Month: July 2010

Lost in Trans-lation: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Part III

Katherine Alejandra Cross1 Comment

The early chapters of Angela Davis’s Women, Race, and Class were palpably powerful and forthright in their analysis of black women’s enslavement and empowerment in 19th Century America. These twin, interwoven narratives tell a story whose importance demands one’s attention. For my own part her vivid descriptions of the horrors visited on black women in the institution of slavery caused me to pause in my reading, staring at the page before finally closing my eyes for a moment, offering some feeble form of remembrance for the women whose stories she brought to life. They were not just passive recipients of abuse, however, but active agents in their liberation. Brave resistance seemed to meet, blow for blow, every whip, cruel word, sexual advance, balled fist or backbreaking labour that these women’s masters could bring to bear or muster.

In this lies the point of Professor Davis’  narrative. This point is twofold: one, it is meant to elucidate on the gendered realities facing black women in the institution of slavery, and two it is meant to show that black women are best understood as oppressed but also as very active in resisting that oppression (which is why she spares no harsh words in criticising Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin for its portrayal of a passive black female slave who was somehow oblivious to slavery’s horrors until her masters threatened to take her children away). The next few chapters expand on her analysis of  that resistance from multiple angles. She looks at the early participation of black women in the broader struggle for women’s rights, how black women problematised a universalist concept of womanhood early on, and how some radical white women saw the struggle against racism as one with the struggle against sexism.

The crucial realisation for me was that in her lengthy narrative, suffused with many compelling excerpts from primary source material and personal testimony from men and women of the time, was a very different story about the abolitionist movement and the fight for women’s rights than what I had been taught growing up. She immediately takes a torch to the idea that the women’s movement only began at Seneca Falls and demonstrates quite convincingly that the foundations of feminism had deeper roots than even that. Many American students know Susan B. Anthony, and a smaller but still significant number will have heard the name Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Yet not even Microsoft Word recognises the names of Sarah and Angelina Grimke, two radical white women who were literally bullied and forced into an all too premature retirement from their forceful oratory that spoke passionately for the liberation of blacks as well as women in America. Few people would associate Frederick Douglass with the women’s rights movement, despite the pivotal, almost keystone-like role he played in the suffrage movement’s heady early days. His article “Why I Became a Women’s Rights Man” can be found in a few latter day feminist theory anthologies. But neither his face nor Sojourner Truth’s made it to the back of a US quarter.

The prominent figures in Davis’ history are certainly altered. Stanton and Anthony, while praised for their foresight in some areas, find their flaws and personal racism writ large in the story woven by Professor Davis, and contrasted very unfavourably with heroines whose names are shadowed beneath the sands of our dominant historical narratives: the Grimke sisters, Frances Dana Gage, Myrtilla Miner, and Prudence Crandall. It is curious that the names of these white women are lost to history while the two whose racist demons plagued the early women’s movement have now become forever synonymous with it. Angela Davis’ historiography does much to correct this imbalance. In my own mind, Anthony and Stanton did well. I have a good friend who has made it her mission to unearth some of the more radical writings of Elizabeth Cady Stanton from academic obscurity and I wish her well in this endeavour. She- like myself- is conscious of Stanton’s racism but also of her more intellectual contributions which have been elided even as she and Susan B. Anthony have been valorized as suffragette scions. Nevertheless, their failures would be drawn into sharper relief by the examples set out by Angela Davis. Proof that it was possible for white bourgeois women to overcome their racism and stand astride the artificial divisions that so ensnared those in Anthony and Stanton’s milieu.

Yet even more important was Davis’ elevation of previously unheard black women’s voices in the movement for Black liberation and for women’s rights.  Ida B. Wells and Frances E.W. Harper were two women of letters who are not often associated with the various rights struggles of the time, but their acumen was no less keen than that of the white luminaries that history better remembers. Sojourner Truth, to whom I will return, also lent a voice of unparalleled conviction to these interlocked causes of freedom. The crux of the story Angela Davis tells in these chapters is how racism would come to divide the fragile alliance made between black liberationists and early feminists, particularly over the acrimonious debate that followed black men being given the franchise but women (white and black) being left behind. Davis’ analysis is penetrating; not only does she condemn the outright racism that underlay many of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s claims about black inferiority, but also the liberal ideology that held the vote as an end in itself. Suffrage, she claimed, was not the sole determinant of freedom or citizenship, and it was hardly a panacea. The ardour with which some bourgeois white women fought for it, however, indicated that they did indeed see that as one of the only obstacles to their full actualisation as citizens. Davis critiques this view and points out the plain fallacy of Anthony and Stanton’s view that black men were now somehow ahead of white women in the post Civil War era. Yes, she argues, they had the vote, and precious little else. Indeed, in a few short years, even that solitary right would be denied them by the force of Jim Crow.

In the midst of the maelstrom that defined the progressive politics of this age came Sojourner Truth’s famous “Ain’t I a Woman” speech. Davis describes it in hortatory terms and in my own estimation it deserves every word of praise the scholar can muster for it. Truth’s words echo down the decades and centuries to follow as a rallying cry for all women who find themselves at a crossroads of oppression in their lives. Native women, transgender women, queer women, labouring and working class women would all take up the clarion call of Truth’s blunt challenge to not only male supremacy, but also to white cis female racism and classism (and later, trans and homophobia). It was a double bladed sword she thrust and parried at those who would presume to rob her of her dignity. In a timeless evisceration of the classic patriarchal argument that uses imposed chivalry to justify women’s subordination, she deftly remarked that she had never been the recipient of such chivalrous acts and had indeed been made to labour as hard as any man with no special treatment; the dainty artifice attached to upper class white womanhood was utterly foreign to her- and to many other women besides. Like a lightning strike on a dark night she illuminated with stark clarity a great truth hidden in plain sight: black women were living proof of the fact that women could work on a par with men, that chivalry was not necessary, that strength of all sorts was as much a woman’s lot as nurturing was. In the terrible conditions foisted on women of colour and immigrant women lay the grand contradiction of the emerging industrial patriarchy: the myth that women were weak dominated a society that was in great measure held up by women’s hard labour.

To this day we still live with the myth that men were the only ones whose labour was exploited in this time, and that the industrial economy of unsafe hard labour was the sole province of men. While it was often conceived of as such, and reified through popular imagery of the white housewife and mother, the reality was far more complex and embodied in the muscle that Sojourner Truth bore to the audience gathered in Akron as she enjoined them to answer her timeless question. In laying bare these complexities and stark but unregarded realities, Davis continues the legacy of powerful orators like Truth who, as later folks might say, tell it like it is.

Lost in Trans-lation: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Part II

Katherine Alejandra Cross2 Comments

Here follows part two of the amazing epic story, nominated for six Golden Raspberries, and a Grammy for Best Kazoo Solo: Lost in Trans-Lation. The witty title of this series will, I hope, reflect, what focus on trans issues I can provide in the context of our readings. But as you’ll see today, save for one cisfail at the end, there wasn’t much discussion this time around. That said, the connections that exist between all three of these readings: biology utilised to buttress discrimination, power and privilege, and neo-bigotry disguised as liberalism all bear heavily on transgender people in our daily lives and are part of understanding our particular social locality.

There is also the fact that while quotas may not exist for affirmative action, this blog has a quota for a certain number of trans-puns per year. So, bear with me on that. Now, without further ado, the curtain rises on our gallant heroine going way past the page limit of her homework assignment…

The New York Times article “Do Races Differ? Not Really, Genes Show” is an interesting overview of contemporary genetics and the view increasingly common among researchers that race is nearly a wholly political rather than biological question. Clearly, race matters tremendously and as a subject remains one of the critical fulcra on which our histories and cultures remain precariously balanced, and yet race has precious little biological basis: we are far more alike than we are different, in other words. Thus it’s clear, from the statements of many of the scientists in the article and the results of recent research that what makes race matter is entirely social; such power as race has was given entirely by us, particularly by the group of “us” that has historically held more power along racial lines.

The reification of racial distinction was bound to enlist the nascent science of biology in its social legitimation process in the 19th Century, just as the reification of sex/gender differences was doing precisely the same thing. Dr. J. Philippe Rushton’s views on the subject of race are, certainly, very disturbing and seem to chase cultural stereotypes rather than any kind of objective facts, but while many today might balk at his ideas, they defined what was collectively understood to be science for generations. The pseudoscience behind Social Darwinism and Phrenology had great influence on the minds of the powerful for a very long time. The changes now afoot that Times reporter Natalie Angier documents are, in many ways, the result of political struggle as much as new science. Biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling has spoken at length about how science is often shaped by the culture, rather than the inverse.

When the prevailing political winds legitimise overt sexism and racism, science is marshalled in its service and used to justify and reify its existence (“women are naturally more weak or more nurturing, thus they should do x, y, and z” and so on). But in the post-1960s era, overt racism has become more passé and more taboo than it has ever been in the West. This hardly means that bigotry is gone, simply that it has taken another form, which will be discussed shortly vis a vis the third article. But this evolution has seen science follow along to catch up with the culture and at last recognise what people for many centuries have known- that what divides us is of our own doing, largely.

Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege and Male Privilege” is another well traveled read in gender studies classrooms and with good reason. She delineates with clarity what, exactly, white privilege is and can look like with a carefully numbered list of privileges great and small. Her ‘invisible knapsack’ metaphor has passed into common use in academic and activist circles along with her list format, which has been reproduced many times over for several groups. In seeing Ms. McIntosh’s name writ large in textbook after textbook it is hard not to see the veracity of point number nine: “If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.” Indeed, she has found several dozen and a kind of immortality in gender studies departments right around the country. There is a certain irony, perhaps not lost on Professor McIntosh, in the fact that the leading paper on white privilege has been written by a white woman. That metanalysis is very material to Professor McIntosh’s point, however, which is that simply put opportunities are not equal.

She may well come under fire from whites for her statements, but there is no doubt that her writing will not reflect badly on her as a white person, nor be seen as selfishness. She herself makes that point in her list. Her ideas will be disagreed with, but she will not be seen as an envoy of whiteness by most of her critics, many of whom are also likely to be of her racial group. If a black author had written this, however, she/he/ze would be more than likely to be accused of bitterness, “reverse racism,” or otherwise simply being too selfish. This ties into her thirtieth point: “If I declare there is a racial issue at hand, or there isn’t [one], my race will lend me more credibility for either position than a person of colour will have.” Among whites (and others as well, frankly) she may be seen as more credible precisely because she is white. This is, in and of itself, another privilege. Despite the fact that she has little to no direct experience of racial antagonism, she becomes an authority on it precisely because she isn’t discriminated against. Hegemonic thinking in our culture presumes victims of discrimination to be “biased” and “angry” rather than, say, experts on the experience with something to teach.

What is compelling to consider is how many of these things tie into male privilege as well. Men will have an easier time finding publishers, men will be taken more seriously when discussing matters of gender, and so on. Men will be construed as less biased on the matter of discrimination against women, whereas women speaking out against sexism will be seen as selfish or otherwise partisan. Membership in a historically marginalised group can often be intuited by seeing if the person’s attempts at reclaiming their dignity are met with cries of group bias. It’s a curious projection of institutional racism, sexism, and so on, that many whites, men, cis people, able bodied people et cetera presume a binary, zero sum system when regarding the progress of marginalised groups. If women gain, men must lose and women will only ever look out for other women whilst trampling on men. Substitute ‘women’ and ‘men’ for any two groups and you’ll have a pretty accurate picture of the dominant view of racial and sexual progress.  This is, in large part, down to privilege. The idea that women and minorities should be content with what they have and not dare to dream for more, lest they ‘take something away’ from the dominant groups who have reified their worthiness of that dominance in several ways.

She also identifies small ways in which we reinforce popular cultural ideas about race, such as the fact that bandages are often a colour more closely approximating white skin colour, or that “flesh” as a colour is conspicuously similar to white European flesh whereas darker tones are never called that. She also testifies to white normativity; as mentioned earlier she explicates how she is not viewed as a representative of her race. She may well be viewed as a spokesperson for her sex, which relates to male privilege, but not for white people as a whole. Thus anything she does that is culturally unacceptable for her class, be it showing up late, being unkempt, talking with her mouth full, having a particular ‘bearing’ or body odour, and on will simply not make people stereotype whites in a certain way.

Time and again I have seen and heard from whites who say that many blacks or Latina/os “are like that” because they met a handful that fit a certain stereotype. This segues beautifully into the final piece, which is Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s “Colour-Blind Racism.” This piece makes many very critical and important points and speaks to what I meant earlier about the evolution of racist practise in our society. It has gone from being largely overt (a la segregation and explicitly enabled legal discrimination) to covert (nominally equal under the law but not in social practise and elided with neologisms and circumlocutions like ‘political correctness’ and ‘reverse racism’). Professor Bonilla-Silva goes through several ways in which modern racism is executed in a way that grants plausible deniability to its speaker. Instead of appealing to an overtly racist ideology, he says, they instead appeal to the seemingly liberating ideology of liberalism- everyone is free, justice is blind, equal opportunity for those willing to work, and so on. Many white racists use anti-racist language in demeaning minorities now such as saying that affirmative action is racist against whites and does not involve choosing the best person for the job, implying quite firmly that a white man is usually going to be best and that no racism or sexism ever undergirds such choices in hiring.

There is a tremendous amount to be gleaned from Professor Bonilla-Silva’s opus here: the idea that racism can be unconscious, the idea that the ‘lone bigot’ is not the most important or significant reproducer of racist ideology, the idea that there is a ‘New Racism’ that is more subtle and no less pernicious than its predecessor, and more and more. Stephen Colbert, in his satirical character of a conservative cable pundit, often proclaims “I don’t see race!” which is a conscious and often very funny send up of the very mentality that Professor Bonilla-Silva is describing here- which is the fact that colour blindness is simply an excuse to use liberal means to rationalise one’s racist ideas. Put another way, as a scholar of race has said, to be “colour blind” in our society means to be blind to only one colour: white. Thus the obvious privilege exercised by whites is ignored, despite their ubiquitous over-representation in the media, in government, big business, higher education, good neighbourhoods, and so on, whites are more likely to believe everyone is racially equal because the law says they are. This type of racism is not as overt, conscious, or maliciously intended as, say, the racism of the Klan. But the intent and the consciousness are largely irrelevant. The outcome of this collective exercise in delusion is to perpetuate the marginalisation of several million people.

What was especially striking from the interviews of white Americans that Professor Bonilla-Silva conducted was how many respondents seemed both defensive and stuttering, as if grasping very hard for words, their minds in overdrive as they clearly tried to express a racist thought (“all blacks are lazy” et al.) without actually being blunt about it. This is the age of circuitous racism that dances merrily around its subject but does not engage with it directly. Misconceptions about affirmative action also abound. The idea that it’s the law of the land, for example, or the idea that there are quotas (a popular word among several of the professor’s interview subjects), or the idea that affirmative action meant hiring inferior candidates due to race (something I consider another projection of internalised racism/sexism: a privileged person can only imagine the inverse of what is already happening- in this case, that underqualified white men get good jobs or get into good schools all the time by dint of their racial and sexual privileges. Yet this causes precious little outcry among these so called liberal-minded people, even when such incompetence leads to disaster, as has happened in the Middle East and with our financial markets).

Professor Bonilla-Silva’s description of the ‘elastic wall’ created by this kinder, gentler racism is very apt. It allows for the new reification of racism to account for people like, say, Oprah who remains everyone’s favourite black success story (“She makes more money than I will in a lifetime, how can you say blacks are still oppressed!?”). It’s a definition that allows for exceptions, to prevent cognitive dissonance, while still enabling you to say “but most minorities are thus and so.” As mentioned earlier, many of these whites extrapolate from experience with a few black citizens to stereotype the entire group as lazy wastrels who are only holding themselves back. This is what is meant by a marginalised person always being made to represent and be responsible for the image of their group in a way that privileged people simply aren’t.

A final note, however, must be made. From Professor Bonilla-Silva’s description of one of his interview subjects: “Thus Henrietta, a transsexual schoolteacher in his fifties, answered…” It was beyond disappointing to see transphobia rearing up again. All of the other interview subjects were described as men or women, but Henrietta becomes “a transsexual” full stop, and is quite apparently misgendered. It is important to consider her words along the other racist statements made by the other white interviewees naturally, but no person’s immorality should excuse transphobia. Like the new racism, transphobia is very often a subtle exercise in the reinforcing power of hegemonic ideas and language. Like Judith Lorber, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva is in a position to know better.

Lost in Trans-lation: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Part I

Katherine Alejandra CrossLeave a comment

This evening I started an introductory Women and Gender Studies class which I’m taking over the Summer to both help me catch up and get me a headstart on one of my two major tracks. I am very excited, of course, and I had a good evening in the first class today. I was also very pleased to see that I had done several of the readings on the course syllabus, and was able to confidently explain a lot of things to my classmates during our group session, so I’m in a very good position to make this a breezy month.

One of our regular assignments is to write a weekly journal entry on our readings. What follows is the first entry, hot off the presses and emailed to my professor moments ago. The class is designed to emphasise the voices of women of colour and other groups that have been traditionally marginalised from feminist and activist discourse, and in that spirit I’m bringing the trans perspective in as well. The following entry will, I hope, set the tone of my participation for the next month (and provides convenient blog material!). Where it is relevant, I will always try to provide a ‘trans response’ to material that directly or indirectly bears on us, or excludes us. I also hope this will provide a bit of background for those interested in gender studies and the ideas, debates, and theories percolating within.

Enjoy.

Judith Lorber’s ‘Night to His Day’ is a foundational text in the women and gender studies canon, and has been included in countless anthologies usually as an introductory overview of a feminist theory of gender and its socially constructed nature, as well as its ramifications. It is not a wholly inaccurate view, either. For instance her analysis of stratification has, for me, the ring of truth; the nature of privileged groups of people and how they are often understood implicitly to be the neutral or default group. As she says “white is not ordinarily thought of as a race, middle class as a class, or men as a gender. The characteristics of these categories define the Other as that which lacks the valuable qualities the dominants exhibit.” As will be explored later in the readings, such is inscribed in the marrow of our very language- the pseudogeneric ‘man,’ mankind, and so on.

Where Man and Human are synonymous, in other words, it is indicative of how- in the case of gender- men are understood as the default neutral category of humanity. Where people are distinguished by their signified group, be it people of colour, women, transgender people, the poor, and so on, what it is they are ‘marked’ with is often a stereotype. Usually it is a negative one, but other stereotypes (with multiple intersecting meanings) can be seen in other ways. The placement of white women on the storied pedestal, for instance, or the stereotype that all black men are adept at sports, or all Asian people are skilled at maths and engineering. These represent signified characteristics that are assumed to be inherent to these groups, where as the generic cisgendered white man has no such stereotypes attached to him. This connects to Orientalism and other forms of exoticisation very easily.

Lorber also speaks of “doing gender” which is a very critical concept. We often think of gender as something one has or that one is. We use the terms sex and gender interchangeably, helped along by infinite government and corporate forms that use each term to basically mean the same thing: do you have a penis or a vagina? The number of assumptions such a binary question is lardered with are myriad beyond words and well beyond the scope of this brief essay. Suffice it to say, that complexity is bespoke when one says that gender is something you do rather than something you are. Lorber’s exploration of the mental process she went through as she tried to ‘gender’ a baby she espied on the New York City Subway is part of an excellent introduction to her work, as it speaks to something all of us do on a daily basis, myself included, often without thinking. The never ending drive to put people into category A or category B. That is what makes her failure further along in the text so incredibly frustrating for me, personally.

In this day and age when one speaks of the complexity of gender, its performance and its socially constructed nature, those of any degree of sophistication will invariably bring transgender people into the discussion and often, in my view, cackhandedly. While the theoretical model sketches out broad truths, some of which I have hitherto elucidated, I feel it too often tries to force trans people into its framework in a way heedless of their actual experiences. For example, when she says “Billy Tipton, a woman, lived most of her life as a man. She died recently at seventy four…” she is erasing, and dare I say gleefully trampling on Mr. Tipton’s knowledge of himself as a man. Putting him in the category of “female transvestites” erases his experience in a flagrantly transphobic way. His whole life and career, his clearly expressed sexual and gender identity, none of that was enough to dissuade Ms. Lorber from misgendering and erasing him so that he could fitted into her theoretical paradigm. Furthermore, her entire discussion of “female transvestites” is very historically suspect and constitutes wilful appropriation of transgender history. We simply do not know how many of these people were actually trans men, how many were butch lesbians, how many didn’t truly identify with either prescribed gender, and so on.

For me, it makes it extremely difficult to take seriously her academic sincerity when she then says “genders, therefore, are not attached to a biological substratum.” This is absolutely true, and it is an idea that is well understood throughout modern gender studies. Yet despite her saying this, she still feels the need to access that mythic substratum when discussing Mr. Tipton and his life. Her entire phraseology in that section implies a falsity to his identity, leads readers to think “he’s really a woman” and treats elements of his life- being a father, a husband, ‘one of the boys’ with his musical partners- as mere artifice exercised by his sartorial choices (which is, after all, what transvestite refers to).

This fundamental failure on her part spoils an otherwise good piece and illustrates how trans people remain a blind spot in cis dominated gender studies.

The second reading, Marilyn Frye’s Oppression, is another pathbreaking reading in gender studies courses because it illustrates at some length what is meant by the term “oppression” which appears so often in left wing politics, emancipatory academia, and social justice movements. Frye’s accomplishments with this piece are twofold. One, she illustrates how when a marginalised person points out some oppressive act (like, say, a single act of employment discrimination or a single act of sexual harassment) they are not saying they are oppressed because this one isolated event befell them. Their claim to oppression relies on this recent material event as an example of one thing among many that disadvantages them. An example of the systemic nature of oppression that allows things like this to happen. Ms. Frye compares them to bars in a bird cage. One by itself, if focused on and analysed in the absence of all the other bars, does not seem to an outsider to be ‘oppressive’- which is why rather than focusing on one instance of oppression and navel-gazing at it, attempting to rationalise or excuse it, one has to pull back and see that it is not the only bar preventing the marginalised from spreading their wings.

Her second accomplishment is making a powerful statement against the ‘definition creep’ of the word oppression. Some people who do not belong to historically disadvantaged groups cite instances of hardship, tragedy, or suffering in their lives as if to claim that because they don’t have it easy either, they are also oppressed and therefore some cosmic balance of oppressions occurs and through such alchemy, white men are no longer privileged. Frye distinguishes oppression by saying that the occurrence of an unfortunate event is not in and of itself oppression. It has to be part of a system that is attacking you because of who you are. White men are very rarely explicitly discriminated against for being white men. Virtually no one is discriminated against simply for being cis. Able bodied people are not singled out for bigoted jokes, scrutiny, pity, or discrimination. But women are, people of colour are, transgender people certainly are, and disabled people are. Therein lies the difference.

Her illustration of double binds also provides a useful distinguishing characteristic of oppression. In her words, such moulds, immobilises, and reduces; it creates the ‘press’ in oppression. The “networks of forces and barriers” that surround various oppressed groups are of great significance. The difference between a cis white man and a transgender woman of colour is that many people feel entitled to decide whether the latter has a right to live, for no reason other than the fact of her gender identity. It is still a disturbing reality that many cis people, commenting on a news story about the murder of a trans woman by a boyfriend or other male antagonist, try to rationalise it by saying that it is completely understandable that a man would want to kill a woman who’s “really a man.”

In this lies the reason Ms. Lorber’s critical failure is so disturbing. Her casual misgendering and appropriation, even if she never holds a knife in her hand, helps perpetuate the very system of oppression that enacts that double bind on transgender people and puts their lives at risk. In a curious way, it helps illustrate Frye’s concept of oppression as pervasive, binding, and institutional, and how that sort of thing is broadly distinguished from non-oppressive tragedy and situational suffering. The entitlement to the bodies of women, be they pregnant women, disabled women,  fat women, or trans women, is something cis white men qua cis white men do not have to confront regularly or en masse as a group.

Through The Looking Glass

Katherine Alejandra Cross7 Comments

<<EDIT: As of this afternoon Blizzard has officially backed down and will no longer move forward with their scheme to force players to use their real life names on the forums. This is, of course, a tremendous victory. One suspects that major media outlets talking about the “row” or “huge outcry” opposed to this idea finally moved their executives to give way. However, significant as this is, Real ID remains and some of the architectural issues I allude to below remain.>>

Yesterday I wrote at some length about my strident opposition to Blizzard’s absurd RealID scheme, something I’ve called the single worst idea I have ever seen implemented in the history of online gaming. I am rarely one to speak without qualifiers, but this surely merits it. The threat posed to women is very real. I myself was stalked in WoW, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could’ve been because it didn’t bleed into real life; he didn’t know my name, nor where to begin with finding out personal info about me. Others I’ve known have not been so lucky. Curiously I’ve actually heard people use that as an argument for RealID. It is often phrased as “well, if it happens already, then what’s the big deal?”

I am personally quite flabbergasted at this line of reasoning. It’s happening already so let’s just make it easier?

I have a few more ideas for Blizzard to consider.

  • Has a female player had an abortion? If so, why not note it in their RealID friends’ list? Never know who might be interested! Who wouldn’t want a tank that could endure that kind of real life drama and ponderous decisionmaking? Just send the clinic records to Blizzard’s billing department and remember, it has to include your full name and Social Security number if possible.
  • Had to declare bankruptcy in the last ten years? Probably, considering the economy! Well, don’t you think it’d be fair to let everyone know? After all, if you’re bad with money, people selling to you in the Trade District of Stormwind really ought to know this before setting you up on an instalment plan for that uber enchantment or Blacksmithing item. Just mail the court documents to Blizzard billing so no one can accuse you of being a dirty dirty liar.
  • Photographic avatars containing pictures of genitalia. You know, just to make sure you aren’t misrepresenting yourself! Send two colour photos of your naughty bits and your birth certificate.
  • Posting peoples’ addresses is a surefire way to really get them to network with others. Their guildies will absolutely love knowing where to send flowers and cards to their favourite DPSer or healer. It saves you the trouble of opening up a private chat window to someone you trust and having to type it out every single time! Just send Blizz Billing a copy of your bank statement and a utility bill.

To be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t be surprised if something vaguely along these lines wasn’t already in the offing. I could go on with the snark, really. Many more links could serve as elucidating examples of why this is unequivocally bad. Even the demographic of young white cis men have something to fear. Men can get stalked too. And more than one has already been killed over in-game disputes that have spilled over into real life. Men and women in professional positions want to very much keep work and play separate. Trans men and women, non-binary identified people, all manner of LGBTQ people, might not want their online personae associated with a real name. Countless people have exes they’d rather not hear from again.

The list of grievances goes on. But the ultimate question is why is this happening at all?

The answer appears to be: Facebook.

But it isn’t just the deal outlined there that’s troubling, it’s the fundamental philosophy behind it. Yesterday I expressed my extreme scepticism at Blizzard’s troll-beating rationale for this forum change and I have not been dissuaded from this view. They know as well as anyone that the WoW forum’s are 4chan’s rectum but they’ve had six years to do something about it, over which time not even the most incremental of changes have occurred, other than cosmetic ones. Threats made against the lives of their own employees did not move them to engage in stricter moderation. This latest, sweeping change of the forums has much more to do with the upper echelons of Blizzard-Activision wanting to cash in on the new social networking boom.

Some have said that because it’s optional and not fully integrated, it’s the quintessential “not a big deal.” I disagree and here’s why:

“6. Real ID is optional.

Only the illusion is optional. Your real name is linked to your toons and already exposed via addons even if you never opt-in or use the Real ID feature. You can test this by running the following:

/run for i=1,100 do if BNIsSelf(i)then BNSendWhisper(i,”RealID whisper from yourself..”);break end end

While this only displays your own real name, it does demonstrate the the connection has already been made, without your approval. And that it could be accessible to a third-party addon developer. When Blizzard merges accounts with Facebook (their next move), will the connections to Facebook friends already be pre-established, even if you don’t opt in? If so, how will Blizzard/Facebook use that information?”

Thus it’s quite clear that Blizzard “has plans,” as they say. The architecture is already there for an expansion of this service and it is indeed ‘fully integrated’ at this point.  To be quite honest I do indeed wonder if Bobby Kotick dreams of players running around with their real names over their characters’ heads rather than an in-game handle. It no longer seems so far-fetched to think so.

This is not why I and many other gamers play online games. If we want Facebook we will go to Facebook. If we want Twitter, or Beebo, or MySpace, we will use those sites. It’s ironic, really. It’s the same criticism I’ve often levelled at newer MMOs that aped World of Warcraft rather than forged their own original direction. Of them I often said “if I wanted to play WoW, I’d go to WoW.” Well, it seems WoW is no longer content with just being WoW.

The gaming experience is about separation from real life, letting your dreams and fantasies take flight, however simple or elaborate they might be. It’s about relaxing in an engaged way and losing yourself in the mystery of another world. I still remember the first time I ran my characters through Shadowglen, how vivid and inviting the misty forests of this world were and how far away the cares of the real one was. That separation is a prerequisite of whatever sort of fun you wish to have in these games, be it roleplaying- as I often did, raiding, PVP combat, or simple grinding and trading. You leave the real world behind for a few hours and immerse yourself in a bath of fantasy.

Now the executives at Blizzard-Activision want to destroy one of the crucial pillars of what makes an online game what it is. There is, of course, a philosophy behind this and it is expressed very neatly here:

“[Zuckerberg] disagrees with the notion that people have different identities. To him, the idea that someone is different at work than at home, than at a rock concert, is dishonest. Says Kirkpatrick, “He believes that he will live a better life personally, and all of us will be more honest, and ultimately it will be better for the world if we dispense with that belief.” ”

Mr. Zuckerberg can kindly stick a goose up his arse and I’ll explain why using my usual flawless logic.

My own personal history. I had to be a different person in World of Warcraft than who I was expected to be in the physical world. For the sake of my own sanity and to prevent me from self harm; the ability to free myself of the pervasive and all consuming lie that my life once was can not be overvalued in how precious it was. Were these two sides of my being fundamentally part of who I was? Two spheres of the same whole? Yes, absolutely. But the difference in their prevalence at that point in my life was stark. Each side of me had a context that I could not shake. I could not let the woman I was burst forth back in 2006, I wasn’t ready and the consequences would’ve been disastrous. But in a controlled way, I could begin building a prototypical new me through my roleplaying and writing online, including in places like WoW.

There was no “dishonesty” there. There was a lot I hadn’t figured out at that time. Did you know everything about yourself when you were 19? I didn’t think so. Part of the long and winding road to self-understanding went through World of Warcraft for me.

Secondly, it is very much true a person can present different sides or shards of themselves in different social environments. It’s not necessarily dishonesty that compels this. It could be a person’s taste, or desire, to let different parts of themselves show at different times. When I speak in class or to gatherings of professors, I am magisterial, professional and my voice is leaden with argent verbiage. When I’m speaking to my friends I… sometimes do exactly the same thing. But other times I curse and laugh mellifluously and make dirty jokes and talk about geese and peoples’ butts as well as poop jokes!

Mr. Zuckerberg, no one has the right to make those worlds overlap except yours truly.

You do not get to arrogantly decide in your creepily paternalistic manner that we’d all be simply better off if we just accepted that our “real names” and photos define who we are and that we only have one dimension to our beings. I’m sure that’s an attractive bit of ideological pabulum for a lazy business philosopher but from where I’m sitting and from the perspective of the many people I’ve known and loved, it is more than a little bit of self-entitled bullshit.

No one decides what to do with the multiple sides of our personalities or phases of our lives but us. If we want to create a completely different persona for ourselves in an online game, we should be able to as long as we’re somehow helping pay the bills for the maintenance of said game.

Trans women I’ve spoken to and heard from already have been frantically calling Blizzard and being compelled to, of all things, mail in court orders and birth certificates. An online game goes from being fun fantasy to feeling like the Department of Motor Vehicles. We move from a game where your identity is entirely self determined, and the numbers and names of your ‘real’ self are kept under lock and key beneath an impenetrable veil of secrecy… to a game where your juridical, state-sanctioned identity is shackled to you like a ball and chain, even when you’re trying to escape.

Mr. Zuckerberg does not seem to have reckoned with the fact that the name and photo associated with one’s legal ‘identity’ is not the identity a person may most identify with.

We have to draw a line in the sand somewhere. Already we live in a world where your state-sanctioned identity stalks you at every turn, where a social insurance number is the only thing standing between you and a powerful individual knowing who you are, where you live, what you buy, what you eat, how many haemorrhoids  you have, when you went to school, the names of your loved ones, friends, and children, the value of your house, how much money is in your bank account… we are part of one big happy digital family now in an information civilisation. And now, at long last, a state identity is being forced on us in the one place we could escape from all that and possibly enjoy the unique pleasure of being known as someone else entirely, for reasons entirely innocent rather than “dishonest,” related to joy and peace rather than a desire to deceive. A desire to relax and forget the stresses of the ID number world.

This is what I meant yesterday when I said the implications went far beyond WoW.

I use Facebook primarily to stay in touch with a particular set of people and because my campus organisation needs me there. But I am not for one moment enamoured of its ideology, nor the fact that it is infecting what should rightly have been the polar opposite of that ideology. Perhaps most important of all, however, for Mr. Zuckerberg to understand: Facebook represents one aspect of peoples’ social lives, not their totality. Facebook is not the ultimate truth of who we are, it is not the Ur chat text of our lives, it’s one dimension that serves a variety of purposes for different people.

When I first played Neverwinter Nights multiplayer, the closest I came to an online game before I played WoW, what stunned me was the fact that I could choose my name. In a time when I was so loathing my given name, and the life I lead, the freedom to determine all of this information on a whim and not have to show this ID or that stamped form or this application signed and stamped in triplicate was amazing beyond words. “I can do that?” was my first thought. It planted the seed in my heart that would enable to me to change myself in the real world. But each time I made a new character and started afresh in a world where no one knew me by that horrid old name I was once cursed with, I flew.

I don’t want others to be denied the opportunity to experience that. If this all sounds dire it’s simply because events move forward. Things look bad now and they could very well get worse over time. More online game spaces may think this is just the bee’s knees and get on the social network bandwagon.

The good news is that these broad implications appear to have been intuited by the wider media. (BBC, MSNBC, CBC, ABC News, and more). We might be through the looking glass but we don’t have to stay there.

World of Warshaft

Katherine Alejandra Cross12 Comments

As I alluded to in my recent autobiographical posts, I was once a WoW gamer. Ahh, those were the days. I still miss those days, in fact! Which was why I was considering going back and firing up the ol’ Priestess so I could kick arse at raid healing again. I’m still in touch with plenty of WoW gamers, so my fingers remain ever so delicately situated on the pulse of that ageing but still powerful online gaming behemoth, including those times when it accelerates from WoW’s neverending and oh-so-entertaining drama.

Most in-game drama blow ups- this class getting nerfed, PVP being changed thus and so, raid gear altered in such and such a way-  is geeky wonk of the nerdiest kind. But Blizzard has recently decided to inaugurate a change that raises important philosophical questions in spaces far beyond the alluring vistas of Azeroth. Real ID.

“Recently, we introduced our new Real ID feature – http://www.battle.net/realid/ , a new way to stay connected with your friends on the new Battle.net. Today, we wanted to give you a heads up about our plans for Real ID on our official forums, discuss the design philosophy behind the changes we’re making, and give you a first look at some of the new features we’re adding to the forums to help improve the quality of conversations and make the forums an even more enjoyable place for players to visit.

The first and most significant change is that in the near future, anyone posting or replying to a post on official Blizzard forums will be doing so using their Real ID — that is, their real-life first and last name — with the option to also display the name of their primary in-game character alongside it. These changes will go into effect on all StarCraft II forums with the launch of the new community site prior to the July 27 release of the game, with the World of Warcraft site and forums following suit near the launch of Cataclysm. Certain classic forums, including the classic Battle.net forums, will remain unchanged.”

As I reread those words on one particularly slow and sweltering afternoon I turned them over in my mind thinking this must be some belated April Fool’s joke. They’d force people to post their real names as a condition of writing on the forums? There must be some caveat to this. Surely they meant the reverse? Posting the name of your WoW character with the option of showing your real name? But, nope. They’re deadly serious.

Ostensibly, this is to ‘clean up’ the forums but I find this logic to be entirely spurious. I’m intimately familiar with how much of a cesspool the WoW forums can be. I myself have called it the Internet’s Sphincter. Yet the solution to the problem, such as it was, would be greater and stricter moderation, as well as commonsense alterations that would make it less easy to troll the forums. Mind you, I’d miss all those Level 1 Troll troll accounts named Ipwnyou or somesuch. They gave WoW a certain zest, like a punch in the stomach that makes you vomit. But it’d be worthwhile to compel users to have only one forum account, rather than one account per in-game character, to avoid this Draconian nonsense.

We’ll leave aside the fact that Real ID bears exactly the same name as the US Government’s years long initiative to harmonise American state IDs and integrate national records, the same policy that now empowers all employers to rifle through their employees’ Social Security records (and outing transgender people who can’t yet change their gender markers at the SSA).

A very eloquent friend of mine who goes by the name Silverdawn in WoW, had this to add:

“As if WoW players weren’t already notorious for being almost completely off the fucking leash and prone to wildly inappropriate responses to trivia such as…oh, losing a drop to a hunter or having your class nerfed, which really totally hasn’t resulted in players lashing out with death threats to developers or yelling at their friends and getting piss-drunk because Warlocks deal 6% less damage now. Yeah, this is a community that’s always been fantastically well-behaved and couldn’t *possibly* misuse access to another player’s real life information.”

I really couldn’t have said it better. This change will not erase the ugly social forces that exist on the forums, merely displace them. Stalking happens in World of Warcraft already. It’s a fact of life for us- us primarily being women- and now Blizzard is proposing forum changes that would make it even easier for someone to have access to your personal information?

Some players and a few apologists for the idea have offered several- well, basically two- defences.

It’s your choice! Don’t use the forums, then!

My problem with this idea is manifold. The choice is a highly coerced one. “Use this service that you may like, but expose yourself naked to the world… or just stay silent” is not much of a choice. The concept of ‘choice’ is oft abused by those who pretend that a choice made with a gun to one’s head has not been in some way influenced.

The other problem I have is that those who this change won’t hurt will disproportionately be male and cis. Transgender people who have not yet changed their names legally cannot have their RealID name altered by Blizzard. This has already been confirmed after one trans friend of mine tried to do so. This change requires a court order, something normally reserved for banks, and government issued IDs. Now a trans person needs a court order to protect their privacy in a video game? Give me a break. “Just don’t use the forums”- and what? Add another thing to the already lengthy list of cis privileges?

Women as a whole are also going to be given the short end of the stick with this. I’ve known in my time several women who played as men to avoid unwanted attention. This blows them out of the water. Such a scenario could also expose transgender men. Finally, it gives potential stalkers a good headstart on information that could be used to track down their targets. The excuse of “well, don’t use the forums!”… It reeks of the same “well, just don’t go outside!” nonsense from people whose privileges render them incapable of understanding a life perspective different from their own. One shouldn’t intentionally make something like that less safe if it can be helped.

While the current system definitely does not keep everyone perfectly safe, the anonymity it affords is still much better than what the proposed alternative is.

This is not a choice, it is a heavily coerced choice.

Don’t rub your transgender whatsit it in our faces!

I couldn’t agree more. That’s exactly why this is a lousy idea. It ‘rubs my transgender’ in random people’s faces without me having any control over it. Well, not me personally; I have the privilege of owning several copies of Blizzard’s precious court order. But many of my brothers and sisters just ain’t that lucky, period. There’s no ethical reason that they should have to pay a price for this when they are just trying to play a silly amusing roleplaying game.

It’s the same logic I’ve used against people who’ve whined about trans people changing their ID gender markers: if you don’t want me to “rub it in your face” then let me have an ID that does not call attention to my assigned sex at birth, ‘kay? You’ll never know the difference!

It is, at heart, a privacy issue. I speak of the specific concerns for women, cis and trans, because they’ve been given short shrift in much of the (perfectly justified) outrage on this issue. But this is something that affects everyone who plays the game. Fundamentally you should be given an uncoerced choice in whether or not you broadcast your name and other information in such an environment as WoW. It isn’t like Facebook where you create an account and then invite only your friends and family, with a good deal of control over how much strangers can see (for now, at least).

There is, also, for those of us geeks who combine our love for theory with our love for high fantasy, a philosophical dimension to all of this. To quote more from what Silverdawn said to me earlier:

“You know what bothers me? It’s that a gaming company as brilliant as Blizzard–this is, by the way, why I blame Activision–has completely betrayed its own belief in the great power of the personal character. It is the projection into the avatar, not the representation of the physical, gross self, that inspires the most passionate socialization with the greatest longevity.”

That distinction is critical. It’s very much a defining feature of roleplaying games, not just of the Internet as a whole. My own reply to this, as ever, wove personal experience into it:

“Well, for me… Quinnae and Qera were my looking glasses into life as woman. Though them, people knew me as one, and I knew myself as a woman for the first time. It was not just the struggles and the joys of the game itself, but the literary personality that emerged in the forums- the young woman whose eloquent barbs undressed the most macho of bloviators with grace that befit the Night Elf she played.

Even when a select few people were told I was “a guy” by me in confidence, the persona that Quinnae enabled me to explore and develop held me in good stead.

Had this RealID thing been in place back then, I’m not saying I’d never have come out, but WoW made the process a lot easier, the self-exploration much easier- because it did so neatly cleave between the real and the unreal while simulteanously weaving them together. The balance of that contradiction provided the netherspace in which I flourished. A place where I could move in semi-real social circles as a woman with consequences similar to the real world, but a fantasy realm surreal enough that accomodated as many masques and guises as a Harlequin ball.

Feminist scholar Hilary Rose spoke of what she called the ‘laboratory of dreams’ when discussing science fiction, and its ability to envision new social worlds that a reader could lose themselves in- daring to imagine a better future. Or a worse one.

And for me roleplaying always was that laboratory in which my own dreams were forged, even if I never quite knew it.”

For many people it never was “just a game.” Their right to privacy and- dare I call such a thing a right- their right to flights of fantasy ought to be respected. One of the greatest things about MMOs was the fact that your real life identifying markers were required only for the credit card that the folks at billing needed to see and that was that. It was all utterly and blissfully invisible to everyone you played with, night in and night out. Once upon a time, Blizzard banned people for revealing personal information about players.

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, I guess, eh?