The European Union’s (EU) long history dates back to the 1950s, but its engagement with LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) issues has been much shorter. It was only a decade ago that the treaty of Amsterdam empowered the EU to ‘combat discrimination based on sexual orientation.’ The dull-sounding Employment Framework Directive arose from this treaty, though its content was anything but dull. It compelled all EU states to ban discrimination against gays, lesbians and bisexuals in the field of employment. Belinda Pyke, a director at the European commission DG for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion, describes this as a ‘pivotal moment’, since the EU was ‘making a reality of something which was in the treaty.’ By 2003, firing someone because of their sexual orientation was illegal across the EU.
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No myth from Greek Classicism is complete without a good ritual sacrifice. One of the most famous of these stories is Iphigenia, the daughter of Agamemnon who was sacrificed by her father in order to appease the Goddess Artemis who had prevented the Grecian fleet from departing for their assault on Troy.Ma-Yi Theatre's production, Rescue Me: a postmodern classic with snacks by Michi Barall takes an irreverent re-examination of the Euripedean classic, Iphigenia in Tauris. The Tauris version of the play, as humorously explicated by the goddess Artemis (David Greenspan), begins with Iphigenia (Jennifer Ikeda) being spared from her sacrificial doom at the last moment; the goddess interceding and replacing her body with that of a deer, and whisking her off to the remote and "barbaric" land of the Taurians, where Iph now labors as a priestess of Artemis. Longing to return to her homeland of Greece, Iph pines over her misfortunes and monotonous life, ironically preparing human sacrifices (preferably Grecians) to the goddess and begs the fates to be rescued by her brother Orestes. Orestes (Julian Barnett), as it turns out is closer that Iph realizes. He arrives at Tauris with his bosom buddy Pylades (Ryan King) to steal the statue of Artemis from the Temple of Tauris to finally rid himself of the Furies (who persecute him for killing his mother to avenge the murder of his father... yes it's all very complicated and vaguely reminiscent of a soap opera). They are captured by the Elvis-impersonating Taurian king (Leon Ingulsrud) and his assistant (Paco Tolson) and are ordered to be sacrificed to the goddess. Will Iphigenia sacrifice her brother? Will Orestes and Pylades escape harm? Will Orestes rescue his sister Iphigenia?
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So BTB has been up and running for over four years now, and I think it's time I finally take a little break. But don't fret! This certainly doesn't mean we're gone indefinitely -- in fact, I plan to return during the summer. In the meantime, posts may go up periodically, and I'll still be accessible by email.
Thanks again, and stay tuned!
-ts
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Employers never know what they are going to get with me, or what to make of me. I know that. They sense that beneath my manners and my smile lie something else. Contempt. Maybe even hatred. I can see it in their eyes. And they are right. Because I do have my fathers 'good' manners, all but one. I have my mother's smile. The simpering smile and words that say, 'Yes, sir, No sir' in all the right ways, but something is amiss. There is something in that smile that says, "I'm going to do what you say and work this measly job because I need it to survive, but don't think for one minute that I like it, or that I respect you and don't you dare insinuate that I should be grateful. This smile is a reminder of the power imbalance between us that while unspoken, we both know is here, and I won't pretend it's not, and I won't let you play pretend either." I know that smile, and I know the rage I feel when I’m on the receiving end of it.
I'm tempted to reach out and shake the person and say, "Don't you know who you are talking to? I know that smile! I give that smile! How dare you give it to one of your own?" and then I feel a wave of shame. At who I am, who I have become and that I am unrecognizable to my own people. My mother married out of her class, married up they call it. She raised me with a deadly fear of slipping back into the poverty that she grew up with, and a push toward a more middle class existence like my father. Always in the back of demands to get good grades and go to college was the threat, her life as the example, of what I might become if I didn't "shape up and get my shit together."
"I'm never going to be like you!" I would scream when I was angry at her, at her need for me, at her lack of ability to understand how we were different. And instead of reprimanding me for disrespecting her, my mother would get silent for a moment and look down in shame. Then she would say, "That's right, don't grow up to be like me. Go to college and have a different life. I know you are going to have a different life than me."
And just like after being on the receiving end of the simpering smile, I would wash my rage down with shame. My mother pushed me to forget my roots. She told me that the world would reward me if I did. But she never told me what I would lose. What it would cost. And how confusing it would be.
So I did what she said. I went to the private school that my father's parents paid for. Fulfilling all their dreams and trying to find a way to squeeze mine in there too. Then I went to graduate school at a University on the east coast, thinking that was another way to fulfill both their dreams and mine. And when I was scared that I would flunk out and be a failure, my mother would tell me that she always knew how smart I was, and that my life would be one filled with books, and to remember, that she cleaned toilets so that I could go to school and be smart someday, and she just knew I was going to make it.
Do my parents know the kind of pressure they put on me? Did they know how alone I felt? How alone I still feel? I wasn't prepared for the world I was confronted with. People who took my accent and my femininity as a sign that I was stupid. People who expected me to come from a wealthy family, to have things I didn't have, to understand jokes and customs that were completely foreign to me. Grad school was a whole 'nother world that I didn't believe existed. I read about people like this in sociology classes, but I didn't think they were real. As trite as it sounds, I kept remembering that line about class from Dirty Dancing when classism would smack me in the face on a regular basis in ways I wasn't used to, "I know these people Baby, they're rich and they're mean."
It would enrage me, when taking a look at my pale skin and blue eyes the wealthy students of my school would assume so many things about me and my life. That I was just like them. Of course not all of them did. Some of them, schooled in the subtle signifiers of class would take note of the lack of tailoring to my clothes, the lack of expensive highlights in my hair or designer accessories and simply sneer. I wasn't prepared for the way it made me feel. Low. Dirty. No good. My mother always taught me that my intelligence and my education would allow me to jump my class if I just acted right. She didn't teach me that people would hate me because of who I was and where I came from and how to deal with that. So full of self-loathing herself, her way of dealing with classism was to pretend that it could be dealt with easily, and was not anything I needed to pay any mind to. Do people know what it's like to grow up as the product of a mixed-class marriage? How to deal with such different world views, both presented as truth, but with so much left unsaid? I wish I could find other people talking about it. I know they have to exist. I know I can't be the only one.
For my father, there was no question that I would go to college and succeed, like he had. I was certainly not going to disappoint him or anyone else in his family. I would live up to their expectations because that was simply how things were done. I could not disappoint or disgrace anyone in the family. My mother's expectation was also that I would go to college and succeed, but not because I was carrying on a family tradition. It was to break tradition, break new ground, not end up drunk or drug addicted with a shit job and children and a no-good alcoholic father who either beat them or didn't take care for them like the rest of the women in my family. I wasn't going to be like that. My mother was going to show them that she could make it and so would her children. We would live to vindicate her. To show the world that she really wasn't mixed-race trash. That she was better than that. I sure as hell better not let her down. The life that awaited me if I didn't 'make it' would be punishment enough.
All these things go through my head when I try to navigate financial decisions. Where will I work? What will I do? How will I pay my bills? What can I afford? I am never without the weight of my family's history. Their expectations and my own. When I don't live up to my own expectations of success I hear my mother screaming about getting my act together, I see my father shaking his head and disappointment, and I hear my father's parents asking me questions about my life with a sneer. They didn't want my father to marry my mother. Thought she was a whore and told her so to her face. I am never without that thought when they talk to me, their voice equal parts suspicion and hope. I know they want to know, will I turn out like my mother? Or will I be the granddaughter they want, expect and invested time and money in? Will the schooling they paid for pay off? Or will I disgrace them just like they thought, because what do you expect coming from that kind of mother?
Oh momma. I want to put your fears to rest. Dad, grandpa and grandma, I want to make you proud. I want to not care about what I know and what I don't know. What I was taught as a child, and what I've learned as an adult. I want it not to matter. I want to believe that middle-class dream my father dreams and wakes up to, which is that with the right education, will come the right job. He left out that it helps to be white, male, and upper-middle class (or higher) for this dream to come true. He's a banker’s son, and he wants to believe that this is the land of opportunity. I want to believe that my mom's admonishons were right, that if I did right, the world would do right by me. I want not to believe her rantings that would say just the opposite, that the world was shit, and would find a way to fuck me over any way it could because that's how it is, and don't nobody give a damn about me so I better get used to it.
I want the American dream. A full time job that I enjoy, am good at, that has a good benefits package - health insurance, vacation and sick days, a job with a wage that allows me to support myself and do things I've always wanted to do, like treat my chronic fatigue, get sick without fear and anxiety, join a gym, eat healthy, maybe even have a house someday, get money back on my taxes. I'm doing my best to act right and get my reward, but sometimes it feels like it's such a long time coming, that I fear it isn't coming at all.
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I wasn't terrible at it. In fact, I thought I was rather good as far as auteurs go, but I lacked the most important of all the academic artist's tools: the ability to compromise and negotiate with faculty and other people who's wants/needs were considered more important than mine. My first serious production, Conquering Neptune, a dadaist space opera about a team of astronauts who succumb to space dementia while marooned on the planet Neptune, was rejected three seperate times. This fact becomes exponentially more pathetic when you realize that during this back and forth “aproval process”, I already had a cast, props, a score which I had composed myself, and a band, all waiting on me, the writer, to get my head out of my ass long enough to bite the bullet and rewrite the script to the nice professor man's specs so they request the appropriate amount of time off from work. But I was not to be swayed. This was college. This was my time to be reckless and fight for my perceived “right” to be obnoxious and subversive. I may have been the fool for not seeing a futile battle when I saw it, but the even bigger fool turned out to be...me...again...for assuming that college professors were above editing naughty language and sexual themes in the first place.
The inky red condescension lurking about the margins of my first “final draft” indicated that the script was rejected for the use of “problematic language”. Hopefully, this was a reference to a moment where a character called another a “f-g” or made a race joke. I say “hopefully” because the dramatis personnae included a martian character, who the others would give wacky nicknames to, being unable to pronounce his real name. There was underlining or crossing out or any singling of what exactly it was that offended them so. I can only speculate, though I try not to, because if I turn out to be wrong it only strengthens my resolve to be complicated and unyielding. At the time, I believed such language was essential to the script and integrity of the play: after all, it was a farcical congratulations to the triumph of bigotry and prejudice in the face of horrible odds: even stranded on a remote fucking planet millions of miles away from Earth, people will find a reason not to cooperate.
My play ends with everyone dying. There's no redemption to be had. And I think therein lied my problem: nobody learned a lesson about how harmful words can be. Gran Torino exists for no other purpose than to let Clint Eastwood show off just how many slurs for Asian people he knows, but because he learns that's it not okay to judge people based on their race in the end, and befriends the Hmong next door and dies to protect them, it's okay. It's okay to illicit giggles from doofy hipster kids who've never heard the word “g—k” spoken aloud as long as there's some lesson, even if only the character learns it as the audience remains blissfully ignorant. But when Quintin Tarantino uses the “n word” in Pulp Fiction, suddenly he's a racist. Garth Ennis' The Boys, a comic series about a gay slur-spouting sociopath who blackmails superheroes with evidence of their homosexual relationships, was nominated for a fucking GLAAD award, because Garth Ennis had the foresight to add a line or two about how it's more hypocritical to call people out on problematic language and then be prejudiced again than it is to just use problematic language. But you'd have to put your head next to an artillery cannon and deafen yourself to drown out the complaints The Sopranos got for its too realistic for comfort depiction of homophobia. At some point, we as a society must accept that we can't have our cake and send it to sensitivity too. Not everyone learns their lesson. Not everyone gets their comeuppence. Years and years after queers have their human rights restored, people will still go on gay activist websites and call everyone a pedophile. The sooner you come to terms with that fact, the sooner you will be able to really apply yourself to the fights you can win. I can't do anything about the radfem who calls me a mutilated man invading her space. I can, however, beat the shit out of the guy who throws a slurpee at me. Pick your battles.
Wow, I'm..disturbed... today. I guess having my play script rejected a few years ago has hit me harder than I thought.
After receiving the rejection, I took a couple days to tinker with the script, and found that I liked it just the way it was, played Dragon's Lair and drank Mountain Dew all night, and re-submitted it with the disclaimer that I would give my actors the choice whether to say the dialogue as is or to edit it to better fit their diverse sensibilities. I waited for response. During that time, I had to replace four actors because I could not give them a definite, concrete schedule. But it will all be worth it, I thought, when the faculty relents and gives me the artistic freedom I so deserve. Little did she know, said the narrator who occupies my brain but doesn't pay rent, what fuckery awaited her in the art department lobby.
My second script was rejected for depicting “violence against women”. The aforementioned “violence” was the end, in which the astronauts mistake the people of the rescue mission for aliens, and die in the ensuing ray gun melee. Everyone meets the same grisly, terrifying fate played for inappropriate laughter. If you can find something “misogynistic” about that, when many cultures believing that dying together is the ultimate expression and test of camraderie, then I would plead for you to write a book about how you managed to free up that much of your time to devote to such mental acrobatics. I struggle to find enough time to exercise every day, and I'm practically unemployed.
To say I didn't take the second rejection well is understating, frankly. To say that I told the professor in question that I felt he was clinging to a job in academia to make up for a lack in talent and artistic understanding would be the truth and sort of embarrassing for me to admit now. But that's what happened. I took particular offense to this because at that moment, in the same department, there was a slasher film being produced by a number of students. A golden age “rise from the dead and kill a bunch of teenage girls who'd rather be left alone to play Mystery Date or drink malt liquor at the beach or whatever the director thinks teenagers do on the weekend” slasher film.I fear I can't delve too deep into how films like Friday The 13th and Sleepaway Camp profit from the psychosexual desire to punish women deemed “impure” inherent in the patriarchy. I'm so late to the feminist critique of slasher films party that I'm being mistaken for a cab driver. This horse is dead, Jim. However, I feel I would be doing you a disservice by not pointing out how mainstream society's approval of films depicting women being brutally murdered (the Friday night showing of Freddy Vs Jason wasn't an all-male audience, I'm just saying) can provide you with a clue as to why anti-abortion activists are so prone to expressing themselves through violence and not frustrating, ultimately unfruitful facebook activisim like the rest of us “well adjusted” folk. Yet it is not beyond me to understand why the faculty would allow such a movie to be made on campus with school resources; it's a professionally and marketablly viable career path. Isn't that what college is really for? Teaching how you to get a job with all that education? There's definitely more of a market out there for people who want to simulate stab wounds on a woman's naked body than there is for schmucks like me trying to bring space opera to live theatre. The guy behind making that student film now produces a web series comedy, I think. I haven't kept in touch, though I should. He still owes 10 bucks for a pizza we split three years ago. Jerk.
I lobbied my case to the faculty, and even read excerpts from the slasher film script that I stole from one of the cast, but to no avail. It was explained to me in no uncertain terms that the women in my play must come to no harm. If there was a ray gun fight at the end, they had to live. I asked if he thought that safeguarding an audience from a depiction of a women being injured wasn't somehow perpetuating the stereotype of women being fragile, delicate toys that must not be allowed to play with the boys lest they be broken, thus undoing all of the work we as artists were putting forth to envision a world free of needless prejudice and stereotype. He replied that if I felt that strongly about striking a woman, that perhaps I should get into hardcore S&M. I replied that it's actually BDSM, and I already am. He told me to rewrite my script again, and submit it to another professor.
If I had owned a camera phone back then, all of that might have been worth it. But it wasn't. I stewed for another week or so, debating the merits of giving in. I lost more actors, more musicians. The remaining rehearsal time that I had available wasn't enough to rehearse, and I was performing unsatisfactorily in my other classes to the point that my mother was getting letters from the school warning me that I was failing two courses, despite the fact that I was in my 20's and paying for college on my own. Moral of the story: if your professor asks for your address on the first day of class, give them your friend's dorm room number.
By the time I submitted it for the third (and hopefully) final time, I didn't care anymore. I knew the play was unperformable in the time and resource constraints given to me, and the only thing keeping me from a nervous breakdown was the hope that someone, at some point in this approval process, would find it in their busy busy day to tell me that my writing was good. If nobody was to ever see this performed, the least they could do is give me the peace of mind of knowing it was good enough to show in the first place.
My script was rejected for the third and final time, not because of language or violence against women, but for a scene in which one of the astronauts pleasures themselves with their ray gun. To this day I can't stand what was funnier: the look on his face when he said this, or the fact that I had already forgotten that such a scene took place, because throughout this whole story, AT NO POINT DID I MAKE A SINGLE FUCKING REWRITE TO THE SCRIPT.
I submitted the same script to the same team of professors, and each time, I received a different complaint, with no mention of previous grievances. This could be, of course, because I gave them fresh, clean copies each time, with no evidence of prior critiques. But I try to write that off as a fool's deduction, for if I was led to believe that the people tasked with my education were that absent-minded, I would have to go back to school and do it all over again out of fear that I had been taught wrong by accident.
That year and every after I cheered at pride rallies and let friends bum gum off me at gender equality workshops. I wrote essays on gender and met prominent people in the LGBT community who I pretend to know of or have read about because I think it makes me seem more interesting to be so aloof and oblique. All in hopes that one day, I will have accrued enough cred to earn the right to depict a woman being marooned on a distant planet without being labeled misogynist or homophobic. But alas, years later my bag is no heavier with tokens than before. Why, thou ask? Is it perhaps because the system of “see no evil, hear no evil” intended to blindfold society to its own inequities more often than not silences the tolerant and not the bigot? Or is it because my zest for campy horror and science fiction enables me to express a hatred and desire to cause women and queers harm that I wasn't even aware of? Make sense, world. Make. Sense.
Three years have passed since that winter of the astronaut pleasing herself with a ray gun. I am troubled not by actions of my past, but the indecision that awaits me in the future. Namely, I'm adapting Conuering Neptune for podcast, and pondering if it the slight betrayal of providing some sort of lesson or moral to my story will be worth the comfort of knowing that nobody would suspect me of phobia. Also, if true and unconditional equality of gender will mark the end of slasher films or, conversely, if a decrease in popularity or public approval of misogynistic slasher films will have any effect or influence on violence perpetrated against women in the meatspace. And finally, am I a woman dreaming she is a javelin thrower, or a javelin thrower dreaming they are a woman?
The answers to these questions (and many more, like “why did I wake up with an empty wine bottle on my pillow”) will have to wait until after I pick out my outfit for WonderCon.
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Take, for example, sexual identity. It is now a commonplace in queer communities--well, most queer communities--that a transgendered identity is separate from a gay or lesbian identity; that is, trans women are not "gay men who can't deal" any more than gay men want to be women. And yet: it is the rare trans person who has not had to confront issues of sexual identity as part of understanding their trans identity. A MTF trans person often has to confront the fact that many of the things that are markers of femaleness--high heels, makeup, skirts--are also markers of straight sexuality, and exactly what adopting those markers might mean for them when out in the world and attracting the attention of men. So, too, do many FTM trans people have to deal with the complicated issues of butchness in the lesbian community, and where, if anywhere, the the line between boi and boy lies.
However, an even more complicated relationship exists between the transgendered and drag worlds.
That doesn't stop many people on either side to deny it exists. "I'm not a drag queen," is the huffy refrain of many a MTF trans person, whether a transsexual or a cross dresser, either to defend the "realness" of their female identity, or to assert a heterosexual identity. "I don't want it chopped off," is the drag queen's rejoinder, an assertion of a gay identity and of a masculine body image, no matter what illusion is currently sported.
Both sides of this argument reveal the internal prejudices sadly too common to each group: the often unconfronted homophobia or at least queer queasiness of many trans people, and the misogyny of some parts of the gay community, especially in this era of washboard abs, body builders, and disdain for anything that seems soft, effeminate, or feminine.
But there is yet another angle on this. Many MTF trans people go through a very, how shall I put it, "draggy" phase at some point in their development--a time of wigs, heels, heavy makeup and short dresses. (This may be slowly changing as people begin to transition at earlier and earlier ages.) And likewise, there are some drag queens who live the majority of their lives as women, who may well have a trans identity but also a desire to remain inside the gay community, much as many FTM trans men who have previously identified as lesbians often keep their ties to that community.
Drag indeed is the crossroads of queerness, the place where gender and sexuality collide, where social expectations of both straight and queer communities clash as loudly as mauve eyeshadow with a bright orange dress. Take, for example, a recent experiment in my ongoing Field Intensive in Reality Show Studies: to wit, a rerun of RuPaul's Drag Race. In this episode, the contestants were introduced to several women who were all experts at a martial art--karate, krav maga, and boxing among others. The challenge was to take these women, all of whom had a "butch" or at least not conventionally feminine presentation and make them into a "real woman" version of the queen's drag persona.
To say this raised disturbing questions about masculinity and femininity is to be as understated as the guy at the end of the third Indiana Jones movie. The women, all by definition strong women, extremely capable, of course take on a "masculine" cast since they know how to fight and don't wear the trappings of straight femininity. And they are transformed...by gay men into mirror images of their own mirror images of "straight" femininity, along with a heaping pile of camp. There is something disturbing--perhaps only to my radical feminist self--about a man demanding that a woman walk in high heels as well as he does. Or at least it does because it is unreflective; there is an expression of superiority on the part of the queen, a conscious or unconscious needling of the women for not being able to perform femininity.
It doesn't have to be that way, of course, and my favorite drag performances have been those that use the artificiality of drag to force an awareness of the artificiality of the "feminine" constructs they imitate. And perhaps I'm expecting a bit much from the Supermodel of the World here. But that's just it: drag can't be uncomplicated, it can't pretend not to make constant commentary on all the worlds it confuses together. It remains on the outskirts of all identities, if central to none, and a fascinating nexus of everything both queer and straight.
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And now today, the thrilling conclusion to a tale of tragedy, heartbreak, and an inconsolable hatred for Jawas.
Two weeks ago, I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. I wasn't surprised. Okay, that's a lie. I thought I would be Bipolar. So I was surprised, but in the way of a gun nut who carelessly cleans their shotgun every night but ends up beefing it in a car crash. I knew the race was over. I just backed the wrong horse. You might find my comparisons between a diganosis and dying a little extreme, but looking back on how I duck and dodged the inevitable reveal, hoping that if I could get my shit together in time I wouldn't need the diagnosis and subsequent treatment, I can't ignore the eerie (and ultimately, inappropriate) similarities between my actions and that college lecture on how people cope with terminal illness that I interrupted by cheering when I got my highest score in Tetris, ever. It's a shame I didn't have to take the final. I think that professor was my good luck charm.
Having a diagnosis is like coming out. All. Over. Again. You have this metaphoric decoder ring that makes sense of all these feelings and experiences, and the more you show it to your loved ones the less valuable it becomes. Because nobody ever fucking believes you. I could construct this insightful pop culture reference about how the internet is like infinite monkeys pulling decoder rings from an infinite amount of boxes of Cracker Jack, and how everybody gets a different secret message from Little Orphan Annie so they assume that either you're decoder ring is broken or that you don't know how to use it, but I feel the reference would be lost on most of my readers, especially the friends who's pep talks about “getting over my bad mood” or “learning to love myself and not need surgery” are killing me by degrees.
In here, behind this screen, I am a trans woman coping with mental illness. Out there, I am a crossdresser who is often very sad and thinks they're being spied on by a guy in a white Sedan. Which is simply not true. It's a Plymouth Voyager, and if follows me to Trader Joe's again I'll...oh I'll...uh... GET OFF MY LAWN! WONDER TWINS ACTIVATE!
The first loser in the 20 man battle royale of black depression is conversation. It doesn't even put up a fight. It practically throws itself out of the ring, runs into the audience and wets its singlet. You can't tell people how you really feel, but you can't tell them what they want to hear because they'll know you're lying. So you think of clever, automated responses to the mundane everyday questions people ask you, hoping to come off as aloof and eccentric, with a dash of on-the-fly wit. But it doesn't work. Probably because you mixed up your “how I'm doing” stock response with your “what I want to eat” stock response and so now everyone thinks you're not paying attention or just have aphasia.
So you can't talk, which means you can't write, because you sound the same doing both. Writing is just carving your internal monologue into a digital tablet, and you don't want there to be any record of your existence because you keep hoping that one day the world will hit the “reset” button and erase your file. It's been months since I've contributed to my other writing projects, and would have flaked on this too if I hadn't received such rabid fanfare from the readers and editors of this blog and genuinely feel that you care, in some voyeuristic fashion. Or that you find me funny. Which for most humorists is the only human sentiment we understand.
So you can't talk or write. What do you do? You get some snacks and let the TV or computer do all the talking. They can do it for hours, even days, like a stupefying Tantra workout for your brain. You download MP3s of The Mighty Boosh's BBC radio show and watch Star Trek: The Next Generation. At first it's just a mild curiosity, but soon, before you have the volition or self-awareness to consciously decide, you're committed. Two or three episodes a day. Subtitled so you can learn all those goofy alien names. If you throw yourself in front of the train, you'll never know if Geordi trades in his visor for eye implants, or if Riker and Troi actually put all this sexual tension they're brewing like moonshine to some fucking use and I swear to god if any of you put spoilers in the comments I will find you, tie you to a chair and play the entire Boston catalog with a kazoo right in your ear.
To say I'm a little late to the Star Trek game is an understatement. Fuck, I missed the game and the playoffs. TNG ended 8 years ago (if we count the movies) and I'm just now starting Season 3. I'm sure some months or years in the future I'll train myself to keep a straight face and say it's because I wanted to wait until it was over so I could enjoy it in its purity without fear of someone trying to retcon or stretch another season out of a perfectly closed story. But I shall take this opportunity to be “straight up” while I still can: my fear of conformity prevents me from partaking of any massively consumed media while it is still “in”. It may be years before I ever give Heroes a chance.
It's a wonder I've stuck it out through two seasons so far. The show possesses none of the qualities I find attractive in a space opera. The campiness is unintentional and uncomfortable to watch, laser battles are scarce and there are no leather goddesses to be found anywhere. Nonetheless, I found myself compelled to hit “next” on my DVD remote. Well, not really, because DVD remotes don't have a “next” button, but ugh, if I don't cut it out with the fucking snarky asides we will never finish this.
Thankfully my support group moderator shed some light on this mystery and let me move on with my life; he noted that Star Trek is easy to get into because it's “fair”. I took some time to contemplate this (not too much, though, as I was busy weighing the merits of cheese and toast vs a ploughman's sandwich for breakfast) and have come to realize that Star Trek really is the embodiment of “fair”, and it may in fact be the fairest of them all. Of all the media I have or will cover on this blog, ST: TNG may be the most gender neutral. When I say “gender neutral” I don't mean the universally compatible restrooms that are becoming all the rage at universities and safe space coffee shops. I mean to say the show goes absolutely out of its way to buck our patriarchal perceptions of gender and sex, all under the facade of “business as usual out here in SPACE!”
Let's consider the women of the Enterprise, circa Season 1. You have Beverly Crusher, Chief Medical Officer and single mom. Her station allows her to relieve Captain Picard of duty when he is deemed medically or mentally unfit to command. There is a small number of things more empowering than being able to pull rank on your boss who you have very telegraphed (in a wide ass font) feelings for, and Michael “Make Fried Chicken And They Will Come” Steele is working to make them all illegal. Her (and her replacement Pulaski) serve to pre-emptively balance out the age range on the ship; with all these sex kitten “special guests of the week” that come on the ship and give Riker a burning sensation when he pees, the uneducated observer might come to suspect that the future is some sort of patriarchal Logan's Run where women too old to jump on trampolines suggestively are euthanised. Thanks for the assurance then I will still be of value to society when I too enter my “faceplate of makeup and coat one size too large for me” phase, Gene Roddenberry.
Then you have Deanna Troi, empath and ship's Counselor from Betazed, the planet of therapists. That's girl power for you. Sticking a woman who can invasively read people's feelings on a ship where people will be confined in a closed space for long periods at a time, during which they will be attacked by robots, succumb to alien diseases and find themselves in situations that the human grasp of physics. Fuck off Jem, this is really really outrageous. Nay, be not deceived by my heckles and jeers. I am quite fond of the Deanna Troi character, because her existence marks a phenomena that I am oh too eager to have return to television. She is eye candy, and unapologetically so (the producers even made her lose weight just to be on the damn show), but rather than risk the ire of women everyone by making her brainless and pedantic, the creators twisted the trop one its head and made Deanna the second most irritating character on the show (the first being a tie between Wesley Crusher and the entire Ferengi race). Even the people for whom Deanna is geared can't fucking stand her. There's something caustically beautiful about taking a commodity (in this case, the “sex appeal”) and just throwing it away right in front of everyone so you they really know how you feel. Deanna's annoying. Not because she's a woman, or a half-alien, or even because she has the quackiest job on the starship. She has a gratingly phony “alien accent”, poor dialogue and stupid clothes, attributes that are pretty gender-generic. Hating everyone equally, the final frontier in tolerance. Roffle. Jay Kay.
Why did Tasha Yar get saved for last? Is it because I really liked the two Trekkies documentaries? Or because I thought her character could've done some great things if Denise Crosby hadn't left the show after Season 1? Or because I wish I had the hair capable of pulling off her look? The answer to all these...is none of your goddam business. Butch yet proudly feminine, sexual yet restrained, Yar is a box of chocolates shaped in a heart sent to the feminists of the world. And I ate every last fucking one of them. She's shamefully validating for the girl sci-fi fan looking for positive portrayals outside of the Whedonverse. Aside from her one-night stand with Data (which some women have read as a woman “taking care of her own needs with the help of some gadgetry”...yeah, you know who you are...), she does not carry torch, unlike her aforementioned comrades, and some say that may be why Yar wasn't given any real development by the writers. Actually, it's just me who says that. I also say that TNG had something very special with Denise Crosby in the role, something that could not be replicated if tried. If the series were remade today, she would change out of her uniform into a tank top, shorts and heeled boots anytime there was a security breach...which would happen at least once an episdoe, even if it was only a false alarm. Don't give me that look. You sit through an episode of Two and a Half Men and tell me television is getting better. Spoiler Alert: you won't be able to, because if you haven't beaten yourself unconscious with the nearest piece of Battlestar Galactica memorabilia, you'll be giggling at the sound your drool makes when you gargle it. Unlike Crusher, who was replaced in Season 2 by the older, even more matronly Pulaski, Yar was eventually replaced by Worf, a male, as if to say the creators knew that they couldn't just cookie cutter another dynamic female role like that. Disappointed I may have been at the unfortunate tipping of gender ratio, I can appreciate that sort of honesty. One token “chick” character was enough.
The women of TNG are as empowered and independent as the plot demands. They are not all very interesting or singular, but they are fair. Like a promotional free lunch, they can be dull and predictable, but isn't the ultimate goal of equality activism to have your behavior, values, and appearance be judged as “normal” or as an acceptable alternative to a default? They're average women. And in the future, in the age of space exploration, we'll all become average. And that's the bittersweet message behind it all. One day, no one will be special because they're a woman, or gay, or trans, or what have you. We'll be judged on our abilities and the convince-ability of our accents. Which is...yeah. Fair.
After all, it's not like I'm taking these three fragile, flawed female characters who are surrounded by immaculate, all purpose swiss army knife men and putting them under the microscope. The fact is the men have no more french fries in their happy meals than their female counterparts. Handsomely aged Picard is forever torn between the sophisticated gentleman officer and the cantankerous, tough-love spewing old man that equally occupy his mind. Ladykiller Riker's libido is so out of control he falls in love with a holodeck program. Worf like women who throw furniture and Data...everybody thinks they're Data. That's the key to the success of the show.
Everybody looks at poor fish out of water Data and sees themselves. Queers see a variant person who's life is pointlessly obstructed by people who demand he justify his existence. Objectivists see the struggle to adhere to absolute truths in a world being painted gray. Glenn Beck sees things too horrifying for words and Stevie Wonder still can't see shit. If queer and gender theorists weren't busy with things like fighting for our equality, they could spend days even arguing the implications of a sentient being having their gender irreversibly programmed into them. Perhaps I will go forth into the world and assemble my own team of academics to discuss such a notion. Yesterday I learned “red delicious” is not slang for apple, it is a type of apple grown. So it might be a quite awhile before I should attempt such a scholastic feat unsupervised.
Picard and Riker are not examples of mangificent men. They are superb officers, and their gender is secondary, no matter how ludicrous their relationship with it is. It will be noted, however grudgingly so, that both have stuck up for a woman's right to serve equally with men, and while both episodes in question (“Code of Honor” and “Angel One”) are considered travesties by even the most forgiving of Trekkies, it's a bit much to expect both a compelling episode and a positive message in a time where Pat Robertson and Jesse Jackson ran for president and nobody laughed. Such is the beauty of space opera. Everyone gets taken down a notch. You have the star of Roots walking around with a shiny viewfinder on his face. Wil Wheaton, God Emperor of all geekdom and the only authority to whom I answer to, made out with a girl who can turn into a giant fur beast. Nobody's sex appeal is getting out alive. And alas, she finally comes around to her point. Without sex appeal, without attraction, there is no enforcement of gender norms. It is my belief that women are told they should wear makeup and do their hair everyday because it makes them attractive, not because it's necessarily what “women do”. Vice versa with men growing beards and working out and not wearing eye liner. Someone who can remain attractive while “playing with gender”, whatever the fuck you that means, does not suffer a loss of gender validation, but is such a powerful/attractive _____ that they can “make it work”. There is no “making it work” on the Enterprise. Everyone wears the same ugly jumpsuit that bunches around the crotch, eats the same generated food and plays the same holodeck games where they are king and everyone lives to amuse them. In space, people are only as special as their duty and skills with a phaser allow them to be.
And that's all all I got to say about that. I know what you're thinking. “What? You gave the three female leads of TNG their own paragraphs, and yet you compress the male cast into one? That's uneven.” Yeah. It totes is. Write your own breakdown of Next Generation character profiles if you want, but I can't in good conscience talk about a gender that I don't identify with. Despite over 20 years of history I still find myself unable to grasp the nuances of masculinity. I think Riker looks like a creepy uncle with that beard. Do you really want me dissecting the merits of his manhood? I didn't think so.
If you only remember one thing I tell you, it's this; forget it. I'll sit here and tear into The Next Generation for five pages, and when Season 3 comes in the mail on Monday I'll get about as much sunshine as I did this week watching Season 2. It's awkwardly written, uncomfortably acted, and I can't get enough of it. Because it's fair. Each episode, each character, fails all by themselves. It doesn't need unfortunate social norms or misinformed opinions about race, gender, or...science...to convey its stories. It says the bare minimum and just keeps going. And in a time where I feel like everyone, even my loved ones and allies and fellow communiteers are keeping an eye on the right bus to throw me under, I can get by just fine on the bare minimum of tolerance and social sensitivity lip service. There might not be a better deal available in television. Judging by how I treat something that is admittedly helping me get through perhaps the worst depression of my entire life, I probably wouldn't deserve it if it existed.
Speaking of obligatory lip service, I apologize for using these articles to air my dirty laundry. I will strive to do more geeking and less bleaking in the future. If I remember. In the meantime, feel free to tell me some of your experiences in therapy or mental health treatment in general.
It'd be only fair...
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Mishana Hosseinioun joins us from As It Ought To Be. For the complete article with citations, please visit the original post.)
“All economic organization is homosexual.” — Luce Irigaray
Paul Schrader’s erotic thriller, American Gigolo (1980) does much more than simply explore the roving life of male prostitute, Julian Kaye, played by quintessential Hollywood sex-symbol Richard Gere (idolized by men and women alike); it supplies viewers with first-hand evidence supporting Belgian feminist Luce Irigaray’s phallo-critical theory that “all economic organization is homosexual”1, or “hom(m)osexual” (between males), as she would specify. What is more, the film adds layers of complexity of its own to Irigaray’s argument. While, in her essay on ‘Commidities among Themselves,’ Irigaray writes of male-to-male relations lubricating all capital flow, many elements in American Gigolo point to the ever-present nature of homosexuality in the economic realm and beyond. As the latter would suggest, the homosexuality that Irigaray regards as the basis for all economic transactions is perhaps just one of the many outward manifestations of repressed homosexuality in society. As such, a scene that depicts a transaction between Julian (or the effeminate, “Julie,” as he is called) and a married couple—exemplary of the homosexual economic organization to which Irigaray refers in her central thesis—can be read as one of the more pronounced expressions of subdued homosexuality of male characters in the film. Given its rich symbolism and rhetoric charged with an unmistakable hom(m)osexual undertone, this particular sequence calls for deep analysis through the lens of Irigaray’s critique of Lévi-Straussian kinship structures.
This sequence is just one instance in which American gigolo, Julian—in exchanging his sexual services with a woman in return for money—actually inserts himself into a transaction with another male. Upon entering the Palm Beach home of a client, Julie addresses the man of the household: Look mister, someone’s made a mistake here. I don’t do fags. When the husband tries to explain that it is not what he meant, Julie promptly stresses that he does not do couples either, to which the husband takes offense and retorts, no, no, no, you don’t understand, it’s just my wife Judy. Not me! Just her. The camera, turning back on Julie to capture his response to the husband’s emphatic disavowal, does not miss the telling shift in Julie’s eyes which graze a nearby male statue just milliseconds before he blurts out, OK. Such body language implies a nonverbal show of understanding on Julie’s part, of the husband’s true homosexual intentions; while the movements of Julie’s lips—a part of the body that is spoken through by culture—cannot similarly engage in the taboo as his eyes do, and are thus obliged to acquiesce to societal convention by forming the word, OK.
Only moments later, the husband continues, but I can watch, greedily asserting his only right that would bring him close to another man without appearing overtly homosexual. He states this less as a question than as a reiteration of a contract already established non-verbally between the two men. ‘Course, Julie says, reassuring the husband, as though merely confirming their pre-signed agreement. Would you—would you like a drink? the husband offers, to which Julie mumbles, No, yet simultaneously pairs with body language that would suggest otherwise. Mid-No, Julie, loosening his tie and making deep eye contact, begins to walk in the husband’s direction. With fear in his eyes, the husband scolds, Not yet!, which represents his being made uncomfortable by what he obviously felt (and possibly enjoyed with guilty pleasure) as Julie’s sexual advance towards him. As the camera zooms in swiftly onto the husband’s panic-stricken face in this scene, a slender, crystal statuette is made apparent just behind, to the side, and in line with the husband’s head, perhaps serving to mirror his psyche at that very moment and, more specifically, showing that he is reminded of how his relation with another man will always be mediated by a third party. The arms of this handless figure stick up in the air and the head drops lifeless to one side, in an almost feminine rendition of the crucified Christ2, foreshadowing his wife who will later be seen lying in a similarly passive position in a bed in the next room.
Immediately afterwards, Julie changes the topic, exclaiming, I think I’d like my money now, to which the husband, with similar aloofness, responds oh sure—sure, the second sure, fully aware of itself as a line spoken straight out of a socially-approved skit for two men seemingly conducting “business as usual”. Despite never having met one another before this particular interchange, Julie and the husband’s dialogue here strangely appears rehearsed, which can only mean that they play a similar role with other men, day-in and day-out. Both seem to recognize that their proper sounding dialogue, tailored to cultural standards, is simply a way of escaping the unease prompted by direct hom(m)osexual confrontation and the patent shadiness of their business. “Hom(m)osexuality is played out through the bodies of women, matter, or sign and heterosexuality has been up to now just an alibi for the smooth workings of man’s relations with himself of relations among men,”3 writes Irigaray, summing up the sexual struggle that takes place in this film sequence. In this situation, the homosexuality plays itself out through superficial dialogue, and in the following scene, through the ‘superficial’ wife.
Julie follows the husband into the bedroom, on the way, passing a phallic shaped cactus, perhaps symbolizing the husband’s “prick” (i.e. cactus needles) which is in a state of chronic unpleasure,4 given that it presumably cannot relieve itself of the tension of pent-up homosexual desire. As the two men enter the room, lying on the bed, in white sheets, is the almost naked, crucified, silent, doll-like, wife whose blonde hair and pale skin make her the closest thing to invisible (not unlike the crystal statuette from the previous scene) so as to maximally erase her from the subsequent sexual exchange in the bedroom; by her bedside lies an abstract piece of art, yet-again, phallic in shape. Its position on the nightstand is significant in that it both represents an unconsciously fetishized object that might be used to arouse the husband sexually and to make sexual contact with his wife bearable. While the hard, twisted, cold metal seems to highlight the frigidity and frustration surrounding his relationship with her and signals the violence that lies ahead, it is possibly evocative of the husband’s infantile fixation and fear of “sterility”, otherwise know as castration.
Julie is asked to engage in sexual relations with the wife as the husband, standing watch at a safe distance from the bed, yells a series of command. “Woman exists only as an occasion for mediation, transaction, transition, transference, between man and his fellow man, indeed between man and himself,”5 reaffirms Irigaray, clearly describing the way in which the wife here is merely an object to be filled, a vehicle through which the two men can carry out their homosexual exchange, and nothing more. When Julie attempts to contest this tripartite system by whispering to the wife to forget that her husband is also in the room, the husband reasserts himself and barks from the back of the room, Oh, no, no, from behind—it has to be from behind! in blatant reference to anal sex. Further evidence that there is no escape from this “triangular trade,” in which the female body is merely utilized a means to an end within an otherwise homosexual exchange, comes from the way in which the camera refuses to ever really capture Julie and the wife alone in a single frame. As soon as the husband no longer becomes visible in the background, the phallic artwork on the nightstand enters the frame and stands in for the second phallus that is required in the transaction, emphasizing Irigaray’s argument of how an exchange cannot take place in society in the absence of hom(m)osexual parties.
Later, the husband orders Julie to slap her—slap that cunt which demonstrates the husband’s frustration at having a woman stand in the way of his homosexual encounter with Julie, just as it shows how the repression of his homosexuality manifests itself into physical symptoms, namely as sadistic outbursts. The expression, cunt, reduces the wife to her mere genitalia, which is tragically the source of the husband’s pleasure as well as pain given that the cunt is both a window and a wall leading to and separating him from a homosexual encounter. In other words, his homosexual desires can only be achieved by means of a female body, yet are eternally doomed to suppression given the lack of direct access to another male; he vocalizes, and thus externalizes this repressed tension, by literally projecting his anger onto her body which is a constant reminder of his infantile fear of castration, as well as a reminder that his encounter with another male is forever sentenced to mediation, filtration, and thus, to dilution, by that cunt.
Not only does this film sequence provide backing for Irigary’s argument that all exchanges are ultimately homosexual6, it draws attention to the repressed hom(m)osexual desires that stir within males on a more regular basis and that desperately seek outlets for articulation. Given that forms of socially acceptable expression of such desires are limited and are, thus, never fully satisfied—as this particular instance in the film suggests—a patriarchal society is left but with one thing as its last avenue of expression: violence; hence, the murder of the wife on the night of the sexual exchange with the gigolo. Although this attempt to exterminate the female from the triangle-trade altogether is successful in one respect, the film shows how the entire monopoly falls apart as a result.7
In painting hom(m)osexuality as central to all socio-economic intercourse, Luce Irigaray once and for all complicates the kinship structures near and dear to the late “father of modern anthropology,” Claude Lévi-Strauss; yet even Lévi-Strauss, who writes that prohibition gives rise to a counter-claim, may not realize that his argument extends beyond the sphere of the incest taboo and already treads into the domain of homosexuality. Lévi-Strauss’ theory is even at work in American Gigolo, where Julie’s sexual transactions almost invariably contain male involvement and can be taken to represent the residue left behind by repressed homosexuality in society. In the same way that incest prohibition creates a need to make up for a subdued desire, the prohibition of homosexuality evidently calls for some sort of compensation, as well. “[…] every negative stipulation of the prohibition has its positive counterpart. The prohibition is tantamount to an obligation, and renunciation gives rise to a counter claim.”8 Just as a man’s renunciation of his sister calls for an obligation to give his sister to another, and claim the other’s sister for himself, figuratively speaking, certain men’s renunciation of their homosexuality makes it inevitable for other sexual forms of male interaction to spring up. All of this makes for the fact that Julie and the husband display a sort of censored homosexuality.
Whether it is Julie’s obsessive behavior towards picking and choosing clothing and scrutinizing himself in the mirror in the privacy of his own home, as the ultimate expression of his being stuck “in the closet,” or the way in which the convertible Mercedes he drives also speaks to the tension that lies between the need to keep a lid on his true sexual orientation as well as the inability to fully repress his identity—hom(m)osexuality, as American Gigolo and Luce Irigaray’s Neo-Marxist theory of “Phallocentric Ecnomics” have shown, lurks around every corner, and “bums a ride” (rides a bum) only when safe.
–Mishana Hosseinioun is a Drafter with the 2048 Project: Humanity’s Agreement to Live Together at the UC Berkeley Law School and a doctoral candidate in International Relations at the University of Oxford, England.
Further Reading:
Photography and Other Modes of Crying at Your Own Funeral by Mishana Hosseinioun, 8/23/09
Black on White: Reading Fanon Against Mapplethorpe by Mishana Hosseinioun, 9/11/09
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Why isn’t there more talk about contradictions between gender politics and desire? Why is it okay for progressive feminists or gay people to hate on hegemonic masculinity where it exists and then also harbor desires for the same characteristics that make up this destructive ideal? Why should we reward ourselves for wanting the bad guys and turning away the nice ones?
First, it should be noted that when I refer to desiring “the bad guys” and turning away "the nice guys,” I am referring to images of men and behaviors that are both gendered and racialized. My vantage point (which I’d argue is quite similar to the vantage point of many heterosexual women) is the mainstream gay male community, where ideal types are traditionally white, typically masculine, and are within a range of body types that lean taller and thicker.
Second, before I have a rant about progressives that employ contradictory desiring, we have to talk about beauty privilege and American individualism. There’s a lot of talk in sociology about the American individualism, but the piece of it that I want to bring into this discussion dissects this national philosophy to understand a privileging process. In the U.S., there is a sense that individuals can do anything as long as they work hard enough, no matter the struggle. Best encapsulated by the phrase, “pull yourself up by your bootstraps" (a phrase that, correct me if I’m wrong, was a defining message of Reagan’s successful presidential campaign), individuals are not only capable of but ultimately responsible for any success or failure that they encounter. The “bootstraps” mentality has often been used to justify cutting welfare programs and policies designed in the interest of racial equality, and now, I argue, also justifies beauty ideals and acceptable romantic desires.
Although we’ve seen a lot of feminist work in the last couple decades about beauty and how oppressive beauty ideals can be, rarely do you see a discussion about how beauty privilege is reproduced at the individual level. The beautification processes that many of us engage in (everything from putting on make up to working out in the gym to modifying how we talk or move to be more attractive) reflect a “buy-in” to a mentality that if we work hard enough at it, we can be one of the beautiful people. While true to a minimal extent, this is actually a mechanism to reproduce structural inequality between beautiful “types” – or rather, groups of people at the top of hierarchies of race, gender, class, ability, etc. – and those who are not beautiful. For example, drawing on the 2008 study linked above, rarely, if ever, do femmey Asian guys get the girl.
After wasting countless (seriously, countless) hours not only hearing the complaints of others but also whining myself about not feeling attractive and not being able to get the guys that I want due to systemic, oppressive beauty ideals, I’ve decided to try and step back think about matters of blame. Yes, like many other gay guys that are sometimes quite literally rendered invisible to the Hot Gay Plastics, I tend to blame the hot gays for everything. Why should they deserve this kind of attention? Why can’t I even get a lick of the attention that they get in the world, when it’s **so clear** to me that they don’t deserve it? And why wouldn’t they want to be with me?
And there the problem is, in that last sentence: Why wouldn’t they want to be with me? For many, myself included, there seems to be this deeply rooted thought that perhaps, if they (the hot people) realize why they’re wrong, if they work hard enough at it, they’ll realize that my desire for That Type of Guy deserves to be rewarded; that I can be squeezed into the mainstream ideal of success and desirability that has also for years denied me of its privilege. In essence, despite having been subjugated by structural inequality, my romantic desiring often reflects the same hegemonic ideals; and further, this process of whining about beauty and trying to make myself beautiful has felt so natural that often I forget to look at my track record and realize how implicit I am in this inequality.
It feels trivial to admit and think about the fact that many of us want what we can’t get or also that we want something that either doesn’t exist or doesn’t make us happy, but it’s important. Particularly given recent talk about the “mancession” and the honestly quite pathetic (but nonetheless real) crises couples face when male partners take up traditionally female domestic roles, these are crucial questions to ask in the interest of gender and romantic equality.
So, male-interested parties – take a second and step back. Think (again) about your dating track record and images of people you’d really want to be with. Are they all white? Butch? Have a tendency to treat people like shit? Look like or act like Brad Pitt? And, perhaps more importantly, what are the qualities in men that turn you off? Hot People don’t exist unless there’s a market for them. Never forget that we’re the market.
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regulars
