Month: May 2007

Male normativity in the usage of "homosexual" and "gay"

tekanji

The terms “gay” and “homosexual” aren’t technically gendered; homosexual women often refer to themselves as gay, and the fact that the previous clause is correct English in itself should be self-evident as to my point. And yet, over and over again I see those two words being used alongside lesbian (like this article which uses the phrase “homosexuals and lesbians”), as if lesbians are some magical creatures apart from the rest of the gay world.

Men, being the default, don’t have a special word for them. But women often have such special status markers as lesbian and Mrs., not to mention that most of the time they are lumped into the markers that carry a male connotation such as gays and guys. Thought not as common, as the newspaper article linked in the first paragraph illustrates, this tendency to construe the male as neutral (and the neutral as male) bleeds into words that, as a clear part of their definition, are gender neutral.

Such male normative language bleeds into male normative thinking, which ends up reinforcing the idea of men as normal and women as Other. If lesbians can’t even be properly included in the term homosexual, then what hope is there for them to be seen as full participants in the queer community?

Voice and silence [Women and Violence, Part 8]

Sigel Phoenix
IMPORTANT NOTICE: This post is several years old and may not reflect the current opinions of the author.
[This is part of my series on Women and Violence, which I am writing as a project for a Women Studies course I’m taking. For an explanation and information on my intentions with this series, please see the introduction.]

In “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” Audre Lorde writes the following description of her thought process when faced with a potential diagnosis of cancer:

[…] and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence. And that might be coming quickly, now, without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had only betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else’s words. And I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear into a perspective gave me great strength.

I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.” (41)

The first time I read these words, it was like a finger had been pointed with uncomfortable precision, straight at my heart. I know what it means to be silent, out of fear, out of the desire to hide – out of the hope that, if I keep quiet, I won’t be the next target.

Silence isn’t always just about fear, of course. I know I have to pick my battles, and sometimes I know that taking on this instance of privilege will win me more headache and heartache than progress. Sometimes I honestly know that there’s no way that my voice will be heard. But along with those feelings comes the hope that silence will provide some sort of safety, like if I don’t call out the oppression around me, I somehow won’t be harmed by it.

It’s a false refuge, I know. Silence is where ignorance flourishes, and that is what allows the structures of oppression to continue to operate unchallenged. More than malice or greed, it’s ignorance of inequality that keeps us from dismantling white supremacy or patriarchy. And that ignorance requires collective action to change it – but of course, collective action requires individuals with the courage to participate.

But silence is a tricky issue for women, and women of color. Hell, if even Audre Lorde fell prey to it, that’s got to mean that silence isn’t easy to resist.

There are two other problematic aspects of silence that I want to explore, which are more complex than simply the fear of negative reaction, and which are tied specifically to issues of race and gender.

We just don’t know how to say ‘no’

Okay, that subtitle is somewhat sarcastic. I don’t mean that women don’t have the ability to actually say speak up for themselves, as if we lacked the courage or awareness. But there are ways that women are – sabotaged, we could say – in their ability to speak up for their own desires, especially when it comes to refusing other people – and especially when it comes to refusing men.

I have been in conversations with women in heterosexual relationships that revealed that they had trouble saying no to sex – either out of the assumption that it’s perfectly normal for a couple to have sex when the woman doesn’t really want to, or because they knew they could say ‘no,’ but felt bad doing it. I’ve had conversations about the origins of this difficulty, too – which reveals that just because women know they ought to be more straightforward, doesn’t mean they can be. There’s still that discomfort, fear, worry about causing trouble for the man. Even if that man is supportive! There’s the nagging concern that somehow we’re asking for too much by asserting our desires when it inconveniences our male partner.

Rather than assuming women just have some sort of biological imperative to have trouble saying ‘no,’ let’s look at these excerpts from Kathleen V. Cairns’ “‘Femininity’ and women’s silence in response to sexual harassment and coercion”:

This pattern may be particularly prevalent in established male/female relstaionships, where women often feel that their consent is, ‘constrained by [a] felt duty to be cooperative, to meet the man’s needs, not to be “inconsistent”, or accept a sexual duty towards a man whom [they are] having a close personal relationship’ [Cairns 1993a: 205]. (104)

and:

Self-assertion or strength in purpose is generally reframed in women as selfishness, and as damaging to the well-being of men and children, since women’s obligations and responsibilities for other are expected to override self-interest. (101)

Tie these factors in to the way in which women are taught that we aren’t ‘supposed’ to have sexual desire, and you get this:

‘Struggling not to know or feel her own desire [and knowing] that she “should” say no, [she may] end up having sex “happen” to her’ [Tolman 1991: 65]. […] The experience of male persistence and coercion is complex for women. They experience strong ambivalence and undertainty about refusing male advances. […] Confronted with sexual harassment or coercion, women educated about their bodies through patriarchy are likely to have difficulty experiencing their bodies as their own, even after being ‘told’ through education that they have the ‘right’ of ownership. (100-1)

Women aren’t born feeling this way: we’re taught to. Consider these facts from “Marital Rape: History, Research, and Practice” by Jennifer A. Bennice and Patricia A. Resick: marital rape was codified into British and U.S. law through the “Hale doctrine,” a 1736 piece of writing by Sir Matthew Hale that stated, “But the husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife, for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband, which she cannot retract.”

Hale wasn’t the only guy who thought this way, of course; his written idea was supported by society-wide cultural assumptions about women, marriage, and sex. And these ideas do not die easily, as we can see by the fact that the Federal Sexual Abuse Act, which made marital rape into a crime on federal lands, passed in 1986. Marital rape was not illegal in all 50 of the United States until 1993. Even now, it is granted more exemptions than other forms of rape – making it clear that, under the law, women lose partial control over their bodies just by virtue of getting married.

Oh, but lest we forget – the principle behind the Hale doctrine can still be seen to rear its ugly head in non-marital rape cases.

So when women are faced with societal opposition to this extent, is it any wonder why we feel ambivalent about our ability to say ‘no’? And what other ways do we undermine women’s rights to assert their own desires, outside of sex and heterosexual relationships?

Silence out of defiance

There are, of course, instances in which we use silence with a purpose. One of my favorite descriptions of this comes from Mira Jacob’s “My Brown Face,” an essay in the anthology, Body Outlaws. An Indian American woman, she talks about her mother’s deadly use of silence to express her refusal or disapproval. It’s a use of silence that I, as an Asian American woman, am used to. I use it myself all the time – usually accompanied with a glare of death. 😉

Sadly, silence doesn’t always convey the message it’s intended to. Whether the gulf of understanding originates from racial or gender privilege, as Jacob describes, white men can misread her silence into something befitting the ‘Oriental girl’ stereotype:

[C]ontrary to my hasty logic (mute girl = bored guy), my silence only perpetuated the enigma, adding the brute element of interpretation. ‘I think you’re avoiding me,’ I heard at parties, often only hours after being introduced to a guy. ‘You’re scared of our connection, right? I know you can feel it. I felt it the minute I laid eyes on you.’ And here it was again, the bond, the miracle, the connection associated with my face, the need to be led into whatever temple I had available. I saw desire thrown back to me in fragments of Taj Mahal, Kamasutra, womanly wiles. I felt my body turn into a dark country, my silence permission to colonize. (10)

Of course, the use of silence is not common to all Asian women, nor is it limited to them. It can be used by women in any number of situations, when silence is the best – or perhaps only – method of refusal. Unfortunately, it’s too easy for men – socialized into entitlement to women’s consent – to be deaf to its meaning.

I hate to give up the tool of silence, which is (to me) one of the clearest ways I can convey my displeasure. Speaking often ends up being messy, my words tripping over one another and failing to convey my point. But in situations like this when it can be mistaken for compliance – and in a cultural context which, as described above, assumes women’s compliance – speaking up in dissent can be necessary.

Women’s words and women’s consent have been misused and abused to facilitate violence, whether in the form of verbal harassment or sexual assault. We need to recognize how silence has been forced upon us, so that we cannot refuse; or twisted, so that our silent refusal is ignored. Recognition can lead us to reclamation of both our voices and our silences.

Policing women through violence [Women and Violence, Part 7]

Sigel Phoenix
IMPORTANT NOTICE: This post is several years old and may not reflect the current opinions of the author.
[This is part of my series on Women and Violence, which I am writing as a project for a Women Studies course I’m taking. For an explanation and information on my intentions with this series, please see the introduction.]

In an article titled “‘Femininity’ and women’s silence in response to sexual harassment and coercion,” Kathleen V. Cairns describes how harassment of women functions as a method of social control over women’s behavior:

[O]vert practices include the public, ritual shaming of women in the form of catcalls, lewd remarks and so on which serves to demonstrate the fact that ‘any man or group of men feels entitled not only to pass judgement on any woman walking along minding her own business, but also to announce it to her‘ [Kotzin 1993: 167] […]

In patriarchy, women are taught to accept that their femaleness, their simple presence, are responsible for men’s behavior towards them […] It becomes women’s responsibility to police themselves, to keep their dress, comportment and presence within approved limits to avoid ‘provoking’ harassment. (96-7).

This dynamic – of men acting with impunity to judge women, and women shouldering the blame for men’s actions towards them – can be applied to other forms of gender violence as well. What it comes down to is the way that negative reactions from men – or even the anticipation of those reactions – function to police women in everything from their appearance to their behavior.

Men policing women

Let’s start with the practice Cairns herself describes, of public sexual harassment. I know few, if any, women who have not experienced this in some form or another. Often this takes the form of men talking at women about their appearance or sexual appeal. This is distinguishable from actual flirting, because flirting is supposed to be a mutually consensual act, whereas harassment is just about a man making sure a woman knows his opinion of her, without caring about her participation in the interaction. (Anyone who’s been both harassed and flirted with/complimented can tell you the difference.) Harassment can also be quieter – lewd or invasive staring, muttered comments, or actual touching.

This practice polices women by imposing men’s opinions onto women about their physical attractiveness – whether the women are heterosexual or not, in a relationship and not looking for outside opinions, or just not in the mood. It reinforces the idea that the male gaze is upon a woman, that her appearance is not just for herself or a chosen few, but open to consumption and judgment by any man who sees her. Even if the judgment is ‘positive’ (“nice ass” as opposed to “ugly bitch”), it reinforces the authority of random men to inflict that judgment.

On the other hand, harassment can also be about punishment. Consider the recent study by University of Toronto professor Jennifer Berdahl, which found that, “The more women deviated from traditional gender roles – by occupying a ‘man’s’ job or having a ‘masculine’ personality – the more they were targeted.”

Women can be punished for things besides being ‘unfeminine,’ of course – as tekanji points out, men harass women for speaking up about gender issues, or just for being female. The ultimate result is the silencing or suppression of women, because we get afraid, frustrated, or just plain angry.

Violent policing

We can also look at tekanji’s examples and see how harassment quickly transforms from ‘only’ insults into actual threats of violence. These threats are almost uniformly sexual in nature, expressing that sexual assault will be used to punish deviant women, or even improve them (by causing a woman to ‘lighten up,’ etc.). How many of us (particularly feminists) have experienced or witnessed similar threats, about how we ‘need to get fucked’ in order to ‘get some sense’ or ‘learn our place’?

Of course these threats are verbal, and the one’s in tekanji’s post were communicated online. These men are not immediately and physically threatening women, and it would be safe to say that few of them actually want to rape the targets of their harassment (though I don’t trust any of them to be intelligent or worthwhile allies against sexual violence). One might be tempted to just blow this off as empty words, online aggression that doesn’t mean anything. Many people do blow it off.

But what does it mean when some men’s anger against women is expressed through threats of sexual violence, even in non-sexual contexts? And rape is a gendered form of violence, undoubtedly – women are the vast majority of victims, men are the vast majority of perpetrators, and when men are victims of rape by other men, there is the threat of the male victim being made ‘gay’ or ‘like a woman.’ All of this makes rape threats a gender-specific way of terrorizing women, above and beyond general physical threats against men or mixed-gender groups.

The effect of this type of threat is to police women’s behavior. Online, it can mean silencing a blogger, defaming her name for potential schools or employers, or driving her from a forum, community, or other space. Threats can teach women not to air certain opinions; or to do so only in private, regulated spaces; or to hide their gender identity; or to avoid sites that otherwise interest her; or to play along like ‘one of the guys’ in order to fit in.

Offline, the threat is more immediately physical, and the policing far, far more extensive. It determines who we talk to in public, the way we talk, the way we dress, the places we go, the times we go out, the amount of alcohol we drink, the people we associate with, the way we arrange our transportation … I’m sure you can think of more.

I am afraid to go out by myself at night. I don’t like being afraid, but I am. And the fear doesn’t really come from the threat of being assaulted – statistically, of course, I am far more likely to be sexually or physically assaulted by the men who are my friends and acquaintances than by a stranger jumping me in the dark.

See, I’m afraid because I have regularly been harassed when I’m walking by myself at night. It’s when I’m walking from my house to the bus stop. It’s not that late, just sometime in the evening after it’s gotten dark. I’m not dressed ‘provocatively’ (because we all know that’s an excuse, right?). But I get screamed at, by groups of guys from the safety of their own cars – loud, incoherent noises, meant to scare me or get some other reaction.

This doesn’t happen in the daytime. This doesn’t happen when I’m walking with my boyfriend. (He, by the way, walks by himself plenty of nights, and doesn’t seem to have this problem.) Sure, I’ve been harassed in broad daylight, but that’s been guys yelling in a sexual way, meant to offend (or perhaps ‘compliment’) me. This? The aggressive screaming? This is meant to police me. To let me know that I’m somewhere that I don’t belong, doing something that I shouldn’t be doing, and to let me know that these guys have the right to punish me for it by bullying me.

This policing works. I find ways to avoid walking alone at night, even when I want to go out – even though I know this isn’t right, and that I’m as entitled to be out there as any man, I can’t always convince myself to take the risk. I hate it, but I obey, because I don’t want the harassment. I’ve learned my lesson.

Women self-policing

Women police themselves in plenty of different ways. Not all of them are like my example above, where I was aware of the power dynamic. We internalize patriarchal disapproval or punishment in a myriad of ways, to the point where they become indistinguishable from our own reactions to ourselves.

Consider these excerpts Tomi-Ann Roberts and Jennifer Y. Gettman’s study, “Mere Exposure: Gender Differences in the Negative Effects of Priming a State of Self-Objectification,” which explores self-policing in the context of body image:

Although only a minority of women in the United States are actually overweight […] the majority report feeling fat and express this as a personal failure, which has been shown to lead to feelings of shame [Crandall, 1994]. Feminist theorists have described this as a cycle where the dominant culture constructs the ideal body and encourages women to monitor their own bodies as objects, and, as a result, women feel shame when they do not live up to these standards [McKinley, 1998].

[…]

Disgust can play a positive role in the development of a civilized society by internalizing norms for cleanliness, restraint, and reserve [Miller, 1997]. Unfortunately, it can also become a negative reaction to violations of these predetermined social standards. Insofar as many women experience a discrepancy between their actual body size and their ideal body size [Fallon & Rozin, 1985], women may become disgusted with their own bodies because they have violated a social standard by being unattractive or overweight, and hence “gross.” […] Indeed, it may be argued that the higher standards of cleanliness, hairlessness, odorlessness, and beauty held for women in our culture are a reflection of the greater burden placed upon women to “civilize” their bodies lest they be seen as “disgusting” by others [Roberts, Goldenberg, Power, & Pyszcynski, 2002]. (18-9)

It is also worth noting that the authors cite a study in which both men and women try on swimwear, and women “reported feeling more disgust, distaste, and revulsion than did men, who, in contrast, reported more lighthearted self-conscious feelings of awkwardness, silliness, and foolishness” (19).

Of course, there is always the possibility that women’s opinions of their own bodies are based on their own individual preferences. But why the strikingly gendered difference, between who feels “silly” and who feels “revulsion” about themselves? Why do women’s preferences about their bodies tie in so neatly to sexism, by keeping them spending their time, energy, and money on practices that make them smaller instead of larger and stronger?

And what is the role of male policing in all of this? How many of us have had husbands, boyfriends, fathers, brothers, and friends imply to us, tell us, tease us, or threaten us about our appearance? weight? body hair? dress?

How much do negative reactions from men influence our behavior? And how much do we blame ourselves for limiting our actions, rather than those who impose those limitations upon us?

Off to WisCon!

tekanji

I’m off to WisCon for the week! I’ll be back May 29, but until then moderation will probably be much delayed, especially for borderline cases. Sorry, but, the conference calls!

For those of you going, I’m presenting on idealized bodies in World of Warcraft, so be sure to look me up. I’ll let everyone know how it went when I get back.

Bye!

Forcing all spaces to be privilege-oriented spaces

tekanji

A lot of time my Privilege in Action posts are born out of me seeing two unrelated areas of interest facing the same exact privileged arguments. This time, it’s on the subject of women-oriented spaces, but of course it can be applied to spaces geared towards any non-privileged group.

Let me begin my post with a quote from one of the essays linked in the two threads I will be discussing [emphasis mine]:

After a while, we began organizing “chick nights,” gatherings of just the four of us and maybe some other women we knew from outside the group. For reasons that were often kind of bizarre, some of the men in the group took exception to this. They never organized nights at which we were excluded. When we pointed out that by the law of averages, a good half of the various social outings ended up being guy-only, they replied that it was not the same thing.

“Look,” I finally said to one of them, “when we get together Saturday night, we’re going to paint our nails and put goop on our faces and play with each others’ hair and watch movies with really hot guys and talk about how hot the guys are and probably talk about sex and periods and all that fun stuff. Do you really have any interest in that?”

“No,” he replied, “but we could do other stuff instead.”

Those of us who are veterans of anti-oppression work get the point that Gillam was making, even before her explanation of why they had “chick nights” in the first place, but for people such as her male friend, the concept is foreign and seems discriminatory in nature. He is used to, by virtue of his privilege, being included in things as a default, and therefore to him the natural course is not only to be included in the nights, but to be given a voice equal, or greater, to the women in deciding what is done in those nights.

And it is with that thought in mind that I begin this post on Privilege in Action.

Please Note: Since this post is going to be long enough as it is, I would rather not explain the difference between privilege-only spaces and non-privileged spaces. For those of you who wonder what the difference is between the two, please read my post on A Deeper Look at “Minority Spaces” before continuing with this one.

I. This is our garden. We like it.

I would like to first start by discussing a series of posts on the Feminist SF blog regarding the female-dominated slash fandom. The posts, for reference, are as follows: Slash fandom and male privilege/hetero privilege (a great PiA post written by someone who isn’t me!), This is our garden. We like it., and So, why do fanboys hate fanfic, especially slash?. The common thread that I want to talk about (also addressed in So, why do fanboys hate fanfic, especially slash?) can be summed up with this quote: “The fanboy… perceived a roomful of women, talking about men, and was infuriated to find that his opinion was regarded as of no value.”

When non-privileged groups form our own spaces to talk about our issues, whether or not we welcome participation from privileged groups or not, there is always a backlash from someone who feels that their privileged opinion is not being properly respected. In addition to the examples that Yonmei listed in her posts, every single one of them had an angry man coming on to lecture her and the other commenters about his opinion on slash/fanfic in the same exact style that Yonmei was criticizing in her posts.

Yonmei sums up the problem with conflating privileged participation and privileged domination in spaces for non-privileged groups:

If you find it comfortable to play in the slash sandbox, as is, I don’t think you’ll find any female slash fans telling you you can’t. If what you want to read is slash, no one can stop you. If what you want to write is slash, slash fans will want to read it. If you want to join in metadiscussions about slash, this is also possible – so long as you do so as a slash fan, and not as a gay man arguing that you know how gay men experience the world, and this or that in a slash story isn’t it. Because then you are not trying to join in metadiscussions as just another slash fan: you are trying to distort metadiscussions about slash with male privilege.

Going back to the quote I used in the introduction, it is not that there is necessarily a problem with privileged groups wanting to participate in non-privileged spaces, but that it often comes out that they want to dominate and change those spaces so that they appeal to them in the way that all of the other kinds of spaces out there do.

II. Defining how friendly “privilege-friendly” spaces should be

I don’t put much stock in old adages, but one thing that the constant tug-of-war over defining spaces brings to mind is, “give them an inch and they’ll take a mile.” I’ve been feeling that way about the woman-oriented gaming network, Iris and its child magazine Cerise that I recently created with Revena. In anti-oppression speak, I would call us a inclusive non-privileged safe space. In real terms, that means that we are a feminist/woman-oriented site that welcomes participation from men as long as they come as allies.

But most guys in the gaming blogsphere, even some who position themselves as allies or openminded, are not content with that. Take, for example, this heated exchange between myself, some other women gamers, and a male commenter on a post on New Game Plus called More reasons for a magazine for gaming women.

The exchange can be summed up as such:

Him: Why care what a guy says? Why react to the negativity? Why create a validation for them?
Me: Women need to see others sticking up for us — both within our community and without… Because It’s. Not. About. Teh. Mens. It’s about networking and safety and creating a non-toxic gaming environment.
Him: But again, why bother?… Why bother trying to convince them otherwise when you could better spend your energy living and creating the world that you want? [Insert a several paragraph diatribe about women wanting to be fetishized, that we shouldn’t “force” our view of equality on him, and that there is no problem because he doesn’t see it.] Me: Listen to what has already been said. It’s. Not. About. Teh. Mens… Men like you, who feel the need to talk over us and not listen to us, are exactly why we need a separate space in order to get our voices heard.
Him: I don’t feel the need to talk over anyone. If anything, this is a need to know. But I think I’ve learned enough.
Me: …

Well, I wasn’t nearly as nice sounding in the actual exchange. But the deluge of misogyny and privilege in his 17+ paragraph argument about how we women need to just shut up and realize we’ve already achieved equality since our voices are already being heard, all being said while he was simultaneously failing to hear what had been said only one comment above about how the premise to entire argument was false did not put me in the mood to make nicey-nice.

Anyway, the point of it all is that Nic felt affronted at the very idea that there was a space out there where his voice was given less weight, and decided to rectify that fact by dominating the conversation on another woman-oriented space in order to tell us all how much we hate men, freedom of speech, and “equality” that recognizes men’s rights to silence women.

So as not to give the impression that criticism of openly women-oriented spaces is confined to only misogynists like the Kotaku commenters and concern trolls like Nic, though, it is important to point out he is not the first to have criticized the community for not properly catering to male needs. Tony Walsh of Clickable Culture wrote an entire post about how put off he was by our magazine having a tagline saying that it was for women gamers.

Both arguments boil down to: “Your community/magazine doesn’t appeal to men enough, change x, y, or z to make it appeal more.” Both of them miss that, while we welcome privileged participation and want to reach beyond the scope of our group, we are here to give voices to women and women’s issues. Why do we need a gaming magazine “for women”? Precisely because of the assumption that underlies the two arguments being made, that male needs need to be catered anytime and anywhere, those women in the gaming community and the gaming industry (not to mention those who are actually allies who want to try to understand women’s issues rather than assuming they know “what women want”) be damned!

III. Conclusion

None of the privileged people could wrap their minds around the idea that their opinions were not only not worth more than those of the non-privileged group whose space and conversation it was, but actually meant less. These men were coming into a woman-created, woman-oriented sandbox and instead of playing by the rules of the community, they were trying to force it to conform to their ideas of what the community should be!

Privilege is believing that, regardless of the purpose behind a space, any space you enter should conform to your ideas, and that the pre-existing members of that space should give your singular opinion weight equal to that their group as a whole. If someone entered a community devoted to Spiderman/Peter Parker, telling them that they should focus on Mary Jane instead is something that, I think, is universally recognized as rude and presumptuous. Why, then, is it considered acceptable to go into communities devoted to giving women a voice in a certain area (like fandom, gaming, politics, etc) and tell us that we need to change to cater to privileged groups, or listen to a privileged point of view, and otherwise change what we are doing because it is not exactly like every other privilege-oriented, excuse me, every other normal space does?

The power of feminism

tekanji

Ragnell has up an excellent, excellent post called Chorus Member that covers everything from debunking the “hive mind” myth to addressing dismissal as an argumentation style. But that’s not why I’m writing this post. I’m writing this post to highlight a comment that shows exactly why feminism — and feminist activism through consciousness raising — is important.

Not sure I would have ever called myself a Feminist in any context, at least that’s just not a word I’d have ever used to describe myself. Closest I’d use is “common-sensist” and barely at that as a few years ago I really wouldn’thave reacted much to alot of the things going on in the funnies. Real life? Hell yea I’d react. Whether it be protests, donations, call-ins, or letter writing, etc. It was just the right thing to do because I was raised knowing people are equal regardless of what’s under their underpants. But that’s y’know real-life.
The funnies? Never dawned on me.

Sure, there were stories I really liked, characters or events that resonated with me for reasons I wouldn’t describe other than “They’re cool when written by so-and-so” and there were writers and artists who would annoy the hell out of me.

But then I discovered the internets and being both bored (and shy) reading other people’s blogs was MUCH more interesting than having to participate in IRC or whatever. And it’s your blog among others that helped me put a finger about things that bugged the heck out of me, and trends that originally had gotten me fed up to the point of quitting comics for a couple of years. And if it weren’t for said blogs helping to put the word out, and most importantly pointing me towards the proper channels to give that feedback and knowing that I wasn’t a single voice complaining to a brick wall, and that I really should quit comics again because otherwise they depress/annoy the crap outta me.

[From Chorus Member, comment by R.Nav]

People, usually those angry at seeing a woman who has been turned onto feminism arguing with them, erroneously believe that feminism creates problems that didn’t exist prior. But the truth is that all feminism does is give us the tools to articulate the feelings that we’ve had all along, and it gives us the support group that we lack from a world that oppresses us. It makes us feel valid and worthy, gives us evidence with which to back up our arguments, and a place where we can go and be heard.

Days like these I’m proud to be a feminist. I’m proud to remember the things that gave me the tools to articulate my opinions. I’m proud to remember the times when people have said similar things to me on my blog. I’m proud to see feminists of all different kinds, who have all different kinds of opinions, coming together and supporting each other for the common goal of equality.

The battle may be far from over, but posts like Ragnell’s and comments like R.Nav’s are some of the little victories that mean so much.

The obligatory FGC post [Women and Violence, Part 6]

Sigel Phoenix
[This is part of my series on Women and Violence, which I am writing as a project for a Women Studies course I’m taking. For an explanation and information on my intentions with this series, please see the introduction.]

Yesterday some of my classmates gave a presentation about female genital cutting (though the terminology they used, and which is probably more familiar to people, is “female genital mutilation” – a difference which I’ll address later on). It’s an important, worthwhile issue, and I’m glad our class is addressing it.

Still, every time the topic comes up in conversation I cringe inwardly.

I didn’t always have this reaction. An explanation of why I do now lies in this quote by Sherene Razack, from her (fantastic) book Looking White People in the Eye:

[I]n many legal texts, both feminist and non-feminist scholars have actively participated in reproducing the binary of the civilized and liberated Western woman and her oppressed Third World sister […] One has only to think of the energy so many scholars and legal activists have poured into the legal proscription of FGM in North America (in comparison with the energy directed to antiracist strategies) to recognize a preoccupation with scripts of cultural inferiority and an affirmation of white female superiority. (6)

The binary that Razack describes is not limited to discussions of FGC, of course; but it is this tendency to divide “First World” and “Third World” women that causes my discomfort when such discussions arise among Western feminists.

This binary is inaccurate and misleading. There is no sharp division between us civilized, non-sexist Westerners and those barbaric, woman-hating brown people over there. The cultural beliefs and gender divisions that foster FGC in certain African, Middle Eastern, and Asian countries are not so different from the ones in non-FGC countries, including the U.S. and Europe. I touched on this topic for last year’s Blog Against Heteronormativity day – policing and mutilating women’s bodies, even their sexual organs, is not an alien concept to the West. And yet, the similarities between the two practices – the spectrum of body modification that spans so-called “advanced” and “backwards” societies – is rarely touched upon. Instead, much of the energy in discussions about FGC center on the horrific things that those people do.

The results of such an imbalance in discussion are multiple, and troubling. As Razack points out, how much of that time could be spent on anti-racism? I don’t want to engage in “my activism is more worthwhile than your activism” hierarchies; I mean, rather, that excessive attention to FGC can actually harm other activism against racism. In other words, those who engage in Western condemnation of non-Western FGC (note the emphasis) do more than take time away from anti-racism, and can actually compound the problems of racism and imperialism by perpetuating the false civilized/uncivilized dichotomy.

This imbalance can also obscure the problems that Western women face, in terms of cosmetic surgery and related pressures, in a “mote in thy brother’s eye” kind of way. This is, of course, unhelpful for Western women’s goals. By relegating “Third World” countries to the “bad” group, it also alienates the women from those countries who could be valuable members of transnational feminist alliances. Condemning a woman’s country as primitive and ignorant and more-sexist-than-us is no way to build coalitions.

All these risks from Western discourse about FGC fueled my decision to use “female genital cutting” as opposed to “female genital mutilation.” It’s not that I believe the practice to not be mutilating, but rather, I don’t think it ought to be singled out as the mutilating practice, when there are so many (Western) practices that also fit the term. If it confuses people who are used to hearing “female genital mutilation,” then at least I get the opportunity to explain my reasons and bring their attention to the hidden racist/imperialist risks of the Western discourse.

“Female genital cutting” also connects the experiences of Western and non-Western women, because labiaplasty is included just as easily as infibulation. By doing so, I hope to highlight how both groups of women can succumb to pressures about their bodies, and how they both can be victimized into coerced surgeries. Western women are not totally liberated from patriarchy, and struggle against oppression just as non-Western women do. At the same time, Western women do not want to see themselves as passive victims – so by connecting these two groups of women, I want to draw attention to non-Western women as active agents, as well.

Recognizing the agency of women in societies that practice FGC means one, very significant thing: debunking the false dichotomy between paternalistically controlling FGC-practicing societies in order to end FGC, or leaving them alone and abandoning the women victimized by FGC. As I said in my earlier post on tradition, there is always the option to support the women who are helping themselves.

There is one other factor playing into Western discourse on FGC that I want to mention, and it’s the idea of “the gaze.” This is not exactly an official theoretical term, I think, but it’s a common idea in writings on racism and imperialism, as well as a central feature of Looking White People in the Eye. Writings about the gaze, or similar concepts, focus on who gets to look, to be the one who observes and judges. This is the party who has power to see, authority to make true judgments. As David Roediger says in the introduction to Black on White:

White writers have long been positioned as the leading and most dispassionate investigators of the lives, values, and abilities of people of color. White writing about whiteness is rarer, with discussions of what it means to be human standing in for considerations of how racial identity influences white lives. Writers of color, and most notably African-American writers, are cast as providing insight, often presumed to be highly subjective, of what it is like to be “a minority. Lost in this destructive shuffle is the fact that from folktales onward African Americans have been among the nation’s keenest students of white consciousness and white behavior. (4)

So white people have held authority over knowledge about people of color. On the other hand, people of color have not held authority over knowledge about white people. White people hold that authority – though they don’t often use it to record knowledge about themselves. Roediger continues:

What bell hooks describes as the fantastic white ability to imagine “that black people cannot see them” constitutes a white illusion at once durable, powerful, and fragile. It exists alongside a profound fear of actually being seen by people of color […] From the beatings of house slaves who knew too much to the lynchings of African Americans thought to look too long, [African Americans’] safety has often turned not just on being unseen, but also on being perceived as unseeing […] Discounting and suppressing the knowledge of whiteness held by people of color was not just a byproduct of white supremacy but an imperative of racial domination. (6)

To be powerful means to be the one who sees, not the one who is seen. I think this understanding of power fuels the Western treatment of FGC, which is so skewed towards viewing the Other (societies who practice FGC) and not being seen (for similar practices such as labiaplasty).

According to Razack, in April 1995 CNN “showed an FGM in progress, and did so throughout an entire day” (124). The fact that someone even considered that this was okay to do relies on certain ideas of who is the object of the gaze, and who the rightful gazer. One of these ideas was the objectification of women in general; our bodies are always to be gazed upon. Yet the treatment of the racial Other as an object was also necessary for the decision to broadcast such intimate images for sensationalist purposes. I can’t imagine the U.S. being comfortable with another country broadcasting, say, a labiaplasty in progress in order to show how “barbaric” we were.

So perhaps some of the inordinate amount of attention that Western feminists have centered around FGC draws from this need to be the gazer. We have a discomfort with being the object of the gaze, either by others or by ourselves.

This is not to say that Western feminists ought to ignore FGC, or never examine patriarchal tendencies in societies outside of our own. This is not to say that all examinations of FGC by Western feminists are innately imperialist. What I am saying is that we ought to be very careful of the judgments we make in the name of feminism, when that feminism can be used to obscure our own complicity in imperialism.

To return once again to Razack, she quotes from Isabelle Gunning to list some basic necessities for feminist analyses of international human rights: “1) seeing oneself in historical context; 2) seeing oneself as the “other” might see you; and 3) seeing the “other” within her own cultural context” (97). These steps do not give us a complete guide on how to avoid perpetuating imperialism through our feminism – but they’re a start.

Today I Called Someone's Actions Racist

Katie

Note: I don’t want to write about this on my blog because I want to hear from race-discussing people, my blog is so quiet you can hear the crickets chirping. I don’t want to write about it on the Daily Kos, even though I’d get traffic, because I’d get hostility and dismissal of white responsibility for reversing racism as a serious issue. Thank you, Andrea, for letting me guest post on Shrub–I’m using the privilege to write a rather “newbie” essay in this safe space.

Today I thought I was accusing “the city,” or some other general system, of having a racist blind eye. Turns out I was accusing my conversation partner of having a racist blind eye. I know from Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting In The Cafeteria?, Maxjulian’s blog, and Shrub that this is as important for me to do as, say, for men to point out each other’s sexism, but when I did it rudely, did I do more harm or more good in the world?
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On women-oriented gaming communities

tekanji

Zach over at Molten Boron became my hero for the day by posting, Kotaku Commenters Prove the Necessity of a Women’s Gaming Magazine, which debunks much of the misinformation Kotaku continues to spread about Iris and, most recently, our online magazine/journal, Cerise. More important than my squeeing over someone outside of my gaming community who actually gets it, though, the post is worth reading for its excellently made points about the culture of hostility in online gaming communities.

He ends on a note that I have thought about (and one day intend to write on), which is the separatism vs. integration argument:

I do somewhat see the argument for the anti-segregationist build-a-better-culture-from-within perspective. The problem is that I think it’s a false choice; it isn’t either be a part of the larger gaming community or be a part of the female/feminist gaming community, it’s both be a part of the larger gaming community and be a part of the female/feminist gaming community. Moreover, I don’t think the problem of women gamers being isolated from the gaming community writ large is as big a problem as the one of women gamers being alienated from the gaming community in general as a result of overt and subrosa hostility to women in gaming.

Obviously since I’m one of the founders of a feminist and female-oriented community, I ultimately agree with the points he’s making. What it comes down to, I think, is that it’s necessary for change to come both from within and without, and communities such as Iris (and new-to-me, Ludica) there won’t be anyone for women (and men) working from within to use as evidence for their arguments for change. And without that evidence, no matter how loud they try to shout they will continue to be silenced by the privileged majority.