season of the bitch

Feminist theory holds, in part, that women are reduced to their bodies in myriad ways by patriarchal society. Women are defined by their appearance, their sexuality, their ability to give birth, in ways that men simply aren’t. The male body is the normal body, while the female body is alien, Other, and thus an integral part of the woman. Man can transcend his body, but woman cannot.

Earlier this year, I presented a paper at a departmental gathering. The best talk I heard there was on “Embodied Cyberfeminism,” by a Mass Media & Communications doctoral student. She wrote about Donna Haraway’s “cyborg” theory, and discussed gender play online as a way to separate women from their bodies and allow them to be defined as they wish.

In the blogosphere, as plenty of us have noted, we sit behind a screen. I don’t have to identify as Jewish or even as female here. The fact that many of us do speaks to that tendency of our bodies to define us. And once we identify as such out in the blogosphere, certain people seem to get the attention, even though the body is hidden and the writing is the only thing we can see.

I took a course on writing and feminist theory that studied the works of Nancy Mairs, a feminist writer with MS. Mairs wrote about her body in eloquent, beautiful terms, and noted that there is no way for her to separate herself from that body even when it fails her, but that her writing can help her to feel comfortable in that body.

In any case, women of color are doubly defined by their bodies. Nonwhite people are defined by the difference of their body from white people’s. With this definition comes a litany of stereotypes, but the starting place is the appearance of the body. The skin color, the shape of one’s eyes or nose (as I note when I am called out in public as a Jew despite no outward symbols of Judaism on me), as a woman, one’s breasts or ass. The shape and shade of our bodies creates an image of how our minds, our whole persons, must be.

Transgendered people define their own bodies–and despite some “feminists” thinking this is somehow wrong, it is beautiful. But as the title of this film (found through Problem Chylde) says, a black person who is transgendered is still black. (And as Holly points out so well here, just because you’re trans doesn’t mean you are trying to uphold some rigid gender roles.)

A white man may escape being defined by his body because his is the normative body in society. A woman may not, whatever the color of her skin. And people of color may not. And this makes it an issue for all of us. It is an issue when Sean Bell is killed and his killers go free (despite them being police officers), because he is being defined by his body as dangerous and as not valuable enough to care when he is killed.

It is an issue when Rev. Wright is seen as somehow more dangerous, scary, and transgressive than John Hagee, because of the color of his skin.

It is an issue when women are treated poorly because they are larger than what is considered desirable (by who, anyway). Fat phobia is often discussed on feminist blogs.

It is just as much of an issue when these things happen as it is when Hillary Clinton is characterized as a “witch” or when anti-Clinton groups name themselves Citizens United Not Timid, because she is female.

We feminists should not wait, as I said below, until an honest-to-god (and maybe cisgendered, if certain feminsts have their way) woman is hurt by something to speak out, because all of these issues are issues of bias against someone because of their body.

Because of the color of their skin.

The shape of their hips.

The curve of their breasts.

Their bodies.

A comment someone made over at this thread has me thinking about when it’s time to shut up and when it’s time to speak out.

I was standing in line on Friday to get my lunch. It was the Day of Silence and there was a group of students sitting at the Bell Tower on Temple campus handing out information on the protest. Two girls got in line behind me. One of them said, “Are you glad they’re all going to be deaf from sitting under that bell when it rings?”

And the other said something about the “Fag-straight alliance.”

I didn’t even think about it, I just reacted. “Wow,” I asked her, turning to look her in the face. “Did you really just say that out loud?”

She didn’t really answer me, and when I turned back around she and her friend started quickly talking about how they were in the gay-straight alliance back in high school, so somehow that alleviated them being assholes about these students’ protesting. (Reminded me of this.)

I didn’t even know about the protest until that day. I’m a grad student, which means I live under a rock when it comes to campus events. Regardless of whether or not I was involved in it, or whether or not I was the person being put down by that girl’s words, I had to say SOMETHING to let her know that what she said wasn’t cool.

See, over at that Feministe thread (the first one I linked to), someone pointed out that the thread was full of white women who were angry about the racist imagery in It’s a Jungle Out There. And that person suggested that white women who were speaking out were just as bad as others in appropriating the words, feelings, and thoughts of women of color.

I know sometimes I err on the side of not speaking up because I feel like it isn’t my place. Hi, privileged white girl. But lately I just can’t keep quiet and wait for someone else to say it. Even in the feminist blogosphere, I find myself annoyed with the persistence of attention paid to white middle-class women’s issues while other issues that affect women of all ethnic backgrounds and economic status are ignored. I’ve started to see why women I admire, like Patti Smith and Susan Sarandon, (yes, white women) don’t claim the label feminist, and why bloggers I admire are leaving.

So I have to speak up when I see things that are just effing wrong. I have to not feel uncomfortable calling people out on their racism and homophobia the same way I regularly call them out on their sexism.

And at the same time we all need to know that there are times when I do need to shut up and listen. There will always be people whose lived experience gives them a right to speak out about racism and homophobia and transphobia and poverty and many other things that I have simply never experienced. And the last thing any of us should ever do is tell anyone else that their concerns are trivial, that they should get over it, or that they’re jealous.

On these blogs, as I mentioned here, we don’t have to claim our race or gender or age or privilege level (other than the obvious, which is computer access and enough time to blog). But yet we do, and it gets brought into all the discussions, either as a positive or a negative. It is painful for me to see, even in a world which is supposedly free of judgment based on appearance, how even here voices are privileged because of the bodies they come from.

Giving white women a pass because they’re feminists, because they’ve experienced sexism, misses the point. Giving them a pass because they’re our friends doesn’t work either. Because someone is on the right side of one issue, it doesn’t make them right about all of them. (See Dick Cheney and his disagreement with Bush about gay marriage, for example.) When they’re our friends, it’s even more important to call them out on the things they do wrong, because we care and want them to do better.

When they aren’t our friends, but are people in a position of more power than we are, whether that be a big-name feminist blogger or a presidential candidate, it is hard for a few voices only from the group being slighted to speak up and be heard. They need more voices to join in the chorus.

Those voices are not more important because they are white. They are important because they are making that chorus louder. If there are enough of us, we WILL be heard.

This issue and this issue are deeply connected. And are even more deeply connected to the national conversation about race that the national media is pretending to have right now.

See, we like to pretend that certain people just CAN’T be racist. Feminists, for instance, get a pass because they’re feminists and are working for justice for all (but all too often starting with middle-class white women). Or my goodness, the police in the Sean Bell case, well two of them were black! So race had nothing to do with it.

We all screw up sometimes (hopefully not to the extent of killing an unarmed person). But to write the screwups off as ‘human’ and pretend that there isn’t more examination to be done here, well…yeah. How about examining how we’ve internalized images of black male bodies as threatening, bad, evil, for so long that many readers of Marcotte’s book didn’t even notice the symbolism? That other black police officers shot and killed a man who presented no threat to them?

I don’t have a long post about this in me right now, but all those people linked above did, so read their words instead.

Thanks to Holly at Feministe for continuing to make that blog worth reading, btw. Literally each time I think I should just take it off my list, she posts something brilliant and I stick with it.

Also related, you should read this.

…and Pennsylvania voters, a very good article at the Philadelphia Daily News.

on privilege, ‘passing’ and Far From Heaven.

That movie popped into my head  this morning on my bike ride to work. Starring Julianne Moore, Dennis Quaid and Dennis Haysbert, the movie (which was excellent) examines the different ways race and gender interact in 1950s Connecticut.

Todd Haynes, who wrote and directed the film, is a white gay man, but he has made the gay man in the movie probably the least sympathetic character. He shows how, though closeted, Quaid’s character is able to leave his wife and start having affairs with men with little disruption to his everyday life–though of course if he were to get caught…but that’s not the point. Being a middle-class white guy, he can get away with gettin’ his on the side, be it from a man or a woman, and there’s not much his wife can do about it. The same cannot  be said for his wife’s fairly innocent interest in a black man.

This thread and this thread got me thinking about passing. In the first one, a discussion of male privilege in the gay community was started and feathers were ruffled on both sides (I myself was a little perturbed at the notion of female sexuality being boiled down to “vaginal receptivity”), and in the second, a discussion of Jews as white people was started, and got a little irritable on both sides.

Someone (not sure if it’s on those threads,or something else I’ve read this week) noted that they did not identify as white, but that other people often identified them as such, and I wondered–is that itself pretty condescending? I mean, I’ve occasionally checked off “other” in the ethnicity column on questionnaires, but I look like a normal white girl. The only people who usually pick me out in a crowd as being Jewish are Jewish themselves. (As I’ve blogged about a few times) So is it just as obnoxious of me to claim that I “don’t identify as white” as it is for people to say “Well, I’M not racist so I have nothing to worry about”?

I mean, for me to not identify as white every day of  my life, I’d pretty much have to wear a T-shirt or tattoo on my forehead “JEW” and I’m obviously not going to do that. So it seems to me that a disavowal of whiteness is more a way to escape being labeled a racist or part of the oppressing class, and a way to shove the burden off on someone else. But maybe I’m being an ass.

As far as being gay goes, that’s become associated in our culture with a certain stereotype of a gay man and a certain stereotype of a lesbian, and if you don’t fit into those stereotypes, you can “pass,” while if you do fit into those stereotypes–even if you aren’t gay or a lesbian–you get treated differently.

And then this train of thought lead me to Thomas Beatie, the ‘pregnant man,’ and my wonder at the fact that Beatie was legally allowed to marry a woman while keeping his female reproductive organs, while two people who are legally female are not allowed to marry each other. I never would’ve thought that there was any privilege in being transgender–hell, transpeople seem to get left out in the cold even in regular discussions of LGBT rights. I don’t know too much about law, but I’d love to read up on the law that decides when a transgendered person legally becomes a member of the sex they are transitioning to and thus gets the marital rights not conferred on homosexual couples. Anyone want to fill me in?

I don’t think Far From Heaven was Haynes’s attempt to get into the oppression Olympics, just as this isn’t my attempt to do so. It’s just what I’ve been thinking about.

From Politico:

Now, I disagree with getting into the oppression Olympics, as he sort of does here, but he is right that Jews have been marginalized for a long part of their history, and that we should be extra sensitive to libelous, gross character assassination like the Obama-is-a-secret-Muslim BS.

(And yes, I know that being a Muslim is not a bad thing, I was engaged to a Muslim for almost two years.)

Lately I’ve been paying attention to intra-feminist debates on the inclusion of different issues into the feminist sphere. (Be patient, I swear this is relevant.) To me, all social justice issues are feminist issues. I cannot understand how one marginalized group can turn around and perpetuate the same injustices on another marginalized group. I can’t comprehend Jews who don’t like black people or feminists who are angry at immigrants (or worse, feminists angry at transgendered people or at sex workers), or Latinos who don’t like gays. And these are all different groups and of course they intersect, overlap, and the boundaries blur.

Obama may be threatening to some people simply because he cannot be quantified or pigeonholed. He is not black or white or rich or poor or liberal or centrist. To some degree he, like all politicians and especially presidential candidates, who run for an office that is as much about our national identity, our view of ourselves, is a scrim onto which we project what we want to see, or what we fear to see.

He must be hiding something behind these multiple identities. That seems to be the thought process behind these email campaigns. We can’t simply accept that he is who he appears to be, as much as any politician ever is and far more than the people he’s running against.

As a feminist, as a Jew, as a human being who sees that all of us are connected in ways we can’t quantify, I consider all issues of justice, of human rights, my issues. If you perpetuate slurs against someone because of their race, their religion, their sexual orientation, their gender, their size, their nationality, their choice of work, you do it to me.