Lost will be abandoning higher ed

I'm moving folks--to the big city and to the non-profit sector. In the interim since my last post, a bee, my kittens and my clumsiness resulted in 1 dead and 1 newly purchased computer as well as a fair amount of debt. More posts will follow soon.

Gospel, the South, and the Spirit

Recently I've been having lots of thoughts about the South. I grew up in a Southern state, living there until I was 14. Since then I've rarely been back except for miserable summers and holidays with my parents who still live there. Christianity is a huge part of that Southern fear for me and is intimately related to my horrible experiences. It drives my parent's lives--providing a convenient excuse for my mother's depression and makes it impossible for them to see me as anything other than hellbound and in desperate need of salvation. I was born again a few times in my life--or at least that's how I experienced it.

So I haven't thought about the South as anywhere but a place to flee for years. Then I started working on this piece about growing up and went to Creating Change and had the chance to meet some folks from Southerners on New Ground (SONG). Recently I had the chance to hear The Blind Boys of Alabama perform. It reminded me of all the things about the South I do appreciate and what I found so moving in the work SONG is doing--I felt the spirit.

When I was a little kid I believed in the holy spirit. I actually used to pray to the street light outside my window because I though it was the Star of David and the holding place of God and spirit. I don't believe in that version of the spirit anymore, but I do believe in the need for a connection and for that emotional and communal moment of celebration and release and love. Gospel music, bluegrass music, classical, a really pretty day, great art, awesome activists and community, love--I've found it all these places, but it's been a long time since I let myself think about how Christian worship music used to do it for me.

African Americans have an extra leg tendon, you say?

I dislocated my kneecap recently and now spend multiple hours a week in physical therapy. Today while I was on one of the machines, I started talking with J, the receptionist, about subtle forms of racism within the LGBTQ movement because she asked me about what kinds of conversations I had at the NGLTF conference. I brought up the idea that lots of people expect every African American man on a college campus to be there to play sports as one example and asked rhetorically why people thought that. J responded, "Because of genetics." I waited a second before I realized she wasn't joking and then we had a fairly coherent conversation about how that's not scientifically true. Despite what it said in J's physiology book, published admittedly 15 years ago, African Americans do not have an extra or longer tendon in their legs. In fact there is no biological basis for race. We talked briefly about how science has been used over the years to prove all kinds of things that we as human beings wanted to believe was so in order to justify certain worldviews. "Yes!" J nodded-- "Like evolution?" I was trapped. Besides I was leaning against a rubber ball on a wall and kind of thought my legs might fall off, so I said "Maybe, kind of" and left it at that.

Appropriatory Fashion: The Stuff Nightmares Are Made Of

Having just gotten back from the National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce's annual conference, Creating Change, there's quite a lot I need to process. There's a lot of information and emotional processing to do. There's this bizarre new and amazing person in my life that I have no explanatory system for. And then there are my nightmares, which may be the weirdest bit.

I rarely remember my dreams. I can count the number of times I've remembered anything at all from my dreams in the past six months without removing my shoes. That said two of those times have been nightmares about bad haircuts. One was a mullet, and then last night there was the nightmare about having a mohawk. Well more accurately the nightmare was about appropriation, and I was well aware in the dream of having committed appropriation not only of the mohawk, but also of something else I can't remember. When your white guilt starts surfacing in your dreams, something proactive around it has to be done.

Now I've had a mohawk before, and as recently as last year I didn't feel guilty about that, but recently I've recognized that while I don't really know that much about the history of the mohawk, it's probably not a fashion statement I have the right to make. Fauxhawks, I'm more okay with, and still occasionally sport--rightly or wrongly. I don't even know what brought the issue up. Sure lots of white queers have mohawks and I certainly took note of them at the conference and every white gay boy was wandering around all fauxhawked up but I didn't think too much about it--until I woke up this morning all anxious.

I'm not normally all white guilting everywhere. I took the get off your butt and do something philosophy and generally try to my work around white privilege and anti-racism. So I'm not sure what to make of this nightmare or what it means I need to be working on within my psyche. Maybe I just need to be chilling with more white folks who are doing their work--there aren't enough of them in my life right now, I acknowledge.

Competence Proves Scary in People of Color

In talking with friend X today, they mentioned that a white co-worker had informed them that they find X scary. In explaining their fears, co-worker said that X is so good at their job and so smart and that is intimidating. I can see why X might be intimidating. X is certainly amazing, very smart, and very together, but the implication seemed to be that it was not these things alone which were so intimidating. Rather X's superb job performance combined with their intelligence, combined, I would argue, with their racial identity were the key factors.

X is a person a color. If X were a white individual, I don't think the comment would have been made in quite the same way although co-worker might still find X scary. Nor do I think if X were bad at their job, lazy, or stupid would they be scary. I think co-worker finds competent intelligent people of color scary--however, unconsciously. Obviously I can't prove it based on the one comment, but it reminds me of the ways "articulate" is thrown at African Americans--as if there's some shock there. Is that because co-worker subconsciously thinks if a person of color outperforms a white person, then the white person is ridiculous because how else could such a thing occur? Is that because X threatens co-worker's sub-conscious assumptions about people of color? Is it because co-worker fears X will see through them and discover some secret flaw?

Hillary Clinton has a CUNT?

Why yes, in fact, she does, and it will continue to be held against her. In perfect illustration of one of the less nuanced ways in which misogyny will play out in the upcoming election, there is a campaign out there to "educate" United States voters on Hillary Clinton's role as a cunt (and I don't mean the empowered happy kind). Referring to her euphemistically as a "special flower," interviewer and Weekly Standard senior writer Matt Labash seeks to avoid the offensiveness of the word cunt, thus also foreclosing any potential discussion about the word's power or value. Founded by Roger Stone, long-time political operator, C.U.N.T's education campaign consists almost entirely of this t-shirt and C.U.N.T. website which contains a count of those who sign their agreement with the statement. For more check out the The Weekly Standard's interview with Stone, in which Labash neatly explains, Stone "is trying to tap into deep-seated sentiments about [women, I mean] Clinton." The real fear after all is not just Clinton but possibilities for shifts in gender equity (at least for white women) because as Stone notes, should Clinton win the nomination, "a thousand special flowers will bloom."

Picture downloaded from: http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=2223264496&size=s&context=photostream

Pop Culture and Empowerment

I've been watching a lot of television and movies lately--probably more than is good for me. The sheer fact that I've seen that damned comcast commercial twice tonight indicates a fair amount about my blood pressure and my viewing habits. As I was watching Cashmere Mafia this evening and getting my cheap thrills out of the developing lesbian relationship, I started thinking about visibility. I wrote an entire thesis bitching about the mainstream lgbtq movement's championing of visibility of the homo/transnormative, but Willow's relationship with Tara in Buffy the Vampire Slayer still got me through the summers at my parent's house in rural uber-red state as a kid. And now in a new rural place, I'm enjoying the lesbian plot line far more than it deserves. What is that? It's not like when I was a younger and Buffy gave me hope. The only answers I'm coming up with verge on psychoanalytic theory, which in all honesty I don't really understand and certainly can't articulate lucidly. Perhaps I'm learning how to better balance enjoyment with critical thinking--which brings me to the most interesting moment in the episode I watched tonight: "Dangerous Liasons."

As publisher, Mia (Lucy Liu) approves her magazine's, Modern Man's, cover. She struggles because the cover of this particular issue seems to violate her feminist code. It contains the picture of a woman's cleavage with a man on a plate before her. She sits fork in hand about to eat him, while he, in his business suit, seems to be squirming and very uncomfortable. His hand happens to fall exactly at her cleavage--making it appear as if he is either dangling from the v of her collar or pulling it down. The copy reads, "The New Dog-Eat-Dog World! Women Chow Down on Men!" This magazine cover storyline is backed by a storyline in which a man (business executive) fucks a woman (sales associate) and then calls off the relationship and the job privileges he'd been giving her as a result of their sexual liason. She threatens to sue and is painted as the unreasonable one--another perspective on the threat of the man-eating woman. For those of you who want to check it out, the best view of the cover is about 10 minutes into the episode and can be watched on ABC's free player.

Mia decides to keep the cover, while including a letter that tells modern men they have to get used to modern women who can and will do things as well as men and even be their bosses sometimes. While a feel good moment, the sub-texts continue to be rather concerned about those man-eating women. The cover image perpetuates stereotypes even if the copy is countered. A woman who is nothing but cleavage and power hungry? The man who somehow manages to grab hold of the cleavage despite his lunchable status? And the narrative holds with the men-visual, women-verbal dichotomy, which to the degree that is true, means that Mia's letter will have little readership. Now ya'll know I love Lucy Liu, and I thought Mia's letter and her decision to run the cover because it is what many men think good. The show is certainly taking feminist issues beyond Sex in the City to which it is constantly being compared. Like the lesbian visibility question, I'm glad that there's a show in the mainstream that's representing feminist questions, but like with the lesbians, I have to ask, what cultural values are they challenging, and which ones are they reifying? Why do the sub-texts all indicate men are actually at risk? For instance why are the most powerful women in NYC almost exclusively white? And why is the token Asian American woman the one most likely to be viewed as a ball buster? White hetero masculinity is on the defensive in our country right now, and that's playing out--even in shows currently claimed as feminist godsends.