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Category Archives: gender

Mickee Faust and the Trouble with Hyperbole

Dear readers,

After an unreasonably long hiatus, I am now once more able to carve out time for this blog. I hope to never abandon you for so long again. And now, for the latest installment . . .

On Saturday, November 17, while at the National Communication Association conference in Orlando, FL, I attended a performance by Tallahassee-based performance troupe Mickee Faust, and I really liked it. I liked their intentionally bad jokes. I liked their skewering of the bourgeois dessert negotiation. I liked their Alice in Wonderland take on the TEA Party. I was with them the whole way.

I was even with them when they sang a song about abortion and the constitution dressed as Supreme Court justices and then put on Klan hoods. At least at first. Or, it didn’t jolt me out of the space of watching the performance or make me want to walk out or anything. I texted a picture of it to my colleague who studies the rhetoric of race and sexuality in Supreme Court decisions, like “you missed this!”

But afterwards I found myself really wanting to talk about it. I showed my conference roommate the picture. I texted it to my two friend-colleagues with whom I discuss race and sexuality. I didn’t know why, yet. I just needed to tell people.

It wasn’t until one friend wrote back “What?! I do not understand! Why aren’t people objecting? This seems really wrong” that I was able to identify what I was feeling as unsettled. So then, a couple more texts with that friend and the other one who whom I’d sent it, and a phone call, and I figured I needed to blog about it. (As, to be honest, was suggested by the friend quoted above.)

Abortion rights are important. The denial of abortion rights is absolutely a means by which women have it enforced on them that they are second class citizens. (And non-uterus-having humans are also reminded that uterus-havers are inferior and incapable of making their own decisions about said baby-incubating organ.)

This is not the same as a systematic campaign of violence intended to terrorize a population.

There is a case to be made for systematic terror campaigns against abortion doctors—but even then it is nothing like the same scale. This is not a case where every member of a population lives under the constant threat of being identified as a target when visually identified through racist optics.

When you compare everything to the worst-case scenario, the worst-case scenario loses its meaning. As my colleague T.J. Tallie put it in discussing how people have been responding to the recent escalation of violence between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, “can we not directly compare nations to Nazis right now? Not to make Nazis particularly ‘evil’, but it cheapens the historical reality.”

This is also the problem with the “gay rights are like civil rights” discourse. Gay folks—the white, middle class gay folks who tend to want to get married—are not systematically denied access to basic services and rights. They’re denied access to a privileged-person state-sanctioned economic benefit. And yes, it is a helpful thing to have access to because it’s a means by which resources are distributed, but it supports an incredibly unequal system wherein capital can exploit productive wage laborers because those workers are exploiting reproductive laborers. And just throwing around civil rights analogies erases the substantial difference in privilege in the two cases.

Ultimately, these things aren’t comparable. And I’m perhaps most distressed by the fact that the troupe had otherwise progressive politics. They were perhaps a little too self-congratulatory on their inclusion of folks with visible disabilities, but they were clearly thinking in broad terms about society and its ills.

Granted, it was mentioned in the question and answer period that the performance at NCA came from their retrospective showcase and that particular piece was written 25 years ago, which was admittedly an era of less awareness around the issues I’m raising here. But they’re still doing the sketch.

And, just to head this critique off at the pass if anyone from the troupe or who attended the NCA performance should want to make it, the fact that there are people of color in the troupe—and in that sketch, even—does not mean that it is not problematic. The existence of one or some members of a structurally undervalued group who aren’t offended by something doesn’t mean it doesn’t participate in deeply troublesome logics.

In the end, Mickee Faust is an awesome social critique cabaret. I would go see them again. I might even pay for it as opposed to having it be a conference panel. But that doesn’t mean they don’t need critiquing. And in this case they clearly do.

In that spirit of friendly critique from someone who shares Mickee Faust’s overall goals and politics, I have deliberately not linked to their website or included any pictures, since I don’t want this to seem like an attack or an invitation to attack them.

Tumblr Perverts and Other Hazards of Fandom

I think most people take some joy in being right. I’ll certainly admit that I’m one of them. But as a critical academic I’m often going around making dire predictions or showing awful intended and unintended consequences of things, so when I’m right about those there’s some disappointment mixed in with the glee (as there is with all glee, Ryan Murphy).

So when Julie Levin Russo, my fan studies buddy, copied me on a tweet about a blog post she’d found, Fangirls, Stay Away From Tumblr,  it was “I am so right!” followed by “I am so right.”

In the post, the author (who @j_l_r informs me is an undergraduate and so I’ll be playing even nicer than usual this week) critiques what she considers the excesses of fangirls who use microblogging platform Tumblr.

The post is in fact quite prescriptive, telling said fangirls how they ought to behave: “they need to change how they fangirl over it. They need to stop focusing on what shoes their favorite actor is wearing, and remember why they became a fan”;  “if you want to run your blog ‘right,’ you need to make your posts about why you’re a fan of so-and-so.”

The author also parses out more specifically what it might look like to not be doin’ it wrong. Thus, she declares, “there’s nothing wrong with listening to the same band for weeks on end, or paying an absurd amount of money for a concert ticket in the nosebleed section.” (Donning the Marxist hat for a second: note that engaging in consumer capitalism is what’s a-ok.)

Moreover, she distinguishes such people from “normal fans,” even insisting that “these fangirls aren’t fans anymore; it’s a race to be the most obsessive, and it isn’t genuine or fair to actual fans on the website.”

Now, @j_l_r quipped “paging Bourdieu?” in the original tweet, and she’s not wrong about that, of course—and maybe my response is because my queer hat just fits me better than my Bourdieu hat—but I want to go a different direction here.

Because the author also noted in the blog post that the Tumblr style of fangirling “makes everyone involved uncomfortable,” and I’d like to argue that this is actually the crux.

This is to say that, as we can see from the definition given—”A fangirl is someone who takes that one thing he or she (usually a she, though) really loves — such as a celebrity, television show, or band — and loves it to the point where their life revolves around it”—fangirling is both highly gendered and an issue of large-scale affect (itself also highly gendered). It’s girls, having extravagant feelings.

But there’s another layer. She says, “Unfortunately, fangirls have taken to blogging their unhealthy obsessions on Tumblr.” Girls have long had feelings deemed extravagant by social standards (ever since rationality became gendered as masculine, in fact), but now they’re doing it in public. And that reminds me vividly of my theorization of fandom as like public sex.

Yes, the blogger’s discomfort (and that of many others) is about what is and isn’t a tasteful way to appreciate cultural objects (obligatory Distinction reference), but engaging in the wrong kind of appreciation shouldn’t produce such a strong reaction. And yet it’s a moral panic. Why? Because such fans become perverts.

The post parses the problem: “It’s a competition — who can post the most pictures, who can get a reaction from a band member or actor via Twitter, who can attend the most concerts or know the most quotes from a show, or who can make the most ridiculous comment professing their undying love,” and complains that such activity is not about the object of fandom.

But here’s the thing you learn about norms and deviants if you can look at it from a certain angle and let go of the panic about contamination: it’s never about the object of fandom.

These girls’ behaviors are scratching some itch they have, providing them some pleasure they desire, and they’re not ashamed to do that even if it does look only tenuously related to the object that is supposedly the point.

Ultimately, love is not rational, and you can write all the essays you want detailing the fine points of a band or TV show and it will always come down to a certain something that produces feelings. What these fangirls are doing openly, everyone does covertly.

And it’s desire, and its excessive feelings, and it’s femininity, and it’s not inside the confines of normative development  (the author identifies it as a “stage”). And it freaks people out.

And this blog post is exactly why it matters to bring queer theory to bear on fandom. Because the power of the norm is such that we get female youth hating on feminized youth practices because they know that having that much desire can’t possibly be right.

Posting early because it’s timely and because I’ll be traveling for the next 10 days or so. Look for my next post probably in June.

Adventures in Stereotyping: People Who Should Know Better Edition

This week, I’ve been provoked into critiquing the casual ease with which people who, by all indications, ought to understand how to avoid stereotyping reproduce the reduction of groups people to the least common stereotype.

Now, I have myself been nailed for this. I wrote in a response paper for my Ethnic Studies 10AC course that “when I think Asian, I don’t think turban” as part of my discussion of the ways Indians get elided. And I was meaning this as a commentary on other people reducing Sikhs to turbans, but that wasn’t clear, and I got a very snarky comment in the margin from my TA. My fault for not being precise. Bad 17 year old me!

I want to distinguish the objects of my ire here from the Unintentionally Hilarious Figure  version of stereotyping, where people had actually found a pattern among groups of people but then just reported it without the necessary commentary or critique:

 

(I’m pretty sure this got from the Atlantic to me via @anetv  but Twitter’s extreme non-searchability precludes verifying. I’ll give her credit anyway.)

Instead, what I’m interested in is the ways that knowledgeable people, generating a name or an image, are using extremely loaded iconography that reproduces stereotypes when they don’t have to. They’re starting from scratch—with the acknowledgement that “scratch” is “the ideas already swirling around in culture around the objects they’re describing”—and yet they deploy these stereotyped ideas, seemingly without sufficient thinking-through.

This first came to my attention when I was forwarded a call for papers: From Veiling to Blogging: Women and Media in the Middle East. This was a goodly while ago now, but it sat there in my inbox until quite recently. The subject is not my area of expertise, so I wasn’t going to submit and should probably have just deleted it. But every time I came to it, I just got mad and tempted to fire off a reply to the listserv about it. I didn’t, because I burn enough bridges on a day-to-day basis without resorting to nuclear tactics, but it was really frustrating.

What was particularly problematic about it was that the people doing the special issue should have known better. The general public discourse around this may well be still about “white people saving brown women from brown men”—Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak specified men doing the saving in the case of sati, but the way some feminists have picked up the veil and run with it makes it an equal opportunity formula—but academics should really know better, because “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is as old as I am.

And indeed the organizers did, in fact, know better, because the actual text of the CFP started out by framing the special issue as a critique of precisely the way that “Middle Eastern women have traditionally been viewed as weak and submissive, passively accepting male authority and leadership rather than seeking to be a leader in their own right” as well as how “women of the Middle East have been portrayed as helpless creatures who are often hidden behind the veil, quietly waiting to be liberated.”

It’s therefore baffling to me why on earth they’d frame the topic as “from veiling to blogging.” Why imply that’s a chronological shift in “women and media in the Middle East” rather than (as they probably intended) in the thinking on women and media in that region? Why redeploy the veil at all, given the enormous risks of re-instantiating the very discourse they’re attempting to dispute?

The second entry in the “wow, you didn’t think that through” file, and the one that solidified my determination to write this blog post, comes from reading the article Minimalist posters explain complex philosophical concepts with basic shapes, which I got from @mikemonello

So there I am, scrolling down, not finding the geometric shapes particularly illuminating—the black and white X for Nihilism, sure, but many of the other Venn diagram-looking ones didn’t strike me as the “surprisingly simple and accessible package” the article’s introduction had promised—when I get to Hedonism and come to a screeching halt.

 

Really? A pink triangle for Hedonism? What decade is this that we’re still reinforcing the idea that gay sex is about irresponsible pleasure-seeking and gay folks have a worldview in which, as the poster-makers describe Hedonism, “Pleasure is the only intrinsic good. Actions can be evaluated in terms of how much pleasure they produce”?  I mean, yes, clearly that’s the world Rick Santorum and other far-right ideologues live in, but the rest of us get that homos are no more or less irresponsible in their pleasure-seeking than anyone else.

If these are people who have enough grasp on philosophy to make posters summarizing it, they should be no strangers to sophisticated thinking. And they should therefore have enough intelligence and sense of the world to think of something considerably less reductive. Like the veiling example, some people may not know better, but these people should.

And I guess that’s the issue. How will the general public know any better if we who do aren’t more careful in how we communicate, to each other (the CFP) and to people in general (the posters)?

(How) Have Technological Shifts Changed Being a Sports Fan?

This week’s post is also a cross-posting of something I put up elsewhere, this time a dialogue with Rayvon Fouché over at the collaborative blog project Culture Digitally.

Go check it out!    (How) Have Technological Shifts Changed Being a Sports Fan?

Hack This Post! Contesting Technological Neutrality at Technology in Theory and Practice

This week’s post is a recap of an event in which I participated on Monday, April 2. It’s housed over at the blog of the organization that hosted the event, the venerable Unit for Criticism at the University of Illinois.

So please do head over there and check it out: Hack This Post! Contesting Technological Neutrality at Technology in Theory and Practice