Broads Is Dead. Long Live Broads!

The new Broad Recognition is up on its feet. Look! We plan to publish monthly. Enjoy.

The New Broad Recognition

Announcement! In April, Broad Recognition will be expanding into a monthly online magazine for observation, commentary, and analysis by feminists at Yale and elsewhere. We'll announce the launch here, so stay tuned.

More Voices

“The words “women and gender” are frequently added after the word “race” and the appropriate commas, and increasingly the word “sexuality” completes the litany. But the intellectual work of black women and gay men is not thought to be of enough significance to be engaged with, argued with, agreed or disagreed with. Thus terms like women, gender, and sexuality have a decorative function only. They color the background of the canvas to create the appropriate illusion of inclusion and diversity, but they do not affect the shape or texture of the subject.”

Yale Professor Hazel Carby published the words above in the introduction to her absolutely phenomenal text Race Men. I was pulled back to this work, after attending Yale's annual Black History Month dinner. This year, the honored speaker was Governor Deval Patrick, first black governor of Massachusetts. For some unknown and seemingly arbitrary reason, the theme of the event was Black Male Achievement. Five black male students shared the dais with the Governor, as Dean George read off a list of their (disproportionately impressive) achievements. Countless superficial references were made to Obama's win, as though the young men being honored were the direct heirs of this historical race.

Too often are black women shut out from intellectual debate. Western intellectual tradition has long marginalized or completely shut out black contribution and when black culture is included, gender is necessarily subsumed. With the strides made not only by critical race and feminist theorists, such as Carby and including Kenji Yoshino, Henry Louis Gates, Jr and John D'Emilio to name a few, there are few excuses to claim ignorance to such historical blindsighting.

So what can the University do? I participated in a race forum last spring, facilitated by Assistant Dean Shelly Lowe, in which a lot of interesting suggestions were advanced. Some participants advocated requiring a certain number of credits to be fulfilled by "multicultural" courses, which I didn't think made the most sense. I do however believe that professors should be challenged to rethink their syllabi and judge whether their material accomodates issues of difference and the works of historically excluded minds. I don't think that courses in marginal studies such as AFAM or WGSS should have to qualify themselves as extensively as they do, nor do I think a class titled as broadly as "The Art of Biography" should pass with no attention to sexual or ethnic difference. This does not have to be a clumsy reform, many works can be seamlessly included without changing the focus of the course.

Not enough is being done to appreciate the intellectual labor of our marginalized ancestors and consequently the way we address issues of race, gender and sexuality on campus is not richly textured or sufficiently progressive. The Black History Month dinner stood as proof of this; we're quickly satisfied with the premise of celebrating black bodies that we do not bother asking further questions.

"Are You There, Steinem? It's Us, Yale."

Something's up. Gender-neutral housing (oh, that phrase!) is at least on the grown-ups' table; a relatively sensible article about contraception didn't ruin the effect by confusing CLAY's values with a viable student health policy; and one Yale male blushingly affirmed that women are, indeed, "people" (!).

Like a kid approaching puberty. Awkward, but cute.

Even Broader Recognition

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Tell us what's up, what's good, and what sucks on the Discussion Board; we'll respond (in one way or another). And feel free to send relevant links or campus events so we can share them on here and on the Page.

More on Law School Women Fighting AutoAdmit

For a lucid account of the actions taken by two Yale Law School women against the website AutoAdmit, see David Margolick's "Slimed Online" in the March issue of Condé Nast Portfolio.

I always see Portfolio as a lean, elegant liberal finance mag fighting a losing battle against its stodgier counterparts. I hope it doesn't fold, as sites like Gawker have been saying it will since before its first issue came out. Full disclosure: I was an editorial intern there last summer. Important note: Portfolio's editor-in-chief is a clever Yale alumna.

Two observations from Margolick's article:

"In the 21 months since they filed suit, the women have already made some headway. But there are also accusations that the victims are becoming victimizers. Some of the defendants say the case amounts to an all-expenses-paid elitist temper tantrum in which two privileged women have cast an overly broad net, thus failing to differentiate between the really wicked and some of the tamer flamers, and have jeopardized careers in ways far more serious than theirs ever have been. One way or another, their suit highlights a culture and a legal system that still aren’t quite sure how freely people can or should speak online, how seriously to take what they say, and whether they can or should be sued for saying it."

and

"...In the view of Dave Hoffman, a professor at Temple University Law School who has blogged about AutoAdmit, the site offered its patrons a peculiar, vicarious kick: It allowed people who were straitlaced and risk-averse enough to want to be lawyers in the first place to become briefly, crazily irresponsible. They could spout outrageous lies, or, in the manner of Sacha Baron Cohen, invent entirely new personalities for themselves, invariably as homophobes, racists, or misogynists. Speaking a common language and flouting the same taboos, such posters became a close-knit fraternity of complete strangers who rarely even knew one another’s names. But for all their trash talk, many could even feel principled about their misbehavior; after all, they were free-speech absolutists. And they became cyber-survivalists when anyone tried to tone down or remove their posts."

One Year Later, Forty Years Back

I am reprinting here my op-ed of this morning. It's a sort of director's cut, since some of my final edits didn't make it into the published version. To read it on the YDN website, go here.


ONE YEAR LATER, FORTY YEARS BACK
Presca Ahn

I write 40 years after Yale welcomed its first female applicants, and one year after a group of fraternity brothers blocked the entrance to the Yale Women’s Center, crowding around the typewritten phrase, “We Love Yale Sluts.” I write in response to the article, “A year later, little impact from ‘Sluts’ controversy” (Feb. 16), which addressed the latter incident but omitted the former.

The Zeta Psi boys’ “Sluts” escapade was not special because it was bigotry — much uglier speech has been voiced, and is still voiced, behind closed dorm room doors, on the comments boards of the News Web site, and at campus parties. It was special because, finally, there were faces to the bigotry — 12 faces, to be exact, accompanied by gestures of pride or of glee.

Hate speech makes its subjects, the harassed and the derided, a little less free in the environment that permits it. Last year Yale was beset by hate speech that went unclaimed: homophobic “NOGAYS” fliers, a swastika formed with snow, racist graffiti on residential college walls and rape threats targeting specific students on an anonymous gossip site.

With no one to blame, what was Yale to do? For lack of evidence, it could only condemn these incidents of hate speech. For lack of evidence, it held “forums” to “discuss” the “issues,” so that we could “express” our “views.”

Then came an incident of hate speech whose authorship we knew, whose perpetrators we could name. And Yale failed us. It formed a committee or two; it held another forum. It listened sympathetically as a few of us expressed our concerns, and less sympathetically when we proposed constructive action. And then, as the furor died down, it looked away.

There are many tired women at Yale right now. They are women who shrug, since boys will be boys; women who say, “You do not speak for me, Women’s Center. I do not oppose what the Zeta Psi boys did”; or women who — most powerfully — know in their hearts that we may fight male contempt at Yale, but that the real world will offer us much worse. Especially with these last women, I disagree. In the world outside Yale, a group of men who publicly rally around a phrase with the word “sluts” would be fired from their jobs, if not prosecuted, and subjected to punishing scrutiny on all sides.

At Yale, a group of men who publicly rally around a phrase with “sluts” were exonerated and protected, and their critics were called — by their peers — unsympathetic whores who had nothing better to do with their privilege. What the Zeta Psi boys did wouldn’t fly in the real world, not even at the male-dominated financial news network where I worked this fall. But last spring it was indulged at Yale, my school, which enrolls more women than men.

A student who physically assaults another student is punishable by the law. A student who drops a crucial footnote is punishable by the Executive Committee. Campus hate speech is less harmful than physical violence, but certainly more harmful than small-time plagiarism; it occupies a space between these two offenses.

Who is responsible for policing that space? A student club with few resources beyond hope, anger and words which foolishly presumed to advocate for Yale women (who, if the backlash is to be believed, are perfectly happy to be called sluts — our mistake)? Or a powerful and storied American university that promised us much, but tolerance and safety at the very least?

This is not the Yale I was promised, or that any of us were promised.

Ms. Jessica Svendsen Explains It All To You

I've been living in New York this year, but on a rare trip back to Yale I saw parts of Jessica Svendsen's meticulous, beautiful project Graphic Feminism. Jessica's talent isn't news; for a while now she's been a powerful architect of what feminism looks like on campus, and there's a subset of gender students and the Yale Women's Center collective who murmur reverently about Jessica's designs. But this new project of hers strikes with particular strength. Her collage of comments ("Your Comments Here") resurrects the whole atmosphere of last spring's struggle in the wake of Zeta Psi's hate speech. I interpret a mordant humor from the piece, although-- it being what it is-- there are a lot of other ways to experience it.

In light of the recent decision by the Executive Committee...

Click here to obtain the Yale Women's Center's report to the administration on February 8. 2008.

Is The Vagina Monologues A Feminist Play?

To continue in a self-referential vein, I wanted to thank Rachel Achs for her article on the most recent Yale production of The Vagina Monologues, which I directed last month.

The article was remarkably uncritical, however, and I don't think it had to be. The play is problematic, both artistically and politically, and I wish there was a forum in which to discuss it with nuance. Check out Basha's "The Absence of The Vagina Monologues" on Broad Recognition for a basic point of departure for such a discussion. In the post, Basha mentions her doubts about a celebration of female physicality that may emulate male body-talk. There are many other feminist angles, of course, from which to approach the play, once you've read or seen it. (Does it truly represent a pluralistic vision of the female body? Should it presume to reference international women's issues, or is the American focus a stronger and more fruitful approach? Is it too unquestioning of the "domination" of women that a female sex worker, in one of the monologues, voices? Is the portrayal of birth that ends the play an appropriate ideological choice, or is it in fact unrelated to the issues of sexual violence that come before it? The list goes on.)

That said, I do think that The Vagina Monologues is remarkably relevant to modern Yale life. For all the talk about sex and sexuality and sexiness on this campus, there's very little discussion of the body itself, what it means to be a body living among other bodies. Which I find odd, since college students basically live on top of each other in dorms and off-campus buildings, how there's so little privacy around here, how we all feed at the same watering-holes and walk the same handful of streets. Given the conditions of life here, doesn't it seem like we'd have more awareness of bodies? It also bears noting that the bread and circuses provided by Yale also contribute to the marginalization of women's bodies (and all bodies, whatever the gender, that don't fit a traditional male norm). The Yale-Harvard Game-- the single biggest tradition at our school, and the event that attracts the most alumni (and therefore donors)-- offers a grand spectacle where glory is achievable only by the bodies of strong men. What a set-up for gender anxiety.

Feeling comfortable with one's physical self shouldn't be hard, but a wealth of cultural facts and social pressures make it hard. The Vagina Monologues is wonderful to see if that's a discomfort that you have; the women onstage speak frankly, funnily, sadly about their own bodies in a way it's hard to see people do in everyday life, especially at Yale. For women, The Vagina Monologues provides what the play calls "a context of other vaginas." Of course, it's an important play for men to see, too; it's important for all of us, as young people, to use our imaginations to relate to the experience of others-- seeing the play includes men in the wider conversation about women's health, sexuality, and identity, a conversation that is necessary if men and women are to live well together at Yale, or in the wider world.

A letter to esteemed columnist Brent Bozell

I'm a little distressed that my critique of Sex Week at Yale, and of its manner of presenting pornography, has been appropriated by conservative "journalism" with dubious (if any) feminist sympathies. Transparency, I think, will bring some relief. Below is the full text of my recent letter to a gentleman named Brent Bozell, who in a recent article seems to be laboring under some false impressions (perhaps he should have read my piece more carefully before using it in his own). I also forwarded the letter to the websites that have reprinted his column.

---

Mr. Bozell,

I feel compelled to correct some apparent factual errors in your column, "Rape Films at Yale." Your writing suggests that feminists from the Yale Women's Center "[e]nter[ed]" Sex Week at Yale's pornography screening, that I "declared" the porn to be objectionable, and that the film was shut down as a result of these two actions. In fact, leaders of the Yale Women's Center did not attend the screening-- nor did they issue any kind of statement (or declaration) about it. My opinion editorial in the Yale Daily News-- from which you've lifted your quotation of me-- is just that: my personal opinion. While it is true, as you say, that many members of the Women's Center were "not pleased" about the screening, we did not interfere with the screening itself. Free speech is a cornerstone of university life. My view is that discourse is far more constructive than blanket censorship, as I hoped to suggest through my critique of the Sex Week organizers' apology, and my expressed hope that we may talk honestly about porn as a powerful cultural product (not a genre to be categorically, or institutionally, banned).

Also, I am pained at the assumption that my op-ed should be taken as representative of the Yale Women's Center. I am listed under the op-ed as a "junior in Branford College" and the "Amy Rossborough Fellowship Coordinator of the Yale Women's Center." However, this identification does not mean that my opinions are those of all juniors or all members of Branford College, let alone of all the members of the Women's Center. When the Women's Center wishes to issue a statement, the entire board signs as such.

One more note, if I may: you seem to imply in your piece that feminism is a more powerful force at Yale than Christianity. If you must deal in false dichotomies, I am not sure that "more powerful" is the best way to characterize campus feminism in comparison to campus Christianity. "Less funded" and "more vibrant" might be better choices.

Sincerely yours,
Presca Ahn

Gio speaks!

Of all the media attention the Women's Center's been getting recently, the story of the Fox interview with Gio Christodoulou (who held the "We Love Yale Sluts" sign) is still my favorite. Read about it on Jezebel.

Strange bedfellows

In a YDN article on The Owl Shop, Dave Thier '09 writes:

"The Owl Shop, the smoking bar on College Street... feels as if it is from a time before women came to Yale, before Hitler, before Stiles and before lung cancer."

Thanks, Dave. As the 40th anniversary of co-education here rolls around, we've been looking for a catchy slogan for the Women's Center. And you've just handed us one on a plate: "Women Coming to Yale: Better than Hitler. Better than Stiles. Better than Lung Cancer."

Boola boola!

Excellent

I am reposting here Chase Olivarius-McAllister's recent op-ed on choice, which, incidentally, is one of the only morally responsible opinion pieces I have ever read in the Yale Daily News. To read it on the YDN website, go to http://yaledailynews.com/articles/view/21650.

RIGHT-WING FOOLISH; ABORTION IS NECESSARY

Chase Olivarius-McAllister

Ann Marie Beckley was born, and not aborted, in 1932. In that year, illegal abortions killed an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 women.

In 1972, Ann Marie Beckley, after seven still-births and five daughters, aborted her thirteenth pregnancy in New York, the only state in the nation in which the procedure was legal. Her Catholic husband had refused to use contraceptives.

Ann Marie Beckley survived the procedure. The greatest injuries that she suffered as a result of her abortion were incurred afterward, in beatings delivered by my grandfather in their New Jersey home.

She felt guilty about the abortion. This was, perhaps, unremarkable, given my grandfather’s habit of greeting her, afterwards, as “the murderer of his only son.” Years later, he called her that in front of the police; the officers saw that Ann needed to be hospitalized, and heard their eldest daughter’s pleas to arrest her father for assault. But they understood, they were men. It was recorded as a “domestic squabble.”

Times change. By 1986, feminism had been declared dead because, its eulogists decreed, its sole purpose — advocating legal contraception and abortion — seemed irreversibly achieved. One feminist (BR ’77) gave birth to a (planned) daughter in that year, and to another (unplanned) in 1989. She told her daughters that feminism was not dead, but that abortion and contraception were indeed irreversibly legal.

Mother was wrong.

In funding, political acuity, and organization, groups that oppose legal abortion are eviscerating the groups that support it. Politicians know it; Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani have spent the past year renouncing their old, recorded, interpretations of civil rights. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards argue that abortion is “a necessary evil” rather than a reason for women’s happiness and a human right from which all citizens staggeringly benefit. The Supreme Court upheld the “Partial Birth Abortion Ban,” a title that Bush’s Congress felt was synonymous with “The Ban of a Perfectly Safe Procedure by which an Unviable Fetus, which is, Definitively, Unborn, is Aborted.” The Court argued, without precedent, and in contradiction to all science (including even the medical findings of Surgeon General investigations begun by multiple Republican administrations because Reagan “had a hunch” that women suffered “Post-Abortion Stress Syndrome”), that abortion wrought psychological damage to the women who had them.

Though legal abortions are safer, medically, than childbirth in America, and though abortion is a relatively non-invasive procedure to terminate a non-human life, the legality of abortion is no longer safe. If a justice dies, if a Republican is elected to the presidency, women’s constitutional right to their own bodies will be further eroded: The government, to protect you from guilt, from infertility, from hell, denies you, kidnaps your body, and your womb is the ransom.

Though the groups opposed to abortion are winning, there is no “abortion debate.” Abortion’s acquaintance with humanity is contemporaneous with pregnancy’s. It was never about abortion. Abortion is true, and human, and regardless of the law will continue to be a human behavior. The current, and false, opposition of “life versus choice” is peculiar to American politics because it is a whitewash, one that obfuscates the two real questions that, despite the spilling of ink and blood, have remained unresolved for millennia.

The first question: Is fact received by God, or the product of secular inference?

The second, though it came first: Is chaos the immutable consequence of women’s freedom?

Accept Eve, or History: The necessity of abortion to women’s integrity, safety and happiness is true whether or not orphanages become better environments, rape ends, and teenagers stop becoming pregnant. While the physical, psychological, and social consequences of intercourse, pregnancy, and motherhood continue to be so disproportionately divided — as though by a drunk — between the sexes, an 80 percent male Congress cannot legislate gynecology. And a social movement that requires female guilt, that reduces the true and uninterrupted misery that women, and not men, experience as “sex” to “God’s plan,” and their choice to abort to a “sin,” words like “baby-killer” should be removed to the shelf that stows apartheid bigotries, and sit next to the word “nigger.”

And the real point that is never made is not about women’s rights, which are fundamental though pathologically qualified: It is that no one has the right to be a parent. We license marriage, driving, ownership of a handgun. But two teenagers can fuck and if a child is the consequence — fine, no problem. That child will somehow be provided for by the children it has for parents. The American government is, right now, aborting lots of 75th trimester Iraqis. When our 75th trimester babies (18-year-olds) are aborted in Iraq, the nation lauds their souls and loyalty and sacrifice but considers their right to life insignificant in comparison to our national interest. The right-wing keeps death row. The right-wing opposes taxes that will pay for better public schools. The right-wing thinks that owning a gun, a weapon that is designed to kill people, is a Constitutional right. The right-wing loves the unborn till they are alive. Parenthood is the only sacred commitment in life, not a responsibility we must expect children, or the unwilling, or the unable, to shoulder when intercourse leads to pregnancy. Protecting unborn life is about ensuring that children are only born, to parents that both want and are able to provide for them. This would require a radical legislative agenda.

But mother was wrong again: Feminism is dead.

A Major Loss in the Fight for Choice

I just wanted to link to this New York Times article that details the shocking decision that was handed down today by the relatively young Robert's court. In short, the 5-4 decision upheld a federal ban on late term abortions (derisively called 'partial birth abortions' by pro-life campaigners, and known medically as 'intact dilation and extraction' abortions). Unsurprisingly, the one woman sitting on the bench, Justice Ginsburg, wrote the dissenting opinion and stated that the decisions fly so directly in the face of earlier decisions that she doubts the decision can stand.

I sure hope she is right. It is a sad day when the Supreme Court works against civil rights.

In Reversal, Justices Back Ban on Method of Abortion

Feminist Art Label is Problematic

I wrote my last 'Broadly Speaking' editorial in the Yale Daily News on Tuesday, so I thought to re-publish the article here since it was, after all, about feminism and Yale (sort of).

Feminism blurs line between art, politics

Adda Birnir

Broadly Speaking

The art world at large has been abuzz over the past few months about the seeming re-emergence of feminist art. Three weeks ago, the Brooklyn Museum of Art inaugurated its Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art, which featured Judy Chicago’s feminist sculpture “The Dinner Party” on permanent installation. The same day, the Brooklyn Museum launched a major exhibit titled “Global Feminisms,” which featured a survey of feminist art made since 1990 from all over the world. In early March, another major exhibition of feminist art, “Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

These two shows are noteworthy because they are the first shows of their kind to go up in the past 10 years. Feminist art saw its heyday in the 1970s and has largely been overlooked or dismissed in the intervening 30 years. In addition, the exhibits are notable because female artists are so rarely represented in major group exhibitions. For example, in the Greater New York show put up at PS1 in 2006, women artists made up only 33 percent of the artists exhibited, though women make up a majority of emerging artists. In addition, a survey undertaken by the feminist performance art group Brainstormers of the representation of women and men in Chelsea commercial galleries found that over half of the galleries show over 60 percent male artists, some as many as 80 percent or higher.

The question that exhibits of this kind raise is whether it is productive to promote a division between political or feminist art and all other types of art. Do these exhibits allow often-overlooked artists a forum? Or do they further ghettoize the works of politically conscious artists by constraining them to such a specific category?

Moreover, art shows with such an explicit curatorial focus promote an overly simplistic reading of the art, both by creating a rigid framework with which to view the works, as well as ignoring a lot of subtly feminist art. A show that features feminist art implicitly suggests that making work that deals with issues of gender, sexuality and womanhood is somehow different from any other art that responds to and is drawn from our cultural environment. All art is indebted to its artistic and historical context, yet we don’t pigeonhole Picasso’s work as being about only World War II, David Hammons’ work as commenting only on poverty in New York City or Diego Rivera’s very political murals as addressing only socialism.

Most feminist art shows would dismiss the works of minimalist painter Danielle Mysliwiec because nothing in her paintings obviously advances a feminist cause. Rather, Mysliwiec’s feminism is embedded in her minimalist undertaking — minimalism is a traditionally male-dominated area of art — as well as the delicate allusions to lace and other feminine objects found in her works.

My fear is that feminist art shows only look for feminism on the surface of the work and give little or no credit to the great deal of feminist rigor that serves as a foundation for many female artists. Making art as a female presupposes a certain level of feminism. Though women constitute the majority of art students, the commercial art market and elite arts institutions remain boys clubs. The Yale University Art Gallery serves as a good case study: Jennifer Gross, curator of the Modern and Contemporary Department, is often considered a feminist art curator because she exhibits and collects an equal proportion of male and female artists, even though she never does so with a consciously women-friendly intent.

The other critical consideration when thinking about this type of art is whether the art is made in service of a political message, or whether the political agenda is simply an outgrowth of the art. For example, posters made by the Guerilla Girls are art, yes, but more importantly, they are meant to be aggressively political. The artistic and aesthetic elements of the posters are only in the service of advancing a very particular goal. A sculpture artist like Betye Saar would argue that the politics explicit in her art are a natural extension of her assemblage process.

I don’t mean to condemn the efforts of the Brooklyn Museum or of MOCA. It is important for artists who consider themselves feminist to show their work and to have a platform to organize and network. Furthermore, it is about time that a major arts institution installed a show that focuses on contemporary women artists. But this should not encourage the art world to prescribe certain working methodologies to women artists or essentialize women artists as feminist artists. Women can and should make art about whatever they choose and be judged on the aesthetic and social value of their work.

Some Words from a Guest Blogger

this probably should've been a post but here i am.... maybe i will make it one...

excellent comments andom; most especially because they highlight the role our-ever friendly media plays in devaluing racism.

but in truth, what's a woman who thinks, well i do remember hearing

Smack that, give me some more
Smack that, 'till you get sore
Smack that.

and akon's "smack that" doesn't even include "ho".

there's also snoop dog's interesting response to being compared to don imus, which is problematic in its own right, but an interesting comment nonetheless:

"These are two separate things. First of all, we ain't no old-ass white men that sit up on MSNBC [the cable network home to Imus] going hard on black girls. We are rappers that have these songs coming from our minds and our souls that are relevant to what we feel. I will not let them mutha-----as say we in the same league as him." http://newsbusters.org/node/11981

interesting. several questions which i'd like to debate:
if one ought to take care and consider the nature of media representations when discussing internal injustice, how does one proceed to create interior justice if not in the public sphere, if not in bringing to light these cultural internalizations of systemic oppression? where is this so-called private, black-only sphere where black identity can heal itself from colonial assumptions of heteronormativity?
and do we not paternalistically presume that our community is too weak to acknowledge internal discrepancies and then to proceed with an equally public movement away from misogyny, an example of progress?

it is a testament of our capacity to represent blackness not as a stringent category of identification, to demonstrate its capacity for morphing, for evolution. perhaps the question is not whether specificity of viewpoints in the black community contribute to division, but rather how do we develop a rhetoric that uncategorically demonstrates us as unified against white supremacy and at the same time, incontestably human in our capacity to express viewpoints that alternate from brother to brother, sister to sister. we are not a political party with one ideology to which we march (though perhaps some might argue we ought to be), we are a people, in the multivarious forms that the word "people" takes.

is it also not possible to reject don imus' and his likes while also stating, 'we categorically reject hip hop's perpetuation of misogyny which sustains heteronormativity, a system of power upon which white supremacy often rests?' - or something along these lines.

it would be a shame to shy from this discussion and alienate our women from our identity on grounds that race as it relates to our relationship to the white public takes precedence over gender discourse within the community.

what's more, i am **accutely** sensitive to the historical legacy of white colonialism (in its wondrous, multivarious forms) use of women's positions in other cultures to attack these communities as primitive, backwards etc., a reason to mutilate cultures. i think the discourse of feminism in the Middle East currently testifies directly to this.

but i am concerned that this acute awareness of how these cultural critiques from the "enlightened" eurocentric lead us to great susceptibility to 1. perpetually imbue female bodies with the role of cultural representatives such that these discussions about race necessarily occur through our bodies, once more encouraging the silencing of women as mere bodily representors of idealism - does she or doesn't she wear a veil, does she or doesn't she wear her culture's garb, does she or doesn't she cook X food, doesn't she or doesn’t she use birth control, is she or isn't she raising our children in this way, etc (has any one heard black female view points? maybe i've missed this but it appears as though men are once more speaking in the place of women) 2. accentuate one form of injustice over another.

so perhaps someone can answer for me where this private sphere for black judgment occurs, and why we cannot reclaim justice as a heterogenous community rather than one that necessarily presents a monolithic front; in short, why in at once condemning don imus' racist comments, there can't be a more nuanced and yes, public critique that acknowledges hip hop's perpetuation of not merely gender injustice but equally problematic, race injustice by so vividly and so often reflecting the rhetoric of white heteronormativity (though perhaps in a more verbose manner than white sexism's great capacity to be insidious)? why when we critique hip hop's gender injustice we cannot also publicly denounce the *continued* unequal pay of women across the US, the many unjust applications of rape laws, the eroding access a woman has to birth control let alone abortion, the absence of day care to ensure women's actual capacity to enter the work force, the appalling number of women tenured as professors despite the steadfast, growing number of females graduating university compared to their male peers.

it's not right, i concede, that the black community must both bear the brunt of racism as well as be the solutions to these injustices. but i am deeply concerned when one form of injustice and its resolution take precedence over another because we find ourselves in the public and often oppositionary eye of the other. i am beginning to understand the dangerous cost of this double consciousness, this perpetual acknowledgment of the white perspective on blackness.

it’s our difficult to move forward with change by taking hold of the rhetoric and calling internal critique of blackness not an instance of division but a representation of another assault on whiteness, where we refuse to perpetuate power structures which have and will continue to uphold racial, gender oppression so long as we choose to not tear down the both simultaneously.

we are fortunate enough to historically know how women have been sidelined in and for race politics (http://www.buffalostate.edu/orgs/rspms/combahee.html) – let’s not make the same mistake twice.

so be equally insulted that black women were referred not only in racially derogatory terms, but at the absurdity of reducing our amorphous and profound sexuality to an apparatus for lust.

i won’t choose to be more upset as a woman or a black person in these comments. i’ll thunder that i’m made to choose, as though sexism and racism were not cut from the same cloth. so snoop can talk from his soul as much as he wants and don imus can reveal his true colors, but neither’s masculinity or blackness is enough a shield to protect him from my anger.

**and may i just add that these moments of internal critique need to be buffered with the role of the media which uplifts misogynistic rap while giving little to no play to rappers like lupe, dead prez, talib, roots, and so many others who have returned to rap's original *revolutionary* role as a voice of dissent and a voice of UPLIFT. there's a reason why hip hop has taken root around the world, from senegal with the amazing didier awadi rapping against neocolonialism to the banlieus of paris against france's hypocritical reputation as race-heaven to palestinians against the israeli occupation to female middle eastern MCs rapping about american cultural hegemony.

so i say: rap is beautiful.
let's bring it back home.




ps for someone notably more eloquent than myself, the black law feminist kimberly crenshaw has written on this not-so-new issue. y'all should check out her article:
http://bostonreview.net/BR16.6/crenshaw.html

pps tns doing loving internal critique…

Online Misogyny: Does the Internet Make Sexism Easier?

By now I'm sure many of you have heard about the scandal at the Yale Law School. As the Yale Daily News and the Washington Post have reported, three female students at Yale Law School have claimed to be the victims of slanderous comments on an online discussion, AutoAdmit, which allows posts by undergraduate students about schools, job offerings, etc. One of the three students believes that the offensive posts damaged her career chances, since the discussions are among the first hits of a Google search.

I read through some of the comments, and I was shocked. The posts are lewd, aggressive, even violent; there are speculations about her sexual health and threats of rape. I know that some will say that these threats are not to be taken seriously, but it's truly horrifying to think that people can voice such thoughts on a public forum anonymously and not fear legal action. Similar phenomena have occurred elsewhere online: recently, a female blogger became so frightened by gruesome death threats that she canceled speaking engagements (read more about this story here).

I am also thinking back to last year when Della and Sabrina received a barrage of hateful comments in which the words "bitch" featured prominently. Is it easier to hate women electronically? It seems that this kind of hate speech is tolerated online in a way it would not be in a print forum or in everyday conversation. Perhaps the anonymity of message boards eliminate the filter between thought and speech . . . or perhaps I just don't notice the expression of these sentiments in other arenas. I realize that posters can attack a wide variety of people in vicious ways, but it is particularly disturbing that women are often the victims of these attacks and that the slander is of a sexual nature. For all of those people who claim that sexism is gone and that feminism is unnecessary, these disgusting posts prove otherwise.

Whoa, Women's Crew!

On an incredibly positive women-note, the Yale Women's Crew team made a ridiculously funny, ridiculously critical video about their relationship to food ("This has 3,000 calories, this has 3,000 calories, let's eat it!") where they spoof the now famous internet video "Shoes." Amazing. Thank god for women being funny and making light of the ridiculously stringent eating habits athletes have to adhere to! Way to put your intellect and comedy and femininity to use. This video is brilliant. There, I said it.

Also, they are wearing mustaches for much of the video. I love the women's crew team.

Take a look.

(Reblogged courtesy of Ivy Gate)

Naked Women, They Sell Everything

I have been meaning to complain about the above poster since I first saw it heralding me from outside of the Yale Rep. My vigor was re-fueled last night when walking by the poster and my friend asked me if I wasn't surprised that The New York Times refused to run the image as an ad for Yale's production of Lulu.

No, I am not surprised, in fact I totally agree with The New York Times' discomfort, although admittedly my objections may be more political than proprietary.

I find this poster offensive. Not only is the body headless, armless and for most purposes legless (ie really it has a vagina, the only important part of a female body), the body is deathly white and totally hairless. No landing strip here boys. Go right on in. I worry that there is this mentality among intellectual institutions, people, and theatrical organizations (apparently) that because we are conscious of the tradition of misogynist imagery we are accessing it's alright for us to mine it.

It is not alright. Lulu is a play about sex and abuse and prostitution and the degradation of women. The play is incredibly violent. Grotesquely violent. The poster image relates only in that it degrades women and is sexual yes, but the apple? The virginal, death-like, obectified body? Tangential at best. Really, its an easy, simple poster that took little to no talent or ingenuity to come up with and which employs a wonderful, rich history of sexist imagery to deliver a quick, sexy punch. Do better Yale Rep, I am sad to see you disappoint.