Fat Pig (Trafalgar Studios)

Shorter Fat Pig:

“Boo hoo! It’s so hard being a shallow jerk! It’s so, so hard! Oh, woe is me, my life is so difficult, because I’m a shallow jerk!”

It’s a shame. It was ambitious. Except for the continual association of fatness with food, Helen was a great character, and it could have been a powerfully positive, courageous piece. Instead they had Carter make some deeply hateful speeches, and ended by affirming every last one of them. It pitched the victory of weakness and conformity over joy - not even merit, not even noble sacrifice, but true joy - as inevitable, and asked us to feel sorry for the selfish, entitled asshole who chose this.

Yuckiness.

Robert Webb was a better actor than I’d expected, though, I’ll give you that.

The Professor of Parody (Martha Nussbaum)

On reader rootlesscosmo’s recommendation, I took a look at Martha Nussbaum’s criticisms of Judith Butler, The Professor of Parody. It relates quite usefully, for me, to my previous post on feminism and “postmodernism” (I’m still not sure if Rorty qualifies, but I suspect, not without pain as I do very much admire him, that Nussbaum’s critique may apply). A few choice paragraphs:

She suggests that the institutional structures that ensure the marginalization of lesbians and gay men in our society, and the continued inequality of women, will never be changed in a deep way; and so our best hope is to thumb our noses at them, and to find pockets of personal freedom within them. “Called by an injurious name, I come into social being, and because I have a certain inevitable attachment to my existence, because a certain narcissism takes hold of any term that confers existence, I am led to embrace the terms that injure me because they constitute me socially.” In other words: I cannot escape the humiliating structures without ceasing to be, so the best I can do is mock, and use the language of subordination stingingly. In Butler, resistance is always imagined as personal, more or less private, involving no unironic, organized public action for legal or institutional change.

Isn’t this like saying to a slave that the institution of slavery will never change, but you can find ways of mocking it and subverting it, finding your personal freedom within those acts of carefully limited defiance? Yet it is a fact that the institution of slavery can be changed, and was changed–but not by people who took a Butler-like view of the possibilities. It was changed because people did not rest content with parodic performance: they demanded, and to some extent they got, social upheaval. It is also a fact that the institutional structures that shape women’s lives have changed. The law of rape, still defective, has at least improved; the law of sexual harassment exists, where it did not exist before; marriage is no longer regarded as giving men monarchical control over women’s bodies. These things were changed by feminists who would not take parodic performance as their answer, who thought that power, where bad, should, and would, yield before justice.

Butler not only eschews such a hope, she takes pleasure in its impossibility. She finds it exciting to contemplate the alleged immovability of power, and to envisage the ritual subversions of the slave who is convinced that she must remain such. She tells us–this is the central thesis of The Psychic Life of Power–that we all eroticize the power structures that oppress us, and can thus find sexual pleasure only within their confines. It seems to be for that reason that she prefers the sexy acts of parodic subversion to any lasting material or institutional change. Real change would so uproot our psyches that it would make sexual satisfaction impossible. Our libidos are the creation of the bad enslaving forces, and thus necessarily sadomasochistic in structure.

Well, parodic performance is not so bad when you are a powerful tenured academic in a liberal university. But here is where Butler’s focus on the symbolic, her proud neglect of the material side of life, becomes a fatal blindness. For women who are hungry, illiterate, disenfranchised, beaten, raped, it is not sexy or liberating to reenact, however parodically, the conditions of hunger, illiteracy, disenfranchisement, beating, and rape. Such women prefer food, schools, votes, and the integrity of their bodies. I see no reason to believe that they long sadomasochistically for a return to the bad state. If some individuals cannot live without the sexiness of domination, that seems sad, but it is not really our business. But when a major theorist tells women in desperate conditions that life offers them only bondage, she purveys a cruel lie, and a lie that flatters evil by giving it much more power than it actually has.

OBJECT: Stripping the Illusion

I know I owe you something on Flat Earth News, but I’ve been busy. Amongst other things, I spent Saturday afternoon on a street corner canvassing signatures in favour of Object’s “Stripping the Illusion” campaign to reclassify lap dancing clubs as “Sex Encounter Establishments” for licensing purposes (previous post about it here). I’d never done any street campaigning before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. Arguments with mouthy blokes about the right, unimpeded by the niceties of planning law, to pay unaroused women to shake their naked bits at them? Long sales pitches culminating in the victory of a signature, or driving me to tears and drama? Harrassment or indifference?

As it turns out, the hardest part was formulating a short enough phrase so that those who already agreed with our measure knew what we were doing before they walked by. “Would you like to sign our petition…” was a non-starter; “Give local authorities more power” didn’t catch any fish. Finally I settled for leaping into their faces with, “Please help restrict lap dancing clubs!” Quite a few people were clearly minded to just ignore me to begin with, but stopped and turned once I finished with “Right now they’re licensed like cafes and restaurants; we want to give local authorities more power to stop them”. Rushing all of that out in time, however, just confused a few. Ultimately, the whole exercise was more a case of collecting evidence of a pre-existing body of feeling than persuading anyone. I did confront one chap with a half-hearted “Do you not think there should be licensing based on social impact at all?” but that was as far as argument went.

I had to fight the temptation to approach women only, since introducing the topic of the sex industry to random blokes was slightly frightening. Though perhaps I am simply easily frightened. We did have a few self-appointed comedians who chimed in with dreary predictability (”Where’s the nearest one? How do I sign up for the lap dancing?”), but there was a good number of supportive men, so, yay men, and boo my secret, nervous, stereotyping heart.

Glass Castle

Glass Castle is a new webzine focusing on women’s welfare and gender relations in Singapore and the neighbouring region. The first issue includes an interview with NCMP Sylvia Lim. The Singapore-based among you might like to take a look.

From the Outbox

I am chugging through Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News (see his website here) and will post about it (as well as, relatedly, LaVena Johnson) once I am done, but it’s quite a tome and I’m fairly busy at the moment so it will take a while. In the meantime, though, a reader of this blog asked me about my focus on feminism and how I thought women’s rights related to “broader” issues, and my reply turned into a bit of a Feminism 101 piece (maybe reflecting the embryonic state of my consciousness!), which I thought it might be good to reproduce here. More advanced feminists will no doubt find it trite, but I’d like to keep it handy for my own reference.

I’m not wholly sure what you mean by “broader” when women are 51% of the world’s population! [...] I see women’s rights as deeply intertwined with human rights and feminism as very important for informing my ideas of what human rights are and should be. If human rights or civil rights are built only on the notion of a gender-neutral person, in a world where men are treated as the default and women as the “other”, this means basing those rights on the experiences of men. The tendency built into our language and the intellectual and political tools we have inherited, in the absence of gendered analysis, is to take seriously the forms of suffering and injury that men have endured, and to focus on the kinds of freedom that men have sought.

But this means basing our ideas of rights, protection and justice on the experiences of people who have not generally suffered certain kinds of harms and subjugation that more than half the population have suffered - indeed, the experiences of people who have benefitted (as a class) from precisely those harms and subjugation. So feminist analysis is crucial to ensuring that we do not build unexamined assumptions and dynamics of domination and subjugation into the very vehicles (human rights, civil rights) intended to combat them. (This is also true of other forms of anti-oppression analysis: our notions of human rights are not complete unless we see them through an anti-classist, anti-racist, pro-gay, anti-ableist, anti-ageist etc. lens as well.)

Anatole France had a great line which encapsulates this: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

Climbing Up the Walls

Like most of London, if the queues outside the Tube stations after were any indicator, I saw Radiohead tonight at Victoria Park. I am woefully unfamiliar with their material post-OK Computer, so didn’t recognise most of the set, but found I actually preferred the electronica they played to the big sing-along numbers.

Not so the chap who accosted me randomly outside Bow Road Tube. “It was kind of self-indulgent,” he sniffed. “Where were all the hits? Paranoid Android? Karma Police?” It must be frustrating to do all this innovative stuff only to have the crowd perk up, having earlier been fairly lukewarm, at the first few bars of Just. Not that 90s Radiohead wasn’t brilliantly amazingly smasheriffic - I’m just surprised, having expected perhaps (on no basis whatsoever, I acknowledge) that attendees at their concerts would generally be more adventurous than to be pining after well-known standards.

==

Unlike many women, I don’t get harrassed on the street much. I have a sort of small, inconspicuous, child-like vibe going, I suppose. Curiously enough being ethnically a minority probably protects me a little bit, as visually, I can be easily pigeonholed into the stereotype of the Chinese nerd (what am I saying? I am a Chinese nerd) and therefore mostly am ignored as inconsequential and unwomanly rather than bothered as a desirable target. Which is not to say I don’t get racist treatment, including morons coming up to me in a park and intoning “Koniciwa! Koniciwa! Ni hao, ni hao! DVD, DVD!” And sometimes harassment seamlessly blended with racist treatment, like the morons in the pub who kept trying to “guess” my name (”I know, it must start with X, right?”).

I wonder about people like this random chap from the gig who genuinely happened to be going my way and insisted on trying to make conversation during the shared portion of the journey, though. He’s quite representative of the attention that I do get on occasion, which is not quite harassment, but not quite friendliness devoid of creepiness either. They tend to open actual conversation rather than simply invite me to perform lewd acts upon them, and seem pretty interested in the topic of discussion itself, but can’t quite refrain from doing wholly inappropriate things like standing much too close or trying to poke my face (this is too long and stupid a story to bear repeating).

As someone who grew up in an authoritarian state and a hugely conservative society, my instinct from a childhood and adolescence of trying to navigate hostile forces is very much to compromise with bullying/harassment rather than stand up against it - I make some effort to save face for everyone involved, while trying to retain enough dignity so as not to feel I am betraying myself (needless to say, this approach dooms the latter objective to at least partial failure). So this weird mix of earnestness and patheticness is something I find quite hard to withstand: I don’t tell people off or disengage, but I somehow have to avoid having my face poked by a stranger who tended to stand too close to me. It’s not feminist of me to employ awkward laughter instead of an icy stare, or to take upon myself the burden of someone else’s inability (rooted in male privilege) to respect boundaries while displaying interest, but it’s become so habitual and ingrained on my part, all I ever do about this is kick myself for it afterwards. I blame the patriarchy.

Spidey Sense

…okay, here’s something a little less rubbish. But only a little.

During the weekend just past, I raced through Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys: my first Gaiman, and one I was inspired to pick up after the surprising - to me, being massively ignorant - non-crapness of the Stardust film. So I think of Jasper Fforde as Douglas Adams with an actual ability to plot (liberal helpings of deus ex machina notwithstanding); and thus far, it seems to me, Neil Gaiman is Jasper Fforde with human depth. No doubt fans of Adams, Fforde and Gaiman alike will now be at my throat.

There are many touches to Anansi Boys that elevate it above being merely entertaining, despite its deceptive casualness, but among those I like best is how Anansi stories defeated Tiger stories, taking the elements of Tiger stories and Tiger himself and weaving them into a wider, more expansive vision. Not disproving, but rather managing to sublimate, to fashion something better, something capable of extracting and redefining and incorporating the value of a perspective while overcoming its limitations. To get all Rortyian about it, not discarding a mode of understanding because it is insufficiently “close” to the “truth” - not assuming the journey has a fixed end point, so that distractions must be cast aside - but rather creating a new mode of understanding which renders the earlier one otiose because its purposes are simultaneously more effectively fulfilled and also redefined.

I feel like this about feminism (oh come on, you knew it was coming), often. It has produced so useful a vision that all the old anti-feminist crap, the “conundrums” that a male-centric view posed to my understandings and my life, can just be cleared away. When people start up with any of it, I also just sort of glaze over, which is often derided as “close-mindedness” or “dogma” or an “echo chamber” mentality, but the fact is none of this is new; regardless of how many times you repeat the words “post-feminist”, every attack made on feminism I’ve ever heard (which doesn’t originate from an anti-oppression standpoint) does not come from something which has digested feminism and produced a more expansive ideology which comprehensively incorporates the value of feminism and then subverts it. It just comes from patriarchal blah which was probably stodgy and boring during the pre-Cambrian. So it’s not disagreement per se I have no patience with, it’s the tiresome same old same oldness of it. Which stands to reason: anti-feminists almost by definition have trouble listening to us and taking us seriously enough to even actually understand what our concerns are, so they’ll never come up with an approach capable of subsuming them.

I wonder how Rorty and feminism sat together, if at all, though. A quick Google search hasn’t produced anything useful. I don’t recall ever encountering much of it in any of the Rorty I’ve read (Philosophy and Social Hope, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity and assorted essays), and it seems to me that his belief that “nothing is good or bad but redescription makes it so” (I may be pulling the exact wording out of my arse) doesn’t jibe well with the lived social reality of subjugation on which feminism is centered (echoing MacKinnon on postmodernism).

Rainbow Road

I know, it’s been quiet round here. Thing is, Mario Kart Wii is eating my brain (and the experience is most exquisite). I leave you with Onion TV’s piercing comment on my substitution of animated bicyces ridden by mushrooms for any semblance of a human life.



And this little gem from PBF.

The New Flesh

“But some people really really really really really like gender roles.”

Yeah.

Whether you love this idea or hate it, you’ve gotta love it; there’s no use standing in the way of Progress. This is the next stage of evolution, in which earlier patterns of domination, exploitation, and self-defeat will be naturalized and eternalized, and the messier and more disquieting aspects of “freedom” will be mitigated by a new race of sexually malleable beings that’s happy just the way it is.

How can anyone not see that striving to express someone else’s fantasy is the ultimate defeat for freedom, the final death of hope? Being genuinely happy with it means not even being able to conceive of any other fulfillment anymore. Like people who think that pleasure and humiliation are universally, ontologically, always and everywhere, inseparable. Why do you say it like it is a mitigation, not a compounding of horror? It’s not transgressive or new, it’s just the same old shit we’ve had for millenia. It is “liberation” the same way war is peace and slavery is freedom. The last nail in the coffin for imagination.

Standard Operating Procedure: A War Story (Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris)

For some time now I have been struggling intermittently through On Photography by Susan Sontag. One of Sontag’s recurring themes (set out also in Regarding the Pain of Others) is the untrustworthiness of photographic images, the way in which they rely so thoroughly on existing narratives, on the context of our preconceptions, for meaning. This is true of just about any communication or artefact, of course, but candid photography makes particular promises of transparency that undercut the wariness we ordinarily feel with other forms of evidence. In Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris and Philip Gourevitch examine what are probably the most infamous political images in recent political history - the Abu Ghraib photographs - and reveal that their implicit transparency was itself a perfect disguise. “The exposé became the cover-up.”

It’s difficult to underestimate how little those pictures, seemingly so shockingly honest, so straightforward in their horror, really told us. Like most opposed to the war, I think, I read them as both ready confirmation of the brutality of occupation and American foreign policy arrogance, as well as clear badges of the deliberate frat party cruelty of a group of racist, ignorant, hypermilitarised youths drunk on power. The smiles, the thumbs-up, the couple posing: it looked like an unmistakable, and seamlessly unified, package.

Through their research, including extensive interviews with the seven individuals convicted in connection with abuse at the prison, Morris and Gourevitch uncover a reality that is simultaneously less, and more, horrifying than the photographs suggest. The episodes surrounding each of the most iconic images - the hooded man, the body packed in ice, Lynndie England with a leashed prisoner, and the pyramid of naked Iraqis - when placed in context appear less like a definitive catalogue of sensational darkness lurking in individual hearts; less like wickedness, derangement, or glorying in humiliation; less like the sadistic recreational activities of “bad apples” (Bush’s description of the pictured perpertrators, and an alternative title considered by Morris and Gourevitch). They become something more nuanced. They are differentiated, for one - some of the scenes (like Sabrina Harman’s thumbs-up pose with a corpse, which Morris especially defends) depict complex and arguably justified responses to horror; some emerge as actions of a distinctly practical cast; and some, like the pyramid of prisoners, are just what they said on the tin. To the extent they communicate a coherent message, it is (as usual) a larger and more complicated one than that our knee-jerk reactions construct: about the conditions that make posing with a corpse almost defensible, and hauling a man around on a leash essentially sensible. About the animating values that give rise to those conditions. And about the way the snapshots misdirected attention so thoroughly: those ultimately criminally charged, none of whom had a rank above that of sergeant, had committed misconduct of some kind by any ordinary standard; but what of the underlying reality that Abu Ghraib was not run by any ordinary standard (indeed perhaps by any standard)? With the blessing, it would appear, of the entire chain of command?

Written with bleak, unflinching clarity, the book is gripping and revelatory throughout. It’s been a while since I read anything I would recommend so completely. The only lack I felt was the narrowness of the single-hearted focus on the Americans concerned, with virtually nothing given of the Iraqi story of Abu Ghraib. But this too is perhaps a telling clue. When the picture built up by the accounts of these American soldiers gives negligible weight to the perspectives of the very persons they purported to be liberating and protecting, little wonder their liberation and protection looks so much like the very hell they claimed to stand against.