Abby Sunderland: the icon of risky imperialism

I also followed the Abby Sunderland case, the 16 year old American, lost and found in the Indian Ocean. The whole obsession with setting records and exploration of the whole world in a sort of neo-colonial quest were highly disturbing in the whole case.
Sungold from Kittywampus writes a thoughtful article called "The Perils of Abby Sunderland: The Problem Isn’t Lax Parenting, It’s the Romance of Risk".

Setting records is addressed in these terms: 

"the desire to set records – to push one’s body beyond its healthy boundaries – to embrace risk just for its own sake. Sailing solo around the globe makes as much sense to me as playing chicken with a train, or drag racing on the freeway.
But drag racing and playing chicken are the desperate sports of poor kids. Setting records is the province of the privileged. The assumption is that no effort will be spared in trying to save you, if your boat runs awry.
Every time an extreme athlete runs into trouble, massive resources are deployed to rescue him or her. Clueless skiers go into the Sierra backcountry and get stranded in a blizzard. Mountain climbers underestimate the danger of avalanche. Solo pilots fly into oblivion. The “resources” deployed aren’t just financial; human beings often risk their own necks in hopes of saving a life.
Just to underscore how much this is a function of privilege: In the last several days, tens of thousands of children have died of preventable disease: malnutrition, dysentery, malaria, typhus, etc. ad nauseam. How many could be saved with the money spent on rescuing people (children and adults) who – from a place of tremendous economic privilege – challenge themselves to break records, or simply assume that they will be “safe” in the wild because their lives have always been safe?"

Setting records is closely related to another element of this dramatic case: the desire to explore. Young Westerners are on a quest of self-discovery where the world is their oyster and their discursive tool is imperialism. You can find them all over Eastern Europe in a constant search to re-confirm their white middle-class neo-colonial privilege. Do global tourism and adventure still function as a form of knowledge? Sungold doesn't think so and we are in the same boat on this one:  

"Once upon a time, parts of the globe were untouched by human exploration. Perhaps the urge to explore was extraordinarily adaptive a few million years ago – even a century ago. Today? We’d be wise to ask when exploration and adventure truly serve human knowledge, and when they’re only yoked to ego."

With the minor adjustment that I don't see how human exploration was ever a necessity, besides imposing capitalism in remote parts of  the Western world and fulfilling the pathological narcissism of the Western male. Now young American women continue the pattern of imperialism and get lost at the ocean. But there is always someone to save them and they continue their trip to success while journalists write heart-warming stories about courageous young ladies...


photo via 

Health for the Americas: Cleanliness Brings Health (1945)

This is the very last movie directed by Walt Disney. If you were wondering what is the reason for global inequalities now you have an answer: cleanliness. Because in the capitalist understanding only the individual can be responsible for personal unhappiness. All other markers of oppression (racism, classism, heteronormativity, patriarchy and their explosive combination) dissapear in a process that this cartoon engages just in order to reproduce oppression and to erase all the signs of its production. The Western viewers are reassured that their consciousness is clean and they have nothing to do with the poor people's misery: it is only their own own choice to stay unclean.

Effeminism

I was re-watching the brilliant documentary "The Celluloid Closet" (1995) and one character got my attention: the sissy. How he was constructed by Hollywood as "the funny gay guy" and adopted by gay men as the only way to perform gayness, how all gay men were constructed as effeminate and how there was a constant move away from that place. What I remembered from my readings was how the effeminate man was immediately diagnosed as homosexual by the clinical discourse and practice for decades and how the sissy is the main way to play gay and get instant laughs in theatre nowadays. Performing femininity as male brings hate and mockery together with the immediate homophobic connection with a bodily mapped gayness. This is the place where the male hysteric stands nowadays through his confusion of masculinity and femininity. Is it so impossible nowadays to acknowledge the sissy as equally human and not as a hated caricature? It makes me sick to my stomach to see all these macho actors performing the sissy for sure laughs on stage (and they start early with it, I remember this high school theatre festival in Brasov, Romania where playing the sissy was the main way to produce comic effects. These guys were 15-16 and the adults in the jury/public were laughing hard and applauding their openly homophobic humor. Such a nice unity/continuity…)


At the "Creating Change 2010: 40 Years After Stonewall" conference there was an interesting panel called "40 Years After Stonewall: A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Activist Timeline," with Jim Fouratt, Roger Goodman, Carmen Vasquez, Ellen Ensig-Brodsky, Phil Johnson. Feministing wrote about it here. The debates brought the sissy back into discussion. Jim Fouratt was saying: "We're all fags at the end of the day to the homophobes. But in our own community there's this demonizing of the sissy, the effeminate male", while Roger Goodman remembered " The effeminist movement - It was men in the 1970s who took feminism on as our politic. We called gay men on their shit. Effeminism is gay men whose fundamental politics is feminism. And that we're not afraid to feel the feminine in us and express that." These new re-discoveries of the effeminate male and the critique/action against the huge discrimination that he faces today at a transnational level are crucial. Join the effeminist movement right now! It will change your life!

Photo from here

A Girl Like Me: The Gwen Araujo Story (2006)

director: Agnieszka Holland

This movie tells a story in a very simple/uncomplicated way (it is made for tv after all) with a huge impact on the viewer. It avoids the melodramatic perspective by equally focusing on the mother and her own dealing with a transdenger teen (after the tragic events narrated here, she becomes an important transgender activist in US). The ethnic/class context is well emphasized in this intersectional story where sexism and cissexism are way more complicated when other forms of inequality are dangerously at play. Not only focusing on the individual drama but on constellations of inequality and by decentering a form of detached/uninvolved narrative (that follows only the hero/antihero), "A Girl Like Me" is a rare gem that must be seen by teenagers at school and adults alike. This is how education functions.

Freud (1962)

director: John Huston

This biopic focuses on some of the events between 1885 and 1890 from, as the title says, Freud’s life. The personal perspective and the expressionist focus on characters and their well-documented dreams are violently contradicted by the opening and ending parts that are narrated by the director in the most positivist/scientific manner. Freud (Montgomery Clift) becomes just another case of a great dead man, a scientific genius in the line of Copernicus and Darwin. In that sense the whole story moves towards the discovery of the Oedipus complex (revealed in the last part of the movie).

Male hysteria or in Freud’s own term, little hysteria, becomes a major theme of this movie and the dramatic engine in the search of an over-arching theory to cure his patient and his own painful neuroses.

Besides the cinematic portraits of Freud, Breuer (Larry Parks) or Viennese physicians, the exploration of Charcot’s persona is one of my personal delights in this movie. Charcot (Fernand Ledoux) and his practice with hysterics (male and female), hypnosis and celebrity are depicted in the way that I imagined the whole business by reading tons of literature on this phenomenon. Freud’s role as PhD student under Charcot’s supervision is explored in a delicate and faithful manner in relation to the written materials on the subject.

Freud's therapy with Cecily Koertner (Susannah York) represents the discovery of the talking cure with its free associations and hilarious “Freudian slips” and also “the cure” for male hysteria in the sense of abandoning it and Freud becoming a father of a major theory. The focus falls on a scientific/ not-fully-embodied discovery of the Oedipus complex and the martyrization of the individual rational scientist in the face of a retrograde society that denies progress. No indication of Viennese anti-Semitism or scholarly masculinism. Freud’s struggle with the Viennese society becomes an individualist fight for novelty and innovation. In this sense, John Huston’s movie is an ode to modernism in scientific discourse.

The cinematic language follows the film noir/expressionist aesthetics and gets mixed very well with the accurate theoretical/psychoanalytical language. What I particularly liked about it was the lack of fear in dealing with theory. There are some complicated ideas out there that you would never hear in more recent biopics, but Charles Kaufman managed to squeeze them in the script (or better say Jean-Paul Sartre, who’s name disappeared from the project after his second draft was considered too long). Surprisingly the narration works better this way. The story becomes more engaging, this is one of the few theoretical thrillers that I have seen.

At the level of acting-directing, Montgomery Clift was under a lot of pressure on the set: the director used the Freudian setting for outing his main actor, emphasizing the repression part (as a direct connection to him being gay) while filming and provoking Monty to speak about his sexuality. No wonder Monty tried to avoid this movie or any contact with its director, to the point of being sued by Universal for the delay of the production.

All in all, Freud is not easy to forget.

image: the Polish version of the poster, from here 

The return of the ugly

How can we think more positively about beauty? As I observe on a daily basis, beauty is used (as a highly popular term) to define multiple privilege, as a sort of intersectional subjective projection that explores personal entitlement (I am talking about the outside/ inside/ me/ other/ world/ transcendental level). Beauty is always exclusionary, it is always constructed in opposition with the despicable ugly. Instead of claiming the new beautiful (and also a re-assignment of a new ugly), why not claiming the ugly and its negativity? Instead of looking for a positive version of beautiful, why not embracing the ugly but without transforming it into the new beautiful?

Jill wrote a strong manifesto in this sense (I took it from here and even if I have some problems with the whole concept of choice detached from structural inequalities, it is a courageous step against beauty discourses):

The Ugly Manifesta

I’d rather be courageous than beautiful. I will not be demure, quiet and pretty… instead I will be loud, I will get into the face of those who try to oppress others and I will confront them. I will be that loud, “ugly” feminist.

I’d rather be unique than beautiful. I will wear the clothes that make me feel happiest in whatever manner I desire. I will wear as much or as little makeup as I feel comfortable with each day. I will shave as much or as little as I see fit. If I happen to fit some standard of beauty one day, fine; I will not care one way or another because my confidence does not depend on anyone’s approval but my own.

I’d rather be happy than beautiful. I will not waste a moment of my life worrying about how I look to others. I’d rather spend my time concerned with how I am trating others, and interacting with them!

I’D RATHER BE UGLY THAN BEAUTIFUL. Being ugly means saying fuck you to the beauty norms and embracing the person I am, not the person that the world is trying to tell me to be; being ugly means being totally happy with the person I am and never hiding that girl from the world, no matter what.

 photo from Improbable Research

white supremacy and hip hop

Parazitii (the most popular Romanian hip hop band) collaborated with Raekwon of Wu-Tang on their album "Slalom printre cretini" and opened the Wu Tang concert in Bucharest (2006). In 2010 Cheloo (one of the leading members) appears in a video wearing a Tshirt with "white and proud 14" with a direct connection to the neo-nazi David Lane and "The Order". Roma Civic Alliance reacted legally against this. Cheloo responded: "White and proud is correct. I like the color of my skin. Everyday I feel good because I am white. It is not right to be attacked for this. I am totally offended." No misinterpretations here.

Since Wu Tang has collaborated with this person in the past, should they have any reaction to this situation? How do white supremacists associate themselves with anti-racist popular figures in the first place? Is artistic success sufficient to erase radically-different ideological  positions? So many questions...

and a link to the news (in Romanian).