Darth Vader and Occupy Wall Street: A TwitterEssay by Ira Livingston November 13, 2011
Posted by bullybloggers in Current Affairs, Global Politics, Political Rants and Raves, Uncategorized.Tags: OWS, Tweet, Woody Guthrie, Lacan, Fascism, Occupation
7 comments
1.
There’s a new Volkswagen ad in which a child dressed as Darth Vader tries to use “The Force” to control objects in the world.
Dad comes home from work and, standing with mom at the kitchen window, sees his child
trying to mind-control the family car in the driveway.? The car starts as if by magic,
then you see that dad has secretly started it with a remote-control device, validating the child’s belief in his own super powers.
This is a classic postmodern ad in that the viewer is shown exactly how the trick is played but made to believe it anyway.
Presumably, even for dad (whose role is otherwise limited to going back and forth to work), starting one’s car remotely
still bestows the feeling of having superpowers.? But just ask power to do what? and you see
that what’s being sold as magical omnipotence is just the ability to start a car with a button instead of a key.
At worst, this pitch is allied with what is recognizable as the fascist tendencies of capitalism
insofar as fascism is defined by the way it offers people an inflated, mythic sense of themselves– and a phantasmatic sense of belonging–
while systematically stripping them of any real agency and political power.? Go to work. Buy a new car.? You’re a superhero!
Of course I’m not suggesting a fine company like Volkswagen could now have or could ever have had anything to do with fascism!
But there is another side of this.? What makes the ad work is its psychological validity.
Unless parents serve their children’s sense of magical omnipotence, their kids will be pathologically depressed at best, or simply dead.
The infant cries and food appears.? He squirms in frustration because he wants a toy but lacks the strength and coordination to reach it,
and mom or dad see this and magically make it happen.? The fantasy of sovereign agency and omnipotent power
precedes, is necessary to, and continues to underlie the acquisition of actual agency and power– the alternative is learned helplessness.
Given these two opposed perspectives, how can we think through this?
Even if you consider the ad a trivial matter, the contradiction is stark and the stakes seem pretty high.
To take the question to another register: do Occupy Wall Street and related actions empower people?
Do they contribute to mobilizing and opening up political discourse?? Or can they be described as simple venting, or worse,
part of some systemic damage control mechanism that offers aesthetic or symbolic shows at the expense of real political mobilization?
As if the revolution were a car and O.W.S. the remote control device that will turn it on?
2.
As you’d expect, many right-wingers but also some so-called leftists are bending over backwards to to assure us
that this is just an infantile display, that we are clutching at straws, that no sustained movement can come from it.
In the face of contradiction, or even just because it’s early days, how can they be so sure?
What makes these little Darth Vaders pretend to knowledge that one couldn’t possibly have at this stage?
As philosopher Jacques Derrida put it, “coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire.”
Whatever else its content, the desire seeks “a reassuring certitude” by which “anxiety can be mastered.”
The anxiety comes from “being implicated,” from being “at stake in the game”– as it seems to me we are all at stake here.
Taking off from Derrida, we can speculate that what the dismissers desire, what they have to lose,
is the structuring fantasy of a single center, a single origin or ground or goal, a single line of causality,
a single kind of political agency, a single public sphere, a single rationality and discourse, a single left and right–
all of what Occupy Wall Street defies.
A famous prayer asks for courage, serenity, and “the wisdom always to know the difference” between what can be changed and what can’t.
Better pray instead for the folly not to know the difference!
And as my old pal William Blake put it, “if the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.”
3.
What if politics–? what if the world– did not work exactly as we know?
What if things were more intricately, globally and locally networked in a complex ecology,
so that we could not necessarily predict how events in one realm might reverberate in another?
What if the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil could Set Off a Tornado in Texas?
What if a mathematician’s algorithms could trigger a stock-market collapse?
What if tiny, hyperlocalized genetic mutations could, through a process of natural selection, lead to collective evolution?
Wouldn’t that be incredibly weird?
What if Occupy Wall Street could be described as a metaphor (the usual phrase is merely a metaphor)
for the movement in which we are hoping it will participate, meaning that the occupations of particular places,
such as Zucotti Park near Wall Street, resonate with how one tries to establish a livable foothold in any inhospitable space–
whether it be the economy, the academy, the family, identity, theory?? And what if these resonances are real and contagious?
What if The Coming Insurrection will take “the shape of a music, whose focal points,
though dispersed in time and space,
succeed in imposing the rhythm of their own vibrations”?
What if what we consider solid realities– like bridges of steel and concrete– could one fine day begin to undulate and break apart?
And when we ask why, what if it turned out that the answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind?? And what if, in the present conjuncture,
we could gain more leverage not by asserting knowledge but by persistently asking questions (as that song famously does)?
What if even God appeared to his faithful out of a whirlwind and addressed them with an epic series of questions,
designed to expose their presumption to knowledge they could not possibly have?
4.
Occupy Wall Street has never suffered from a lack of rational plans and proposals, as some allege.
Here’s some for you: progressive taxes, financial regulation, health care, jobs, socialism.? Take your pick.? I have more.
If the left suffers from anything now it seems more like the lack of emotional coherence,
part of what Raymond Williams called a “structure of feeling.” ??This is part of what OWS is helping to discover, to invent.
Assorted already-existing emotional coherences are available, of course.
The sober left intellectuals, with their reassuring certitude that Occupy Wall Street is a flash in the pan,
have their manly stoicism and depressive clarity.? The Tea Party has its righteous indignation,
or as historian Joan Scott translated the Tea Party stance into psychoanalytic terms, the outcry “they’ve stolen our jouissance!”
As for the rest of us: well, at least nobody has stolen our jouissance!? If you visit Occupy Wall Street,
you will hear hundreds of lively political conversations– in fact, this is one of the hallmarks of the occupation–
and among them will be careful analysis, magic thinking, policy proposals, paranoid ramblings, theorizing, new-age spiritualism, and so on,
but over them all, under them all, behind them all, running through them all is not exactly righteous indignation,
which comes from more privilege–? more wounded sense of right and dignity– than most of those present possess.
There is the everpresent tenor of surrealism, which comes from the sense that dominant discourse is so thoroughly locked down–
so foreclosed–? and political speech so narrowly defined that one cannot restrict oneself to the use of these tools
without undermining from the outset what one hopes to accomplish.? Ultimately, as Audre Lorde said,
“the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”? But this is not only a matter of tools, of instrumental strategies.
Surrealism arises when what counts as reality itself is so impoverished,
when what passes for intelligible politics, viable social identities, reasonable careers and aspirations
are so hobbling, corrosive and suffocating as to make the reality of neoliberal late capitalism uninhabitable.
When you can’t inhabit it, occupy it!
5.
Over all the conversations, under them all, behind them all, running through them all
there is at least– a vitality.
As Brooklyn artist Dread Scott said about OWS: “there’s oxygen in the room again.”
Of course, I have to point out, you can’t recognize constructive politics by vitality alone.
I recently watched a Wagner opera and was struck by the histrionics, tragic gender politics, erotic intensities
of hierarchy and duty and family: very lively indeed! ?I was mesmerized– but I also understood for the first time
something about the aliveness and emotional intensity captured by Nazism.
Much of the work of politics is affective labor, the work of translating vitality into a stance.
Lately I’ve been listening to old Woody Guthrie songs (more my style, admittedly) and marvelling at how seamlessly
the songs combine the stances of worker, empathic ally of immigrants and outlaws, socialist, proud patriot, anti-fascist–
a combination mostly unthinkable today.? But I bring this up not at all to say those were the days.
For one thing, they never were the days– and for another, they’re still the days:
Rich man took my home and drove me from my door
And I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.
In any case, fascism remains and will remain one of the ongoing tendencies of capitalism, and not only as a distant spectre.
Even if you were inclined to discount clearer and nearer dangers that demagogues can be elected, scapegoats systematically targeted,
people mobilized in favor of symbolic but deadly wars, or perpetual warfare sold as Manichaean good-versus-evil struggle–
what about the demagogues, scapegoating, symbolic and perpetual wars we already have?
What about the mazes we run to get the cheese and avoid the shocks, the levers we push to get the pellets
of whatever it is, the simulacra of identity and belonging being sold to us, and behind all that, underneath it all,
the dark energy pushing all of us apart?
What if, at the most fundamental level, we are engaged not so much in an attempt to enact specific reforms
nor to foment a one-off revolution, but in an ongoing struggle against fascism, to make the world livable,
and what if, in this, we are most aligned with the everyday work of various other queers, workers, culture-crossers, women,
immigrants, and other displaced people?? What if, in our own lifetimes, we will only know small and local victories,
that resonate only faintly, sparks that crackle and wink out, glowing embers that never burst into flame?
Would that warmth be enough to sustain us?
6.
In the interests of full disclosure, let me acknowledge where I’m coming from: I’m a writer.? It’s an interesting moment for me.
The presidency of George W. Bush, as you may be aware, was also a nightmare for anyone who cares about language.
Language itself seemed to be in the process of being continually, systematically evacuated of meaning and life.
After that, to hear Obama speak with intelligence and presence– even with precise grammar– could bring tears to my eyes.
That’s not enough, but it is something.? So it’s interesting to me to discover that the discursive spaces at Occupy Wall Street
are mostly not my spaces.? Even though I make my living speaking (as a teacher, anyway), I’m not inclined to speak there,
and the intellectuals I have heard speak there seem somewhat out of their element too.
In fact, the durational performance– the occupation– at the heart of OWS seems actively somehow to disturb and displace speech,
to make it plural (like the human microphone), to make no one iteration definitive.? But although I’m not inclined to speak,
it feels good to me!? This is partly because the massive, single acoustic space of traditional protest rallies always felt to me
like Hitler or Mussolini should be haranguing the crowd from a balcony.? You really want a unified public sphere?
I experience this displacement of speech, of all that it is now possible to say, as ?something more like thinking,
more like writing, a process of reaching for what wants to be said but is not yet possible to say.
You there, with your head bent down!? Why are you mumbling inarticulately to yourself?
I’m thinking.
7.
If the fantasy of magic superpowers underlies all agency, then yes, at some level I must believe the world turns around my words
and around all words that move me.? On the other hand, I know Auden was right:
“poetry makes nothing happen.”
If language can be understood as a parasite or a symbiotic entity that co-evolved with our brains, then yes,
I am one of those traitors to my species that serve the entity known as language. That’s the extreme version, anyway.
But what if writers and intellectuals are also neither servants nor traitors nor leaders but just one kind of lifeform among many,
each of which, even in the name of simple diversity, has a claim to life,
or even more simply, what if a text makes no claim at all but the bare fact of its aliveness in the moment of its being written and read?
This is why I want to say to those occupying Wall Street, and occupying and animating these words and thoughts, thank you.
As a Word Person, it’s taken me 50 years to admit– as various therapists and lots of less verbal people have been telling me–
that the words themselves are always trumped by the ways they are wielded, the feelings that animate them.
“In those days,” as Virginia Woolf wrote wistfully about the days before the First World War,
“every conversation seemed to have been accompanied by a sort of humming noise,
not articulate, but musical, exciting, which changed the value of the words themselves.”
So what is it, over all the conversations at Occupy Wall Street, under them all, behind them all, running through them all?
Perversely, one of the most notoriously difficult writers of all time, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan,
gives me slogans for the placards with which I want to march out of here:
THE FUNCTION OF LANGUAGE IS NOT TO INFORM BUT TO INVOKE.
WHAT CONSTITUTES ME AS A SUBJECT IS MY QUESTION.
(Acknowledgements: Many thanks to Thad Ziolkowski for insight into the VW ad, Jennifer Miller for citing Dread Scott, and apologies to Jayna for the Woody Guthrie references!)
Riots and Occupations: The Fall of the US and the Rise of The Politics of Refusal October 19, 2011
Posted by halberst in Current Affairs, Political Rants and Raves, Uncategorized.Tags: Anarchy, London Riots, Occupy LA, OWS, Political Protest, Zizek
7 comments
BY JAYNA BROWN AND JACK HALBERSTAM
If there was an Arab Spring, it has been followed by a US Fall, not simply an autumn of increased political protest and widespread dissatisfactions but also literally, the fall of the US. When some demonstrators decided to sit down on Sept. 17 in Zucotti Park to protest corporate greed and the continued looting of US working people by investors and bankers, a certain North American propensity for indifference, ignorance, obedience was punctuated at last by a multi-racial alliance against a ruling class that sometime around the mid-90’s began its latest assault on global peace and domestic shared prosperity. In this spliced parallel conversation, Jayna Brown and Jack Halberstam exchange ideas about the London Riots, Occupy Wall Street/Occupy LA, Anarchy, uprisings, looting and the folly of Zizek.
JAYNA BROWN (JB):?
August of this year there were a few days of looting, burning and general chaos in London. These events, as with previous upheavals, were called ‘riots’ in Britain, but here in the US, ?Left wing commentators ?tried to use other terms like rebellion or insurrection. But thinking about these riots, Brixton and Handsworth in 1981, Broadwater Farm in 1985, and the banlieus of France in 2005, I’ve taken to actually preferring the term “riot” after all. It is bleak, it understands what it means to live in conditions of permanent and violent oppression. After all, ask any black person, “No Future” was not a sentiment first articulated by Sid Vicious!
(Handsworth Songs, part 1):? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3jPGI3uIWQ
The term ‘riot’ provokes something different than the more euphemistic and hopeful ‘uprising’ or ‘insurrection’, both of which capture the spirit of irrepressible resistance, but seem to me infer the eventual need for centralized political and tactical organization and carry with them a nascent militarism. What I embrace about the term riot in our current moment is that it points away from a politics of resistance to a politics of refusal. The boys in the streets refused to behave, or even to complain properly. They were not demanding the state fulfill its promises or mend its ways, for riots are not about state recognition or redress, in fact they refuse a dialogue of any kind with authority.
The boys (and girls?) also refused to shop properly, gleefully looting everything from H&M to consumer electronics stores, sorting out goods in the back gardens of neighboring houses. And, as the Situationist Guy Debord observed following the Watts Riots in 1965, “Looting is a natural response to an unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It…exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state’s monopoly of armed violence.” www.mara-stream.org/think-tank/guy-debord-the-decline-and-fall-of-the-spectacle-commodity-economy/
These were not, as Zygmunt Bauman described them, “defective and disqualified consumers,” gratifying a “longing” to be part of the system, but snatchers, defying the terms of appropriate accumulation. (Zygmunt Bauman, On Consumerism Coming Home to Roost) http://www.social-europe.eu/2011/08/the-london-riots-on-consumerism-coming-home-to-roost/
JACK HALBERSTAM (JH):?
New theorizations of political protest emerged after the riots in the French banlieu in 2005, and took the form of a pamphlet called The Coming Insurrection authored by an anonymous group called The Invisible Committee. In The Coming Insurrection, the group dissected the revolts that had just happened and mused about revolts still to come. They blamed the collapse of the global economy for the revolts and suggested that “the economy is not the CAUSE of the crisis, it IS the crisis.” They critiqued conventional forms of political protest and called for wide recognition that everything must change ? that everything has changed and that work, social life, the economy, aspiration, hopes, dreams, melancholia are all ready to be reinvented through new relations between people and between people and institutions. They also named political domination as less a logic or a set of actions and as more of a “rhythm that imposes itself, a way of dispensing reality.” To offset the rhythm of domination then we need, they said, an insurrection that gathers form after it flares up and resonates: “it takes the shape of a music, whose focal points, though dispersed in time and space, succeed in imposing the rhythm of their own vibrations…”
It is this model of political (in)action that manifests in the riots of London and the occupations in US cities ? a set of vibrations rumble through urban zones and gathering force they emerge in a blast of sound.
The exhaustion of conventional forms of protest has left people with a few different options out of which to craft a viable, dynamic and show-stopping movement: people can riot and literally block up the city; and, they can loot in the aftermath of the riot as a way of taking back the wealth that has been stolen from them; people can exchange information on facebook, twitter and other social networking sites and find new ways of flooding the media with our discontent; finally, people can simply “be there,” show up, show off, refuse to leave.
And while commentators like Slavoj Zizek in his piece titled ? “Shoplifters of the World Unite” ? http://www.lrb.co.uk/2011/08/19/slavoj-zizek/shoplifters-of-the-world-unite?– have criticized the London riots and the looting that followed for “expressing Zero-degree protest,” it is more likely that the message is clear and loud, but Zizek, saddled as he is with his nostalgia for a more binary mode of leftist politics, cannot hear it. ?“The UK rioters had no message to deliver” he said. And it is true, the rioters, like the OWS movements around the country, have no succinct and unitary message to deliver: instead they speak in a babble of voices all rising in volume and intensity to say “no.”
JB:?
The riots in London have been referred to repeatedly as “pure anarchy” in the conservative British press (Michael Nakan).?Anarchy is a perfect term in fact because itis always in process: anarchy depends on improvisation, and creates fluid decentralized forms of organization. It is against not just economic exploitation, as with Marxism, but of all forms of domination. “Anarchy is not society without rules ― it’s society without rulers,” writes Thomas L. Knapp at the Center for a Stateless Society, “If true anarchy is present in the riots, and I believe it is, it’s to be found in?ad hoc mutual aid societies springing up in affected neighborhoods.”??This is an exciting idea, as it gestures to the ways disenfranchised communities, especially black people, already live in alternative relationship to the state, embrace anti-state practices, and engage in creative forms of cooperation.
A frail, pale ballerina, en pointe atop a raging bull, my god, Adbusters, you couldn’t get much whiter).
Apart from Cornel West’s performance, perhaps we should remember that there is a lot more at stake for black people in getting surveilled and/or arrested, considering the history of blood and terror that has accompanied black protest. Julianne Malvaux says that black people are generally more concerned with concrete causes, such as the execution of Troy Davis and other cases of police brutality than an abstract, general protest of the financial system. But this sounds condescending to me. No doubt black people are more than aware of the larger picture, yet not that interested in joining in the somewhat smug, and grubby, Woodstock of it all.
Perhaps the disproportionate absence of people of color also speaks to their very different relationship to money and the financial system, one that is much less intimate, less expectant and less entitled than most white people’s. For African Americans, as Greg Tate writes in his “Ten Reasons Why So Few Black Folk Appear Down to Occupy Wall Street,” it’s “no newsflash here” that elites will sell you (out). Yet I often lament the deep grain of economic and social conservatism in my communities as well. The last era of black conservatism substituted the financial success of a few for actual social change.
JH:?While pundits and mainstream media puzzle over the Occupy Wall Street/LA movements and wonder about what they want and about whether the whole thing is just a side-show to some “real political movement” still to come, the occupiers, many of whom are now without occupations, are standing witness to the crime of the millennium: while we were all sleeping in homes we could not afford, the investors and brokers were draining the bank accounts of the professional class and sending the service classes into ruin and onto the street; they then recruited the government to the role of lookout and getaway driver while the Goldman Sachs Harvard graduate coolly wandered through the digital vaults of the nation’s banks and investment firms, pocketing the cash as he goes and called his activity “work.” When poor people rob banks they get life imprisonment, when Harvard grads do it, they get bonuses.
There is no doubt that the riots in London and the new Occupation movements are filled with opportunists as well as sincere activists, drunks as well as revolutionaries, people who want new goods as well as people who want to break down the structures of capitalist greed. But there is also no doubt that after the occupations have dispersed and the parks have been cleaned, the rhythm will continue, the vibrations will spread, the song will rise and the message will be, will always have been, the noise of many voices not speaking as one but speaking all at once the language of refusal.
The Summer of Raunch July 16, 2011
Posted by halberst in Film, Pop Culture.Tags: Halberstam Bridesmaids, romantic comedy
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By Jack Halberstam
Did anyone else notice how comedies, I hesitate to call them “romantic,” let’s say “sex comedies,” have become absolutely pornographic nowadays? And I don’t really mean pornographic in a good way, as in “no holds barred, sexy, fun, overturn a few taboos and have a good laugh” pornographic. I mean teenage boy, obsessive dick humor with fart jokes, erection jokes, shit jokes and period jokes thrown in for good measure. While critics and bloggers are celebrating the new “bra-mances,” the female equivalents to the bro-mances that received a boost this summer with Bridesmaids and Bad Teacher, the bra-mances are as low as the bromances when it comes to sexual humor. 
Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not mounting a prudish objection to low, low-w-w-w, humor in general, I was as amused as the next dude by the penis sight gags in Austin Powers, the off-color jokes of Borat (“I want to have a car that attract a woman with shave down below”), even the hair-gel scene in Something about Mary tickled my fancy. But, in the genre of sex comedies, a little bit a raunch goes a long, long way. Nowadays, we have graduated from a few nudge nudge wink winks with a bit of how’s your father to a lot of fingering, blow jobs, cock rubbing and ball licking!
No doubt the Judd Apatow comedies are in part to blame for the new raunch and for the rise of the nerd as sex god. But there was something very sweet (if unbelievable) about 40 Year Old Virgin and at least in Superbad the adolescent humor belonged to adolescents rather than 40 year old men.? But Apatow is definitely to blame for opening the floodgates from subtle sexual innuendo to all out porno-comedy.
The new sex comedies are formulaic in every way (not in and of itself a bad thing) and they build on character archetypes, broad raunchy humor, bad guys and worse guys, bad girls and clueless girls, lots of drugs and alcohol and some kind of far-fetched scenario (guys wake up in Vegas with a tiger in the room; guys try to kill their bosses; girls try to engage in some female bonding; father in law inadvertently take a super-viagra drug etc. etc.) that allows everyone to engage in lots of extra-marital, perverse and often homo-sex before everything returns to normal again.
Every film in this genre has to build to a “laugh until you cry scene” that provides a payoff for the cycle of gross, porno jokes. These scenes have to be way over the top ? they consist of envelope pushing scenarios in an extended play format, replete with bodily fluids and long gross-out sequences. Think of the nude wrestling scene from Borat as the quintessential “laugh until you cry” scene. And then look at its counterpart in Bridesmaids, which strove to be the mother of all gross-out scenes and but maybe went over the top at going over the top. In Bridesmaids, the gross-out scene played with the tropes of disordered female embodiment in general, and focused therefore on food, on binging and purging and with a kind of involuntary bulimia ? following an ill-advised dinner for their hen night, the bridesmaids head for a dress fitting and in the pristine chamber of virginal white gowns, they, one by one, throw up and shit uncontrollably in the grips of mass food poisoning. While audiences busted a gut at these scenes of digestive mayhem, for me they were beyond grotesque and humiliating to boot. While there was lots to laugh at in Bridesmaids, this scene did not deliver for me on a comic level.
And of course, as some critics have already commented, the bra-mance is not exactly leveling the playing field of hetero-sex comedy. While the bromance is all about the bros being bros with their hos and not with their whiny wives, the bramance is also all about the bros ? the ladies all talk about guys, whine about them, bitch about not getting laid, bitch about how they get laid and mostly, they bitch about each other. The bromance allows the guys to snuggle up together while figuring out how to get out of whatever dilemma confronts them. The bramance provides a stage for bride wars, for out and out girl hates girl battles with a few romantic interludes thrown in for good measure. Which is not to say that some of the bramances are not very, very funny; just that the humor continues to come at the expense of women and not men. And of course, as per usual, there is plenty of off-color humor in these films in the form of racial stereotyping (see the Jamie Foxx character in Horrible Bosses or the Asian gay hysteric in The Hangover) all of which adds to a kind of post-political correctness expression of gloves-off white male anger and disappointment.
So, in case you think I am being too easily shocked by the new raunch, here are a few lines from recent sex comedies:
Guy to friend: “you know what the best part about having gay dads is?
Friend: “What?”
Guy: “They are never gonna eat out my ex-girlfriends?”
Friend: “You and your dad are tunnel buddies, huh?”
Or…
Woman to Guy she is having sex with: “Your balls are so smooth…!”
Guy to Woman he is having sex with: “Cup my balls…oh yeah!”
Guy to Woman: “I made you this to help sooth your womb” ? hands her a CD
Woman: “It’s a mix…Even Flow, Red Red Wine!”
Friend: “Sunday, Bloody Sunday.”
Woman: “You made me…a period mix?”
Friend: “That’s so romantic.”
Woman: “I am gonna suck your dick like I am mad at it!”
Guy: “I am gonna rock your vagina.”
Father in law to son in law: “Focker, there is no way I’m going into an ER room with this thing. Now you need to stick me and you need to stick me now! I’m having a dick attack! Stick me!” (Son in law sticks a needle into his father in law’s erect penis while watched by his 7 year old son who has come to see what is going on!)
It is not just that the material is crude and made for youporn, it is also that these new sex comedies imagine men as the victims of unwanted sexual attention from voracious women. And so, Jennifer Aniston recently played a sexual harasser in Horrible Bosses (“Come on, slap my face with your cock!”). Melissa McCarthy played a butch sexual harasser of men in Bridesmaids (“I’m glad he’s single because I am going to climb that like a tree.”) And when they are not playing sexual harassers, very hot women in sex comedies are begging for sex “with no strings attached” or playing “bad teachers” and begging for sex or being flattered into a quick hook up by guys who feed them outrageously flat lines like: “Are you a model?” It is as if we have gone through the looking glass here from a world where a wardrobe malfunction led to massive national paroxysms of outrage and horror to a world where a wardrobe malfunction will humorously lead to a lots of boob shots, a quick blow job followed by some anal and a few jokes about poop shoots.
These films raise a lot of questions for me: have we gone too far? Are they funny? Do heterosexual people really talk like this on a regular basis (“your balls are so smooth!” really? “I am gonna rock your vagina!” Vagina?? “I’ve made you a period mix…” Awesome)? Is Hollywood, in a last ditch effort to reach the much desired 15-25 year old males group, manning its script writing sessions with 15-25 year old males? While the gays are getting married, singing duets to each other on Glee and other mainstream TV shows, the straights are telling each other about how they want to “hit that,” and dumping marriage for some lost weekends with foul-mouthed sluts. It’s a topsy turvy world and while I am all for some raunch, for lots of raunch even, is it too much to ask something be left to the imagination?
Frida and Anita May 20, 2011
Posted by Tavia in Film.Tags: anita berber, berlin, frida kahlo, queer, trans
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by Tavia Nyong’o
Frida & Anita from Liz Rosenfeld on Vimeo.
Frida & Anita, the new film by Liz Rosenfeld, had it’s Berlin premiere last night at Moviemento, to a packed house of friends and fans. The 20 minute short, which stars Les Margeaux and Richard Hancock as its respective titular stars, is a queer reverie of an imagined romantic encounter between Frida Kahlo and Anita Berber, one that never happened and perhaps couldn’t have, but which, in its very impossibility,? illustrates the performative premises of all nostalgia.
Rosenfeld draws her viewer in with the devices of silent film, like jerky intertitles, which are coupled with luscious technicolor cinematography (by Samuel Maxim and Imogen Heath). Frida and Anita meet in a Weimar-era lesbian nightclub that is also a present day queer bar, habituated by many of the actors themselves. As the film progresses (or, like night and day in bohemian Berlin, ambles) the period frame shifts and dissolves, as the characters Frida and Anita merge with their present day incarnations in Hancock and Margeaux. The two (or is it four?) trade philosophy, politics and sex in three languages.
Margeaux is positively the d?ppelganger of the teenage Kahlo, in the days before her accident, strolling around in her father’s suits with an air of proletarian insouicance. Hancock conjures Berber out of thin air, literally, drawing upon the most subtle of movements to evoke her presence, not on the basis of gender imitation, but rather through a kind of queer transubstantiation.
The screening was a community event, with many of the cast and crew in the audience. It was accompanied by a variety of shorts by those who had contributed in some way to the film. Highlights included Screen Tests by Sam Icklow, which featured the filmmaker romping around in various post-Warholian scenarios with bosom buddy Eric; Imogen Heath‘s meditative The Poetics of Porn which seemed, among many other things, to be a paean to dendrophilia, Tom Weller‘s witty Maik?fer flieg, in which the filmmaker documents the fluctuations in his vocal range over the two year period that he was taking testerone and gender transitioning by singing the same children’s song about a “Cockchafer fly”; and original contributions from Leila Evenson, Christa Holka, and Hancock himself.
Frida & Anita is the first of a trilogy of films about Weimar and queer nostalgia. The second is already in the can, and the final one will be shot this coming summer. DIY filmmaking at its finest, and, at this pace, its fastest!
Poly Styrene, 1957―2011 April 26, 2011
Posted by bullybloggers in Current Affairs.Tags: poly styrene, punk, xray spex
13 comments
By Jayna Brown
Poly Styrene died Monday night at the age of 53 of what was originally breast cancer. Going to the GP for back pain, she was told to take some painkillers. So she put up with the pain for a few months, as many of us would do, and when she went in again it was cancer that had metastasized to her lungs and spine. Her last tweet reads quite sadly now: “Slowly slowly trying 2 get better miss my walk along the promenade. Would b so nice 2 sing again & play.”
Poly Styrene’s death invites a meditation on mortality, which we all face, even punks like us who swore we were going to die young. Punk flayed mortality, flaunted youth in its face. Yet it’s ephemeral nature also affirmed death’s inevitability. An 18-year-old Polystyrene had the most profound insight into the ephemerality of life itself. “ I do it and that’s it,” she said. “I go on to something else.”
In 1977 the daughter of a Somali father and white English mother from Brixton by way of Bromley gave a high-pitched driving dystopian critique of capitalist consumption and sexist violence. “Some people say little girls should be seen and not heard,” she begins, with a girlish lilt, “but I think,” and her voice rises to a bellowing screech, “Oh Bondage, Up Yours!”? In thick braces and stiff plastic dress, Marianne Joan Elliot Said, better known as Poly Styrene, screamed precociously into the face of a mostly boys only club of misfits. Bind me tie me/chain me to the wall/I wanna be a slave for you all/ Oh bondage up yours!”
In this song as in many others Poly Styrene linked pithy critiques of slavery, authoritarianism, patriarchy and plastic, “It was about being in bondage to material life,” she explains about Oh! Bondage! “In other words it was a call for liberation.” Poly Styrene’s keening voice, riding atop the band’s signature saxophone, created a barrage of high-pitched sound. Carrying her consistently articulate, socio culturally astute lyrics, the sound of Poly Styrene and X Ray Spex continues to resonate, weaving its way insistently through the intervening years.
Poly Styrene called out patriarchy from within a counter culture that was supposedly subversive, yet was indeed heavily invested in masculinist performances of power. Poly Styrene’s politically awake compositions disrupt in some very interesting ways the smooth patrilineal narrative constructing what gets remembered as rebel music, and also challenges the calcifying racial orthodoxy of white riot memory.
Poly Styrene’s lyrics politicized the mundane, the prosaic, the quotidian, the everyday. Her prescient visions were of a world turned dayglo. “My thing was more like consumerism, plastic artificial living,” she explains. “The idea was to send it all up. Screaming about it, saying:? ‘Look, this is what you have done to me, turned me into a piece of Styrofoam, I am your product. And this is what you have created: do you like her?’” Art-I-fical:
She speaks to the specific ways consumer capitalism targeted women. Her imagery in songs, like Artificial, swirled with the plastic products of a woman’s domestic everyday―nylon curtains, perspex windows, acrylics, latex gloves. “My mind is like a plastic bag,” she sings. Plastic Bag:
After seeing a pink fireball in the sky―a UFO as she called it, though not a machine, and with no aliens―she felt electricity vibrating through her entire body. Her prescient dayglo vision was harbinger to the nuclear nightmares those of us stranded in the 1980’s had. And she told people about it. Her personal experience with mental illness, about which she was very open, also bears traces of the medical profession’s treatment of ‘mad’ and ‘hysterical’ women; she was sectioned, and misdiagnosed with schizophrenia. Poly found a spiritual home in the Hari Krishna movement, and it wasn’t until 1991 that she was properly diagnosed with bipolar, known as the ‘genius condition.’ Whose to say what a vision is? identity
Poly Styrene’s new album, Generation Indigo had just come out, and before I knew how sick she was I was hoping she would grant me an interview. Now, I will just do the best I can to speak of her music for the ways in which it disrupts, interrupts, provokes a history of punk. What is identified as punk, from the fleeting moments of the late 1970’s, is constantly eulogizing itself, writing it’s formative artists, almost always as that of men, with the exceptional, or token, women. Poly, like many other female artists, put up with male jealousy and sabotage from fellow male musicians. But her lyrics, her scream, will not be contained. RIP Poly Styrene, as you move onto something else.
BB documentary, “Who is Poly Styrene?”
CESA 2011: Critical Ethnic Studies and the Future of Genocide: Settler Colonialism/Heteropatriarchy/White Supremacy: A Major Conference UC Riverside, March 10-12, 2011 March 20, 2011
Posted by halberst in Higher Education.Tags: Andrea Smith, CESA, Dylan Rodriguez, Jayna Brown, Jodi Kim, UC Riverside, Wissoker
12 comments
Anatomy of an Anti-Disciplinary Riot
By Jack Halberstam
1. Des(s)ert Of The Heart
This past weekend in Riverside California, with little edible food close at hand and desert winds blowing in from the East, some 1500 people gathered to scavenge for food, look for shade and discuss new intellectual and political formations loosely associated with a “Critical Ethnic Studies.” While the grumbling began before the conference about whether there was such a thing as an “uncritical” Ethnic Studies and whether this was perhaps just an oedipal uprising of the new against the old, the conference itself showcased a wide variety of work from scholars young and less young and certainly offered up multiple models of new disciplinary forms and new paths to follow without discarding all that had come before. Some people also found food at notable local haunts with wistful names like The Salted Pig, Phood on Main and Subway Sandwiches.
2. High Heels, Long Drop
The grumbling after the conference, the post mortem of an anti-disciplinary riot if you will and even if you won’t, seems mainly to have focused upon the endurance aspect of the meeting ? the dawn til dusk scheduling, the 2 hour long plenaries, the uncomfortable seating, and the conference fashion trend of very high heels, worn by women type people as well as men type people this not being a queer conference after all ? but also, predictably, about the star power of the plenary sessions and the divisions between academics from prestigious institutions and those from community colleges, the ethnic diversity of the speakers and the aforementioned shoe choices.
3. Can The Sub-Lectern Speak?
The plenary sessions consisted of 5 or 6 speakers, all of whom were asked to speak for 15-19 minutes each, and, on every plenary, after the last speaker finished, whether with a whimper or a bang, the event was over. In other words, there was no Q and A, no discussion and no opportunity for people who had been sitting and listening for over 2 hours to speak back to the panel. With audiences of 800 plus people, perhaps Q and A was inevitably a doomed enterprise to begin with ? would the questioners just be drawn from that odd genre of people who use the Q&A mike as a place to give their own mini lectures? Would the size of the audience intimidate the more interesting respondents? Would Q&A quickly degenerate into a cataloguing of what was missing from the plenary panel? Would anyone get a word in edgeways once the question had been posed and the panelists all rushed to answer it? We will never know the answers to these questions, or others like them such as how does Ken Wissoker seem to manage to tweet your talk even before your give it?
Conference attendees Melissa White and Dan Irving, who traveled from Ottawa to be at the conference, had strong feelings about the plenary events: “the forming of an alternative “we” within the Academic Industrial Complex,” they write, “was compromised significantly by the way that the plenaries were organized” with no opportunity for the give and take of exchange through Q&A sessions. They continue: “This complicity with the good old fashioned neoliberal notions of professional expertise and entrepreneurial “risk”-taking―or alternatively, perhaps, Revolutionary Vanguardism Part Two (everyone knows the sequel is never that good)―was in stark contradiction the spirit of social justice, radical democracy and queer disruptions of business as usual that we thought this conference was supposed to facilitate.” Others, however, felt differently and thought that the plenaries were a real draw and that everyone, for once, seemed prepared and took the event very seriously.
4. Provocations, Manifestos, Questions
Despite all the complaints about the “star system” that circulated before and after the conference, undoubtedly many people showed up for it precisely because it was jam-packed with people doing notable work, on and off the plenary panels. Some of the speakers on the plenary panels used their time to issue provocations and to try to shake us out of the complacency that universities, conferences and academia in general produces in abundance. For my own contribution to this “major” conference, I offered up a short manifesto drawn from the insights and writings of others and amplifying the calls I found there for socially relevant, intellectually electrifying and disciplinarily defiant work. My manifesto ran through The Coming Insurrection, “The University and the Undercommons” (Moten and Harney), Ranciere, Da Silva, Lindon Barrett and The Fantastic Mr. Fox in that order and concluded by seeking insurrectionist possibilities in the whimsy of stop-motion cinema and its foregounding of the wild, the unthinkable and the fantastic. Given that I had to give my talk moments after the audience gave a collective groan at the announcement by Jodi Kim (in crazy heels) that Angela Davis was sick and could not make it, the manifesto went over ok. My talk was followed by brilliance from Denise Da Silva herself (author of the immensely influential Toward A Global Idea of Race), more provocation from Sarita See on the corporate university and a warning about environmental degradation, misuse of the land and issues around sovereignty from Dakota scholar and Indigenous studies professor Waziyatawin.
Several plenary speakers tried to speak to the insurrections in the Middle East and both Lisa Hajar and Nadine Naber used powerful and controversial images to call our attention to the impact of US backed wars in the Middle East, and to the violence in Gaza, Egypt and Lebanon. Hajar focused on torture in her plenary and Naber tried to bring some formulations from contemporary queer theory to bear upon activism by queer Arab groups. There was much discussion after each presentation about whether it was ethical to leave up disturbing images of violated bodies as backdrop to a lecture.
Some of the plenaries were very coherent ? the queer plenary for example, and the plenary on Settler Colonialism and White Supremacy ? and others were more disjointed. The queer plenary was a kind of love fest at the start, with each speaker on the panel (Ferguson, Gopinath, Camacho, Naber, Munoz, Cohen) receiving a fabulous introduction by Jayna Brown followed noisy and boisterous applause. The event at that point felt more like an episode of American Idol than anything and the speakers did not disappoint, each one singing their favorite song while looking poised and fabulous.
It was Jose Esteban Munoz, however, bullyblogger and bull dogowner extraordinaire, who had to ask the question that was on the?tip of everyone’s tongue but that remained unspoken until now,?half way through this marathon conference: as he rounded the?corner from a brilliant critique of the much-cited argument byWendy Brown from States of Injury about wounded attachment (resentment, ressentiment and wounded attachments had also received a blistering critique from Glen Coulthard earlier in the day), Munoz began a gentle appraisal of the rise and fall of performance artist Nao Bustamente in her recent participation on Bravo TV’s “Work of Art” reality show. He paused for a moment and then dropped the bomb: “What do you wear to “The Future of Genocide”? The conference attendees held their collective breath and then moved from nervous laughter to applause. Tweeters grabbed the question, held on for dear life and then gave a range of answers to this sartorial conundrum, many focused upon Jody Kim and Jayna Brown and their shoes.
Other highlights from the plenaries included: Andrea Smith’s blistering indictment of the attempt to eliminate Ethnic Studies in Arizona ? Smith reminded us that Ethnic Studies is what we are and what we do and cannot be “eliminated” by any legislation; Lisa Lowe’s elegant formulations of new genealogies for a Critical Ethnic Studies (Benjamin, Fanon, Sylvia Wynter); Dean Spade’s insightful remarks on transgender issues, neo-liberalism and white supremacy; Laura Pulido’s brave exposure of USC’s attempt to dismantle American Studies and Ethnicity and, last but not least, Dylan Rodriguez’s moving round-up of the event on the last day, the last plenary ? his impassioned plea to look beyond the rhetoric of inclusion and agreement, his evocation of intellectual ancestry and his call for dissensus and collectivity through difference.
And the brilliance, needless to say, was not at all exhausted by the plenary presentations: notable panels included a discussion of Critical Ethnic Studies in relation to activism in Detroit with Shana Redmond, Sarah Haley and Stephanie Greenlea; lots of panels on the Occupation of Palestine; workshops on Prison Abolition; LGBT Politics and Deterritorialization; a powerful discussion of “Racial Neoliberalism, Necropolitics and the Question of Violence” featuring Grace Hong, Chandan Reddy and Jodi Melamed; an intriguing panel on “Mobility, Settlement, Belonging and Coloniality” featuring a powerful presentation by Katherine McKittrick on racial geographies and a controversial paper by Nandita Sharma that raised the question of whether the rubric of “settler colonialism” flattens out distinctions between different kinds of migrants and whether indigeneity might sometimes be a site for the production of racial antagonism.
On Saturday, there was an exciting panel on “Culture, “Racisms and War” featuring Paul Amar (who has blogged around the world about the Egyptian revolutions) on Brazil, Macarena Gomez-Barris on the Mapuch? struggles in Chile and Jayna Brown on violence and Black diasporic creative resilience. Environmentalism, youth, the academic industrial complex and the histories of radical movements rounded out the packed agenda.
5. The Afterparty
So, you kinda get a sense here of how big this conference was, how wide its range and how ambitious its scope. What you cannot know is how hard everyone worked to make it happen, how stressed the plenary speakers were given the stakes of the event, how uncomfortable it was to sit for so long in a gym and how much energy the conference generated even as it left people tired and hungry by its end. As the conference attendees drift back to life as usual in places far from this hub of suburban mini-malls, the question of “what now” still hangs in the air ? what forms of intellectual mayhem can stall the corporate university’s emphasis on profit? What can renegade knowledge forms tell us about prisons, settler colonialism, white supremacy? Are these the most useful categories with which to confront the challenges of our historical moment? What are the relations now between knowledge and power? And, of course, the still unanswered question, from now on to be known as the “Munoz Paradox,” “What does one wear to the future of genocide?” (Tweet this kwissoker!)
EMP Pop 2011: Where were the Queers? March 2, 2011
Posted by Tavia in Pop Culture.Tags: music
1 comment so far
By Tavia Nyong’o (reblogged from Hear is Queer).
The 10th Annual EMP Pop conference wrapped up over the weekend and, against my fears, hosting it at a university didn’t alter the ‘secret recipe sauce’ of journalists, academics, and musicians. Is it me or did we actually gain a new and welcome constituency of students? I can’t think of another conference I go to in which people from 18 to 60+ are in the audience and at the podium, carrying on overlapping conversations about a single topic with such enthusiastic passion.
Others, notably Ned Raggett, have offered copious documentation of specific papers. And a couple conference reviews are coming online, including one by my co-panelist Oliver Wang. I am going to offer my own scattered thoughts on presentations that struck a chord in me but before I do, I have to give a “wag of the finger” as Stephen Colbert likes to say to myself and the EMP community for a group that, upon reflection, was seriously underrepresented this year: queers.
Where were the queers?
I don’t mean the queer presenters: because there were plenty of us. My question is not about a head count but about where, in the discussion of popular music today, queer and transgender topics figure. Homosexuality is apparently a big enough topic that Congress has recently passed legislation on it, people have fought and died for it at home and abroad, artists are singing about it, and sex columnists are making sentimental YouTube videos about it. Is it important to us too when we gather annually to talk about music?
It’s possible ― even likely ― that I missed some great conversation on queer music happening in some other room. (I missed the Idol panel. Did Adam Lambert come up in relation to queer performance or music there?) But here’s my evidence based on what I do know. In the printed program (which would have attracted or kept away potential attendees), only a single paper title (mine) including the words lesbian, gay, transgender, bisexual or queer. And that paper wasn’t even about a queer artist, exactly, although Gaga has, as my co-presenter Jack Halberstam pointed out in his talk, provocatively declined to disavow the transgender body imputed to her by some hostile fans. So while I don’t ordinarily do this kind of thing, I got out my rusty essentialist bean counter and looked for honest to goodness out musicians announced in paper titles (I started to go through abstracts too, but got tired. I’d never make it as a sociologist!).
The results (aside from my and Jack’s paper): Ann Powers’ creative use of the closet as a metaphor for thinking about genre; Jos? Mu?oz’s (sadly missed) paper on Darby Crash, and an interview with the man who signed The Smiths. I do have to throw in one attendee: Phranc showed up to the Work It! pre-conference (and asked, incidentally, are we going backwards or forwards? Is there any progress? Part of the trigger for this post.)
Gerrick Kennedy’s LA Times review of the pre-conference Work it! (organized through the prodigious energies of Karen Tongson) was appreciated. But it reproduced the annoying (to both feminists and queers) equation of “sexuality” and “female sexiness in some vicinity of the conventionally heteronormative.” (as the accompanying illustration of Beyonc?, Nicky Minaj and Lady Gaga suggested). Homosexuality or bisexuality was not mentioned in the article.
I embrace the selfishness of my criticism: I want more people to talk to at EMP about stuff I care about! It’s why all of us keep coming. But me aside, its obviously not the case that sexuality is irrelevant to the theme of money and capitalism, or that we did it a couple years back and now we’re through. We need to talk about it every year, especially if the mainstream media and scholarship doesn’t, or does so in simplistic ways.
So here, in the spirit of productive suggestions, are some ideas for next year:
- Queer as Format: Logo TV runs “gay themed” video shows. Virgin America has a “Pride” channel featuring a range of artists from Ricky Martin to Joan Armatrading. What’s that about? Do you have to be gay to be featured on Logo? What if you aren’t gay? Have artists ever objected to their videos being shown on a gay channel? I’m thinking perhaps about glass closeted artists. What’s the history of gay labels (including the one that the original “I Was Born This Way” was on: the amazingly titled Gaiee Label!)
- After the Closet. Speaking of Ricky Martin: where is the reflection on the momentous change (is it a momentous change?) in the last year or two where established and up and coming artists coming out to increasing indifference? K.D. Lang and Melissa Etheridge broke through in the 1990s. Was it harder for male artists to come out? What about trans (does Antony (& the Johnsons) count)? Is indifference a non-story, ie: sexuality doesn’t matter now? Or are new things happening with queerness precisely in the space where, for instance, straight female fans feel free to adore gay male singers and male frat boys groove on Kaki Kings’ guitar stylistics (HT Tina M on that last one).
- Boys who do Girls. Speaking of new things happening, someone (ID anyone?) did bring up one EMP conversation the start that Darren Criss got a start performing Disney Princess songs on YouTube. Learning that completely opened my eyes to the canny sexual orientation striptease Glee has going on now, in which an openly straight actor plays an openly gay character who is given all these songs of female empowerment (Bills Bills Bills, Teenage Dream) to sing. Isn’t there an emo genealogy to trace here (paging Dr. Tongson)?
- It Gets Worse: But maybe this is just a bigger question: where was Glee at this year’s EMP? Isn’t its commercial revivification of the TV musical and its impact on the pop charts and digital downloads worth checking out from a C.R.E.A.M. perspective? How do we think about the clash that the show constantly stages between musical theatre and contemporary pop/hip hop, both in its plot and in its contemporary impact (and its problematic whiteness)? Glee has used music to put forth the powerful idea (connected to neoliberalism in ways I could spell out) that life after the closet isn’t necessarily easier. As the adults on Glee intimate: life often gets worse, so endurance is not about normative futurity but about a kind of indefinite, lateral childhood (which is why the bratty Sue Sylvester remains the heart and soul of the show). The braggadacio of pop and the pathos of musical theatre meet in uncanny and uncomfortable ways on Glee that seem to have a lot to do with accommodating the growing social visibility of queers.
I shouldn’t be giving away all my ideas here because really I want to write a book on Glee and the unmaking of the American Dream. But really, it would be swell to have more stellar minds than mind helping me think these things through. I’m jealous of how much platonic love record collectors, eminent rock critics, and the term “authenticity” gets.
Or, as Darren Criss, channeling Princess Ariel, sings: “wish I could be part of your world.”
Judith Butler’s Letter to NYC LGBT Center February 25, 2011
Posted by bullybloggers in Uncategorized.3 comments
Dear Glennda Testone,
I am writing to communicate my outrage and sorrow that our movement has come to this point where it refuses to house an organization that is fighting for social justice.? I was appalled to see the very ignorant and hateful messages that supported your center’s decision to ban Siegebusters from holding an event on the topic of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.? The colleagues at Jewish Voice for Peace and other progressive Jewish organizations with whom I have spoken are in strong disagreement with your action.? It is simply wrong to assume that housing an event that discusses the BDS movement is anti-Semitic in content or implication.? There are increasing numbers of Jewish intellectuals and cultural workers (including Adrienne Rich and myself) who support the BDS movement, including a vocal group from Israel that calls upon the rest of us to put international pressure on their country (including Anat Matar, Rachel Giora, Dalit Baum – one of the founding queer activists there, and Neve Gordon).? There are also queer anarchist and human rights groups in Israel- including “Who Profits?” – who support BDS and who are struggling against illegal land confiscations in Jerusalem and the building of the wall or who, at least, would support an open forum to discuss the pros and cons of this strategy, non-violent, to compel the State of Israel.? But there is, perhaps most importantly as well a network of Palestinian Queers for BDS that have an important and complex analysis of the situation, calling for BDS as a sustained non-violent practice to oppose the systematic disenfranchisement of Palestinians under the Occupation.? It is surely part of our global responsibility to understand this position and to make alliances across regional divisions rather than stay within the parochial assumptions of our own neighborhoods.
The idea that BDS is somehow anti-Semitic misunderstands the point and is simply false. It is a? movement that is in favor of putting pressure on states that fail to comply with international law and, in this case, that keep more than 1.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank under the military control of Israel, which also maintains political control over their survival, mobility, employment, health, and elections – and this has been amply demonstrated.? This is a human rights and social justice issue about which we all have to learn. And it seems to me that just as the very notion of freedom must include sexual freedom, and the very notion of equality must include sexual and gender equality, so must we form alliances that show that our concern with social justice is one that will include opposition to all forms of state subjugation and disenfranchisement.? We now have many organizations that affirm the interlinking networks of subjugation and alliance: queers against racism, queers for economic justice.? We must oppose all forms of anti-Semitism to be sure (as a Jewish queer who lost part of maternal line in the Nazi genocide against the Jews, I can and will take no other stand). But we must extend our critique of racism to all minorities whose citizenship is unfulfilled, suspended, lost, or compromised, which would include the Palestinian people in the last several decades.
The Siegebuster event is one that would simply seek? to inform the LGBTQ community of a set of political viewpoints. No one who goes to the event has to agree with the viewpoint put forward there, and neither does the center.? By hosting this event, your center would simply be acknowledging that this is an important global issue in which LGBTQ people are invested and are now currently debating. The Center thus would agree that we all need to hear this viewpoint in order to make more informed decisions about the situation.?? I fear that to refuse to host the event is to submit to the tactics of intimidation and ignorance and to give up on the important public function of this center.? I urge you to reconsider your view.? These are important matters, they concern us all, and we look to you now to show that?? the LGBTQ movement remains committed to discussing social justice issues and will not be intimidated by those who seek to expand the powers of censorship precisely when so much of the rest of the world is trying to bring them down. There is still time for you to act with courage and wisdom.
Sincerely,
Judith Butler
University of California, Berkeley
Visiting Professor, New School for Social Research (Spring, 2011)
Open Letter to the NYC LGBT Community Center February 25, 2011
Posted by bullybloggers in Uncategorized.3 comments
Professor, American Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies
Department of Social and Cultural Analysis
New York University
The Bully Awards, 2010 February 15, 2011
Posted by halberst in Film, Pop Culture, Uncategorized.1 comment so far
And the Bully Goes To…2nd Annual Bully Awards
by Jack Halberstam
Yes folks, it really is that time again. It is time for the second annual Bully Awards for the best and worst in motion pictures for the past year. I know there has been a lot happening in the world recently, what with so much commotion and upheaval, so many upsets and ousted leaders…and that was just at the Grammy’s. But now that Gaga is out of her egg, 
Mick Jagger is out of his retirement home and Justin Bieber is out of short pants, let’s turn to an adult level awards show…the Oscars.?This year, as you know, the sacred ceremony is to be hosted by Ann Hathaway and that learned English PhD scholar, James Franco.?Yup, all around the country, English departments are congratulating themselves for being cool, for finally being the right discipline at the right time and for providing a home for aspirational actor/academics.
While this time last year, we were bemoaning apocalyptic pics (2012), bromances (I Love You Man!), gay films masquerading as straight films (A Single Man and Up in the Air) and chipmunks (Alvin and the…) this year we witness a return to the quote unquote smart film, talky pictures with lots to say ? smart films about fast talking guys at Harvard changing the world (The Social Network), slow talking kings in the British Monarchy saving the world (The King’s Speech), chatty hiking nerds (127 Hours), mouthy fighters (The Fighter), garrulous toys (Toy Story 3), expressive dancers (Black Swan), hell we even had a film about conversational bourgeois lesbians (The Kids Are Alright) and an animated film about super intelligent beings (Megamind). All in all, the films this year were smart, dark, darker, and downright depressing.
While last year the mood was goofy (Br?no), mock serious (Avatar), mock goofy and chirpy (aforementioned Chipmunks), this year, there was little humor to leaven the slide into bankruptcy, chaos and death. Last year’s animated winner was Up, which pretty much summed up the overly optimistic late-decade predictions about the economy, this year’s sure thing is Toy Story 3, a dark film about redundant toys put out to pasture, abused old toys, sad Big Baby toys abandoned at birth, bitter toys that try to crush each other. Last year, James Cameron created a 3-D world in Avatar in which blue indigenous peoples crushed white imperial forces, this year David Fincher in Social Network created a virtual world in which pricks from Harvard fought over millions of dollars while bonking stupid girls and showing not an ounce of social responsibility. Last year Br?no stuck his fist up various arschholen on screen, this year James Franco in 127 Hours stuck his fist in a rock and could not get it out again. 
And just in case you thought it couldn’t get any worse,?Javier?Bardem, who two years earlier had won an Oscar for the deadpan depiction of a Latino serial killer of white people, this year in Inarritu’s Biutiful, dies a slow painful death from cancer while his ex wife goes crazy and his kids look on in horror.?Oh and never let it be said that the English don’t know how to do misery ??Another Year by Mike Leigh brilliantly depicts the breakdown of human sociality facilitated by the imperial domination of the intimate form popularly known as “the couple.”
Yup, it’s cold out there and getting colder. Even the comedies were dark in 2010 ? did anyone see?Cyrus? Whaaaat? Mumblecore my ass ? this was Oedipus wrecks, a wretchedly weird film in which Marisa Tomei is romanced by the singularly unappealing John C. Reilly only to be thwarted in her sexual escapades when her twenty-something son expresses his Oedipal objections to the match. In a romantic comedy with few jokes, little romance and a massive incestuous “ick” factor, so little was appealing that the reviewers tried to rescue it by inventing a new genre to explain this and other navel-gazing not very funny rom-com, sex-with-mom, ho-hum films ? mumblecore? No, I don’t think so, try Dumbocore ? dumb films pretending to be smart films, but what these films really do is provide a justification for a new form of parasitical masculinity.
The Mumblecore films by the Duplass Brothers (Cyrus), Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha), but also inspired by Judd Apatow (Knocked Up) give this Mumbler guy meaning ? yes, he may be a loser, may lack a job, a purpose in life, ambition, charm, likeable qualities, this may all be true, but Mumblecore imagines beautiful women throwing themselves at these men not despite their shortcomings but because of them. If there weren’t plenty of evidence in the real world for this phenomenon of smart women/ slacker men couplings, Mumblecore would be truly offensive. As it is, the films are depressingly accurate and we can expect many more of the same.
Well forget mumblers then, what about stutterers? The King’s Speech has won the hearts and minds of many an anti-monarchist on account of its whimsy, its humanization of the sovereign and the arch acting skills of one queenly Helena Bonham Carter. But is this really the right film for our times? Do we really need to cathect now, at this moment in history, on to a story about a soon to be monarch who has lost the confidence of his people and who allegorizes the faltering of sovereign power and then its recuperation on the verge of World War 2? Right now, as dictators begin to fall in Tunisia and Egypt, we cleave to a narrative of good monarchy, kind and gentle, frail and vulnerable monarchy; we apparently want the story of the good king, the sweet king who finds his voice and leads his people out of the darkness…plus, there is not a little hint of mumblecore/stuttercore here in the tale of male incompetence propped up by female ambition…
And speaking of female ambition…How about those Black Swans? Darren Aronsky gives ballet the same treatment he applied to wrestling in The Wrestler a few years ago. In both films, the protagonist sacrifices his/her body to the call of the discipline but Black Swan has the added, horror element of the toxic mother-daughter bond. Barbara Hershey plays a creepy Tiger mother to Natalie Portman’s anxious over-achieving daughter and the two drag each other down into the muck of estrogen fuelled competitive destruction. In fact this was the year of bad parenting as The Kids Are Alright, Toy Story 3, Megamind, Biutiful, Black Swan and Winter’s Bone proved; but at least heterosexual films about bad parenting actually admit that the whole enterprise is fucked and wrong. The lesbian bad parenting film had to try to salvage something good and meaningful from the failing family unit. Even Toy Story 3 had the decency to toss the bad parent, Lotso Bear, into the incinerator at the end. And at least Black Swan, for all its mother-daughter drama,?had a tremendous lesbian sex scene between Portman and Mila Kunis.
Oh well, onto the predictions such as they are for the 2011 Bullies/Oscars:
Best Actress: I predict that everyone will want Annette Bening to win best actress despite her cringe-inducing, potentially career-ending improvised Joni Mitchell number in the lesbo-phobic The Kids Are Alright. But in the end, the historionics of Natalie Portman in the creepily awesome?Black Swan will and should win. The Bully goes to Portman for going over the top and reminding us that inside every good girl is a black swan.
Best Actor: And while Javier Bardem should add another gold man to his collection, for his harrowing depiction of a dying, desperate man, this year our academy voters will go for heartwarming over heart stopping and the stuttering king, played by Colin Firth, will win best actor. But the Bully goes to James Franco for giving the best castration performance of the year – the gruesome amputation of a vital body part with a small knife was a perfect metaphor for the process of getting a PhD in English at Yale and no doubt his experience there really helped him with this role…
Best Director: Probably will go to David Fincher, The Social Network or Tom Hooper for The King’s Speech but who cares.
Best Animated Film: Of course, the best animated film Oscar will and should go to Toy Story 3, a dark parable about the dangers of aging in a world committed to the young, the new and the expendable. But keep in mind the wondrous lessons of How To Train Your Dragon and Megamind: namely, dragons are pretty nice actually, as are blue men with big heads, not to mention Vikings, but beware of heroes in tights, especially if they sound like Brad Pitt.
Worst Film of the Year: And the Bully goes too…well, it is a toss up actually. I really hated Sophia Coppola’s continued and extended meditation on male boredom inSomewhere. I disliked the durational shots of male fatigue, the quick takes on male inertia, the lingering shots of Stephen Dorff falling asleep during sex, during conversations, during life. But I also really hated?Cyrus, not sure if you got that from my comments on it above. Both of these films are actually Mumblecore, although Dorff mumbles more than anyone in?Cyrus. Yogi Bear and?Furry Vengeance are of course in contention for this coveted award but with no mumblecore elements anywhere to be found they cannot seriously compete. Plus I did not see them… This bully (did you ever doubt it?) goes to?Cyrus.
Best Film: ?The Oscar will continue its love fest with the royals and give the award to The King’s Speech, I think. I could be wrong and it could go to The Social Network, for making Americans look smart at a moment when the education system goes belly up. But the truth is―Hollywood, are you listening?―talking fast does not equal intelligence! The worn out trope of the nerdy white guy dropping everything to rush off to his computer to type away at high speed while chatting at an even higher speed needs to be retired after this film. And by the way, the representation of Harvard as a world where smart chatty guys date dumb silent women returns us to Mumblecore but makes me think again about how much I preferred watching Franco self-amputate over Jesse Eisenberg self-pleasuring by writing code frantically.
No matter, the Bully goes to Never Let Me Go ? the other British film of the year, which, along with Mike Leigh’s?Another Year, eschews royals and high society in favor of the dirty little secrets of a British post-empire, post-life, post-war landscape. In this deeply affecting, flatly melancholic film, the eugenic imperative of neo-imperialism finds its fullest expression in the children who, like the toys in Toy Story 3, realize that they are expendable, that their organs will be harvested and that their “completion” represents the darkest conclusion to the dark ages we have now entered.
Runners Up: Four Lions ? under appreciated British comedy about terrorism without Mumblecore story line; I Am Love ? under appreciated Operatic Italian drama with Tilda Swinton mumbling in Italian about Oedipal love (Mumblecore Italian style?); Mother ? Korean mumblecore; Red ? Helen Mirren with a machine gun, say no more ? the right response to mumblecore…
