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.