Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

Imperialism is still a most powerful force to be reckoned with in Africa. It operates on a world-wide scale in combinations of many different kinds: economic, political, cultural, educational, military; and through intelligence (covert operations) and information services. …Just as our strength lies in a unified policy and action for progress and development, so the strength of the imperialists lies in our disunity. We in Africa can only meet them effectively by presenting a unified front and a continental purpose.


— from Africa Must Unite (page xvi) by Kwame Nkrumah

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/20 ... hat-is-it/

SEXUAL OBJECTIFICATION (PART 1): WHAT IS IT?
by Caroline Heldman

This is the first part in a series about how girls and women can navigate a culture that treats them like sex objects. Cross-posted at Ms. and Caroline Heldman’s Blog.

Around since the 1970s and associated with curmudgeonly second-wave feminists, the phrase “sexual objectification” can inspire eye-rolling. The phenomenon, however, is more rampant than ever in popular culture. Today women’s sexual objectification is celebrated as a form of female empowerment. This has enabled a new era of sexual objectification, characterized by greater exposure to advertising in general, and increased sexual explicitness in advertising, magazines, television shows, movies, video games, music videos, television news, and “reality” television.

What is sexual objectification? If objectification is the process of representing or treating a person like an object (a non-thinking thing that can be used however one likes), then sexual objectification is the process of representing or treating a person like a sex object, one that serves another’s sexual pleasure.

How do we know sexual objectification when we see it? Building on the work of Nussbaum and Langton, I’ve devised the Sex Object Test (SOT) to measure the presence of sexual objectification in images. I proprose that sexual objectification is present if the answer to any of the following seven questions is “yes.”

1) Does the image show only part(s) of a sexualized person’s body?
Headless women, for example, make it easy to see her as only a body by erasing the individuality communicated through faces, eyes, and eye contact:



We get the same effect when we show women from behind, with an added layer of sexual violability. American Apparel seems to be a particular fan of this approach:





2) Does the image present a sexualized person as a stand-in for an object?

The breasts of the woman in this beer ad, for example, are conflated with the cans:



Likewise, the woman in this fashion spread in Details in which a woman becomes a table upon which things are perched. She is reduced to an inanimate object, a useful tool for the assumed heterosexual male viewer:



Or sometimes objects themselves are made to look like women, like this series of sinks and urinals shaped like women’s bodies and mouths and these everyday items, like pencil sharpeners.

3) Does the image show a sexualized person as interchangeable?
Interchangeability is a common advertising theme that reinforces the idea that women, like objects, are fungible. And like objects, “more is better,” a market sentiment that erases the worth of individual women. The image below advertising Mercedes-Benz presents just part of a woman’s body (breasts) as interchangeable and additive:



This image of a set of Victoria’s Secret models, borrowed from a previous SocImages post, has a similar effect. Their hair and skin color varies slightly, but they are also presented as all of a kind:



4) Does the image affirm the idea of violating the bodily integrity of a sexualized person that can’t consent?

This ad, for example, shows an incapacitated woman in a sexualized positionwith a male protagonist holding her on a leash. It glamorizes the possibility that he has attacked and subdued her:



5) Does the image suggest that sexual availability is the defining characteristic of the person?

This ad, with the copy “now open,” sends the message that this woman is for sex. If she is open for business, then she presumably can be had by anyone.



6) Does the image show a sexualized person as a commodity (something that can be bought and sold)?

By definition, objects can be bought and sold, but some images portray women as everyday commodities. Conflating women with food is a common sub-category. As an example, Meredith Bean, Ph.D., sent in this photo of a Massive Melons “energy” drink sold in New Zealand:



In the ad below for Red Tape shoes, women are literally for sale:



7) Does the image treat a sexualized person’s body as a canvas?

In the two images below, women’s bodies are presented as a particular type of object: a canvas that is marked up or drawn upon.





——————

The damage caused by widespread female objectification in popular culture is not just theoretical. We now have over ten years of research showing that living in an objectifying society is highly toxic for girls and women, as will be described in Part 2 of this series.

[American Dream]

"The worship of money leads to a hardening of the heart. And it can lead any of us to condone, either actively or passively, the exploitation and dehumanization of ourselves and others."

---bell hooks

[American Dream]

Girls, Sex, Markets and Feminism

July 01, 2012

By Susan Ferguson
Source: New Socialist


This article could begin pretty much anywhere, describing any number of contemporary fads that work to reproduce and reinforce our deeply (hetero)sexist Western norms and behaviours. Girls Gone Wild videos. Toddlers in Tiaras. Playboy bunny-stamped snowboards and cellphone covers. Sex bracelets that signal which sex acts the (inevitably female) wearer is willing to perform. Kiddie-thongs. Thongs.

Never has the personal -- the intimately personal, that is -- been so public. And yet it remains stubbornly non-political, despite the age-old feminist urging to the contrary.

In some ways, the Western world is a female-friendlier place than it was half a century ago, when second wave feminists began fighting for everything from access to abortion and women's shelters, to maternity leave, daycares and pay equity. But today, at the very same time that young girls are encouraged to play hockey and soccer, take science and math classes, and become doctors and engineers, the scope of their more intimate lives appears to be narrowing, catapulting us all backwards to an era when men were men, and women were…? Well, women were feminized, sexualized bodies, manners and charm.

Consider, for example, Glamour magazine's "30 things every woman should have and should know by the time she's 30" recently republished by the Huffington Post. Number 11 in the "have" column reads "A set of screwdrivers, a cordless drill and a black lace bra," while listed fifth in the "know" column is "How to kiss in a way that communicates perfectly what you would and wouldn't like to happen next." And then there's Toronto's Globe and Mail, which in March devoted 1600 words to a middle-aged white guy defending the pleasure he takes in ogling women on the streets, and describing how the 20-something objects of his desire in fact get off on his leering too!

Of course such moronic and offensive commentaries rarely go unchallenged. There are still some important marginal spaces in the media-sphere for feminists and others to object, and to offer alternative visions. And sometimes unglamorous, sympathetic accounts of the personal lives of young women can even attract a substantial audience. (I'm thinking here of HBO's Girls, a much vaunted antidote to Sex In the City - although it too is about white, affluent urbanites). But these spaces can't truly compete with the gender-traditionalist, sexist imaginings and practices which - despite the highly complex, varied and often contradictory impulses characterizing actual gender relations - seem to so powerfully speak to the popular imagination.

Explaining the current forcefield of gender relations is no easy task, and well beyond the capacity of a single article on the subject. It would involve looking at evolving family structures, workplace dynamics, communication and political landscapes to name a few. It would mean seriously assessing the political retreat since the 1960s of once vibrant mass-based social movements, explaining how and why this has either isolated feminists or led to them narrowing their horizons to work within -- rather than challenge -- prevailing institutions. Leaving all these important areas aside, this article focuses instead on the social forces underlying our practices as consumers. In what follows, I simply float a few ideas about how and why the market itself was, is and continues to be a hothouse of regressive (hetero)sexism.

Living in contemporary society is an intensely private and commodified experience -- a condition that originated historically with the initial stages of capitalism. One of the things that distinguishes capitalism from earlier societies is the development and refinement of a private, domestic space -- a space in which human needs that cannot be met directly by the market are attended to either individually or through (gendered and sexist) interpersonal interactions. That is, rather than a community organizing together to feed, clothe and educate its members, under capitalism much of that work falls to isolated families. In this sense, the care for our bodies and our selves -- for what some scholars call our "social reproduction" -- is thus essentially privatized.

Bodies of course are also an abiding public concern. They are disciplined and educated at schools, in prisons, at work, and elsewhere. They can be physically trained in community sports centres, or ordered by the government to die in times of war. And public health care, welfare and education systems assume that people's well-being is at least partially a social (as opposed to individual) responsibility, although ongoing funding cuts to these services prove how precarious this actually is. But this public attention to social reproduction has developed to complement and compensate for the failures of the more fundamental principle: responsibility for one's life under capitalism rests with the private individual or household.

While it is a basically private undertaking, social reproduction requires access to the means of living (food, shelter, clothing, etc.). The market -- the space where such things are bought and sold -- has only gradually been incorporated into our personal social reproductive activities. But in the process, it has become ever more central to our lives, its tentacles reaching into increasingly personal and intimate aspects of life.

In early capitalism, household members largely furnished both their own basic necessities such as food, soap, clothing and lighting, and essential experiences (or "services") such as love, sex, child-rearing, leisure and sleep - all things that were not then so easily purchasable in the marketplace. With industrialization and urbanization came a flood of consumer goods and services, higher wages and thus greater buying power for workers, and an increasing involvement of women (mothers in particular) working in the paid workforce. All this prompted a growing reliance on store-bought items. As a result, households today produce far fewer of the goods they consume, although they remain a space where, overwhelmingly if not exclusively through the labour of women, human needs continue to be met: wives and mothers clean clothes and linens, buy and prepare food, love and care for others, pursue and fulfill sexual and other pleasures.

Still, our ability to reproduce ourselves on a daily basis now centrally revolves around commodities (things or experiences we buy). Working ever longer hours, people in the US and Canada regularly pay others to prepare their food, clean their house, mind their children, and cut their hair. Relaxing and pleasuring their bodies is now also a deeply commodified event, as the current popularity of spas, brothels, movie theatres and theme parks attests. And increasingly, we turn to the market to supplement or access what were once basic public services such as education and health care.

None of this has been inevitable, nor uncontested. There are significant and on-going moments when people struggle to preserve non-market experiences and spaces (struggles to establish and, like the Quebec student movement today, preserve and defend access to public education is one). But capitalism has an in-built tendency to constantly expand the realm of commodities -- to turn things and activities that were once free into things and activities that are bought and sold. This transfer of control over the conditions of our social reproduction from the household to the market has tremendous repercussions for the conditions under which we strive to meet our social reproductive needs.

One consequence is the intensification of poverty. Those who can't afford these goods and services have no secure right to them or to the sustenance they provide. Although the world produces far more food and other necessities than its population could ever use, the poor struggle to get by, many of them dying daily due to poor nutrition, lack of shelter and health care.

Another is the commodification of our personal lives. The more we give over the means and processes of social reproduction to the market, which produces things not to meet human needs, but to sell and make a profit, the more the care for our bodies and selves comes under distinct market-based influences. For instance, eating prepackaged food and dining out has dramatically altered our very physical beings: due in part to high-salt, high-carb diets, this generation of Canadians and Americans is heavier, more prone to diabetes and, some scientists predict, a shorter life span than earlier generations in which family members (usually wives and mothers) produced or prepared food in the home.

As the examples at the beginning of this article make clear, this creeping commodification extends to our most intimate experiences. There is, in fact, a tidy symmetry between the logic of the market and the nature of personal intimacy. They share a common currency: desire. The advertising industry spends billions of dollars researching and playing to consumers' deep-seated wishes and urges -- the very impulses that define and govern our erotic fantasies and lives. Thus, what more fitting experience to market to people than desire itself, and sexual desire in particular?

Yet, in promoting goods and services intended to fulfill sexual needs and desires, the market depersonalizes -- indeed dehumanizes -- some of the most intimate aspects of our lives. These experiences become objects of an impersonal circulation of goods and services on a profit-driven market. On one level, such commodities have no necessary attachment to individual bodies and selves, that is to human needs. As a result, they can be considered frivolous and harmless. On another level, because people buy and use them in an effort to meet their highly personal needs, they help structure and condition our understanding of our intimate selves. Just as diamond rings came to shape our understanding of romance due in part to De Beers' late-1930s marketing campaigns, today bunny logos, Brazilian waxes and Cosmo TV all contribute to shaping our expectations and experiences of sex and sexuality.

It's not hard to see how this state of affairs can provoke a nostalgic defense of the family, and calls to shield children in particular from the aggressive, corrupting, influence of the market (with more "family dinners," for example). While I'm all for pushing back against market encroachment, it's important to be clear that the commodification of our lives does not signal the sort of social or moral regression that such a pro-family position usually implies. There is nothing inherently progressive about organizing the care of our social reproduction in families, as opposed to organizing it increasingly through the market. The former takes place in a context inflected with all kinds of unacknowledged, seemingly natural, political -- usually patriarchal -- power. To escape those confines, to be able to meet our needs outside of familial relations, can be incredibly important to individuals.

Indeed, sex sells in part because the market validates and celebrates something that not only families, but society more generally, otherwise demands we repress or degrade. Our desires, our bodies, our sexualities are routinely obscured and ground down by the demands of providing for and taking care of ourselves and the next generation, as well as by the sheer effort of earning a wage and getting by in a world that values profit over need. The market-based celebration of sexuality cuts against those oppressive forces, inviting us to be playful, desiring bodies - speaking powerfully, in other words, to crucial aspects of our humanity. Commodities can thereby generate an aura of liberation, a casting-off of society's erstwhile repressive restrictions.

For this reason, some feminists embrace the hyper-sexually explicit nature of contemporary pop culture, seeing it as evidence of a burgeoning and welcomed "sex-positivity." Women finally have the space, they suggest, to acknowledge themselves as sexual beings, to affirm and define their sexuality for themselves. But this perspective seems naïve in the extreme. However important it is for people to have a space in which sex and sexuality is acknowledged and validated, the market offers an inherently limited strategy for liberation.

First, so long as a confident, positive experience of sexuality is premised on purchasing the appropriate (trendy) goods or services, those who cannot afford to pay will be excluded. In this way the market offers, at best, an individual "freedom" of self-expression (narrowly defined by what goods and services are deemed profitable at any given time). But this comes at the cost of equality and democracy.

Second, markets are indifferent to human needs. Commodities exist in order to generate profits. Comfort, fulfillment and sustenance will always be secondary (if a consideration at all). And equality, human rights and justice? Well, those things simply don't sell. Instead, markets bank on human anxiety and longing.

Finally, however sexually explicit and provocative popular culture may be, it promotes a remarkably static and limited image of intimacy and sexuality, one that draws upon and re-asserts traditional gender-typed, (hetero)sexist conventions. That's because the business strategies at work are surprisingly conservative. In stoking our desires, marketers are experts at stylizing their goods and services as risqué. But their success depends on enticing buyers without alienating them by moving too far beyond what they already know. And what consumers know is a deeply gender-divided, patriarchal culture.

Thus, while selling sex bracelets to pre-teens pushes up against certain comfort zones about promiscuity and age, it leaves other presumptions and norms -- those undergirding a (hetero)sexist sexuality -- intact. The image of nubile sexuality that the bracelets suggest doesn't challenge patriarchal conventions one iota. As a result, what appears, for better or worse, as a risky, boundary-crossing expression of sexuality, recuperates and reasserts age-old, conservative conceptions of gender, sex and sexuality. In a brilliant article skewering this sexual "counter-revolution," feminist blogger Laura Penney reminds readers that "female submission has never really been shocking." (She goes on to list various "non-standard sexual trends" that, because they cross class, age, racial and other barriers, would.)

If markets won't change things for the better, what will? To answer that, we need to ask how we might organize society so that we are not dependent upon the market or the private household for our social reproduction. For some this has meant trying to opt out of consumer society, and living in democratically organized communes. But such a strategy fails to challenge the capitalist class structure and its state, the forces that propel people toward the private families and markets in the first place.

Socialists suggest full women's liberation can only happen when all working and poor women -- and the men in their lives -- fight to win control not only of their reproductive processes, but also the way that society is organized to produce goods and services. That is, it can only happen if we get rid of capitalism and institute a system in which we collectively and democratically decide what goods and services to produce on the basis of meeting human need not profit -- even those goods and services intended to meet our most intimate needs and desires -- and what sorts of social relationships we aspire to create. While we work toward that broader goal, however, it'd be a good idea to also work together to make the personal not just public, but unapologetically political too.


Susan Ferguson is an editorial associate of New Socialist Webzine.


From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zcommunications.org/girls-se ... n-ferguson

[American Dream]

How To Celebrate the Fourth of July: Read Frederick Douglass



by Kai Wright

I’m content to let most holidays be just that—a time when you come off your daily grind and act up with the friends and family. July 4th—or, Independence Day—is a bit more complicated for me. It’s a celebration of the United States’ mythical founding story, an ahistorical account that was written to obscure the young nation’s many, many crimes against humanity. It never fails to surprise me how little Americans know of their real history, and thus how often we repeat its sins.

Today, Americans of all races hear about slavery, but haven’t the faculties to truly grasp it, or how crucial that brutality was to creating the wealth upon which this nation was built. Few schools teach that, in fact, trans-Atlantic slavery began as British capitalists stole their own countrymen’s common lands and forced the displaced into pressed labor on their ships. Or that it grew through their Irish conquest, where they repeated the formula, shipping forced labor to the Caribbean. Or that white supremacy was concocted by European capitalists who feared a multinational, multiracial coalition of the many hues of people they had forced to labor for them in deadly conditions in the Americas. When African slavery proved the most profitable way to extract labor, they just dehumanized the Africans from which they stole. Anybody who objected to this labor system was branded an outlaw, an illegal, as it were.

That’s just the beginning, of course. All that before you get to genocide of the people who already lived in the Americas, systemic rape as a tool for controlling your work force, eugenics and attempts at breeding laborers, child exploitation—on and on in an effort to amass wealth for a few at the expense of the many. Don’t get me wrong, I still fire up my grill and crank up the summer jams and pop open one too many bottles of wine every Fourth. But I always start the weekend by reading Frederick Douglass’ 1852 speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”

Douglass stands as one of many reminders of another history, one of which I can be more proud. From capitalism’s gruesome start, people have stood and fought its crimes. Pressed sailors in the slave-trade triangle mutinied and became pirates. Africans escaped plantations and joined with Native Americans to create outlawed maroon communities. African organizers on plantations carefully plotted and boldly executed long-shot revolutions. Anti-slavery radicals created underground networks to steal African Americans across slavery’s borders and support them in creating new, free lives. And abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic stood in the town square to tell the truth about this unjust, criminal economy to anyone who would listen.

Douglass was perhaps the most articulate among them. And his 1852 Independence Day address is recognized by many as among his greatest bits of oratory. In it, you see the foundations of his political philosophy. On one hand, he ridicules the hypocrisy of the U.S.’s proud celebration of liberty, a freedom that exists only through the oppression of millions of other people. His words are biting:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.

On the other hand, Douglass explains that America’s language of liberty in fact describes what a just nation ought to look like. The nation’s founding fathers had the right idea, Douglass says, “Oppression makes a wise man mad. Your fathers were wise men.” Problem was, those ideas had not made it into practice, and all the festive celebration of liberty as a matter of history was being used to obscure enslavement of the present. The point remains relevant today.

So, today, I’ll once again kick off my Fourth of July weekend by reading Douglass’ speech. I’ve pasted a lengthy excerpt below (warning: it’s a scan and there are surely many typos). It’s a long speech—this was, after all, 1852; folks had a slightly longer attention span. But go sit in the sun someplace, eat or drink something indulgent and take in some true history—then go live and love with your people all weekend.

Continues at: http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/07/ ... glass.html

[American Dream]

When I dare to be powerful-to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.

— Audre Lorde

[American Dream]

We use our criminal justice system to label people of color ‘criminals’ and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

--Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

http://libcom.org/library/not-your-mom’s-trans-101-asher

Not Your Mom’s Trans 101 - Asher

There is a huge problem with the way that people are taught about gender in this society. Children are indoctrinated early to believe that there are two sexes, corresponding with two genders, which are both immutable and non-voluntary and completely beyond our control. This worldview is called the gender binary, and it has no room in it for us.

Trying to teach a new perspective to the victims of this extremely aggressive brainwashing can be daunting. In fact, the task can seem downright impossible. The temptation, therefore, is to “dumb things down” for the benefit of a cisgender audience. This situation has given rise to a set of oversimplifications collectively known as “Trans 101.” These rather absurd tropes, such as “blank trapped in a blank’s body” cause confusion among even well-meaning cis folks, feed internalized transphobia among us trans people, and provide endless straw-man fodder for transphobic ‘radical feminists,’ entitled cisgender academics, and other bigots.

Near the beginning of my transition, I myself taught “Trans 101” this way. Because I didn’t know any better. Because I had been taught to think of myself in terms of these same useless tropes, as an “FTM,” as a “female man,” as somebody who was “changing sexes.” Eventually, through a lot of intense discussions and a lot of tough love from people who were more knowledgeable, more radical, and more politically sophisticated than myself, I came to see things very differently.

I haven’t tried to teach Trans 101 since extracting my head from my rectum. But I think the time has come for me to tackle the problem of explaining and defining what it means to be transgender without resorting to cissexist language. It strikes me as I contemplate this task that Trans 101 is generally not only dumbed-down, but also declawed. There are truths that I must speak here that are incredibly threatening to a cissupremacist worldview, that attack its very foundations. But I for one am willing to do that. I am not here to make cis people comfortable or to reassure them that they are still the center of the gendered universe. In fact, I am totally fine with doing the opposite.

Without further ado, let’s begin.

Gender Assigned at Birth

Let’s start at the beginning. A baby is born. The doctor says “It’s a boy” or “It’s a girl” based on the appearance of the child’s genitals. If the genitalia cannot be easily categorized according to binary standards– that is, if the child is intersex– the doctor makes a decision. Surgery is then generally performed on the unconsenting infant to render its body more socially acceptable.

Whether the baby is intersex or not, the child is then raised as whatever arbitrary gender the doctor saw fit to assign.

“Cisgender” is the term for people who have no issue with the gender that they were assigned at birth. For whatever reason, they are able to live somewhat comfortably within the gender in which they have been cast. No one really knows why so many people are capable of fitting into such arbitrary categories.

Transgender people cannot accept our assigned genders. We know ourselves to be something different than what we were told to be. We do not see the random gender scripts we were given by society as relevant to us. We know that there is a different way, a way of autonomy, self-creation, and self-definition, and that this is the way we must follow, because we can never be happy with the parameters that have been mandated for our behavior and our bodies.

The Binary

All cis people and many trans people are binary-identified. Given the options of “man” or “woman,” we who are binary-identified are able to be comfortable with one, even if it is the opposite of what we were assigned. For example, I am a man who was assigned to live as a woman, therefore I am a trans man. My father is a man who was assigned to live as a man, therefore he is a cis man. Both of us are binary identified, both men, even though he is cis and I am trans.

It is a mystery why so many people are comfortable being categorized in just one of two ways. Just as nobody knows why there are so many cis people, nobody knows why there are so many binary identified folks.

But there are many trans people who are neither male nor female. They cannot be categorized as “either/or.” These people may use terms for themselves like genderqueer, androgynous, agender, or neutrois. They often use gender-neutral pronouns such as “ze/hir/hirs” or “they/them/their/theirs.” They can be both male and female, or none of the above, multi-gender, genderless, or something else completely.

In typical trans 101 discussions, right now I would probably be explaining to you that “gender is a spectrum” and drawing a cute little line graph labeled “m” at one end and “f” at the other. But this would be fallacious, as well as total bullshit. Gender is not a line, it is a huge three-dimensional space too big to be bounded by the concepts of “male” and “female.” Being trans is not always about falling “in between” binary genders, and as often as not, it’s about being something too expansive for those ideas to have meaning at all.

Self Identification

The language of self-identification is often used to describe trans people. “George identifies as a man.” “I respect Judy’s identification as a woman.” “Chris just told me that ze identifies as ‘genderqueer.’ Oh dear, that pronoun is going to take some getting used to.” An organization I know, in an effort to be trans friendly, as posted little signs on their bathroom doors, underneath the “MENS” and “WOMENS” signs that we know so well, saying “Self-identified men welcome” and “Self-identified women welcome” and “please be respectful of diversity.”

This co-opting of the language of self-identification is not only condescending, it completely missed the point.

Cis people seem to think that self-identification is only for trans folks. They don’t have to “identify” as men and women– they just ARE! Their gender isn’t “self-identified,” it’s “self-evident!”

What they fail to understand is that self identification is the only meaningful way to determine gender. Any other method is wholly dependent upon what that doctor said way back when we were still wrinkly, writhing, screaming newborn messes, completely unformed as individuals and without any identity at all to speak of, too bloody and scrunchy-faced to even be called cute. The fact is that cis people self-identify too– they just happen to agree with what the doctor said all those years ago. Anybody who answers the question of “are you a man?” or “are you a woman?” with “yes” has just self-identified.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “but what about bodies? What about genitals? What about chromosomes? What about hormones? What about SEX? Doesn’t that have any bearing on gender?”

Be patient, my darlings. I’ll get to that in just a moment.

Bodies

Almost every Trans 101 will contain the truism “Sex is between your legs, gender is between your ears.”

Gag.

Or they may say “Sex is physical, gender is socially constructed.”

This simply isn’t true.

Sex is no more an immutable binary than is gender. There are intersex people who are born with non-binary genitalia, as I have already mentioned. There are people with hormonal anomalies. In fact, hormone levels vary wildly within the categories of cis male and cis female. Chromosomes, too, vary. If you thought “XX” and “XY” were the only two possible combinations, you have some serious googling to do. In addition to variations like XXY, XXYY, or X, sometimes cis people find out that they are genetically the “opposite” of what they though they were– that is, a ‘typical’ cis man can be XX, a ‘normal’ cis woman can be XY.

The fact is that the concept of binary sex is based on the fallacious idea that multiple sex characteristics are immutable and must always go together, when in fact many of them can be changed, many erased, and many appear independently in different combinations. “Female” in sex binary terms means having breasts, having a vagina, having a womb, not having a lot of body hair, having a high-pitched voice, having lots of estrogen, having a period, having XX chromosomes. “Male” means having a penis, not having breasts, producing sperm, having body hair, having a deep voice, having lots of testosterone, having XY chromosomes. Yet it is possible to isolate, alter, and remove many of these traits. Many of these traits do not always appear together, and before puberty and after menopause, many of them do not apply.

And what about women who get hysterectomies? Or who have had mastectomies for reasons related to breast cancer? Are they not women?

What about a soldier whose dick gets blown off by a mine? Is he not a man?

The fallacies of binding identity to bodies, which are fragile, changeable things, subject to injury, mutilation, maiming, decay and ultimate destruction, should by now be clear.

Sex is as much a social construct as gender, as much subject to self identification, and besides all that, quite easy to modify. Surgical and hormonal techniques are only becoming more sophisticated. If there ever was a need to consider biology destiny, that time is surely past.

The entire concept of “sex” is simply a way of attaching something social– gender– to bodies. This being the case, I believe the most sensible way to look at the question of sex now is this: a male body is a body belonging to a male– that is, someone who identifies as male. A female body is a body belonging to a female– that is, someone who identifies as female. Genderqueer bodies belong to folks who are genderqueer, androgynous bodies belong to androgynes, and so forth, and so on.

This is why I question the value of phrases like “man in a woman’s body” or “male to female.” Who is to say we ever were the “opposite sex?” Personally I will never again describe myself as “born female.” I was born a trans male and my years of confusion were due to being forcefully and repeatedly told that I was something else. This body is not a woman’s. It is mine. Neither am I trapped in it.

None of what I say here is to minimize the necessity of surgery. Many trans people do experience body dysphoria. Many of us do seek hormones, surgery, and other body modifications. But the point is that, while such modifications may be necessary for our peace of mind, they are not necessary to make us “real men” or “real women” or “real” whatevers. We’re plenty real right now, thank you.

Oppression

This brings us, I think, the most important topic of all, and the topic which is most commonly left out of any Trans 101: transphobia and cissexism and how to avoid them.

“Cissexism” can be defined as the system of oppression which considers cis people superior to trans people. Cissexism is believing that it is “natural” to be cis, that being trans is aberrant. Cissexism is holding the genders of trans people to more intense scrutiny than the genders of cis people. Cissexism is defining beauty and attractiveness based on how cis people look. Cissexism is prioritizing cis people’s comfort over trans people’s ability to survive. Cissexism is believing that cis people have more right to have jobs, go to school, date and have sex, make decisions about their bodies, wear the clothes they want, or use public restrooms than trans people do.

Transphobia is irrational fear and hatred of trans people. Transphobia is Silence Of The Lambs. Transphobia is referring to transgender surgery as self-mutilation. Transphobia is believing that trans people habitually “trick” or “fool” others into having sex with us. Transphobia is believing that we are out to rob you of your hetero-or-homosexuality. Transphobia is trans people being stared at, insulted, harassed, attacked, beaten, raped, and murdered for simply existing.

If you want to be a good ally, you need to start taking cissexism and transphobia seriously right now. That means getting our goddamn pronouns right and not expecting a cookie for it. That means learning our names. That means not asking invasive questions or telling us how well we “pass.” (Passing generally means “looking cis.” Not all of us want to look like you, thank you very much.) That means deleting the words “tranny” and “shemale” from your vocabulary. That means understanding the immense privilege you have in your legally recognized, socially approved, medically assigned gender.

That means realizing that this is just the beginning. and that you have a lot to learn. That means realizing that it would be intrusive and importunate to ask the nearest trans person to explain it all to you, as if they didn’t have better things to do. That means hitting the internet and doing all that you can to educate yourself. And once you’ve done all that, maybe you can call yourself an ally, that is, if you’re still genuinely willing to join us in the hard work of making the world a less shitty place to be trans.

This will be a work in progress. I expect to receive a lot of commentary on this piece. I expect that it will be edited and possibly revised almost beyond recognition. I am OK with that. As always, there is more work to do. Trans 101 is a huge deal. Revising the way that it is discussed and taught is not a task for just one person. It’s something the entire community must take on.

This is only a first step. But I still hope we learned something today.

[American Dream]

MAY BE TRIGGERING!

http://thatenergyfromthemoon.tumblr.com/page/17

[youth part 1: an homage to my father]

i never understood how your “lessons” lied in your fists
or your 4-inch thick leather belt that held up your repressive workpants
stained with the blood of innocent black and brown youth
i never understood the array of insults
or how they were supposed to show you cared
i never understood how rolling eyes warranted bashing my head against the wall
or having a secret boyfriend was equal to a choke hold until i blacked out
i never understood how verbally degrading me in every way possible was supposed to make me a stronger womyn…fatass, ugly, slut, whore, stupid, faggot
or how the spontaneous violent attacks were supposed to teach me how to defend myself
creeping in the shadows of the hallway so i could never see you coming
i never understood how you were always enough for her but she was never enough for you
or the audacity it takes to have a lover drop you off in front of our home
i never understood why i was the scapegoat of your anger simply because you never wished to have a daughter
i never understood why she always told me to just let it go
or why my brother hid in his room pretending he didn’t hear the monotonous yelling followed by vigorous slaps
or how this was supposed to be how you showed your love
cuz you had a rough childhood
and were always there financially
understanding you was never something i swallowed
instead rage grew in the pit of my stomach with putrid hatred pouring out of my being every time you came home
and when i was big enough to fight back
i did so with all the pent-up aggression 17 years of abuse perpetuated
but now, no longer a helpless little girl
but a strong womyn
i transformed that rage into a part of the fire that propels me forward
and keeps me going
keeps me struggling
keeps me seeking liberation

-moon ☭


[youth part 2: a dedication to my mother]

throughout my childhood you’ve always said “never be dependent upon a man in any way, shape or form
cause you’d be surprised as to what they are capable of…”
oh how i yearn for you to see the contradiction embedded within your words and your life
work all day
children all night
you are a warrior and don’t even know it
making sure there was always food to eat
always clothes to wear
and a safe place to sleep
always preparing his dinner before your own
making sure his work clothes were washed and ironed on time
only making decisions when he wasn’t around
ignoring the insults
turning a blind eye to the lipstick stains-shades of which you did not wear
enduring the constant demands
and following them silently
it broke my heart every time i heard you sobbing in your bed
on the nights he “worked late”
or raised a threatening hand
or kept count of every calorie you consumed
and i hoped and waited for the day we would leave
and start a new life
a life without him
yet that day never came
twenty-one years later i know it will never come
for society has conditioned you to believe this is the way of love
but still
i see the rage growing in your eyes
on those occasions when you refused to make him dinner
because he carried the scent of another
or when, exhausted, you told him if he wanted a cleaner house to grab the broom
or when you jumped in-between our battling bodies
rescuing me from the relentless blows
it was at these times when i felt most proud to call you my mother
it was these moments, of what i know now,
to be the growing embryonic cells
of fierce feminist resistance

-moon ♀

[American Dream]

http://shesamarxist.tumblr.com/post/348 ... -all-about

Notes/Quotes Taken From bell hooks’ Book: All About Love




Love

A combination of care, commitment, trust, knowledge responsibility, respect.
Requires the courage to take risks
Is an action not a feeling
cannot exist without justice
abuse and neglect cannot exist with love
requires a willingness to accept criticism & a capacity to reflect on behavior and change without losing dignity and authority
truth, not lies, justice requires honesty.

The dance of deception by Harriet Lerner: Women taught by sexist socialization to pretend and manipulate and lie as a way to please. This constant pretense and lying alienate women from their real feelings.

Estrangement from feelings makes it easier to lie because one is in a trance state utilizing survival strategies. The inability to connect with others carries with it an inability to assume responsibility for causing pain. *WOWW

Lies: When one lies and presents a false self, the terrible price is the capacity to give and receive love. Trust is the foundation of intimacy.

Justice between people is the most important connection two people can have. Loving justice for themselves and for others enables men to break the chokehold of patriarchal masculinity.

Where the will to power is strong love will be lacking

Colonization: A process where one adopts patriarchal behavior, out of survival or necessity.

[American Dream]

http://chaka85.wordpress.com/2012/07/04 ... -and-well/

Fourth of July and Gentrification:
All indications that Colonization is alive and well



Womyn of the Cuban revolution

What does Fourth of July mean to me, a working-class queer mixed Black revolutionary indigenous communist womyn? Not a whole lot. More bourgeois lies manifested into rituals of blind worship of this system. They inoculate us with patriotism so that we do not question or rebel. These types of celebrations distract people from the truth.

What does come to mind when I think of this bourgeois holiday is land. That’s what it is all about, historically and presently. The stealing of it to develop a foreign system that harms, that waste, that is unnecessary. Land. And the coming struggles to reclaim it and ourselves. Malcolm X very directly and eloquently breaks this down in his important speech Message to the Grassroots given October 10, 1963. Within the speech he attempts to define what revolution is and what it would take to achieve it and full liberation for black people. By defining the basis and purpose of revolution he then critiques the black struggle for failing to represent these revolutionary politics. Reformist politics versus revolutionary politics; negro revolution versus black revolution. He draws from many historical examples of revolutionary struggles around the world, and places them all within the context of land,

“Look at the American Revolution in 1776. That revolution was for what? For land. Why did they want land? Independence. How was it carried out? Bloodshed. Number one, it was based on land, the basis of independence. And the only way they could get it was bloodshed. The French Revolution —— what was it based on? The land—less against the landlord. What was it for? Land. How did they get it? Bloodshed. Was no love lost; was no compromise; was no negotiation. I’m telling you, you don’t know what a revolution is. ’Cause when you find out what it is, you’ll get back in the alley; you’ll get out of the way. The Russian Revolution —— what was it based on? Land. The land—less against the landlord. How did they bring it about? Bloodshed. You haven’t got a revolution that doesn’t involve bloodshed… Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality.”


Malcolm in Egypt

Land is freedom. Under the current system only those with economic privilege have access to it, and therefore the freedom to move around. Capitalism, and its exploitative system of private property, was developed through European conquest of land, and the violent removal of people from it. Indigenous people everywhere were turned into slaves, while European peasants were proletarianized. A racialized and gendered caste system within the division of labor was created so that the people would remain divided from each other, thus weakening any potential rebellion to Europe’s colonial plans. I am always disturbed by the violent and oppressive history of Europe. Indigenous/non-European people, historically, have not treated each other with the same type of harm. I am not saying that everything was a peaceful utopia. Local tribes in the America’s and Africa were very protective over resources and land, and confronted other tribes if they became a threat to their territory. However, these actions were fueled out of the reproduction and preservation of their communities, not at the expense of them. Africans were not going around and completely annihilating other civilizations, in the manner that Europe did to the world. Their capital and technological innovations (fire power) gave them freedom and power in their movement to access the world, and rebuild it in their own selfish image so that it may support a ‘white’ patriarchal global power. This was no easy task though. The people rebelled. There have been revolutions, as Malcolm X points out above. But the global tyranny of Capital is still in place, although slowly crumbling, due to the conscious actions of the people.

As the world transitioned into the new historical epoch of capitalism, the terrain and way of living also dramatically shifted. Concrete paved over earth. Factories are built to produce commodities that the people are manipulated into consuming. New housing is constructed around factories to support the workers, who produce products they do not own for the profit of the owners. No longer are we to live peacefully with the land. People are violently removed from it and then crowded into urban centers to support this new industrialized way of living. The new cities reflect the divisions of power and privilege within society. People of color, who historically have been enslaved and then proletarianized, are lower within the division of labor and therefore are paid less and live within the poorest conditions. The poorest conditions are also heavily policed, because the pigs are here to protect the rich and their property. This brings us back again to the root of our oppression and exploitation: the fundamentally unequal system of private property.


The first people of these lands!

This legacy of European conquest has given white people, people of European descent, centuries of privilege and more total power within society. They are represented strongly within the global ruling class, because they have had more access to capital historically. Even among the working-class they are the highest paid and always prioritized for work. Their quality of life, even amongst the exploited is better. They have more material privilege to move and access space, due to this legacy of privilege. Oakland is a prime example of this legacy of colonization. The Ohlone people originally inhabited the land until the Spanish violently displaced them in the 18th and 19th centuries. This was the beginning of the process of industrialization, which transformed Oakland into a booming port city and trade hub. During World War II working-class people in general, and black people in particular, migrated out of the rural south looking for employment in the new urban centers. Many settled in Oakland, due to the concentration of industries. After the war many factories closed down and jobs became scarce, but the new black residents decided to make Oakland home. This caused the racist and affluent whites to leave the city relocating to Berkeley, Albany and El Cerrito in the North and San Leandro, Hayward, Castro Valley and Fremont in the East. All areas that still carry racial and economic privilege and divisions. This was called ‘white flight’ and it was a part of a nationwide trend, where white people had, and continue to have, fear and anxiety about living among poor black and brown people, due to their racist conditioning. They flee to the suburbs, because they have the material privilege to do so. Oakland transformed into a ‘black’ city, and with this transformation came the escalation of police force within the city. Starting in the late 1940’s the Oakland Police Department began to recruit fascist officers from the south to come and occupy neighborhoods and discipline the rising black population. The southern KKK was an excellent model for OPD, and I see and feel these origins when I think of Alan Blueford, Raheim Brown, Oscar Grant, all black, all unarmed, all murdered by OPD fascists with no response from the local government.


Youth at a Oscar Grant protest a few years ago

The continual violence and exploitation of working black and brown people within Oakland exists alongside rapid efforts by the local bourgeoisie to gentrify the city to compete with the opulence and privilege of SF. I am reminded of this when I look at the changing faces and spaces of Oakland and the harm, materially and spiritually, that gentrification is causing. Rising unemployment and the violent closing of schools, day cares, free health clinics, and social services in general, are disproportionately effecting working people and families of color, while there is steady flow of privileged white people moving into the space with such ease and access. I feel the weight of history and colonization resting on my shoulders, when I observe the changes within the city I live in. Oakland has been deemed the ‘cool’ place to visit by bourgeois travel sources and alternative press. This combined with the cheaper prices, in comparison to SF, has resulted in droves of white people moving into the city. All kinds of white people. Affluent white people looking to make money and start families as well as working class whites and artist, who cannot afford the gentrifying prices of SF anymore. This, of course, is driving up the prices within Oakland, which is effectively pushing people of color out or deeper into the hood. The new white residents and their pocketbooks are welcomed into the city with new spaces to take up, and no awareness of the land they are on and the history of colonization and racial tension within the city. For white people, affluent whites in particular, the world is their playground and they can come and go as they please, without any understanding of the consequences of their movement and actions. Privilege truly blinds.

The Oakland first Friday Art Murmur reflects the racialized class tension within the city as a result of gentrification. The murmur consists of a free art walk, where the public can check out local artists at the many exhibitions occurring at galleries around downtown Oakland. According the Murmur website,

“The mission of the Oakland Art Murmur is to support art and cultural venues that are dedicated to increasing popular awareness of and participation in the arts of Oakland.”

In theory it is an excellent event featured in a city that carries important cultural and political history. As an artist I was excited to learn about the Murmur upon moving to Oakland. It reminded me of a similar event in Sacramento called Second Saturday Art Walk, where I had my first gallery show featuring paintings and drawings at the tender age of 19. However, when I first attended the Art Murmur I was immediately disappointed with what I saw, which was a whole bunch of drunken white people stumbling around the street in front of police cars with pigs doing nothing. If black and brown people were running around in the streets with bottles in hands, the cops would call it a gang and guns and handcuffs would be drawn. My students in East Oakland can barely walk through their neighborhoods without pigs hassling their movement. This is the freedom that comes with privilege. The galleries were also full of largely white artists, white aesthetics and white rituals. I felt alienated and angered. Art Murmur had become an event to help support and facilitate the new white population moving into Oakland. It also reminded me of the importance of creating our own spaces and taking space back. This is a struggle always.

Gentrification has many layers that support the racial and class privilege within our society. Working-class white kids moving into the hood are a part of the tension, because of the privilege given to them due to their skin, but they are not at the root of the problem. In the words of Malcolm, land is the source; private property. It is the property owners, capitalists and landlords, who are at the root of gentrification. They are able to control the housing that sits on this stolen land, and therefore get to regulate the populations within the neighborhoods. White people are prioritized as tenants, just like in jobs, because they have more material privilege, and the world is not conditioned to fear them in the same manner as black people. Even within working class black neighborhoods. I witnessed this when I was waiting to look at an apartment a year ago in downtown/west Oakland. The apartment owner was an older white womyn. When I got to the apartment I saw she was in the middle of showing it to some other people so I looked around by myself while waiting. After a few minutes a young black couple came in to look at the place. As soon as the landlord saw them she told them the place had already been rented. After they walked out she turned to the women she was showing the place to and said ‘oh no they are the bad kind. Baggy jeans and white shirts that’s how you know.’ I walked out disgusted by her and the jim crow system still in full effect.

What is happening in Oakland and cities all across the world are new forms of colonization. It is Capitalism’s nature to continually look for new ways to expand and exploit all in the sake of profit. Primitive accumulation of capital is an ongoing process, where people of color historically and presently have been on the colonized side of the equation, while white people have used their privilege and power to colonize and own all the wealth within the world for themselves. This power is maintained through stripping us of ours; forcing us to live and work in poverty. Creating a stratified working-class, where we are pitted against each other for survival.

So what does fourth of July mean to me? Bloodshed and centuries of colonization that have disconnected us from ourselves and each other beginning with the stealing of land and the removal of the people indigenous to it. History that is ongoing with the gentrification of our cities. I am also reminded of the struggles, historically and presently, that have been waged to resist colonization. The worldwide revolutions that Malcolm speaks so boldly of. Today I will engage in rituals that keep that history alive in our consciousness so that we may be inspired to direct it through conscious actions for freedom.

Fuck fourth of July. All power to the people!

[American Dream]