The Chapel Perilous: On the Quiet Narratives in the Shadows

February 6, 2014February 13, 2014Katherine Alejandra Cross9 Comments

Michelle Goldberg’s feature in The Nation magazine about “Feminism’s toxic Twitter wars” landed in the social justice community like an incendiary cluster bomb and its merciless conflagration is still raging online. The article, framed around discourse about race among feminists and implicit villainisation of Mikki Kendall (of #solidarityisforwhitewomen fame), enraged many who saw its misrepresentation of complex discussions skew towards condemning forthright voices of colour and protesting the innocence of the most privileged, white feminist leaders.

As someone who was interviewed in the piece, I feel a certain sense of responsibility for this and an obligation to speak out about the impact of something I had contributed to. If I had known that this was the article Ms. Goldberg would write, I would have advised her to write or frame it differently at the very least, or even hand it off to a writer from the communities she was describing who could better handle the fjord-like shoals of nuance that such critiques require. Whatever her intentions or beliefs, which I will not speculate about here, she wrote something that—as I have reflected these many long days—has left many feeling unheard, misunderstood, and villainised.

This, of course, does not even begin to describe how many trans people, myself included, felt mocked by Goldberg’s Spartan and unsympathetic description of the latest debate around the use of the word “vagina” as synecdoche for “women.”

But in the process of expressing that outrage something was lost, ultimately to the point of being effaced entirely: the fact that the article in question extensively quoted myself—a trans Latina—and other women of colour who spoke specifically to the ways that the aforementioned “toxic” culture in feminism had been harmful to us and our communities in particular.

In short, we spoke to the tragic irony of a purportedly intersectional feminism, operating in our names, which then erased us for our own putative good.

In the wake of another round of community-driven call-out articles on this topic, I felt compelled to do something I never thought I’d find myself doing—mostly out of my curious combination of shyness and wordiness—and that was to rant on Twitter.

Well, here’s the more “seemly space” I described, and come what may, here is the fuller version of what I had to say:

The Whitewashing of Activist Discourse

In the wake of Goldberg’s article, the right and proper impulse to defend Kendall and the other feminists of colour who had been antagonised by the piece became the dominant theme of much of the media criticism; it was beautiful in its way, it showed an unbowed community unwilling to be locked out of discourse about their lives and the meaning of their existence. They would not be dictated to about what their activism meant, nor would we stand for undue criticism of a tool that we use to talk back to the powerful.

A prime example of the latter is Janet Mock’s uncompromising response to Piers Morgan and his sensationalising interview that fixated unnecessarily on her embodiment rather than her activism. As she said, speaking to Buzzfeed about the incident, “That’s the special thing about social media now is that we can talk back. Piers doesn’t have the final say…Our media is just as valid.”

But the aforementioned Nation cluster bomb effect ensured that the community became more polarised than ever on the discussion of internal toxicity, and in the process the online debate became entirely about upper class white cis women and how the media was defending their hurt feelings against our online horde.

Some prominent activists even said that the article only defended white women and was only about their interests and interpretations—a fact that was patently untrue by dint of my own participation, as well as that of Samhita Mukhopadhyay, Brittney Cooper, Anna Holmes, Kimberlé Crenshaw and Jamia Wilson.

Indeed, the erasure of what we said in the activist responses to the article, and in the name of the new dominant narrative about it, which asserts that the Nation piece only privileged white women’s perspectives and interests, many social justice activists have repeated the manoeuvre that Jamia Wilson recounted from her own experience with the #FemFuture debacle:

“One self-described white feminist tweeted at her to explain that no women of color had been at the Barnard meeting “and that I needed to be educated about that,” Wilson recalls. Somehow, activists who prided themselves on their racial enlightenment “were whitesplaining me about racism,” she adds, laughing.”

I will also go on the record here and say that for all the unforced errors in the Nation feature’s framing, Goldberg’s use of my interview quotes and snippets of my writing did not in any sense “take them out of context,” as some have alleged. I cannot speak for any of the others, and Mikki Kendall herself has stated publicly that Goldberg misrepresented and misused her words (to be clear, soliciting Kendall’s memories about 5 year old events, and then calling her “obsessive” because she happened to remember, is downright low and patently unfair).

But for my part, my words were contextualised appropriately, and I will not claim to have been used by Ms. Goldberg, nor will I lend credence to the racist suggestion of others that saw me and the other women of colour dismissed as “tokens.”

As I tweeted, our part in the article was either ignored, or we were dismissed as tokens and then ignored. This is not a matter of personal pride and petulance; believe me when I say that there is a big part of me that wishes to squirrel up in a cave and never talk about this again. I did not get into activism to pen extensive pieces about rage culture, nor dwell on these topics with all the potential criticism it could entail or hurt it could cause, on top of the social justice work and academic work I’m already doing.

This is not “look at me”—this is “look at us.”

Feminist Madonnahood Redux

The discussion that Goldberg dove into was one that had been started chiefly by marginalised people. My part in it grew out of a discourse among transgender gaming critics (two of whom, including myself, were women of colour). We continued a larger, longer tradition of internal discourse about activist culture. For many of us, this was a culture we neither created nor asked for, dominated by norms, argot, mores, and rage sired by a predominantly white, cis middle-class core that had always presumed itself implicitly more knowledgeable about “what the real issues are.”

Activist perfection and ideological purity were always luxuries of the privileged. The perfect activist life is bought; it is a commodity; it could never be something organically attainable in our present relations of capital and ruling, least of all by those of us for whom “compromise” is the air we breathe.

And this inspired discussion aplenty, mostly from the most marginalised or maligned voices in feminism, about a particular form of toxicity that threatened to rob of us of the only community we had. It was a discussion about how we, as people on the margins, hurt each other using activist logics we either did not create, or created under unacknowledged and compromised positions. It is unsurprising that women of colour and trans people have had the most to say about this; we are the ones who most exceed the comfortable boundaries of activist perfection and for whom the compromises so anathema to purism are a necessary way of life.

Many of our discussions about activist rage sought to acknowledge both our own complicity in it, why it happened, what external forces often compelled it (the Nation article is a good example of this, to which I’ll return), and yet also name who too often held the real power in activist movements and what the consequences of that were.

One of the cardinal sins of the Nation piece was that it did the very thing I strenuously avoided in my own writing about the subject: it re-litigated past events and named and shamed individuals, condensing all possible discussion into a singularity from which no light could escape.

Now all debate would be about whether the disagreement around #FemFuture was represented appropriately and how Mikki Kendall as an individual was characterised. It is a ditch into which discussions about activist toxicity are easily driven because of our nigh-on cognitive bias towards discussing individuals rather than social structures—no doubt it was what made Goldberg herself more interested in writing the article the way she did in the first place (or what steered her editors to encourage her to writing the article that way).

Note that I am not saying we ought not discuss these things; Mikki Kendall’s portrayal in the article is, after all, an excellent case study of the subtle ways media bias can operate and why our relationship with the press as women of colour is always a fraught one. But it is instructive to consider how the “rich white women vs. the rest of us” dynamic is all the discussion is about now.

A complex, 2D maze in blue lines set against a white backdrop. — A visual metaphor for how easy all of this is.

On Misappropriation and its Consequences

The comments beneath the Nation piece itself are, by and large, like the screaming death of reason itself. Everything I ever feared from speaking out on this topic has manifested there.

Men smugly proclaiming this is the end of feminism or proof of its obsolescence, MRAs wailing that men as a whole were victims of “feminist toxicity” and that women should be punished, atheist MRAs proclaiming Richard Dawkins the most prominent victim of “toxicity” from feminists, and still others accusing Amanda Marcotte, Rebecca Watson, Sady Doyle, and other women of being purveyors of “feminist toxicity” (against men, of course).

Meanwhile those on the Left accused Goldberg of supporting apartheid in Israel (because she’d critiqued a tactic of the boycott movement) and Justine Sacco (because she, like others, myself included, had been downright horrified by the way the response to her on social media had spiralled violently out of control—it’s one thing to call out racism, it’s another to have people waiting at an airport to harass the offender, sending rape and death threats, et cetera.).

The polarisation of the discussion evinces many of the issues with online toxicity as a whole, but also the big problem with discussing these issues in front of such a wide audience. Latoya Peterson wrote about this on Twitter recently better than I ever could:

“Real talk: The crew at [Racialicious] expected random shit to happen in feminism. We didn’t expect our peeps to try to eat us too. But you have to look at cycles/systems. If I call out xxx feminist of color for being fucked up, it gives ammo to those trying to discredit. So then, I can’t even critique someone on our beef without thinking about how that plays into power structures. Because I knew if I went hard on xxx feminist of color for xyz problem, people would piggy back on my critique in ways I didn’t want.”

The wide public exposure of what began as a family discussion makes misappropriation inevitable; it attracts swarms of people clamouring to deny responsibility, hide behind it, and tell the whole world about that one time a woman of colour was mean to them.

Which, indeed, was the other dreadful thing about the Nation comments: it seemed to spawn a whole minor subgenre within itself about white cis feminists complaining about a specific incident with a specific woman of colour from a specific number of years ago. It merely added to the drear beneath the article and, in and of itself, acts as a specific form of silencing. For one thing, it disincentivises any feminist from talking about internal community problems and poisonous dynamics, but it makes it triply hard for trans people and/or women of colour to lead those discussions because of the specific ways our words can be and often are misused.

It also makes polarisation easy; it makes sweeping declarations of “internet gentrification” easy and attractive. We can defend the most vulnerable from the most privileged, and at a stroke change or challenge the narratives directed against us.

A classic, surrealist painting of a castle in a spiral configuration converging on the centre, its channels in between populated by figures. — Remedios Varo, Spiral Transit (1962). Virtual streets– the streets we build online– are quite a bit different from the physical sort.

Whose e-Streets? Our e-Streets

But the problem with this, and the wider idea of internet gentrification and the assumptions such an argument relies on, is that it pretends there is no such thing as internal toxicity that disempowers and silences other marginalised people. It makes no provision for the way we do violence to each other.

I myself nearly got bullied out of activism by two other trans women, one of whom was a trans woman of colour, who mocked and derided me for an innocent mistake and then wished death to a friend I had been defending. In the light of hindsight, I understand why my views at the time were somewhat misguided and that this needed to be addressed, but I was so thoroughly vituperated that I nearly gave up online writing altogether.

I have helplessly watched trans loved ones be attacked by other trans people, shamed publicly as self-hating trans people, because of literally a single misunderstood word. I have borne witness to death threats, to people telling others to commit suicide (or even taking bets on whether the latter would occur), picking apart a woman of colour’s history to meet some arbitrary test of authenticity (one that was, lest we forget, structured by white supremacy), slandering someone into the ground for something they actually did not say, erasing each other’s words when it was expedient in the short term, engaging in inappropriate sexual commentary (be it about genitals, attractiveness, secondary sex characteristics, etc.), yelling at a trans woman who called 911 as a trans woman of colour was on the verge of suicide per her livetweets thereof, and so on.

These are all things we have done to each other. And sorting this out is a discussion worth having. It is still a discussion worth having, and discussing this is not “gentrification.” It is not about making the internet safe for the privileged or denuding us of our ability to respond with forthrightness and courage to those in power who antagonise us.

I have tremendous respect for those like Suey Park—the foremost articulator of the “internet gentrification” concept—who have taken the lead in responding to the prejudicial aspects of The Nation article and what it represents; the work they do for us on the outside of, or the margins, of the mainstream press and funded feminism is remarkable, challenging, and discomfiting in the best ways possible.

In that same spirit, however, we as women of colour must also not allow half of our voice to be silenced in the name of a misbegotten idea of solidarity, and I am willing to say loudly and proudly that we have the ability to have multiple difficult discussions at once, to speak truth to power and be accountable to ourselves.

There is no party line, there is only us.

The True Wages of Privilege in Activism

What I had strained to get at in my writing, as well as in my recent tweets, is the fact that so many norms in activist culture, as well as what gets considered pure and just, is often not decided by us but by better-off white radicals who have luxuries of choice and sacrifice we couldn’t dream of. Indeed, one of the leading headwinds against much of my own work comes from the trends sired by white queer masculine folks with access to class privilege, and whose definition of what constitutes queer culture, radicalism, and solidarity have a good deal more weight than those that originate from trans feminine folks and trans communities of colour.

Such white radicals are the first to wonder why no trans women of colour would show up to an event labelled “Tranny Pride” and then turn around and politely degrade us for being “conservative” or “reinforcing of the binary” in our desire for surgery, feminine affectation, or any number of other perceived sins. Those activist norms are also toxic.

It is worth noting that those same people would likely clamour to show public solidarity with an idea like “internet gentrification” (even as they gentrify neighbourhoods in the physical world), because the “enemy” it focuses on lives somewhere in a Valhalla occupied by Rachel Maddow and Gloria Steinem, and not in the world of activism where these particular white queer radicals I’ve described actually live.

The recent arguments put forth by many social justice advocates posit a Manichean cleavage between two camps of feminism. In so doing, they both erase the complicated critiques of certain (cis and trans) women of colour, and gives wide berth for culpable white radicals to hide and pretend solidarity– with no discussion about how what “radical” even means is something they have far too much control over– while also shutting down discussion over how we can hold each other accountable.

By making this discussion entirely about the already-privileged, we repeat a mistake that I criticised in a recent paper, which described the ways that popular discourse around anonymity focuses only on what (presumptively young, white, cis) men are doing with it. By fixating on men’s purported abuses of anonymity and seeing it only as an accelerant to their virtual harassment of women, I argued, we ignored the ways that online anonymity was of tremendous positive value to women, people of colour, LGBT people, and others (including domestic violence or abuse victims of all backgrounds). We blunted our own understanding of this vital modern phenomenon because of a popular fixation on the way privileged people exercised it.

The same thing is happening here in the wake of the Nation piece.

By allowing ourselves to think of the term “toxicity” only as a dog whistle against women of colour, we neglect the extensive, recent history of feminist insurgency against online harassment, which often critiqued social media, but never used it as coded synonym for women of colour’s voices or criticisms. The best way to overcome the mistakes of The Nation article is not to declare all discussion of online toxicity verboten, but to bring the discussion back to the complicated place we’ve been taking it for years—both in terms of describing internal and external dynamics. As a trans woman of colour it has been the pride of my life to write about both at length; discourse on toxicity, inside and outside feminism, has not only taken place between the privileged.

To give but one of many examples of discussions we could be having louder and more often: how much the linguistic focus of call-out culture (i.e. using the wrong terms, words, et cetera) is possessed of a significant class/formal-education-access bias. We talk about class all the time and piously observe that formal, credentialed education is a privilege, but if someone like my mother, who never went to high school and knows about all this social justice work only through me, were to stumble and say “transgendered” instead of “trans person,” what would we say? And why? If we can be honest with ourselves about that, we have already created a foundation for an important discussion.

Conclusion

That is what has been lost in the wake of the Nation article.

There is no doubt that our arguments have already been “piggy backed” on by many who are operating in bad faith, but if we allow that to silence and erase trans/women of colour with something complicated to say, those of us who embody intersectionality in its truest sense (with specific identities that also inform larger wholes) are at risk of losing the movement that supposedly speaks for us.

We cannot continue to locate the problem of prejudices exclusively in the stratum of elite media feminists or commentators—responsible as they are—we must also look inward at what we allow to transpire in the name of solidarity and what its costs are.

There is no party line, there is only us. And movement or no, everything we are, and everything we embody and represent, will remain on this earth; what we say can either further the cause of justice, or it can be lost in the name of bathing the already-privileged in yet more undeserved limelight.

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

June 17, 2012June 17, 2012Katherine Alejandra Cross3 Comments

Mobius Strip — 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 pleasurable “reality” that also manifests in gaming culture. It feels like the real world, and yet isn’t; because of this, many gamers feel able to express themselves in a deeply violent and prejudicial way. It feels like reality, and thus being a bigot provides all the perverse pleasure that asserting dominance over another person often provides, but the “unreal”/”fake” virtuality of the space provides moral and ideological cover for this behaviour. What follows is my attempt to draw together various sociological, geographic, and philosophical ideas to provide a thumbnail sketch of how all that works.

Enjoy!

Gaming cyberspace provides a virtual refuge for a certain kind of masculinity, and one that is consciously constructed in defensive opposition to a rapidly changing world. Sociologist Michael Kimmel argues that for modern young heterosexual men “the fantasy world of media is both an escape from reality and an escape to reality,” capturing the dualism that defines a space of exception. He goes on to point out that this “reality” is one that “many of these guys secretly would like to inhabit” and that video games “provide a way for guys to feel empowered,” (Kimmel 2008: 150). His analysis of men’s relationship to virtual space concludes that these men feel “it’s nice to turn back the clock and return to a time when men ruled—and no one questioned it” (156).

It is hardly surprising that some men wish to perceive this as a “virtual men’s locker room” threatened by the presence of women. It is often constructed as a refuge for hegemonic masculinity, particularly as expressed through technological mastery. Connell identifies two hegemonic masculinities that she argues have diverged and are sometimes in tension with one another: dominance-based masculinity, and expertise-based masculinity (Connell 2000: 194-195). It can be theorised that gaming in cyberspace folds these two back together with a violent world of hierarchical rankings, which allows for the virtual embodiment of conquistador-style masculinity through the mastery of technology, thus reuniting two patriarchal symbolic universes. The conflict between these two masculinities may play out more widely in the physical world, but in the space of exception furnished by cyberspace they combine to form a unique but also familiar expression of gender

But it is here that we come to a very critical distinction between the space of exception constituted by, say, the [internment or prison] camp, and the space of exception the virtual world represents. The marked difference between “exception” and “normal” is important for all such spaces, but only in the virtual world is there an equally clear, aggressively policed, distinction between “real” and “unreal” that constitutes both cyberspace and its social practises. This is a nontrivial distinction, but also a connection between the two– cyberspace and social practise therein. The purported exceptionality of time and place surrounding the internet as a whole gives licence to the abuses within, and the ostensible unreality of gaming, more specifically, licences abuse within its boundaries.

Continue reading →

Immoral Women: Why We Need More of Them

March 4, 2012March 5, 2012Katherine Alejandra Cross3 Comments

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 as persons. Human beings are flawed characters with failings and weaknesses; angels are not.

When I call for ‘good portrayals’ I do not mean that all women should be virtuous. On the contrary, I actually want to see more women as villains, or as morally grey/dubious characters. The simple reason for this is that such figures can be fascinating, merit much discussion, and are fully human. Think of your own interests in fiction: what characters do you love to hate? Who is your favourite villain? What character could keep you up for hours at night as you discuss their philosophy and the writing behind them? Which characters have you debating their morality: good, evil, anti-hero? We all have answers to these questions, and that alone tells us why ‘good portrayals’ include morally flawed/villainous characters by necessity.

My objection to femme fatale villains is not that they are villains, but that women’s agency is always reduced to sexuality in such portrayals. Consider the Drow from Dungeons & Dragons, for instance. The women are defined by rampant, unchained sexuality that is used to literally dominate men. There’s nothing interesting in this, save as a rather specific form of pornography perhaps. Moral weakness, failure, compromise, and villainy are about much more complicated motivations than luring men to their dooms with T&A.

My favourite character of all time is a woman who is widely considered a villain: Kreia from Knights of the Old Republic II. My love letter about this character can be found here, but for the purposes of this article the main points to raise about are these: her character is defined by a philosophy, she is not reduced to sex, she is an agent whose motivations are complicated, her morality shades into a good deal of grey.

It’s hard to peg Kreia as pure evil. She isn’t. Her overarching, long-term goal is ultimately a positive one: she wants to eliminate the new Sith threat as much as you do (if you’re a light-side character), but for her the ends justify the means. Throughout the story you’re treated to many examples of Kreia’s richly self-justified taint manifesting itself in odious actions that service the greater good she has in mind. She is utterly driven by hard-won truths in a life that has been struck by torture, betrayal, and the harshest kind of learning. It produces a figure who is conscious of how far she has fallen, but will use her last gasps of energy to train someone who “may yet be saved.”

If you are a moral idealist, as I try to be, her incredibly well-written dialogue will force you to account in detail for why you believe what you believe. You may disagree strongly with what Kreia does, but you cannot deny she has her reasons—reasons she’ll talk about at length which define her character.

This is far more interesting than what we usually get.

Another example of such a character comes to us in the form of Dragon Age 2’s Knight Commander Meredith. She is horribly undermined by an ending that, in my view, reflects lazy writing and was perhaps the game’s worst moment, but you are otherwise shown an equally morally compromised woman who struggles mightily to do what she feels is right. Machiavellian evil is fascinating because it most closely imitates the evil we see in the real world. Most people are not Snidely Whiplash-esque moustache twirling sociopaths who do evil because it’s funny to them. Evil manifests itself in our world mainly in the form of people who are utterly convinced they are doing the right thing. Morality is rather tricky like that.

Knight-Commander Meredith is one such person. She is introduced to you quite forthrightly, her sword running through a powerful Mage on the verge of killing you. But she quickly evolves into an adversarial force. Meredith is a holy Templar commander driven by her desire to ensure that the Circle Mages under her command in Kirkwall are kept under control and do not become blood mages or abominations. With this in mind, she justifies increasingly onerous restrictions on their freedom. A literal red scare takes hold of her city as she sees the dreaded “blood mages” around every corner, purges becoming a regular feature of life in the city of Kirkwall. But through it all it’s impossible to walk away feeling Meredith has not thought this through. She commits moral wrongs in the name of moral rectitude; her convictions are deeply held and premised on fear of Mages with freedom causing widespread destruction. Meredith has considered all the arguments against her ideology. She is, you learn, painfully aware of the hurt she causes but believes strongly that she is resolutely holding back the tide of a greater evil.

To challenge her is to only compel her to stand her ground, and in a stentorian voice that feels like living scripture, she enjoins you to give her a better solution to this Gordian knot of a crisis between Templars and Mages. If you cannot—and indeed your character cannot—“then do not brand me a tyrant!” she thunders.

This is how you write a villain, and this is how you portray a woman as a human.

The most compelling characters make you think, and sometimes the most intriguing villains are those who are not outright evil, but who are morally compromised. Good people corrupted by the difficulties they confront, who convince themselves that the ends they envision are worth wicked means.

Other examples include Mother Petrice from Dragon Age 2, a quietly zealous manipulator who, again, is committed to doing what she sees as right. In a beautiful moral contest, Grand Cleric Elthina—her superior— can be shown chastising her for her radicalism, telling her “Eternity is long enough that we do not need to rush to meet it.” Elthina’s moderation contrasts with Petrice’s blossoming zeal. The struggle here is not one of cattiness, nor does it revolve around a man, but around a profound theological rift that each woman has her own struggles with.

Lord Zash, forcing someone to pay the price for their lack of vision. (Red robed, light skinned woman shooting lightning out of her hands.)

Moral complexity is wonderful, but you can also write complicated, interesting out-and-out evil. The Old Republic has a woman villain who, in an MMO with an enormous cast, manages to stand out: Lord Zash. While her physical beauty is occasionally remarked upon, what drives the story of the Sith Inquisitor class are Lord Zash’s manipulations and a carefully planned game of chess that testifies to a truly devious and thoughtful mind. A scholarly genius and an intelligent (rather than brash, impulsive, and childish) Sith Lord, she plays a long game leaving you to wonder if you’ll be ensnared next. Her evil is not the showy, infantile evil of your usual hyper-macho scarred Sith Lord (with the way some talk, it’s not hard to imagine some go out of their way to kick puppies and steal candy from babies). It is, instead, the evil of careful, strategic planning born of a true intellect. Each strike is the solution of an equation, a carefully calculated blow rather than an impulsive iota of violence-for-the-sake-of-violence.

Speaking of such, I’m making a note here to say that GLaDOS was a triumph (if ever there was one).

There are many ways to write such characters, of course, but careful attention given to motivation ensures that a character’s humanity—rather than a fetishised gender/race/sexuality—is what defines them as a narrative figure. Kreia is motivated by a drive to stop the Sith from using an ancient evil to consume all life in the galaxy, and by a long nursed hatred of the Force itself, as well as a desire for her as a teacher to have a successful student. Knight-Commander Meredith sees herself as the woman who must make painful choices to ensure peace and order in Kirkwall, and to stop Mages from becoming abominations that threaten the lives of all. In the name of all the above, they will commit to doing repulsive things.

At no point do we find ourselves harping on their looks, their sexuality, any femininity they may possess, or any other fetishised quality. Neither is turned into a man-hating caricature. And neither is a fundamentally morally righteous person; instead, they are human beings whose profound flaws are a part of their characters. What constitutes their “immorality” is also, crucially, not at all related to their sexualities.

Consider my title here: “Immoral Women.” Even now it conjures images of promiscuous, ‘loose’, or otherwise proudly sexual women, which is a testament to the suffocating and dehumanisingly limited framework with which women are saddled. I want that notion of immorality to be expanded to be something more fully human.

Speaking of fuller humanity there is another note that must be made, one of great importance when it comes to conceptualising “women”– it is a reminder that the category “woman” includes women of colour. I adore all of these characters, and am always grateful I have all these examples of great morally compromised women to choose from… and yet also dismayed that they all are, or appear white. Everything I’ve said hitherto applies just as much if not more to the lack of morally compromised, strong women of colour in games. Isabela from Dragon Age 2 is not a villain but as a rogue/pirate/renegade, definitely skirts the outer limits of ethics– and her struggles therewith define her character well. But it’s hard to think of many other women of colour with Kreia-level thought invested in their characters, regardless of whether they’re heroes, villains, or anything in between.

This brings us back to the beginning: the role of moral diversity in character portrayals and my sincere desire to see more women (all-inclusive) as villains and compromised figures. Perhaps part of the communication problem I have is that I use the word “good” when I say “good portrayals,” which leads people to think of it as a moral proposition. What I really mean is “well-written.” This includes the full spectrum of morality, it includes amorality, it includes immorality, and everything in between and beyond. Humans are flawed, and humans are capable of that full range of emotion, motivation, and morality.

No human is a true moral paragon of perfect righteousness. This is not a pessimistic statement about human nature, far from it. It is merely recognition that many people have intricate characters to some degree, and that because women are human, we can commit great wrongs as well as do good. What influences our sense of ethics is a complicated melange that no Madonna/Whore dichotomy can ever hope to capture.

The key to getting past stereotypes is recognising this.

In Faith, I do not Know Thee by Thy Name

August 15, 2011August 16, 2011Katherine Alejandra Cross3 Comments

In my recent article for The Border House I took on a number of the arguments made by a few starry eyed technophiles in favour of ending the practise of online anonymity. This is a significant issue for me that, in its many facets, presents me with the ultimate intersectional landscape on which to grow my ideas about interpersonal politics. In other words, it is very easy to talk about sex, race, power, class, and a range of issues surrounding both individual and group behaviour (group psychology and sociology), identity, and just plain old techno-geekery. It touches on a myriad of issues that are important to me.

What follows is a refinement of what I wrote for The Border House and an expansion of it.

I.- Setting Information Free(?)

It is very much worth mentioning that the central idea behind the anti-anonymity advocate’s vision is the firm belief that the death of anonymity will allow information to flow more freely. The reality, however, is that the end of anonymity means a significant lever of personal control will be wrenched away.

To explain what I mean by this I should go into greater detail about the nature of the information being hotly debated at the moment. Invariably the two pieces of information most prized by the Zuckerbergs and their ideological fellow travellers are, in order of importance: legal names and recent, tasteful photographs. This is what I’ve long referred to as “driver’s licence info” and it is information of a very particular and discrete (if not discreet) type. Driver’s licence information actually has very little to do with your personality and who you are as a person. Such information can, in the case of some, affirm who they are (such as in the case of us trans folk) but even that is only the result of the primacy placed on this otherwise relatively un-telling data.

The reason it is so vitally important, the reason it is fought over like the bloodied scrap of earth it is, is because people in power have made that information a matter of life and death.

A name is what you decide to call yourself, and secondarily what others agree to call you. The ‘legal’ codification of it was merely a forerunner to the 20th century invention of serial numbers which are used to ‘identify’ us ever more finely as the owner of a legally sanctioned identity. Legal names are the foundation of this particular form of identification and are the essence of it. Their legality arises from governmental sanction, but it says nothing immediately genuine about who you are. The reason my own name speaks so powerfully to me is because I chose it. I sought to have it legally recognised because in our society where legal names are gold standards and wherein we must all have one, I felt the most self-empowering thing I could do would be to choose it. So indeed I have and my name is now recognised at various levels of officialdom.

But it was no less mine and no less true to me when it lacked legal recognition. It was my name from the moment I chose it in the company of a dear friend as I tepidly set out to claim a name as my own for the first time in my life. If anything my old legal name actually signal-jammed a good deal of truth that may have eminated from me years sooner, and equally blocked a lot that I might have otherwise taught myself. Obviously my old name was not solely responsible for this– a welter of other social conditions played their parts– but it had a starring role to play. We can discuss and debate the particulars but the fundaments of the matter are these:

My old legal name hid far more than it revealed, hindered more than it helped, and stifled far more than it liberated.

In other words it was actually an impediment to the free flow of information for it to be known and in the public record. It was an obstacle to me forging my own identity, right up to the multiple legal rigamaroles I had to endure in order to change it publicly.

Forcing me into a particular ‘legal identity’ closed doors, it did not open them. Who, precisely, is Mark Zuckerberg to adjudicate on which name is a person’s true name? These legal names are important, yes, but only for the same reason that, say, the institution of marriage is important: so many unjust privileges are bound up in it that we cannot help but pay close attention to its use. For precisely that same reason control of that information must remain in the hands of those with the least power. More broadly, it should remain in the hands of those who are the rightful adjudicators of such information: the people themselves.