About rape jokes on facebook

I was reading today this article on Une Femme Plus Courageuse's blog and my curiousity made me check my facebook pieces of flair application for rape content. I was using pieces of flair for a while and it had some pretty smart jokes. totally funny. but what about this rape issue that is so big today? it looks like all those chuck norris jokes that were everywhere dissapeared and now there is something funny about rape. where am i standing towards all this? i try to reveal the mechanism of my critique: i often hear that feminists have no sense of humour, they don't get a joke and anyway feminist political corectness is so uncool that you can't even mention something related to it in non-academic circles if you don't want to get a mocking attitude from the joker and an embaressment comment from your good friend host-of-the-party. and why is that? well, first of all jokes are anyway innocent, somehow universal and there can be only good and bad jokes, never offensive ones. the offended is probably a square head that doesn't get it anyway, so don't bother about this type of characters. I have to say that i do not go with this essentialist explination for a number of reasons: rape jokes come with a bigger ironic discourse on protecting patriarchal practices, jokes construct social hierarchies and let's face it, inocent jokes coming from nowhere are not so innocent after all. The ideological game of relating to any form of reality is highly connected to the imaginary present in jokes: the consensus of what is reality is not much of a matter of rational agreement but more of an imaginary affirmation, a form of misrecognition. This type of misrecognition is exemplified by the rape joke: the ideological-distorted reality of the rape is epitomized by the usage of a mysoginistic dominant fiction. and the fictionalized content that makes reality is thrown straight into the popular culture and on facebook. The misrecognition of the rape is ideologically constructed to deny its existance and make it a joke, ie illusory, a made-up story and not a possible bearer of reality. And that's not funny at all.

some random examples of rape-friendly pieces of flair, there are plenty more:

Monster of Loneliness

Probably our final monster will never look like these ones but the whole concept is here. How does your monster looks like?

brechtorama introduces terrorchic

one of my friends started a blog. she writes some challenging stuff there and quite often. highly recommanded. with blogs like these i will stop reading the tabloids :) keep up the good work!

a post about readin tabloids and blogs will come soon. i am thinking about it: why am i doing it? what is my little dirty pleasure in spending hours in their fascinating company?

Nicu and his dwarf

I took this photo a couple of years ago. We were in first year of directing school playing some object games and Nicu came with this weird garden dwarf. Pretty cool.

The return of the clown

Meyerhold in his clown costume

Charcot identified a second phase of hysteria that he called “the phase of clownism” or later known as the buffoonery syndrome. Protracted movements, big gestures and excessive behaviour were main symptoms. Mady Schutzman spots this phase of hysteria in contemporary advertising. Hysterical joy, full blasted energy and euphoric uprising appear in hundreds of commercials in relation to a product to be consumed in nowadays capitalism. Bodies of women in commercials are putting the mask of hyperfemininity and are manifesting the buffoonery syndrome. Hysteria in its theatrical visualization can be used in popular culture as a critical tool in reviewing the construction of hyperfemininity as a clown discourse. If Charcot’s patients were considered “sublime comediennes” and studied by actors like Sarah Bernhardt for their melodramatic roles, the popular hyperfemininity can be read as a radical potential of buffoonery inspiration. The hysterical spectacle is an act of self-mockery, where subjectivity is replaced with something bigger, something oversignified, a suggestion of hypersubjectivity. The becoming of a clown implies the abandonment of consciousness that is understood as a lie, a myth that is to be avoided.

The clown manifests hysterical symptoms especially in the area of gender identification. The male clown acts his desire to be the female, the desire for women clothing. In Marx Brothers’ film A Night at the Opera, Harpo is caught wearing the clown costume of an opera singer. When he is ordered to take it off, he reveals the uniform of a naval officer, and from beneath it, a woman’s dress. If the naval uniform is the sign of masquerade, the dress underneath stays on, the unlayering goes no further. If the uniform used by the clown is a mockery of male authority that the hysteric rejects, the dress is the fantasy of femininity attached to the male imaginary, where sexual difference cannot function anymore. The story of the hysteric is as controversial as the story of circus clowns. They both had to disappear in the 20th century, due to their masterful refuse of mastery but their contradictions can be revalued and used in capitalism’s dynamic of its internal contradictions. As Mady Schutzman observed the clown is back especially in advertising, and hysteria is back in neurosciences.