So, I've decided to change my master's thesis topic, once again. It was to have begun with one of the more contentious moments in History of Sexuality--this is the one in which a farmhand seduces a little girl at the outskirts of town. Well, more specifically, this is the moment afterward, the moment in which the farmhand is reported and subsequently criminalized, pathologized, made the object of intense scientific and psychological scrutiny (imagine everything from demanding endless confessions of his every thought to taking measurements of his cranium), and basically identified as a deviant or pervert.
It's a contentious moment because Foucault focuses on the juridical and medical treatment of the farmhand rather than on taking an ethical stance on the farmhand's act (i.e., condemning it) and because Foucault calls the entire treatment "petty." I don't think Foucault's just an asshole, but this is just another enormous issue of its own. What I am more so interested in is what happens if we pick up where Foucault leaves off, that is, if we follow the sexual trauma survivor (who is quickly left behind in the shuffle to identify the source of the farmhand's perversity so as to contain it)--if we follow her through Foucault's genealogy of sexuality.
In short, the genealogy Foucault depicts is one in which certain acts and pleasures get grouped under the heading "sex" and in which these acts and pleasures become identity-constituting in a totalizing way--basically, sex moves to the center of identity and we get "sexuality." And what is more, we get the desiring subject (who is endlessly projecting him/herself into the future and who is apparently also endowed with superagency), but we also get the "pervert"--that is, persons with "deviant sexualities" do not simply act in deviant ways according to the discourses of sexuality, rather these persons are themselves "deviants."
So, what happens to the sexual trauma survivor in these fabulous discourses of sexual identity? Well, first I would argue that these discourses place survivors in the paradoxical position of being both marginalized (not only do they generally bear witness to many truths which contradict the logic of the dominant symbolic--that incest does not exist, for instance, or that all sexual predators are easily identifiable hairy monsters, strangers, unkind, unloved, etc.--but also the survivor holds a marginal position in that in order to identify as a whole, healthy subject s/he must either ignore, forget, or seamlessly leave the past behind, a prospect which is largely impossible for many survivors) and at the same time, the survivor is positioned in many ways invisibly (it's still more or less taboo for her to talk about it in most spaces at any length) at the center of sexual identity discourse--it is her testimony that allows us to identify the farmhand as pervert and it is also in the name of the virginal Child that adult sexuality is continually policed--even while the survivor is brushed aside and swept underneath, as in Foucault's genealogy, and as in our focus on and fascination with unwinding the mindfuck of how the pedophile can exist, rather than on supporting the survivor.
Second, weighting sexual abuse with discourses of identity complicates not only the ability for many survivors to acknowledge some events as traumatic or abusive (is it worth identifying the abuser as pervert?) but it also limits our receptiveness to listening and believing survivors' claims and narratives (is it conceivable that the accused could possibly be a pervert?). I'm not sure that these problems would go away if 'sexuality' were not positioned at the center of identity, but I would argue that it complicates and imbues these questions with excess weight and that it deals in unrealistic dichotomies (doesn't everything?) and thereby causes its own damages--so that it's difficult to tell where the effects of trauma end and where the effects of this whole apparatus for dealing with sexuality as identity begin.
All of this is to say that I think sexual trauma survivors have a special stake in queer politics and in resisting traditional, normative notions of sexual identity.
This doesn't so much say why I'm dropping this as my master's thesis. In part it's because I am still thinking through Foucault and other queer theorists and feminists, particularly radical women of color, and what it might mean to resist the 'deployment of sexuality' and explore new spaces and visions for identity. The other part is that I'm not ready to make this such a big project.
Anyway, I think I will leave off there for now.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Monday, July 21, 2008
on the dark knight, disability, queering, bdsm, and other summer blockbusters
Okay, thoughts in progress as I'm reflecting on The Dark Knight, which overall is a fantastically well-made and interesting/entertaining film in part because it leaves me with so many unresolved thoughts.
Minor spoilers but mostly spoiling of the sort that comes with chronic academia.
So, first, I'm wondering about the correlation between bodily disfiguration and character flaws in our cinematic imagination. The Dark Knight itself should hardly bear the brunt of my criticism here, as the film comes out of a long cinematic and narrative tradition of associating the two, and actually it comes of course out of a comic book that is located even earlier in that tradition. I'm mainly concerned here with "Two-Face"--that is, Harvey Dent (here played by Aaron Eckhart) who basically starts out as Gotham's upstanding, crime fighting district attorney but who--after a Joker-inflicted tragedy in which he loses his love and has one side of his face severely burned--loses his faith in morality and agency and becomes yet another villain who must be stopped. One of the first symbolic moments in which Dent's moral shift is actualized in the film occurs when the Lieutenant visits Dent in the hospital, asking why Dent has refused any pain medication or skin grafting, thereby resisting the moral expectation that he recover, cueing us into the fact that something is askew with him. An additional symbol is, of course, the double-sided coin--which had previously served as a symbol of his mantra "I make my own luck"--which is now also *burned* on one side (oh, the glorious layers of symbolism). Post-tragedy Dent is no longer committed to fighting crime, his new mission is one of revenge against those who allowed the tragedy to happen--though revenge mediated by chance, by a coin flip, that is, if Dent's coin lands on the 'good' side, he lets them go, if it lands on the 'burned' side he gets his revenge.
Of course, the film's logic is not so simple as "bodily disfigurement makes one evil." But Dent's disfigurement and refusal of treatment (and particularly the refusal to have his face 'repaired' so as to erase the tragedy and make him easier to look at) do function as a symbolic corollary to, and as the site through which his character shift is conveyed and made believable in the film. On the one hand, his drastic character shift does require drastic measures (such as these visual cues) in order to be convincing in a two and half hour film and additionally we could make the case that the portrayal of his character thereby resists the western mind/body disjunct. But in a troubling, disturbing way. And of course it is once again marginalized persons (here, especially disabled bodies, everywhere else, disabled, raced, sexed, queer, and poor bodies, etc.) who retain the wonderful privilege of having and being marked by a more symbiotic relationship to their bodies. And it's also worth noting how Dent's character is contrasted with Batman, who is the shining star of moral excellence--selfless, humble and willing to be misunderstood for the greater good--and who is not only attractive and able-bodied but who even overcomes the limits of his agile body through exorbitant technology--all of which is made possible by his tremendous inheritance of the Wayne empire.
As long as we're on the topic of disability and summer blockbusters though it's worth mentioning that I think the Dark Knight does a better job of handling this character, at least a slightly more complex or nuanced job it, if only because there is more character development in general, than does say, Hancock which contains all the plot and character gaps one might expect of a fairly crappy film and in which one of the villain's losing his hand and having a hook seems completely unnecessary (and unimaginative). Even so, I'm worried about what the symbolic structuring of physical disfigurement as the manifestation of character flaw or moral shortcoming in The Dark Knight and our imaginative cinematic consciousness more collectively--what this does for our cultural thinking about disability more generally. And along with that, the association of resisting or having a body which resists normative standards of beauty or physical acceptability with social or moral deviance.
On this note, it seems worth commenting on the implicit association between obesity and laziness in Wall-E. For those who haven't seen it, the movie takes place sometime in the future, generations and generations after the earth has become uninhabitable--in this future civilization, humans live in a huge resort-like spaceship where everyone moves around in floating lawnchairs staring at individual tv/computer-type screens suspended in front of their faces and interacting with each other digitally, drinking shakes, and being fat--too fat to get out of their chairs, in fact. I have to say the movie was enjoyable, and I was glad to see that the movie ended before everyone could get all superskinny or ubermuscley--though there were of course some climactic moments that involved people getting out of the chair and standing up. Anyway, I'm not entirely sure what to think about this--certainly Pixar's portrayal of these people as obese and having limited mobility plays to a trope that is already ubiquitous in our cultural consciousness and I'm also torn because there's some reality to the association, even if the association is I think frequently misapplied and often deals in unrealistic notions of choice and agency. So there's that, but I'm just wondering overall about the message the association communicates with regard to obesity, people in wheelchairs, and ablebodiedness.
Second, to return to The Dark Knight, I'm fascinated by Health Ledger's portrayal of the Joker, who is my new favorite villain. I'm interested in him as a queer character at the same time that I'm leery of putting the two in conversation with each other because, well, the Joker is a sociopath and I think we've done enough pathologizing of queerness. But it's also difficult to ignore the ways in which the film sets the Joker up as a queer character--from the beginning, the mobsters make it clear that he is not like them--the Joker is a 'freak' because he not only engages in criminal activity but also wears makeup and a purple suit. There is even a whole sequence in which the Joker appears in drag--a nurse's outfit and wig--that is incredibly awesome but that I'm not entirely sure what to do with. But mostly I am thinking of the Joker as a queer figure in the sense of his fucking up boundaries and making chaos, upsetting moral certainty, and doing it all playfully. He also refuses any stable set of characteristics by which we might identify or make sense of his behavior, in one scene he tells us that his scars were given to him by his father, in another he says he gave them to himself. (and so again, more physical disfiguration-character associations.....) But I think what is interesting here is the way in which his character resists stable identity categories, and in fact, refuses categorization by refusing to give us the material by which to categorize him. So, whereas Dent's scars function as a reminder or memory of an event that explains his current actions, the Joker's scars are unexplained--his behavior, the reason for his actions, is maybe even unexplainable--? The best explanation that the Joker can offer is that he is like a dog chasing a car--he says that he wouldn't even know what to do with it if he caught it. There seems to be at least something very Bataille/Nietzsche/Foucault in this. This totally could use more explanation, but this is about as fleshed out as I have it for the moment.
My last sort of cluster of thinking about the film sits around the fact that I've always thought that there was something intensely erotic and bdsm about batman--my main exposure to the comic being the old silly tv show reruns I watched when I was younger--I mean, surely there is sadomasochistic erotic tension/buildup all over the elaborate and ridiculous traps the villains are always setting for batman and robin and others--tied up feet away from some enormous slowly encroaching razor blade for instance, traps that leave them just enough time to escape at the very last second. But all the more interestingly erotic in that it seems to deal less in overtly widely accepted genital-centered erotics and more so in fantasies largely unacknowledged as erotic or even as fantasies, even if the scenarios do seem to be canonically or ubiquitously represented in films and narratives (think, woman tied to the old train tracks, for instance). Maybe Batman seems particularly interesting because we've got these running around in tights and underwear and being tied up just as frequently, as I recall, and by both women and men in tights and capes and makeup. Wow. I think I need to find some of these old episodes and watch them again. My mind is making all sorts of connections here with Dorothy Allison (for instance, Bone's burning haystack fantasies in Bastard Out of Carolina), but this is probably a topic for another post.
I'm also wondering if the relationship between batman and the joker, the going around and around between good and evil, rules/boundaries and chaos, that the two cannot seem to dispense with (in The Dark Knight, the Joker declares while suspended upsidedown by Batman's rope that he does not wish to destroy Batman, as Batman is just so much fun and the Joker would not know what to do with himself without him)--whether this relationship is not erotically charged as well and whether the chargedness of this relationship and others is not a large part of what gives the story momentum and appeal--after all, the movie doesn't entirely dispense with the Joker either, he seems as infinitely necessary as Batman.
Oh, tights, and capes, and makeup, oh my!
Minor spoilers but mostly spoiling of the sort that comes with chronic academia.
So, first, I'm wondering about the correlation between bodily disfiguration and character flaws in our cinematic imagination. The Dark Knight itself should hardly bear the brunt of my criticism here, as the film comes out of a long cinematic and narrative tradition of associating the two, and actually it comes of course out of a comic book that is located even earlier in that tradition. I'm mainly concerned here with "Two-Face"--that is, Harvey Dent (here played by Aaron Eckhart) who basically starts out as Gotham's upstanding, crime fighting district attorney but who--after a Joker-inflicted tragedy in which he loses his love and has one side of his face severely burned--loses his faith in morality and agency and becomes yet another villain who must be stopped. One of the first symbolic moments in which Dent's moral shift is actualized in the film occurs when the Lieutenant visits Dent in the hospital, asking why Dent has refused any pain medication or skin grafting, thereby resisting the moral expectation that he recover, cueing us into the fact that something is askew with him. An additional symbol is, of course, the double-sided coin--which had previously served as a symbol of his mantra "I make my own luck"--which is now also *burned* on one side (oh, the glorious layers of symbolism). Post-tragedy Dent is no longer committed to fighting crime, his new mission is one of revenge against those who allowed the tragedy to happen--though revenge mediated by chance, by a coin flip, that is, if Dent's coin lands on the 'good' side, he lets them go, if it lands on the 'burned' side he gets his revenge.
Of course, the film's logic is not so simple as "bodily disfigurement makes one evil." But Dent's disfigurement and refusal of treatment (and particularly the refusal to have his face 'repaired' so as to erase the tragedy and make him easier to look at) do function as a symbolic corollary to, and as the site through which his character shift is conveyed and made believable in the film. On the one hand, his drastic character shift does require drastic measures (such as these visual cues) in order to be convincing in a two and half hour film and additionally we could make the case that the portrayal of his character thereby resists the western mind/body disjunct. But in a troubling, disturbing way. And of course it is once again marginalized persons (here, especially disabled bodies, everywhere else, disabled, raced, sexed, queer, and poor bodies, etc.) who retain the wonderful privilege of having and being marked by a more symbiotic relationship to their bodies. And it's also worth noting how Dent's character is contrasted with Batman, who is the shining star of moral excellence--selfless, humble and willing to be misunderstood for the greater good--and who is not only attractive and able-bodied but who even overcomes the limits of his agile body through exorbitant technology--all of which is made possible by his tremendous inheritance of the Wayne empire.
As long as we're on the topic of disability and summer blockbusters though it's worth mentioning that I think the Dark Knight does a better job of handling this character, at least a slightly more complex or nuanced job it, if only because there is more character development in general, than does say, Hancock which contains all the plot and character gaps one might expect of a fairly crappy film and in which one of the villain's losing his hand and having a hook seems completely unnecessary (and unimaginative). Even so, I'm worried about what the symbolic structuring of physical disfigurement as the manifestation of character flaw or moral shortcoming in The Dark Knight and our imaginative cinematic consciousness more collectively--what this does for our cultural thinking about disability more generally. And along with that, the association of resisting or having a body which resists normative standards of beauty or physical acceptability with social or moral deviance.
On this note, it seems worth commenting on the implicit association between obesity and laziness in Wall-E. For those who haven't seen it, the movie takes place sometime in the future, generations and generations after the earth has become uninhabitable--in this future civilization, humans live in a huge resort-like spaceship where everyone moves around in floating lawnchairs staring at individual tv/computer-type screens suspended in front of their faces and interacting with each other digitally, drinking shakes, and being fat--too fat to get out of their chairs, in fact. I have to say the movie was enjoyable, and I was glad to see that the movie ended before everyone could get all superskinny or ubermuscley--though there were of course some climactic moments that involved people getting out of the chair and standing up. Anyway, I'm not entirely sure what to think about this--certainly Pixar's portrayal of these people as obese and having limited mobility plays to a trope that is already ubiquitous in our cultural consciousness and I'm also torn because there's some reality to the association, even if the association is I think frequently misapplied and often deals in unrealistic notions of choice and agency. So there's that, but I'm just wondering overall about the message the association communicates with regard to obesity, people in wheelchairs, and ablebodiedness.
Second, to return to The Dark Knight, I'm fascinated by Health Ledger's portrayal of the Joker, who is my new favorite villain. I'm interested in him as a queer character at the same time that I'm leery of putting the two in conversation with each other because, well, the Joker is a sociopath and I think we've done enough pathologizing of queerness. But it's also difficult to ignore the ways in which the film sets the Joker up as a queer character--from the beginning, the mobsters make it clear that he is not like them--the Joker is a 'freak' because he not only engages in criminal activity but also wears makeup and a purple suit. There is even a whole sequence in which the Joker appears in drag--a nurse's outfit and wig--that is incredibly awesome but that I'm not entirely sure what to do with. But mostly I am thinking of the Joker as a queer figure in the sense of his fucking up boundaries and making chaos, upsetting moral certainty, and doing it all playfully. He also refuses any stable set of characteristics by which we might identify or make sense of his behavior, in one scene he tells us that his scars were given to him by his father, in another he says he gave them to himself. (and so again, more physical disfiguration-character associations.....) But I think what is interesting here is the way in which his character resists stable identity categories, and in fact, refuses categorization by refusing to give us the material by which to categorize him. So, whereas Dent's scars function as a reminder or memory of an event that explains his current actions, the Joker's scars are unexplained--his behavior, the reason for his actions, is maybe even unexplainable--? The best explanation that the Joker can offer is that he is like a dog chasing a car--he says that he wouldn't even know what to do with it if he caught it. There seems to be at least something very Bataille/Nietzsche/Foucault in this. This totally could use more explanation, but this is about as fleshed out as I have it for the moment.
My last sort of cluster of thinking about the film sits around the fact that I've always thought that there was something intensely erotic and bdsm about batman--my main exposure to the comic being the old silly tv show reruns I watched when I was younger--I mean, surely there is sadomasochistic erotic tension/buildup all over the elaborate and ridiculous traps the villains are always setting for batman and robin and others--tied up feet away from some enormous slowly encroaching razor blade for instance, traps that leave them just enough time to escape at the very last second. But all the more interestingly erotic in that it seems to deal less in overtly widely accepted genital-centered erotics and more so in fantasies largely unacknowledged as erotic or even as fantasies, even if the scenarios do seem to be canonically or ubiquitously represented in films and narratives (think, woman tied to the old train tracks, for instance). Maybe Batman seems particularly interesting because we've got these running around in tights and underwear and being tied up just as frequently, as I recall, and by both women and men in tights and capes and makeup. Wow. I think I need to find some of these old episodes and watch them again. My mind is making all sorts of connections here with Dorothy Allison (for instance, Bone's burning haystack fantasies in Bastard Out of Carolina), but this is probably a topic for another post.
I'm also wondering if the relationship between batman and the joker, the going around and around between good and evil, rules/boundaries and chaos, that the two cannot seem to dispense with (in The Dark Knight, the Joker declares while suspended upsidedown by Batman's rope that he does not wish to destroy Batman, as Batman is just so much fun and the Joker would not know what to do with himself without him)--whether this relationship is not erotically charged as well and whether the chargedness of this relationship and others is not a large part of what gives the story momentum and appeal--after all, the movie doesn't entirely dispense with the Joker either, he seems as infinitely necessary as Batman.
Oh, tights, and capes, and makeup, oh my!
Friday, July 18, 2008
Thursday, July 10, 2008
things i would like to do
There are so many things I want to do:
write
paint
sit by the lake
go for an aimless walk, or bike ride, or drive
get a bike
sing really really loudly and off key
learn to knit or crochet
learn the difference between knitting and crocheting
dance around my apartment
find a delicious recipe for chickpeas
eliminate idontknow
not create unnecessary drama
not feel like my words are breaking and i am barely fluent in english
be myself
make more lists
create imaginative portraits of myself
imagine myself as an adult in the world, free spirited, and happy, and at home
learn to do all the forgetting that's necessary for normal life
be charming
be a friend
have kindred spirits nearby again
talk on the phone
speak endlessly and endlessly until ... (?)
feel things, a whole range of things
take pictures of things
have restful sleep
be attuned to myself and my body
watch all of pedro almodovar's movies
go camping
go to the art museum
play dress up
fly a kite by the lake
learn to play sand volleyball
etc etc
But learning French, feeling like crap, berating myself, and being anxious all the time seems to by occupying all my time and energy at the moment.
write
paint
sit by the lake
go for an aimless walk, or bike ride, or drive
get a bike
sing really really loudly and off key
learn to knit or crochet
learn the difference between knitting and crocheting
dance around my apartment
find a delicious recipe for chickpeas
eliminate idontknow
not create unnecessary drama
not feel like my words are breaking and i am barely fluent in english
be myself
make more lists
create imaginative portraits of myself
imagine myself as an adult in the world, free spirited, and happy, and at home
learn to do all the forgetting that's necessary for normal life
be charming
be a friend
have kindred spirits nearby again
talk on the phone
speak endlessly and endlessly until ... (?)
feel things, a whole range of things
take pictures of things
have restful sleep
be attuned to myself and my body
watch all of pedro almodovar's movies
go camping
go to the art museum
play dress up
fly a kite by the lake
learn to play sand volleyball
etc etc
But learning French, feeling like crap, berating myself, and being anxious all the time seems to by occupying all my time and energy at the moment.
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
teethgrinding
I'm angry. It's hard for me to get angry and it's scary. It is easy to be sad. Sadness is quiet when it's not grief, and sadness can be hopeless but it is compatible with hopelessness and complacency. Anger refuses hopelessness and demands impossible reparations.
I'm tired of being bullied and having my movement limited by men and groups of men who harass me on the street, of beginning my day by swallowing another fuck-off! that I'm too afraid to scream at these men. I can't remember the last time I really screamed, and I don't think that all this suppressed screaming is doing much for my insides. I can sense these fuck-offs building and gaining momentum that I am only barely containing and will someday have to scream at them I'mnotacontainer!
If my silence does not protect me then I can't help but wonder what it will mean to be not-silent in a way that will protect me.
I'm tired of being bullied and having my movement limited by men and groups of men who harass me on the street, of beginning my day by swallowing another fuck-off! that I'm too afraid to scream at these men. I can't remember the last time I really screamed, and I don't think that all this suppressed screaming is doing much for my insides. I can sense these fuck-offs building and gaining momentum that I am only barely containing and will someday have to scream at them I'mnotacontainer!
If my silence does not protect me then I can't help but wonder what it will mean to be not-silent in a way that will protect me.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
pleasure tourists
They [I] climb the hill like animals, stupid and perspiring: no one has told them there are beautiful views on the way. (Nietzsche, WS, 202)
("i tried taking pictures... every girl goes through a photography phase you know, like horses... you know, you take dumb pictures of your feet")
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