Butler and Race?

In rereading some of Judith Butler’s work as published in The Judith Butler Reader (2004), I was startled to note how little she actually addresses race. This seeming silence on race is particularly odd when editor and introducer Sara Salih gives Butler a lot of credit for looking at race and in light of Butler’s fairly unambiguous antiracist credentials. [1]

Indeed, it seems that Butler in some sense “discovered” race sometime between Gender Trouble (1990, reissued 1999) and Bodies That Matter (1993); her 1990 objection to Mapplethorpe’s depiction of “naked Black men” as one which “engage[s] a certain racist romanticism of Black men’s excessive physicality and sexual readiness” (197) is not on par, theoretically, with the kinds of complex arguments she was making about gender at the same point in her career.

In the Reader, it was only in her 1999 introduction to the reissue of Gender Trouble that she pointed out that “racial presumptions invariably underwrite the discourse on gender” (95) or that “gender norms” are substantially “underwritten by racial codes of purity and taboos against miscegenation” (101).

These brief mentions, and the recognition that “race and gender ought not to be treated as simple analogies” and “the sexualization of racial gender norms calls to be read through multiple lenses at once, and the analysis surely illuminates the limits of gender as an exclusive category of analysis” (95) are really all she gives us.

It thus becomes the reader’s job to discern how Butler’s ideas about gender illuminate (or don’t) aspects of the operation of race as a system of discrimination (in both the “differentiation” and “inequality” senses, a dual valence Butler points out with respect to Wittig on p. 29), and so I shall.

The idea of performativity tends to generate resistance because it violates cultural common sense: “What do you mean, race (or gender) is produced by doing? I can see with my own eyes that this person has a race (gender)!”[2] Accordingly, the social construction of the matter of bodies generally has to be established before performativity can make sense (which makes the fact that Butler explained gender first (1990) and then the body (1993) unfortunate for both her and her readers).

Butler argues that body parts (or bodily characteristics) only come to exist at the point that we notice them (145); accordingly, the physical features that say “race” to us are products of paying attention to them. This does not, however, mean that they are not “real,” either materially or socially, but only that we make sense of bodies through social categories (100) that tell us that this skin color or that eye shape indicates membership in a particular race category.

These are, like sex categories, arbitrary—people from some Pacific Islander groups have the same, objective, “hue” (Dyer, 1997) skin color as some Africans, for example, but we understand them to be different “races” through classifying what “matters” about the “matter” of these bodies, and in so doing materializing these bodies in particular ways (and not others).

Once the matter of bodies is understood as social, performativity becomes easier to accept. Though there’s nothing inherent in the body about the races or genders we inhabit, we experience them as the inner truth of a person because they “act like it." The possibility of “doing” race out of line with the socially produced body is exemplified by the idea of the “Oreo” or “banana”—people of color who “act white” and are presumed then to be “white on the inside.”

Finally, as Butler notes about gender, performances of racialized selves are not volitional acts—we are hailed at birth into a race as much as a gender, and the social imperative to be raced and gendered is difficult and painful to refuse (What are you?).

In the end, then, I think it is clear that Butler’s work on gender can be useful for making sense of race, though clearly this does not relieve Butler of the obligation to make these articulations herself.

Notes
[1] For example, in her refusal of an award from the Berlin Christopher Street Day (i.e. gay pride) organization due to racism within the organization: http://www.egs.edu/faculty/judith-butler/articles/i-must-distance-myself/
[2] The fact that this obviousness only occurs with respect to marked categories of race or gender, and white people and men don’t “obviously” have a race or gender to most people, though important, is beyond what I can consider here.

References
Butler, J. (2004). The Judith Butler Reader. (S. Salih, Ed.). New York: Wiley-Blackwell.
Butler, J. (1999). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (10th anniversary ed.). New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1993). Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". New York: Routledge.
Dyer, R. (1997). White. London: Routledge.

The Persistence of (Punitive) Vision

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault (1995) traces a shift in how power works, arguing that in the late 18th and early 19th century punitive spectacle went out of fashion as the way of managing illegality.

Unfortunately, however, nobody bothered to tell the South.

Indeed, according to Joane Nagel’s (2003, p. 114) telling of the history, it was not until the 1890s that “lynchings moved beyond instances of local lawlessness to take on the proportions of large-scale spectacles.” These occasions of excessive visual penality, Nagel (2003, p. 114) says, were “publicized in advance and attracted crowds that sometimes numbered in the thousands,” and she argues that they “were part of the consolidation of the color line and the construction of whiteness in the postwar U.S. South.”

Until well into the 20th century in the South, then, the idea that power had ceased to act upon bodies in destructive rather than productive ways is simply not applicable when it comes to white power acting on black bodies.

Similarly, Tony Bennett (1995, p. 24) argues explicitly that having “witnesses of a symbolic display of power [ . . . ] remained important—and more so than Foucault’s formations often allow.” He particularly notes that the museums his own work analyzes made particular use of the display of “other, ‘non-civilized’ peoples upon whose bodies the effects of power were unleashed with as much force and theatricality as had been manifest on the scaffold” (Bennett, 1995, p. 67).

In Foucault’s defense, there is a sense in which this lapse on his part is the product of looking at the history in one place or set of places and generalizing to all places, which it’s not entirely clear he meant for his work to do.

However, there is nevertheless a real racial absence in Foucault’s work, which is all the more perplexing when racialized difference had to have been relevant in the precise time and place he is intending to describe--France was a colonial power exercising repressive power over bodies that were somewhere in the process of being racialized as other.

Why is it that some bodies were still fair game for this kind of punishment at the same time that others were being subjected to discipline and made productive? Can we explain this simply as those people being seen as ineligible to become docile and productive due to some racialized imputation of unruliness? Is this a product of the production of some bodies as not-quite-human?

These are vital questions, as they can perhaps help us think through things like contemporary uses of torture at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, and Foucault as written doesn’t help us answer them, so now it’s our job.

References
Bennett, T. (1995). The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage.
Nagel, J. (2003). Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers. New York: Oxford University Press.

Neoliberal Fictions II: Property is Privacy is Freedom

Gay marriage advocates, as it turns out, are complicit with the people who want to privatize Social Security.

This is no nefarious scheme, but rather the consequences of buying in to a certain kind of political logic that has become the standard language of politics in the United States.

Though David Roediger (1991, p. 28) discusses discourses circulating at the time of the American Revolution that “thoroughly conflated opportunity to accumulate and secure productive property with the ‘pursuit of happiness’” and taxation with slavery and therefore unfreedom, in the era typically known as neoliberalism this equation of economic with political liberty has become orthodox—and in the mainstream at least it is verging on becoming unquestionable doxa.

It is this (strange) unquestionability of the equation of property and freedom that animates contemporary activism around gay marriage. That is, though Brown (2003, sec. 6) points out that political liberalism can “lean more in the direction of maximizing liberty (its politically ‘conservative’ tilt) or maximizing equality (its politically ‘liberal’ tilt),” and the demand for equality of marriage rights from the state is clearly the latter, the ways in which the demand for state recognition for one’s marriage is about inequality with respect to things like inheritance and taxes indicates that this “tilting” is within a relatively narrow orbit of economic laissez-faire liberalism.

Floyd (2009, p. 68) makes this argument quite explicitly, arguing that “neoliberal efforts to limit the horizon of struggles against ‘homophobia’ to the right to get married and own property” function “to assimilate homosexual practices not only to a heteronormative model of monogamy and ‘commitment’ but to a related, uncritical identification of privacy with property.”

This contention is also implicit in Gray’s (2009, p. 179) description of the successful framing of gay rights as “special rights” in Kentucky—“rural voters who reject recognition of LGBT rights,” she argues, “telegraph their own feelings of economic vulnerability, lack of access to social-welfare benefits, and reliance on the material more than symbolic preciousness of marriage to span the gaps in a woefully threadbare social safety net.”

“Guarantee us the right to accumulate property with and bequeath property to whomever we choose,” the activist attention to marriage seems to say, but it’s only a segment of the population (gay or straight) who can take advantage of those benefits of marriage.

The idea, then, that “my ability to get married is my property and I should be able to do with it what I want” points right back to the logic that “my Social Security contributions should go into an account for me, and yours should be for you, and if you don’t have enough when you retire then tough.”

Most gay rights activists would be horrified at the latter statement, so why is the former their organizing principle?

References
Brown, W. (2003). Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy. Theory & Event, 7(1), n.p.
Floyd, K. (2009). The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism. Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press.
Gray, M. L. (2009). Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America. New York: NYU Press.
Roediger, D. R. (1991). The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso.

Come Out (of Your Body) on the Internet

When reading Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America, after I had pried myself away from Google-stalking Mary L. Gray to figure out where she was from (She’s from where I’m from! Sort of.), I had one of those “I never thought of that before, but it’s so true!” moments with her argument that there is a link between the ideology of coming out and that of being disembodied and free on the internet.

As she puts it, “the politics of LGBT visibility’s demanding refrain to ‘come out, come out, wherever you are’ echoes the rhetorical invocations of disembodied freedoms and escapist anonymity attributed to the ‘effects’ of the Internet” (Gray, 2009, p. 15). In both of these discourses, that is, family/community/the private is framed as bad and oppressive as opposed to the individualist liberation to be who one really is—whether by coming out or becoming digitized.

However, as Gray presses us to ask, who are family/community/the private bad for? They’re necessary, she argues, for rural youth, for whom they are the means of distribution of both emotional and material support.

They’re also necessary—as her analysis hints at with the story of African-American queer youth Brandon but doesn’t interrogate in depth—for many people of color, as has been argued by a number of scholars working on issues of queers of color (and I know it’s horrible, but I can’t remember which right now. I think one place this was articulated was the Combahee River Collective (1981). Bear with me, it’s early).

This raises the question: “why are those who privilege gay visibility valorized as ‘beyond the closet’ and youth of color, rural young people, and other individuals with core identities vying for recognition seen as in denial?” (134) That is, who is it that has the privilege or inclination be public/visible?

Moreover, as Gray’s analysis shows, public and private don’t really work the way we think they do on the internet anyway. These technologies are, first, both public and private, as anyone who’s posted something meant for one audience that subsequently made its way to an unintended other audience knows: “Internet technologies can be both a private experience and a suspended moment of public engagement” (106).

Additionally, as the articulation of the internet as enabling “public engagement” suggests, the idea that the Internet serves a “need or desire to mask queerness from an imagined inherently more hostile social world,” that it promises some sort of alternate public space of freedom from local, embodied troubles is in need of interrogation (106-7; of course, others, including quite prominently Lisa Nakamura (2008) , have argued that offline inequality follows us online).

Thus, Gray argues, her findings “complicate the presumption that new media liberate our bodies from locations and highlights what rural queer-youth identity work can teach us about the politics and conditions of sexual- and gender-identity formation and their indissoluble entanglement of the ‘public’ and the ‘private’” (108). And that’s pretty cool.

References
Combahee River Collective. (1981). A Black Feminist Statement. In C. Moraga & G. Anzaldúa (Eds.), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (pp. 210-218). Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press.

Gray, M. L. (2009). Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America. New York: NYU Press.

Nakamura, L. (2008). Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.

In Memoriam: The Nation-State?

Sorry for missing last week; life was crazy. New blog day will be Thursdays through early December.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the nation-state as a site of legal, economic, and diplomatic power has been (or is being) superseded by globalization/transnationalism/technological processes.

Tony Bennett (1995, p. 218) had begun to observe these processes as early as 1988; “Expo ’88” in Brisbane, Australia displayed a “tendency for the corporate pavilion, once a marginal feature of the exhibition form, to displace national pavilions as the organizing centres of expositional rhetorics of progress.”

Rather than the traditional exposition structure, then, in which the core was made up by nations showing off their innovation and modern-ness, there was a shift in the late twentieth century toward the corporation as the preeminent international entity.

This change, I’d like to argue, is not just a matter of exhibition layout, but rather is indicative of a shift in the worldwide balance of power; the de-centering of the nation, then, would seem to “pose fundamental questions to our neat categories of the liberal public sphere, where citizens interact through constitutionally guaranteed rights” (Liang, 2005, p. 16).

This is to say that the model of the citizen with legal rights—and particularly rights to private property, as has been codified by the conflation of political and economic liberalism (see Brown, 2003)—has become less compelling (and less accurate to the functioning of the world) in recent years.

Instead, as Lawrence Liang (2005, p. 16) argues, “globalization demands that we ask fundamentally different questions of the relationship between law, legality, property (tangible and intangible) and that which we call the public domain.”

On one hand, there are situations in which the power of capital is great enough to override the protections extended by the nation, such as when nations eliminate or relax or create exceptions to labor and environmental and tax regulations in order to draw business, though as Aneesh (2006, p. 22) notes this is “not an autonomous process that undermines the ability of nation-states to protect against the deregulation of their markets. In fact the nation-state—under contemporary neoliberal pressures—is the key actor in effecting deregulation.”

Through deregulation, then, nations are actively ceding their power to corporations, but there are also ways in which the nation-state is undermined through processes which, if not autonomous, are at least beyond its control. David Savran (1998, pp. 240-1) describes terrorism as “both a perversion and a parody” of “multinational capitalism”—each, he says, “threatens not just national security and national borders but the very idea of the nation as a sovereign political and economic entity.”

In the age of terrorism, one of the nation’s fundamental powers and responsibilities—to keep its citizens safe—has been to some degree stripped from it, and in this way the power of the nation has been diminished overall. Indeed, U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan can be seen as a last-ditch effort to keep that power in the hands of the nation using old-style military-power modes of maintaining safety in a world in which they no longer apply.

In these ways, then, the nation’s role is diminished from one direction through a reduction of the power of law, whether chosen or imposed.

On the other hand, though, the process works in more or less an opposite direction—the nation is obviated by means of a shift from place-based to international enforceability, or the extension of law.

This can be seen in the articulation of intellectual property piracy as requiring “universal jurisdiction” (Govil, 2004, p. 382). Typically, law operates with “national jurisdiction,” overridden only by “the moral heinousness of crimes against humanity,” and “for centuries prior to the post-World War II application of universal jurisdiction against genocide, apartheid and war crimes, maritime piracy was the only crime deemed heinous enough to warrant universal jurisdiction” (Govil, 2004, p. 382).

In this way, then, Govil demonstrates the ways in which the use of the term “piracy” for illicit copying of data is not coincidental, but instead quite explicitly bound up in moral judgement, as it frames the theft of intellectual property as on par with genocide, of such compelling interest to humanity that nations have no right to protect their citizens from prosecution.

In this way, then, though the world may seem to be becoming more lawless, it turns out that law is actually just becoming disarticulated from the nation-state, which suggests that, as an institution, it is perhaps being rendered obsolete by the tides of history.

References
Aneesh, A. (2006). Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bennett, T. (1995). The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge.
Brown, W. (2003). Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy. Theory & Event, 7(1), n.p.
Govil, N. (2004). War in the Age of Pirate Reproduction. In R. Vasudevan, R. Sundaram, J. Bagchi, M. Narula, S. Sengupta, & G. Lovink (Eds.), Sarai Reader 04: Crisis/Media (pp. 378-383). Sarai/Center for the Study of Developing Societies/Society for New and Old Media.
Liang, L. (2005). Porous Legalities and Avenues of Participation. In Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts (pp. 6-17). Retrieved from http://www.sarai.net/publications/readers/05-bare-acts/02_lawrence.pdf
Savran, D. (1998). Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Fandom as Public Sex

In one of the many sidebars in his 2006 book Convergence Culture , Henry Jenkins notes that an “analogy to Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence lies close to the surface” when discussing the efforts of game companies to encourage their fans to produce content (Jenkins, 2006, p. 165).

But earlier in the text, there’s another analogy that seems quite fruitful to pursue. In the pre-Internet days of fandom, he says:

Corporations might now, abstractly, that such transactions [trading around of unauthorized songs and stories] were occurring all around them, every day, but they didn’t know, concretely, who was doing it. And even if they did, they weren’t going to come bursting into people’s homes at night. But, as these tractions came out from behind closed doors, they represented a visible, public threat to the absolute control the culture industries asserted over their intellectual property (Jenkins, 2006, p. 137).

Maybe this is just a product of re-reading this in juxtaposition with some queer theory, but this just screams Lawrence v. Texas to me.

For those who are unfamiliar, this is the Supreme Court case that ruled that sodomy laws were unconstitutional. The case revolved around the arrest of two men who were found to be engaged in consensual homo-sex in Lawrence’s home by police who were (legally) entering for another reason. The argument that swayed 6 of the 9 justices was based, at least in part, on the right to privacy, or the idea that what happened “behind closed doors” wasn’t anyone’s business. For more information, see the Wikipedia article.

Sounding familiar yet?

It is in this context that Jenkins’s (2006, p. 142) assertion that “the Web provides an exhibition outlet moving amateur filmmaking from private into public space” becomes very interesting. This and other fan practices have now “come out,” ceased to be private, begun circulating openly.

We’re here, we’re fans, get used to it.

Yet, just as the decriminalization of particular sex acts between particular configurations of people is a limited victory, both Jenkins (2006) and Coppa (2008) point to ways in which some fan practices remain equivalent to sex in public, not covered by the new amnesty.

Thus, on one hand, fan films of the Atomfilms Star Wars contest, largely created by male “filmmakers who were making ‘calling card’ movies to try to break into the film industry” are encouraged, publicized, and rewarded (Jenkins, 2006, p. 154).

On the other hand, “female fan writers sharing their erotic fantasies” (Jenkins, 2006, p. 154), and the vids that are essentially equivalent (Coppa, 2008; Jenkins, 2006), aren’t so lucky. Indeed, these queer texts have become newly actionable, continually taken down from YouTube for copyright violation.

Jenkins (2006, pp. 157-8) has a vision that “if the corporate media couldn’t crush this vernacular culture during the age when mass media power went largely unchallenged, it is hard to believe that legal threats are going to be an adequate response to a moment when new digital tools and new networks of distribution have expanded the power of ordinary people to participate in their culture,” but to some degree he misses the point.

You can’t stop fans, but you can hope to contain them, and the validation of particular, gendered practices of fan filmmaking would seem to be exactly a move toward containment.

References
Coppa, F. (2008). Women, "Star Trek," and the Early Development of Fannish Vidding. Transformative Works and Cultures, 1, n.p.
Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

Vast Content, Vast Enjoyment, Vast Consumption

In thinking about what Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin (2009) call “vast narratives,” it soon becomes quite clear that to have such vastness a narrative requires both user-generated content and vast consumption.

To begin with the former, Bartle (2009, p. 114) notes that, using what he calls “Alice” design—in which users can, so to speak, choose their own adventures (or quests) toward a predefined goal rather than having to take a particular, pre-designated path—producers of virtual worlds “don’t have to create anywhere near as many of these quests as they would have done without the Alice quests in support, and although making a world rich enough for a critical mass is not free, it’s a lot less expensive than one in which all the quests are lovingly crafted.”

Players of these games, then, are asked to do the work of making the game for themselves, and while this is a form of freedom, it’s simultaneously unremunerated labor. (See Old Fashioned Marxism for New Media Labor for more on this.)

Similarly, Gingold (2009, p. 132) speaks glowingly of the design of the game Spore as one in which, “by directing their creatures’ evolution, players would contribute valuable material to the Spore gene pool, creating aliens and civilizations for other players to discover. [ . . . ] Thanks to the effort of other players, an infinite number of alien civilizations would await your discovery.”

Other people make the game for you, and you make the game for other players, and it’s far richer than it could be if the designers built the whole thing, but the designers, at least, would get paid.

The other commonality when considering the “vast narrative” is the extensive efforts of media companies to make connections between properties such that consumers of A come to also consume B.

Thus, “For decades, DC and Marvel treated all of their titles as interconnected: characters move across different series, and universe-wide events periodically require readers to buy titles that they were not otherwise reading to understand their full ramifications” (Ford & Jenkins, 2009, p. 304).

This, then, is a richer experience, more stories and information to enjoy, which keeps fans from running out of something they love. However, at the same time this is manipulation of consumption practices; fans can’t get everything they want/need without spending more.

Another form this takes is “multiauthored, cross-media franchises”; as Krzywinska (2009, pp. 395-6) points out, “worlds”—however “completely furnished”—“offer up a recognizable brand that can be used to produce a whole range of different products.”

In this way, rather than sprinkling some of A onto B to make it more attractive, A is spun off into A-prime, and so on. The effect is similar, whether viewed as manipulation or as providing more of what people love.

The reason all this matters is that, as Hills (2009) and Krzywinska (2009) both point out, fans would seem to be the vanguard of changes to media consumption in general. Thus, Hills (2009, p. 338) argues, “one of the key developments of television seriality in the Internet age is that cult fans’ attention to narrative continuity will start to become a more generalized feature of audience activity.”

If this privileging of narrative continuity extends to everyone, will everyone then start following narratives across platforms, spending money as they go?

Krzywinska (2009, p. 396) makes this point more explicitly, arguing that “while shows that encouraged this type of consumption used to be considered ‘cultish’ and marginal to mainstream popular culture, they are now becoming central [ . . ]. This dovetails all too neatly with greater industrial and technological convergence, which depends increasingly on formulating devices to create long-stay audiences/consumers who will spend money to remain on contact with their preferred world” (396).

This needn’t be only a pessimistic future, but in the face of the persistently celebratory tone of much of the work on these developments drawing attention to the other side seems vital.

References
Bartle, R. A. (2009). Alice and Dorothy Play Together. In P. Harrigan & N. Wardrip-Fruin (Eds.), Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (pp. 105-114). Cambridge: MIT Press.

Ford, S., & Jenkins, H. (2009). Managing Multiplicity in Superhero Comics: An Interview with Henry Jenkins. In P. Harrigan & N. Wardrip-Fruin (Eds.), Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (pp. 303-312). Cambridge: MIT Press.

Gingold, C. (2009). A Brief History of Spore. In P. Harrigan & N. Wardrip-Fruin (Eds.), Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (pp. 131-136). Cambridge: MIT Press.

Harrigan, P., & Wardrip-Fruin, N. (Eds.). (2009). Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Hills, M. (2009). Absent Epic, Implied Story Arcs, and Variation on a Narrative Theme: Doctor Who (2005-2008) as Cult/Mainstream Television. In P. Harrigan & N. Wardrip-Fruin (Eds.), Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Krzywinska, T. (2009). Arachne Challenges Minerva: The Spinning out of Long Narrative in World of Warcraft and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In P. Harrigan & N. Wardrip-Fruin (Eds.), Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives (pp. 385-398). Cambridge: MIT Press.