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Portfolio of Paintings

it's a pom-pom burlesque show for men.

A preacher who sexually harasses USF students. He's been there for at least three years. The cops are there every day that he is (which is literally every day) because about a year ago, this man was punched in the face after harassing someone, and then he sued the college. So now they are basically his bodyguards. I shot this video today.

courtesy of roboshobo

If the divine is what causes appearances and does not appear itself, then man's inner organs could turn out to be his true divinities.

Hannah Arendt

Gloria Steinem on Why Women Aren't Successful At Brainwashing

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Monkey Children: Biology and Gender Identity

Astrid, your questions about my last essay on Ma Vie en Rose were really great, thank you so much. I've finally found the time to write some answers.

1. Have you read Julia Serano's 'whipping girl'?

I have read some of Julia Serano's text. Honestly I didn't finish it, because at the time I found it a little hard to read, both in terms of clarity and in terms of the emotional response it evoked in me. Also the cover of the book really turned me off, although I've heard she disliked it herself. I remember singling out a specific line in which she was talking ostensibly scientifically about the relationship between testosterone and aggression. I don't think the best biology we have confirms that there are any such definitive, or even “on average” links between sex hormones and behavior. Have you read Natalie Angier's 'Woman?' I really recommend it. I think it's arguably one of the most important books for feminism since The Second Sex

2. [Whether there is a strong sense in which we can 'know' that we have a continuous identity...”] ...would seem to be another place where faith comes in. or...hmm, that doesn't seem to fully grab it. there does seem to be a point where believing in something (a self, i am thinking here, one's self) can no longer even be described as believing because the conviction is deep enough to warrant feeling a knowing, (cont...)...which translates into a more passionate (read: effective, affecting [?]) action)

I think you're right here, about the faith to knowledge transformation. You make a good point, and it's something I've been thinking about lately with regards to the issue of trusting in other people, temporarily bracketing the question of self-relationship: If we could absolutely guarantee the other person's continued existence, or if there were some definitive plan which could guarantee someone being trustworthy, then “trust” wouldn't be required to begin with.

In a sense I think what is usually called “circular reasoning” is useful here. It does not work on paper, but what works on paper doesn't always work off paper. I think that it is not only true but necessary of identity that it not be knowable in a fixed way – in order for it to really exist and thrive, not in order to discount the idea. The assumption I am making is that we make a provisional leap, a faith, like you're saying, which allows us to perform the action of identification which creates the identity to begin with. I believe that identities (including gender identities) are knowable and real the same way a law is. What is important to me isn't destroying the basis for belief in the self (like you find in Buddhism, say), but on the contrary, simply emphasizing that it is always open in the future to revision, if one should want that revision. Which brings me to the next question.

3.“Even though i realize your discussion involves self-conception, it would be lacking to say that trans people's existences stem solely out of self-conceptions. while i acknowledge that you may not intend to frame things this way, .it seems like your essay implies that the only good that comes out of cross-gender (-sexed? potentially?) identification (not mentioning, that i saw, body modification), is binary-smashin', or rather, moving that we might move again later. this seems like a circular exercise used to get someone out of the habit of stagnation and into a habit of movement, of productivity. it ignores the very specific intents of most trans people, the ends to which are usually personal peace.”

I can't make any claims about what is right or wrong in someone else's identity. “The moral earth, too, is round! The moral earth, too, has its antipodes! The antipodes, too, have the right to exist! There is yet another world to be discovered—and more than one!” In that sphere, and as I often do, I think an aphorism or two from The Gay Science is helpful --

"One thing is needful.— To "give style" to one's character—a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. Here a large mass of second nature has been added, there a piece of original nature has been removed:—both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed, there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distant views:—it is meant to beckon toward the far and immeasurable. In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small: whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose,—if only it was a single taste!— It will be the strong and domineering natures that enjoy their finest gaiety in such constraint and perfection under a law of their own; the passion of their tremendous will relents in the face of all stylized nature, of all conquered and serving nature; even when they have to build palaces and design gardens they demur at giving nature freedom.— Conversely, it is the weak characters without power over themselves that hate the constraint of style: they feel that if this bitter and evil constraint were imposed upon them they would be demeaned:— they become slaves as soon as they serve; they hate to serve. Such spirits—and they may be of the first rank—are always out to shape and interpret their environment as free nature—wild, arbitrary, fantastic, disorderly, and surprising. And they are well advised because it is only in this way that they can give pleasure to themselves! For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself—whether it be by means of this or that poetry and art: only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold! Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is continually ready for revenge: and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight. For the sight of what is ugly makes one bad and gloomy."

Also, Astrid, what do you mean more specifically when you say “it would be lacking to say that trans people's existences stem solely out of self-conceptions?” What else do you think is involved?


5. Obviously no individual person is responsible for helping everyone else see the binary smashed through their own personal lifestyle. i just feel like the "can be" above is...dangerously vague. (which may only be because of the slew of feminists that have held trans people, and queer people in general to strict double standards).

Your point about double standards is a good one. Thanks for pointing it out. I'm going to be honest and possibly politically incorrect here, but I think the result will be helpful, because I think these kinds of dialogues are helpful. I think these double standards against transwomen exist because of a fear of antibiotic-resistant sexism, to put it as simply as I can. It is really, really difficult for a woman to see any woman who lives “the dream” of the 1940's housewife and grant them their “feminist” freedom to determine their own path. And sometimes, I think, in asking themselves questions about their own identity, transwomen, like all women, look to popular culture for images through which to find the identity they feel they share with other women. To begin the long task of finding a self-concept that gives them peace of mind. This is really what my essay was about – the possibility that sometimes trans identity or queer identity can be just as sexist or dangerous as any cissexual or heterosexual identity.

The important thing for me is not to legislate any protocol specifically for trans or queer people. I want to talk openly and calmly about what is a huge question: Do we have the freedom to give up our freedom? When do we stop exercising freedom in choosing an identity (housewife, for example), and start becoming totalized by that identity? To what extent does the totalized/unfree identity of one woman negatively impact those around her? Does that impact mean we have an obligation to be free, not just for our own sake, but for the sake of all women?

There is, and I'll be frank, a fear among many feminists of the transwoman as a “symbol,” in some parts of the feminist community. I need to be clear: I do not think this symbol has anything to do with transwomen at all. It's just as ridiculous as any symbolic image of women -- virgin, whore, and all the rest. However, what I think this specific fear may be growing out of, is the fact that the patriarchy is an “enemy which has outposts in our own minds.”

We live in a society which fetishizes lesbian identity as a trope that exists for male enjoyment, which attempts to reduce female identity to nothing but a conglomeration of sexualized imagery that has very little to do with the interior life of any human being. That reduced female identity is artificial in the narrow sense. It can be taken off and put on easily (as I did in that photo-montage), and in the end, I think, doesn't necessarily have anything to do with women at all. The women we see in mainstream pornography, for example: those are images "of men," in one sense, because misogynistic men are the ones producing the images. In this sense, ironically, I think there is some truth to that lunatic Republican politician's claim that "all pornography is homosexual." Where I disagree with him is that I think mainstream pornography is homosexual in a way that is reserved especially for the sadistic, misogynistic, heterosexual men who produce it -- and NOT the gay community at large.

Because of all this, is a scary symbolic value which I think some feminists mistakenlyattribute to transwomen. To take one example of how this fear can take form –- what if misogynistic men decide that, since they hate women's over-emotional, inferior minds, anyway, transwomen are actually superior to ciswomen, since they have “the mind of a man and the body of a woman?” One person I heard about actually said this. On a more formal level, plenty of historians have tried to suggest that Joan of Arc, who was nearly peerless among women in her time in terms of political resistance, had Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. For those historians, this would mean that she was therefore, technically, "really a man," and therefore didn't threaten their concept of the inferiority of women -- although this theory has not been taken very seriously.

Obviously it does both transwomen and ciswomen a disservice to take this stance, because transwomen are women, not men in female bodies. I think that ought to be self-evident to most people, but right now political conditions are such that it generally is not. I think that what happens is that feminist ciswomen feel threatened by this "men in female bodies" possibility, too. I think, actually, they are threatened because of the same old “all women are your jealous competitors for male attention, not your allies, friends or lovers” trope that keeps all women in general from forming effective friendships, sexual relationships, or political alliances very often. The difference is that in this case the jealousy and antipathy and fear is directed at a specific group of women, i.e., transwomen, in a way that undermines their very right to be women, so it becomes the form of transphobia I described in the first essay. It's a painful, serious, and tangled situation that really needs to be remedied. The mortality rates among trans people are absolutely dismal; particularly dismal are the mortality rates as a result of violence.

6.

So, ultimately, my concern is that the re-evaluation of the gender binary that I'm talking about needs, to be consistent, an admission that if gender is performative, no one is --a priori, anyway -- “objectively” any gender at all. They can obviously identify with one very narrow gender identity and it will be quite certain and true that they do so, but this is something they are doing of their own freedom, and not because fate has forced them into it. Related to this "Fate" issue is the argument in pop culture that queer people deserve equal rights because “they can't help being gay, it's genetic.” I think this argument, while it might be politically expedient, is dangerous, because it implies that if they could help it, they would and should. And on some level it might be true that some people would prefer if they themselves were not gay. It's obviously not very easy in this society to be gay. But so long as the question is phrased this way, I think it leaves open the possible interpretation on the part of "well-meaning" moderates or republicans that queer or gender-variant identity is an immoral condition, even if it is not a choice.

On the topic of the gender binary, I want to say that destabilizing the gender binary doesn't mean, for me, that no one can choose to simply identify as 'man,' or 'woman.' The destabilization aims to do something very specific – to create a radical concept of freedom that doesn't destroy these choices, but actually includes them as some choices among many choices. In one sense, the structure of the basic concept of man or woman, in all its fabulous, caricatured glory, fundamentally untouched. The important thing is not whether they are presented as choices at all, but whether they are presented as the only possible choices. If we change that, these binary options lose their power to:

--impose horizons on anyone,
--to conceal their status as just that, an option,
--to thereby in their enforcement (an enforcement that in my opinion, functions and has reality the same way a law does) create a totalitarian effective reality.

7.

The biological question of sex can accommodate this. There is nowhere in biology any rigid, universal and absolute rule by which we have been able to reliably “distinguish between the sexes.” There is intersexuality, and all of the related biological diversities, in our own species. There are frogs that begin as one sex and spontaneously transition to the other over the course of their lives. There are worms for whom the male lives out his life as a small part of the female's digestive system.

We can try to say things about specific cases; we can generalize about numbers of cases that resemble each other. But the fact of the matter is that if you inject a chimpanzee (or preferably, bonobo, since they are the bisexual vegetarian matriarchal pacifist ones) sperm cell into the heart of a human egg cell, you could hypothetically create a viable human-chimpanzee hybrid (not that I am advocating this). We have cloned from single animals, or from two female mice. There is a potential evolutionary future in which we are a parthenogenetic species, as unlikely as it may be. Our biology in the end is as changeable as any “social construct,” and its horizons, as far as I can tell, are determined by the trends in the evolutionary accumulation of the stylistic choices all of us make, over time.

Heteronormativity and Transgendered Identity

Ma Vie en Rose

Trailer:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0b0F8HAJgI
Relevant Clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eINgc4N7JmI


1.
I found this movie, like XXY, to be surprisingly heteronormative. It is sexist in spite of, and not because of, its positive portrayal of a gender-variant character. The film could have been reworked, albeit quite thoroughly, to accommodate a space for thinking about the intersections of all sexism, and not merely transmisogyny. It could have taken an emancipatory theme forall women, and not only transwomen. If a more general and affirmative concept of womanhood, one that includes both transgendered and cisgendered women, isn't articulated in this film or any film with female protagonists, this doesn't merely disadvantage ciswomen. It also leaves transwomen vulnerable to the attack one finds in patriarchal transphobia-- the reading that a transwoman is simply an extreme incarnation of an effeminate homosexual male.

If transwomen cannot ally themselves with cissexual women, if cissexual women cannot ally themselves with transwomen, then the heteronormativity which affects us all -- even the heterosexual, cissexual women who are portrayed so critically in the film -- will still be permitted to reign.Just as feminism needs the support of men to succeed, we also must ensure that even heterosexual ciswomen are aware that they are not, in our current global society, being guaranteed basic human rights because of the same reason that transgendered people are oppressed.

However, we cannot think of oppression as 'being deprived of access to' a certain, unproblematic, unquestioned identity possessed by men, or in this case, ostensibly possessed by ciswomen. I argue that the cissexual woman in a patriarchal society is atno advantage in this regard; is affected just as negatively by patriarchy. This means something positive. It means there is a shared experience, a point of solidarity between transwomen and ciswomen. Any generalized concept of womanhood is always something that is achieved performatively, it is never something you are born with, it is not something you were born lacking – it is always something you become. This partiality is the source of the danger of stereotypes. Yet it is also the frontier of our new, futural identities.

Before I go any further, I need to responsibly to distinguish my criticism of the limited representation of gender-variance in Ma Vie en Rose from transphobia generally, because there are some uncanny similarities. To begin with, I would say that I am only criticizing a specific concept of the transgendered person: one which reincarnates sexist ideals. This is one which puts both the transwoman and the cisgendered woman at a disadvantage. If I don't want to see a transgendered woman feel that her only path to financial stability is through heterosexual marriage, sex work, or otherwise capitalizing on her femininity or her appearance, this is not in order to renounce her femininity as such. It is because all women, not only cisgendered women, are affected by a common kind sexism, although there are clearly additional specific forms it takes.

In fact, I argue that if the media suggests that a transwoman can participate in a heterosexist ideal [of housemaking, marriage, heels, hyperfemininity, et cetera] without being oppressed herself, the media is implicitly suggesting that the transwoman has a special status, which can only be explained by her having been born as a male. The only way a transwoman could find a 'liberation' of her identity in being permitted to participate in a subordinated, if traditionally female role, would be if a transwoman is 'not really a woman.' This is because it is the only way one could be immune to the injustice that oppresses any and every woman who is put in a similar situation. This insults transwomen and all women. We cannot suggest that the problematic stereotype of the transwoman, the "drag queen,*" reincarnating all of the problematic ideals of femininity with jubilance, is accurate. Not without undermining the transwoman's very status as a woman – or without compromising our assertion that we live in a patriarchal society in which women are oppressed, and that women are oppressed in a systematic way by these very stereotypes.

*Note that this is a criticism of the idea of a “drag queen” as a misreading of the transwoman's identity, which is different from renouncing from the lifestyle of an actual drag queen, i.e., a male-identified person who performs femininity.


2.
I want to call to mind the situation where feminists against exploitative pornography and coercive sex trafficking get lumped in with extreme, right-wing, and usually Christian groups. In that case, the right-wingers believe pornography and sex trafficking should be censored because sexuality in general is evil. The feminists, on the other hand, believe that pornography and sex work should be radically re-envisioned becausesexual exploitation, not sexuality in general, is an ethically problematic scenario. Similarly, feminists who criticize any sexist normativity among communities of transwomen can be easily mistaken for patriarchal misogynists -- for, it is true, in each case the critique results from a desire to destroy a certain concept which threatens the strength of one's own self-concept.

However, there is a difference, which I will argue is similar to that between the anti-sex-trafficking feminists and the anti-sex-trafficking Christians. We believe that a concept of transsexuality (broadening the definition here even to include cissexual homosexual men and women who play into sexist butch-femme relationships) which recreates, almost parodically, heteronormative ideals, should be radically redefined (specifically,broadened) because heteronormativity, and gender normativity, amonganyone, is an ethically problematic phenomenon.
So yes, the anxiety that feminists experience in the face of sexism is similar to the anxiety that sexists feel in the face of feminism. Each feels threatened in their own self-concept. However, feminism must work to ensure that its response to this threat, this anxiety, is not to attempt to recover a sense of identity that has been defined on patriarchal terms -- i.e., a fixed, stable identity. As Judith Butler says,every attempt at inhabiting a specific gender fails at least partially, and that is a good thing, because it is what gives us freedom over these ideals – it is what allows us to choose from among the identities we are offered – and what allows us to create new ones if we like none of the options.

As an aside, I believe this is a basic philosophical state of affairs about what it means to be a self, beyond just a question about sex and gender. I don't think there is a strong sense in which we can 'know' that we have a continuous identity. Memory or consciousness, are, of course, part of what allows us to posit the concept of identity to begin with. But it should be noted forgetting is just as important. With an excess of consciousness, or memory, we begin to lose our sense of self again. We have to be willing to 'forget' our mortality and finitude, our smallness re: the rest of the universe, in order for the selective memories we hold on to about our personal identity to make sense.

Although I think this means in some sense there is no static, unchanging, unified 'true self' behind the process of creating and holding onto memories, I don't think that the 'falsehood' of it is a bad thing. I think that it our finitude, what allows us to be incomplete, also makes us open to new experiences, to learning from others, and to a future that we absolutely cannot predict based on our memory of our past self alone. I am pretty sure that if we could have a 'true' concept of the self, and/or know exactly what was going to happen in the future, it would probably mean that we were dead.

3.To speak more specifically of the content of the film -- as I said, there are really no positive portrayals of cissexual women. And while the need to criticize the complicity of cissexual women in patriarchal modes of identity is urgent, the only way the depiction of cissexual women in the film could be consistent would be if Ludovic's dreams about becoming a Barbie-doll housewife were subject to a similar criticism. And they're not. But oh, what befalls the cisgendered women who find her problematic! The very first interaction with a young cisgendered girl we have is when she is jealous of Ludovic for getting the attention of a mutual male friend. (I should note that in the film XXY, the intersexed protagonist was also exclusively attracted to men).The primary ways, from the outset of the film, that we even learn Ludovic is 'gender-variant' is through an over-the-top depiction of her interest in dollhouses and neon pink dresses.

There is also a schema set up where all women, cisgendered or transgendered, primarily exercise power through their ability to manipulate men sexually. The character of the boss' wife is repeatedly subordinated to Ludovic's mother because Ludovic's mother (whom Ludovic herself clearly envies the influence of), is willing to wear short skirts, style her hair, and otherwise sex it up. The stereotype of the frigid, envious, sexless woman watching from the sidelines is so blatant it doesn't really merit analysis. And when Ludovic does receive support from other women in her community, it comes primarily from this strange, drag-queen-esque version of Barbie, who at one point literally ties up Ludovic's mother, and the mother of Ludovic's love interest, so that Ludovic and the Drag Fairy can fly away together to a brightly colored land full of dollhouses, where weddings never end.
It is certainly true that heterosexual women do a lot of the enforcing of gender roles. However, it is not enough to re-create derogatory depictions of sexism as it exists. In order to effect change we need to create new concepts of friendship. We need new kinds of political solidarity. And, I would argue, we need new kinds of sexual relationships between women. Throughout the film, the tired dynamics between sexually jealous women get recycled over and over. Even if the gender-variant version of femininity self-actualizes at the end of the film, without the solidarity of all women, this is not really a success. The demographic of cisgendered women who unabashedly support a critique of gender identity is not represented at all. Even less can we imagine the possibility of lesbian relationships between cisgendered or transgendered women, in any combination, based on the set of premises the film provides us with. And I argue that it is not merely a personal urgency but a serious political urgency that these diverse forms of lesbian identity become widely represented and legitimized.

Instead, the schema we find in the film suggests that perhaps the problem with the social structure Ludovic finds herself in is not with the heteronormativity itself, but merely where she is located in it. The only ally she finds in her peer group is a girl who is similarly interested in transitioning across the binary, but in reverse: into manhood. In this sense, we see that "individualist" questions of personal identity, wherein a transgendered person says they are 'objectively' one sex while being intersubjectively treated as the opposite sex, can be quite dangerous. They allow us to feel successful in a reform of who gets to participate in which heteronormative identity, but it leaves a necessary, revolutionary abolition of the very concept of a normative gender binary untouched.

In the film, for example, we only ever see men using athleticism to relieve stress. Further, Ludovic's ineptitude at sports seems to imply for her something of her 'fatedness' to the status of woman. Again, the problem with this depiction is so obvious it doesn't merit analysis. While at times Ludovic receives good support from her sister, it is fleeting. The real female alliance remains with Pam, the Barbie doll. All other adult women are depicted as varyingly frigid -- even the scene in which Ludovic's mother cut her hair smacked, to me, of the myth of the 'castrating woman.' And lest I be accused of questioning Ludovic's gender identity by saying that, let's not forget that women can be robbed of their sexuality just as well as men through a metaphorical 'castration' -- in fact it is the rule and not the exception in our society, and all too often we all feel 'castrated' by the other women in our lives.

I think that it is to Ludovic's immense credit that, given the pressure to be gender-compliant, she chooses to pursue what feels right to her. The biggest problem, though, which again, only Ludovic seems to recognize, is with patriarchal masculinity, which harms all women – and men. There are scenes where boys fight and she doesn't want to participate. There are scenes where she is beaten up. While these may be pivotal experiences for a transgendered person, it is also important to note that they can have very similar significance for a cisgendered woman, or even a cisgendered man. Together, we are all realizing that something is profoundly wrong with the role that is being forced onto transwomen -- the same role that is forced onto anybody who was raised as a male.

It does not threaten the concept of transgendered identity to suggest that we need to make a decisive critique of this naturalization of male violenceas it is. If Ludovic goes on to "live the fairy tale" and marry a heteronormative man, cisgendered or otherwise, she is highly likely to find herself in the same scenario -- of being adversely affected by the decaying, mythological gender binary as it executes itself through individual human beings. To say that a transwoman would be any less hurt by a fairy tale wedding than a cisgendered woman could only suggest that transwomen aren't 'real' women, and are thus immune to the conditions which have held back all women for millenia. It is not for the sake of delegitimizing the identity of transwomen that we must criticize the limited representations of cissexual women – or of lesbianism – in media that deals with gender-variance. We must criticize these representations because it is only by uncovering and cutting the vast network of roots which anchor the tree -- in all of their intersections -- can we finally reach their source, and fell the blighted forest.