The canonical modernist theatre is still the norm in theatre studies, performance studies and institutionalized nowadays theatre all over the Western world (including Eastern Europe). Why? I try to answer this tough question by looking at one concept: originality. The modernist ideas of acting/staging/writing are still treated as strikingly original or fashionable. That happens while other contemporary forms of theatre are described as derivative, deviant, old-fashioned and second-rate (for example, feminist theatre is often described as a pale/boring copy of Brechtian political theatre).
My assumption is that in order to assure the existence of various hierarchies through the discourse of modernism in the theatre world nowadays, there is a need to reinforce the primacy of originality or novelty. The binary opposition original/copy functions in theatre as a complex mechanism with exclusionary effects, “for differentiating between and evaluating various forms of deviance and marginality”.[1] One of the effects of original/copy dichotomy marks the masculinity/femininity separation and becomes essential in masculinist reconstructions of the modernist theatre. Some authors such as Rosalind E. Krauss identified the theme of originality as the only constant in the discourse of the modernist avant-garde. I have to agree with them when it comes to theatre. Modernist theatre depends exactly on the repression of the second term of the binary. Originality, daringness or being-interesting are valorized in the modernist discourse as masculine features with no critical attention to the social implications of such reconstructions. While the unoriginal or repetitive work was feminized, modernist avant-garde was constructed in the masculine. Contemporary theatre is modernist to the bone and promotes same exclusionary practices. Especially the margins of contemporary theatre follow the modernist formula and become feminized while those actors, directors or dramaturges stay insignificant unless they accept a masculine individualist approach and produce acceptable original work.
Ezra Pound’s expression to “make it new” never left Western theatre and is here to stay because theatre people don’t give any critical attention to the political/social engagements that they reproduce through their novelty/originality. The obsession to be original as an exclusion of the copy has other not-so-innocent implications: the unqueering of theatre practitioners and reinforcement of heteronormativity. From Peter Brook to some of my friends too afraid to affect their work by coming out, the obsession of an “original” is still at work: queer sexuality and cross-dressing are regarded as pale copies of heterosexual norms when they form the basis of artistic production. And no one wants to be an unoriginal artist, right?
[1]Bridget Elliott and Jo-Ann Wallace, Women artists and writers, 1994, p. 34
I am currently reading “Jocasta’s children” by Christiane Olivier and lately everyone around me talks (usually in bad terms) about motherhood. It makes me wonder why… But I won’t write about the book now. There are too many thoughts based on this book and the charming style of the apparently pop writing on very complicated concepts. What I want to explore a bit is Winnicot’s idea of the “good-enough mother”. Because I had too much Freud and Lacan lately, I need a break from the phallic fathers. For Winnicot the mother is not absent and she is not frustrating the child, she is the positive presence. The real question here is if Winnicot’s theoretization of the mother is positive or not. And I think not. The mother is important but she has no desire, she is not scary, she is not aggressive, she has no orgasms, she is just an objective presence, the good-enough mother. Running away from Lacan, I end up in a bigger trap: Winnicot’s mother is not a real woman, she is just another misogynist myth, a male phantasy, a beautiful ideal. The good enough mother is the source of ultimate blame for real mothers. Because no one can achieve the good-enough high standards that patriarchal cultures impose for women (where the mother is the only one responsible for child care). This social aspect is devastating for the individual mothers, for children and for society at large. The good-enough mother has to be repressed by society for her too much power, for the fear of infantile helplessness. Men deny their helplessness and construct their domination attitude towards the world and their heterosexuality, where the gender roles are kept imbalances and mothers are in control, just not to become too good and too powerful. The external ideal of the mother is the perfect patriarchal blame in the Oedipal travel. And that brings back Olivier’s book and what we still tend to forget: what about Jocasta’s desire for Oedipus?
Chimamanda Adichie gives a mind blowing lecture on single stories (with a lot of personal examples and a focus on the single story of Africa). Her criticism on the single storytelling is very convincing and makes you wonder about your own construction of stereotypes, easy readings of otherness and the function of tourism (I always had in mind this type of single story when I hear touristic stories from far away lands and people, all these stories are so similar and unidimensional). After hearing Chimamanda Adichie, all my single stories came to mind and I was fascinated by her not-so-Foucauldian definition of power: Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.
The single story has serious implications when power is involved: besides the othering/objectification of a person or a group of people as an unified universalized/atemporal object, the single story is "what they become" and no one can beat the white colonial man at telling single stories (I am just curios, aren't they bored by the monotony of their own storytelling? I am. completely. ). But better watch the whole 20 minutes of wisdom:
Minsky explains it so nice and simple in her chapter on Freud: "Before we are able to fall in love with another person, we fall in love with our mother's breast, our faeces, our clitoris or penis because they give us pleasure, and importantly, our first primitive sense of identity." I always think of this when I observe children or I hear remarks related to them: experiences of self are based on pleasurable sensations. When old people apparently "become children" they return to pleasurable sensations: their pleasurable pain is an expression of love and getting in touch with a body that is feeling (beyond sexual difference, phallic phase and Oedipus). This does not necessarily apply to heavily sedated Americans.
“An actor working for the new class needs to re-examine all the canons of the past. The very craft of the actor must be completely reorganized.” (Vsevolod Meyerhold)
Human Rights Initiative from my university is organizing a Halloween party to raise funds. Sounds great! But when you read their announcement more carefully...something weird pops up.
Costume competition categories will include:
- most original group/couple…
- best handmade…
- funniest…
- scariest…
- and least politically correct.
What?!?! Maybe they should add more explicit categories to that last category. For example, the most racist, the most homophobic, the most transphobic and so on. Because Halloween is such a great opportunity to express ourselves and be bigots, right?
The Human RightS Initiative (HRSI) is a social engagement, capacity building, and awareness raising human rights organization based at Central European University (CEU) in Budapest, Hungary.We regularly organize a wide range of events for both the CEU as well as the local community, such as workshops, awareness raising campaigns, public lectures, student country presentations, and film screenings.
UPDATE: The announcement was not removed, but one of the organizers assured everyone that: "when thinking of non-PC I was imagining people dressing up like Soros or, taking this opportunity to challenge stereotypes, but staying within the borders of non-offensiveness (otherwise, they would definitely not be let in the venue) and such, within the CEU framework.
I am sending a reminder of this party tomorrow, and I will write, in brackets, something along the lines of "no discriminatory costume will be tolerated." ... I have given you my "side" of the story and again, I take full responsibility for creating this "non-PC" category."
Another brilliant video from Jay Smooth, this time about derogatory terms for gays. Next time when you're calling someone names, you should check out the genealogy of the used concept because it might turn against your argument.
"It wasn't a clear battle between hero and villain, good and evil. Now the hero had to have doubts about his achievements. Everyone needed a dose of neurosis and to be up to their ears in Freudian, subconscious problems."
Queer activists in Spain launched a calendar where transgender persons play the Virgin Mary. This personal discovery of the Spanish calendar comes after a long discussion with my PhD supervisor on religion, about how Orthodoxists claim Tarkovsky, about the easy way out of religion (the claim: “I am an atheist”), about the creepiness of the Christian right and a final agreement on the finest pose of Catholicism that we both enjoy (Father Ted).
Carla Antonelli explains the idea of this calendar:
“I posed myself the following scenario: Why is it that a transsexual woman can’t represent a religious icon given life by so many other actors and actresses throughout history? To not do it would be akin to internalizing the same discriminatory principles that people want to throw against us.”
Because telling who is allowed to act what role denies/recognizes the body of the performer. Transgender people’s bodies are constantly denied, ignored, non-recognized as “real bodies”. Because only ciswomen can play women, right? Otherwise we are looking for the comic effect.
Carla Antonelli’s comment made my day. I remembered my old time fascination with Marcela Althaus-Reid’s books indecent theology of qeering God. I discovered the queer Catholicism when I was in the Netherlands years ago and there was this image stuck in my mind: Jesus in a black latex Batman suit suffering on the cross. Besides the inherent iconoclasm of the calendar to Vatican I style Catholicism (still strong in Catholic countries and also in Greek Catholic communities as I remember from my years in Transylvania), we should not forget t
hat there are also “those who go to gay bars and salsa clubs with rosaries in their pockets, and who make camp chapels of their living rooms”. We are not talking only about the Marxist criticism on religion.
Back to the Virgin, I am impressed by the materiality of belief in these images, where the missing body of the Virgin returns. And this is a strong visual/conceptual statement. As Marcela Althaus-Reid wrote
“If theology has its own cowardice and fears, the horror of uncontrolled bodies and especially of the orgy made up of unrestricted bodies may be the stronger. There are bodies whose fluids overflow the metaphorical discourse of theology, but they have lost materiality and sensuousness. Theology can see blood in wine but not blood in blood. The Vatican can see tears in the eyes of the statues of the Virgin Mary, or sweat on her robes when considering the legitimacy of a claimed apparition, but cannot see a trace of semen on her skirts.”
The criticism of this calendar based on explicit sexuality is shallow: it is only your cissexism and transphobia speaks. You need a better argument than “trans women’s bodies are not fit to represent the Virgen”.
What I see as a valid critique on this project is Prof Susurro’s point of view that
“there is only one trans woman ofcolor in the calendar. Modern day Spain is an international country with Middle Eastern, African, Asian, and Latin@s living within its borders as new comers or third and fourth generation Spaniards. It would have been fairly easy to include trans women of color under these circumstances. Neither the mainstream queer community nor the religious community imagines people of color as part of the Body. Even when correcting the transmisogyny of traditional Christian images, queer activists continue to make these dual exclusions, except for the month of April.”
In this ad from Wrangler men who are looking to pump up their hegemonic masculinity are encouraged not to think because as they say it : "we are animals". I always thought that (critical) thinking was seen in late capitalism as a queer or feminine trait, a big No in face of re/production, efficiency, control or consumerism. Something that has to be stopped or discouraged. "Being a smart guy"/ "Thinking too much" / "Reading is boring" / "Too much theory" are definitely phrases that represent worries connected to a crisis of masculinity. Now the lack of thinking is taken un-subliminally as a marketing message to sell some products for male audiences in search of their lost masculinities. What do you think about it?
Isn’t acting just getting on stage, or in front of a camera, and saying your lines, then going out and meeting your public to sign autographs? (Ed Wood, jr.)
I am against all "Free Polanski" artists, including here the ones that I really liked at some point in my life (Wim Wenders, Pedro Almodóvar, Darren Aronofsky, Terry Gilliam, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Wong Kar-Wai, Tilda Swinton, Asia Argento, Woody Allen, David Lynch, Harmony Korine). This support for raping 13 years old girls tells a lot about their aesthetics and I don't want to be involved in it, as part of their audience. Jay Smooth explains why they are so wrong.
I was reading the Guardian debate on black theatre and even if it was too local for my case (I can’t really relate to British theatre) and lacked an intersectional perspective, it gave me some food for thought.
Roy Williams affirms the healthy state of black theatre in Britain, where there are different voices exploring what it means to be black in Britain. To the universalist claims that there is no black theatre because “Theatre is theatre. Nobody talks about "white theatre" when they go to see a David Hare play”, Williams responds in a meaningful way: “But then they don't need to. From box-office staff to administrators, from performers to directors, theatre is owned and controlled by white people. Anyone who isn't white is marginalised.”
The whole idea of promoting black theatre in Britain is based on the ideas “we need it to ensure we are heard” and also “"Theatre" sounds po-faced and white; "black theatre" sounds intriguing, daring”.
Tokenism is addressed in his article on these terms: “Black writers have to write about whatever they want. Write about race. Don't write about race. Just make sure your play challenges you as much as you hope it will challenge your audience. But if that audience seems more interested in defining you as a black person, rather than listening to your work, walk away. Those people are looking backwards and will take you backwards, if you let them.”
Michael McMillan writes another article on black theatre where he addresses also the importance of naming the black theatre: “ And eventually we would have heard about young writers such as Bola Agbaje and Michael Bhim, for example, irrespective of whether they're black or white – they're just talented and skilled new voices. Yet somehow the label of race seems to stick. Given our recent history, perhaps that's little surprise. Djanet, a character in Afrika Solo by the black Canadian playwright Djanet Sears, tells us in the very first words of the play: "You know, nothing exists until a white man find it." Thus it was claimed for many years that no theatre existed in Africa before Europeans arrived, even though black music, dance and humour have been intrinsic to the development of modern western entertainment.”
This argument makes me wonder how the Westerness/whiteness/patriarchy/heterosexism of theatre, music and entertainment become invisible on the way to the spectator and how artists are reproducing or challenging the colonial/imperial/dominant culture in various contexts. Because ignoring these genealogies certainly reproduce the conservatism of many artistic environments.
Paulette Moore’s call for Easy Ways For Men (and Women!) to Become Better Feminists gave me a lot of food for thought.To the often heard question what can men do to support feminism, there are some motivating ideas:
Move to clean up dishes after a meal before anyone else does.
Read biographies about women. Start with Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein by Miranda Seymour. Move on to Do They Hear You When You Cry – a stunning political and personal journey by and about Fauziya Kassindja; a woman from Togo who sought asylum from the practice of female genital mutilation.
Read more literature, watch films created by women. Check out the mind-boggling book Orlando by Virginia Woolf. Then watch the beautiful film of the same name by director Sally Potter.
France is confused about how to make the banning of the burqa legal. A parliamentary commission will soon meet to investigate how they can ban any cloak that covers most of the face of a woman. André Gerin, a Communist Party mayor of a Lyon suburb with many Muslims from North Africa, began the debates in late June by initiating a motion calling for this parliamentary commission. The French state had to answer his request.
“The burqa is the tip of the iceberg. Islamism really threatens us” he was complaining in a letter to the government for them “to do something”.
Sarkozy responded by saying that “the burqa is not welcome on the territory of the French Republic.” He did not specify how it would be made unwelcome. Guess still working on that part.
French domestic intelligence issued a report saying that only 367 women in France wore a full veil, while recently a woman was refused entry to a bank because employees thought a head scarf was illegal.
To all these anxieties in France, there is one possible answer. It comes from Sudan and the already famous article 152 of the Sudanese Criminal Code.
This article is used by the Public Order Police in Sudan to harass women about their dress code. Article 152 exists in Sudan since 1991. Maybe French government can check also the practicalities and implementation of such an article. It stipulates that any conduct or clothes in violation of public decency (I am sure it can be defined in a more secularized way) should be punished with 40 lashes or a bail or both. France can change some parts, but the control effect can stay the same, because after all is the same concept: best way to police women's bodies. Thirteen women were arrested on July 3, 2009 in Khartoum under article 152 of the criminal code. The 13 women in question were arrested because they wearing trousers. They have been sentenced to 10 lashes and a bail of $100. Three of the women including a well-known journalist-Lubna Hussien- refused the punishment and asked for a lawyer and a court case. Lubna and the other three women were granted a presidential pardon, which the women refused. They have instead challenged the judge to eliminate article 152 of the criminal code. The article is vague on what constitutes indecent clothing and stands against the country's Interim National Constitution that came in place after the Comprehensive Peace Agreement signed in 2005. However, it is still being used to harass women in the streets of Khartoum and around Sudan. French authorities can have their exceptions too, no doubt.
There is a petition against article 152 here. There is no petiton against the French parliamentary commission.
Saturday was a special day. Together with more than 2000 people we marched for Budapest’s “Gay Dignity”. Remembering last year’s violent events and Jobbik’s political statement to do everything possible to stop the March, we expected another riot.
Friday was the first day of fall in Hungary with thunderstorms, wind and low temperatures. We waited for rain on Saturday also. But the weather and the March didn’t follow the predictable script. During the Pride, Andrassy utca looked awfully quiet, no locals to cheer on the sides. In front of the Opera there was one middle-aged woman dancing in support: she was applauded and cheered by the crowd. From some windows you could see other people watching. That was from our side of the fence. As some observed, Budapest Pride became mainly a TV event in terms of reaching audiences outside the event.
On the other side of the fence, like 100 meters away, extreme right-wing rioters were trying to get in but police did a great job in protecting the marchers. Concerning protesters, the only ones we have seen at the Pride were at the Hosok Tere entrance: two groups of skinheads surrounded by cops. They didn’t get in.
Otherwise, from our side the rioters were absent: we didn’t hear them, we didn’t see them and we could enjoy a very peaceful, cheerful, happy event. Because they couldn’t get closer to throw stones, eggs, tomatoes and Molotov cocktails like last year, the protesters came with a plan B: a crowd of 500 neo-Nazis and skinheads went wild in Budapest's Jewish district. Riot police used tear gas and baton charges against the loud and violent xenophobic group. Police made more than 30 arrests. These people were using dangerous weapons and I heard that two guys with army knives were stopped earlier to enter the Pride. More details of this not-going-to-the-city-for-nothing adventure:
The rioters invaded the heart of the traditional Jewish Ghetto District, started a small fire, tore down signs and shouted threatening anti-Semitic vitriol. The attacks were witnessed by families of foreign Jews visiting the district for the current Budapest Jewish Cultural Festival.
One British tourist trying to argue with the rioters at the edge of the ghetto had to be rescued by police when he was verbally abused and physically assaulted by a gang of 20 attackers. A policeman who tried to break up a confrontation not far from there was knocked to the ground and kicked, as was a woman displaying a Gay Pride T-shirt while standing alone at a tram stop.
Because how else can you solve a failed homophobic attack if not by an old-fashioned anti-Semitic rampage somewhere close to the Synagogue? These anti-Pride protesters come with a pretty coherent political discourse with their actions: hate all of them. I guess that last year old women hitting marchers with their big Bibles were in a different hate group than these guys...
Another interesting crowd that I actually saw on my way home from Blaha Luija Ter was made of Swedish football supporters. They were in town with their team and because they couldn't enjoy the Budapest tourist attractions, everything being closed in the center with the big fence that was protecting us, they decided to manifest their anger in a very particular way: they joined the extreme-right protesters in their homophobic attack on the March.... Another coherent activity for a day: start getting drunk in the morning, attack together with friendly locals the LGBT crowd or at least try to get in over the fence, get some tear gas from riot police, drink some more, go to the stadium and support your team in the cheerful hooligan style, yell some more and then get back home with your low-cost flight. Full extreme touristic program for a day.
I am still wondering what would have been without that huge fence in between. Will we need a bigger fence next year?
The first international Same-sex hand holding (Sshh!) Saturday starts on September 26:
On this day, same-sex couples and friends all over the world are encouraged to hold hands in public to support the visibility of Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans (LGBT) people. Sshh! Saturdays will occur on the last Saturday of every month, publicised by A Day In Hand. This is a revolutionary way of encouraging and inspiring LGBT people to take responsibility for their equality and live their lives without fear or restraint.
The campaign is asking people who take part to send their Sshh! photos to yourstories@adayinhand.com. The first Sshh! Saturday is held in memorium of the shooting at an LGBT youth centre in Tel Aviv “and the ongoing atrocities being committed to LGBT people in Iraq”. Queer politics are back! This is a silent revolution because nothing needs to be said: no war of words, no impassioned speeches, no organised rallies. Simply hold hands. This is not a campaign for couples only. It's for anybody who has ever believed that love has no exceptions.
Straight people could be at the forefront in fighting for queer rights.
Straight people can support us by holding hands with someone of their same gender and uploading the pic.
Do you have to be black, to object to racism?
Do you have to be female, to object to sexism?
You can see a whole load of photos and stories on the A Day in Hand website, including the one on this post of Alice & Em at Charing Cross Station, by Mark Weeks:
Me and Em hold hands everywhere we go, I’m aware we get stared at, might even be dangerous sometimes which scares me but I really believe it’s a basic human right to express my love for my girlfriend so I do it anyway. It’s funny not long after this photo was taken, we were walking in Islington (holding hands) when a teenage boy threw his drink over Em stating the obvious by calling us lesbians. We confirmed his suspicions and decided to educate him further by having a good old snog in front of him. He couldn’t believe our audacity and decided to coax his friends to follow us on the bus. By this point I was pooping my pants,thinking we may have gone a bit too far, but thankfully one of his friends saw sense (or noticed that a bus full of people might not tolerate any blatant homophobia quietly) and said “Leave em alone, they’re not hurting anyone, it’s up to them what they wanna do.” At which point they promptly got off the bus at the next stop and no doubt went on to harrass someone else. I was angry and scared, cautious about holding hands in public, but amazingly it also made me realise that their behaviour was because of ignorance, and the importance of A Day In Hand campaign.
Judy Garland in the 1949 musical "In the good old summertime". Priceless. The youtube video is better than the whole plot and relations in the movie: when taking a part out of its context does justice and gives extra-meaning. Just priceless.
The mayor of Constanta, Radu Mazare went with his 13 years old son to see the Valkyrie Operation movie, where Tom Cruise plays the unsuccessful Hitler assassin. It is not just another Nazi exploitation movie: it hardly affected the mayor. And with a twist: father and son left feeling so inspired that both decided to wear Nazi uniforms to a fashion show and goose-step on the runway over the weekend.
Even if Romania constantly denied Holocaust till 2004, wearing Nazi uniforms is still illegal and Mazare can get a prison sentence of up to three years. In theory. Even if the Centre for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism sent a letter to the country's general prosecutor urging an investigation of Mazare for breaking the law and instigating a child to follow his example, Csaba Asztalos, the director of the National Agency Against Discrimination said that he won't be prosecuted because this law never applies in Romania. And this is the shock element for me. Not that a social democrat mayor dresses up in Nazi uniform and makes a ridiculous and horrible statement:
I was inspired from the Valkyrie movie ... I wanted to dress like a Vehrmacht general because I've always liked this uniform, and admired the rigorous organisation of the German army.
that comes connected to another declaration:
By no means did I intend to harm and I do not agree with the war and I didn't want to offend the Jews or the Israeli community, with which I'm in a very good relationship and which possibly focused most of their investments in Romania in Constanta.
His lack of basic logic is kind of well known: I heard him a couple of weeks ago making plenty of sexist comments and when the reporter asked him about his misogynism he very confidently replied:
Nonsense, everyone knows that I love women.
It is really worrying that this case is treated by media as a celebrity scandal, the only concern is about international criticism and the fact that Romania will look bad. The fact that wearing Nazi uniforms is treated as something cool and humorous, that Mazare won't be prosecuted because the law never applied before, that he treats this case as something irrelevant. He even said
for how many complaints I already have, is there any problem if I have another one?
and even victimized himself with:
Nevertheless, it was only a fashion catwalk. It shouldn't have received such attention, but in Romania we're generally inquisitors.)
Let's not forget, as Csaba Asztalos said
Mazare is not a top model, but a person with a public position. It is not about a parade of military uniforms.
And there is still no comment from prosecutors. Probably they are waiting for the whole scandal to pass so that they can get back to their daily routine. And the mayor can continue his political career and job. Because when it comes to make some privileged politicians loose some of their benefits, everything freezes and laws stop to function.
A re-reading of one of the most canonical writers. These extremely funny and effective animations are a model for how transgressive we can possibly read the monolithic drama canon.
Pam Spaulding writes on her blog about some weird situtions in the soap opera industry. First, Chris Engel, an actor from The Young and the Restless, quitted the series after he realized that his character was about to kiss another man.
Now there is another similar case: Patricia Mauceri plays the mother of a character that turns out gay in One Live to Live. She refused the script because a Latina mother can never accept that, in her opinion. She was changed with another actress.
"OLTL" was taping scenes in late-June concerning roommates Cristian, Layla and Fish. (They'll air in September.) Cristian and Layla suspect that sweet cop Fish is gay, but aren't sure how to approach him about it. So they buy a book about how to tell if you're gay and plan to give it to him.
Cristian's mom, Carlotta, was supposed to find the book and assume Cristian is gay. Her reaction was scripted to be very accepting and even amused, citing his love of art and fondness for going shirtless as signs she should have recognized.
But Mauceri, who has played diner purveyor Carlotta Vega for 14 years, refused to play the story as written, saying a Latina mother would not be so accepting. Rather, Mauceri rewrote the scenes to make Carlotta confused and troubled, and submitted them to "OLTL" execs.
"That's not the story we're telling," responded an exec.
Mauceri then said she could not play the scenes as written, so the show called Santiago.
"Saundra Santiago is now playing Carlotta Vega," confirms an ABC rep.
The stereotype that all Latino mothers are homophobic is used in this case to promote a very personal and direct form of homophobia. Some actors afford to refuse the part or re-write the script. That brings to my mind the situation in theatre, the one that I know better. A couple of weeks ago, Iulia Popovici was mentioning how Romanian actors are avoiding to identify with their gay characters, almost yelling "this is not who I am!". I see that quite often when a gay character comes on stage. Quite bizarre, this detachment is not happening with criminals, murderers, rapists, bigots etc. Playing evil is more convincing most of the times. Does it mean that playing queer is seen as being more threatening to most heterosexual actors? Or is it the fear of their own sexuality, the fear of becoming one of them by rehearsing? It is a good example to show how performance has implications on subjectivity just like performativity does. Actors fear that and they try to keep the character as far as possible from their subject. Then you come with some black-face type of performances, ridiculing the queer character, in the style of Bruno (Sacha Baron Cohen was most of the time close to his wife during premieres, even if in character: he needed the proof that he IS not Bruno, he is not queer, that is just a character to make fun of of). Directors are doing it in a similar way: they dis-identify with their queer characters and stories by some poor form of Brechtian alienation. The purpose is not to make the audience think about their own situation or to make them critical of what they see: theatremakers are just telling that it is not their story, it is not their alliance, it is not their concern and creativity, queerness is incidental and it's "used" mainly for its comical homophobic effect. That is the situation if the queer character is not part of a melodramatic plot and is killed at some point to reinstall the original status quo. Then it becomes a tool for a queer cleansing of the stage. Both situations are dead ends for any social change and reinforce a homophobic attitude.
The amazing Paul Robeson! Who? A short history lesson cannot harm:
Already a famous singer, Broadway and cinema actor, Paul Robeson became a primarily political artist, speaking out against colonialism and racism. Robeson was a prime target of the Red Scare during the late 1940s through to the late 1950s. His passport was revoked from 1950 to 1958 under the McCarran Act and he was under surveillance by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency and by British MI5 for well over three decades until his death in 1976. The reasoning behind his persecution centered not only on his beliefs in socialism and friendship with the peoples of the Soviet Union but also his tireless work towards the liberation of the colonial peoples of Africa, the Caribbean and Asia, his support of the International Brigades, his efforts to push for anti-lynching legislation. This mass vilification by the American establishment blacklisted and isolated Robeson for the latter part of his career. Despite the fact that Paul Robeson was one of the most internationally famous cultural figures of his era, the persecution virtually erased him from mainstream culture and subsequent interpretations of 20th century history, including civil rights and black history.
To this day, Paul Robeson's FBI file is one of the largest of any entertainer ever investigated by the United States Intelligence Community, requiring its own internal index and unique status of health file. There is also documented evidence from the files released under the Freedom of Information Act that Paul Robeson was drugged and neutralized under the CIA's clandestine MKULTRA mind control program and subsequently subjected to unnecessary and abusive levels of electroconvulsive therapy while under private care in Great Britain as a means to keep him from influencing the U.S. civil rights movement and worldwide anti-imperialist movements during the 1960s.
More on wikipedia about a forgotten person who could not just enjoy his privileges as a well-known artist but used them wisely with a radical political agenda not being concerned of possible persecutions.
Judith Butler is not my favourite feminists. There are some problems with her approach towards performance that masks Austin's biases, the whole performativity theory is uncritically built on this exclussion of performers as not-enough egosintonic subjects. But on the other hand, she is one of the most popular feminist&queer thinkers, well cited in academia and elsewhere, already a popular culture figure. And her thinking is still a mind-blowing for me on various topics. In a recent interview published in Monthly Review she explains her understanding of feminism:
In my opinion, feminism implies thinking about the practices of freedom: when we object to discriminatory practices at work, to forced reclusion within the private domain, when we protest about violence against women. . . , it is not only because we want women to achieve equality, to be treated justly. Equality and justice are very important norms, but there are more: we want certain freedoms for women so they are not totally limited to the established ideas of femininity or even of masculinity. We want them to be capable of innovating and creating new positions. Insofar as feminism has been, at least in part, a kind of philosophy, it is crucial that it develops new notions of gender. If feminism suggests that we cannot question our sexual positions or affirm that we have no need of the category of gender, then it would be saying, in some sense, that I should accept a particular positionality or a particular structure -- restrictive for me and for others -- and that I am not free to make and remake the form, or the terms in which I have been made. And it is true that I cannot change these terms radically, and even if I decide to resist the category of woman, I will have to battle with this category throughout my whole life. In this way, whenever we question our gender we run the risk of losing our intelligibility, of being labelled 'monsters'. My struggle with gender would be precisely that, a struggle, and that has something to do with the patient labour that forms the impatience for freedom. Thus, gender perfomativity can be understood: the slow and difficult practice of producing new possibilities of experiencing gender in the light of history, and in the context of very powerful norms that restrict our intelligibility as human beings. They are complex struggles, political in nature, since they insist on new forms of recognition. In fact, from my experience of feminism, these political struggles have been being waged for the last hundred years, at the very least. I only offer a radical language for these struggles.
I can completly identify with this particular vision of feminism and her own implication. She oferred the radical language indeed. Following another question, she explains her commitment to gender as a social construction and the need for "body talk":
My commitment involves opposition to all restrictive and violent measures that are used to regulate and restrict the life of gender. There are certain types of freedoms and practices that are very important for human flourishing. Any excessive restriction of gender limits, or undermines, the capacity of humans to flourish. And, what is more, I would add that this human flourishing is a good thing. I am aware that there I am taking a moral standpoint here; I know that I have a strong normative structure, but this has nothing to do with saying "this kind of gender is good and this one is bad". To do so would constitute a dangerous use of morality; rather, I am trying to shift the moral structure towards another framework in which we can ask ourselves: how does a body survive? What is a flourishing body? What does it need to flourish in the world? And it needs various things: it needs to be nourished, to be touched, to be in social settings of interdependence, to have certain expressive and creative capacities, to be protected from violence, and to have its life sustained in a material sense.
In what way is gender relevant today and what happens when gender roles are not questioned? Butler explains:
Today there are many people with modalities of gender that are considered unacceptable -- the sexual or gender minorities -- and who are discriminated against, considered abnormal, by the discourses of psychiatry or psychology, or who are the object of physical violence. These people are not being given the opportunity of having their lives recognised as worthy of being protected or helped, not even as lives that deserve to be mourned. I question the norms of gender that prevent us or make us incapable of recognising certain lives as being worth living, and which stop us providing the material conditions necessary for these lives to be lived, to flourish. For these lives to be publicly recognised also means their being understood as lives whose disappearance would be felt as a loss.
The same thing happens in war: certain lives are deemed worthy of being protected, while others are considered expendable, of negligible importance, radically dispensable. One could say that all my work revolves around this question: what is it that counts as a life? And in what way do certain restrictive norms of gender decide for us? What kind of life is worth protecting and what kind of life is not?
But more on Levinas, Agamben, Arendt, Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, life, humanism and so on here. After reading this interview, I admit that I see things a bit different. Mindblowing is the right word.
And one last quote on Butler's postition on sexual difference. Here she is again:
We are all trying to change these values and work on them, trying to find other spaces and possibilities for femininity, for masculinity, for that which is neither feminine nor masculine. We have distinct conceptions about how to think this difference, but, for sure, we are all interested in exploring this difference.
Others pale and soft being stored for later eating
And Jefferson
Who saw hope in new oats
The wild houses go on
With long hair growing from between their toes
The feet at night get up
And run down the long white roads by themselves
The dams reverse themselves and want to go stand alone in the desert
Ministers who dive headfirst into the earth
The pale flesh
Spreading guiltily into literatures
That is why these poems are so sad
The long dead running over the fields
The mass sinking down
The light in children's faces fading at six or seven
The world will soon break up into small colonies of the saved
(1966)
I started to develop a passion for 1960s American poets lately. I guess it was a very special moment in hystory, their struggles in writing resonate to my daily struggles in 2009, only less energy and vision on my side.They are my heroes these days.
Here is an incredible book. It will shock and amaze you. But as a documentary on the sexual corruption of our age, it is a must for every thinking adult. (on the cover)
The Velvet Underground is a paperback by journalist Michael Leigh published in September, 1963. The legend is that Andy Warhol found this paperback on the streets of New York, in the gutter, and named a rock band after it. This gesture influenced the reception of the paperback, becoming a necessary collectable. Various sources modify the legend: actually Lou Reed and Tony Conrad found a copy lying in the street. The group liked the name, considering it evocative of "underground cinema," and fitting, due to Reed's already having written "Venus In Furs", inspired by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's book. But back to the book:
Michael Leigh writes on various sexual practices everything other than reproductive intercourse conducted in privacy by a heterosexual couple: swapping, group sex, sex orgy parties, LGBT activities, corset fetishism, sado-masochism. This paperback explores the various ways in which sexual practices are solicited “to exchange strange experiences and discuss bizarre and exotic” (from newspaper advertisements, clubs etc.), and how getting in touch happens. Even if the book deplores the sexual depravity of the modern age, the detailed descriptions filled with pathos makes you wonder about the author’s fantasies and experiences.
The historical shift in attitude toward sexuality is American society finds its best expressions in this fun to read book. A central passage in the book is a paraphrase from a 1961 article in the French Esprit magazine, which calls this liberal attitude toward sex the sexual revolution, and attributes it to the general availability of contraceptives. What makes it annoying is the moralizing view that explodes especially in the introduction. Louis Berg, “a professional lecturer on topics of psychological interest” who has “studied abroad”, writes this introduction, considered by Susan Stryker “the most hateful, perversely twisted antiqueer propaganda ever printed in a mainstream American paperback book.”
Gay and transgender people are for Berg the absolute nadir of humankind and enjoy numerous privileges: “In America, as in Europe, they have their own bars and clubs, their restaurants, their magazines and newsletters. They even have certain areas of the city where they can flaunt themselves without interference. But this is not enough. This ilk is never content to remain prisoners of their own abnormality. It would seem to be a condition of their aberrant drives that, as some light-skinned Negros, they should “pass.” And it is here that they frequently come into open conflict with the law. For it is as at such times that they attempt to raid the ranks of the normal.” Sounds familiar? The same discourse over decades on the gay conspiracy that brings the end of civilization. Nice normal heterosexuals and their kids are seduced into immorality by queer people who pass as straight. Racist paranoia arguments complete the picture. Sexual revolution from the 1960s was only beginning and reactionary Bergs became less mainstream or self-censored themselves. Here and there they still show their ugly heads.
You didn't have to travel to become an airplane, nor fly to get high. Considerable numbers languished in your exclusive calculations. You would wind up abroad. You choose home entertainment and the mechanical society.
The machine had machines which told machines all about it. The machine knew, for example, of sensational airwaves. The machine knew how to go up and how to drop down. The machine knew all the exits, and the best exits.
Then your metabolism changed and you entered energy: model-making glue, carbon, tet., solder, a piezo-electric crystal-controlled oscillator smelled like the real thing, and gave you the advantage of interchangeable frequencies.
You were calibrating fame and the landscapes you entered. you could prove forty-eight states and Britain and at dusk you could prove the small isles of the Atlantic. You spoke to every radio on St.Pierre and Miquelon Islands!
Fifteen years later, you abandoned your license, just as the next generation was entering chemicals. You were writing, compulsively, bit nothing fashinable. A poem on your birthday seemed out of the question.
Yet, here you are, celebrating, speaking openly as if the moral of aesthetics is that the parable convinces. The easy way out, you concluded, is through the village, under the antenna, down the long path intended for your feet.
I have just returned from Finland and while reading some blogs, I ended up with Renee's macabre short post at Womanist Musing about a gay man from Senegal who was exhumed twice from the graveyard for being gay. Not knowing much about Senegal, I won't make some statements about how homophobia works localy, the effects of French colonialism, the religious connotations or how heterosexuals discriminate gay people in Senegal. To put it simple, this case from Thies is really fucked up: "a man who was presumed to be gay died of natural causes in a hospital. Just hours after he was buried in a Muslim cemetery four men had his body exhumed his body, leaving it near his grave. The police were forced to intervene and the body was reburied. Not wishing to be stymied in their efforts the man was once again exhumed and this time his body was dumped in front of his family home."
Death is not a safe place anymore, even after becoming a corpse, the queer body is atill denied, rejected, thrown out of the grave. The zombiefication of the gay man in this case makes me wonder of some stories of life after death. Because obviously homophobia goes that far.
Harper's Magazine published in 1975 an "unscientific poll of interested parties" on this issue. From the boring answers, one of them catches the eye. William S. Burroughs responds:
Both in this life or any previous incarnations I have been able to check out, I never wanted to be President. This innate decision was confirmed when I became literate and saw the President pawing babies and spouting bullshit. I attended Los Alamos Ranch School, where they later made the atom bomb, and bombs bursting in air over Hiroshima gave proof through the night that our flag was already there. Then came the Teapot Dome scandal under President Harding, and I remember the unspeakable Gaston Means, infamous private eye and go-between in that miasma of graft, walking into a hotel room full of bourbon-drinking, cigar-smoking lobbyists and fixers, with a laundry hamper.
“Fill it up boys, and we talk business.”
I do not mean to imply that my youthful. Idealism was repelled by this spectacle. I had by then learned to take a broad general view of things. My political ambitions were simply of a humbler and less conspicuous caliber. I hoped at one time to become commissioner of sewers for St. Louis County–$300 a month, with the possibility of getting one’s shitty paws deep into a slush fund–and to this end I attended a softball game where such sinecures were assigned to the deserving and the fortunate. Everybody I met said, “Now I’m old So-and-so, running for such and such, and anything you do for me I’ll appreciate.” My boyish dreams fanned by this heady atmosphere and three mint juleps, I saw myself already in possession of the coveted post, which called for a token appearance twice a week to sign a few letters at the Old Court House; while I’m there might as well put it on the sheriff for some marijuana he has confiscated, and he’d better play ball or I will route a sewer through his front yard. And then across the street to the Court House Café for a coffee with some other lazy bastards in the same line of business, and we wallow in corruption like contented alligators.
I never wanted to be a front man like Harding or Nixon–taking the rap, shaking hands, and making speeches all day, family reunions once a year. Who in his right mind would want a job like that? As commissioner of sewers I would not be called upon to pet babies, make speeches, shake hands, have lunch with the queen; in fact, the fewer voters who knew of my existence, the better. Let kings and Presidents keep the limelight. I prefer a whiff of coal gas as the sewers rupture for miles around–I have made a deal on the piping which has bought me a $30,000 home, and there is talk in the press of sex cults and orgies carried out in the stink of what made them possible. Fluttering from the roof of my ranch-style house, over my mint and marijuana, Old Glory floats lazily in the tainted breeze.
But there were sullen mutters of revolt from the peasantry: “Is this the American way of life?” I thought so, and I didn’t want it changed, sitting there in my garden, smoking the sheriff’s reefers, coal gas on the wind sweet in my nostrils as the smell of oil to an oil man or the smell of bullshit to a cattle baron. I sure did a sweet thing with those pipes, and I’m covered, too. What I got on the Governor wouldn’t look good on the front page, would it, now? And I have my special police to deal with vandalism and sabotage, all of them handsome youths, languid and vicious as reptiles, described in the press as no more than minions, lackeys, and bodyguards to His Majesty the Sultan of Sewers.
The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts. Then I met the gubernatorial candidate, and he looked at me as if trying to focus my image through a telescope and said, “Anything I do for you I’ll depreciate.” And I felt the dream slipping away from me, receding into the past, dim, jerky, far away–the discrete gold letters on a glass door: William S. Burroughs, Commissioner of Sanitation. Somehow I had not intersected. I was not one of them. Perhaps I was simply the wrong shape. Some of my classmates, plump, cynical, unathletic boys with narrow shoulders and broad hips, made the grade and went on to banner headlines concerning $200,000 of the taxpayers’ money and a nonexistent bridge or highway, I forget which. It was a long time ago. I have never aspired to political office since. The Sultan of Sewers lies buried in a distant 1930s softball game.
What would you do if you were in the President’s place? You would be inexorably pressured by the forces and the individuals that made you President, and by your own desire to be President in the first place; so you would wind up doing just what they all have done. It’s enough to stop any sane man from wanting to be President.
Melodrama never dies or if I may quote Bruce La Bruce: "Susan Boyle's future: loses virginity to Simon Cowell at 48, right leg amputated after car crash at 49, quads from in vitro at 50, OD at 51." To fullfil all expectations.
In New York Times, Judith Warner writes an amazing article on bullying and homophobia. The facts that bring in the discussion are deadly serious:
Early this month, Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, an 11-year-old boy from Springfield, Mass., hanged himself after months of incessantly being hounded by his classmates for being “gay.” (He was not; but did, apparently, like to do well in school.)
In March, 2007, 17-year-old Eric Mohat shot himself in the head, after a long-term tormentor told him in class, “Why don’t you go home and shoot yourself; no one will miss you.” Eric liked theater, played the piano and wore bright clothing, a lawyer for his family told ABC news, and so had long been subject to taunts of “gay,” “fag,” “queer” and “homo.”
Teachers and school administrators, the Mohats’ lawsuit now asserts, did nothing.
If in Eastern Europe, bullying in school is not treated as a relevant case in media, in US violent events such as Columbine demand an important analysis. But apparently, the critique and direct action on bullying is not so engaged. The main ingredient of this type of reactivity is generated by a more structural process besides homophobia, the pathologization of femininity:
I’m only partly talking about homophobia, which, though virulent, cruel and occasionally fatal among teenagers, is not the whole story behind the fact that words like “fag” and “gay” are now among the most potent and feared weapons in the school bully’s arsenal.
Being called a “fag,” you see, actually has almost nothing to do with being gay.
It’s really about showing any perceived weakness or femininity – by being emotional, seeming incompetent, caring too much about clothing, liking to dance or even having an interest in literature. It’s similar to what being viewed as a “nerd” is, Bennington College psychology professor David Anderegg notes in his 2007 book, “Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them”: “‘queer’ in the sense of being ‘odd’ or ‘unusual,’” but also, for middle schoolers in particular, doing “anything that was too much like what a goody-goody would do.”
It’s what being called a “girl” used to be, a generation or two ago.
“To call someone gay or fag is like the lowest thing you can call someone. Because that’s like saying that you’re nothing,” is how one teenage boy put it to C.J. Pascoe, a sociologist at ColoradoCollege, in an interview for her 2007 book, “Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School.”
The message to the most vulnerable, to the victims of today’s poisonous boy culture, is being heard loud and clear: to be something other than the narrowest, stupidest sort of guy’s guy, is to be unworthy of even being alive.
This type of interaction is so popular in the most opened environments that it really makes me wonder what the best tools to fight it are. I can only think of two very special environments where I experienced this type of discrimination: theatre schools and gender studies departments in different countries. What starts as funny jokes on particular gestures, outfits, ways of talking or interests becomes dangerous hate tools for exclusion in a very concrete manner. All guided by an internalized path to hegemonic masculinity or even hyperfemininity that is endangered by some particular attitudes that can challenge and subvert such hard earned positions:
It’s weird, isn’t it, that in an age in which the definition of acceptable girlhood has expanded, so that desirable femininity now encompasses school success and athleticism, the bounds of boyhood have remained so tightly constrained? And so staunchly defended: Boys avail themselves most frequently of epithets like “fag” to “police” one another’s behavior and bring it back to being sufficiently masculine when someone steps out of line, Barbara J. Risman, a sociologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, found while conducting extensive interviews in a southeastern urban middle school in 2003 and 2004. “Boys were showing each other they were tough. They were afraid to do anything that might be called girlie,” she told me this week. “It was just like what I would have found if I had done this research 50 years ago. They were frozen in time.”
Pascoe spent 18 months embedded in a Northern California working-class high school, in a community where factory jobs had gone south after the signing of Nafta, and where men who’d once enjoyed solid union salaries were now cobbling together lesser-paid employment at big-box stores. “These kids experience a loss of masculine privilege on a day-to-day level,” she said. “While they didn’t necessarily ever experience the concrete privilege their fathers and grandfathers experienced, they have the sense that to be a man means something and is incredibly important. These boys don’t know how to be that something. Their pathway to masculinity is unclear. To not be a man is to not be fully human and that’s terrifying.”
By trying to achieve some strongly gendered identities imposed by family, pop culture, school hierarchies, standards of coolness, they have to make the difference between them and those who don’t fit the narrow standards. And the best way to keep those standards is to discriminate, use hate speech and direct violence.
Malina Saval, who spent two years observing and interviewing teenage boys and their parents for her new book “The Secret Lives of Boys,” found that parents played a key role in reinforcing the basest sort of gender stereotypes, at least where boys were concerned. “There were a few parents who were sort of alarmist about whether or not their children were going to be gay because of their music choices, the clothes they wore,” she said. Generally, she said, “there was a kind of low-level paranoia if these high-school-age boys weren’t yet seriously involved with a girl.”
It seems it all comes down, as do so many things for today’s parents, to status.
“Parents are so terrified that their kids will miss out on anything,” Anderegg told me. “They want their kids to have sex, be sexy.”
This generation of parents tends to talk a good game about gender, at least in public.
In US as in Eastern Europe, family plays the major role in promoting this type of status, in offering legitimacy for hate and bullying. And the future of bullying looks rather dark, with the public and private discourse on gender roles becoming more conservative and bigoted. The examples are numerous, the two dead kids are just the most obvious ones.
photos by Szandra Gonzales
