Susan Boyle effect

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.

"that's so gay": reactions on bullying

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 Colorado College, 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.

photo via deviantart

Peter Brook, interculturality and women

I am reading lately all these books on Brook, the famous English modernist director, and I am still puzzled by his idea of interculturality. Peter Brook’s well-known focus of intercultural theatre was dealing with East/West connections, mainly by using Asian performance elements and Indian or African narratives for his Paris-based theatre. The intercultural fantasy that he was involved with was very tricky. Gabrielle Griffin said it mildly: it “leaves intact a geopolitical imaginary that distinguishes, in a seemingly unproblematized way, between ‘them’ and ‘us’, between an ‘other’ and a ‘self’”. But on the other hand, what brings in, like in the case of Peter Brook's production of Mahabharatha, was emphasized by the actress Mallika Sarabhai which relates her acting experience in Mahabharatha to feminism:
"The turning point came with Peter Brook’s international version of the Mahabharatha where I played Draupadi. At that time a new wave of feminism was gripping the mind of the younger generation in the west. And for the first time young women were looking into feminist thought and ideology.[...] I had women of different backgrounds, black mamas from Harlem, sophisticated Sorbonne graduates, aboriginal women from the Australian outbacks—coming up to me and saying ‘why don’t we have role models like Draupadi today? She makes sense to us.’ One evening in the Paris Metro two slinkily dressed women came up to me and said, ‘we have stayed away from the feminist movement, things like “bra burning”. But today, after seeing your performance, we feel that is the kind of woman we want to be.’ I came out of the Mahabharata tour with a new perspective toward my art. I felt that if the role of one woman affected women across cultures then my advocacy and my performance had to marry."
Mahabharatha is even today probably one of the most contested Brook productions for his colonial appropriation and decontextualization of one of the most significant Indian texts. His official biographer, Michael Kustow, accused “the chorus of politically correct academics and cultural theorist attacking Brook” of demagogy, because they are not able to see the universalism of Brook’s mise-en-scene and his view on Mahabharata as one work that “carries echoes for all mankind” and is “of the greatness of the works of Shakespeare.” Even by this defense, I can clearly sense the Western standard to which the performance is referred to.
Another problematic episode in Peter Brook’s career as director is the way he depoliticized some powerful plays such as Caryl Churchill’s Far Away in a 2002 performance. David Hare, the British playwright, accused Brook of “draining plays of any specific meaning or context to a point where which became the same play – a universal hippie babbling which represents nothing but fright of commitment.” Brook responded by saying that he no longer believes in ”the value of debates, pamphlets, statements and pseudo-Brechtian speeches.” His theatrical direction for last decades is in search of something “more to life that the rational mind can grasp” with a strong influence of the spiritualist Gjurdieff’s ideas, a highly problematic approach in my opinion, by removing any social context and critical awareness for a “one-size-fits-all mysticism”. This is an important tool in maintaining and pushing a conservative view on theatre, by maintaining an oppressive idea of a forgotten tradition, none other that the colonialist privilege of a misogynist white male that conquers and exploits the feminized “oriental wisdom” (as Brook was talking on several times about his wife). In an Oedipian game, the non-Western culture becomes for Brook object of desire and exchange, a woman that can offer satisfaction as long as she becomes “maternal and domestic” (Brook talking again about his wife).

photo via flickr

An Afternoon Read on Chinese Women

The Good Women of China. Hidden Voces is a book written by Xinran, a Chinese radio host whose program for women, Words on the Night Breeze, aired nightly from a Communist Party controlled radio station in Nanjing from 1989 to 1997. During her time as the Chinese Oprah Winfrey, as she has been called by some (Western) reviewers, Xinran received an impressive amount of cards and letters from women all over China telling her of their lives, of hardships and misery. This book is a collection of the testimonials she gathered.

The stories that Xinran collected aim to lift the heavy veil of silence that has covered the suffering of generations of women during and after the bloody upheaval of the Cultural Revolution, a time in which the population was struck by poverty, and when abuse against anyone deemed counter-revolutionary was extremely common. While she champions to give voice to women who have been sexually and emotionally abused at the hands of the Red Guards, or by their own fathers and husbands, and to challenge the discourse of gender equality professed by the Party ideology, Xinran fails at some fundamental level to really criticize the deeply ingrained misogyny and heavily oppressive system that she describes. The narratives, with their first-person confessional and highly melodramatic mode, function in that they trigger immediate emotional response. There is the tween girl repeatedly raped by her own father, and whose only friend in the world is a 'baby fly'; little girls gangbanged by soldiers because their parents are declared foreign secret agents; women who get married off by Party officials to unfeeling, cruel men, in order to have them prove their dedication to the communist mission; peasant women being traded like cattle in the mountains, with bodies deformed by countless births and never-ending hard work in the fields. And Xinran tries to address taboo topics like female sexuality, homosexuality, and female infanticide...But the oral histories and confessions that she gathers fail to deliver on their feminist promise.

I couldn't help sensing a touch of self-righteousness in the way she portrays her 'informants'... Xinran speaks from within a rigid heteronormative framework, in which women are defined by their relationship to a man, by motherhood, by conforming to conventional norms of beauty. None of the women in her book are ugly, in fact, the descriptions she provides betray the objectifying male gaze with which she obviously identifies. Describing a university student who shares her experience as an escort to well-off businessmen to her, she writes: "She wore a well-cut navy suit that showed her figure to an advantage, an elegant suit, and seductively high leather boots" (p.39). And there are plenty more instances of that.

There were many points where I kept wondering what is this book really about. It is definitely not a feminist project, since its politcal goal escapes me. Xinran is vaguely disapproving of the abuses committed against women by the communists, but what she offers up instead of a solid critique of the way womanhood is constructed and imposed as an impossible ideal in Chinese society, she takes refuge in nostalgia of the good old days before the Cultural Revolution. Instead of looking towards possible political action, she annihilates that potential by resorting to an idealized image of the past as a counter-narrative. And in so doing, she defeats the very (declared) purpose of the book.

Critical Mass Budapest

This Sunday there was Critical Mass in Budapest. It’s the third time I’m going, it’s an amazing feeling to have access to bike freely on some of the city’s otherwise busiest streets, together with several tens of thousands of other people. A biker’s wet dream come true, really.

Scenes from a Marriage (1973)

Director: Ingmar Bergman

After a couple years of trying, I managed to see the whole film. And I tried so many times…never managed to get over the first half. I feel a little bit proud of myself getting over this horror. As much as I love Bergman, I have to recognize that this is one of his most awful tries. Focusing all the drama on the universal white Swedish bourgeois family with no social network whatsoever, he manages to depict a gloomy world with no way out. Any outburst against the patriarchal matrix is repressed with fists and intellectual bullshit analysis. A feminist critique made by Liv Ulman’s character on her miserable condition finds no answer but pure violence. And the end is just sick: a return to the oppressive status quo, with a self-righteous husband and a submissive and dreamy wife, where past conflicts are seen as detached experience, a needed element for a “healthy” relationship. And all based on personal guilt and useless individual struggle, with no connection to an outside world that can face similar problems. I definitely not recommend this very long crap, especially if you are a Bergman enthusiast.

The parting of the Red Sea

Yesterday night around 11 we went to see Erik Mátrai's instalation at the Rumbach Street Synagogue. It was one of the best video instalation I've seen in years. The simple concept worked at its best in the ruined synagogue that is beautifully patterened and painted in Islamic style. The sounds worked amazing in this space and it really made me feel like being in a dream sequence with the nicely lit running water and the dark somptuous temple with magic inscriptions in flames. I didn't feel so deeply connected to a work of art in years. After getting out I was feeling high, even if the joint came only later with the wine. This project gave me a lot of hope, I want to start working again on my theatrical magic.

destroying the US army

Jerome Lindsay from The Washington Post writes an article of how openly gay troops will destroy the US military. Don't get too excited, the case is more complicated:

With the nation engaged in two wars and facing a number of potential adversaries, this is no time to weaken our military. Yet if gay rights activists and their allies have their way, grave harm will soon be inflicted on our all-volunteer force.
The administration and some in Congress have pledged to repeal Section 654 of U.S. Code Title 10, which states that homosexuals are not eligible for military service. Often confused with the "don't ask, don't tell" regulations issued by President Clinton, this statute establishes several reasons that homosexuality is incompatible with military service.
Section 654 recognizes that the military is a "specialized society" that is
"fundamentally different from civilian life." It requires a unique code of personal conduct and demands "extraordinary sacrifices, including the ultimate sacrifice, in order to provide for the common defense." The law appreciates military personnel who, unlike civilians who go home after work, must accept living conditions that are often "characterized by forced intimacy with little or no privacy."
While there have been changes in civilian society since this statute was adopted by wide bipartisan majorities in 1993, the military realities it describes abide. If anything, they are more acute in wartime.
In our experience, and that of more than 1,000 retired flag and general officers who have joined us in signing an open letter to President Obama and Congress, repeal of this law would prompt many dedicated people to leave the military. Polling by Military Times of its active-duty subscribers over the past four years indicates that 58 percent have consistently opposed repeal. In its most recent survey, 10 percent said they would not re-enlist if that happened, and 14 percent said they would consider leaving.
If just the lesser number left the military, our active-duty, reserve and National Guard forces would lose 228,600 people - more than the total of today's active-duty Marine Corps. Losses of even a few thousand sergeants, petty officers and experienced mid-grade officers, when we are trying to expand the Army and Marine Corps, could be crippling.
And the damage would not stop there. Legislation introduced to repeal Section 654 (H.R. 1283) would impose on commanders a radical policy that mandates "nondiscrimination" against "homosexuality, or bisexuality, whether the orientation is real or perceived." Mandatory training classes and judicial proceedings would consume valuable time defining that language. Team cohesion and concentration on missions would suffer if our troops had to live in close quarters with others who could be sexually attracted to them.
There are better ways to remedy shortages in some military specialties than imposing social policies that would escalate losses of experienced personnel who are not easily replaced.
Some suggest that the United States must emulate Denmark, the Netherlands and Canada, which have incorporated homosexuals into their forces. But none of these countries has the institutional culture or worldwide responsibilities of our military. America's armed forces are models for our allies' militaries and the envy of our adversaries - not the other way around.
As former senior commanders, we know that the reason for this long-standing envy is the unsurpassed discipline, morale and readiness of our military. The burden should be on proponents of repeal to demonstrate how their initiative would improve
these qualities of our armed services. This they cannot do.
Everyone can serve America in some way, but there is no constitutional right to serve in the military. The issue is not one of individual desires, or of the norms and mores of civilian society. Rather, the question is one of national security and the discipline, morale, readiness and culture of the U.S. armed forces upon which that security depends. It is a question we cannot afford to answer in a way that breaks our military.

I left this long quote from the article because it sounded too good to be true, in the sense that gays soldiers will completely reshape the military culture and make it more open and egalitarian. I guess it was the same situation and worry when women started to join the army. And things didn't change much. Because the simple fact that you are gay doesn't make you immune to the conservative and patriarchal discourse of the military. The homophobic stereotype in this case of gay soldiers as umasculine, totally detached from discipline and militaristic culture is such an illusion. And the fact that most heterosexuals will leave the army because they are homophobic is plain bullshit. I would like to see the US army that this guy is afraid of. Especially with "the nation engaged in two wars and facing a number of potential adversaries."

photo via flickr

Detouring the Twitter Revolution

The current situation in Moldova, the failed Twitter Revolution, still keeps the local front pages. While I was watching angrily and astonished the daily events on different news channels, I couldn’t miss the Romanian detouring of the twitter revolution in two similar directions:

1. An increased wave of right wing and nationalist discourses in connection to the events, evident also in president Basescu’s discourse in front of the parliament yesterday, used in this particular case, for gathering a few votes from old school Romanian nationalists. The reactivation of right wing arguments on Romanianness and territorial expansion based on the Moldavians’ revolt is just sick and disrespectful.
2. Another invalidation of any Marxist or leftist discourse in the region by connecting it to the communist oppressive regime in Moldova. Principles of Prague declaration are seen now as a common sense reaction to the horrible violence in communist Moldova. With these events any type of leftist critique becomes outrageous and should be erased from our talk only if we actually do not agree with the state oppression in Moldova, of course. I was reading on some Romanian blogs, the simple support for any Marxist argument or leftist syndicate is seen as inappropriate in the new conditions created by the Moldavian events.

I am still surprised about the cynicism of all these local conservatives, how they cancel any type of oppression or sufferings of real people, in their offensive struggle to validate their own discourse. I really get the feeling that these characters do not care about people, or they care in a melodramatic way as long as they can be used for personal petty political purposes. And while hundreds of Moldavians are in arrest, beaten and killed by police, they continue their old fashioned rhetoric.

Objective Subject

another poem by Allen Ginsberg

It's true I write about myself

Who else do I know so well?

Where else gather blood red roses & kitchen garbage

What else has my thick heart, hepatitis or hemorrhoids -

What else lived my seventy years, my old Naomi?*

and if my chance I scribe U.S. politics, Wisdom

meditation, theories of art

it's because I read a newspaper loved

teachers skimmed books or visited a museum

March 8, 1997, 12:30 A.M.

* I think Naomi is Ginsberg's mother, Naomi (Levy) Ginsberg. She was diagnosed as suffering from paranoia. She was institutionalized, eventually lobotomised, and she died in an asylum in 1956. Her life is the "objective subject" of Ginsberg's poem 'Kaddish', which was written in one 40-hour session as a compensation of her funeral service, where there weren't enough male mourners present for the rabbi to read the funeral elegy, the kaddish.

photo via flickr

New musical for women only. Literally.

Jaweed Kaleema writes about a musical, Light for Greytowers, a film by an Orthodox Jewish group that is to be screened in Miami. Nothing outrageous so far, only that the so-called soul-stirring musical drama made by women and girls, for women and girls is really meant to be seen by women only.

The movie, which has an all-female, mostly Orthodox cast, was kicked out of the Jewish Film Festival in Jerusalem last fall when its producers asked that men be barred from screenings.

An Orthodox Jewish law called Kol Isha forbids men from listening to a woman sing. Rabbis disagree on whether it applies only to live performances, but Kol Nashama Performing Arts Conservatory, the Los Angeles group that produced the film, isn't taking chances. Gary Lund, Colony Theatre director, said he will comply with the group's request.

As you can see in their flyer for Miami, it is only for women. Robin Garbose, the director, needed rabbinical approval and a grant from the Jewish Community Foundation to make the movie. She thinks it will be well received by conservative Christian and Muslim mothers and daughters, who also "value modesty".

Compared to "The Color Purple," with its cast of strong black Southern women determined to live by their own rules, this musical sounds for me like another twisted patriarchal exclusion of women that celebrate their exclusion. The director explains:

"The power of the woman's voice is incredible," Garbose said. "Only when the Messiah comes will the men get to hear the women sing. I would like that to happen today, so I can get a good distribution deal."

I can hear the men singing in this movie also, without even seeing it.

learning some misogyny in English

Misogyny starts early. No wonder my male friends can't explain how words and attitudes are popping out of them. They use the ultimate excuse and argument: "this is how I was socialized." And sometimes I found myself using words or phrases that are so unthought. And they stand for so much bullshit. Yesterday I thought a lot about how we use dirty language and what all these colorful and funny expressions actually mean: homophobia, mysoginy, racism, classism, hate. Of course, the solution is not to completely delete all these words and language associations from your vocabulary but to think more about them when using. And if possible subvert them and play around their first problematic meaning. I know it takes a lot of work but that can also be fun, you can do it playfully. Because using what you learn in primary school as something impossible to change means hell. If you look at this "innocent" drawing from a children's book you might get the bigger picture. And fuck, I don't want to live in that patriarchal world. Or to make any kid believe that this is how this world functions.

thanks Bogdan for the image!

Moralizing ‘science’?

After recently the Pope has been going around telling people condoms actually help spread AIDS, now some US scientists come up with the breaking news that, oops, oral sex can lead to throat cancer. Science and the church may be formally separate these days, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t fool around with the same discourses once in a while. As BBC gracefully informs us in an article titled “Oral sex linked to throat cancer” (don’t bring out your moral panic repellent yet),

“The New England Journal of Medicine study said the risk [of HPV infection] was almost nine times higher for people who reported oral sex with more than six partners.



I know what you’re thinking. Shit.
But it gets even more serious...or does it?

“The Johns Hopkins study took blood and saliva from 100 men and women newly diagnosed with oropharyngeal cancer which affects the throat, tonsils and back of the tongue. They also asked questions about sex practices and other risk factors for the disease, such as family history. Those who had evidence of prior oral HPV infection had a 32-fold increased risk of throat cancer.”

So…how does this work exactly? After all the questions on risk factors, disease and family history on the impressively representative sample of 100 people already diagnosed with cancer, the logical and scientific conclusion is …that oral sex is the culprit. Uhuh. While at it, why not throw in some questions about films they watched or religious beliefs? Then we could scientifically establish the fact that oral sex, Titanic (insert any other movie you personally hate) and believing in god (or not) have been linked to throat cancer. Duh.

a Great War postcard

Dated 18 August 1915

more Great War postcards at greycat

staging death

In Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead there is an interesting line: "You can't act death. The fact of it is nothing to do with seeing it happen – it's not gasps and blood and falling about. It's just a man failing to reappear." Alfred Hickling uses it as a contradiction to an event at the Liverpool Shakespeare Festival last week, the so called Stage-death contest, organized by Lodestar Theatre Company. I have thought about it quite a lot, probably because I used death in most of my performances. What was the driving force for such an unconscious decision? I have to admit that death is everywhere and nowhere, one of the most used conventions in alternative theatre and one of the most life-affirming technique but the question is: what is behind it? Used as a convention, death becomes a Brechtian comment. If it is just a form of affirming life on stage, as in Judith Butler’s amateur theatre act of playing dead-of-AIDS gays, then the act in itself is full of hysterical creative energy, the dead is not actually dead, is just an identification for the living. The focus in many cases is on the impossibility of representing death, just like in Tom Stoppard comment: it is not death that we see on stage but just a form of avoiding its representation. Because we know actors are not dead: we can feel their breath and their aliveness. They are showing us something and their staged death is not in vain, it comes with a reason.
But back to the stage death contest: the basic requirement was to turn up and expire for as long as possible. The proposed scenarios included Death By Chocolate, Death By Liposuction and Death By Misadventure. Marks were awarded for overacting, self-indulgence and shoddiness of costume. I have no idea who won. And to close this post I found a photo on flickr with a theatrical sketch from Brazil where thousands of mothers loose their children to armed violence. Few of these mothers staged a performance for the Hummingbird Project in connection with the Social Communication Programme, Urban Outcries. This is from their show, staging the death of their children:

when making art becomes trafficking

A perfect example of how false is the image of the innocent artist. The persons that were trafficking were professional stage artists, they really had a performance to do in Budapest:

MUMBAI: In yet another case of human trafficking, 18 passengers were arrested at Mumbai airport for trying to board a flight and travel to Budapest illegally on Saturday afternoon. The passengers, all of whom hail from Kerala, were intercepted at the immigration counter before they could board a Thai Airways' Mumbai-Istanbul-Budapest flight. They are currently in police custody. Last week, two Air India staffers were arrested for human trafficking. "These passengers were travelling on genuine visas, which were obtained from the Hungarian consulate in New Delhi,'' said a police official. "However, they had furnished incorrect documents claiming that they were stage artistes going to perform in Budapest,'' he added. This is the second time in the past five months that such a large number of passengers, travelling together on forged documents, have been arrested at the airport. Officials said eight passengers were stage artistes and acting as carriers for the 10 others. There were six women in the group. "The rest, who were feigning to be artistes, said they wanted to procure jobs in Budapest,'' senior inspector Dilip Patil said. "The artistes were to perform on March 31,'' he added.

via The Times of India

Reclaiming masculinity..not again!

Tyler Retherford, a "sophomore anthropology major from Springfield, Mo.", writes an article on redefining masculinity. Even if his argument is clumsy and so patriarchal, I stopped for a sec. I heard this type of redefinition of masculinity so many times that it makes me sick. Coming from anthropologists "interested in masculinity" or even teaching it or from my male colleagues in gender studies. Let's hear it:

Obviously gender studies should incorporate studying both genders, but stereotypically that's just not the way it tends to work out. It made me think about just how little masculinity is discussed. It's not something that comes up in conversations with my friends, and as evidenced by the name of the "women's and gender studies" minor offered at the University, it's not something widely discussed at an academic level either. It seems masculinity in popular culture is defined more by an avoidance of typically feminine behavior than by any actual definition of masculine behavior. The few stereotypical masculine behaviors such as hunting, working on cars and fighting aren't actually that popular among the majority of guys. However, participation in feminine activities such as watching "Gossip Girl," shopping or talking openly about feelings is much more likely to earn negative reactions.Popular media is starting to subvert this structuring of masculinity. One example is the growing "bromance" film genre. The recent movie "I Love You, Man" and a plethora of Judd Apatow films feature male characters who share their feelings about one another in a typically un-masculine way. In the television world, characters like J.D. from "Scrubs" act in stereotypically feminine ways, like carrying around a unicorn diary in one episode. It certainly isn't the norm, and usually these
characters are supposed to draw laughs rather than make a statement about the way we look at masculinity, but it is a step toward guys being more accepting of male participation in typically feminine activities. Even the new James Bond movies portray the ultimate "guy" as a little more emotional and less of a womanizer. Weakening arbitrary gender divides in popular culture is eventually going to cause a restructuring of the way we define masculinity. Unfortunately, gender studies tends to fall within the feminine realm of interests, meaning that working to develop a healthier definition of masculinity is, by its very nature, un-masculine. Guys need to make it OK to talk about what it means to be a guy. Even more importantly, having a better discussion of what it is to be a guy is a vital step in building a healthier view of men with differing lifestyle choices.

For the sake of "developing more inclusive notions of masculinity and making the discussion of gender more accessible to a wider audience" we are witnessing a major backlash. Weren't we always talking about this masculinity for hundreds and hundreds of years? Open your TV or a philosophy book and see what is discussed: masculinity as the norm, humanity as masculinity, universal as harmonious masculinity. Do you want to just name it positively and claim it? Go ahead, no one will stop you. The problem is when this positive claim of masculinity is related to gender studies as a form of inclusiveness and softening of the feminist discourse. I know that privileges have to be kept by white heterosexual men by any means but don't come with this bullshit that poor guys are marginalised and discriminated in gender studies departments controlled by lesbian terrorists. Or that we already leave in post-patriarchy and it's safe now. Or that egosyntonic masculinity can be subversive and empowering for women. As long as femininity is still pathology, masculinity is the norm and the healthy way to live in society, I see all these initiatives as dead ends. And for Godsake, try to be a little bit more modest!