On Anthony Weiner, or: Obvious Pun is Obvious

First off, let me come right out and say it: If the man wants to engage in kinky photo play, sexting, phone sex, or whatever else with other consenting adults, that’s none of anybody’s damn business.

In saying this, I’m not trying to make some sort of distinctly un-queer demand for privacy, but to refuse the way we typically deal with sexual nonnormativity in politics.

Right now, that is, any sort of news about any public official having anything but “heterosexual, married, monogamous, procreative, noncommercial, in pairs, in a relationship, same generation, in private, no pornography, bodies only, vanilla” sex—what resides in Gayle Rubin’s “charmed circle” of “Good, Normal, Natural, Blessed Sexuality”—results in a scandal and in people, usually from the other party, demanding immediate resignation.

(One exception to the “same generation” one: people are a-ok with trophy wives.)

The knee-jerk response to say people don’t belong in office for engaging in these kinds of sexual practices is a problem. Enjoyment of sexual activity that other people don’t approve of is not indicative of an inability to govern. It’s also not necessarily the case that people who are “in the public eye” should be held to a higher standard than Average Joe or Jane, no matter what the Average Jane on the street interviewed by the LA Times says.

Of course, the fact that Representative Weiner didn’t come out and argue that in the first place doesn’t do him any favors. Nor does his go-to response of making up stories about hacking and Photoshopping, because, though probably effectively mystifying the situation for people over a certain age, he should have taken a stand rather than dodging.

And indeed, it seems like maybe he himself was confused about how the internet works, as somebody points out over at GraphJam. Hey dude, if it’s in electronic form, it can and will travel given an incentive. And you being a politician is all the incentive needed.

Announcing that he’s “seeking treatment” was also lame. Treatment for what? Liking sex? Using new media to facilitate it? So much for the ringing, sex-positive proclamation that nobody should care because it’s not relevant to his job that it’s high time for and which I, for one, would have liked to see.

On the other hand, it’s pretty likely that he has hurt his family with all this, and he’s definitely been dishonest, and those aren’t traits I particularly want to defend in public officials or anyone else.

However, whatever interpersonal strife Mr. Weiner has going on is a family issue that should be dealt with as such—currently, we tend to do that in private, though we could imagine a different way, with some sort of community working together to make it better. Or counseling or churches or whatever floats peoples’ boats.

But not a media circus and being essentially fired from one’s job—not least because if lying was the criteria for resignation, all houses of governance would be empty tomorrow.

Now, I’m not unquestioningly supporting this guy. Far from it. As we have learned from many an incident before this one, politicians (and activists. I’m looking at you, Julian Assange) sometimes abuse their power when it comes to sex.

So Nancy Pelosi was right to initiate an investigation into "whether any official resources were used or any other violation of House rules occurred"

It’s also right to check whether he got women to like him because he was a politician or because he suggested he could use his connections for them or any of those things.

And maybe we should also ask whether the exchanges he had with underage individuals were of a sexual nature, though that’s assuming we ignore the sheer arbitrariness of 17 = illegal sex vs. 18 = legal sex. Seriously, people magically become able to make good decisions when the clock hits midnight on their 18^th birthday? (I teach 18, 19, and 20 year olds. They don’t.)

But, in a general sense, this is what we should be concerned about, not that he was having sexytimes with another consenting adult. Looking into these sorts of things is, first, the feminist, sex-positive set of questions to ask. All sex is a-ok as long as nobody gets hurt, so let’s check to be sure there was no coercion or manipulation, because given unequal power that was a possibility.

Second, these kinds of questions about doing it on company time, using company resources, or promising favors are what we would ask in any other job—and therefore totally reasonable.

Third, what might actually be indicative of an inability to govern is using his office as a Representative to facilitate his sex practices. His constituents who questioned his ability to make good decisions are right on in that respect.

So, let’s have that conversation instead.

I did really think I was done with Glee, but then Dianna Agron had to go and wear that "Likes Girls" shirt. Tune in next week for "So, You like Girls: Dianna Agron, Meet Adrienne Rich"

Representation is the Real Disability: Cripping Glee and Making Ability Trouble

Blog four of four in a series on Glee.

To riff on the theme of last week’s blog calling Glee’s creators out for having Gay White Man Syndrome (which, I neglected to mention, also sometimes manifests as White Feminist Syndrome), the other major lecture I do on Glee when I teach Intro to Media Studies is on disability.

And how colossally they fail at representing it.

I’m imagining that the process of checkbox character creation went something like “Hey, let’s have a kid in a wheelchair! OMG yes, that’s awesome! We’re so freaking progressive.”

And yes, having a main character who isn’t bodily normative is a good step, just like the show’s casting beyond black and white, discussed last week is a step forward.

But again, mere presence isn’t enough. Because what they do with the character now that they have him is a problem. What Artie really wants more than anything is to be “normal”—and there is no sense within the show that that word belongs in scare quotes.

That is, the character doesn’t operate with a model of “Hey, I’m different from you, and that’s ok ‘cause I’m good in my way and you’re good in yours.” Instead, he desperately wants to be a dancer—which, according to the show’s logic, can only mean dancing with legs.

So, somehow, for all the progressiveness of making Artie a main character and not the Problem of the Week, we’re right back with Poor Disabled Kid Who Can’t Achieve His Normative Dreams.

People sometimes have a hard time getting why this is a problem, so in my lecture I talk about Ari Ne’eman, the first openly autistic White House appointee in history. He was nominated in December 2009 to the National Council on Disability and confirmed in June 2010, a delay that may have had something to do with his criticism of the idea of curing autism.

In an interview with Wired, Ne’eman explains his position:

Wired.com: Though you criticize groups like Autism Speaks for focusing on a cure, if someone offered you a pill to wake up tomorrow without autism, would you take it?

Ne’eman: That’s an intensely silly question. How can I draw a line around one part of my brain and say that this is the autistic part, and the rest of me is something else? That way of looking at autism is predicated on the strange idea that there was or is a normal person somewhere inside me, hidden by autism, and struggling to get out. That’s not reality.

Here again it’s serendipitous simultaneity to the rescue, since I was (belatedly) watching the first season of Glee at the same time I was (belatedly) reading Robert McRuer’s Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability and, I was like, “Oh my god, Robert McRuer would have a field day.”

McRuer calls our attention to the fact that (though admittedly it isn’t exactly the same) we would never ask:

“Wouldn’t you rather be white?” or

“Wouldn’t you rather be a man?” or

“Wouldn’t you rather be straight?”

But we would ask “‘In the end, wouldn’t you rather be hearing?’ and ‘In the end, wouldn’t you rather not be HIV positive?’” (McRuer, 2006, pp. 8-9). That is, though each of these things is a social hierarchy, only the first three do we identify as such. Accordingly, with race, sex/gender, or sexuality, we don’t think that just because something is normative it’s normal in an evaluative sense (except sometimes with being straight).

With disability, we don’t recognize that social privileging as social. That is, “able-bodiedness, even more than heterosexuality, still largely masquerades as a nonidentity, as the natural order of things” (McRuer, 2006, p. 1). McRuer wants to draw our attention to this and make us question the naturalness of assuming able-bodied is better and everyone’s goal.

In an example of what happens when we make strange the idea of normativity for all, the Wired article asks us to “imagine a world in which most public discussion of homosexuality was devoted to finding a cure for it, rather than on the need to address the social injustices that prevent gay people from living happier lives”

Ne’eman points out that “Dr. Ivar Lovaas, who passed away recently, said that his goal was to make autistic kids indistinguishable from their peers. That goal has more to do with increasing the comfort of non-autistic people than with what autistic people really need. Lovaas also experimented with trying to make what he called effeminate boys normal. It was a silly idea around homosexuality, and it’s a silly idea around autism.”

To counter ideas like this, there’s something that has been called the “neurodiversity movement.” Ne’eman, who belongs to this group, argues that “many of the bad things that autistic people struggle with are things that happen to us, rather than things that are bad about being autistic,”—that is, the hard part of being nonnormative is being in that subordinate position vis-à-vis the norm, not anything inherent to the bodily or mental state.

That is, there are plenty of other ways to make sense of these physiological differences between people. Lynne Roper—whose Disability in Media piece is what I actually assign to my students, McRuer being a bit hard core for a 100-level class—points out that “some religions will see epilepsy as possession by a god and therefore a gift, whereas in capitalist western societies where medicine is powerful, disability acts as evidence of the failure of medicine and is this treated negatively” (¶ 9).

The fact that we can’t see this, McRuer (2006, p. 37) argues, has a lot to do with the fact that “the vast majority of both nondisabled and disabled people have in effect consented to comprehending that binary [able-bodied/disabled] as natural.”

McRuer contends that what we need to do instead is see the able-bodied/disabled dyad “as nonnatural and hierarchical (or cultural and political) rather than self-evident and universal,” which he terms “cripping” on the model of “queering” or “ability trouble” on the model of Butler’s “gender trouble.”

Now, Glee has already caught some flak for how it does disability, notably for casting a bodily-normative actor to play Artie. And I imagine that their thought process after getting called out went something like, “Oh, that offends you? That’s cool, no problem. I’ll see your paraplegic and raise you quadriplegic. And the character will be all sympathetic and stuff and played by a Real Paralyzed Actor™.”

And maybe there is a flash of, “Woo hoo, Glee figured its shit out!” for a second.

But then that scene—in the episode entitled “Laryngitis”—goes on and it becomes clear that it’s not about the quadriplegic character at all. It’s about Rachel. The non-bodily-normative character is in the episode solely to lead Rachel (who, oddly given the episode’s title, is afflicted with tonsillitis rather than laryngitis) back to health. He shows her that possibly losing her singing voice if she has her tonsils out isn’t that bad after all because hell, she could be like him.

Are you kidding me?

Roper argues that representations of disability “are usually about the feelings of non-disabled people and their reactions to disability, rather than disability itself” (¶ 13). The way disability gets represented, she contends, is voyeuristic and lets the able-bodied feel better about themselves by comparison, and this is a textbook case.

That is, as McRuer (2006, pp. 8-9) points out, quite often the representation of non-normative embodiments “reveals more about the able-bodied culture doing the asking than about the bodies being interrogated.”

McRuer also notes that by using mobility disabilities, Hollywood can have bodily nonnormative characters that are both visibly different and still photogenic—particularly important when you cast bodily normative actors to play them, but clearly also in play here with this actor who is in fact not bodily normative but still looks pretty “normal.”

It seems like this may have been on the minds of the writers when they wrote one of the other storylines in the Laryngitis episode.

My imagination of their thought process again: “I got it. We’ll put in some characters with Down Synrdome. They will be a chance to show that Sue Sylvester has a heart, cuz you’d have to in order to be nice to people like that, right? And they look different and everything. And they’re very sympathetic characters—always unfailingly sweet. Problem solved, amirite?”

Having a character (and actor) who is cognitively nonnormative is a huge step forward. Having one with no depth whatsoever, even more so than the two-dimensionality of the other characters in the show, is not.

As one blogger put it:

“This episode especially irked me because of the sensitivity of the way Kurt’s storyline was handled. Kurt’s struggling with feeling abandoned by his father and he tries to mold himself into something he’s not and he and his dad have it out. Why do I get the feeling that Ryan Murphy, who is gay, put a lot of time, thought, and energy into that storyline? Because it shows. It was well done. It was a good scene. It spoke to experiences I’ve had of trying to pretend to be somebody else to please someone else and it resonated.”

Oh, wait, is that Gay White Man Syndrome rearing its ugly head again? You betcha.

Try again,Glee and try to peer around your enormous self-congratulation this time.

Glee’s Diversity Fumbles, Or: Ryan Murphy has a Serious Case of Gay White Man Syndrome

Glee blog three of, I think, four.

Glee seems, in some ways, to be pretty invested in diversity. Certainly, the way people throw praise (accolades from GLAAD) and awards (a Diversity Award from the Multicultural Motion Picture Association) at them (and these are just the examples from the first page of Google results) suggests that his is a popular interpretation.

And indeed, the show has had, in various combinations over its run, some white-American kids, and some Jewish-American kids, and some Asian-American kids, and some African-American kids, and a Latina kid, and a kid in a wheelchair and some characters with Down syndrome, and a boatload of gay, lesbian, bisexual, or questioning kids.

Check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check. Let’s dust off our hands, our work here is done.

That is, Glee seems to be working with a sort of smorgasbord or checkbox model of difference. They have characters who differ with respect to the categories Americans generally recognize as important, and that is about as far as it goes.

Most notably, the show has gotten accolades and award statuettes for the way it deals with sexual orientation, and I actually don’t have a whole lot to dispute there. It’s a pretty narrow subset of LGB folks (and no transfolks), but there sure are a lot of them. The show is gay central (which has not escaped the attention of the right), and because at least one of the people in charge has had those experiences, it does an ok job of it.

And it’s true that they exhibit race in more than black and white, which is a definite improvement over the American TV standard, but they stop at (East) Asian and Latina/o. No Native kids. No Arab or Muslim kids. No South Asian kids (though there was one scripted, he got replaced with Kurt because a) Chris Colfer is just that awesome and b) Ryan Murphy saw himself in him—this is one place where we have gotten into trouble).

But just having characters who fit in those categories—checking off those boxes—isn’t enough. I mentioned offhand a couple weeks ago that Santana is periodically ethnic-ed up when the writers remember to break out their English-to-Spanish dictionary, and that’s really as far as it goes for any of the characters.

Granted, I haven’t yet seen the back half of season two, but I can’t think of a single episode dealing in depth with anybody’s racial or ethnic identity. It seems like the people who make Glee think of race or ethnicity as good only for a snappy one-liner.

Or, sometimes, it’s a minor plot point—like when Quinn was pregnant and craving bacon and Puck’s Jewish mother was appalled or Artie and Tina break up because Tina wants to date fellow Asian Mike (with whom she hooked up at “Asian Camp”—seriously?).

Of course, the ways in which Glee swings at equality and misses haven’t entirely escaped attention: Margaret Hartmann over at Jezebel discusses Why Glee Still Needs To Work On Diversity. Angry Asian Man calls the show out for the way that the Caucasian cast is made so much more central in plots and promotional materials. Even Jeff Field of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil rights argues that “'Glee' Loathes Diversity.”

As Hartmann’s article points out, it would be less annoying that Glee fails at doing diversity if it wasn’t so busy patting itself on the back for doing diversity. And this is where it becomes clear that Glee creator Ryan Murphy has Gay White Man Syndrome, and he has it bad.

This isn’t to hate on all gay white men. Some of my best friends are gay white men, to use that horrible, privilege- or prejudice-obscuring saying with tongue firmly in cheek. But Gay White Man Syndrome is a serious problem for that subset of the population of gay white men who have it.

When people have the Syndrome, they tend to mistake their experience of discrimination on the basis of their sexuality as interchangeable with all other ways that people are disadvantaged for the social categories of inequality to which they belong.

This is sort of like saying “I understand what it’s like to be discriminated against as a woman because I’m gay” or “I can’t be racist, I’m gay!”

When you put it this way, it sounds totally ridiculous, but it’s rarely expressed this way. Instead, there’s just an assumption of commonality of the experience of being outside the privileged norm, ignoring the ways in which being white and male are still pretty good cards to have in your hand.

And that’s sort of what happens in Glee. The people making the show apparently don’t know what they don’t know, so they proceed as if what they know is enough to allow them to successfully engage with all categories of social inequality.

It’s not. Props to them for having a cast in many hues, but simple presence is not enough.