boundary 2

Category: Gender & Sexuality

  • Peter Valente — The Body’s Prehistories (Review of Hervé Guibert’s Written in Invisible Ink)

    Peter Valente — The Body’s Prehistories (Review of Hervé Guibert’s Written in Invisible Ink)

    The Body’s Prehistories: On Hervé Guibert’s Written in Invisible Ink

    by Peter Valente

    One of the many pleasures of reading Hervé Guibert’s collection of stories, Written in Invisible Ink (Semiotext(e), 2020), is following his development as a writer from the earliest  stories in this volume, which date from the late 1970s, to the latest (which were collected in 1988’s Mauve Virgin). According to his widow Christine Guibert, he did not write any stories after 1988 and focused more on longer works such as the novel To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (1990).[1] Several of the stories published in this present volume have never been published before. Interestingly, the ones collected here, chosen by the translator Jeffrey Zuckerman, coincide with Guibert’s time as a journalist; many of the texts have the journalist’s attention for details that will capture a reader’s attention.

    The stylistic difference between Propaganda Death, the earliest of his books, and the later stories is between the raw passionate writing of the former and the more controlled prose of the latter. Guibert was one of first French writers of “autofiction,”: he used writing from his diary as well as memoir and fiction to complicate the narrative “I.” The writing in Propaganda Death is almost cinematic in its cataloguing of physical violence to the body mixed with an unbridled sexual urge: “My body, due to the effects of lust and pain, has entered a state of theatricality, of climax, that I would like to reproduce in any manner possible: by photo, by video, by audio recording” (27). Its scenes of the savage torturing and disemboweling of the human body, amidst slaughterhouses and hospitals, exhibit the frightening transparency of what lies beneath the skin, revealing its secrets: “no need for candles to brighten this night of the body; its internal transparency illuminates all” (27). In “Final Outrages” Guibert imagines himself as the young girl Ophelia, “stolen away in the bloom of youth by an ailment gnawing slowly at her interior (while making her exterior radiate!)” (81). In “Five Marble Tables”, he writes, imagining himself dead: “I won’t let go of my body, I cling to it, I push out everything I can inside but it all stops immediately, I’m clean forever now, my muscles tear apart, I can’t go back in myself anymore and I leave this deserted place, all the fight gone, all the fury slain” (70). Death in life is imagined as transformative; in a later work, Crazy for Vincent (Semiotext(e), 2017), published in 1989, a year after the latest stories in this volume, Guibert writes: “I struggle with the mystery of the violence of this love…and I tell myself that I would like to describe it with the solemnity of the sacred, as if it were one of the great religious mysteries…I don’t have too many sexual thoughts, of fucking or of defilement, violent hallucinations that would bring sex or lechery into play, but rather the suspended grace of bearing witness to a transfiguration” (85). The thrust of these stories is away from materiality, and toward a refiguring of the male body as a site for spiritual transformation.[2]

    Propaganda Death is also an ecstatic fantasy of destruction, desecration, and horror, calling for nothing less than the annihilation of the petit-bourgeois world through a complete reversal of cherished mores and customs, and its obsession with good hygiene, both physical and mental: “I’d like to smear my gonorrhea over the entire world, infect the planet, contaminate dozens of asses at a go, …my bed every morning is a field of carnage, a slaughterhouse” (51).  He continues: “Let’s open abscesses in all this stupid flesh!…Let’s love ourselves and hate them! Let’s orgasm as we pull our heads from our bodies!” (47). Wayne Koestenbaum writes:

    Filth is Guibert’s passport to infinity. Filth, as literary terrain, belongs to de Sade, but Guibert reroutes s/m through the pastoral landscape of religious interiority, as if ghosted by hungry Simone Weil, or by Wilde’s scarified, Christological denouement. (To skeptics, such spirituality might seem papier-mâché, but I’m a believer.) Guibert sees a cute young man at a party and “instead of imagining his sex or his torso or the taste of his tongue, in spite of myself it’s his excrement I see, inside his intestines.” (Kostenbaum 2020)[3]

    These passionate, anarchic early texts are difficult to read. They are unpolished, raw, unedited, obsessed with the violence of desire, and with orifices; but nevertheless, they are works of great intensity, written when Guibert was 21 years old, and likely to shock a reader into a recognition of his/her own body, and its impermanence, and the weakness of the flesh. They are performance, spectacle, and indeed, propaganda in defense of homosexuality and the violence of desire.

    Guibert seeks to “to uncover my body’s prehistories,” the traces of the animal inside the human. In the story, “Flash Paper,” he writes that while kissing Fernand, he imagines that “Out of the extended, warm pleasure of the kiss came other visions: we were two animals that had met on the terreplein, each from our own half of the forest, two horned beasts, two giant snails, two unhappy hermaphrodites” (Invisible Ink 230-31). And, continuing with this theme in the same story: “His wide-opened eye had awakened mine and did not leave it: we had become insects” (232). He and Fernand are, “two poor shameful animals” (233). Finally, he writes: “we danced like two spider crabs being boiled, destroying everything in their path” (234). The erotic charge of an encounter turns men into animals searching for their release. There is danger and excitement in the kill, the sexual energy of it: “If I fuck him, if I decide to fuck him, it’s first to annihilate him.”[4] This is “no simple sadism…no simple equation of fucking and killing, of penetrating and violating – instead, the wish to fuck or be fucked…is a sensation of being voided, chiseled, scalded, disemboweled. Is this consciousness a queer privilege? Is it shamanistic? Is it in fact not trans or queer or anything of the sort, but simply poetic?” (Kostenbaum 2014). Guibert could certainly be melodramatic, as well as poetic. Sex in his work is theatrical; he plays a game of hide and seek with a reader; but he doesn’t sugar coat desires that are complex or grotesque and this is what makes his work so valuable as a document of honest writing in a time such as ours when the line between truth and falsity has been blurred.                            

    In the section, “Personal Effects” Guibert examines objects rather than bodies and reveals their hidden meanings or forbidden histories. About the “Cat o’Nine Tails”, for instance, he writes: “The cat o’ nine tails has been hung, among the cobwebs dusters, from ceiling hooks, in the dim backroom of the hardware store. It carries within itself, in its unmoving straps, the screams of battered children, it exhales the pleasure of perverted lovers” (Invisible Ink 97). Gloves are a normal part of winter wear or when working in the garden, or in construction et cetera, but Guibert reminds us that “it should never be forgotten that the hands they’re keenest to help are those of thieves and stranglers” (103). With regard to the “vibrating chair,” he notes that the dukes of Pomerania found “extravagant” uses for it, including attaching a large dildo to its seat (107). This section of the book is representative of Guibert’s poetics. As a journalist, he was accustomed to examining the forbidden histories behind things which elude the eye of the observer. In “Newspaper Clipping,” he talks about certain facts concerning the death of a person and cautions about imaginatively reconstructing the scene. “Let’s come back to reality!,” he writes, concluding that “…everything, for now, remains purely hypothetical” (56). The secret will not reveal itself easily and it requires patient and research to reveal a truth perhaps stranger than fiction.

    In the world of these stories, love is essentially a complex power game, where the weak person is always at a disadvantage. Guibert is not a psychological writer, concerned with exploring in depth the subjective feelings of lovers. There is no utopian idea about love in these stories. Love is often deceptive, leading to betrayals and even violence. “For P. Dedication in Invisible Ink,” concerns a young writer who has complex desires toward an older, more established writer, and is called upon to help him write a book. At the end of the story, the young writer speaks of their erotic dynamic in the following way:

    The king of the jungle had been tamed, or maybe it was the lion that subdued its tamer, but one or the other, at his point of submission, attacked the other in hopes of breaking him, and these visits grew increasingly rare. The break-up happened over the course of the seventh year, bit by bit, as if by blows, and neither the assailant nor the stronghold, at risk of breaking their necks, wanted to bow down. (159)

    Love often begins with a kind of “tacit contract” that one or the other eventually betrays. In one of the central stories, “The Sting of Love,” love is imagined as a liquid that is injected in the lover. The story traces its various effects on those who have been “infected” and concludes:

    A happiness so great becomes unbearable unless one is shackled, or better yet, in bed, because the effect of this injected liquid doesn’t end with any climax, it persists all the way into sleep. It is impossible here to determine the specific link between consciousness and dreams. Anyone who wants to fight against this surreptitious transition with conscious effort, who is afraid because the dream, at first still just as wholly gentle, slowly turns into nightmare, flickering with swift animal shapes, anyone who wants to prolong this amorous stupor indefinitely with a second injection is struck with melancholy, as with a tarantula’s bite, and loses speech, nails, job. (135)

    Physical attraction is just as capricious and mysterious and not necessarily the result of erotic language: “We sat facing each other in the small, unlit kitchen, and I immediately felt within his physical presence a sense of elevation, adventure, freedom. The words he had said had nothing overtly erotic about them, but they suddenly, mysteriously had my penis swelling” (182). There is no attempt to seek a reason for his desire which would amount to a kind of defense; Guibert was open about his homosexuality and its relation to danger as well as pleasure. Furthermore, this physical excitement can suddenly turn into potential violence: “two years earlier, walking behind him, I had suddenly wanted to use all my force to hit the back of his neck with the heft of the camera hanging by a strap around my wrist” (178). In “For P. Dedication in Invisible Ink”, Guibert writes, “My feelings about this man were skewed: even as I could have said that I loved him, when I found myself before him, at long last, I wanted to go for his throat” (153).

    Danger extends to sexual encounters in the park. In “A Lover’s Brief Journal,” Guibert relates an incident in the Tuileries, where, after “a guy whispers the word cop,” he and another man get dressed, and leave the park; but Guibert is then assaulted: “the first one punches me in the face, another kicks me in the balls, right after a third guy takes a running start to headbutt me, I fall down, I get back up, I shout for help without thinking about it, they run off, I run in the other direction, I turn around, I see one of them hurrying to pick up the coins that fell out of my pocket, hungry, greedy” (48-49). The violence has as much to do with money as with sexuality: the link here is between capitalist greed and homophobia.  Though capitalism created the material conditions so that both men and women could lead independent sexual lives, it also, at the same time, imposed heterosexual norms on society to create an economic, ideological, and sexual regime, centered in the family. In the present time, when Trump, a symbol of capitalist greed, is seen as a spokesman for the white, heterosexual male, and encourages violence against marginalized groups on the basis of their skin color, religion or sexual preference, it is no surprise that we see a rise in violence against gay and trans men and women.

    For the narrator of “Flash Paper,” love is, “ a voluntary obsession, an unsure decision” (239). But Guibert writes of the man who died in “A Man’s Secrets,” “All the strongholds had collapsed, except for the one protecting love: it left an unchangeable smile on his lips, when exhaustion closed his eyes” (254). And the aging star in “The Desire to Imitate” says, “In this impossibility of love there will have been all the same a little love” (212). In these stories, love and cruelty are woven together; this unholy union was born of Guibert’s hatred of his own body, his self-pity, his anger, his theatricality, his passion for the grotesque. He is attacking bourgeoise values, and inherited ideas about morality, thus turning our assumptions about love and hate upside down. Men who knew him said he was cruel but he hated pity and charity; Marie Darrieussecq writes that he preferred real friendship and despised cowardly people (“Guibert’s Ghost” 2015). For Guibert, true love may be impossible, but all the same, he valued the love that was possible in genuine friendships. He sought the truth in himself by testing the limits of his body and of his desires. In a world where our freedoms are being assaulted by both far right conservatives and neoliberals, a writer like Guibert is necessary and should be read, because he questions our conventional ideas about the nature of sexuality, love and hate.

    Death hovers on the periphery of the stories in Written in Invisible Ink, and is often a central theme, and linked mysteriously with desire. In “Five Marble Tables,” Guibert imagines himself on a laboratory table, communing with other bodies, one of which is a young child. As I suggested earlier on, in the story Guibert feels in some way liberated: “I’m clean forever” (Invisible Ink 70). Guibert speaks of the dream, a kind of death-state in itself, as concealing, “a geography of pleasure, an itinerary with its impasses, its openings, its stairwells, its gulfs, its forbidden directions. Desire is there alone, idealized, freed of all materiality” (75). It can also contain, “desirable monsters,” such as the man whose “suffering was immense” because his “head is four times larger than his body” (129) and who believes the hand that gives him his food through a trapdoor is the hand of God. The monstrous, the forbidden, is a gateway to the spiritual.

    In this palace of desirable monsters are men with “dog’s or wolf’s heads” or with “scales or moss growing on their skin” (129, 128). The animal and the vegetal are mixed and the monstrous appears beautiful. A world based on reason, a human creation, gives over to the animal, the irrational, the monstrous. This space contains an alternate time that exists simultaneously with the real world. In “Posthumous Novel,” one of my favorite stories, Guibert writes of a space where, as a result of a “deatomization effort” in Holland, “countless words, incomplete sentences” are “hanging like clumps off of trees and, broken and sown over the ground” (143). Words are not necessarily attached to sentences but exist alone as fragments. In the story, Guibert writes that when one is travelling by train, one’s thoughts release, “more or less clouded and blinded” words into the air of the surrounding countryside and that they take root in the “roadside dust, a branch shaken by the wind, setting sun” (144). These words or sentences, cast into the world by the living, are “nourishment for the dead…a vital message of what happens in the hereafter” (144). By accessing these “sentences” through “x-raying” the “final trajectories” of the young writer in the story who committed suicide, the author is able to partly reconstruct the dead man’s novel (146). The narrator is like Orpheus, in Cocteau’s film, listening to the transmissions on the radio which are actually the voices of the dead. These words of the dead need to be remembered. History must be remembered in order not to repeat the same mistakes to the point of unconsciousness.

    It is in this forbidden space, this underworld that does not obey the laws of physics, that Guibert, a kind of Orphic figure, is able to imagine a language that is not bound to its materiality; it exists in the air, unrealized, incipient, spiritual, the image of a ghost. It is here where the monstrous, the aborted, the abject thoughts reside, and where the dead dwell. It is a land that “had never been described or transcribed on a map” (220). It is a forbidden and magical place, where one has the “courage to be oneself, to present oneself, and to liberate every secret, to invent them” (150). Guibert wrote this book in “invisible ink,” from that place, as if the stories themselves are only the visible traces of what lies behind them: the sexual encounters that produced them.[5]

    In January, 1988, Guibert was diagnosed with AIDS. As a result, he immediately found himself the focus of media attention and appeared on numerous talk shows. Early in his career, Guibert was openly gay and unashamed of his homosexuality and this, according to his translator Jeffrey Zuckerman, “was not meant as a provocation” but as “a quietly revolutionary stance in line with his particular brand of rebelliousness, in which, to quote a line from the end of “Ghost Image,” ‘secrets have to circulate” (“Translator’s Preface”13). Furthermore, Zuckerman writes, “When I began this project, all of Guibert’s translated novels were out of print – even To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. At the time, it felt symbolic yet saddening: if gay rights were moving so steadily forward toward equality with the broader population, why preserve this particular, liminal past? Indeed, such an unprecedented nationwide – and even global – sea change in attitudes toward gay marriage and adoption risked effacing the long struggle that came before it, from Oscar Wilde’s trials and Alan Turing’s cyanide-laced apple to the Stonewall riots and the ACT-UP movement” (“Translator’s Preface” 15). And for this reason, the stories in Written in Invisible Ink are a valuable addition to Guibert’s work in English, and a good starting point for the reader unfamiliar with his work.

     

    Peter Valente is the author of A Boy Asleep Under the Sun: Versions of Sandro Penna  (Punctum Books 2014), which was nominated for a Lambda award, The Artaud Variations (Spuyten Duyvil 2014), Let the Games Begin: Five Roman Writers (Talisman House 2015) and Catullus Versions (Spuyten Duyvil  2017). He has also published translations from the Italian, Blackout by Nanni Balestrini (Commune Editions 2017) and Whatever the Name by Pierre Lepori (Spuyten Duyvil 2017), Two Novellas: Parthenogenesis & Plague in the Imperial City (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017). He is the co-translator of the chapbook Selected Late Letters of Antonin Artaud, 1945-1947 (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs,2014), and has translated the work of Gérard de Nerval, Cesare Viviani, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. His poems, essays, and photographs have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Mirage #4/Periodical, First Intensity, Aufgabe, Talisman, Oyster Boy Review, spoKe, and Animal Shelter. His most recent book is a co-translation of Succubations and Incubations: The Selected Letters of Antonin Artaud (1945-1947). Forthcoming is a collection of essays, Essays on the Peripheries (Punctum 2020) and his translation of Guillaume Dustan’s Nicolas Pages (Semiotext(e) 2021).

    Works Cited

    Darrieussecq, Marie. “Guibert’s Ghost.” Tin House, 13 January, 2015: https://tinhouse.com/guiberts-ghost/

    Guibert, Hervé . 2020. Written in Invisible Ink. trans. Jeffrey Zuckerman. Los Angeles:  Semiotext(e).

    —-  2017. Crazy for Vincent. trans Christine Pichini. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

    Kostenbaum, Wayne. “The Pleasures of the Text.” Book Forum, June-August, 2014: https://www.bookforum.com/print/2102/herve-guibert-s-unbridled-eroticism-13298

    Zuckerman, Jeffrey. “Translator’s Preface” in Written in Invisible Ink. trans. Jeffrey Zuckerman. Los Angeles:  Semiotext(e), 2020, 1-15.

     

    Notes

    [1] Guibert married Christine in 1989, so that she could protect his estate and so that the royalty from the sale of his books would go to her children. The publication of the mentioned novel, in which Guibert told the world he had AIDS, caused a scandal because in it he disguised Michel Foucault, who had the same disease, under another name (Muzil). However, the public discovered that this was Foucault; he had been dead for six years (reportedly from cancer) at the time of the publication of Guibert’s book.

    [2] For Bataille, the indulgence in “perversity” also contained a strong drive for the metaphysical, for that which lies beyond the body.

    [3] I would also add Artaud to the list above in his researches into “fecality.”

    [4]Quoted in Kostenbaum, The Pleasures of the Text,” accessed on May 17, 2020, https://www.bookforum.com/print/2102/herve-guibert-s-unbridled-eroticism-13298

    [5] In “A Lover’s Brief Journal,” Guibert writes, “I got completely undressed, I write and that gets me hard, I jerk myself off with one hand…” Hervé Guibert, Written in Invisible Ink, 49.

  • Travis Alexander – Deregulating Grief: A Review of Dagmawi Woubshet’s “The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS”

    Travis Alexander – Deregulating Grief: A Review of Dagmawi Woubshet’s “The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS”

    a review of Dagmawi Woubshet’s The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015)

    by Travis Alexander

    ~

    Not long after someone dies in Ethiopia, the edir—friend, relative, or neighbor—takes to the streets to blow a horn and call out the deceased’s name. Thus begins the process of mourning. After this announcement, the edir pitches a tent in front of the bereaved’s home. Over the next three days, mourners congregate in the tent and grieve. By the seventh day, public grieving has largely subsided. More urgency still has passed by the fortieth and eightieth days, by the seventh year. Dagmawi Woubshet opens The Calendar of Loss with a lyrical description of this practice, according to which the temporality of the living attunes itself to the claim of the dead. It’s a fitting introduction, as The Calendar casts Woubshet himself as no less edir than scholar. His particular charge is the AIDS dead from the “early years” of the epidemic—1981 to 1996, when highly active antiretroviral treatment became widely available. It was in 1996 that AIDS, according to certain political constituencies, was rendered nonlethal; according to others, it was even cured.

    The ambition of The Calendar, though, exceeds mourning the AIDS dead in either the form of a memoir or uncritical memorialization. To be sure, there exists a prolific tradition of just this kind of memoirish text, epitomized by writers like Sarah Schulman. Woubshet looks instead to efforts made by AIDS mourners to simultaneously grieve their dead, process the historical contingency of these deaths, and reckon with the probability that their own deaths were on the horizon. As such, these works are “steeped in a ‘poetics of compounding loss’” (3). This idiosyncratic form of mourning not only registers a novel structure of feeling, but, in “confound[ing] and travers[ing] the limits of mourning” renders extant literary and cultural elegaic genres inadequate (3). Evincing his interdisciplinary sensibility, Woubshet trains his analysis on genres running to obituaries, funerals, graffiti art, photography, film, epistolaries, choreography, installations, and of course, the poetic elegy itself. The resulting critical work is a dialogue at the intersection of trauma studies, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and African Diaspora studies.

    Woubshet organizes the book’s chapters according to the various ways that queer loss was reinserted into a public discourse that had attempted first to conceal it, and then to efface its embodied specificities. To take only one of his most powerful examples, Woubshet addresses how in its traditional form the obituary had functioned as a disciplinary genre of (hetero-) reproductive futurism. In its foregrounding of birth-family kinship networks, the obituary not only omitted mention of gay partners, but reified the futurism (those, especially, children, who live on) that sublimates and mediates such reproductivism. Moreover, these pieces never mentioned AIDS, coyly alluding instead to a “long disease” the deceased had suffered, thereby interring the dead in one last closet. In response to the mainstream news outlets running these posthumously disciplinary remembrances, gay newspapers “arrogated to themselves the authority of the obituary,” emphasizing the cause of death and the queer networks left in the wake of the decedent’s passing, thus both constituting queer counterpublics and protecting the “rights of the queer dead from the normative rites of the living” (59, 61, 67, 84). Woubshet’s ability to demonstrate how works of mourning exhumed the queer body interdicted from the scene of public grief is equally salient in his poetic analysis, centering on figures like Melvin Dixon and Paul Monette and informed by poetry and elegy scholars ranging from Peter Sacks to Max Cavitch to Jonathan Culler. He hastens to remind us that the explicitly fatal homophobia of the 1980s and ’90s has simply been sanitized into the gay liberalism of the present. In its triumphalist projection of gay normalcy and citizenship, gay liberalism (akin to what Jasbir Puar calls homonationalism) demands the erasure of AIDS, of the embodied queer past. “[B]y looking for the dead now, therefore,” The Calendar of Loss “challenge[s] gay liberalism’s present undertaking” (23).

    As such, the reformulation of central mourning genres such as the obituary , Woubshet notes, wasn’t demanded simply by the novel epidemiological and biocultural poetics of AIDS itself. It also responded to the unique forms of silence and erasure under which queer loss was placed in the 1980s and 90s by civil and governmental institutions alike. It is this “regulation of the ‘sphere of appearances’” (to borrow Judith Butler’s phrase) that the activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) addressed in its motto “Silence = Death” (16). Woubshet argues that the protocols of silence in this era “disprized” mourners of queer loss, “shroud[ing]” their grief “in silence, shame, and disgrace” (4). The texts and performances collected in Calendar refuse this status, and collectively insist that “mourning = survival.”

    In its recuperation of a form of grief that is indeterminate and inconsolable, The Calendar of Loss is also a referendum on the approach to loss and trauma offered by Freudian psychoanalysis, which sets forth a pat binary between normative grief (mourning) and pathological grief (melancholia). Where the mourner eventually replaces his lost object, the melancholic cannot, and languishes. Amid the exigencies of AIDS, however, this binary falls short insofar as it fails to apprehend the fact that for these mourners, death is not a “singular” event, but part of an ever-expanding series of deaths, including—most likely—the mourner’s own (5). The melancholic grief of queer communities constituted by AIDS are certainly not “normal” according to Freud, but neither are they pathological, inasmuch as they “achieve cathexis in mourning itself and in its art and activism. However, […] as newly cathected objects, [these] cannot displace loss; on the contrary, they place loss center stage” (18). In worrying the normal/pathological binary, Woubshet delivers a theoretical instrument to those employing psychoanalysis, and a bracing intervention to a queer theory whose conceptualizations of trauma have unproblematically embraced this conspicuously unqueer binarism for too long.

    Drawing on work by Howard Thurman, Woubshet observes that this non-pathological melancholy finds clear historical expression in the genre of slave songs and black spirituals. In the spirituals as well as in black life generally, “[d]eath and dying are not just ‘unusual, untoward events’ or ‘inevitably end-of-lifespan events,’ but instead punctuate [it] routinely and proleptically” (19). This constant anticipation of loss is central to the conceptions of social death elaborated by scholars such as Orlando Patterson. Thus, the paradigm of black mourning (as in the slave songs) and black life generally, “accommodates” and illuminates early AIDS mourning, particularly in its “insistence that death is ever present, that death is somehow always impending, and that survivors can confront all this death in the face of shame and stigma in eloquent ways that also often imply a fierce political sensibility and a longing for justice” (5). This comparative work confirms The Calendar Of Loss as the first monograph in the humanities at the intersection of queer theory and African Diaspora studies and allows it to spark a true theoretical commerce between those fields (26).

    Already in this book, in fact, interdisciplinarity has sensitized Woubshet to a liability of queer theory over and above its internalization of Freud’s pathologization of melancholy. I’m speaking here of queer theory’s characterization of the child derived heavily from Lee Edelman’s pathbreaking No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004). In this latter account, the figure of the child is not only opposed to the queer subject, but is deployed—insofar as it represents the claims of futurity—to discipline and defer queer pleasure, which represents by contrast not only the present at the expense of the future, but also the very foreclosure of the future itself. In his final chapter, Woubshet details the Sudden Flowers collective, which provides the resources for Ethiopian orphans whose parents were lost to AIDS to create works of art and performances that help mediate their grief. Many of these orphans choose to write letters to their deceased parents in which they chronicle the stages and practices of their mourning, and the sensation of the absence, the lost object(s), they have not (yet) filled or replaced. These children “rely not on idealized figures of innocence and purity to characterize their own experiences, but instead on queer figures of abjection, disparagement, and fearlessness,” thereby “thwart[ing] the naturalized figure of the child as the very embodiment of futurity” (140). The experiences of these children, then, are a living rebuke to the cleanliness of queer theory’s characterization of the child. But Woubshet doesn’t simply gesture to the children of Sudden Flowers to append an asterisk to the queer theory’s anti-natalism, to correctively bolster its critical acumen (though he certainly does accomplish this). While joining Edelman in the latter’s critique of hegemonic natalism, he breaks away in aiming to indicate what we might well call the white privilege of queer theory—the complacency of the latter’s archive, its evident disinterest in the particularities of life in the submerged global south in favor of an aestheticized lumping-together of African people with AIDS under the signifier of unalterable tragedy.

    But more witheringly still, The Calendar of Loss reveals the extent to which queer theory becomes a vested defender, an unwitting academic strategist, in the process of universalizing whiteness. Drawing on Robin Bernstein’s Racial Innocence, Woubshet recounts how, unlike the image of the white child that gelled (under the auspices of nineteenth-century Romanticism) to figure innocence, purity, and futurity, the black child discursively produced simultaneously (most canonically in the pickaninny) evoked repulsion, abjection, and social death (142). “Emptied of innocence and futurity,” he speculates, “the black child […] cannot be a marker against which queerness can be negatively defined” (142). Hidden behind the tact of Woubshet’s account is the indictment that positions like Edelman’s not only prefer the white child for its compatibility with a given theoretical imperative, but perpetuate a universalization according to which the white child, unburdened by racial marking, becomes the child as such, which iterates in turn the social death (in its rhetorical concealment) of the black child. This revelation represents just one of the fruits of Woubshet’s inflection of queer theory by the itinerary of African Diaspora studies.

    While we might fairly critique Woubshet’s failure to address the role of NGOs (like those that care for Ethiopian Orphans) as the “mendicant orders” (cf. Hardt and Negri) of the very same biopolitical governmentality that allowed AIDS to become a pandemic in the first place, this oversight seems the exception rather than the rule. The Calendar’s more concerning oversight is instead its unintentional reification of vitalist, optimistic, and citizenship-oriented rubrics of affect in its moments of “recuperation.” Consider for example Woubshet’s description of the children in the Sudden Flowers art collective who become “political figure[s], publicly taking on one of the most urgent issues of our time, [while simultaneously] departing from the norm” (144). These children are revealed in turn as “powerful agents, as subjects capable of reflection on and articulation of their experiences” (140). Here these children become deserving of praise insofar as they embrace an active, vigorous relationship with their circumstances. Elsewhere Woubshet will attribute the same valorizing characteristics to the gay American subject of his book too. AIDS mourners “across the Atlantic […] embodied AIDS openly and fearlessly” (5). Here “openly and fearlessly” carries the same sense of vigor and interactivity he attributed to the “powerful,” “agent[ial]” children of Ethiopia.

    Not only do these forms of affect coincide neatly with the behavioral strictures demanded by a late liberalism that exercises itself in intellectual and emotional economies, but they also threaten to undo the depathologization of melancholy executed above. That is to say, where Woubshet had previously claimed to find melancholy non-pathological insofar as it generates a new cathexis (attention to compounding loss), here he seems to smuggle in—through “articulation of […] experiences”—the kind of object-replacement or work-completion characteristic of normative mourning. Indeed, he says so himself in expressing his desire to show that nonnormative mourning “can be ‘productive rather than pathological, abundant rather than lacking, social rather than solipsistic, militant rather than reactionary’” (22). Here Woubshet no longer desires simply a neutral opposition to the pathological (that is, the nonnormative), but—in the term “productive”—casts his lot in with a term derived from the cathectic economy of capital. In turn “social” evokes liberal citizenship and pluralism, while “militant” continues in the valorization of vigorous and positive affect suggested earlier by “powerful,” “agent[ial],” “open,” and “fearless.” Inasmuch as “militancy,” “articulation,” “social[ity],” and “productiv[ity]” address themselves to futurity, they reiterate the natalism that Woubshet in agreement with Edelman deemed unsalvageable.

    Indeed, Edelman himself is perhaps most helpful in diagnosing the forms of complicity I’ve attributed to Woubshet. In a 2006 piece, he cautions us against the trap of “affirm[ing] an angry, uncivil ‘politics of negativity’” (“The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory” 821). Insofar as such negativity is “affirmed,” it becomes “little more than Oedipal kitsch,” performing the sentimental and “fundamentalist […] attachment to ‘sense, mastery, and meaning,’” and thereby striking “the pose of negativity while evacuating its force” (822). True negativity, meanwhile, refuses what Adorno calls the “all subjugating identity principle” (Negative Dialectics 320). In his attempt to depathologize queer melancholy, Woubshet pays homage to negativity, spurning the identification between melancholy and pathology. But in framing that melancholy as “militant,” “productive,” “social,” “articulate,” “open,” “fearless,” and certainly “agent[ial],” his negativity is outed as an identity principle in drag. This complicity also lends support to Jasbir Puar’s recent critique of affect theory (“Prognosis Time: Toward a Geopolitics of Affect, Debility, and Capacity”). For her the latter, in attempting to conceptualize a register of energies and forces uncapturable by a form of governmentality dependent on the capitalization of intellectual and emotional labor, unwittingly finds itself attributing to affect a set of optimistic, buoyant characteristics that are themselves of a piece with the imperatives of productivity and ablement central to late capital in the first place (“Prognosis Time”). While Woubshet’s methodology has no stake in affect, the optimism inherent in his characterizations of melancholic grief and its creative expression—even his exclusionary attention to only those who have taken it upon themselves to create—instantiates the ideological double-bind of Puar’s affect theorists.

    Of course, a productivity that is cyclical and endlessly iterative would be recuperable where one that is teleological would not. And his investment in the trope of the calendar, which evokes a form of articulation that repeats—despite its “militan[cy]”—in stasis, suggests that this is version of productivity Woubshet has in mind. So his flirtation with productivity is potentially aesthetic rather than ideological. Whatever the case may be, The Calendar of Loss remains a rich and urgently needed contribution. When the legacy of AIDS is being submerged, not only by the rhetoric of gay liberalism, but by a generation of queer theorists who have turned their attentions elsewhere, efforts like Woubshet’s to “speak again” its history and “reanimate lives that demand remembering” cannot go unnoticed (xi).


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    Travis Alexander is a Mellon Graduate Fellow at The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Though broadly interested in Post-45 literature and visual art, his specific interests cluster around portrayals of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in film, literature, television, and cultural theory between the 1980s and 1990s. Website: http://englishcomplit.unc.edu/people/travis-alexander.

    Back to the essay
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    Works Cited

    • Adorno, Theodor. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E.B. Ashton. New York: Continuum, 1994.
    • Edelman, Lee with Robert L. Caserio, Judith Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz, and Tim Dean. “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory.” PMLA 121.3 (2006): 819 – 828.
    • Puar, Jasbir. “Prognosis Time: Toward a Geopolitics of Affect, Debility, and Capacity.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 19.2 (2009): 161 – 172.
    • Woubshet, Dagmawi. The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015.
  • Elizabeth Losh — Hiding Inside the Magic Circle: Gamergate and the End of Safe Space

    Elizabeth Losh — Hiding Inside the Magic Circle: Gamergate and the End of Safe Space

    by Elizabeth Losh, The College of William and Mary

    The Gamergate controversy of recent years has brought renewed public attention to issues around online misogyny, as feminist game developers, critics, scholars, and fans of independent video gaming have been targeted by very intense campaigns of digital harassment that seem to threaten their fundamental rights to personal privacy, bodily safety, and sexual agency. Feminists under attack by users of the hashtag #GamerGate complain of being silenced, as they report being disciplined for imagined infractions of supposed sexual, social, journalistic, and ludic norms in computational culture with punishing messages of censure, ridicule, exclusion, and violence. As noted by the mainstream news media, extremely aggressive tactics have been deployed, including leaking women’s sensitive private information – such as unlisted addresses and social security numbers – to the web (a practice known as “doxxing”), placing false reports with law enforcement or emergency first responders (a practice known as “swatting”), and highly personalized stalking with rapid escalations of threats of graphic violence that are often sexualized as rape or racialized as lynching. Although it may be important for the eloquent first-person testimony of the terrorized women themselves to be given priority as speech acts that command attention in resisting prevailing misogyny, the women’s antagonists often are allowed to remain invisible. Furthermore, allies presuming to advocate for the feminist victims of Gamergate may not adequately honor their stated wishes for peace, privacy, and closure that those experiencing online violence may express (Quinn 2015). This essay attempts to examine the larger discursive context of Gamergate and why hardcore gamers who were fans of AAA videogames – often with military storylines and first-person shooter game mechanics – constructed a seemingly illogical and paranoid explanatory theory about so-called “social justice warriors” (Bokhari et al. 2015) or “SJWs,” pursuing unfair advantage to sway the game industry.

    How do we understand how Gamergaters’ claims for noninterference and sovereignty in game worlds and online forums function alongside their claims for no-holds-barred investigations and public debates? Common rhetorical tactics deployed by Gamergaters include using rights-based language to further this specific variant of the men’s rights movement (Esmay 2014) and making appeals to the values of a supposedly rational public sphere (MSMPlan 2015). As these hardcore gaming fans deny the materiality, affect, embodiment, labor, and situatedness of new media, they also affirm positive notions about the exceptionalism of a realm defined – in Nicholas Negroponte’s terms – by bits rather than atoms. Gamergaters are particularly vehement in denying that “online violence” is a possibility with tweets such as “>violence >online pick one” and “will you please point me to the online killing fields where all the bodies from violence online are kept?” (Wernimont 2015). The Gamergate vision of digital culture is one of disembodied and immaterial interactions in which emotional harm is considered to be nonviolent.

    According to Gamergate accounts, the assumption that hardcore gamers representing masculine white privilege were under attack was also apparently buttressed by a number of online articles by game journalists suggesting that that the species was endangered and soon to be extinct. Gamers were declared “over” (Alexander 2014), at their “end” (Golding 2014), or facing the “death” of their collective identity (Plunkett 2014). The arguments made for years by feminist game collectives for pursuing the large market share in lower-status “casual” games, often played by women, had finally seemed to create inroads for independent developers. At the same time Gamergaters described their defensive position as a response to what they often characterized as a feminist “incursion” or “invasion” of gaming that was conceptualized as a substantive attack or threat to gamers. So-called “men’s rights” proponents – who may characterize themselves as “Men’s Human Rights Activists” – differentiated themselves from the distributed and heterogeneous population of gamers but also proclaimed that “the same people attacking Gamergate have been attacking us for years, using exactly the same tactics” (Esmay 2014). According to Breitbart columnist Yiannopoulos (2014a), “cultural warriors” arrived on the scene of gaming like “genocidal, psychopathic aliens in Independence Day;” these “social justice warriors” allegedly attempted to colonize a diverse community, but their “killjoy” advances were repelled and defenders declared them “not welcome in the gaming community.” According to this columnist, supposedly “politeness and persistence” had guaranteed victory in “the culture wars against guilt-mongerers, nannies, authoritarians and far-Left agitators.” While Sara Ahmed (2010) has explicitly called for self-identified “feminist killjoys” to disrupt the perpetuation of patriarchal false consciousness and the enforcement of positive affect in society, the perceived opponents of Gamergate are often cast as the aggressors despite what may be deep desires to participate in the gaming communities that exclude them.

    Decades before Gamergate, Dutch game theorist Johan Huizinga (2014) described what he called the “magic circle” of the temporary world constituted by a game, which appears to function as an isolated “consecrated spot” within which “special rules obtain” for performances apart from everyday concerns (10). Gamergaters often use similar terminology to discuss how game spaces should be intended to serve as a refuge from real-world behavioral constraints and the restrictions of social roles, as in the case of one Breitbart blogger seeking to exclude “angry feminists” and “unethical journalists” from interference with game play.

    Gamers, as dozens of readers have told me in the relatively short time I have been covering the controversy now called #GamerGate, play games to escape the frustrations and absurdities of everyday life. That’s why they object so strongly to having those frustrations injected into their online worlds. The war in the gaming industry isn’t about right versus left, or tolerance versus bigotry: it’s between those who leverage video games to fight proxy wars about other things, introducing unwanted and unwarranted tension and misery, and those who simply want to enjoy themselves. (Yiannopoulos 2014a)

    Gamergate advocates claim that video games are expected to be arenas where gamers can assert their sovereignty and self-determination in spaces that can’t be “leveraged” or annexed to “fight proxy wars” by non-gamer outsiders.

    According to Huizinga (2014), the arena of game play is characterized by the freedom of voluntary participation, disinterested behavior, and an opposition to serious conduct. Similar criteria also often are presented as premises for action in the rhetoric of Gamergate enthusiasts in their comments on various sites for public debate. For example, feminist game developers and critics may be accused of coercing and manipulating potential allies who are journalists through sexual liaisons, romantic promises, or appeals to social justice that invoke guilt and shame. Feminist opponents of Gamergaters are also characterized on sites such as Breitbart as “self-promoters” and “opportunists” and labeled as “egotistical” people who “beg for sympathy and cash” (Yiannopoulos 2014b). Thus, according to the logic of free choice, feminist “social justice-oriented art” in digital culture is aimed at “robbing players of agency and individualism” in every possible kind of engagement (Yiannopoulos 2014b).

    Personal freedom and a separation from material interests or a profit motive are often cited as ethical values shared by Gamergate, although many of its tactics are not at all solemn or high-minded. Active Gamergaters on the Escapist and 8chan emphasize their own diverse and distributed structure, and these anarchic swarms of participants take action “for the lulz,” much as members of Anonymous and 4chan have engaged in outing and calling out campaigns (Coleman 2013). Images of feminist gamers are altered with editing software, phrases like “online violence” are mocked, and fake identities are manufactured with puns and inside jokes. For example, in a crowd-funding effort to promote women in games who disavowed feminist “SJWs,” Gamergate forum members created an elaborate green-eyed and hoodie-wearing fictional persona intended to represent a pro-Gamergate libertarian “everywoman.” The avatar dubbed “Vivian James” wears the four-leafed clover of 4chan, “tough-loves video games,” and “loathes dishonesty and hypocrisy” (“The Birth of Vivian” 2015).

    While Gamergaters emphasize “personal responsibility” and “individual agency” (Yiannopoulos 2014b) as values, feminist critics tend to emphasize interdependence and states of being always-already subject to the coercions of others. In Huizinga’s (2014) terms, feminists inside the magic circle may be perceived as “spoil-sports” who must be “ejected” from the “community,” because they are attempting to break the magic world by failing to acknowledge its misogynistic conventions (11-12). As Anastasia Salter (2016) notes, in Huizinga’s analysis the spoil-sport is most visible in “boys’ games,” thereby establishing solidarity around youthful masculinity as the norm.

    By discussing misogyny in different venues for conversation among networked publics in game forums, blogs, or vlogging communities, and even within live multi-player gaming itself, feminists are cast as a disruptive presence.  Social justice warriors must be treated as aggressors to be repulsed by Gamergaters from the magic circles of game worlds in order to reclaim these spaces and return them to their proper exceptional status and thus maintain their security from real-world incursions.

    Of course, the concept of “safe space” has been central to the history of the women’s liberation movement and its associated consciousness-raising efforts. After all, feminists have reasoned that safe space might be necessary to explore intimate issues about sexuality and reproductive health – which might even include techniques for gynecological self-examination championed by foundational texts like Our Bodies, Ourselves – and safe space would also be needed to share confidences about personal histories of rape, domestic violence, and other forms of gendered trauma. How safe space is constituted can be developed along a number of different axes. For example, as awareness about “microaggressions” – a term used to describe the automatic or unconscious utterance of subtle insults (Solorzano, Ceja, & Yosso 2000) – has proliferated, participants at feminist events may be asked to be mindful of their own assumptions, privileges, and power relations in social gatherings. The full sensorium of potential kinds of assault may also be invoked in defining safe spaces, so those speaking loudly or wearing scent may be prohibited from these activities to protect those intolerant, averse, or allergic to certain stimuli.

    Feminists themselves have been reevaluating the assumed need for safe space for a variety of reasons. While media outlets grappling with the concept of “trigger warnings” may characterize any special treatment of vulnerable individuals as coddling or “hiding from scary ideas” (Shulevitz 2015), feminists themselves are often concerned about how the gestures of exclusion mandated by protective impulses enforce particular norms counter to the goal of empowerment. Some argue that “brave spaces” that encourage public acts of asserting identity or declaring solidarity may be more productive than private “safe spaces” (Fox 2004). Homogeneous safe spaces designed for the security of cisgendered whites may be criticized as excluding transgender people (Browne 2009) or people of color (Halberstam 2014). As Betty Sasaki (2002) observes, “safety” can become “the code word for the absence of conflict, a tacit and seductive invitation to collude with the unspoken ideological machinery of the institutional family” (47). And Donadey (2009) points out the irony “that radical feminist pedagogy tends to replicate the assumptions of the bourgeois concept of the public sphere” (214).

    In addition to using the #Gamergate and #SJW (for “social justice warrior”) hashtags on social media platforms such as Twitter, Gamergate adherents frequently use #NotYourShield, which indicates that feminists shouldn’t be shielded from criticism merely because they might claim alliances with underrepresented groups, such as women or minorities, given the fact that members of these groups might not identify with feminism or feel exploited, disenfranchised, or excluded from hardcore gaming communities. #NotYourShield allies of Gamergate may embrace the quintessential hardcore gamer identity of AAA titles with military themes, or may indicate that they are content with conventionally feminized casual games played on mobile devices and don’t want to interfere with so-called “real” games. While Gamergaters may protect the borders of their own magic circles, they criticize those who claim feminist discourse operates in safe spaces devoid of challenges from opponents. Affixing the #NotYourShield piece of metadata to a message supports Gamergaters’ contentions that feminists use the victimization of women and people of color to shield themselves unfairly from rebuttals or tests of truth claims. In videos such as “#NotYourShield – We Are Gamers,” choruses of voices are carefully curated to emphasize “corruption” and “censorship” as features of feminism, and “transparency” and call-out culture as features of Gamergate.

    Although Huizinga’s (2014) magic circle may be more open to public spectatorship than the private sphere of feminist safe space, it is also a zone of exception that is marked off by “secrecy” and “disguise,” according to Homo Ludens (13). Even if the rules for the magic circle are assumed to be uncontested, and the space of play is accepted as apart from the everyday world, the exceptional territory of game play could be a space of less violence (if mockery of authoritarian rulers is tolerated in the case of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque) or more violence (if physical injuries from contact sports are permitted that would normally be prosecuted as assault). Nonetheless, according to Edward Castronova (2007), the membrane of the magic circle “can be considered a shield of sorts, protecting the fantasy world from the outside world. The inner world needs defining and protecting because it is necessary that everyone who goes there adhere to the different set of rules” (147).

    Feminist game critics have begun to question Huizinga’s (2014) concept of a zone of exceptionalism, particularly as the legal, economic, and social consequences of game play are manifested in a variety of “real world” contexts. For example, Mia Consalvo (2009) challenges Castronova’s belief that “fantasy worlds” are a separate domain: “even as he might wish for such spaces, such worlds must inevitably leave the hands of their creators and are then taken up (and altered, bent, modified, extended) by players or users—indicating that the inviolability of the game space is a fiction, as is the magic circle, as pertaining to digital games” (411). Within game spaces of conflict and collaboration, players may bring different agendas into the magic circle, and thus it might be more difficult than Huizinga (or Castronova) imagines to reach consensus about the common rules of play. For example, when a guild of players in World of Warcraft decided to hold a funeral in an area for player-versus-player combat, other participants justified attacking the solemn ceremony in a coordinated raid on the grounds of asserting existing play conventions (Losh 2009). Consalvo further claims the static, formalist vision of bounded play that is grounded in structuralist theory, which is articulated by Huizinga and his disciples, ignores the fact that context is constantly being evaluated by players. Instead of the magic circle, she posits that players “exist or understand ‘reality’ through recourse to various frames” (415).

    For women, queer and transgender persons, and people of color who identify as gamers, neither magic circle nor safe space often seem descriptive of the harsh settings of their game play experiences. As Lisa Nakamura (2012) observes, playing as a woman, a person of color, or a queer person requires extraordinary game skills and talent at a level of hyper-accomplishment because of the extremely rigorous “difficulty setting” of playing in an identity position other than straight white male. Unfortunately, to be an exceptional individual in an exceptional space is often punished rather than rewarded. Moreover, as a woman of color, Shonte Daniels (2014) has insisted that “gaming never was a safe space for women” because “their identity makes them vulnerable to threats or harassment.” However, she also speculates that Gamergate may prove to be “both a blessing and a curse,” given how much attention to online misogyny has been generated by the intensity and egregiousness of Gamergate behavior.

    Many date the Gamergate controversy from fall 2014 – when harassment of dozens of feminists in the videogame industry, including game developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu and cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian, made headlines. However, online misogyny and gender-based aggression have had a long history in digital culture that goes back to bulletin boards, MOOs, and MUDs and the existence of virtual rape in early forms of cyberspace (Dibbell 1998). To coordinate the current campaign of harassment, IRC channels and online forums such as Reddit, 4chan, and 8chan were used by an anonymous and amorphous group that came to be represented by the Twitter hashtag #GamerGate after actor Adam Baldwin deployed a familiar suffix associated with prominent political cover-ups. According to the Wikipedia entry, Gamergate “has been described as a manifestation of a culture war over gaming culture diversification, artistic recognition and social criticism of video games, and the gamer social identity. Some of the people using the Gamergate hashtag allege collusion among feminists, progressives, journalists and social critics, which they believe is the cause of increasing social criticism in video game reviews” (“Gamergate Controversy” 2015).

    It is worth noting that Wikipedia’s handling of its own distributed labor practices defining Gamergate has had a contentious history that included a personal invitation to Gamergaters from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to contribute to improving the Gamergate article (Wales 2014), a pointed rejection of financial contributions to Wikipedia from Gamergaters (“So I Decided to Email Jimbo” 2014), and a defense of banning Wikipedia editors perceived as biased against Gamergate (Beaudette 2014). Ironically, during this intense period of engagement with the “toxic” participants of Gamergate eventually dismissed by Wales, Wikipedia often deployed a rhetoric about volunteerism, disinterested conduct, and playing by a neutral set of rules that paralleled similar rhetorical appeals from Gamergaters.

    Attention to this recent controversy – about who is a gamer and what is a game – has already generated a literature of scholarly response that focuses, as this essay does, on Gamergate rhetoric itself. Shira Chess and Adrienne Shaw’s (2015) essay, “A Conspiracy of Fishes,” analyzes how a particular cultural moment in which “masculine gaming culture became aware of and began responding to feminist game scholars” produced conspiratorial discourses with a specific internal logic that shouldn’t be dismissed as nonsensical:

    It is less useful to consider the validity of a conspiracy in terms of actual persecution, and is more potent if we look at it in terms of a combination of perceived persecution and an examination of the anxieties that the conspiracy is articulating. From this perspective, we can look at gaming culture as a somewhat marginalized group: For years those who have participated in gaming culture have defended their interests in spite of claims by popular media and (some) academics blaming it for violence, racism, and sexism. A perceived threat opens a venue for those who feel their culture has been misunderstood—regardless of whether they are the oppressors or the ones being oppressed. It is easy to negate and mark the claims of this group as inconsequential, but it is more powerful to consider the cultural realities that underline those claims. (217)

    As Chess and Shaw point out, the gamer identity may function in the context of other kinds of intersectional identities in which subjects for which the personal is political can be imagined as oppressors in one context and the oppressed in another.

    In addition to deploying a primary strategy about constructing a narrative about persecution aimed at a marginalized group, Gamergate is also concerned with the secondary strategy of mapping supposed networks of influence across publication venues, media genres, knowledge domains, political spheres, and economic sectors. Such Gamergate infographics seem to have begun with visualizations that were often reminiscent of Wanted posters, in which names and photographs of individual offenders were clustered in particular interest areas. For example, 4chan assembled a list of “SJW Game Journalists” that was republished on Reddit, which goes far beyond the initial allegations of impropriety about game reviewing at Kotaku to target writers at over a dozen other publications.

    As Gamergaters go down the “rabbit hole” of exploring possible connections and exposing hidden networks, they eventually claim political and educational institutions as agents in the conspiracy with a particular focus on DiGRA, the Digital Games Research Association, which was founded in 2003 and holds an international conference each year. One diagram shows the tentacles of DiGRA extending into online venues for gaming news and reviews, such as Kotaku, Gamasutra, and Polygon, as well as mainstream publications with a print tradition, such as The Guardian and TIME, and conference venues for many AAA games, such as the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC), which was founded in 1988 with a focus on fostering more creativity in the industry. Pictures of offender/participants in the network continued to be featured in this denser and more recursive form of network mapping, as though facial recognition would be a key literacy for Gamergaters.

    It is worth noting that many feminists would describe DiGRA as far from being a haven organization from misogyny, given existing biases in game studies that may privilege academics with ties to computer science, corporate start-ups, or other male dominated fields. Members of the feminist game collective Ludica have described strong reactions of denial when they declared at DiGRA in 2007 that the “power elite of the game industry is a predominately white, and secondarily Asian, male-dominated corporate and creative elite that represents a select group of large, global publishing companies in conjunction with a handful of massive chain retail distributors” and thus constitutes a “hegemonic” power that “determines which technologies will be deployed, and which will not; which games will be made, and by which designers; which players are important to design for, and which play styles will be supported” (Fron et al. 2007). The rhetoric of the Ludica manifestos about how games and gamers were being defined too rigidly by an industry enamored of AAA titles often ran counter to the origin stories of organizations such as GDC and SIGGRAPH.

    The third key strategy of Gamergaters – in addition to the fabricating the persecution narrative and the influence maps – is formulating threats of financial retaliation. If liberal members of the press and academic and professional associations in game studies and game development benefit from a supposed flow of money, social capital, and privileged access to career advancement, libertarian Gamergaters will thwart them with economic threats. This creates a paradoxical dynamic in which Gamergaters both assert an ethos of economic disinterest – because gaming is supposed to be a non-profit/non-wage activity that is separate from accumulation of capital in the real world – and seek to exercise their collective power to crowdfund sympathizers, and boycott, divest, and freeze assets of feminist allies and ally organizations. Advertisers are besieged with consumer complaints about the ethics of reporting in game publications, university employees are reported to administrators with accusations about frittering away public funds, and even donations to Wikipedia are withdrawn by indignant Gamergaters.

    Because feminists supposedly use financial interest as a lever, Gamergaters must also use financial interest as a way to assert the fairness, neutrality, and civility of a rational public sphere, which is tied to their fourth strategy about policing discourse. In regulating language in order to keep it freely flowing in a neoliberal marketplace of ideas so that the best notions will be the most valued, hyperbolic and hysterical feminist “strawmanning” and “insulting” very explicitly will not be tolerated by Gamergaters. In insisting that harassers are a statistically insignificant fraction of their movement in a counterfactual account of their power to terrorize targets and dominate channels of communication, language reminiscent of Robert’s Rules of Order can be as commonly encountered in Gamergate discourses as more stereotypical forms of trolling.

    This does not mean that the campaigns of Gamergate to construct us-and-them narratives, to make explicit and to visualize connections in social networks, to block some financial transactions and facilitate others, and to regulate discourse with structures of rational dialogue, leveling effects, and tone policing are not misogynistic. They defend and enable doxxing, swatting, and stalking behaviors that undermine the very barriers between virtual reality and material existence that are central to their contradictory ideologies of exceptionalism and common jurisdiction.

    The need for nurturing diversity among game players and developers (Fron et al. 2007) has been a work in progress for the better part of a decade, but in the wake of Gamergate, hundreds of prominent signatories who asserted the “right to play games, criticize games and make games without getting harassed or threatened” published an “open letter to the gaming community” (IGDA 2014). The fact that this pointed defense of feminist gamers, critics, and designers also used rights-based language might be instructive for better understanding the discursive context of Gamergate as well.

    The Italian biopolitical philosopher Roberto Esposito (2010, 2011) has theorized that two conflicting modalities of “community” and “immunity” operate when members either accept or resist the obligations of the social contract. Looking at the rhetoric of Gamergaters about the magic circle and how they caricature the rhetoric of feminists about safe space, we see how these oppositions are underexamined, and we can ask why opportunities for reflection and reflexive thinking about intersectionality are being foreclosed.

    Works Cited

    • Ahmed, Sara. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press.
    • Alexander, Leigh. 2014. “‘Gamers’ Don’t Have to Be Your Audience. ‘Gamers’ Are Over.” Gamasutra, August 28. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/224400/Gamers_dont_have_to_be_your_audience_Gamers_are_over.php.
    • Bailey, Moya. 2015. “#transform(ing)DH Writing and Research: An Autoethnography of Digital Humanities and Feminist Ethics.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 9, no. 2.
    • Beaudette, Philippe. 2015. “Civility, Wikipedia, and the Conversation on Gamergate.” Wikimedia Blog. January 27. http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/01/27/civility-wikipedia-Gamergate/.
    • Bokhari, Allum, and Milo Yiannopoulos. 2015. “Entertainment Industry Says ‘No More’ to Social Justice Warriors.” Breitbart. July 20. http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2015/07/20/enough-entire-entertainment-industry-says-no-more-to-social-justice-warriors/.
    • Browne, Kath. 2009. “Womyn’s Separatist Spaces: Rethinking Spaces of Difference and Exclusion.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, 34 (4): 541–56.
    • Castronova, Edward. 2007. Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
    • Chess, Shira, and Adrienne Shaw. 2015. “A Conspiracy of Fishes, Or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying About #Gamergate and Embrace Hegemonic Masculinity.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 59, no. 1: 208–20.
    • Coleman, Beth. 2011. Hello Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    • Coleman, E. Gabriella. 2014. Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous. Brooklyn, NY: Verso.
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    • Daniels, Shonte. 2014. “Gaming Was Never a Safe Space for Women.” RH Reality Check. November 4. http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2014/11/10/gaming-never-safe-space-women/.
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    • ———. 2011. Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life. Cambridge; Malden MA: Polity.
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    • ———. 2014b. “The Authoritarian Left Was on Course to Win the Culture Wars… Then Along Came #Gamergate.” Breitbart. November 12. http://www.breitbart.com/london/2014/11/12/the-authoritarian-left-was-on-course-to-win-the-culture-wars-then-along-came-Gamergate/.
  • Chinese Privilege, Gender and Intersectionality in Singapore: A Conversation between Adeline Koh and Sangeetha Thanapal

    Chinese Privilege, Gender and Intersectionality in Singapore: A Conversation between Adeline Koh and Sangeetha Thanapal

     

    Edited by Petra Dierkes-Thrun
    Introduction (by Adeline Koh)

    ~

    Singapore, a tiny Southeast Asian nation-state, is well known for its impressive economic growth since its independence in 1965. Filled with towering skyscrapers, an impressive, well-maintained public transport system and an unemployment rate the envy of most industrialized nations, the small country is often referenced as a model postcolonial state.

    Despite these impressive economic strides, many of the racial tensions that have their roots in Singapore’s colonial history continue to manifest today, especially in relation to gender. Formerly a British colony, Singapore boasts a multi-racial, multi-ethnic population, most of which are classified into four major groups by the state: Chinese, Malay, Indian and ‘Other’. Unlike Singapore’s neighboring countries Malaysia and Indonesia, Singapore’s ethnic Chinese population is the majority ethnic group. These four categories are also constantly being challenged and nuanced by the high level of foreigners who are employed and study in Singapore. Constructions of ethnicities are highly inflected by gender roles in the four major ethnic groups and nuanced by the constant influx of migrants in the country, which include mainland Chinese ‘study mamas’ (mothers accompanying their young children to study in Singapore), female domestic workers from the Philippines and Indonesia, and male construction workers from China, India and Bangladesh.

    Singapore’s ethnic Chinese population enjoys the most economic wealth and social status in this small country, which manifests itself in political and material privilege. Despite the fact that there are four officially sanctioned state languages (English, Mandarin Chinese, Malay and Tamil), television screens on public transport often broadcast shows only in English or Mandarin; increasingly, customer service representatives will be fluent in Mandarin but not the other two official languages; there are multiple reports of taxi drivers refusing to answer calls in areas where there are often more minority people. National beauty pageants also tend to celebrate a Chinese ideal of feminine beauty, as opposed to other ethnicities, so that it becomes exceedingly rare for a minority to win these competitions.

    Scholarly work on race and ethnicity in Singapore seldom discusses this inflection of racial privilege with gender, an extremely important intersection that nuances the structure of minority identity in the country. In this interview, I speak with Sangeetha Thanapal, an Indian Singaporean woman who first introduced the controversial concept of ‘Chinese privilege’ in Singapore. Thanapal holds that structural ethnic Singaporean Chinese’s racial privilege is in some ways analogous to White privilege in Europe, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, despite the important differences in the historical, social, political, and geographic circumstances and developments of these two privileges. Thanapal’s provocative work and the virulent responses it engendered (mainly by Singaporean Chinese), inspired me to write a Medium essay titled ‘To My Dear Fellow Singapore Chinese: Shut Up When A Minority Is Talking About Race’ (which has since garnered over 105,000 page views and 56 recommends). We are now collaborating on a Medium Collection on Chinese Privilege, which seeks to bring to light the stories of minority voices in Singapore.

    Chinese privilege in Singapore is unique because it occurs outside of mainland China and territories which it has historically controlled. In this manner, our interview is intended as the beginning of an examination of a larger Chinese privilege, with its own histories of colonialism and migratory communities. We note that in order to zero in on the current racial and political structures in Singapore, as well as specifically on the complex role of gender, our interview does not focus on the historical development of this privilege per se, or on the obviously important, historically motivated distinctions between different groups of Chinese in Singapore. In the nineteenth century, under British colonialism, southern Chinese immigrated from China to Singapore and Malaysia to escape famine and the effects of the Opium Wars back home, and arrived to a colony in which they were brutally subjugated: the majority of male Chinese immigrants experienced great abuse under a system of indentured labor (the “coolie” system), and many of the (comparatively few) female immigrants were forced into prostitution. While this interview is intended to open up a conversation about monolithic Singaporean Chinese privilege today, we plan a more comprehensive critical historical genealogy of comparative Chinese privilege in our future work in order to elaborate upon these distinctions and developments.

    Furthermore, future work should pursue two additional important lines of inquiry: first, a clear conceptual delineation between Chinese-speaking and English-speaking Singaporeans and the different sorts of privileges which they encounter; and second, a comparison between the historical forces driving the subalternity of the indigenous Malays, and that of the diasporic Indian population. Like the Chinese, many contemporary Indian Singaporeans arrived in the colony as indentured labor, as well as convicts, traders and as sepoys under the British military. Which historical and material conditions allowed the Chinese to appropriate the forms of privilege they enjoy in Singapore today, while Indians could not join or rival them in this privilege in their own Singaporean experience? Further, we want to investigate the sorts of cultural imaginaries that are used in the creation of Singaporean Chinese privilege and its connection with reinventions of mainland Chinese chauvinism (such as in the Chinese term for China, Zhong Guo, meaning Middle Kingdom, center of the world between heaven and hell). We also want to continue building on this concept of Chinese privilege through a simultaneous examination of Tamil-Hindu internal prejudices of the Indian community in Singapore, as well as its relationship with the Malay community.

    In many respects, then, this interview is simply a first step towards a larger, sorely needed conversation about race, gender, and privilege in Singapore. We hope it will inspire others to build on our suggested research trajectories and also develop new ones of their own.

    *******

    Adeline Koh: Sangeetha, thanks so much for speaking with me today. To begin with, could you tell me about your experience being an Indian Singaporean?

    Sangeetha Thanapal: To be Indian Singaporean is to carry a number of identities, not all of whom work in concert with each other. We are expected to keep in touch with our root culture, language and traditions, but never to engage in any kind of ethnic chauvinism. We are expected to be bilingual cosmopolitan citizens of the world, while constantly being grounded in Indian culture. Those who manage to do this effectively are invariably performing a form of code switching between their traditional Indian language-speaking identities and their English-speaking, modern ones. We are told we have to be firmly established in our cultures, but people who follow this advice are seen as provincial. To speak your mother tongue well is to invite questions about how long ago you immigrated from India. It is this tension that we have to constantly negotiate, and many of us cannot or refuse to do so. To be Indian is to have my ethnicity matter in all things, but to be Singaporean is not have it matter at all, supposedly. It is ironic and–given the inability of the state to adequately marry these two binaries–unsurprising that race and ethnicity are difficult concepts to examine and contend with in Singapore.

    AK: Could you elaborate on this?

    ST: The racialism paradox in Singapore makes race front and center of your identity, while at the same time denying that race has anything to do with the obvious differences in people’s treatment. One example is the Singaporean Identity Card, which states your ethnicity.1 This identity card is akin to a Social Security number in the United States (used to apply for housing, bank loans, even something as simple as a phone number), and hence including this information makes someone’s racial identity a dominant factor. It is not hard to imagine the many ways in which this can disadvantage minorities. Even job applications ask for your ethnicity, a practice that is illegal in many countries. Educational achievements are viewed through the lens of race, not gender or class.2 Why does the state constantly racialize us and pit us against one another? This also obfuscates the intertwinement of race and class. For instance, the state says that Malays are underperforming3 in academics, leaving out their constant marginalization leading to such class factors. The Singaporean pledge literally says, ‘regardless of race, language or religion,’ implying that meritocracy trumps race in this alleged land of opportunity. Supposedly, hard work comes with the same opportunities for all. The government has a governance principle: ‘Work for reward, Reward for work.’4 Meritocracy is a neoliberal lie that tends to ignore the systemic inequalities that have strong material effects on people’s ability to live and work in Singapore. It places the blame for failure on those who did not work hard enough or take full advantage of the choices they had, conveniently forgetting that some people did not have a diverse range of choices to begin with.

    AK: It almost seems as though minority Singaporeans have to adopt what W.E.B. Dubois called a ‘double consciousness’–always having to think in terms of the language and social of the dominant group while maintaining their own cultural space. What do you think?

    ST: When Dubois speaks of double consciousness, he is referring to people of colour’s, specifically Black people’s, constant negotiation of conflicting racial identities, often a result of racial oppression. In The Souls of Black Folk, he writes that Black people feel ‘’twoness . . . two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body…’5 It is the struggle between our view of ourselves, versus the dominant racial narrative. Dubois was speaking to people sharing an African history and heritage, of course, and in that context, he also addressed White supremacy and its implication in such double consciousness. In Singapore, Chinese supremacy and institutionalized racism against minorities have resulted in a similar double consciousness. We constantly think about and cater to Chinese people, as they have institutionalized power. In Singapore, the government regularly emphasizes the need for the different ethnic groups to stay in touch with their cultures and traditions, so it is not just Chinese supremacy itself that’s responsible. Personally, I think they don’t actually object to Indians and Malays giving up their cultures; on the contrary: they would probably love it if many of us gave up our cultures to assimilate through marriage or learning Mandarin, for example. The government finds Malay culture a hindrance to its economic growth and would like spread more ‘Chinese’ attitudes of hard work and personal drive. I think the government also wants Chinese people to be steeped in their traditions and are afraid of encroaching westernization. It only cares about keeping minorities’ traditions as long as they are a marketable tourism commodity, but not because they are valuable on their own. The government needs to keep up its multi-racial facade for tourists, who feel like coming to Singapore means that they can access authentic Chinese, Malay and Indian culture, all in the same place.

    AK: Interesting. Dubois talks about ‘twoness’ in relation to race. How would this be further refined in relation to gender? Can you describe the difference between being an Indian Singaporean man and a woman?

    ST: Being an Indian Singaporean woman is to be at the very bottom of the totem pole. Patriarchy and ensuing male privilege means that while Indian men are discriminated against for being Indian, they are also treated better than Indian women, both by the majority Chinese community and within the Singaporean Indian community. Indian women are still fairly restricted in their movements and their lives, expected to be both the modern worker and the traditional housewife. Indian men retain their patriarchal freedom. In Singapore, the hierarchy of race puts the Chinese at the top, Malays in the middle, and Indians at the bottom. Some have argued that Indians have it better than Malays in Singapore, which I think is a valid argument, depending on context. Indians are generally better off than the Malay community in terms of education and economic status, and one might even say that their minority class privilege intersects with the majority Chinese’s.6 In 2010, the average household income for Indians was almost twice as high as in Malay households.7 There is, however, a lot more research regarding Malay marginalization.8 Because of the diasporic Tamil Hindu immigrants’ relatively high socio-economic standing, many people do not think there is discrimination against our ethnic group. What is important is that instead of seeking to compete for attention for our oppression, we study the Chinese dominated state’s specific ways of enacting it against both communities, and validate differing experiences while encouraging a new solidarity.

    As mentioned above, women of different races are treated differently. This kind of colourism and inter-POC (people of colour) policing of skin colour is not new or unique to Singapore, of course. A lot of it is internalized White supremacy: the lighter you are, the higher on the hierarchy you stand. Colourism is a serious problem within the Indian community itself, and, to a lesser extent, within the Malay community as well. White supremacy and Chinese supremacy function in combination here. Darker-skinned Indian and Malay women are constantly bombarded with messages that their skin colour makes them unattractive. Our body shapes, which are naturally curvier, are compared to skinnier, fairer Chinese women’s, and found inadequate. In such body policing, race and gender again intersect and amplify each other. The communities themselves are responsible here, but so are the state and the media. In the 2013 Singapore Miss Universe, there were no Indian or Malay women in the top twenty. Since 1966, which is when Singapore started being represented at the Miss Universe pageant, Malay or Indian women have won the title at home a grand total of four times.9 In 2014, for only the second time ever, an Indian woman won Miss Singapore Universe. She was inundated with disparaging comments on her face and skin colour online.10

    Discrimination against Indian men is mitigated by their gender. Not so women’s: whatever racial discrimination they undergo, it is made yet worse by being female. William Keng Mun Lee of the University of Lingnan argues that in Singapore, women in general are in lower-paying jobs across both core and periphery. This observation, despite the small differences in the educational standards of males and females in Singapore, leads him to theorize that this is due to structural factors such as sexism and discrimination. Interestingly, however, he says that it is also due to ‘Chinese male workers success in protecting their economic success by excluding females from high-paying jobs.’11 Chinese males, not Singaporean men in general, hold wealth and power in the core industries in Singapore. So if Chinese females are being excluded for being women, how much worse is the situation for Indian and Malay women?

    AK: Let’s talk a little bit about the concept you’ve developed, ‘Chinese privilege.’ It’s a terrific concept that can be easily used to explain social inequity in Singapore. How did you come up with the concept of Chinese privilege?

    ST: I remember the exact moment. I was reading bell hooks’ ‘Beloved Community: A World Without Racism.’ I deeply sympathized with what she was saying, even though she was speaking about a different context. I performed a simple experiment. I took a paragraph I particularly loved and I substituted the words ‘Chinese’ for ‘White.’ I read it back to myself, and the moment of realization that that paragraph could have been written about Singapore, and not the U.S., was what made me realize that racial privilege is not simply a White phenomenon. I don’t mean that I never realized it before, only that I had lacked the language to express it in a way that wholly encompassed the experience not as singular, but as universal to minorities here. In Killing Rage: Ending Racism, hooks speaks of ‘supremacist attitudes that permeate every aspect of […] culture’ while ‘most white folks unconsciously absorbing the ideology of white supremacy […] do not realize this socialisation is taking place [… and] feel they are not racist.’12

    Now, I am not going to make the claim that hooks’s ideas are wholly transferable to the Singaporean context. That would be an undue appropriation of the African American experience and erase the specificity of their oppression. But there are enough similarities for me to associate the two phenomena in my mind: the daily microaggressions that minorities experience, employment discrimination, the paradoxical, simultaneous derision and appropriation of their culture.

    While I realize that the concept of White privilege has its own context and history, it really helped me understand the situation in Singapore by analogy. Chinese Supremacist attitudes permeate our society. The PAP believes in keeping the Chinese and their Confucian ethic at the helm, supposedly for our economic growth and success. So-called Special Assistance Plan schools, where all taxpayers’ money pays for Chinese students’ opportunities only, with the argument that this practice enables better trade with China in the future.13 The media constantly laud China as the world’s next superpower, even though economists predict its one-child policy will cause it to fall behind an ever-burgeoning Indian state. And the state continues to make racist comments such as the following: ‘We could not have held the society together if we had not made adjustments to the system that gives the Malays, although they are not as hardworking and capable as the other races, a fair share of the cake.’14 Religion, specifically Islam, is not spared from racist attacks: ‘In those days, you didn’t have a school tuckshop, so you bought two cents of nasi lemak and you ate it. And there was a kway teow man and so on. But now, you go to schools with Malay and Chinese, there’s a halal and non-halal segment and so too, the universities. And they tend to sit separately, not to be contaminated. All that becomes a social divide. Now I’m not saying right or wrong, I’m saying that’s the demands of the religion but the consequences are a veil across and I think it was designed to be so. Islam is exclusive.’15

    Chinese people do not see such comments as racist. Most people see it as normal–common wisdom. If minorities ever raise their voices, they are told to shut up and sit down.

    I started doing a similar analogy exercise with other texts after my experience with bell hooks. In Privilege, Power and Difference, Allan G. Johnson says:

    Being able to command the attention of lower-status individuals without having to give it in return is a key aspect of privilege. African Americans for example, have to pay close attention to whites and white culture and get to know them well enough to avoid displeasing them, since whites control jobs, schools, government, the police, and most other resources and sources of power. White privilege gives little reason to pay attention to African Americans or how White privilege affects them.16

    If you pay attention to minorities in Singapore, the analogy rings so true. We know about Chinese culture, some of us learn Mandarin to make ourselves more employable, we try to understand how the Chinese work, we give in to them when they speak Mandarin around us, never asking them to be sensitive towards us. We know that knowledge of them will help us; they, on the other hand, know very little about our cultures, religions or languages. They do not have to: not knowing it does not affect them in a material way. Reading about the African American experience triggered these important insights about our own situation for me.

    AK: Could you say a little more about how you define Chinese privilege? Does Chinese privilege take place around the world, or is it specific to Singapore?

    ST: I define Chinese privilege similarly as White privilege, again by analogy rather than wholesale transference of one distinct historical context to another. White privilege is invisible and normal to those who have it, which makes it hard to discuss because people rarely see how they are being privileged. It goes beyond advantages people enjoy because of their race. It is also the unearned power the system confers by virtue of your race alone. It is a set of institutional benefits, with greater access to power and resources and opportunity, that are closed off to those who do not have it. In the same vein, these advantages are bestowed upon Chinese Singaporeans, regardless of any other intersectional identity they carry. By virtue of being Chinese in Singapore, they start life on a higher place in the scale as compared to minorities. They are the beneficiaries of a system of racial superiority, which is why when I talk about the country I call it a Chinese Supremacist state.

    Many see Chinese privilege in Singapore as the root cause of Singapore’s economic strength. Lee Kuan Yew is the only man to have ever held three political titles in the government. That alone should signal his significance. He was Singapore’s first Prime Minister, and as such, the chief architect behind modern Singapore. He later became Senior Minister, a title he held until his predecessor Goh Chock Tong ascended to the position. In an attempt to continue keeping him in power, he was then given the title of Minister Mentor in 2004. He has been in power since 1959, and only stepped down in 1990, making him the world’s second longest serving head of state, after Fidel Castro. He is the man who has most impacted Singapore with his policies and his words still continue to hold enormous power and clout. In 1989, he commented that Chinese immigration from Hong Kong to Singapore was necessary, given the low birth rates amongst Chinese Singaporeans: without the Chinese ‘there will be a shift in the economy, both the economic performance and the political backdrop which makes that economic performance possible.’17 Chinese privilege means that problems within the Chinese community are framed as national crises, while problems within minority communities are blamed on culture or genetics, and left to the communities themselves to handle.

    Chinese privilege in Singapore falls into a unique category with Taiwan (and China, of course). Chinese privilege cannot exist in the U.S. or in Europe because Chinese lack institutionalized economic, social and political power in those places. In Singapore, Chinese Singaporeans have power in every facet of life; it is systemic and systematic.

    AK: For me as a Chinese Singaporean, your analysis makes a lot of sense. How does this racial concept of privilege intertwine with other intersectional oppressions, such as gender?

    ST: In 2012, a survey found that women hold just 6.9 per cent of directorships. Moreover, the joint study with advocacy group BoardAgender, found 61.3 per cent of the more than 730 companies listed on the Singapore exchange do not have a single female member on their boards.’18 The survey does not break it down further by race, making the assumption that all women in Singapore are discriminated against only on the basis of their gender, not their race. Singapore has the same gender representation as other places that tend to erase race in favor of gender. In the West, White women often stand in for ‘all women,’ even though they actually earn more than Black and Latino men in the US,19 just as Chinese women are seen as representatives of all women in Singapore, including minorities.

    Recently, an article cited a survey of Singaporean women’s under-representation on company boards. ‘Companies with more diversity in boardrooms are more profitable, but Singapore doesn’t fare so well – 56.5% of the companies surveyed had all-male board members.’20 It was a matter of much discussion. The article itself concluded that ‘we recommend empowering board nominating committees to cast their net wider and pro-actively look for women candidates.’ However, the article also mentions that ‘59% of the boards were of single ethnicity.’ No discussions, no conversations online or in the mainstream media ensued about this, and the article does not even seem to pick up on the potential impact for minorities, let alone minority women. If women’s rights groups such as AWARE (Association of Women for Action and Research) are solely focussed on gender representation, not gender in conjunction with racial imbalance, do we need to wonder why minorities on company boards are so few in number? Who are the women actually being represented here? Clearly, Chinese women are the default here. Given the intersection of gender and race, Indian and Malay women are at a double disadvantage. But that conversation does not happen.

    Feminism in Singapore is about making Chinese women equal to Chinese men, not about equality for all women. Dismantling the Chinese patriarchal structure itself would mean that Chinese women would have to give up their racial power and privilege, too, and they do not want to do that. Chinese women need to realise that they actually have better opportunities than many minority men here. As minority women, we are far more attuned to racism and sexism than Chinese women are, because we fight both those intersections every day, and we see how we are treated not as women, but specifically as Malay or Indian women.

    In the recent Singapore Literature Prize awards, all the winners were male, and a furor about women’s exclusion from these prestigious awards broke out.21 Again, however, there is no furor over the fact that no minority person has even won the English prize for fiction. The closest call was the playwright Haresh Sharma in 1993 and the poet Alfian Sa’at, who was awarded a commendation prize in 1998 (both before the prize was categorized into languages). This year, there was not even one minority on the English short list, either for fiction or non-fiction. Chinese writers are fully represented both in the Chinese and English categories. This is what Chinese privilege looks like in everyday life. There was only one, just one, minority woman, in the entire shortlist across all three categories under the English poetry category.22 Of course, she did not win.

    Chinese women clearly realize the gender disparity in Singapore. But since they see themselves as the only women worth talking about in Singapore, they do not focus on the effects of racial discrimination against other women in Singapore.

    AK: I have seen exactly what you mean–Chinese feminists who remain silent when their minority sisters and brothers are being discriminated against. It makes me so mad. For those who are new to the concept, can you please elaborate a little bit more on the effects of Chinese privilege, and give some concrete examples about how Chinese privilege affects minorities in Singapore?

    ST: Privilege and oppression are two sides of the same coin. If one exists, the other does, too. Chinese privilege means that Singaporean minorities are oppressed. Within minority groups themselves, there are subtle differences. Light-skinned North Indians are treated marginally better than darker-skinned South Indians. The term ‘shit-skin’ is often a slur the Chinese use to describe us. This further intersects with class, as class privilege often mediates racial oppression. Higher-class Indians are treated better, and are often co-opted into Chinese supremacy, or they assimilate themselves by choice by marrying Chinese partners, etc. Those the government co-opts become exemplary tokens of our so called multi-culturalism — but they might as well be Chinese. S Dhanabalan, once almost tapped to be the next Prime Minister of Singapore, is of Indian Tamil descent and was a prominent minority in the government.23 He was supposed to represent the Tamil-Indian population in Singapore. He has a Chinese wife and is Christian, while most Indians in Singapore are Hindus. There is such a lack of proper representation of minorities in Parliament. K Shanmugam, another Minister, was instrumental in the state policing of religious Hindu expressions, such as Thaipusam,24 where he spoke on behalf of the government, all the while claiming to represent Indian Singaporeans. Elite Indians buy into the state rhetoric and enforce it against their own people. The complicity with the Chinese majority interest by those who could have done something for the community ensures farcical representation only, designed to only allow us a voice compatible with the government line.

    AK: The issue of interracial marriage is an interesting one. How do you understand Chinese privilege in relation to marriage and relationships?

    ST: In recent years, the number of interracial marriages in Singapore have risen. This is to be expected–after all, we are a multiracial country with a multitude of races and cultures. In 2012, one in five marriages was interethnic.25 Singapore prides itself on being a postracial society, and within the Indian community, there has been indeed been a strong increase of Indian men dating and marrying Chinese women. And yet, the reverse is rarely true–Chinese men do not usually date or marry Indian women. It is also important to realize that the Indian men who marry Chinese women are by and large extremely well-educated members of the higher Indian-Singaporean socioeconomic classes. Chinese women are not marrying blue-collar Indian men, but rather those considered most eligible. Again, race and class issues are intertwined here. Fanon perhaps explains this phenomenon best in Black Skin, White Masks: for Black men, relationships with white women are often about the need for recognition and indirectly, the desire for assimilation.26 I believe this is true in the Singapore context. Indian men who date Chinese women are desperate to assimilate. They instinctively realize the privilege of being Chinese, and unable to access it any other way, aspire to marry a Chinese woman. They do not have to experience racism as much when their wives’ Chinese privilege protects them, and it gives them access to opportunities that are usually reserved for Chinese people. They are effectively deracializing themselves.

    Heterosexual patriarchy is also at work here. Women are expected to marry up wherever possible. Indian women occupy the lowest rung of the Singaporean race hierarchy, and Chinese men occupy the highest. For a Chinese man to date and marry an Indian woman means to marry far beneath his status. Chinese women of a middling socio-economic class can move up a class by marrying the wealthiest indian men in the country. These Indian men, lacking racial privilege, which is itself a ‘property right’,27 can also move up the racial class through gaining access to their wives’ racial privilege. Chinese men gain nothing and lose everything by marrying an Indian girl, while Indian men gain access to racial privilege and Chinese women to class privilege by marrying rich Indian men. But what about Indian women? Singapore does not break down interracial marriages by gender, which obfuscates this racist situation, but the number of people needing to marry into Chineseness shows how powerless the minority communities really are. Indian women like me do not usually have access to the same opportunities Indian men have. Again, we observe the complex intertwinement of sexual, class, and race discrimination here, and the internal paradoxes and contradictions to official postracial, egalitarian Singaporean rhetoric are obvious.

    AK: One interesting theme repeated here is that representation is either always Chinese or White. What do you think is the relationship of Chineseness to Whiteness in Singapore?

    ST: Generally speaking, I think that Chinese Singaporeans do not seem to struggle with reconciling Whiteness and Chineseness. I believe this is the case because Chineseness is seen as equal, and in certain aspects even superior to Whiteness. Whiteness is liked, welcomed, and used as a stamp of approval, but the liberal political ‘Western values’ frequently clash with our ‘Asian values.’ Chinese people tend to see themselves as victims of White racism (while at the same time refusing to recognize their own racism regarding other minorities in Singapore, as I outlined above). White expatriates work well-paying jobs and live in the most expensive apartments in Singapore. They are treated very well everywhere they go in Singapore, because the ‘White is better’ mindset still exists here. Chineseness functions the same way in Singapore as Whiteness, sometimes even more so, since the Chinese are the true owners of power here while White people are long-time beneficiaries of that power.

    As a person of colour living in a supposedly decolonized Singapore, I would say that what makes our struggles markedly different from minorities in the West is that we have to deal with Whiteness on top of Chinese supremacy. So we experience a double racial oppression. I often say minorities here have been colonised twice, once by the British, and once again by the Chinese. What other decolonised state has a completely alien population control political and economic power, while the formerly decolonized indigenous people remain continuously marginalized? The language of Critical Race Theory can only take us so far in Singapore. We need to start coining our own terminology and framework for talking about racism in Singapore. This conversation has just only begun.

    AK: When you complicate this issue of privilege by bringing gender into the picture, how do things shift for women, regarding White privilege and Chinese privilege?

    ST: Intersections always make things complicated, especially for people who carry multiple oppressed identities, and so these shifts are difficult to quantify. White women have more privilege than Chinese women. Chinese women have more privilege than Indian and Malay women. Even among Indian and Malay women, the comparative amount of privilege is hard to pin down. Indians in Singapore are by and large Tamil, the darkest Indians from the subcontinent. Malay women are generally fairer, a light brown compared to the dark brown of most Indian women here. Due to colourism, Malay women might thus have a tad more privilege. But at the same time, this can be negated by something simple as wearing the hijab. Singapore is suspicious of Malay Muslims, and Malay women who wear the hijab are seen as conservative and oppressed. Indian women, however, are not seen as religiously fanatical, even if they are in ethnic attire, as Hinduism is not seen as the same kind of threat as Islam.

    AK: Can you talk about people who inhabit in-between racial spaces, for example people who might be of one ethnicity but can pass for another? How does racism affect them in Singapore?

    ST: Passing is a mixed bag, and it is present across all intersectionally oppressed identities. To put it simply, passing is the ability to be able to ‘pass’ as your oppressors, even though you carry an identity and occupy a space as the ‘other.’ There are many people of mixed race in Singapore, especially a group of people in Singapore called ‘Chindians’, which is a term for people who are Indian and Chinese, and who can pass for Chinese and thus have access to Chinese privilege. People like ‘Chindians’ can effectively move between the worlds of oppressors and oppressed. It is really difficult for people who pass, because they are always fighting to have their entire identities validated.

    AK: We are nearing the end of our conversation. What messages would you like to give to young minorities in Singapore?

    ST: Audre Lorde said that our silence will not protect us. This is true no matter who we are. When you are silent, you are complicit. Inaction against oppression is collusion with oppression.

    To young minorities in Singapore, I would say: you can start small. Call out Chinese people when they behave micro-aggressively. Call out our own people when we show stereotypical prejudices towards Malays, Indians and other minorities. Many Indians believe the Malays are better positioned because of their supposedly free education, even though that policy actually ended a long time ago. Malays believe the Indians are the preferred minority, because there are more high-profile and prominent Indians, and because Indians are compared favorably to Malays, to blame Malays for their alleged lack of progress. Indians are merely the token minority, there only because the state needs to have some public minorities to salvage its international reputation. Indians see Malays as having some sort of special advantage because the state protects their religion, and because they are indigenous to this part of the world. The Chinese supremacist state uses such highly problematic comparisons for its own ends. It wants to keep us from finding solidarity with each other. It wants us to be suspicious of each other. But divide- and-rule tactics only work when we buy the Chinese supremacist state’s lines of thinking and argument.

    Zora Neale Hurston said that when you are silent, they will kill you and say you enjoyed it. Every time you remain silent, they believe they have the right to treat you this way, and worse than that, that you want to be treated this way. Again, to the Singaporean youth I would say, do not be afraid, and do not be silent. This country has gone through four generations since independence, and with each, it has become less willing to talk about its serious race problems. That needs to change. The conversation needs to happen. You cannot sit back and let a few of us take all the hits. Hit us long and hard enough, and without the support from our own communities, we will inevitably cower, too. It is unconscionable for you to let others fight your oppression, while you wait to reap the rewards of what may come. Realise that we can only do this together, or we cannot do it at all.
    _____

    Notes:

    1. “National Registration Identity Card.” Wikipedia. Accessed Jan. 15, 2015. Back to the essay

    2. Ministry of Education, Singapore: Press Releases – Performance by Ethnic Group in National Examinations 2002-2011.” Oct. 29, 2012. Accessed Feb. 22, 2015. http://www.moe.gov.sg/media/press/2012/10/performance-by-ethnic-group-in.php. Back to the essay

    3. Zakir Hussain, “No Short Cut to Raising Malays’ Maths Grades,” in The Straits Times, Dec. 18, 2009. Accessed Feb. 22, 2015. http://news.asiaone.com/News/Education/Story/A1Story20091214-185790.html Back to the essay

    4. Hsien Loong Lee, “Singapore’s Four Principles Of Governance.” Civil Service College, Nov. 1, 2004. Accessed Feb. 22, 2015. https://www.cscollege.gov.sg/knowledge/ethos/ethos november 2004/pages/singapore four principles of governance.aspx Back to the essay

    5. W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Library, 1996), 9. Back to the essay

    6. Education Statistics Digest.” Ministry of Education, Singapore, Jan. 1, 2013. Accessed Feb. 22, 2015. http://www.moe.gov.sg/education/education-statistics-digest/files/esd-2013.pdf Back to the essay

    7. Demographics of Singapore.” Wikipedia. Accessed Jan. 14, 2015. Back to the essay

    8. See L. Rahim, The Singapore Dilemma: The Political and Educational Marginality of the Malay Community (Oxford University Press, 2001) for an excellent discussion on oppression of the Malay community. Back to the essay

    9. “Miss Singapore Universe.” Wikipedia. Accessed Jan. 16, 2015. Back to the essay

    10. Surekha Yadav, “Is Singapore a Racist Country?” Malay Mail Online, Aug. 30, 2014. Accessed Feb. 22, 2015. http://www.themalaymailonline.com/opinion/surekha-a-yadav/article/is-singapore-a-racist-country Back to the essay

    11. William Keng Mun Lee, “Gender Inequality And Discrimination In Singapore,” in Journal of Contemporary Asia 28, no. 4 (1998): 484-97. Back to the essay

    12. bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 267. Back to the essay

    13. “Special Assistance Plan.” Wikipedia. Accessed Jan. 15, 2015. Back to the essay

    14. Tom Plate, “The Fox and the Hedgehog (Not a Disney Movie),” in Giants of Asia; Conversations with Lee Kuan Yew Citizen Singapore; How to Build a Nation. 2nd ed. (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish International [Asia] Ptd, 2013), 61. Back to the essay

    15. Kuan Yew Lee and Fook Kwang Han, Lee Kuan Yew: Hard Truths to Keep Singapore Going, 1st ed. (Singapore: Straits Times, 2011), 230. Back to the essay

    16. Allan G. Johnson, Privilege, Power, and Difference. 2nd ed. (Boston, Mass.: McGraw-Hill, 2006), 24. Back to the essay

    17. Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh, Floating on a Malayan Breeze Travels in Malaysia and Singapore (Singapore: NUS Press, 2012), 194. Back to the essay

    18. Joe Havely, “Singapore Lags in Board Diversity,” Singapore Lags in Board Diversity. Think Business, National University of Singapore, Business School, Mar. 7, 2012. Accessed Feb. 22, 2015. http://thinkbusiness.nus.edu/articles/item/7-singapore-boardroom-diversity Back to the essay

    19. Derek Thompson, “The Workforce Is Even More Divided by Race Than You Think,” in The Atlantic, Nov. 6, 2013. Accessed Jan. 15, 2015. Back to the essay

    20. Yen Nee Lee, “Companies with More Diverse Boards Fare Better: Study.” TODAY Online, Sept. 29, 2014. Accessed Feb. 22, 2015. http://tablet.todayonline.com/business/companies-more-diverse-boards-fare-better-study Back to the essay

    21. Corrie Tan, “Gender Bias Allegations over Singapore Literature Prize English Poetry Results,” Books News & Top Stories, in The Straits Times, Nov. 6, 2014. Accessed Feb. 23, 2015. http://www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/books/story/gender-bias-allegations-over-singapore-literature-prize-english-poetry-results Back to the essay

    22. “Singapore Literature Prize,” Wikipedia. Accessed Jan. 16, 2015. Back to the essay

    23. “S. Dhanabalan,” Wikipedia. Accessed Feb. 23, 2015. Back to the essay

    24. “The Uproar Over Thaipusam.” The Online Citizen, Jan. 21, 2011. Accessed Feb. 23, 2015. http://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2011/01/the-uproar-over-thaipusam/ Back to the essay

    25. Theresa Tan, “More Mixed Unions, Remarriages Based on Latest Marriage Data,” in The Sunday Times, Sept. 30, 2012, Special Reports section. Back to the essay

    26. Frantz Fanon, “The Man of Color and the White Woman,” in Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove, 2008), 45-60. Back to the essay

    27. Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” in Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1707-791. Back to the essay

  • Transgender Studies Today: An Interview with Susan Stryker

    Transgender Studies Today: An Interview with Susan Stryker

    _____________________________________________________________________________________

    Petra Dierkes-Thrun interviews Susan Stryker, leader of an unprecedented initiative in transgender studies at the University of Arizona, and one of two founding co-editors of the new journal TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (together with Paisley Currah). Stryker is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, and Director of the Institute for LGBT Studies at the University of Arizona. The author or editor of numerous books and articles on transgender and queer topics for popular and scholarly audiences alike, she won an Emmy Award for the documentary film Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, a Lambda Literary Award for The Transgender Studies Reader, and the Ruth Benedict Book Prize for The Transgender Studies Reader 2.
    _____________________________________________________________________________________

    Transgender Studies initiative at the University of Arizona. Left to Right (Front): Paisley Currah, Susan Stryker, Monica Casper, Francisco Galarte; (Back): Eric Plemons, Max Strassfeld, Eva Hayward. Not pictured: TC Tolbert.
    Transgender Studies initiative at the University of Arizona. Left to Right (Front): Paisley Currah, Susan Stryker, Monica Casper, Francisco Galarte; (Back): Eric Plemons, Max Strassfeld, Eva Hayward. Not pictured: TC Tolbert. Photo by Paisley Currah.

     

    DIERKES-THRUN:  The University of Arizona recently initiated an unprecedented cluster hire in transgender studies and is actively working towards a graduate degree program in transgender studies. Can you tell us a bit more about the history and the thinking behind this strong, coordinated move at your institution?

    STRYKER: After the University of Arizona (UA) recruited me away from my previous job to direct the Institute for LGBT Studies in 2011, I came in saying that I wanted to put equal emphasis on the “T” in that acronym, and they were supportive of that. But none of us anticipated that the T was going to become the tail that wagged the dog, so to speak. It would not have happened had I not been courted by another, much more prestigious university during my second year on the job. UA asked what it would take to retain me, and I said I wanted to do something unprecedented, something I would not be able to do at that other university, something that would transform my field, while also putting UA on the map in a bold new way. I said I wanted to launch a transgender studies initiative, which represents my vision of the field’s need to grow. The institution said yes to what I proposed, and to the upper administration’s credit, they saw an opportunity in what I pitched.

    The truly unprecedented institutional commitment came in the form of strategic hiring support for a transgender studies faculty cluster. As UA has been quick to point out to conservative critics of this initiative, no new funds were identified to create these faculty lines—they came from existing pools of discretionary funds, and represent a shifting towards emerging areas of study of faculty lines freed up by retirement or resignation. That said, no university anywhere in the world has ever conducted a faculty cluster hire in transgender studies. Four lines were made available: two in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and two in colleges elsewhere in the University. We wound up filling three of those positions last year—hiring in medical anthropology, feminist science and technology studies, and religious studies—and are in negotiations about where to place the remaining line.

    UA has a strong institutional culture of interdisciplinary collaboration, as well as a good track record of supporting LGBT issues, so this fit right in. They understand that transgender issues have a lot of cultural saliency at the moment, and that studying the rapid shifts in contemporary gender systems, including the emergence of historically new forms of gender expression, particularly in the context of the biomedical technologization of “life itself,” is a legitimate field of study and research. Pragmatically, they saw the initiative as a way to attract and retain innovative and diverse faculty members, to bring in out-of-state tuition dollars, to compete for external research grants, and to push back against the popular misconception that Arizona is only a politically reactionary place. From the institution’s perspective, there was no advocacy agenda at work here, just an opportunity to increase the bottom line by building on existing faculty and research strengths.

    The lowest-hanging fruit, which can be accomplished with relatively little bureaucracy, is a graduate concentration, minor, or designated emphasis in transgender studies, and there is definitely support for that. We hope to have that in place within a year. It is also possible that a currently existing MA program in Gender and Women’s Studies could be adapted relatively easily to accommodate a transgender studies emphasis, but that involves a lot of inside-the-ballpark negotiation with current GWS faculty. Actually creating a new, stand-alone graduate program at the state’s land grant university would require approval by the Arizona Board of Regents, and ultimately by the Governor’s Office, so that will be a longer and tougher row to hoe.

    The final element of the initiative is approval to pursue establishing a new research enterprise called the “Center for Critical Studies of the Body.” The rationale here was to provide a non-identitarian rubric that could bring transgender studies into dialog with other interdisciplinary fields, such as the study of disability, trauma, sports, medical humanities, etc. No funds were provided for this, just a green light for starting the process of cobbling a center together.

    Of course, it’s vital to ask the question why, in an era when the teaching of Chicano/a studies is literally being outlawed in Arizona public schools, when xenophobic attitudes inform the state’s border politics, attention to transgender identities and practices can appear palatable. How does institutional investment in transgender studies at this particular historical juncture play into a deep logic of “managing difference” through expert knowledges, or get positioned as less threatening than calls for racial and economic justice? As the person heading up this initiative, I want to be attentive to ways I can use trans studies to advance other concerns that currently have a harder time getting traction in Arizona. I think my deepest challenge in trying to spearhead this initiative lies in resisting the ways that transgender studies can be co-opted for neoliberal uses that fall short of its radical transformative potential.

    DIERKES-THRUN: The University of Arizona also provided financial and logistical support for the establishment of a new journal of record for the field of transgender studies, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, published by Duke University Press in 2014, with you and Paisley Currah (Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center) as founding co-editors. How did that come about?

    STRYKER: Launching this journal had been a long-term project of mine and Paisley’s and was already well underway before the opportunity to launch the broader transgender studies initiative came up, but it nevertheless constitutes an important element of what has become the bigger project. UA has significantly supported the establishment of  TSQ by contributing about one-third of the start-up costs. Those funds were cobbled together from a lot of different institutional sources, including the Provost’s Office, the office of the Vice President for Research, the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Institute for LGBT Studies.

    DIERKES-THRUN: For our readers who are just now becoming acquainted with transgender studies as a diverse intellectual and academic field, how would you summarize its most important constants and changes over the past two decades? What are some important subareas and affiliated fields for transgender studies?

    STRYKER: I’d recommend taking a look at the tables of contents in the two volumes of The Transgender Studies Reader. The first volume, from 2006, offers a genealogy of field formation, highlighting historical ties to scientific sexology, feminism, and poststructuralist theory.

    It includes work from the “transgender moment” of the early 1990s that changed the conversation on trans issues and tackles many of the topics that were of interest in the field’s first decade—questions of self-representation, diversity within trans communities, the increasing visibility of trans-masculinities. The second volume, from 2013, showcases the rapid evolution of the field in the 21st century, which is self-consciously moving in strongly transnational directions away from the Anglophone North American biases of the field’s first decade. There has been much more attention paid to the relationship between transgender issues and other structural forms of inequality and injustice, and, post 9/11, to questions about borders, surveillance, and security—and the ways that non-conventionally gendered bodies experience heightened scrutiny and limitations on movement, and can be seen as posing a terroristic threat to the body politic. There are increasing affinities with posthumanist work, as well as with animal studies, critical life studies, and the so-called “new materialism.” The first several issues of TSQ suggest something of current directions in the field: they address decolonization, cultural production, population studies, transanimalities, higher education studies, archives, transfeminism, political economy, sex classification, translation, surgery, sinophone studies, and psychoanalytic theory.

    DIERKES-THRUN: Can you say something about the trans- and international context of transgender studies today? What are the most important challenges there and why should we be thinking about them?

    STRYKER: The field has indeed been moving in a strongly transnational direction for more than a decade. I was particularly pleased that The Transgender Studies Reader 2 was awarded the 2013 Ruth Benedict Prize from the Association for Queer Anthropology/American Anthropological Association, precisely because the field of transgender studies challenges us to think anew about how we understand sex/gender/identity cross-culturally. I think one of the biggest intellectual challenges has to do with fully acknowledging that some of the fundamental categories that we use to understand “human being”—like man and woman—are not ontologically given, but rather are themselves historically and cultural variable and contingent. Translation is also a huge problem—how do we facilitate the exchange of knowledge across language and culture, when the very categories we use to organize and recognize our own being and that of others can be so deeply incommensurable?

    DIERKES-THRUN: In the introduction to the inaugural issue of TSQ, the editors write, “Transgender studies promises to make a significant intellectual and political intervention into contemporary knowledge production in much the same manner that queer theory did twenty years ago.” What are some of the most needed intellectual and political interventions that you anticipate transgender studies can and will make?

    TSQ coverSTRYKER: First and foremost, I see it creating more space for critical conversations that involve transgender speakers. Bringing trans studies into the academy is one way of bringing more trans people into the academy. Of course I’m not arguing that trans studies is something that on trans people can participate in. Far from it—anybody can develop an expertise in this area, or feel that they have some sort of stake in it. But just as disability activists said in the 70s and 80, “nothing about us without us.” What’s most significant is creating an opportunity for the privileged and powerful kinds of knowledge production that takes place in the academy (about trans topics or any other area that involves people) to be not just objectifying knowledge, what we might call “knowledge of,” but also “knowledge with,” knowledge that emerges from a dialog that includes trans people who bring an additional kind of experiential or embodied knowledge along with their formal, expert knowledges. It’s the same rationale for any kind of diversity hiring initiative. People have different kinds of “situated knowledges” that derive from how they live their bodily differences in the world. It’s important to have people in critical conversations who come from different perspectives based on race/ethnicity, gender, ability, national origin, first languages, etc. Transgender represents a different kind of difference that offers a novel perspective on how gender systems, and therefore society, work.

    DIERKES-THRUN: You also say, in the same TSQ introduction, that transgender studies “offers fertile ground for conversations about what the posthuman might practically entail (as well as what, historically, it has already been).” The posthuman is a topic of interest to many of our readers. Could you map out for us what specific or broader contributions transgender studies can make to past and future discussions of the posthuman?

    STRYKER: The first thing we say of a new child is “It’s a girl” or It’s a boy.” Through the operation of language, we move a body across the line that separates mere biological organism from human community, transforming the status of a nonhuman “it” into a person through the conferral of a gender status. It has been very difficult to think of the human without thinking of it through the binary gender schema. I think a lot of the violence and discrimination trans people face derives from a fundamental inability on the part of others to see us as fully human because we are considered improperly gendered, and thus lower on the animacy hierarchy, therefore closer to death and inanimacy, therefore more expendable and less valuable than humans. A transgender will to life thus serves as a point from which to critique the human as a universal status attributed to all members of the species, and to reveal it instead as a narrower set of criteria wielded by some to dehumanize others.

    DIERKES-THRUN: The journal description announces that TSQ “will publish interdisciplinary work that explores the diversity of gender, sex, sexuality, embodiment, and identity in ways that have not been adequately addressed by feminist and queer scholarship.” What have been some of feminist and queer theory’s most important blind spots when it comes to thinking about the transgender experience?

    STRYKER: Transgender Studies emerged as an interdisciplinary field in the early 1990s, at roughly the same time as queer theory. There’s been a robust conversation about the relationship between the two, especially given the simultaneous formation of what’s come to be called the “LGBT” community. I contend that trans studies, as it was first articulated, shared an agenda with queer studies in the sense that it critiqued heteronormative society from a place of oppositional difference. It argued that “queer” was not just a five letter word for homosexual, but rather that queer encompassed a range of “different differences” that all had a stake in contesting various sorts of oppressive and coercive normativities related to sex, sexuality, identity, and embodiment. As queer theory developed, however, issues of sexuality really did remain in the forefront. From a transgender studies perspective, the whole distinction between homo and hetero sexualities depends on a prior agreement about what constitutes “sex,” on who’s a man and who’s a woman. Destabilizing those material referents, or needing to account for their sequentiality, their fuzzy boundaries, their historicity or cultural specificity, or their hybridity really opens up a whole different set of questions. In addition, trans studies is not organized primarily around issues of sexuality; equally important are questions of gender, bodily difference, heath care provision, technology studies, and a host of other things that have not been central to queer studies. So the debate between queer and trans studies has been about whether they are different parts of the same big intellectual and critical project, employing the same transversal methodologies for bringing into analytical focus and contesting oppressive normativities, or whether they overlap with one another—sharing some interests but not others—or whether they are really two different enterprises, concerned with different objects of study.

    My personal answer is all of the above, sometimes. At its most radical, trans studies offers a critique of the ways in which gay and lesbian liberation and civil rights struggles have advanced themselves by securing greater access to citizenship for homosexuals precisely through the reproduction of gender normativities—the liberal “I’m just like a straight person except for who I have sex with” argument. What actually provides the commonality there between homo and hetero is an agreement about who is a man and who is a woman, and how we can tell the difference between the two. Trans studies puts pressure on that tacit agreement.

    With regard to feminism, I think the major innovation transgender studies offers has to do with how gender hierarchies operate. In the most conventional feminist frameworks, what has seemed most important is to better understand and thereby better resist the subordination of women to men. Without contesting that basic tenet, transgender studies suggests that it is also necessary to understand how contesting the hierarchized gender binary itself can increase vulnerabilities to structural oppression for those people who don’t fit in, or who refuse to be fixed in place. That is, in addition to needing to address power structures that privilege normatively gendered men and masculinity over normatively gendered women and femininity, we also need to address a wide range of gender nonnormativities, atypicalities, transitivities, and fluidities. I see this as extending, rather than challenging, fundamental feminist insights.

    DIERKES-THRUN: Many of our readers may not know this, but traditionally, the relationship between queer theory and transgender studies and activism has been quite contentious. Is the fact that there is now a separate academic journal for trans studies indicative of an ongoing divide with queer studies, despite what you call the recent “transgender turn”?

    STRYKER: There’s a big enough and deep enough conversation on trans topics to merit and sustain an independent journal for the field, that’s all. There is more publishable scholarship on trans issues and topic than will ever fit into GLQ, given that journal’s broader scope, or that can ever fit into one-off special issues of disciplinary or interdisciplinary journals devoted to trans topics. Worrying that the advent of TSQ signals a divergence or parting of the ways between queer and trans studies is an overblown concern. Personally, I’d hate to see queer and trans studies drift further apart, because I feel strongly committed to both. I think trans studies is expansive enough to encompass a lot of queer scholarship on sex/gender nonnormativity, while also advancing scholarship on transgender-related topics that queer studies has never been particularly interested in.

    DIERKES-THRUN: As someone who has worked as a historian, social activist for trans rights and documentary filmmaker on trans history, how would you describe the state of our society’s understanding and attitudes towards transgender today? Does it feel like the tide has finally shifted?

    STRYKER: I think it is a mixed bag. Pretty much everybody today knows that there is this thing called “transgender”, but they can’t say exactly what it is. They know if they want to be considered progressive they are supposed to be OK with it, even if they secretly feel squeamish or judgmental or confused. That’s an improvement over the situation in decades past, when pretty much everybody agreed that there were these sick people and freaks and weirdoes who wanted to cross-dress or take hormones or cut up their genitals, but they were not important, and society really didn’t have to pay any attention to such a marginal and stigmatized phenomenon. So yes, there has been a shift, but yes, there is still a long way to go.

    DIERKES-THRUN: Which projects are you working on now?

    STRYKER: I have a really heavy administrative load right now. I was already trying to run a research institute, teach, commute between my job in Tucson and my home in San Francisco, and launch a new peer-reviewed journal, before the trans studies initiative became a possibility. That has definitely been a “be careful what you ask for” lesson, in terms of workload. I feel like I don’t write anything these days that doesn’t start with the words “Executive Summary” and end with the words “Total Budget.” It will probably be like that for a couple more years, especially until I complete my agreed-upon term of service as director of the Institute for LGBT Studies at the end of 2016.

    But there are a couple of projects percolating along on the back burner. At the time I came to Arizona, I was working on an experimental media project called Christine in the Cutting Room, about the 1950s transsexual celebrity Christine Jorgensen, who burst onto the global stage when news of her sex-change surgery made headlines around the world. The project was sparked for me by a comment Jorgensen made in an interview with television journalist Mike Wallace. She was talking about her pre-fame job as a film cutter in the newsreel division at RKO Studios in New York, and said that she “used to work on one side of the camera” because she “didn’t know how to appear on the other side.” That gave me the idea of approaching the question of transsexuality from an aesthetic perspective, as a technique of visualization, accomplished through media manipulation. I saw Jorgensen using cinematic techniques of media cutting, suturing, image creation, and projection to move her from one side of the camera to the other, by moving herself from one kind of “cutting room” to another. I have always been interested in ways of exploring trans experience outside the pervasive psychomedical framework, and this project lets me do that. I mix archival audiovisual media of Jorgensen herself, found sound and images, electronic glitch music, and a scripted voice-over narration performed by an actress playing Jorgensen. At some point I hope to edit this material into a narrative film, but I have found it also works well as a multimedia installation in galleries and clubs.

    I am also trying to write a book. I’ve finally hit on a way to piece together into one overarching argument lots of fragments of abandoned or incomplete projects on embodiment and technology, the early Mormons, members of San Francisco’s elite Bohemian Club, transsexuals, urban history, and popular music. My working title is Identity is a War Machine: The Somatechnics of Gender, Race, and Whiteness. It’s about the processes through which we incorporate—literally somaticize—culturally specific and historically revisable categories of individual identity within biopolitical regimes of governmentality. I won’t say any more about it at this time, because this book itself could be one of my many unfinished projects.

    DIERKES-THRUN: Transgender as a topic of public curiosity seems to be everywhere in U.S. media culture these days, from Laverne Cox and Orange Is the New Black to Chelsea Manning, Andreja Pejic and others. (There is also a lot of naïve conflation with drag and cross-dressing, as the media treatment of Conchita Wurst illustrates.) Do you worry about the glamorization and commodification of certain kinds of trans bodies in the media and the silence around others? Are famous celebrity spokespeople like Laverne Cox or Janet Mock good or bad for the movement, from your perspective?

    STRYKER: In the wake of the repeal of the U.S. military’s Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell policy regarding homosexual service members, and after the Supreme Court decisions on marriage equality, transgender has emerged in some quarters as the “next big thing” in minority rights. I have a lot of problems with that way of framing things, and am very leery of the ways that story functions as a neoliberal progress narrative, and of the ways in which protecting trans people (now that gays have been taken care of) can exemplify the values of inclusivity and diversity, so that the US or the West can use support for trans rights to assert influence over other parts of the world who purportedly do not do as good a job on this front. What is truly amazing to me, after having been out as trans for nearly a quarter century, is the extent to which it is now becoming possible for some trans people to access what I call “transnormative citizenship,” while at the same time truly horrific life circumstances persist for other trans people. Race really does seem to be the dividing line that allows some trans people to be cultivated for life, invested in, recognized, and enfolded into the biopolitical state, while allowing others to be consigned to malignant neglect or lethal violence. The contemporary celebrity culture of transgender plays to both sides of this dichotomy. It’s increasingly possible to see trans people represented as successful, beautiful, productive, or innovative (and I salute those trans people who have accomplished those things). At the same time, you see people like Laverne Cox and Janet Mock using their platform to call attention the persistence of injustices, particularly for trans women of color. I am truly inspired by the way they both speak out on race, classism, the prison-industrial complex, and sex-work.

  • Feminist Emancipation and Performance in Russia

    Feminist Emancipation and Performance in Russia

    Pussy Riot Meets Judith Butler and Rosi Braidotti

    ~

    Organized and published by The First Supper Symposium: “creating spaces for female voices in the art world.”

    Previous: Performing Philosophy: Masha Gessen’s Words Will Break Cement (The Passion of Pussy Riot).

  • Exploring New Boundaries in Gender and Sexuality Studies

    Exploring New Boundaries in Gender and Sexuality Studies

    –

    Petra Dierkes-Thrun commits The b2 Review to a focus on Gender & Sexuality:

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    It is with great pleasure that I have agreed to join the collective as an advisory editor to launch a new online initiative for Gender and Sexuality Studies for The b2 Review. While boundary 2 has a longstanding interest in the best scholarly work of any kind, it is both fitting and necessary that gender and sexuality become a more obvious area of interest for the journal’s intellectual inquiry. The new Gender and Sexuality section aims to provide a flexible and mobile platform for the discussion of important new work both in feminist and LGBTQ studies. We will publish brief essays on current trends or events, interviews, and reviews of interesting books and other projects (including digital ones), keeping in mind boundary 2’s commitment to identifying and pinpointing important contemporary intellectual, conceptual and performative topics and trends that affect society at large.

    Our first project, a collage in memory and tribute to the late queer, critical race, and performance studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz, was already published in March. This month, we offer Alice E. Underwood’s book review of Masha Gessen’s journalistic work on the Russian feminist punk rock collective Pussy Riot, whose famous trial and incarceration highlighted troublesome trends and anti-feminist attitudes in Putin’s contemporary Russia. Upcoming projects include an interview with professor and activist Susan Stryker concerning recent trends in transgender studies at the University of Arizona and in academia in general, as well as the historical and conceptual relationship between trans theory and queer theory. Further future topics for our Gender and Sexuality section will include the recent networked digital turn in the academic research and teaching of feminist, gender and sexuality, including their intersections with critical race and postcolonial studies, as well as digital pedagogy.

    As more new topics and ideas start influencing the journal’s scope and focus, we embrace a wide variety of topics, theoretical approaches, ideas and interests, and warmly welcome readers’ suggestions. Contact boundary 2 with inquiries.

    -Petra Dierkes-Thrun

  • Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot by Masha Gessen

    Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot by Masha Gessen

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    Performing Philosophy: Masha Gessen’s Words Will Break Cement

    Review by Alice E.M. Underwood

    ~

    As an established voice speaking against Putin’s increasingly authoritarian actions, Russian journalist Masha Gessen emphasizes in her new book Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot the ideological tension between culture and politics in the president’s attempt to reestablish Russia’s global power status. The book offers a biographical portrait of Nadya Tolokonnikova, Ekaterina Samusevich, and Maria Alyokhina, the three Pussy Riot members whose faces were hidden behind neon balaclavas during their punk performance in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, and who became familiar to the world during their subsequent trial. Gessen’s book was published at a turning point in Russia’s behavior on the world stage: weeks after Putin’s pardon of the two imprisoned Pussy Riot members, immediately prior to the Sochi Olympics, and against the backdrop of escalating tensions in Ukraine. Given Gessen’s record of critiquing Putinist repression of civil society, particularly surrounding questions of gender and sexuality, the book adds to the conversation on resistance to authoritarian regimes. Words Will Break Cement will likely appeal to a mixed audience: general readers curious about the formation and motivations of this guerrilla-style punk rock art collective, as well as scholars interested in unmasking the theory underlying Pussy Riot’s attempts to deconstruct both epistemological and political systems of power.

    While the structure of Gessen’s portrait would benefit from tighter organization, her work is thorough in illustrating the philosophical development and political motives that brought the group together, and in explaining why those ideals got them arrested. The book is comprised of three sections: “Becoming Pussy Riot,” which pictures the lives of Pussy Riot’s three most prominent members prior to their emergence on the international stage; “Prayer and Response,” describing their infamous action in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and its aftermath; and “Punishment,” which covers their post-trial lives. Each section interrogates the role of art and ideas in producing social change, and Gessen often cites her subjects citing theory. While her thesis regarding the intellectual foundation of Pussy Riot’s message might benefit from her own deeper engagement with the works that shape the punk rockers’ philosophy, she covers the impressive expanse of Pussy Riot’s library, which encompasses the Russian canon, queer theory, German existentialism, biblical scholarship, Soviet dissidence, and Moscow Conceptualism.

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    The frequency of Gessen’s references to these diverse intellectual camps demonstrates the significance she attributes to their role in Pussy Riot’s artistic philosophy. Meditations on the search for truth in face of a political system founded on hypocrisy and lies abound in the court statements, personal correspondences, and conversations among Pussy Riot members that Gessen reports. Their engagement of classical and contemporary philosophy contrasts the inflexible worldview characterizing the discourse of political realism and nationalism Putin uses to bolster Russia’s Great Power status. This “language of lies,” as Gessen puts it, has discredited “the language of confrontation itself” (35). Her corollary to this—“There were no words left”—suggests that donning bright balaclavas and dresses and screaming punk rock lyrics is the next step from such politically imposed aphasia.

    Though not treating them extensively, Gessen finds in the traditions of dissidence and Conceptualism useful analogues for artistic movements that entail the disturbance of dominant epistemologies through aesthetic or performative practices, a key notion underlying Pussy Riot’s motives. The book’s first part, “Becoming Pussy Riot,” describes how Nadya Tolokonnikova, as a disenchanted philosophy student at Moscow State University, found meaning in Conceptualist art’s methods of “confronting the lie” (35) of public rhetoric. She joined the performance art collective Voina (War), which targeted consumerism and political corruption through performances in public spaces, and there encountered Kat, a computer programmer-turned-photographer. The two collaborated on several Voina actions, but soon became disenchanted with the misogynist tone taken in some of the group’s political performances (a conflict Gessen does not go into) and split to form their own group. There they were joined by Maria, an environmental activist studying at the Institute of Journalism and Literature, whose statement “We are forever serving life rather than living life” (qtd. 82) highlights the complacency—even complicity—within Russian society that the three united to combat.

    Gessen’s account of Pussy Riot’s development and early actions demonstrates the importance of ethics and the quest for self-education that propelled each of the group’s members toward opposition through art, and ultimately toward each other. The background on these three—with an occasional mention of participants deemed more peripheral—gains critical dimension through Gessen’s focus on their goal of staging actions that would make political statements, but with such outlandish aesthetics that even the mainstream opposition movement wouldn’t know what to think.

    This method was best—and most famously—exemplified by Pussy Riot’s Cathedral action, which targeted the collusion of Church and State and the superficiality of piety characterizing post-Soviet Russia. The site of their action, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, was demolished during the Soviet period; since Yeltsin rebuilt it in the 1990s—one of his most popular moves, despite the tremendous cost at a time of economic depression—it has symbolized the renewed preeminence of Russian Orthodoxy. It has also become a site for politicians to perform piety and church dignitaries to benefit from ill-gotten political gains, however. Gessen is careful to justify Pussy Riot’s actions just as the group did: their aim was not to desecrate the church, but to show how it is “already being desecrated” (113) by the corruption of religious and political leaders.

    Pussy Riot in Christ the Saviour Cathedral. Photography by Mitya Aleshkovsky
    Pussy Riot in Christ the Saviour Cathedral. Photography by Mitya Aleshkovsky

    Gessen builds suspense toward the infamous action in the Cathedral and Nadya, Kat, and Maria’s frantic work to produce the video clip of the performance that same evening. Her account of their collaboration, the initial media storm, and their subsequent experience of going into hiding provides behind-the-scenes insight about the group’s shifting dynamic as the three were propelled onto the world stage. Despite Gessen’s suspenseful account of the events leading to their arrest, it is curious that an argument whose focus is the art and words of Pussy Riot does not spend more time explaining the thinking behind the song that led to their incarceration. “Punk Prayer”’s paradoxical blend of punk rock and hymn is as jarring stylistically as lyrically. Of Pussy Riot’s songs, it is unique in highlighting the state’s violence and corruption without making an explicit call to action—with the exception of the direct pleas to Virgin Mary, Mother of God, to “chase Putin out” and to “become a feminist”—while other songs contain such provocative commands as “Kill the sexist,” “Fuck the leaders,” or at least, “Occupy the square, make the takeover peaceful.” One wonders why Gessen does not provide a closer reading of “Punk Prayer,” whose lyrics reveal careful composition emphasizing the Patriarch’s collusion with Putin as well as the human rights violations practiced by the regime and supported by the Church.

    In the section about Pussy Riot’s trial—the book’s strongest part—Gessen compellingly stresses the surreal nature of the legislative process in post-Soviet Russia. Based on the charge of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred,” the prosecution focused their case on Pussy Riot’s disrespect to the Russian Orthodox religion and consistently dodged the defendants’ attempts to explain their political motives. Gessen, who attended the trial, repeatedly likens the event to a poorly staged performance and to the show trials of dissidents under the Soviet regime. She portrays such political trials as following two typical trajectories: defendants attempt to fight for justice despite their awareness of the complete lack of due process, or they treat the trial as a farce and attempt to uncover its corrupt practices while making their own political point. Pussy Riot’s lawyers’ tactic of drawing attention to the trial’s legislative failings ended up “exacerbating the travesty” (185), in Gessen’s estimation, while Nadya, Maria, and Kat used the platform to deconstruct the logic of the charges (especially Kat and Maria, who became familiar with the penal code). Their ability to point to the absurdity of the system appealed to their international audience, if not to the civil servants within the Khamovnichesky Courthouse. Their closing statements, which Gessen reprints in full, provide poignant and useful insights for the reader. Nadya, citing historical cases of artists condemned for speaking against the regime, argues for “acting and living politically” (196) under the urge to always be seeking the truth. Maria condemns the Putinist power structure which teaches people to “live on autopilot” (211), unable to act or even think for themselves. Kat focuses on the space of the Cathedral itself as symbol of political strategy and aesthetic instrument for Putin’s consolidation of power, ending with the words, “We have won because the system cannot hide the repressive nature of this trial” (220).

    It is a Pyrrhic victory, however: the women are sentenced to two years hard labor. Kat ends up having her sentence commuted to a suspension, while Maria carefully documents human rights violations in the penal colony and Nadya vacillates between similar lobbying, hunger strikes, and the desire to return to the comfort of philosophy. The author also describes her own visit to Nadya’s prison colony, and their reported conversation contains perhaps the clearest argument regarding Pussy Riot’s attempt to politicize the notion of “truth” by subverting state-controlled language through iconoclastic, if not incomprehensible, art forms. Gessen’s insertion into just the type of philosophical conversation that threads through the entire book underscores her thesis that Pussy Riot’s concept-driven political art has the potential to foster change because of its solid metaphysical foundation.

    While Gessen impeccably illustrates the farce of the trials, the fear of the penal colonies, and the corruption and hypocrisy that characterize much of contemporary Russian society, one is left thinking that this book could have pushed further into larger questions of feminism and culture. Many Russians perceive feminism not as a movement for equity and understanding, but rather as a rabid extremism infecting women with the desire to kill men and unravel the very fabric of society—a claim that seems substantiated by a glance at Pussy Riot’s lyrics. Further, unconventional expressions of gender and sexuality are at the center of the movement, unorthodoxies that most Russians prefer not to confront. Both features represent the incursion of “Western” ideals of liberal democracy and civil rights that are all but anathema to Putin’s government and the propaganda machine that sustains it. Indeed, as Gessen notes in a recent op-ed titled “Russia is Remaking Itself as the Leader of the Anti-Western World,” Putin often lambasts such values as inherently anti-Russian: “The ‘so-called tolerance’ [Putin] mention[s] as the key feature of Western civilization is…nothing but a slide into immorality.”[i] Gessen’s book incisively contrasts that “so-called tolerance” to the Russian justice system, perhaps best summarized in Alyokhina’s closing statement: “For me, only this trial can rightly be referred to as ‘so-called’” (qtd. 216).

    As a Russian journalist whose move to the US was at least in part politically motivated, Masha Gessen is well positioned to explain to her presumably mainly American audience some specifics of Russian culture that make the case of Pussy Riot so perplexing. Though she might have better clarified certain cultural disparities in Words Will Break Cement, overall she does succeed in painting a powerful picture of a Russia endangered by its monolithic condemnation of difference. Her account of Pussy Riot’s performance and prosecution exemplifies the role of state control over culture that has bolstered the nationalist and realist discourse Putin has used to justify his most recent moves to consolidate power. Under a system so cemented in ideology, one fears for the present and future potential of words—or even Conceptualist feminist punk rock—to break through.

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    Alice E.M. Underwood is in the Ph.D. Program in the Comparative Literature Department at Stanford University. Her research addresses the intersections of poetics, sexuality, and political resistance in twentieth-century narrative prose, particularly in Russia and Latin America.

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    Update, 29 May

    Pussy Riot Meets Judith Butler and Rosi Braidotti

    Organized and published by The First Supper Symposium: “creating spaces for female voices in the art world.”

  • José Esteban Muñoz (1967-2013): A Collage

    José Esteban Muñoz (1967-2013): A Collage

    José Esteban Muñoz’s sudden passing in December 2013 has saddened many and sent shock waves through the queer theory, performance studies, queer of color and critical race studies communities. A prolific author, editor, beloved teacher and mentor, and Professor of Performance Studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Cuban-born José Muñoz made vibrant contributions to the intellectual life of our era and to the personal and professional lives of many individuals in our communities. To honor his life and work, I asked several of José’s close friends and colleagues to contribute a brief essay focusing on a specific idea, passage, or personal memory and share with us what Muñoz’s work has meant to them. What follows is a rich personal collage of love, wonder, grief, appreciation, and admiration for a scholar and a friend whose work and life will continue to resonate and inspire beyond his death.

    – Petra Dierkes-Thrun

    chusma rodriguez pink brooks jungle fiol-matta yellow kent study paredez
    blue moten orange halberstam Jose Esteban Munoz2 gold ferguson purple browning
    brown cvetkovich blue villajero maroon stadler freeman green normative love
  • The Realm of Potentiality

    The Realm of Potentiality

    potentiality post

    by Roderick A. Ferguson, University of Minnesota

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    Of José Munoz’s inspiring work, the argument in which I would most locate and recognize my own interests and solidarities would be his almost incantatory observation in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. After calling for a queer politics that dares to “see or imagine the not-yet-conscious,” a politics that can derive much of its revolutionary energies from past insurgencies, he wrote, “The not-quite-conscious is the realm of potentiality that must be called on, and insisted on, if we are ever to look beyond the pragmatic sphere of the here and now, the hollow nature of the present. Thus, I wish to argue that queerness is not quite here; it is in the language of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, a potentiality.”1 I am drawn to this argument in particular because it is clear that for José a very powerful realm of potentiality—one that can provide us with the resources for the not-quite-conscious, for the utopian future whose materiality we can find in the audacious dreams and visions of past formations—lies in and with minoritized communities and peoples themselves. Remember, for instance, that he opens the chapter from which the passage comes with the 1970 manifesto produced by that queer of color organization that disbanded almost as soon as it emerged—Third World Gay Revolution. In his chapter, the organization stands as a metaphor for that dazzling resource of all minoritized communities—that is, the power to yearn for and suggest something beyond the given state of affairs. And in many ways, he was, trying to encourage us to develop optics for seeing (where minoritized life is concerned) not only what “is” but what—if provided the conditions for its own liberation—“can be.”

    In this way, his argument and indeed his work are rebuttals to those stultifying and empiricist methodologies that attempt to pin down the lives of queers, women, and people of color, pinning them down in that longstanding and misguided effort to capture their “true” and “unchanging” meanings. In this regard, we find José performing a maneuver that is characteristic of his work: the use of minoritized subjects as levers for epistemological and philosophical considerations. In addition, his work assumes political import as it excavates and rearranges critical formations like queer theory and Marxism to point to and call for insurrections in the current state of affairs, recognizing that the existing conditions never exhaust historical or social possibility. Here, he takes a page from Herbert Marcuse who argued, “to express and define that-which-is on its own terms is to distort and falsify reality. Reality is other and more than that codified in the logic and language of facts.”2

    By coincidence or providence, I have been reading Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings’s biography Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life. There is a part in that text that makes me appreciate José’s originality and genealogy all the more and helps me figure out what to do with the space he left behind. In a summary of the young Benjamin’s 1913-1914 essay “Metaphysics of Youth,” Eiland and Jennings write, “What we do and think, [Benjamin] says, is filled with the being of our ancestors—which, having passed away, becomes futural. Each day, like sleepers, we use ‘unmeasured energies’ of the self-renewing past… In awakening its own historical resonance, the present gathers to a moment of decision, by which, rooted in the past, it grounds a future…”3 Queerness, like the figure of sleep for Benjamin, was José’s way of describing a practice that—while sometimes giving the appearance of disengagement—actually reprocesses the “unmeasured energies of a self-renewing past” to break new and non-normative ground.

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    Visit the full José Esteban Muñoz gallery here.

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    Notes
    1. José Esteban Munoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 21.
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    2. Marcuse, “A Note on Dialectic,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arrato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 2000), 447.
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    3. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 44.
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