Although I have been seriously slacking, the past few days have seen some hardcore catching up…or at least trying to, which leads me to this post. In the last week, I have read the second half of Jean-Franscois Lyotard’s Just Gaming, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, and the first half of an anthology called PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions about Gender and Sexuality, edited by Carol Queen and Lawrence Schimel. And several hundred pages later I am left with far more questions then I found answers, but one inquiry that stands out: Is individual, creative thought even a possibility? Read the rest of this entry »
Posts Tagged gender
I will be the first to admit, when I first saw this video, my response was laughter. It had been sent to be as a link a friend had tweeted.
Only after I had caught my breath from my hearty chuckle that I realized it wasn’t all that funny. I mean, yes, penguin relationships of an kind are funny in that “aww…look at the penguins looking awkward in their tuxedos” kind of way, but soon it hit me: this was CNN breaking news! We are at war, the economy is worse than its been in decades, the potential first Latin American Supreme Court Justice is in her confirmation hearings, and what we call one of our most dependable and reputable news outlets is putting in the time, energy and money to put out video packages on penguins, with the only actual news part of it being their sexuality?
I thought it was a joke. It had to be a joke…or at least I thought so until it was followed by a story of a family who was almost killed as their minivan burst into flames in the middle of the roadway, leaving one disabled relative stuck between the flames and a dividing wall. I’ve seen a lot of cruel jokes, but that was too far, even for CNN. It had to be real, which made me question a few things: Do we really want to discuss sexuality issues and pull them to the forefront enough for the homosexual relationships between penguins in a zoo becomes news? Is that really publicity to help “the cause”? Because quite honestly, I felt it was more of a mockery, a grab for ratings and attention, and the creation of a mental bond between the ridiculousness of the situation, and the reality that affects millions.
Sexuality, in one way or another, rips apart families everyday, and more than you realize. So, if it makes you feel its less serious because there are cute penguins on your screen, good for you. If not, then you and I are of a similar frame of mind. And for those who think that it just isn’t that serious, or that it’s a cute story to break the monotony of disaster and bad news, keep in mind that everything you see in the media is put there for a certain reason by someone with an agenda. I may not know what their intentions were, but then again, neither do you. And when we are all ignorant of them, intentions mean very little in comparison to interpretations of the meanings in the final product.
There are a lot of people for whom such a story is interpreted as the light side of gays, and their ability to “go straight” when the right person of the opposite sex comes along. And it is such an ideology that forces thousands into the closet, drives countless young people to suicide and even more to deep, dark, depressing places they just can’t seem to get out of. I would now, for a while, I was there.
This is something that I have been thinking about and going back and forth on with a close friend of mine.
Here’s the deal: Feminism, or at least the Third Wave is supposedly all about telling stories, raising voices and finding a space of inclusion through deconstruction. Much of what is happening as a result of this ‘new feminist activism’, however, is more alienation and division than ever before. We are now living in a world where womanists, ecofeminists, liberal feminists, socialist feminists, radical feminists, post-colonial and third world feminists, french feminists, post-structural and post-modern feminists, multiracial feminists, libertarian feminists, and the list goes on and on, all claim to be true feminists, who have adopted the ideology that will free women and make for the best society, while attempting to silence all other “feminist” voices as not being as productive or meaningful as theirs.
The theoretical beginings of the feminist movement, and its third reincarnation, spout off idealistic rhetoric of a full standpoint, within which all aspects of an individual’s multitude of momentary and long-term idenities are brought into a senes of critical and optimal consciousness to deconstruct all power relations within the heirarchies and ideologies that intersect to construct societies. There are not many problems with standpoint theory its self that I would want to note, but instead wth the attitudinal practice that is using this theoretical approach to silence those who disagree with not only feminist mindsets and limited consciousness, but also with the dominant racist, capitalist patriarchy we like to call ‘the norm’. Read the rest of this entry »
Jean-Franscois Lyotard’s early work, Heidegger and “the jews”, takes on the issue of the Other, the Stranger, the Foreigner, however, you choose to label this group, specifically as it pertains to the Holocaust, so that he can then take his findings and apply them on a broader scale. For the past week or so, I have been slowly making my way through the dense, reader-unfriendly, yet terribly fascinating text, but Chapter 6 in particular caught my eye.
In this chapter, Lyotard takes on sexual difference. He provides a brief, yet detailed examination of the subject by calling attention to what it is not, rather than popular conceptions of what it is, in order to arrive closer to a true definition of the term “sexual difference.” This method, in my opinion, is because the very nature of difference is what it is not. It is not representable, because in representation, definition and categorization, one would be choosing one method of judgment, therein silencing and devaluing others. His discussion calls attention to the problems of binary gender constructions in that as long as we attempt to organize, divide and rationally conceptualize gender, we are forgetting and excluding entire groups as “others” (or in Lyotard’s terminology: “jews”) faster than we can begin to understand all that we are destroying. Read the rest of this entry »