress dissent and oppress minorities. Indeed, we gallae know this well; the iconic story of our life is to have fingers pointed at us in accusation by the very same men who accepted our favors the night before. We, being visible, cannot hide behind the notion of respectability which allows people of privilege to hide from accountability for their deeds.

‘Autogynephilia’ is a model promoted by Ray Blanchard, who coined the term; Michael Bailey, who promoted it; and Anne Lawrence, a post-op TS who lends legitimacy and the weight of further research. The word was defined by Ray Blanchard as “a man’s paraphilic tendency to be sexually aroused by the thought or image of himself as a woman.”

Look at that definition. The real meaning, which all but literally drips from this statement, is, essentially, “They’re being naughty.” And furthermore, the arguments made by Blanchard, Bailey, Lawrence, McHugh, et al., is that sex-reassignment therapy is a misuse of the medical profession’s sway over the public to promote naughtiness; that transsexual women (where are the transmen in all of this? nonexistent of course) cause psychiatrists and surgeons to be unwitting participants in the acting out of their sexual fantasy.

It’s a funny thing, arousal. In my time, i’ve toyed with the idea that arousal is one of the body’s ways of telling us that something is good or right. I can lay beside my partner, or walk down the street holding her hand, and feel my flesh get warm and tingly, you know, down there; i’ve even heard that women sometimes feel arousal when breastfeeding their child. Affection and breastfeeding are good, and if they should be accompanied by arousal, why should we conclude that there is suddenly something immoral going on? Why shouldn’t the body be able to respond positively to encourage us to seek more of something, when after all, the body is also capable of reacting with physical repulsion or sickness?

This doesn’t mean that arousal is always good or right. But maybe, even just sometimes, it can be a reflection that we are doing something right.

Furthermore, and here’s the point i am really heading towards: even if some or most of us do happen to be aroused at some point in conjunction with of our transition, it does not necessarily follow that transition is therefore invalid, or improper, or unhealthy. It does not mean we are lying when we say it is what we need.

I find particularly moving this essay by Margaret McGhee, who was a participant in a now-defunct online autogynephilia support group. I was going to quote from it, but i’d rather anyone interested just read the essay.

She arrived a conclusion not unlike my own, that gallae live our lives adrift at sea, tossed this way and that by competing ideologies and narratives that silence us and re-write our lives in their image. There is not a single paradigm for answering the “transsexual problem,” but there are instead numerous competing narratives. If we live our lives in resonance with one, we run afoul of another; there is no way to win. In the spaces between competing paradigms, our lives, our bodies, our minds, even our sexual favors, are bargaining chips.

An underlying implication of this conflict is that gallae are not allowed to be aroused. This is a running theme: it is a likely reaction to medicines and surgery; it is a prominent theme in many a galla’s sex life and is often found in galla-objectifying pornography; and then we see moralistic, pathologizing condemnation like this if it does occur. Sexual arousal is the prerogative of the ruling class.

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

Last week i wrote about an issue close to my heart - the crisis facing lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth.

But i only told half the story, and left out perhaps the most important part; the part which is more difficult to talk about because it is shrouded in secrecy. That half of the story is this: who it is that actually commits the violence.

We know who the survivors are, by their scars, by their determination to move on, by their lives in the perpetual spotlight of being marked as Other. But so little is ever said about the ones committing the violence. We hear about who is assaulted and think we know all we need to know about the perpetrator. A woman was attacked? Probably done by a man. A gay man was attacked and peppered with slurs? Probably done by a straight person.

But this is far from the whole story, because most men have never attacked anyone, and most straight people have never attacked someone queer. What do we know about those who actually commit acts of violence or harassment, and why do they do it?

It was very easy to research the entry i wrote about the prevalence of homophobic and transphobic violence, exploitation, and harassment. But it is very difficult to find any information on the web about why people commit violence. I may have to actually — oh the horror! — go to a brick-and-mortar library for any answers.

Some time spent this weekend searching for a first-hand account of what was going through someone’s mind when they assaulted someone was fruitless. It’s possible that many perps even block this from their own conscious mind. Or its possible that the simplest reason of all applies — they did it because, straight up, they wanted to, and figured the relatively small risk of official sanction was worth it.

Psychologist Karl Jung claimed that we attribute our “undesirable” feelings and motivations to a part of our mind he called the Shadow, so that we can mentally detach ourselves from them and pretend they are not a part of us. Many people still attribute these feelings and motivations to the Devil. A while back i wrote in my LJ about the othering of perpetrators; it’s likely that many perps do this even to themselves in their own mind. “It was like someone else doing it through me,” or “i don’t really know why i did that, it’s not like me.”

That may account for the lack of personal accounts of committing violence; but it still doesn’t address the question of what is going through someone’s mind before they do it.

Criminal science and criminal psychology seem to mostly deal with finding out who has committed crimes. Even profiling does not seem to deal so much with what leads people to attack as it does with identifying characteristics which are likely to distinguish those who commit attacks. A criminal profile parses people into a list of things to look for, bits of demographic information and pieces of behavior, the kind of analysis that erases whole people from direct attention.

Google “criminal psychology” and mostly what you see are accounts of unusually heinous criminals: serial killers, sadistic kidnappers, that sort of thing. Not much on run-of-the-mill attacks like insulting and intimidating the queer kid every time you find him near his locker.

Serial killers appear to lack the part of the brain, which the rest of us have, which makes it possible to empathize with other people. So, they cannot conceive of the “thing” they subject to torture and murder as a conscious person who sees and feels the way they do.

But unless we’re prepared to believe that a fifth to a fourth of the population is psychotic and lacks the most basic ability to empathize, we need a better answer to why so many people set aside their empathy and lash out when they see the queer kid at his locker.

ETA. Even appeals to neuro-psychology are incomplete and unsatisfying. Why should lack of empathy lead to sadism? It does not logically follow that a missing or disordered part of the brain should lead to thoughts and actions being added. And why should the drives and desires which appear be those of aggression? Despite the stereotype of the ‘crazy person,’ people who are neuro-atypical tend to be in much more danger from others than they themselves represent.

The lack of satisfactory explanation is what drives feminists to conclude that acts of violence are primarily acts of will, driven by opportunity (”i can do that and get away with it”) and entitlement (”i have the right to do what i want, no matter who is put out in the process”); and furthermore, that they reflect a prevailing paradigm of silent, unspoken encouragement to violence against the out-class.

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

Transfascism (n) (related to BiFascism; both being subsets of QueerFascism)(def) hysterical whining tantrums accompanied by maniacal shouts of ‘Oppressors’ or ‘Hitler” while calling for the banning/shunning/hitting/hating of any gay man or lesbian (LG) who does NOT embrace forced “inclusivity” of everything BTQ. source

Oh, yes, bi people, transfolk; fascists. Now that you point it out, i totally see the connection. Silly that i missed it before, especially after we took over the government, rounded up dissidents, and silenced the journalists. And we look smashing in tall leather boots. Yes, it’s plain as day.

This week has been very instructive. Watching events unfold regarding the Dyke March, and seeing the aftermath, observing what is said and what is not said… oh yes, very instructive indeed.

Let’s start with a basic truth: you can’t force anyone to include you. Unless you have a gun, ha ha.

But men and women of color and white women could not have simply barged into polling stations and cast votes, and thereby solved the problem of disenfranchisement. Women cannot simply barge into the boardroom and start voting on corporate decisions and thereby shatter the glass ceiling. When you have been excluded, disenfranchised, written out, all you can do is stand outside and talk about how wrong it is that you have been excluded.

So, when the fifteenth and nineteenth amendments were added to the US Constitution, it was not just a victory for men and women of color and white women — it was also a victory for the white men who saw the wrongness of exclusion and acted to change it. (Not that this is worthy of a medal or a cookie, since the exclusion should not have happened in the first place. But it is never too late, as they say, to do the right thing.)

For better or worse, though, it is the excluded Others who get the credit, and the blame. The excluded Others are perpetually salient; they are the ones who get the scrutiny. The dispute was “about them;” funny how it was never seen to be “about” the ones doing the excluding.

Now, it is a different story when we are talking about the machinery of society on one hand, and small private groups or gatherings on the other. You can’t make a convincing case for exclusion in the first case. In the second case, it may be warranted. For example, gay men might want to have one hotel, one lousy little hotel, where they can… you know, do gay male bonding things without having others come and watch. And women might want to have one festival, one lousy little festival, where they can gather and camp for a week with no men around.

It’s not the same as being excluded from the right to vote or the economic infrastructure of society. It’s not necessarily wrong or inappropriate either.

So. Here is the popular conception of how the inclusion of excluded Others happens:

1. Excluded Others perform “hysterical whining tantrums accompanied by maniacal shouts of ‘Oppressors’ or ‘Hitler’”
2. Excluding in-group gets fed up and lets the hysterical whining protesters in.
3. World goes to shit.

And this version is probably a bit closer to reality:

1. Excluded Others express disdain at having been excluded. Sometimes they talk, sometimes they demonstrate, sometimes they wear tape over their mouth, sometimes they whine or shout.
2. Increasing numbers among the excluding in-group come to understand the wrongness of what they are doing and push for inclusion of Others until it happens.
3. Life goes on.

Let’s look at 1. “Hysterical whining tantrums accompanied by maniacal shouts” is the perception the in-group frequently has of protests by Others. Others are supposed to remain silent; so even when they speak they are already out of line. Let any anger creep in and suddenly they are whining, screaming, being shrill, and so on.

Feminists are “shrill.” Sound familiar? It’s because whenever a feminist speaks, she is by definition speaking out of turn.

Part 2, and this is really what i’ve been building up towards during this whole post. I opened with the basic truth that Others cannot make the in-group include them, except maybe by violent force.

What i saw unfold before my eyes, here in Boston, was an action largely by members of the in-group (mostly women-born-women) expressing their solidarity with transgender Others. It appears to have been a woman-born-woman who initiated the call to remove Bitch from the performing line up; it was mostly women-born-women on the committee making the decision to do so; it was mostly women-born-women who i saw in the crowd cheering when a committee member read the announcement.

Why would they do so? Maybe they have transgender friends or lovers they hoped would feel more comfortable about going to the March with them. Maybe they just think in principle that transfolk should feel welcome at the March. I’m sure there’s as many reasons as there are folks who participated. I’m sure there are also just as many different levels of comfort with the decision as well.

And yet, this is how the world sees what happened:

lesbian rocker Bitch was removed from last Friday’s performance roster at the Boston Dyke March, due to complaints by transgender activists. source

For better or worse, we transfolk got the credit. We transfolk got the “credit” for pulling the film “The Gendercator” from the lineup at Frameline, even though this decision was also made by non-trans-people.

Does it seem, i don’t know, histrionic of me to point this out? I know it’s inconvenient and people want to pretend that it’s all being done by transpeople, that it has nothing to do with any women-born-women who have expressed solidarity with us.

It’s remarkable that no matter how many times i’ve pointed out this week that this was an action largely performed by people who are not trans — it is pointedly ignored. It is not convenient. It is easier to say we Others are being divisive, whiny, pushy than to acknowledge how many in the in-group agree with us and want us in there with them. Never forget that the in-group is invisible.

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

At Boston Pride i tabled for the Network La Red for a couple of hours. A Latino fellow came by at one point and said he’s against domestic violence too — and hinted (i don’t remember his exact words) that he was obliquely referring to INS raids and similar anti-Latino actions of the US Government.

But it’s all connected, really. Oppression of a minority by a government is much the same thing on a bigger scale. The mechanisms in prevailing ideologies and institutions which make it easier for someone to get away with battering their partner also enable and justify official racist violence. These webs of abuse interweave, for example when a woman is brought into the United States as a domestic worker and then turned into a sex slave; the people holding her threaten to reveal her undocumented status to the INS as a way to keep her compliant.

Personal, first-hand experience can be unreliable; but it’s also the only thing we have that cannot be taken away from us. The messiness of our lives under oppression, the various survival strategies which “coincidentally” do not fit on religious moralistic laundry lists, make it more difficult for anyone to sympathize with us. That we live in a society that teaches us to compare other peoples’ lives to ideological checklists makes it easier for us to stay divided as well.

Understanding the way the world works, the way our laws and doctrines and “common sense” and logic and language have been constructed in order to maintain privilege for those who have it, is an important part of working for justice. But, just as “upholding the law” is taught to us as the way we know justice has been done, upholding ideology is taught to us as the way we know we’re right.

Which is why it’s significant and subversive to say “the personal is political.” Those of us who live, inconveniently and untidily enough, outside the lines like a stray crayon mark can give direct personal testimony to the wrongness (or at least incompleteness) of an ideology. This is true even when the ideology is radical; and the results can be disastrous for the unity of the radical community.

For example, during the 1970’s and 1980’s a prevailing ideology throughout much of the feminist movement was that “women are good and nurturing while men are bad and abusive.” (For the record, it’s worth noting as an aside that Andrea Dworkin, often cited as a gender essentialist, took a lot of grief for taking a vocal public position opposed to the idea of “natural female superiority”.)

In that climate, women who came forward seeking shelter because they were being abused by their lesbian partners were quite often silenced. Battered women’s shelters had been set up on a “female victim, male abuser” model and women who had been beaten by women were inconvenient and unwelcome. When they did gain admittance to shelters they had to deal with homophobia from staff and other survivors.

Lesbian abusers, like battering husbands, used prevailing misogyny to frighten their partners. But they could use the threat of outing to keep their victim in line. They could use their partner’s lack of knowledge about lesbianism to keep them in the dark about the abusive nature of their relationship (”This is what lesbian love is like,” etc.) They knew, too, that their partners would not find sympathy within the women’s shelter network. Ideology, institution, and abuse woven together in a web keeping women down — and the experience from the survivor’s point of view is quite similar whether their batterer is a man or a woman.

Lesbian (and gay) abuse survivors were also silenced by the gay and lesbian activist community, seeking to establish an image of our community as “clean and upright.” They were afraid that seeing us discuss things like gay or lesbian partner abuse would place ammo in the hands of homophobes. Abuse survivors would just have to “take one for the team.”

Now, fortunately, there is some recognition of the issue, and movement in some areas, even though it is still largely uphill.

The thing is, anyone who silences another person on the basis of a prevailing ideology is doing the work of domination. Why is not as important as what. That is a part of what we are saying when we say the personal is political.

I think we should make it a kind of radical oath that we must resolve to hear what people say about their experience before ideology. It’s hard — it’s very hard. I see myself violating this all the time.

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

I have a feeling that there is going to be an intense blogosphere backlash over the cancellation of the showing of “the Gendercator” at a GLBT film festival a couple of weeks ago, and just today, of Bitch’s performance at the Boston Dyke March.

It is being said that this is our doing. Or, if it isn’t our direct doing, it is our indirect doing because transfolk have colonized the lesbian community so thoroughly that lesbians now regularly act against their own interests and uphold surgically-altered men over their own kind.

Well, maybe. Or maybe it’s just that we’re… well… you know… kinda… a little bit… sorta… right. In which case, lesbians (and the rest of the queer community) have been colonized with the truth.

Either possibility has the power to explain both the Gendercator incident and the Dyke March incident.

The first position relies on the presumption that our experience is delusional, or that we have misinterpreted our experience or have been misled by others for their gain, or, worst yet, that our motivations are base or even downright evil. Did i miss any possibilities? So at the outset, we are wrong either because we are crazy, or because we are ill-informed and manipulated, or because we are evil.The first position erases what we have to say about our lives and the only strategies that come even close to dulling the pain we feel; the first position starts by silencing us, and goes on from there to demonize us.

If you think i’m crazy, or manipulated, or evil, what won’t you believe i am capable of?

If we’re right, then the matter is simple; it is simply the truth tending to win out. But our detractors hold that we are wrong; and, see, for a wrong idea to flourish and spread, it must be propped up by some form of injustice. To maintain the insistance that we are wrong and they are right, they must offer increasingly sinister explanations for the flourishing of our viewpoint.

It might be that many in the queer community judge us to be not crazy, nor manipulated, nor evil. It might be that after hearing us describe what we have to go through to get through the day, that they listen and even come to feel compassion towards us. It might be that they think our detractors see the world in terms that are too simplistic. It might be that they have come to understand that it is wrong to silence and marginalize us (or themselves, or anyone). And if that’s the case, maybe the natural thing to do is to stand with us in solidarity against people who go out of their way to say things which hurt us.

As i told another galla today, someone i consider a close friend, these incidents suggest that, in the queer community, transfolk aren’t the underdog any longer. I want to sit with that thought for a moment. It’s not that we’ve “won,” but that we are actually respected by our friends and peers. It’s not my desire to see anyone’s contributions cut down and to that extent i’m sad about what happened to Catherine Crouch and to Bitch. Maybe we can make some good come from these events by having some discourse on how we can respect the voices and experiences of transpeople while at the same time allowing voices of controversy or unpopular inquiry.

And hopefully that will give us the chance to move on and take on our real foes for a change instead of spending so much energy arguing with ourselves.

Well, i never imagined that a proclamation of women's rights would squick me, but the town of Herouxville, Quebec, managed to do just that:

A sign at the entrance of this rural Quebec town says: Herouxville welcomes you. Unless, that is, you plan on stoning a woman to death, sending your kids to school with a kirpan or covering your face other than on Halloween.

The town council of Herouxville, a sleepy town dominated by a towering Roman Catholic church, has adopted a declaration of "norms" that it says would-be immigrants should be aware of before they settle in this town. Among them, it is forbidden to stone women or burn them with acid.

from Quebec town outlines societal 'norms' for would-be immigrants

Salam Elmenyawi, president of the Muslim Council of Montreal, said the declaration had "set the clock back for decades" as far as race relations were concerned. "I was shocked and insulted to see these kinds of false stereotypes and ignorance about Islam and our religion ... in a public document written by people in authority who discriminate openly," he told Reuters.

from Town to immigrants: you can't kill women

Well... i'm glad to hear that the town frowns on stoning women to death, burning them alive, or throwing acid on them. Everyone everywhere should frown on these sorts of things.

But the proclamations and signage are worded so as to single out immigrants, in such a way that it underscores and perpetuates certain racial stereotypes. It has to be read in the larger global context.

I'm especially thoughtful on this lately because i'm currently reading Color of Violence and the first piece therein is a blockbuster dealing with racist stereotype scripts and the way they color bias in the enforcement and creation of laws, particularly in the matter of justice for women.

In this set of "norms for immigrants to follow" is the implication that we are normal, moral people who treat women well whereas you are unschooled and barbaric and have to be told the proper way to treat women.

What is the proper way for westerners, who are concerned about cases they hear of stoning women to death in other countries, or burning them alive, or throwing acid on them, to voice their concerns about these things? The proper way is to tie misogyny and racism in another culture with misogyny and racism in your own culture and understand them both as reflections of a global pattern of oppression. The proper way is to let voices of dissent from the other culture speak for themselves rather than paternalistically speaking for them. A "we are good, you are bad; listen to us, we'll tell you the right way" stance which presumes cultural superiority (in the global context of Euro-American colonization of the rest of the world, no less!) is not the proper way to voice these concerns.

A girl dies of anorexia and what does the mass media do? Pick a famous woman and blame her! Voila, now she will be scrutinized instead, no more scrutiny on any role the mass media might possibly play in spreading the eating disorder epidemic.

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.

The other day in Bailey, Colorado, Duane Morrison walked into a classroom, fired a shot into the floor, and had the students stand and line up. He told the boys to leave, and kept the girls in the room with him.

( may be triggery )

Sheriff Fred Wegener says, "I don't know why he wanted to do this."

But, you know, i think he really does know why. I think we all know why. He's just not allowed to say it.

It's safe to say that he did it because he hated women. I mean, beyond saying that to kidnap or kill someone could be called an expression of hatred.

Police report that he made no demands other than, "Go away." He did not expect to walk out of there alive. One could fairly argue, from the news reports alone, that he was committing suicide by cop. He was down and out and apparently had no family. He had, as we say colloquially, "no reason to live."

Instead of simply shooting himself, though, he decided to cause terror and traumatize a few girls first.

But, conventional wisdom will say, surely hatred of women is not enough in itself for someone to do this? So police are going to search for a "motive." If they don't find a suicide note, they'll say instead that his reason will remain a "mystery," and the crime will go down in posterity as an "unexplained tragedy." If they do find a suicide note, maybe it will say something about an ex-wife or his mother or some other woman who wronged him, and they will latch on to that as the "motive."

They will do ANYTHING to avoid having to write, simply, "He hated women and wanted to die, so he raped several and killed one before killing himself." To me, that alone, in itself, makes perfect sense. It is explanation enough.

If he had come in and singled out black students, or Jewish students, or Muslim students, then we would understand hatred to be enough. But not when it comes to women.

Society prefers to probe for some minute detail in a criminal's life, or to call such cases a "mystery," than to face looking at the "big picture" here, which is that the violence which is implicit in misogyny can at any moment, even when we think we are safe in our homes with our husbands or boyfriends, or when we think we are safe at work or at school, turn into explicit violence. It is something that women are never allowed to forget. If police started to declare misogyny to be enough, then we'd have to start having a national debate about it, we'd have to examine the size and scope of sexism in our culture. Is it because too many men hate women that we don't want to believe sexism could be enough, in itself, to cause this?

ETA: Apparently police are now reporting that a suicide note has surfaced. Let's see what comes out of this... maybe i will be proven wrong, but i think the odds are with my prediction above.

Current Music: Siouxsie and the Banshees "Swimming Horses"

On my mind this morning is the misappropriation of suffering. This happens when politicians or activists point to the suffering of oppressed people and claim it as their own suffering, in support of their own agenda.

Now, it's one thing to want to bear witness to suffering, to raise awareness of it and to indicate that you stand beside and support people who have been abused and mistreated. There's a fine line, though, beyond which you are not just raising awareness and bearing witness, but instead you are grandstanding for your own benefit.

Take, for example, those politicians or preachers in the United States who talk about the way Christians are persecuted in parts of Africa or Asia, and then attempt to use this as evidence that Christians are or could easily be oppressed in the United States. This turns away from solidarity and becomes misappropriation when these politicians cite these events for their own purpose.

What makes it doubly problematic is that most people are not likely to ever hear the voices of the oppressed themselves. They are not usually given a chance to voice their objection to having their plight used to someone else's political advantage... or if they do, it is likely to be drowned out.

In today's news there's a piece about complaints survivors of the genocide in Rwanda have about the way the genocide has been depicted in Hollywood films. I haven't seen any of the films in question, but i have little difficulty believing the charge that Hollywood has misappropriated their suffering for profit.

( Read more... )

Hollywood wants to make stories about heroism in the face of senseless brutality, because that is the kind of story that sells. Perhaps target audiences did not react well to depictions of slaughter where heroism was in short supply. Perhaps such depictions were never even offered for consideration.

Should we be glad that at least someone in the mass media is raising awareness of what happened? Perhaps. I would not argue that a flawed piece of art is thereby without merit. But are survivors well served by depictions which create heroism that wasn't there so that Hollywood investors can make a profit? Where profit is involved, there is always the chance for distortion of message, and in this case, misappropriation.

I have even heard it suggested that the Transgender Remembrance Vigil involves misappropriation of suffering. Many of the transpeople who are mentioned are Latina, but in the two vigils i have attended i do not recall seeing the racial dimension adequately addressed. If this does qualify as misappropriation (which it may or may not be) it is not as egregious (transpeople are not people of privilege trying to play at being oppressed, we really *are* oppressed), but any danger of misappropriation could be avoided by giving racism adequate attention during the vigil.

Current Music: Massive Attack "Angel"

The other day a person on my friend's list wrote a locked post about seeing news clips or ads depicting women's pregnant bellies without showing the rest of the woman's body. The subliminal message here is that we are encouraged to see women not as people but as life-support systems for wombs.

But this is just one aspect of the phenomenon generally referred to as "male gaze." Just as the voice we hear on the cultural "microphone" is that of a white male, the gaze we see through the cultural "camera lens" is that of a white male.

But these are not the genuine voices and perceptions of real white men, they are culturally-proscribed expected views. So what male gaze gives us is a highly stylized representation of reality which makes it difficult for us to see things as they really are.

After i first read about male gaze a long time ago, i started seeing its effect all the time, especially in ads, those fnord-ridden experiments in social engineering. For example, many ads and works of art contain images of disembodied woman-parts -- a sleek stockinged leg, a smooth thigh, an hourglass-shaped torso -- in such a way that they are abstract, and without the woman's face, so that it is easier to think of what you're looking at as an object. Generally, i have not seen comparable images of disembodied man-parts (with, ahem, a distinct and notable class of exceptions -- but these of course are found only in particular contexts). And it's increasingly common to see images of women, partial or whole, which have been so airbrushed and modified that they barely resemble real people.

As a related aside, not long ago i started lurking in

gothic_babes (NSFW). I've seen many pretty pictures there, but i've also noticed a trend, especially among the professionally-done offerings, towards exceedingly stylized and dehumanized images of women. There is apparently now a "high goth" couture which depicts women in ways you'd rarely actually encounter them in the real world, involving elaborate fake hair, makeup, and extreme costume, designed to present an image of a woman who no longer looks human. (Okay, i know i'll take some heat for this, but the more things change, the more they stay the same, you know? One generation's rebellion is the next generation's establishment, and goth is now a generation old.)

The subtext of all this is that men are encouraged to develop fetishistic sexual attraction not to women as human beings but to woman-parts. And the disembodied pregnant bellies mentioned at the outset are part of this, too. In the "male gaze" view of the world, compliant whore-bots become compliant mother-bots.

This is a very difficult topic to grasp at, as both a writer and a reader, because our patterns of perception and conceptuality have been formed in ways that facilitate the kyriarchal status-quo.

Some forms of oppression are visible, and we can have awareness of them, because there have been somewhat successful movements to raise that awareness. Even so, one must undertake constant positive effort -- as if one were swimming upstream -- to avoid allowing sexist, racist, or classist presumptions to intrude into one's language. Consider the depth of effort and vigilance required -- and witness the consequent resentment many have against "political correctness" -- for an illustration of how deeply our brains have been colonized by oppression.

It sometimes seems like a fruitless undertaking to be conscious of sexist/racist language, because what we've witnessed in recent decades is a flowering of tacit forms of sexist or racist expression -- and the sense that "we all know what's really going on, so why candy coat it?" The best answer i can give involves the transmission of oppressive memes to our children. It is now well-known that the brain is exceedingly plastic when we are children, but not so when we are adults. Our brains were wired with racism and sexism when we were young, watching the way adults treated us and each other, in actions and words. In the brain there is no real distinction between hardware and software -- this is why the "software upgrade" of oppression awareness does not automatically fix our internalized sexism/racism. It may only seem like a faulty pretense, but there's a chance that the next generation will observe our struggles, and our attempts to address them, and will be better equipped to handle the struggle against institutional oppression.

Some forms of oppression are just now coming to public awareness, such as the oppression of queer people, transpeople and people with disabilities. Other struggles have yet to come to public awareness, such as the mistreatment of neuro-atypical or fat people. Modern oppression of these people includes marginalization by way of patterns like medicalization (the above are treated by modern society as medical disorders, as femininity was and still is in some ways), moralization (they are treated as moral failings or psychological errors fixable by therapy or religious intervention), fetishization (cultures of 'chasers' and 'admirers' have been established around these characteristics), and ridicule (much "humor" depends on the ridiculousness of being fat or transgendered or neuro-atypical). Light is made of our plight and then we are told, "What, can't you take a joke"?

Whole industries have been set up to make a profit off the plight of the oppressed. The beauty and diet industries are huge; politicians make political and financial capital by promoting homophobia; neuro-atypical people are medicated or unwillingly hospitalized.

These marginalizations are "common sense" -- we all know and understand them and they are the expected social attitude towards people with these attributes. Since they are common sense, the person who questions these attitudes or agitates for their reversal can be characterized as unreasonable (especially if, heaven help them, they have a bit of anger in their voice) -- and can then be told their errors in a "calm, reasonable" tone of voice. Other language tactics of avoidance are employed -- the accusation of having an agenda beyond the scope of one's actual comments, or the use of cavil to draw attention to the details of one's statement and away from the wider implications.

In all of these ways the deck is stacked against the targets of oppression, so that it is impossible for us to win; to turn our abuse in on ourselves, to make it our fault, to traumatize us, to deny the perception of the larger pattern, to isolate us, to desensitize us to the reality of what is going on, to break up our coalitions, to render us more helpless, to make it easier to exploit us economically, emotionally, sexually. And this cannibalism is the bottom line, why it is all done.

The most contentious discussions I've been involved with on LJ tend to have this in common: they buck up against the conceptual "othering" of perpetrators. What I mean by this phrase, is that people who rape, persecute, molest children, queer-bash, lynch, or commit other acts of oppression are conceptually and linguistically treated as though they are a remote shadowy group of people, faceless caricatures lurking in dark alleys or hiding beneath white sheets while burning crosses. They are less than civilized, they are "out of control," primitive, brutal.

"Othering" is hard to describe because like many aspects of social stratification there is a conspiracy of silence around it.

Conspiracy of silence means that we learn about oppression not primarily through language but by watching people act and reconstructing the "deep syntax" of social grammar. ( example using the othering of people with disabilities )

There is a lot of talk in critical or feminist literature about the othering of oppressed people. But up to now I haven't read a lot about the othering of perpetrators.

Anyone who's read my journal for a while knows that the most contentious discussions took place after I pointed out that (a) the people who have harrassed me for my religion or sought to restrict my civil rights were Christian, or (b) when I point out that the people who have sexually exploited or assaulted me were men.

As these statements are right there, they do not invite cavil.

If that statement is saltpeter and the othering of perpetrators is charcoal, here's the sulfur that gives the gunpowder: If I say that when I encounter people in public I cannot tell good Christians from bad Christians, or good men from bad men, simply by looking at them, all hell breaks loose. Because THIS is a statement that challenges the conspiracy of silence around the othering of perpetrators.

Inevitably this statement is taken as promotion of intolerance, rather than the depiction of experience. I finally figured out why: it is not the promotion of intolerance, it is the promotion of the concept that any viewpoint other than the "expected generic" viewpoint of straight-white-healthy-wealthy-male counts just as much. I write from the viewpoint of a "queer-fat-trannie other," which means that my statements come to rhetorical discourse from across a divide; the mere act of stating my experience is taken as argument in favor of a specific view. I do not have the privilege of having my articulations taken as value-neutral.

Inevitably my statement is also taken personally, though it is not intended as a personal accusation. Men or Christians have every time jumped to assert that not all men or Christians are like that. I also am sternly reminded that women and non-Christians do heinous things too. I never challenged either of those assertions and agree with them, and know them to be true firsthand.

But these points are thrust at me with such force that I'm inclined to conclude that a challenge to "the othering of perpetrators" is a challenge to the way self-identity is constructed in our society.

We want to feel good about who we are, and we want our self-identity to be pristine. We want to know that there is a solid divide between our self and evil, a barrier that keeps us safe from taint. Carl Jung described a faculty in the unconscious he called the Shadow, onto which is projected our darker impulses so that they seem to come from outside rather than inside our self.

None of us want to acknowledge that we live in a cannibalistic society, so we pretend otherwise. The purpose of ideology -- all ideology -- is to perpetuate othering (of the oppressed and of perpetrators) in the context of oppression.

crossposted to my journal and crossposted to

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sophiaserpentia

December 2021

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“bad idea,” part 2
visible victims, invisible perps
“inclusion fascists”
the personal is political
we’re either wrong or we’re right
(no subject)
blame a woman -- it's fast and easy
the "transgenderism is misappropriation" charge is victim-blaming
misogyny is explanation enough
misappropriation of suffering
"i'd hit it"
visibility, invisibility, and oppression
the "othering" of perpetrators

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The Serpent's Wisdom

Eat of this fruit; your eyes shall be opened, and you will be as Gods.

Entries tagged with othering

“bad idea,” part 2

visible victims, invisible perps

“inclusion fascists”

the personal is political

we’re either wrong or we’re right

(no subject)

blame a woman -- it's fast and easy

the "transgenderism is misappropriation" charge is victim-blaming

misogyny is explanation enough

misappropriation of suffering

"i'd hit it"

visibility, invisibility, and oppression

the "othering" of perpetrators

Profile

December 2021

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