Seven of Nine was the best part of Voyager twenty years ago and I will fight anyone who says she wasn’t queer as fuck back then.
Star Trek: Picard has been up and down, and by far the finest ups have been Raffaela Musiker and Seven of Nine (and Elnor, who is a doll, but I’m about the ladies here). And the season finished with this. This is correct sci-fi. Shipping the shit out of this.
In the end, white women’s work for massive resistance illuminated just how ubiquitous and enduringly seductive the politics of white supremacy remained decade after decade. Shaping ideas of sex, marriage, and motherhood as well as those about property rights, school curriculum, elections, and culture, legislation was never enough to sustain a Jim Crow South or nation, nor was it enough to destroy it. In the face of legislative defeat, segregationist women continued to craft a broader politics of white supremacy. The deep roots they had long nurtured continued to bear this particularly enduring and familiar fruit. Local politics and politics that continue to frustrate the quest for equality and the entrenched stories that shape American attitudes toward racial change have persisted and have made way for new ones. Grounded in such deep and fertile political soil, the politics of white supremacy and segregationist women who made it so remain a powerful force in American politics. Where they live and where they work is the ground that still remains contested.
While reading Elizabeth Gillespie McRae’s Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy, I was continually reminded of the photo of Angela Peoples at the Women's March in 2017, holding a sign saying, “Don’t forget: White Women Voted for Trump”. The resistance by white people, especially white women and white mothers, to the unequivocal truth of the disparity between who they voted for and who Black, Latinx, Asian and everyone else voted for remains, not just in the US but everywhere white supremacy never went away: Australia, Canada, UK, Germany, across Europe, and elsewhere. “Their white motherhood meant teaching their children lessons in racial distance, in a racially determined place in society, and in white supremacy.” (p.237; quote above p. 240)
I cried the first time I saw Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan read This is not a humanising poem. And every time since. And when I read it just now because I wanted to quote it. Every time since the first I know what’s coming, and I tell myself, “Nah, I’m good, it’s not going to hit me like I remember it did,” I’ve got immunity now, I’ve read it so many times now, so, nah, not this time, silly, not this time. Every time.
Probably Twitter. Probably Omar J. Sakr, probably Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff. Probably that moment when science-fiction and fantasy had disappointed me again, not having the range, the political, social, personal, religious, aesthetic range, and finding that, so unexpectedly, in poets.
A conversation, outside my local café on Sonnenallee, talking political authors and all:
“D’ya know … ah shit, I forget her name, poet, Muslim, London, The Brown Hijabi?”
“Which one?”
“… ah, no, that’s the name she uses, The Brown Hijabi.”
“… Oh.”
“Yeah, anyway, she’s got a book coming out, forget what it’s called also. You should read it though.”
Postcolonial Banter. It’s her first collection of poetry. I love it. I love her. Alhamdulillah.
Pertinent reading for the turn of the decade — the turn of any decade in the last few hundred years. Elizabeth Gillespie McRae’s Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy came to me from I have no idea where, early last year. My ‘Want to Buy’ list is mad out of control, and taking 18 months for a book to circulate up to getting ordered is quick. I’m presuming it turned up in my RSS feed, or maybe Twitter shortly before I bailed from there.
I play this game when I’m reading histories of racial segregation. It doesn’t have a name, and it’s quite simple. It’s a ‘What if’ game and goes like this: ‘What if my dad or his parents lived there?’ How would or could their lives be shaped and changed by the laws and regulations at that place and that time? What might they be categorised as? I am reminded every time I play how conditional and tenuous ‘race’ is, how arbitrary the race line is, how those tenuous and arbitrary demarcations of where the line falls determine even if they could have married at all. And if they did, and if then my parents could — for the same reasons — the possibilities for life stop with me. White supremacy is, after all, bound at its root with reproductive heteronormativity and the eugenicist-defined ‘health of the White race’.
Around the time I saw the exhibition, Deutscher Kolonialismus: Fragmente Seiner Geschichte Und Gegenwart, and while Germany was (and is) moving through its unfinished history with Namibia, I noticed the burden of proof that genocide had occurred always rested on the victims. Again, conditional, arbitrary. Namibia (then German South-West Africa): genocide; German East Africa: (now Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania), merely subduing of an uprising. If we accept the fact that the aim of European colonialism was to divide the entire globe amongst itself (clearly seen in its late-19th century form of the Berlin Conference dividing up Africa), we must also agree that two fundamental tools or strategies in that were (and are) race and genocide. Eugen Fischer, who was there in German South-West Africa, later with the Nazis, whose ideology shaped the Nuremberg Laws, said of genocide, “whoever thinks thoroughly the notion of race, can not arrive at a different conclusion”. Wherever colonialism happened, so too did genocide.
And after the Second World War, after anti-colonialist movements, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Iron Curtain, the End of History and all that, we didn’t magically cease to live in a racist, genocidal, white supremacist world. That should have been self-evident before the events of the last few years, and arguing this is again an instance of burden of proof falling on the victims.
While this book deals with a narrow time period and geographical context (primarily 1920s–1960s and the Jim Crow South; broadly the US), nonetheless the role of white, cisgender, heteronormative women in collectively and individually creating, enforcing, and adapting racial segregation is something we’ve seen continuously, around the globe, without pause, right up to the UK election result on Thursday. Whatever racist, colonialist, genocidal (and we’re talking about planetary scale genocide these days) white supremacist fuckery the straight white men who run shit get off on, it’s their women who, in all the little, everyday ways, from home to school to communities to government offices who make it happen.
This wasn’t meant to be a review or compilation of opinions, it’s a Sunday, I haven’t blogged for a while, I have a pile of books that Panda bought (Panda unilaterally does the buying, I get the leftovers, Panda is mad educated), and I’m thinking through a large piece of fiction I’m writing of which books like this are extremely pertinent. It’s the kind of book I say, “Read it if you can, then find and read the comparable books from where you live,” keeping in mind my own global history as a product and result of colonialism.
I swear this book will end me. Six months in and some days I read the first sentences of a paragraph and realise it’s the same paragraph I’ve been on the whole week. And it’s a Sunday. I’m having trouble reading books at the moment anyway. Fiction is out, because I’m in fiction-writing mode and the novels I’ve started are either dissatisfying for where I’m at, or feel like they’d influence my own writing. Non-fiction, well, yes, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, we are still shouting, “Fucking yes!” when we do manage to read a new paragraph (usually on the toilet because that seems to be where a balance is currently found), but I have no cash for the pile of non-fiction waiting for me to pick up. Lemme tell you how long-term poverty as a function of even a moderately ok life as a trans woman / trans feminine person / transsexual is a very real life. (I weirdly want to start using that ‘transsexual’ word again to fuck with cis queers and their ‘gender is cultural’ bullshit. Petty is as petty does.)
So, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, or First Class Spivak, because someone said she only flies first class, and even if that’s not true, I admire that image of her, and she is so so very first class. I keep reading and wanting to underline and quote, and as I haven’t blogged this month, here we go, one quote at least. from The Double Bind Starts to Kick In, p.108:
This much is at least clear: to imagine or figure the other as another self, you need to engage the moving edge of culture as it leaves its traces in the idiom. To reduce it to language—to semiotic systems that are organised as language—was a structuralist dream. But at least, whatever the subject-position of the structuralist-investigator there was a rigour in the enterprise. Its tempo was different from the impatience of a universalist feminism re-coding global capital. From existing evidence, it is clear that individual-rights or universalist feminists infiltrate the gendering of the global South to recast it hastily into the individual rights model. They simply take for granted that colonised cultures are inevitably patriarchal. I will not enter into historical speculation. I will take shelter in a figure—the figure or topos, that in postcoloniality the past as the unburied dead calls us. This past has not been appropriately mourned, nor been given the rites of the dead, as the other system brought in by colonialism imposed itself. There was no continuous shedding of a past into unmarked modernity.
I started reading this a couple of years ago, which might have already been my second attempt. It’s been giving me disappointed looks from my ‘currently reading’ pile ever since. But, having successfully reminded myself how to read dense theory again, while spending months on Edward Said’s Orientalism earlier this year, I thought it was time to suck it up and get back into Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. The problem is, she’s so fucking brilliant, I’ll read a sentence and spend half an hour just thinking it through.
On that, then, I decided to just quote some of these bangers. Ending the Preface, on page xvi:
Gender is the last word. Figure out the double binds there, simple and forbidding.
Starting the Introduction, page 1:
Globalization takes place only in capital and data. Everything else is damage control.
Next on page 2:
The most pernicious presupposition today is that globalization has happily happened in every aspect of our lives. Globalization can never happen to the sensory equipment of the experiencing being, except insofar as it always was implicit in its vanishing outlines. Only an aesthetic education can continue to prepare us for this […]
Quoting Hanna Arendt on page 3:
“The general future of mankind has nothing to offer individual life, whose only certain future is death.”
Page 4:
We want the public sphere gains and the private sphere constraints of the Enlightenment; yet we must also find something relating to “our own history” to counteract the fact that the Enlightenment came, to colonizer and colonized alike, through colonialism, to support a destructive “free trade,” and that top-down policy breaches of Enlightenment principles are more the rule than exception.
I spent most of breakfast on that page 1 Introduction quote, swearing at its magnificence, meme-ing Where is the lie? tru dat, and that’s the T, and realising it’s gonna take me about 2 years to read this at this pace.
Around the time I started dancing, living in Auckland, shortly before moving to Australia, I fell in with a rough crowd of philosophers and academics. Or rather, I skirted the edges of their world in Auckland and then in Melbourne as they en masse crossed the ditch; and then they were students, working their way through Masters and Phds. As with almost everyone, I lost contact, lives diverging, names hazily remembered.
Perhaps I’m inventing a fictional history, perhaps also the bright memories I have are of the enthusiasm of first discoveries rather than any significant shift in paradigms, nonetheless there was a raw thrill for new philosophy and theory. There were names that have stuck with me: Deleuze, Butler. I tried on Serres, Derrida, Kristeva, Iragaray; newer names still, like offspring of those first names, Rosi Braidotti, Keith Ansell-Pearson, Slavoj Žižek; felt like a fifth columnist going to lectures on Habermas and Lyotard. Perhaps it was because Deleuze and Guattari’s 1000 Plateaus had only recently been translated into English — by recently I mean this mob were the first generation of university students to be exposed to it, and it was certainly far outside the mainstream of university curricula; and Butler’s Gender Trouble was similarly new and far out.
Anyway, I found myself in Sydney one summer, in Gleebooks, and there on the shelves were both 1000 Plateaus and Gender Trouble. I bought both without a second thought. I read them over and over. (There was another book there, I forget the name, but it was about trans identities, I remember the rush of finding that, reading possibilities for living. I mention that so as not to compartmentalise these interwoven moments, one side joy, the other, shame.)
As with seeing Frankfurt Ballet and knowing my life belonged in dance (I still trust that decision however precarious my life has been because of it), Bridget telling me to read Deleuze and Butler is one of those monumental instances in my life. I’d call it an epiphany, but like the word ‘genius’ she’d probably hate it. Sitting in Black Cat Café in Fitzroy one day she also said, “You’re lucky. You get to live what we only theorise about.” So now I’m doubly lucky ’cos I live and theorise this shit.
Which brings me in a roundabout way to other words and names from then: Subaltern, Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak. Perhaps it was only these couple of people from this small group who were really into all this, and a proper history of ’90s New Zealand and Australian academic life would barely rate them a footnote. For me though, I got booted onto a course I’m still riding the momentum of. Curiously, I never read Spivak then, or never the way I did Butler and Deleuze. Spivak seemed and seems to be everywhere, when I see her name it’s like an old friend, or a friend of a friend I’ve heard so much about.
I wonder how common this is, to be able to trace vast paths and directions through a life back to single moments. Seeing Frankfurt Ballet, Bridget telling me to read Butler and Deleuze; more recently maybe, Erik telling me to read Caroline Walker Bynum. I’m sure there are others, though those moments on the cusp of teens and twenties have determined much of my life.
So I’ve returned to that name: Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak. I’ve been reading around migration, human rights, Islam, colonialism, these subjects in Europe, Seyla Benhabib, Kathryn Babayan, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Ruth Mandel, Katherine Pratt Ewing, and more recently with the current precarious state of democracy and human rights in Europe having a need to focus on this. I’m not sure why Spivak’s name occurred to me, maybe I read about her somewhere, or just decided she was the right choice for now.
I went through all her published works before deciding on An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. There’s other works that are probably more essential Spivak, ones that I remember from student days, but this was published in 2012 and I thought reading her newer stuff would be a pertinent choice.
What’s it like then? It’s a well proper slab of a book. Almost 600 pages (about 100 of which are notes) with wide spaces for marginalia, and a small typeface that’s making my eyes apprehensive. I started reading it a week ago, then went off to read some fiction, so I might have to start it again. I’ve read the preface, where she describes each essay in the collection as “looking for a distracted theory of the double bind.” She finishes with, “Gender is the last word. Figure out the double binds there, simple and forbidding.”
I think it’s common when reading philosophy or critical theory to read people without having actually read them. Quotes, lengthy discussions, analyses, criticisms, notes, all these over time can result in a feeling for an author, a familiarity, at the very least enough to know if I actually want to read them or not. I can’t think of another writer who’s been as large in my consciousness as Spivak without me actually reading them. I’m also desperate for direction at the moment. Spivak, writing on post-colonialism, globalisation, and most importantly aesthetics (I’m reminded of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory here), somehow it feels right to be reading Spivak now. As an artist making political work (like there’s any art possible without being political?) maybe to quote the back cover: “aesthetic education is the last available instrument for implementing global justice.”
Some months ago (Which tells you how much I’ve slipped on blogging what I’m reading), I was in Saint George’s picking up something or other and talking with Paul, and found myself holding a rather heavy slab of pages bound in starkly impressive yellow. A book on the philosophy of aesthetics, art, and artists by a Berlin artist, Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen. It wasn’t so expensive as far as heavy philosophical publications go, so I took it home. I’d been reading a bit on aesthetics at the time, so it seemed fitting.
I began reading it last night, after finishing with Hannu Rajaniemi, and did the usual “peruse the index and bibliography” finding plenty of the current philosophical idols, Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, even Kristeva, Heidegger, Kant, Merleau-Ponty … Lacan … fucking Freud … ok, off to the table of contents then.
For a very long time I’ve had a simple, effective method to elucidate if an author is worth reading or is in fact full of shit. Germain Greer and Margaret Atwood are full of shit. Oh but their blahblah is so good and important and they are important writers, nay, National Treasures! They also happen to have made some extremely transphobic statements in the past that if they’d made such remarks about gays, lesbians, Jews, any other group whom we all have an articulate understanding of how they are stigmatised in society, we would always mention this in the same breath, just as we do with, say, Wagner and his anti-semitism. Yet it was perfectly acceptable in ’70s and ’80s feminism to advocate genocide for transgender people (largely at that time referring to trans women), and despite vast change and improvement, especially in the last decade, the level of stupidity emanating from people who should know better is tiresomely common. Hence my need for a simple, effective method of working out if a writer should be taken seriously, or if they’re ignorant, dangerous bigots: Has said person made transphobic statements or remarks, yes/no?
Which brings me to 2. OWN BEING. A. The intimacy of own being. 2. The monstrous body. 1. The sexual plane. of Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen Generic Singularity. ‘The monstrous body’. I have a little yawn. It’s as large a cliché – and misunderstanding – as ‘gender is performance’. A quote from Spinoza. I like Spinoza a lot. “No one has thus far determined what the body can do.” The lazy thing to do now in philosophy is to waste a few trees chanting ‘monstrous, monstrous’ until it forms a fetish in the utterer’s throat and one can feel all scatologically ‘edgy’. It’s become vanishingly rare in the current time of queer philosophy for any body that in some small way seems to jar against the claimed homogeneous norm to not be named monstrous and thus achieve awesomeness. My yawn at Spinoza and ‘monstrous’, and the conspicuous lack of female authors in the bibliography (around ten in total on fifteen pages of bibliography – or one for each Heidegger work cited) … well, we can see where this is going.
Page 65: “A sub-phenomenon is the question of transgendering.” I let out a “What the fuck!” right there. What exactly the fuck, Asmund, is ‘transgendering’? Oh, wait, let me continue! “These are instances where a man feels like a woman or a woman feels like a man and pursues this feeling to the point of altering his or her body through surgery, hormone treatments, name-change and clothing-change.” Which is where I put this waste of paper down and fight back the urge to spit. It’s the cis equivalent of mansplaining. (He then goes on to bizarrely conflate gender identity with sexuality, and later claims that neuroscience can differentiate male and female brains. I laugh a little at the mediocrity.)
I have no idea where he got the word transgendering from, but it’s not in common use on any of the queer, feminist, trans, anthropological, journalistic, human rights (and so on) websites and blogs I read, nor in any serious literature I can recall in around two decades of reading in this area. It does seem to be more associated with anti-trans sentiments, either of a right-wing or radical feminism perspective, which I think wasn’t the kind of ‘monstrous’ Asmund was aiming for.
The succinct point here is Asmund doesn’t know what he’s talking about by any reasonable measure when it comes to writing about transgender (bodies, issues, identities, legal and medical matters etc) and has merely co-opted the lives of transgender people of which he knows nothing about to push his own ‘edgy’, ‘radical’ philosophical aesthetic. This is bullshit, wrapped in academic language and propped up with two thousand years of western philosophers. And if he’s so wilfully completely incompetent when writing about trans people, we have to assume his incompetence on everything else he’s written. There are many, many brilliant works written in philosophy, on aesthetics, on art, on identity. This isn’t one of them. This is a work full of shit.
