Halloween at CEU

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."

  Here are some of the results:

nothing offensive, obviously....

Jay Smooth explains "Christopher Street boys"

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.

quote of the day

"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."

Ed Wood, Jr., Hollywood Rat Race, 1998

Queering the Virgin

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 of color 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.”

What about the other months of the year?

Stop thinking?

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?

quote of the day

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.)

A Case of Morals: Jay Smooth on Polanski

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.

about black theatre

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.

Art Does Not Excuse Rape

Polanski Must Face Justice!

please sign the petition here