Heartening

Over at shakesville, there is the following Question of the day:

What was the last encouraging sign (outside the blogosphere) you saw that womanism/feminism is still on the march?

I wish I had a ready answer... but reading the comments is heartening. EDIT: honestly reading them is making me tear up. Some highlights for me:

PizzaDiavola:

Also, I got fed up with a friend's constant use of "hag" and "bitch" when complaining about his female colleagues and yelled at him. He apologized and said he wouldn't do it anymore, and then said that being told that it was inappropriate and sexist was helpful. I was pleasantly surprised that he didn't get defensive and make excuses, which is the response I usually get (e.g. "I call everyone a bitch, so it's gender-neutral."), and then was flabbergasted when he said it was helpful and please keep doing it. I've never heard that from anyone I know outside the blogosphere.

sunflwrmoonbeam:

This afternoon, we got life insurance on my husband, and my middle aged insurance agent (with whom we have several policies) actually asked me what my last name was after he already had my husband's.

Solitary:

I'm a substitute teacher and I had 7th graders - roughly 12-13 years old - the other day. One of the boys - ugh - piped up that 'boys were better than girls'. Before I could even pick up my jaw from the floor, all four girls and two of the boys basically read him the riot act and spent the rest of the class 'proving' him wrong. We didn't get much math done, but I left a note for the regular teacher and considered it a fair trade off. :)

lauredhel:

This is a really small thing, but my six year old son and our neighbour, also a boy, played a chasey game a couple of days ago which they built a fantasy world around, involving them taking turns being an "enchantress" character. It really hit me how rarely you see primary school age boys role-playing female characters.

There's more. It's the little things...

Atlas should just go away already

Awesome quote (hattip: Ampersand) by Kung Fu Monkey:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Heidegger on Time

As someone who has a deep ambivalence towards the present structure of modern capitalist society, especially the notions of work and leisure, I feel moved to note Heidegger's comments on time in What is Called Thinking?:

Today's reckoning in sports, for instance, with tenths of seconds, in modern physics even with millionths of seconds, does not mean that we have a keener grasp of time, and thus gain time; such reckoning is on the contrary the surest way to lose essential time, and so to "have" always less time. Thought out more precisely: the growing loss of time is not caused by such a time reckoning--rather, this time reckoning began at that moment when [humans] suddenly became un-restful because [they] had no more time. That moment is the beginning of the modern age.

I wonder about us as an imaginative species at this moment in time. We choose to create the world based on how we imagine it (with the qualification that as individuals, we may feel powerless to do such because of the various structures that order our world). I feel, given our "advances" that we exhibit a deep lack of imagination such that we haven't created a world where "technology" isn't working for us in more healthy and imaginative ways. What weakness is shown by our imagining and creation of a world where every moment is taken up by the work/leasure diad--where all of our individual activities are framed in as a contribution to the work of the economy, or leisure to support this work. If there is a revolution, I think it needs to start with re-imagining how we want to see our daily lives. It needs to begin with the question of how we make the modern work for us. Let us have a revolution of play, where work is the minimal support for play; let us discard the structure of leisure, where it is the minimal support for work. Perhaps we should bring back the 19th century question of alienation with this new thinking in mind.

'The East' in Advertising - Part 1

I try to compile advertising media images of Orientalism just to have a visceral representation of how Orientalism plays out in a certain sub-set of media. Perhaps one day I can put together a series of film clips that show the same.

The first video, an ad for a Nomad phone package, shows quite a number of tropes. It is about India, as Other. Let's Watch.



It opens with a series of romanticized images of India as the exotic, bountiful, Other: full of the treasure we can have access to. Here take note the gaze of the camera: it is a romanticized, colonial gaze. We follow, in the narrative, the exploits of the white woman as she negotiates her journey through the East--hearkening back to 19th century travel journals (many penned by women) that were a part of sparking the imagination towards the East and a contributor to the discourse of colonial Orientalism. The images flash before our eyes and collect to our imagination the semiotics of Orientalism: elephants, gold, saddhu, available wealth, access to elite indigenous power.

But then, the union of East and West poses a threat. The white woman, duped, is now part of the harem. She has lost her Western privilege. She is trapped by the East in a despotic social arrangement. Other threatening tropes rise to our mind: despotism, barbarism, irrational inequality. On the one hand, we might argue that it was her own colonial and Orientalist imaginings that led her to this 'trap'. Homi Bhabha has argued that the colonial imagination is both of these simultaneously. It is ambivalent: "The menace of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority. And it is a double vision that is a result of what I've described as the partial representation/ recognition of the colonial object." The trap was set before the curtain even opened on this ad.

On the other hand, the East as both romanticized AND dangerous is a hallmark of Orientalism. It is an ambivalent, contested representation. Orientalism must represent the East as BOTH opportunity and threat. It must call to the desire of the Western Self, but must repel this call at the same time to preserve the essence of the West. The threat is to the very identity of the West as a Self. That is, if Orientalism is a discursive regime that imagines the East as Other in order to define the West as Self, any union is a threat, and necessarily so. So, this ad reinforces and recreates some of the most fundamental tropes of Orientalism.

A final point: It is no coincidence that the protagonist is a white woman. Women as property, tagged by race, insights the fear of the colonial gaze by having a brown, colonized man then possess the true property of White, colonial ownership. Racism, colonialism, misogyny, and Orientalism. All are different, and yet all are intertwined.

And the threat? Encapsulated quite well in the capping statement. In English translation it might be something like: Know what you are getting into before you commit. Reflechissez avant de vous engeger. Before you get with the Other, remember this commercial, where we point out that the mysterious Other can be a dangerous, duplicitous, threat. Remember this, so that you can go with the sure thing, the known. Ironically, I am sure some white women watching, who know the perils of Western Patriarchy, seeing the luxury of the harem, might feel attracted to this idealized image of Eastern Patriarchy rather than the sure thing, which they know so well and must deal with on a daily basis, something that is often no less threatening.

Orientalism videos

Orientalism. Edward Said. Post-colonial theory. Etc. Here is a bunch of videos about Orientalism on youtube. I don't think the shortened versions really get at the crux of Orientalism. It does some parts well: the visual representation of bias, some relationality with power/knowledge. What I don't think it captures well is the discursive structures that found the analysis, nor the power of the category 'Orient' to include all of the non-West, nor even showing us our own complicity and knowledge of its structures. But, there you have it. The longer version gets into a lot of good stuff, but again, misses some of the Foucauldian aspects.

Shorter version:



Longer Version (4 parts):









Enjoy

Zizek on Violence

This is video 1 of 6. I'm sure you can find the rest. IF you like Zizek, the publisher of this video has many many talks by Zizek. Just click through. You know what you are doing...

Queer Friendly Webcomics

http://www.questionablecontent.net/
http://www.khaoskomix.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi
http://www.stripteasecomic.com/
http://www.menagea3.net/
http://rosalarian.com/yume/
There is more, but I can't be bothered to find them. Other suggestions? I've perused lots, but if the art doesn't appeal to me, I cannot read it.

Fuzzy

Anonymous creative outlet. We'll see if I keep it up. Expect theory. Expect Cultural Critique. Expect unloading of random thoughts.