Two Articles on CeCe

The first, from Not Yr Cister: “This Is What Justice Looks Like: They Don’t Give a Fuck About Us.”

The second, by Bryn Kelly, from Original Plumbing, on Captive Genders and the case against CeCe.

For more details, and to provide support in whatever ways you can, go here.

To echo Not Yr Cister: For taking a life worth living by any means necessary,

–HJM

Filed under: Gender Thangs, Love Letters, The Anti-Jam, Captive Genders, CeCe McDonald, Free CeCe, Not Yr Sister, Original Plumbing, Prison Industrial Complex, queer

Post Exam Weekend Video

Katy Perry’s controversial, yet pretty well executed, cover of Ni**as in Paris.

–MLA

Filed under: Everything's Political, The Anti-Jam, The Jam, Jay-Z, Kanye, Katy Perry

Rihanna, Intimate Violence, and Feminist Rage

There is this post, by Ann Powers, on the Rihanna/Chris Brown collabs, that’s worth quoting, and worth reading in its entirety:

The songs Rihanna has chosen to record, and has sometimes co-written, are not ones I play for my own daughter (though yes, she’s heard them on the radio, and we’ve talked about them). They’re rarely, if ever, feel-good anthems encouraging self-empowerment. Rihanna has basically abandoned such efforts, ceding that ground to her friends Katy Perry and Beyonce. Instead, she’s entered into a space previously occupied by many blues women, country singers and girl groups, where women attempt to uncover the truth behind emotional violence, without necessarily comprehending ways to escape it.

The outrage over this one particular, very public reminder that folks who have experienced intimate violence don’t always fully disown, eschew, or even (gasp!) stop eroticizing their abuser has a whole lot more to do with the psychic boundary maintenance, experiential naivete, and forced/faux moral propriety of those engaging the decrying than it does with any kind of feminism.

A feminist response to this phenomenon? The phenomena of domestic violence more generally? Call me old-fashioned, but that might have something to do with, first off, providing some space outside of a Manichean moral system to think about the affective intricacies of the experience. This might be a cultural moment wherein things pop are prompting us to reconsider our collective refusal to engage the common, quotidian nature of abuse that occurs in contexts wherein the ‘victims’ rarely have the luxury to refuse to dignify the existence of their abusers; Rihanna might have the economic means to do this, but apparently not the psychic armor or access to structures of feeling that would enable her to do so. I don’t think many of us do – this is why there’s a little thing called ‘recovery’ that is a) a complex process and b) never complete.

Radical feminist thought, for me – particularly those inappropriate, outrageous feminisms Jack Halberstam has termed “shadow feminisms”, the kind disowned by liberal, mainstream instantiations of feminism on account of their antisocial, politically negative refusal “to remake, rebuild, or reproduce” conventional modes of femininity (The Queer Art of Failure, 138) – has been, through its vociferous refusal of these conventional modes of femininity coupled with a commitment to grappling with affective messiness, intimate horror, and everyday violence, one of the only sources capable of prompting an alternative structure of feeling – one of feminist rage – that could potentially counter the multivalent forces that normalize intimate violence. These discourses on abuse are a far cry from the hackneyed, conventional, condemnatory response all sorts of mainstream music journalists, and informal commentators, are doling out to Rihanna, responses wherein she’s being chastised for not definitevely estranging herself from Brown, responses that echo, in an only mildly modified register, what I’ve heard so many times before re: victims of domestic violence: “why doesn’t she just leave him?”

As for Chris Brown: man, my footwork is almost as good as yours, and I ain’t even famous.

–HJM

Filed under: Gender Thangs, The Anti-Jam, Ann Powers, Chris Brown, domestic violence, Rihanna

Binghamton Under Water

If you watch the news, you might have seen that Binghamton, really much of upstate New York and Eastern Pennsylvania, is under water. I am now displaced as where I live required evacuation, I will not be able to attend the Revisioning Terrorism conference at Purdue.

Knock on wood or pray to your god that my apartment isn’t under water.

–MLA

Filed under: The Anti-Jam

Winehouse-love and sundries

Feminist Magazine has tons of great stuff. Check it out and forget what you were doing before, whatever it was.

Amy Winehouse has passed, and that is entirely sad. Whatever her ish, it was the same ish tons of working-class, lady-identified folks struggle with on the daily, and losing her feels intimate, beneath-the-skin shitty. Another queer icon, gone. It was only a few years ago that my self, a close friend, and an ex-lover cruised the quiet late night streets of Durham, NC with Back in Black jacked loud on the speakers, intensely feeling the failed romance, the regrettable temper tantrums, the tendency to always want to do what was terrible for us because it felt so good. Authenticity’s got an exorbitant price tag, don’t it? This is why, I’m sure, the North American public prefers Gaga. She’s a less troubling mirror. It’s terrible to see all the reportage that mentions Winehouse’s work being upstaged by her, to paraphrase, “substance abuse and run-ins with the law,” insofar as it unilaterally fails to realize the intimate relationship between AW’s appeal and the simple fact of this ‘bad behavior.’ It’s like living through Courtney Love-baiting all over again, but worse. She survived; Winehouse didn’t. Remember Dave Chapelle talking about the high price of fame for African-American men, by way of the example of Martin Lawrence? The ways in which celebrity drives one crazy? Where is that analysis re: working-class high-femme subjectivity?

On another, not unrelated note: I recently worked my way through David Valentine’s fabulous Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category, and I’m seduced by this ethnographic turn wherein the categorical is being analyzed as such, in a sort of defense of the singular, the complex, and the (perhaps) inarticulable. What I mean by this is that Valentine, working primarily with queer and trans persons of color, places at the forefront of his analysis the failure of “transgender,” understood categorically, to encompass or do justice to the complexity of the lives he’s interfaced with. The sciences of the social deconstructing themselves is always one of my favorite things to witness.

The big move to Bloomington commences in 1.5 days, circuitously, with stops in Augusta, GA and Asheville, NC along the way. That explains much of the silence in these here computer-parts. Midwestern folks/readers, I’m about to be neighborly company.

–HJM

Filed under: Gender Thangs, Love Letters, The Anti-Jam, Amy Winehouse, David Valentine, Imagining Transgender

In other news, the Supreme Court has decided all those old-timey radical feminist arguments about sex-class

are totally invalid, insofar as they’ve decided that broad-based and well-documented evidence of gender discrimination doesn’t constitute a coherent class-action suit. There are much better grounds on which to critique sex-class materialist feminist thought, of course. All this does is make me think Sisterhood Need Be More Powerful. I wonder how Shulamith feels.

Outrage? Outrage.

–HJM

Filed under: Gender Thangs, The Anti-Jam, Antonin Scalia is a Jerk, Wal-Mart Class Action Suit

Etiologies of Transness and Empiricisms of Sexuality (or, what is the deal with J. Michael Bailey?)

Some of you may already know who J. Michael Bailey is. For the uninitiated, he is a professor of psychology at Northwestern most (in)famous for the claims made in a text entitled The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism (2003) regarding gayness as congenital and MTF transness as either a variant of male homosexuality or the manifestation of a psycho-sexual orientation he terms ‘autogynephilia’ – that is, a sexual interest in having a female body of one’s own. This text spawned a veritable torrent of argument within and across sexological, trans, and more generalized academic communities, with some of the most vociferous opponents of Bailey’s work being well-known trans academics Deirdre McCloskey and Lynn Conway (who provides a large compendium of sources documenting the various debates here). Bioethicist, intersex activist, and medical historian Alice Dreger wrote a long account of the entire controversy that’s definitely worth taking a look at (note: it’s a defense of Bailey, primarily on the grounds of academic freedom).

You might know of J. Michael Bailey on account of another, more recent scandal: on February 21, 2011, as part of his regularly scheduled post-class, not-for-credit roundtables/discussions/labs related to the material taught in his 600-seat Human Sexuality course, he allowed two guest presenters to perform a sex act involving a phallus attached to a chainsaw engine (a device called, colloquially, a “f**k-saw”). A gentleman presenter wielded the device, a lady (self-identified exhibitionist) was brought to orgasm in front of the 100+ students who had decided to stay for the discussion. Apparently, the demonstration was impromptu, a response to student inquiry about the supposed fallacy of female orgasm (edit: female ejaculation, rather. Thanks, Scu!) – an empirical counter-proof, if you will. Here’s the NY Times article on the event.

I’m definitively not interested in defending or chastising Bailey’s actions (on moral grounds, nor in the name of freedom of research). What I find striking about his work is the fact that – in the first instance – it’s considered news at all that one might derive pleasure from the transformations undergone by their body. Why is it that Bailey feels the need to establish a coherent and normative etiology for queer sexualities and embodiments in the first place? Why is it that no one – his detractors or defenders – seems to take issue with what seems to be his inability to think about pleasure, embodiment, and becoming in anything remotely approaching a singular manner? Similarly – why is it news that female ejaculation exists? Moving beyond the detail of Bailey’s research, and even beyond his motivations for embarking upon it, I suppose I take issue with the very epistemological grounding of it. The scandal of his research is predicated upon a deep erotic conservatism coupled with a perhaps more profound inability to approach sexuality as something other than a set of subjective properties, something one is or has. The methodology of Bailey’s sexology is thoroughly infected with that hoary virus of Baconian empiricism, thoroughly marked by the inability to form a networked, relational, or diffusive account of his (non!)object of study. The long debates about the moral rectitude of public sex all ignore the more fundamental issue: the notion that sexuality is only about discrete acts, objects, and objectified subjects, and that observation is the privileged mode of coming to understand the ways in which it works.

–HJM

Filed under: Gender Thangs, The Anti-Jam, alice dreger, Deirdre McCloskey, J. Michael Bailey, Lynn Conway, Northwestern Sex Scandal, queer, The Man Who Would Be Queen

Burnout, Gender, and Responsibilization

So, the first comprehensive study documenting academic burnout among faculty was recently released, and (no) surprise: it’s a profound and widespread reality. The really interesting part, though, is that burnout is gender-correlated, with ladies experiencing higher levels of ‘emotional exhaustion’ while gentleman suffer more from ‘depersonalization.’ The causal explanation for this? A gendered differential in professorial engagement — those of us gendered female tend to be more open, inviting, conversational, empathic (dare I say nurturing?); those of us gendered male tend to be more adept at disengagement. However, in the context of the consumerist university, those prior (lady-like?) characteristics are being valued, rewarded, prized by students (who, of course, always want a prof that cares — this is not an ethically unsound or even particularly problematic desire, either). With rising course-loads, class-sizes, etc., however, what to make of this tacit demand for nurturance? While not willing to rely on that sorry refrain of “we’re not their parents” (which presumes, problematically, that parenting is the only — or at least the privileged — paradigm for empathy), I also know exactly what this burnout feels like, as a lady professor with a 4/4 course load who cares a great deal about her students. The obvious solution is, of course, the one that’s not addressed by the report. While education in stress reduction techniques (oh, aromatherapy in the faculty lounge! Yoga after department meetings!), therapy, and counseling services are all suggested, the reduction of course-load isn’t. These tactics, of course, individuate and responsibilize an endemic institutional problem.

Here’s the Inside Higher Ed write-up on the findings.

–HJM

Filed under: Gender Thangs, The Anti-Jam

Does it get better?

So, I’m working on a new bit of writing that’s concerned with the affective work done by the ‘It Gets Better’ video project. While I’m deeply critical of the project, for multiple reasons that I won’t get into here (let me finish the paper first!), a quick read-through of my working title should provide some suggestive hints.

The working title: “What If It Doesn’t Get Better? Suicide, Bad Feelings, and the Constitutive Outside of Homonationalism”

As part of my due-diligence for this piece, I have spent all morning watching these videos. My selection methodology is relatively random, having a whole lot to do with haircuts and outfits and not much to do with popularity rankings. I have, of course, viewed both the Obama and Clinton contributions (the latter, in particularly, is gross-out material). There are some gems, though, that I wanted to share below. I love these mostly because they disrupt the utter scripted-ness of the hope on offer to queer youth in most of the videos. With no further adieu, I present to you

Kate Bornstein’s contribution:

The existential affirmations of a rural dyke:

And some sound advice for all of us, really:

Remember, keep your nails short and do push-ups.

–HJM

Filed under: Gender Thangs, Love Letters, The Anti-Jam, The Jam, homonationalism, homonormativity, It Gets Better, queer

Radicality and Trans/Gender Non-Conforming Rights

Alright, folks: an awful lot of people who read this blog do so, I suspect, on account of its engagement with a particular strand of radical/left politics that considers, often, thinkers who have very little to say on gender, generally, and on trans and gender non-conforming issues, specifically. Aside from the fact that us here at P+M think this is a particularly unfortunate state of affairs (and on this count, find the recent work of Negri and Hardt on identity politics important, as an effort at co-articulating certain not-frequently co-articulated strains of rad thought), it is also — more importantly — an immense ignorance paid to one of the most (if not THE most) systematically disenfranchised, brutalized, and stigmatized populations in the U.S., with this institutional and quotidian abuse increasing even more drastically among trans and gender non-conforming folks of color.

So this is a challenge, in a way, to start placing some of these issues more centrally in our work. But before doing so, check out the stats and write-ups present in the new report compiled by the National Center for Transgender Equality along with the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, “Injustice at Every Turn.”

Here are some stats cribbed for your quick perusal:

•Respondents were nearly four times more likely to live in extreme poverty, with household income of less than $10,000.
•Respondents were twice as likely to be unemployed compared to the population as a whole. Half of those surveyed reported experiencing harassment or other mistreatment in the workplace, and one in four were fired because of their gender identity or expression.
•While discrimination was pervasive for the entire sample, it was particularly pronounced for people of color. African-American transgender respondents fared far worse than all others in many areas studied.
•Housing discrimination was also common. 19% reported being refused a home or apartment and 11% reported being evicted because of their gender identity or expression. One in five respondents experienced homelessness because of their gender identity or expression.
•An astonishing 41% of respondents reported attempting suicide, compared to only 1.6% of the general population.
•Discrimination in health care and poor health outcomes were frequently experienced by respondents. 19% reported being refused care due to bias against transgender or gender-nonconforming people, with this figure even higher for respondents of color. Respondents also had over four times the national average of HIV infection.
•Harassment by law enforcement was reported by 22% of respondents and nearly half were uncomfortable seeking police assistance.
•Despite the hardships they often face, transgender and gender non-conforming persons persevere. Over 78% reported feeling more comfortable at work and their performance improving after transitioning, despite the same levels of harassment in the workplace.

41% SUICIDE ATTEMPT RATE.
4X MORE LIKELY TO LIVE IN CIRCUMSTANCES OF EXTREME POVERTY
NEARLY 2/3 of the almost-7000 respondents had experienced one or more of these sorts of extreme modes of discrimination, with almost a quarter of the respondents citing more than one of these events as pertinent in their biographies:

• Lost job due to bias
• Eviction due to bias
• School bullying/harassment so severe the respondent had to drop out
• Teacher bullying
• Physical assault due to bias
• Sexual assault due to bias
• Homelessness because of gender identity/expression
• Lost relationship with partner or children due to gender identity/expression
• Denial of medical service due to bias
• Incarceration due to gender identity/expression

In short: you can’t just not write about this, folks, even if you don’t ‘do’ queer and/or feminist theory, no matter how much you love the Situationists, no matter what your dissertation is on or what your next article is about, whatever courses you’ve been assigned this semester. If you don’t feel you have whatever knowledge-base you need to think about resistance and the amelioration of certain of these modes of thoroughly naturalized and normalized brutalities, better ask somebody.

It’s, like, an ethical imperative, y’all.

–HJM

Filed under: Gender Thangs, The Anti-Jam, NCTR, NGLTF, queer, trans issues