Forms of Boredom Advertised as Poetry

XXV

Tag: Political

Feminism: Not “For Everybody” Anymore

August 21, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Feminism is for white women. Feminism is for cisgender women. Feminism is for straight women. Neurotypical women. Bourgeois women. Able-bodied women. Western women. Feminism was always this way. Feminism never tried to be anything else.

When intersectionality was gradually introduced into the broader feminist vocabulary, I like to believe that this became less fully the case. As a queer, not-quite-cis, differently abled, neurodivergent woman, feminist spaces are more accessible to me now than ever before in the history of the movement. But this formative period of social intersection, transnational discourse, and identity politics has brought about its own host of problems. Foremost among them, at least in my mind, is the casual treatment of feminism as something amorphous: an identity to which all women are universally entitled.

But unlike so many feminists before me (hi, Betty Friedan!), I am not arguing that feminism is not for queer people, people of color, trans and nonbinary people, working class people, differently abled people, or First Nation people. Instead, I am arguing the opposite: that feminism is no longer a movement for the women whose opinions and language dehumanize and disenfranchise the aforementioned groups, and that the label of “feminist” should no longer be so easily accessible for racist, transphobic, homophobic, classist, and ableist women.

This line of thinking is a tedious one, though: in an effort to help make the movement as inclusive and supportive as possible, privileged feminists run the risk of worsening the problem through logical and dialectic fallacy. In 1975, British philosopher Antony Flew wrote:

“Imagine [a Scotsman], sitting down with his Glasgow Morning Herald and seeing an article about how the “Brighton (England) Sex Maniac Strikes Again.” [He] is shocked and declares that, “No Scotsman would do such a thing.” The next day he sits down to read his Glasgow Morning Herald again; and, this time, finds an article about an Aberdeen (Scotland) man whose brutal actions make the Brighton sex maniac seem almost gentlemanly. This fact shows that the Scotsman was wrong in his opinion, but is he going to admit this? Not likely. This time he says: “No true Scotsman would do such a thing.”

This type of inconsistency, casually known as a “No true Scotsman” fallacy, is a vital one for feminists to keep in mind. In the rising tides of feminism’s third wave, it is all too easy for people like myself—relatively privileged feminists who often oppose transphobic, homophobic, racist, classist, and ableist views without directly experiencing the dehumanization that these views entail—to dismiss the women who hold these views as something other than “real” feminists. But in doing so, we fail to address the deeply rooted flaws within the feminist movement. We disregard the fact that if people with racist, transphobic, classist, or ableist views still consider their opinions acceptable or even welcomed within the broader sphere of feminist thought, then the movement has not done enough to publicly challenge and renounce these views. It goes without saying that we are nowhere near where we should be in our efforts to make feminist spaces safe and supportive environments for trans* and nonbinary people, queer people, people of color, First Nation people, differently abled and neurodivergent people, stateless people, and people of the working class. The “No true Scotsman” fallacy is what allows us to maintain the delusion that the copious levels of bigotry, oppression, and supremacy within modern feminism are anybody’s fault but our own.

This is, in fact, another one of the most pervasive flaws in contemporary feminist thought. For far too many women with genuine intentions of allyship (myself included, many times over), the notion of “intersectional feminism” has, instead of promoting actual growth and discourse, caused us to dismiss the racists, homophobes, transphobes, classists, ableists, nationalists, and Eurocentrists within our spheres as anomalous problems—as “not true feminists.” For me, this has always presented quite a paradox. How can we address both the interpersonal and broadly political? How does feminism denounce racism and bigotry, and create an environment of support and solidarity for people with marginalized identities, while simultaneously remaining always cognizant of our own history as a deeply racist, classist, ableist, homophobic, transphobic, and Eurocentric movement?

This is not an easy piece for me to write. Mostly because I do not have many answers, however deeply I wish I did. But as a feminist and a person, I do know this: I am no longer willing to help empower the women who disempower me and the people I love. Please understand that I am all too aware of how imperfect I am, especially in terms of my feminism. I am constantly guarding my own humanity, preserving my own physical and mental well-being, and generally just doing what I can to carve out a healthy and worthwhile existence in a world that does not seem to have been built for people like me. I make a lot of mistakes, but I am always growing, learning, changing, and I do hope to stay that way.

So I want to say that feminism is for everybody, because that sounds so damn appealing. And let’s make one thing very clear: if by saying “feminism is for everybody” you mean that feminism helps everybody, then still I believe that you are correct. Because in this sense feminism is, and always will be, for everybody. Until the day I die, I will believe that feminism can help everybody, including (or perhaps especially) the white, cisgender men who feel so deeply victimized by it. In some ways, then, my title was misleading, and feminism is still for everybody: for men, for women, for trans and nonbinary people, for people of color, for queer people, for straight people, for white people, for all classes, genders, ethnicities, cultures. I  sincerely believe that we can create a better world than the one we live in now, and that feminism can help us all get there.

But if you are a feminist who silences women of color, who believes that trans women are not “really women,” who opposes a woman’s right to choose, who does not respect gender pronouns, who regards queerness in women as a sexy trend to be appropriated at will, or who votes against legislation that supports working class women, protects stateless people, or defends the remaining territories of First Nation peoples (and yes, I am looking at you, American “Republican feminists”), then I am sorry, but feminism is not for you. Or at least, it shouldn’t be. Not my feminism. Not anymore.

Because if your “empowerment” does not include educating yourself and admitting your own bigotries, then you are doing a disservice to the very notions of solidarity and sisterhood. Because I will not prioritize your feelings or opinions over the people and groups whose humanity you are invalidating—including, quite often, my own. Because whatever quality allowed me to do so in the past (whether it was ignorance or resilience I genuinely am not sure) has clearly been beaten out of me. Because if this is what it means for feminism to be “for everybody,” then feminism (or at least, feminists) might not always be for me.

Works Cited

Flew, Antony (1975), Thinking About Thinking: Do I Sincerely Want to Be Right?, London: Collins Fontana, p. 47

 Social Death & the Murder of Mike Brown

November 6, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Seeing as it has been about a month or so since I have last been able to really write, I figured I’d post a piece I wrote for my English 517 class (Automortography). Comments and critiques are, as always, welcome.

On August 9, 2014, an 18-year-old Black man named Michael Brown was fatally shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The exact circumstances of the event remain heavily disputed, but Brown was reported to be unarmed at the time of the shooting. Although the anger and grief of Ferguson’s Black population inspired tumultuous protests that animated the area for several weeks following the event, an allegedly militarized police force attempted to contain the protestors, which resulted in several violent clashes. Regardless of contradictory witness reports and the minor allegations against Brown for an unrelated crime, officer Darren Wilson’s willingness to end the life of an unarmed Black man without absolute and indisputable justification reflects the general devaluing of Black bodies that characterizes American culture. The deeply problematic social perception of Black bodies and identities as something other than fully human can be traced as far back as the antebellum slave trade, and establishes the murder of Mike Brown as not simply an instance of police irresponsibility and brutality, but also as an exemplification of African American social death.

In order to analyze and comprehend the relationship between Brown’s murder and the Black social death, the concept of “social death” must first be defined. In the practice of automortography, mortality can be examined as an extensive but always-shortening spectrum between a life/death binary. Upon this spectrum, human beings exist as animated “subjects”— fully realized beings with emotions, desires, and identities. But in death, humans exist as non-sentient objects—corpses. Ordinary human death is characterized by the transition from subject to object: person to corpse. Social death, on the other hand, is a rare phenomenon in which cultural factors force the subject-to-object transition to occur prematurely, resulting in a still-living individual who exists, through the social lens, as an object rather than a fully recognized person. “Social death,” in the context of this essay, is any transmutation from subject to object that precedes the physical ending of one’s life, and is a form of subjugation that affects both the public and private spheres.

The cultural ideologies that compelled the social death of African Americans were contingent upon the notion of property in a bourgeois society, and more specifically, the United State’s status as an independent slaveholding economy. In Orlando Patterson’s work, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, the practice of slavery is defined as “one of the most extreme forms of the relation of domination, approaching the limits of total power from the viewpoint of the master, and of total powerlessness from the viewpoint of the slave.”3 The power dynamic of the master-slave dialectic stemmed from the commodification of enslaved bodies— the reduction of enslaved persons to property (or objects) within a commercial system. This premature (that is to say, pre-death) reduction from subject to object in the public sphere was further ingrained into African American identity during the 1857 Supreme Court Case Dred Scott v. Sandford, wherein Chief Justice Roger B. Taney essentially established the status of the American slave as interchangeable with that of private property. In the aftermath of this decision, Black men and women were socially and legally reduced to objects before their physical deaths in the very language of United States legislation; as such, their social death was cemented into the American public sphere.

But as Patterson demonstrates in his writing, the reduction of a living individual to an object impacts the private sphere as well. In Slavery and Social Death, the interviews with form American slaves reportedly include statements such as, “I was so bad I needed the whipping.” The immense personal ramifications of social death are unavoidably clear here: in reducing their status from human to object before the moment of physical deaths, slave owners staked a claim to their slaves that stretched past the fibers of their forms and towards the very foundations of their identity. The quotation highlights the inescapable fact that the Black body is, in essence, a body that has been colonized, raped, brutalized, murdered, and always commodified—and that now, haunted by a specter of visceral subjugation barely rivaled in human history, men and women of color are tasked with establishing their physical presence as more than that of an object within a white supremacist society. Perhaps they believe that in doing so, they will be able to resurrect their bodies and themselves from the personal degradation that accompanies social death.

Even now, in what too many consider to be a post-race era, the frequency of police brutality towards and mass incarceration of Black individuals makes this reclamation and redefinition of the Black body nearly impossible. Instances such as Mike Brown’s murder, in which Black individuals, and particularly Black males, are victims of senseless and excessive violence, shed light upon the lingering strains of racism and the racial objectification that devalue formerly colonized bodies for the benefit of a white audience. In the aftermath of Brown’s shooting, certain media outlets feigned impartiality by using potential evidence of Mike Brown stealing cigars from a convenience store in order to justify, or at least rationalize, his murder. While some sought to vindicate the white police officer by affirming allegations of Brown’s theft, others attempted to emphasize the criminal nature of the shooting by denying Brown’s involvement in the robbery. In these unceasing conversations in a white-dominated American public sphere, the Black body was continuously stripped of its value: whether outlets were affirming or denying the claims against Brown, these discussions reduced Black men to a fundamentally lower social group—a class of not-quite-people for whom, in the aftermath of a minor misdemeanor, assassination can be considered a potentially valid response.
In the actions of Officer Darren Wilson, as well as in the subsequent media response, Black social death emerges as an inescapable and deeply horrifying American reality. The excessive force used by white police officers, disproportionately high rates of incarceration among Black males, and imposed economic and legal circumstances—most notably the so-called War on Drugs—that seriously limit the possibility of upward mobility for Black individuals, have all contributed to the establishment of a contemporary sociopolitical climate within which the full reclamation of the Black body seems almost unattainable. The white public’s commodification of the Black body, which brings with it the legacy of American slavery, has reduced the identity and visceral autonomy of African Americans to that of an object, and formulated an inescapable cultural death that begin to take effect at the moment of their birth. In recent years, the social death of Black community has never been more evident than in the cases of Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown, wherein social objectification of the Black male body has skewed the definition of humanity with which the public considers identity, autonomy, and the worth of a human life; nevertheless, the actions of the Ferguson protestors are the first steps towards Black social resurrection. It is here, amidst the very commercial culture in which the Black body first became public property, that African American individuals and communities can transcend circumstantial restrictions of their respective realities by overcoming their objectification. The Ferguson protestors’ full recognition of the value of Brown’s body and life was, by extension, recognition of their own inherent worth: a collective struggle to complete the transition from object back to subject in which Black individuals can—and ultimately will—triumph.

Works Cited

Schmidt, Michael, Matt Apuzzo, and Julie Bosman. “Police Officer in Ferguson Is Said to Recount a Struggle.” The New York Times. October 17, 2014. Accessed November 5, 2014.

Bello, Marisol, and Yamiche Alcindor. “Police in Ferguson Ignite Debate about Military Tactics.” USA Today. August 19, 2014. Accessed November 5, 2014.

Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982.

Confessions Of An Ugly Girl

March 5, 2013 / / 5 Comments

It took a while for me to build up the courage to write something this personal, and I hope people do not perceive it exclusively as a “rant post,” but it seems like every day I realize more and more how deeply insecure everybody is in high school. Maybe I cannot fix such a deep-rooted issue on my own, but I certainly can rage against it. And I think I just did.

“What you feel is what you are, and what you are is beautiful.”

– The Goo Goo Dolls

“You know, I bet you could get a lot more guys if you let the rest of your hair grow out,” someone told me once.

The statement was meant to be a casual observation, nothing more. In fact, it really did not bother me at the time. I know not everyone is crazy with what I did to my hair last year—namely, take my older brother’s razor in the bathroom one night, and shave half of my head almost to the scalp. I am okay with that. What my friend did not understand, though, is that I shaved my hair my year last year in order to make a statement that I feel people should be encouraged to make far more often. I shaved my hair to show the world that I am an individual, that I am confident in who I am, and above all else, that I refuse to conform to any social ‘standard’ of beauty.

We live in a culture nowadays where self-loathing is rampant and often even expected in women. Almost every girl I know spends at least an hour on her makeup and hair before leaving her dorm or her house. And it really isn’t surprising. They are terrified of being disregarded or ignored, and so they allow themselves to be sexualized, objectified, and ultimately used. Our insecurities have a tendency to consume us. I am no exception to this.

We all seem to have forgotten that beauty is a mutable and ultimately irrelevant concept. I look around Commons every single day and see so many people whose beauty goes entirely unrecognized. It might sound cliché, but it is completely and indisputably true. Because beauty is not confined to a certain body type, hairstyle, or face—beauty can be found in passion, individuality, exuberance, and love. It is imperative that we recognize this.

My second year of high school, attending academy that is competitive in more ways than one, has taken an enormous toll upon my already fragile self-image. I wake up every morning, and try not to see myself in the mirror. I smear makeup on my face until I feel ready to step outside. I pick myself apart—the size and shape of my nose, the color of my eyes, the proportions of my mouth, the imperfections of my body, and of course, the scars on my skin from these past four years of dermatillomania. And every time I watch someone disregard me for one of my prettier friends, or when I learn that someone has assumed that I am a lesbian due to my appearance or opinions, it is like nails against the blackboard of my mind.

I hate this society, but more than anything else I hate what it has done to me. I hate that I never feel good about myself anymore. I hate how many times I instinctively check the mirror before leaving for school in the morning. I will never be beautiful in the way that they all expect me to be. I never have been capable of it, and I am tired of pretending that I am.

I want to make it clear, though, that I do not want anybody’s sympathy. That is not what this is about. So if you do not think I am pretty, do not tell me that I am. If you do not find me attractive, do not enter a relationship with me. And if my appearance is more important to you than my passion or my interest or my individuality—in that case do not even condescend to speak to me. I am not writing this for any of you. I am writing this to remind the world that if I am able to love myself despite the opinions of others, then I am above all of this.

We see this world in terms of pretty and ugly. Instead of seeing the beauty in everyone, we constricted our standards—made them rigid and exclusive and fitted to one small group of people. We could have found passion and gratification, but chose to create devastating stereotypes and unbreakable stigmas instead. And in doing so, we have handicapped our own ability to love.

I am tired of putting on a face and praying that others accept it. I am tired of hoping to be viewed as a sexual object rather than the complex, flawed, and ultimately beautiful person that I am.

I did not title this post “Confessions Of An Ugly Girl” because I hate the way that I look. I titled this post “Confessions Of An Ugly Girl” because I am tired as being perceived as one. A lack of status, looks, and conformity has resulted in my failure to meet the certain social standards that should never have existed in the first place. My inability and refusal to satisfy these ideals will always make me ugly in the eyes of society. I think that unfair stigmas and preconceived notions have created an image of me that does not line up at all with who I truly am. I think that image has been projected to the world, and I hate the world for that.

Maybe nothing will ever change—especially not where I am from. But if we all truly hate the stigmatized, sexualized, and judgmental culture in which live, it is time for us to consider who created it.

I am so much more than a face caked in makeup or a body that is never quite thin enough. I am so much more than my imperfections and my insecurities. I am passionate and I am individual and I am infinitely flawed—but above all else, I love fiercely, and I see no reason to hide that.

So here are the confessions of a self-proclaimed “ugly girl.” And no matter how beautiful you actually are, I’m willing to bet quite a few of you read this and understood. It is exceptionally lonely, frustrating, and at times, exorbitantly painful for me to accept the way that I am, and to love myself despite whatever the social perception of me may be. But I will continue to do so anyways, because with nothing more than judgment and gossip we created these standards—and through tolerance, acceptance, and a newfound understanding of the true nature of beauty, we can break them too.

Honoring Newtown: The Truth That No One Wants To Hear

December 15, 2012 / / 4 Comments

“And it’s true we are immune / When fact is fiction and TV reality,
And today the millions cry / We eat and drink, while tomorrow they die.”

Before I really get into the issue at hand, let me make it clear where I stand on gun control. Although I am usually pretty far to the left on social issues, I tend to lean towards the center on gun policy. Some people believe that every citizen should retain the right to own a weapon with which to defend his or her home and family. I am willing to hear that argument out.

However, Connecticut’s Chief Medical Examiner Wayne Carver reported that all 20 children succumbed to multiple gunshot wounds from the “long rifle,” which was a Bushmaster .223 M4 carbine rifle. Although reports still vary as to whether or not the shooter legally acquired this particular gun, the weapon in question is legal to own in the United States. To me, this is mind-blowing. There is no feasible reason why any person outside of the armed forces would need to a gun so powerful. This weapon was made with the express intent of slaughtering as many human beings as possible in the shortest space of time. This is a not a defense weapon. This is a killing machine.

It is an embarrassment to our country—where in the past year alone, we suffered 10,728 handgun related deaths in contrast to Canada’s 52—that it required the brutal murder of 27 innocent souls before we even began to consider having this discussion. When our second amendment was written, it was written with muskets in mind. Our founding fathers never considered that the human race would create machines that could kill others with such efficiency. When children are dying, it is time for something to change.

As a friend of mine said before, we cannot legislate away insanity. We cannot administer a blanket ban on all guns and expect that to be the answer. I do not think we should take a measure this extreme, as I believe it would be both largely ineffective and detrimental to our civil rights. But people need to talk. Clear boundaries must be set to ensure the safety of our people. Following this tragedy, there hasto be some sort of rational discussion in Washington regarding this kind of issue, as well as another important point: mental health care.

The funding and beneficiary requirements of mental health care are subject to the whims of governments, and people often do not know when they are entitled to mental health care services. I know from personal experience that finding any kind of therapy, never mind the level required caring for someone as sick as the Newtown elementary school shooter, is extremely difficult. It requires money, research, and exorbitant amounts of time. According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, a mere 7.1 percent of all American adults receive mental health services, and most of these Americans’ care is covered by private insurance. Children, poorer, and more elderly Americans are covered through public insurance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, and an additional ten percent are uninsured. And even with health care insurances, out-of-pocket costs for both inpatient and outpatient mental health services remain staggeringly high. The National Alliance on Mental Illness reports that Connecticut’s public mental health system currently provides coverage for less than one in five Connecticut residents with a serious mental health problem. The other four may not be able to afford to pay for those services on their own, particularly since mental health issues tend to disproportionately affect poor people.

On the other hand, a typical handgun can be purchased for anywhere between $250 and $500. The semi-automatic rifle in question costs between $700 and $2000. And contrary to gun lobby hysteria regarding President Obama, gun ownership has actually been rising over the past four years, as has the use of guns in violent crimes. And the Bushmaster .223 M4 carbine rifle in particular—the weapon that gunned down 26 innocent souls in an elementary school yesterday—is available all over the Internet. My eighteen-year-old brother could buy one tomorrow.

Does anyone else see a problem here? Because I truly believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with a country where instead of offering easy access to mental health care, we offer easy access to guns.

And now I want to make my final point: the necessity of politicizing human tragedy.

The first prediction Dudley Brown of the Denver group Rocky Mountain Gun Owners made upon hearing of this tragedy was,  “They’re going to use the bodies of dead children to push their agenda.”

I initially could not believe my eyes upon reading Dudley Browns words: I consider them a disgusting and twisted take on what gun control advocates are actually trying to do right now.

By blatantly attempting to shame us into silence, Mr. Brown reveals a tactic that has been prevalent in the Right for several years now. On an interesting Daily Show expose around a week ago, political commentator and Comedy Central satirist Jon Stewart presented his audience and at-home viewers with a lengthy montage of Fox News video clips, where guests and anchors expressed all of the reasons why, when discussing gun control, the timing is always inappropriate. Mr. Stewart voiced his concern that if the Right continued to tell their viewers over and over that “Now is not the time,” we would face another tragedy before gun policy discussions had even been brought to the table. One week and 27 dead later, we can all conclude that Stewart was correct.

Although the scope and magnitude of this tragedy should never be undermined, that does not change the fact that now is the time to speak. Otherwise it will first be too early to talk politics, and then too late. In a country where our media thrives on emotion, the timing will never seem right: this makes it simple to just keep pushing the political aspects of this issue further and further into the background, which is exactly what gun associations want us to do. Even now, in the wake of such horror, it is too easy for my generation to log onto their Twitters, type 140 sad characters or #PrayForNewton, and consider their work to be done.

It is the holiday season. Who wants to talk about gun control? Why not leave the “heavy stuff” to the politicians, while we catch up on reality TV and gossip? This is why it really drives me insane is when people like Brown try to imply that by politicizing this issue, we are somehow disrespecting the deceased and their families. This is the sort of backwards thinking that entirely undermines progression, and makes it laughably easy for associations like Rocky Mountain Gun Owners and the NRA to bully others into staying silent on these issues. And in our silence, they have won.

So if you are somebody who believes that by turning this tragedy into a political point, I am the one dishonoring the dead, I say to you this:

The people pushing for gun control today, in the wake of such tragedy, have not let anybody down.

You let these families down, as you looked on through years of school shootings and movie theatre massacres. You, as voters and as the American people, chose to turn a blind eye to these tragedies—you mourned them for a day, or maybe a week, but then you carried on. The mainstream news outlets turned their focus away from these tragedies, and subsequently, so did you.

I am not dishonoring the dead by politicizing this issue. You have already dishonored them by not ensuring them safety in their schools, by not offering adequate mental health care to them or their families, and now, by indirectly administering Adam Lanza the assault rifle and other weapons, with which he took 27 lives, ended 27 futures, and killed 27 dreams.

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