Sag mir wo die Blumen sind: “Vienna to Weimar” and Songs of Resistance

March 25, 2013 By Leave a Comment
Karen Kohler (l) and K.T. Sullivan, courtesy of Ms. Kohler's website. (http://www.karenkohler.com)

As my semester ramps up and my workload is beset by ever more fascinating layers of tedious yet exciting social scientific labours, I realised that I might do well to share with you some older essays of mine; reduce, reuse, recycle, I grew up with Captain Planet, baby. What follows here is a review of a cabaret show that I wrote for my German Thought & Culture class back in October 2012. I loved the show and I wanted to share my reflections on it with you all, partially since my last essay on Nuclear Unicorn broached the subject of 'bridge building' across identities and experiences. This fits with that rather serendipitously  I think. I hope you enjoy, there may be more of these to come; I like to write beyond discretely trans issues and German history is actually a bit of a hobby of mine. *** An intimate theatre arrayed much like a speakeasy, a crowd of chatter, wooden colonnades framing a petite proscenium—all washed down with aromatic whiskey; it was the carefree … [Read more...]

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What I Would Say if I Weren’t Afraid: “Lean In” Reviewed

March 19, 2013 By 1 Comment
lean-in-by-sheryl-sandberg_original

A good friend of mine captured a certain zeitgeist best when she said that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s new book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead was “feminism on one limo a day.” Considering Sandberg’s position as a white cis het billionaire at the pinnacle of neoliberal society, the caricature seemed both inevitable and apt. What could she possibly have to say about American women, gender in the workplace, and feminism itself that wouldn’t be both horribly inaccurate at best and monstrously inaccurate at worst? Surely this book, billed as a self-help guide to help businesswomen succeed through confidence and force of will (‘women are holding themselves back’ was an oft heard refrain in Sandberg’s elevator speech about Lean In), would be another individualist nightmare that would be yet another mess for academics and real feminists to clean up as best we could.I purchased it to keep up with the debate and because Lean In had potentially huge implications … [Read more...]

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The Academic Superheroine: A Review of “My So-Called Secret Identity”

February 19, 2013 By 1 Comment
headshots_4square

My So Called Secret Identity, the product of writer Will Brooker and artists Sarah Zaidan and Susan Shore, is a comic that seems to blossom out of the implied fissures left by the mainstream comic genre. While its protagonist, Catherine Abigail Daniels, is remarkable for being a non-sexualised star who presents an image of womanhood rarely seen in comic books, she is no less interesting for the fact that she is one of the “little people” in her superheroic city. The big superheroes and villains of Gloria City would be the focus of any other comic; here they are relegated to the background, flying far above the very richly detailed urban world that Cat lives in. “Gloria City is a theater where these big figures fight, posture, pose and self-promote. And if you're not in a costume and a mask, you're just little people,” as the promotional summary says. The story is set to tell the tale of Cat’s intervention into that theatrical landscape, and how she becomes a costumed … [Read more...]

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All Things to All People: Some Brief Notes on Solidarity and Free Speech

January 15, 2013 By 1 Comment
Freedom of Speech

If transgender people have a “superpower” it is our remarkable ability to stand for anything:  living, breathing “floating signifiers.” Our meaning d’jour is, for some on Fleet Street, “a professionally offended, Left wing lobby group” that is now the latest “post-Leveson” threat to free speech and a free press. Meanwhile, on the opposite side of things—fleeting as these meanings are, such that we can even speak of stable oppositions—Suzanne Moore and Julie Burchill had accused trans people of dividing and distracting the Left from its “important” goals and its “true” cause. If this seems exasperating and contradictory, you ain’t seen nothing yet, as they say. But for now, it is enough to deal with these two absurdities one at a time and bring a bit of light to a decidedly un-illuminating heat. Free Speech: From Posturing to Substance Toby Young and all the other vacuous, fly-by-night defenders of “free speech” filch lovely rhetoric that … [Read more...]

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Unguarded and Poorly Observed: A Response to Julie Burchill

January 13, 2013 By 24 Comments
Grauniad Offices; photo by Bryantbob.

It is altogether fitting that on a day when my own father yelled at me for being a feminist, and got angry at me for introducing my brother to novels by women, about women, that I should come across Julie Burchill raging against “shemales” in the Guardian. It was very much in the spirit of an evening where I was told to my face that I’d do more good for feminism if I’d “been a man” and not a woman; it was a day where I had to listen to a man witheringly declaim literature about “women’s stuff,” and a day where I was attacked for my anger and verve in defending our right to write and speak as women. So in that spirit, I shall continue to write, and to speak. I shall continue to write in spite of having been threatened with rape, in spite of having been told that I’m a “shemale feminazi with too much sand in her fake vagina,” in spite of having been called every misogynist, transmisogynist, and transphobic slur in the book many times over, and in spite of … [Read more...]

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My Transsexual Menace: A Response to Riki Wilchins

December 22, 2012 By 12 Comments
dinosaur_t_rex_0

If I were to give a measured reaction to Riki Wilchins now infamous "Transgender Dinosaurs" editorial in The Advocate, it would amount to this: it is yet another example of hierarchal inversion where we assign a moral-political value to genders and then exile the ones we disapprove of. The kind of visibility Wilchins writes about is based on a trendy ethic that suggests if you aren't visibly out of the mainstream, then you're The Man, and part of The Problem. This, however, neglects the fact that 'standing out' in that way carried unacceptable risks for most trans women, historically. It also ignores, from a moral perspective, that if we attach moral value only to accoutrement—or suggest that the latter is indispensable to moral behaviour—then we are creating an exclusionary, even bankrupt political ethic that is based simply on what is fashionable, not what is politically necessary. We begin with this quote which, in a way, neatly sums up everything that is wrong with … [Read more...]

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Belated Nuclear Unicorn Presidential Endorsement

November 9, 2012 By 2 Comments
Proud to Vote

I haven't written much about mainstream politics here since that's done to death in a variety of outlets all over the place-- from private blogs to every news agency the world over, the US Presidential election has enough people saying almost everything under the sun about it. But a few nights ago I was moved to comment on the matter via Facebook; at length. I felt I'd be remiss if I did not, with some editing and additions, republish those thoughts since they speak to an often ignored debate on electoral politics. On the political left there is intense discussion about the value of the presidency and voting, and whether radical change can truly come through morally compromised candidates. What follows is a qualified discussion of the stakes, and why I stuck with this president. The first section was composed on election night. The second was composed early the next morning.   Why I Voted for President Obama My choice this year should surprise no one. The reasons should be … [Read more...]

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A Troublesome Occurrence: Postmodern Investments in Trans Women

August 9, 2012 By 3 Comments

[11:59] john: so u r a natural woman? [12:00] sarahlizzy: Like the song? [12:00] sarahlizzy: Or do you mean, do I occur in the universe? [12:00] sarahlizzy: Because I like to think so. ~Activist Sarah Brown having a bit of fun with a "tranny chaser"   As a trans woman, one sees herself reflected in academic texts as if peering into a cursed mirror; the woman, if she is allowed to be called such at all, stares back with a postmodern face. It is a thought that has struck me as I have made my rounds through journal articles and discussions about trans women—written by or conducted by cisgender people, and occasionally by trans-masculine folks—when I am left wondering where precisely I am meant to stand in this increasingly fragmented movement of ours. What seems to arrest the academic luminaries most concerned with transgender people are questions of identity and transgression, of political meaning neatly cleaved from political reality. In characteristically … [Read more...]

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“It’s Just a Game”—The Discursive Construction of the Virtual

June 17, 2012 By 3 Comments
Visual metaphors! M.C. Esher! Giant ants! This picture has it all! (Giant ants-- at least I like to pretend they're huge-- walking around a wire-mesh mobius strip).

It’s been quite a while since I updated here. I’ve been exceedingly busy working on a research project in my sociology department and with some of my other commitments as well as a few personal problems I had to overcome. But, I'm back, and I thought that in the wake of Anita Sarkeesian’s struggle with a cavalcade of trolls over her proposed webseries it’s worth digging up a recent piece of writing I submitted as a final paper in one of my classes (Gender and Geography). This paper sought to chart out the geographic dimensions of cyberspace, particularly gamer subculture, through the lens of “the space of exception”. I’ve excerpted a part of the paper that I think is quite relevant to what had just transpired with Feminist Frequency. In a section entitled “It’s Just a Game” I describe how the “unreal” nature often imputed to gaming space gives licence to abuse that would be intolerable outside of it. This “unreality,” I argue, is on the flip-side of a … [Read more...]

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Immoral Women: Why We Need More of Them

March 4, 2012 By 2 Comments
"Do not brand me a tyrant!" What I also find interesting about some of these characters is that they are portrayed as being older-- lines of middle age are visible on Meredith's face, for example, and Kreia is older still. It's a positive image for older women, to say the very least.

This article is due to be published on Border House this coming Tuesday. In case its raging nerdular nerdence doesn't give it away, it's about video games specifically. Enjoy! One of the most irksome things I hear when I make arguments for ‘good/positive portrayals’ of characters from traditionally marginalised backgrounds is that my interlocutors immediately assume I’m calling for portrayals of moral paragons. They seem to think I’m saying “if you write a gay male character, he must be the most righteous dude ever.” In a word, no. That’s what today’s article is about, particularly with regards to women characters. The reality of the situation is that the portrayal of women as pure, stainless alabaster icons of virtue is a huge problem that arises from cultural stereotypes of women. The notion that women are inherently more virtuous, kinder, and so on is part of the limiting and fetishising pedestalisation that serves to fence us off from being thought of … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Feminist Theory and Criticism, Gaming Tagged With: , ,
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