Zoophobia

Planet on a Plate

2011-03-27T13:27:00.014-05:00

PLANET ON A PLATE
Q15: Is it possible to meet present global demand for animal products humanely and sustainably? If so, how? If not, what should we do?

0-5min: NEWS
-- Vegetarian Debate

First, each team will take turns summarizing their paper in 5 minutes. Next, there will be 20 minutes of open debate. Finally, you will have 20 minutes to record and analyze the results of the debate. The last 20 minutes of class we will all reflect on the debate and animal unit.

You are not arguing for or against vegetarianism per say, so much as arguing *as* the author of your paper. Don't make arguments that s/he wouldn't. Each team is required to make an outline of their reading (i.e. a one-sentence thesis and a paragraph summary). Your guilds will be assessed on a) your knowledge of and loyalty to the readings, b) the clarity and conciseness of your presentation, c) the strengths of your defenses, and d) the generosity and thoughtfulness of your responses.

5-15min: INTRODUCTION
--power point
SOCIAL COSTS

Over the last 50 years, the method of producing food animals in the United States has changed…[and] has come at a cost to the environment and a negative impact on public health, rural communities, and the health and well-being of the animals themselves.
--Pew Commission (2008)

CAFOs (i.e. “factory farms”)

Replaces small, sustainable farms
Contracted into massive debt
Lung disease & Nausea from smell
Toxic contamination of ground water
Decreased property values

Slaughterhouses

Human rights violations
Exploitation of migrant laborers
Among the most dangerous jobs in USA
High turn over rates
Destruction of community
Increased violence within communities

Other Health Concerns

Livestock compete with world’s hungry over staple grains
Increased bacterial food contamination
Breeds “superbugs” (resistant to antibiotics)
Source of heart disease and cancer

ENVIRONMENTAL COSTS

“The Livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems at every scale from local to global
--UN’s FAO 2006

WATER / OCEANS

Severely depletes groundwater / aquifers
Contributes to the eutrophication of rivers and dead zones in the Gulf Of Mexico

WATER / OCEANS

Potential collapse of world fisheries by 2048
90% of large predatory fish pop. Depleted and most fisheries fully or over-exploited
Large numbers of unwanted fish killed as by-catch (Only ½ of fish caught in nets are eaten)
Deep water trawling destroy ancient marine habitats (like clear-cutting a rainforest)
Shrimp farming destroy coastal forests

Conversion Ratios (protein output : input)
Over 95% animals in the USA are from CAFOs

1:2 chicken
1:5 pig
1:10 cows

Over half of fish now come from fish farms

1:3 salmon
1:5 cod
1: 20 tuna

EARTH / LAND

Occupies 33% of arable land, 70% ag land
Responsible for 55% of land erosion in USA
US diet uses 20x more land than vegan diet

HABITAT / BIODIVERSITY

Responsible for 70% of Amazon deforestation
Eradication of wildlife (i.e. wolves and bison)

AIR / CLIMATE

Livestock sector contribute 18% of global anthropogenic GHGs
US diet : vegan diet // SUV : compact car
Ammonia emissions major cause of acid rain

15-40min: MOVIE
--Animal Factories in Michigan (see below)

40-60min: WORKSHEETS
Discuss the questions for the readings in small groups (10min each)
--write your names at the top!

Q1: What would the following ethicists' positions be on producing and consuming animals in the context of today's readings on animal agribusiness' impact on animal welfare, social welfare, and the environment? (Please give an explanation of only one sentence):

Immanuel Kant (Deontologist)
Peter Singer (Utilitarian)
Upton Sinclair (Socialist)
Greta Gaard (Anti-colonialist Feminist)

Q2: After reading the articles and discussing the ethical positions above, what ought to be done to produce and consume animals sustainably on a global scale?(Consider the questions below. You MUST justify your answers with today's readings)

Are people eating too many animals and animal products? If so, how much is too much?
Are there certain animals we ought not to eat? Which ones? Why?
Should certain people eat less or more animals? If so, which ones? Why?
If you had the power, what agricultural policies would you write for the USA?
As individuals in the USA, what actions ought we take in regards to eating animals?

60-80min: DISCUSSION
--Discuss the questions above with regards to today's readings.

PBS FRONTLINE: Polluted Waters (Chesapeake Bay Chicken Farms)

SIERRA CLUB: Living a Nightmare: Animal Factories in Michigan

POP TECH 2009: Gidon Eshel on the Impact of Food

Gidon Eshel: The Impact of Food from PopTech on Vimeo.

TED: Mark Bittman on What's wrong with what we eat

The Sexual Politics of Meat

2011-03-27T12:43:00.011-05:00

SUPERBOWL SPECIAL
InGame Now: Vegetarian Eats Bacon in Bacon Bikini

PETA: Superbowl Ad 2009

NEWS STORIES
New York Times: "Where Only the Salad is Properly Dressed"
(Frank Bruni 2007)

New York Daily News: "Wall Streeter sues employer over vegetarian taunts"

ADVERTISING IMAGES
Suicide Food: Sexy

TELEVISION ADVERTISMENETS
Burger King
I am a Man

Cheat on Beef a

Cheat on Beef b

Carl Jr's
Paris Hilton

Padma Lakshmi

Ms. Turkey

White Castle
BBQ Pulled Pork

Rustler's
"Date"

OTHER
Taylor Mali "On what teachers make"

America the Porn Queen

2010-12-06T22:24:00.003-06:00

In last week's class we watched another interesting documentary on media and body image. Most of the documentaries in class I really enjoyed, but little of the content had been all that new to me. When I saw we were going to watch yet another documentary on body image, I was anticipating just more of the same. We had already watched one on sexual stereotypes, women in advertisements, and two on masculinity (which and one on Disney that discussed every angle on gender and media representation I expected to see in the class, but America the Beautiful was different. It was less an education film than a documentary, a narrative with characters you loved to watch or loved to hate.

Darryl Roberts' documentary was a refreshing look that was more investigative than agenda driven. Certainly there was some craft with how the story would be told, but overall the film felt more like an exposure to a culture with fascist beauty standards perpetuated by top media firms and the fashion industries. I was surprised to learn that one reason designers show off very thin models is in order to save costs on fabrics. On the one hand, this made sense--there was a logic to it, but on the other, the logic was perverse! The only costs being taken into account are monetary, with all social and emotional costs for millions of little girls being externalized and marginalized. (And I thought it was exclusively to sell a standard in which very few could attain and thus people would perpetually be spending money on all kinds of projects which only the wealthiest could ultimately keep up with and thus achieve the ideal and make it all the more prestigious. According to one report, to upkeep a diva appearance, the average woman would spend approximately $450,000 in her lifetime on beauty products and procedures!)

Also interesting, a couple men of possibly the lowest common denominator in society were interviewed including one guy who could care less about women as anything more than fuck object and servant and another who would have won at evolutionary psychology bingo. According to this one doctor(?), humans had evolved to prefer lighter skin so that they could spot diseases further away--something that makes no sense since it would be to assume genetic determinacy and would be irrelevant to explaining how skin color is a cline that varies by latitude, not so much genes. It was almost unbearable to watch how offensive he was to one woman of color who sought his help, making her skin five shades lighter to make her more "objectively" beautiful, then getting ubber upset and defensive when she left, calling her a "loser" just like the Amerindians who continue to live on reservations. She also, according to him, had no more excuses for her status since she had never been a slave like her ancestors. I really wanted Roberts to sock him in the face, even though I'm usually opposed to violence. This was one man who was never going to "get it."

Most interesting of all was the whole narrative that tracked Gerren Taylor's rise and fall as a supermodel, from "the giraffe" to the "obese." As one interviewee noted, Gerren had not so much self-esteem from modeling so much as an inflated ego, an ego-enhancement. From my own personal experience and observation, ego is often the utmost detriment to self-esteem. And so we saw how true this was, as Gerren crashed and burned because she was neither thin nor white enough by European standards. It was audacious to hear how many people had called her obese. I'm assuming this was done out of spite and/or jealousy. The extend to which Garret and the other girls in the video really believed they were "ugly" was extremely disturbing. How odd that someone could have so much certainty about something so subjective!

On pornography

Somethings I would have liked to see more of in this class are positive and subversive and alternative media. Too often we have to hear about all that is wrong with the media that it makes us progressive folk sound like a bunch of whiners--I'm guilty of this in my class too, of course. I feel that showing some scandalous and creative forms of media expression would be more empowering to people in the class showing that there are still ways to resist cultural hegemony and disrupt the meanings and identities we have inherited.

Besides that, I would have also liked to see less focus on gender and more on sexuality. Yes, the two are very related, but we left untouched one of the most powerful social forces in the media over the last several decades--pornography. Pornography is quickly creeping its way into every mainstream outlet including corporate advertisements (i.e. Carl's), cable television (i.e. Nip/Tuck), and video games (i.e. Grand Theft Auto). Very little of class was devoted to discussing sexual identity and politics other than the one day on GBLT in the media--which was one of the most educational days for myself. When sex work was discussed in videos, it generally painted women as victims and objects, rather than agents. I think it would have been great to have more discussion over how sex workers are portrayed by the media for it seems very few people really take the time to listen to their voices and instead opt for speaking for them.

Sex worker politics aside, pornography has had such a radical shaping of people's sex life ever since porn became freely accessible to anyone with a web connection. I recently watched several documentaries on pornography and had a hard time swallowing some of the statistics (no pun intended). For instance, the porn industry racks in more dough than all of major league sports in the country combined. One documentary was about an experiment to see what effect pornography would have on one's perception if one were to watch it everyday for a month. Both men involved had significantly less happiness with their current partner and belief in commitment and found themselves less sexually disciplined. After a month of recovery from the exercise, their opinions rebounded back to where they were before. In another documentary, the filmmakers followed Anabelle Chong, who became famous after breaking the world record by sleeping with 251 guys in 10 hours. It was pretty sad, given that in the end word gets out when she visits her family in Singapore that she isn't so much an artists as her teacher and other expected to be but a porn actress. She leaves them shamed and returns to the US promising all that she will bring them honor again, but ends up returning to the industry--probably because of finance issues since she was never given $10,000 from her infamous gangbang even though she had risked her life.

My favorite documentary was Pornography: The Secret History of Civilization. It is a six-part series that discusses erotic art from ancient Rome through the middle ages and renaissance up into Victorian England and the sexual revolution, concluding with an analysis of video and internet porn's influence on both technology and sex life. I recall watching Gail Dines give a talk on pornography and its collusion with capitalism via Playboy, which helped sell a new lifestyle after the war as well as a new persona. I've heard both positive receptions of Kinsey and Hefner in promoting sexual liberation, but also heavy criticism over their methods and exploitation. In either case, it cannot be undone, and for better or worse, if it weren't for porn, VHSs victory over beta may not have been secured. In addition, broadband internet and cybersecurity Dines claims were the products of enormous demand for high quality and quantity porn.

The perfect vagina from heather leach on Vimeo.

As was seen in America the Beautiful, a surgery on the rise is vaginal correction, in which women are unhappy or embarrassed about their labia minora wither because they are asymmetric or enlarged compared to the pornography they or the men they are interested in are used to. Recent studies even tell us that men are influenced to mimic acts in the films they see such as choking women and ejaculating on their bodies. Dines believes that porn, at least the porn industry is a threat to healthy and private sex lives, especially now that the person next to you can be looking at it next to you on his cell phone or that any child could accidentally stumble across it, typing in the most innocent of searches such as white house. Porn is no longer less impossible to avoid than it is impossible to censor.

Tough Guise, Weak Personality

2010-12-06T15:18:00.004-06:00

Tough Guise
After watching a documentary by Jackson Katz, Tough Guise, a week before, I requested to show a video about Linda McMahon's run for senator of Connecticut. I had just watched a couple minutes into the video when I realized that ti was mad by the same director. I hadn't anticipated showing all ten minutes of the segment, especially since I hadn't even watched all of it myself, but no one had cut me off. So we all bared witness to some of the most disturbing footage all class, as female wrestlers were bullied and humiliated in front of thousands of screaming and taunting men and women.

Nearly everyone in the class was extremely dismayed by what was just seen... well, at least all the women and the feminist dudes (that being me). As far as I can recall all the other guys in class said either nothing or were apologetic of the WWE, the that produced this crap. While none of them were saying it was acceptable or no big deal, several of them acted defensively in regards to their past relationship to it as boys. It was an awkward spot to be placed in, I suppose--being surrounded by several dozen upset women and a heinous wake up call what they previously enjoyed as children. A couple of the guys responded by saying that they were no longer interested in the show after they found out it wasn't "real." Professor Everbach laughed, and asked them if they would only enjoy this scene if it were real. They said "no!" and that it was only make believe and that the women participating did so on their own free will and made a lot of money.

Their response was right out of oppression bingo (I don't think one made a card for it yet). One by assuming any occupation someone takes is purely a matter of free will; second, by assuming they didn't pressure these women into doing things they felt uncomfortable with as they were under contract; three, that as long as they get paid, that makes all else acceptable.

Of course, the biggest fallacy of all was the naive divide they established between "fantasy" and "reality." I tried to explain to the best of my tired-ass ability that the distinction between fantasy and reality breaks down if we are to follow the social theorists like Erving Goffin and Judith Butler who argue that gender identity is a performance, not an essence. That is, gender is performed in a society that recognizes certain acts as signs of one's gender, that register as one being of such and such a gender simply by playing the role of that gender. That these wrestlers were "just playing" is oversimplifying the phenomenon. When people watch, whether they recognize this is "just play" or not, either way they are recognizing certain roles as masculine and others as feminine, and are in some way being instructed on how to play these parts.

The fact that there are thousands of real people cheering and sympathizing with Vince MacMahan and others as they "fake" humiliating and sexually assaulting women seems to me that something more than innocent fun is taking place. People are enthralled and impassioned by this narrative and in interviews express no uncertainty about the justness of such acts. The guys in class called these people "stupid," as if only less intelligent people would take enjoyment out of misogyny, as if wealthy and/or educated celebrities would think this behavior too low brow. But really, they would just as likely eat this up in a different context--perhaps in a scene at the theater. What happens is that they end up projecting their own anxieties over their ambiguous relationship with misogyny onto Others, displacing responsibility.

Finally, to take the cake, a couple of them came up after class after they had heard one of the students was crying on the toilet because she had been so upset by what they were saying--feeling that there was no hope for the world--and attempted to purge themselves of fault. Perhaps they wanted to be reassured that they had done nothing wrong, but even so, their attitude was a gain to displace responsibility and guilt by falling back upon the dictum of personal responsibility. AS long as they hadn't said anything wrong, and they didn't think they did, they were off the hook. There was no need to apologize because they were right in their opinion and it had harmed no one. Little did they think of the collective responsibility they shared in being men in a patriarchal culture or by being part of a mosaic of unpleasant opinions.

Sex and Gender in Video Games

2010-12-06T09:46:00.012-06:00

Female video game characters tend to verge on the extreme opposites of sexuality, neither of which are particularly flattering or accurate. On one end of the spectrum, there are women who are portrayed as helpless damsels that lounge around in long pink dresses, waiting to be rescued by your typical hero, and on the other end you have self-reliant, empowered women who risk endless sexualisation from video game developers or the gaming community as a whole

* Men fear strong, empowered women because these women make men feel weak. Sexualising these characters portrays them as having a weakness (i.e. sexual hunger) that can only be cured by men, thus returning the male to an alpha position.
* Video game developers felt that games featuring independent women in the title role would alienate traditional male gamers so the characters were sexualised to entice players.
* Men are so shallow that every woman they see offers the opportunity to create a vacuous sex object in their heads. Video games (and the internet) have offered society the opportunity to share these musings.
* Female characters with large breasts and little clothing sell more games; we’re in a shady business after all.[*]

History of Female Game Icons
The first video arcade, Pong (1972), was released by Atari in the early 1970s, later to be released on the first home console, the Atari 2600 (1977). Four years after the first game console and nearly a decade after the invention of popular video games, gamers would be able to play the first female protagonist, Ms. Pac Man (1981).

But just as quickly as the empowerment of female characters entered the picture, so did their degradation: the damsel in distress and the sex object. A year later, Nintendo's Donkey Kong (1981) would introduce the precursors to Mario, Bowser, and Princess Peach--Jumpman, Donkey Kong, and Pauline--, based off the Popey-Bluto-Olive Oyl triad. Pauline and her successor Peach would become the archetype of the damsel in distress character. On the other hand, you also had the release of three of the most mysoginistic games of all time by a developed named Mystique. In 1982 they released three a trilogy of disgusting including Custer's Revenge, in which your objective as Custer is to dodge Amerindian arrows so you have sex with (rape?) a woman named "Revenge" tied up to a cactus, Beat Em' & Beat Em' in which you control two naked women who must ingest the ejaculate from a man on a roof, and Bachelor Party in whcih you control a man who must bang a two lines of falling women.

While the damsel in distress was a motif that has persisted long in video game history, the release of eroticism on videogame counsels would be very rare (at least within American and mainstream markets). The female protagonist returned in the late 80s and early 90s, including Chun-Li in Street Fighter II (1991) and Sonya Blade in Mortal Kombat (1992), in addition to female characters in Role Playing Games like Final Fantasy III (1990) and the protagonist, Terra, of one of the most popular one's, FFVI (1994). The largest female role of all since Ms. Pac Man would come in the form of Samus Aran in Metroid (1986), a space bounty hunter whom you did not discover until a secret ending was actually a woman. Samus would become the most beloved female lead in gaming (a topic I'll discuss later).

Samus's popularity, however would subside since the sequels Metroid Prime II (1991) and Super Metroid (1994) were not to be followed up by another, Metroid Prime and Metroid Fusion (2002) for another 8 years. Meanwhile, Lara Croft, the star of Tomb Raider Tomb Raider (1996) and the "girls" of Dead or Alive (1996), a fighting game in which the 3D characters' breasts jiggled, became the new face of female game characters. While the Both Lara and the DoA girls were tough, the DoA girls were more eye candy compared to Lara who at least had wit and personality and could figure as an empowering, although increasingly sexualized female game character.

Frustratingly, as one saw the presence of more female game characters, they were either regulated to "girl games" or manufactured as pure eye candy and sex objects. This trend was perhaps anticipated or set a new bar with Grand Theft Auto III (2001), in which one could purchase sex from prostitutes (and murder them to steal the money back). While GTAII was critically acclaimed despite its violent nature for allowing gamers to have one of the most liberating worlds in any game, a host of other games to follow were so bad that they used sex to sell, at least some have argued. These games include BMX XXX (2002), in which topless women riding around nude on motor vehicles, Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball (2003), which centers around oogling at buxom women, and Rumble Roses (2004), a wrestling game with scantidly clad women with jiggly breasts.

The year 2004 was a a paradox for female portrayal in video games. On the one hand, it introduced some of the most powering female character yet. Samus returned in her second fifth-generation game, Metroid Prime: Echoes, as well as two of what are considered the strongest and most admirable female roles in video games: Jade in Beyond Good and Evil (2004), Alyx Half-Life 2 (2004). However, this was also perhaps the sexiest year in gaming history since Mystique's gruesome trilogy in 1982. Of this lineup included Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude (2004), in which you play a supersenior in college trying to lay as many women as possible, Playboy: The Mansion (2004), in which you play Hugh Hefner trying to make a buck, the Guy Game (2004) in which the hetero-male player must guess what a videorecorded woman will answer to a trivia question in order to see her breasts. (There is also another game I can't find, that was the first dating simulator game that allowed players to choose homosexual--but not bisexual--characters).

In many of these games, sex was implicit and nothing more than nudity and heavy petting made an appearance. Yet, some content had been cut from the game but not removed form the code, as it was discovered to be the case in the Hot Coffee scandal of the GTAIII sequel, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004), in which there was an unlockable sex game. The following year, another game, God of War (2005), included an un-hidden sex mini-game. Five years later ,sex and nudity has become a regular in major games, perhaps reflecting not only an older audience but also greater graphical capacities and a more sexualized media.

The Sexualization of Samus?

Wii Games - E3 2011 - Metroid: Other M

Although last year was no stranger to sex controversies in video games, in August of 2010 the issue of gender representation ingvideogames would jump front and center with the release of the much anticipated, next generation Metroid game, The Other M. While Samus had kicked-ass across the galaxy in at least six previous titles, her reconceptualization (by Team Ninja, the same folks who brought you DoA) was perceived as a step backward to several reviewers. In her review, G4 reviewer Abbie Heppe writes

Yes, that’s right. The woman who in the first five minutes of the game gives the squad access to the ship by using her missiles is restricted from using her abilities... until a bland male character dictates it to her.
...
In short, you're asked to forget that Samus has spent the last 10-15 years on solitary missions ridding the galaxy of Space Pirates, saving the universe and surviving on her own as a bounty hunter. Instead, Other M expects you to accept her as a submissive, child-like and self-doubting little girl that cannot possibly wield the amount of power she possesses unless directed to by a man.

Interestingly, Heppe's criticism focused little on Samus' appearance and more on her personality. Samus' tight skin zero suit she wore throughout the last couple games, and not her vulnerability, was the target of others criticism.

But Samus had been a sexual object form the beginning, it seems--from her very first "striptease" in which her gender was revealed. After all, the revelation was a reward for completing the game quickly and little more than a last minute twist in production. Adam Sorice of Nintendojo raises the question whether the gamers were witnessing in the original revelation "the birth of a feminist icon or just another sex object?"
Another commentator reminds us

Modern gamers may not think much of a bikini clad 8-bit image of a woman, but this was probably the most provocative image to appear in a mainstream NES game

Yet, no one can deny that regardless of intent and origins, both male and female fans have attributed their own meaning to Samus' gender. As one blogger writes:

The largely male (and largely very young) demographic of NES players tended to be surprised, “Hey, I kicked ass, and I’m a girl!”, suggesting a the potential for a kind of gender equity for video game warriors and that little boys might think of women’s roles as warriors in a slightly less traditional way.

and another

As for Samus, when I was little, playing the game, and saw the ending of Samus in her skin-tight outfit, I didn't mind. I was a little girl, and the thought of another girl doing something as awesome in a game like Metroid...

Heppe's review of Other M, triggered serious discourse not only within the gamers' community, but all the way up to the editors of major gaming media sources, such as Tae Kim of GamePro:

It dawned on me that if Abbie hadn’t pointed it out, I would never have thought of Other M that way. I simply didn’t have the necessary perspective to see the larger implications of the narrative decisions Team Ninja and Nintendo had made. I began to wonder how differently GamePro’s review would’ve turned out, had I assigned the game to a woman instead of doing it myself.
...
reading Abbie’s review and talking to the lone female member of our staff, News Editor AJ Glasser, about this issue makes me wonder if I should start factoring in gender – both of the game and of its reviewer
...
While games are, first and foremost, a form of entertainment, they’re rapidly taking on the same sense of cultural weight and significance as established art forms like cinema and novels; this is why it’s important to discuss these issues and wonder how things like gender, race, class, and religion can affect our perceptions of the games we play.

Kim, I believe, is spot on. The game industry, especially the media needs more critical reviewers to address questions of sex, race, and gender, among other things, not only within their practice, but also within their hiring. If Heppe did not have the position she did, her voice and criticism would not have reached so many ears and eyes and Kim would never have been conscious of his oversights. More critical reviewers can put greater pressure on the industry and make gamers likewise more aware of problems in gaming. This is critical, because as Kim recalls, gamins has tremendous cultural significance and outperforms even Hollywood financially.

Virtual Sex Sells: The Consolidation of Soft core Porn & Mainstream Game Media

The same year Playboy released their first major console video game amongst the many other sexy titles, their September 2004 issue annual feature, "Girls of Gaming," in which video game companies submit a nude version of one of their characters. In a USA Today article, Scott Alexander, Senior editor of featured, what is now an Playboy, explained the logic:

Hopefully the purists won't get too bent out of shape. This is just the next version of the pinup [...] We treated these women just like they are celebrities[...] We treated them real, as if they had turn-ons and turn-offs [... ] There's a funny kind of almost paternal feeling that a lot of these game creators have about their creations [...] Are you going to let your little girl pose in Playboy?' is the question we were asking. But a lot of them saw the benefit, both aesthetically, and ... hey, sex is part of life.

While such a maneuver may be celebrated by many gamers as "getting to know" the female character better, being an acknowledgment of the gaming community, and the transcendence of a fantasy world into a real magazine, the inclusion of video game women in the spread confirms that these women have truly become sex objects. The sex object status of these female characters, however, goes deeper. There aren't women who are choosing to be in the spread whether because of financial, prestige, or fun, but rather these are images of wholly virtual women who are little more than their representations--whom have no agency at all apart from their male engineers. They do not occupy an agency all of their own.

This is yet further evidence of pornography's increasing acceptance and integration into the mainstream. Other examples are Burger King's "Singing in the Shower" promotional campaign--being advertised as "The world's first guilt-free shower cam"-, the coverage of a new automated sex doll that can have political conversations by CNN, a reality tv show--the Family Business--about the porn industry, and the use of porn star Sasha Grey to "sell" animal rights messages. Yet these again are not women with some level of agency, some level of control over their representation. Instead, the image of women are increasingly being determined by "experts", becoming increasingly artificial in the virtual sense through technologies like photoshop.

Even porn, which is already criticized for being "artificial," has become even more farcical as photos have been doctored to cover up all "imperfections", so as not for readers to look at women, but merely images of women. As the blogger at Jezelbel comments,

the message is clear: even after a genetic bounty, all-but-certain plastic surgery and dieting, good lighting, a pro-photographer, and dozens of shots, even the fantasy woman is not fantastic enough. Ironically, it's that mentality, and its cookie-cutter sexual sensibility, that's helped make Playboy irrelevant in the years since.

Women have become mere raw material, inspiration for these shoots as they get replaced or cleaned up by the virtual. Women become increasingly absent, yet ever more present. Without representation in the videogame and sex industry, there may be a future in which male heterosexuality is possible without actual women, yet women still must deal with the real consequences of such sexual subjects. Some men, surrounding themselves with virtual porn and sex robots whose form is that of "woman," are but virtually objectifying women as the real objects are no longer female subjects.

What would such a future be like where "woman" has been completely dissimulated into virtual commodity? Will this technological performance function to substitute or marginalize women further, or may it also free female subjects from the supposedly "natural" category and role of "woman"? What role do women and will women have of creating new subjectivities in such a space without returning to a so-called more originary and authentic position?

Spike Lee Speaks... but Not for Everybody

2010-11-15T21:16:00.002-06:00

"Imagery is everything" -- Spike Lee 11/11/10

MY JUDGMENT
I am regretful to say that I was extremely disappointed in Spike Lee. First, I can't believe we spent $30,000 to have someone come and talk about himself for an hour and answer personal questions for another one. What a scam. No wonder he didn't want anyone taking video? What does he have to hide? Is he so frightened of ruining his image or saying something embarrassing, or does he simply want people to continue to pay him thousands of dollars to sit in a chair and talk about his favorite topic: himself. Lee mentioned that the most difficult thing about making films is getting funding. I wonder how much of his own funds from these events he contributes.

So why is this leftist so bitter and cynical about such a daring filmmaker? Well, it doesn't help that he sued Viacom several years ago for "stealing" his name, Spike, for the rebranding of TNN as the "first network for men"--as if TV hasn't generally been for men to being with! (But they're not anti-feminist: just recently they put up a Top Seven Cutest Feminists list, explaining "Contrary to popular belief, attractive women are allowed to be feminists").

To make things worse, the Atlantic reported in a recent article that Lee has sold-out to the French-owned corporation, Absolut.

In June, writers and fans converged on the Brooklyn Lyceum, in Park Slope, for the fifth annual Brooklyn Blogfest. This year, for the first time, it had corporate sponsorship: Absolut. Not coincidentally, Lee was the featured speaker... As for how to keep Brooklyn a "rich source of material and inspiration," Lee called on the audience to blog about his new vodka and proposed that each neighborhood could come up with its own Absolut Brooklyn-based cocktail... Maybe Lee just really loves Brooklyn... But if that's the case, why didn't he team with one of the many great Brooklyn-born-and-bred breweries and distilleries?

Lee likes to portray himself as an enemy of gentrification and a defender of the traditional, Brooklyn vernacular. Instead, he's become a tool in the borough's commodification and the worst enemy of everything he once stood for.

In other words, I was bias already going in. Yet, this did not entirely roast my optimism that I would walk away with some new knowledge.

THE TALK
Lee's narrative was as follows: "Parents kill more dreams than anybody"--don't listen to their pressure to make money. You are most blessed when you are doing something you love. Don't surround yourself with negativity. Just do it, but never alone--you need to collaborate to be successful in the film industry. And most importantly *everyone needs to find their own way*; there is no formula (something several audience members apparently didn't hear). The biggest problem in the black community is crack, or at least it his symbol of what went wrong since the 1970s (he divides African-American history into B.C. and A.C). Nowadays, only 50% of black youth graduate high school and there are more black male young adults in prison than in college. We spend more on our prisons than on our education, and we house something like 25% of the world's prisoners (despite having only 5% its population), most of which are incarcerated for drugs.

Lee does not stop there. The problem, he says, isn't simply the war on drugs and anti-poor government policy, but the absence of black male figures. I'm with Lee here, certainly, Afro-Americans boys develop their concept of self through modeling figures in the house, community, and media. And this is where he really infuriated me. Ultimately what his diagnosis for the socio-political ills of Afro-American communities is the presence of a man in the home! Now perhaps this could include a grandfather or brother or older cousin, but these were not the examples he provided. Instead, he was referring to either husbands or boyfriends of single mothers--as if black women could not raise respectable children themselves, that they are deficient parents because of their gender. Would the same be said of a woman--that girls always need the presence of a woman in the home? No, because as Simone de Beavoir explains, women are considered the inessential.

My suspicions of the heterosexist implications and presuppositions of this statement (an insult to all lesbian sistahs out there) found further evidence in his response to a question about why there are not more good roles for black women. Very frankly he said, "black women need to write their own roles." In a single sentence, Lee purged himself and other screenwriters of the responsibility to create roles for his sistahs in the industry--and this after he was complaining of the institutional racism of the industry that keeps people of color out of top tier positions to grant funding to controversial and films that don't target a middle-class white audience!

I became even more suspicious after his uncritical response to one of the few good questions from the audience: what did he think of the Antoine Dodson's auto-tune sensation? His response: "It's funny!" The inquisitor was paralyzed in silence, waiting for some kind of explanation. Of course, things become un-funny once you have to explain them, but did he really ponder why he thought it was funny? Isn't he after all a cultural critic? Why does a cat got his tongue on this subject? Is there simply something he wishes to hold back so as not to say to tarnish his image?

Supposedly he was naturally funny; but the song was made about an interview in which he was intending to be anything but funny, to hold the attempted rapists accountable. As was mentioned towards the end of the discussion, one of the students said she found him really gay. Immediately, people started laughing and nodding, saying they didn't even think about that. Whether conscious or not, such sentiments are still homophobic. Why people laugh is less because he is black, but more so because he is flamboyant. He's a gay caricature to laugh at (as opposed to with--at least until he attained popstar status)... And to be honest, I find it funny too, but I am not satisfied with finding the humor as being "natural".

So is Spike Lee homophobic and dismissive of being an ally to women? I don't know. But that is the feeling I had walking out of there that night beyond my disappointment. Perhaps, I'm being overly critical and judgmental--I accept that. But I don't think my intuitions are so unfounded to make such critiques mere antagonism.

Disney's Animal Pedagogy

2010-11-14T18:13:00.003-06:00

In class last week, we discussed Disney narratives complicity in heteropatriarchy and white racism. No surprise, other students were extremely resistant to recognizing any problems with Disney. Disney has done such an incredible job at hoodwinking the public of its innocence through its strict censoring and infiltration into the American family ethos, that it has become almost invulnerable to criticism, especially any criticism along the already taboo lines of thought on gender and race.

I was shocked that Abigail, normally a relatively progressive student in the class reacted with such vehement disgust that people would dare challenge Disney's mulitnational corporate media empire. All those gasps she made during the documentary I thought were disgust at having once been naive to the racism in the film, but no, it was because people attack the inventors of her childhood. Childhood. It's the closest to home, it is the home we discover ourselves thrown in; it's language (what Heidegger calls the "house of Being") the house of our narrative identities, the fertile soil of the roots of our subjectivities. To threaten and shame such "comfort food" (perhaps as much so as critiquing "meat") is to threaten identity, to throw one into self-criticism, to dare one with an opportunity to change, to open an abyss of possibility and an abject perspective to reassess one's child world. It is to choose bad faith, to choose cowardice over responsibility to at least critically reflect.

White Male Privilege of Naivete
Fortunately, this wasn't the first time I had been exposed to these criticisms of Disney. I had been reading Sociological Images for a couple years and connected to some other sources. For instance, Nostalgia Chick's take on Disney Princesses (Pocahantas, Mulan, Beauty and the Beast, and Hercules.):

One thing people have trouble wrapping their heads around is that racism need not be intentional and that context matters. Gwen at Sociological Images had this to say about the Princess and the Frog:

Depicting Cinderella as a maid doesn’t play into pre-existing stereotypes of White women; it’s just an individual portrayal. A Black character cast as a maid, to many people, reproduces an image of Black women that goes beyond the individual–whether the creators intend to or not, such images bring with them associations to the Mammy character and real oppression of African American women in a culture that saw them primarily as servants for more privileged groups.

In other words, depicting a white woman and a black woman as a servant will resonate with two very different historical and cultural contexts through which we make sens of the narrative, and that certain representations may be chosen simply because of implicit biases and correlations within world of narrative in which we live. White middle-class ablebodied heterosexual males, and the like, have certain privileges in which they take for granted their own race, gender, class, sexual orientation, etc, something not afforded to the vast majority of the world. To become reactionary verses well-reasoned to such criticism is exposing a serious level of naivete.

While some have argued with films like Mulan and The Princess and the Frog, Disney has finally become more race conscious and more empowering to women, there are still issues. As Lisa from Sociological Images notes

But, to be fair, these princesses aren’t radical. They aren’t pushing the envelope of femininity. They are only reflecting the fact that ideal femininity in the West has changed such that the perfect woman now incorporates some masculine character traits. “Some” is the operative word here. Today’s ideal woman is still feminine, but she works, wears pants, and plays sports. She may even be a sports fan and drink beer. But she also preserves her femininity, especially those aspects of femininity that mark her as “for” a (just barely and totally benevolently of course) dominant male. She still doesn’t disagree too vigorously or laugh too loud. She marries a man who is slightly older, more educated, larger, taller, and makes a bit more money at his job that is just slightly higher prestige. And, no matter what, she looks, dresses, and moves in pretty, feminine ways.

Put another way, Disney's representation of princesses is lagging behind cultural attitudes about women rather than simply being ahead or even with the times. And this isn't saying much either, given that, in my opinion, our culture has become hypersexualizing of both men and women (and not in the liberatory sense, but the commodification sense) in addition to giving preferential treatment to the hyperfeminine and male archetypes).

Responses to my Classmates
I prodded Teresa to speak and at last she did. I gave her a round of applause as did some other students, but regrettably the other three graduate students, two of which who are in Women and Gender Studies did not contribute. According to them, they were too infuriated to say much, too hopeless to expect the class to understand the theory.

I was glad I could finally cut in my critique at the end of the ignorance that saturated the petrified sponges that were some people's brains. I made several points: 1) NON-INNOCENT: Disney is a multinaitonal corporation that seeks above all else profit, not art. 2) POWERFUL: Disney is a dominant figure in American media, and its work has international influence. 3) DOMINANT DISCOURSE: Disney plays into fabricated narratives that are neither traditional nor progressive, but simply racist (stereotypes, symbolic annihilation, orientalist, villainous accents) and sexist (no mothers, sexualized, victims, white middle/upper-class and conventionally beautiful). 4) SUBJECTIVITY: Children who watch these seek models for social behavior, which is bad enough, but some children have no one to identify with in the film or have more racial identification with stereotypes and animal others (i.e. how do Amerindian children feel when they see the Indians in Peter Pan or the Africans feel when they identify with gorillas?). Finally, 5) RECOGNITION: People are not just creating a hissy-fit for entertainment; at the very least, the dominant demographic should be willing to take into consideration, to hear out, marginalized groups who feel they are being caricatured.

Of course, there are always criticisms in regards to this. Some will argue that 1) we teach the same American narratives in school (so two wrongs make a right), 2) corporations are businesses and aren't responsible for content (so we shouldn't hold businesses accountable for racism and sexism), 3) that its damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't (so you are critiqued both when the majority of your films are entirely absent of diversity and when you include racial stereotypes in your movie--as if there weren't an alternative), 4) kids either aren't effected or walk away from it later when they know its false (so then there is no reason people would be so invested in defending Disney), and 5) kids shouldn't know the truth and stereotypes make it easier to think (WTF????).

The Human Race of a Different Species
Disney has had a long history of racist iconography: Fantasia's (1940) pikaninny slave, Dumbo's (1941) sambo crows, Peter Pan's (1953) rendition of "Indians," Lady and the Tramp's (1953) Siamese cats, The Jungle Book's (1967) orangutan singing "I want to be like you," Aladdin's (1992) demonization and orientalization of Arabs, The Lion King's (1994) hyenas, Pocahantas' (1995) (mis)telling of the truth of American colonialism. and Tarzan's (1999) absence of Africans admits the African rainforest. Although I'm no 21st century American historian, it seems that some of these racial depictions were made at corresponding times of racial tension in American history. For instance, the Siamese cats were in theaters during the Korean War, the Jungle Book was made amidst the civil rights movement just prior to the assassination of MLK Jr., and Aladdin was released shortly after the Gulf War. Coincidences? I don't know.

What I'm particularly interested in is how "animals" function in cartoon fables to displace the realness and ugliness of real moral problems and crimes onto uncanny others, thereby making the adult and horror appropriate for child fantasy. As Harrit Ritvo (1987) discusses in her seminal book, Animal Estate,

As material animals were at complete at the complete disposal of human beings, so rhetorical animals offered unusual opportunities for manipulation; their position in the physical world and the universe of discourse was mutually reinforcing... both discussed and exemplified a central theme of domination and exploitation. Animals were uniquely suitable for rhetoric that both celebrated human power and extended its sway, especially because [the English] concealed this theme at the same time they could express it…. Talking about [animals] offered people who would have been reluctant or unable to avow a project of domination directly a way to enact it obliquely (5-6)

Through animal representations, largely made possible through the disappearance of an unmediated encounter, projected meanings took on a new "reality" in which, through animal tales, one could likewise make representations of others seem "natural." So the power relations in a particular society become inscribed on animal representations and get read back through a circular logic that has forgotten the lies.

It is difficult not reading the song "I wan'na be like You," written by two white men and sung by Lois Armstrong in Disney's The Jungle Book, a colonialist narrative itself, as anything but racist,especially since it went into production shortly after the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Now I'm the king of the swingers
Oh, the jungle VIP
I've reached the top and had to stop
And that's what botherin' me
I wanna be a man, mancub
And stroll right into town
And be just like the other men
I'm tired of monkeyin' around!

Oh, oobee doo
I wanna be like you
I wanna walk like you
Talk like you, too
You'll see it's true
An ape like me
Can learn to be human too

Perhaps few animated animal features appropriate and colonize the bodies human-animals as much as those about insects. Bees and ants are fertile sources to impose cultural representations on (human) nature, by building gender and class relations off of misrepresented social structures. One need only look at Bee Movie. Gwen writes:

how animals are anthropomorphized tells us a lot about our social assumptions and what we’re comfortable with. There’s no reason the worker bees’ sex has to be changed, except that it makes more “sense” to us that the hard-working providers would be male. The choices to make the males the center of the story, to make them bigger than the females, and to portray female bees as fawning groupies desperate for male attention tells us an awful lot about the gender stories we tell ourselves about humans, and that they’re important enough to us that even children’s movies have to recreate those stories, no matter how much fiddling with reality it takes.

Previously, I've looked into similar anthropomorphisms related to Gotmilk.com and the film Barnyard, which features a steer with utters. It's all bull (pun intended).

GenderQueer

2010-10-15T13:12:00.000-05:00

In class last week, our class discussed queer and transgendered issues in the media. I particularly found this class the most informative yet as I am much more familiar with representations of race and cisgender in the media. Up until recently, the mid-1990s it seems, "deviant" sexualities and genders have been symbolically annihilated (Tuchner 1978) through their lack of representation in the media. Although homosexuality has become more predominant in popular films and literature, while it is not cast into the negative stereotypes as it once was, still requires the annihilation of the queer, which recognizes its own un-articulability (Warner 1993), through assimilation to hegemonic (Gramsci) construction of "the family", or what they call in media theory, mainstreaming (). Certainly mainstreaming has the benefit of what Bandura calls "social learning, in which one learns certain behaviors through watching media. For instance, I have little doubt that the mainstreaming of homosexuality has contributed to the linear growth in acceptance to gay and lesbian marriages, especially as youth come into contact with such acceptable and "acceptable" characters who are "like us", verses "the other." On the other hand, many queers have fought against such a mainstreaming and assimilation of queer identities into hegemonic social good, a good which is never questioned (Edelman 2004).

In particular, genderqueers and transgendered and transexuals have yet to be accepted societally. Still, there are no federal hate crime laws protecting them (although, hate crime laws are another contested issue in the queer community--it is argued they support a racist, classist, unjust prison system at the expense of offering restorative and transformative justice). Nip/Tuck was mentioned in the documentary, in particular, how it offered a positive, non-stereotyped role. Yet, this was only in the first season. By the second season, trans women were being used as props for plot twists and by the third they were victims of transphoic violence. By the fifth season, lesbians became the target of homophobic humor. This is an instance whereby the phenonmenon of mainstreaming may also produce media backlash as a show rises in popularity and thus emblemises what is called "gratification theory," that people watch media in part to validate their own values and experiences.

In class before the video, we looked at a news article about a transgender student who wanted to be homecoming queen, however, the school board decided that since her birth certificate said she was a boy that she could only run for homecoming king, a position that insists upon biological reductionism and essentialism and also what Julia Serano (2007) calls "oppositional sexism" (in which there no continuity and transition between "opposite" poles is accepted). It was noted that the journalism made the decision to identify her as a "her" and not a "him." This brings up the inevitable political consequences and construction that discourse is, that any journalist can never escape the categorizing of language. However, just the other day I also encountered a story on feministing about a story that deliberately used the pronoun "he" instead of "her" for the story and another in which there was a very objectifying description of a trans woman:

One of those men, who asked not to be identified, said “Stacey” was beautiful and could pass for a woman.

“She was pretty, but if you didn’t know what time it was, you wouldn’t know what she was,” he said. “She was built . . . and she drew attention from men just walking down the street.”

This does to show how just as there is a male gaze (), a particular hegemonic perspective in which to perceive women, so is there perhaps a cissexual gaze through which we see transexuals. This also relates to what Serano calls "transmisogyny," a particular form of transphobia directed at trans women in a culture that knocks on females and feminity, and especially those male bodies that privilege the feminine over the hegemonic norms of masculinity performance.

The Question of the Animal

2010-09-26T14:23:00.009-05:00

Rate of Slaughter of Chickens, Pigs, and Cows in the United States, 2008

Through the intensification of carnophallogocentrism, animals are increasingly entrapped, enclosed, corralled, and sacrificed both symbolically within a single term and literally within what Barbara Noske (1998) calls “the animal industrial complex.” Derrida notes that the conditions under which animals are subjected today are “conditions that previous generations would have judged monstrous, outside of every supposed norm of a life proper to animals that are thus exterminated by means of their continued existence or even their overpopulation” (26). Just as farmed animals have been reduced to the general singular “meat,” so has their suffering been hidden from presence “in order to organize on a global scale the forgetting or misunderstanding of this violence that some would compare to the worst cases of genocide” (26).
http://picasaweb.google.com/Adam.Weitzenfeld/TheIndustrialMeatComplex#

Free Range Studios (2003) The Meatrix

PETA (20014) "Meet Your Meat"

NOTCOT: Banksy's Village Petstore & Charcoal Grill from Jean Aw on Vimeo.

Banksy (2008) "Village Petstore & Charcoal Grill"

To Love or Kill: Man Vs Animal

The Onion (2010) "Scientists Successfully Teach Gorilla It Will Die Someday"

Koko All Ball

Hero dog saves another after it was hit in the highway.

Dans Le Couloir De La Mort (Death Row)

Maxine's Dash for Freedom

Georges Franju (1949) Le Sange de Betes

Nature's tools! How birds use them - David Attenborough - BBC wildlife

Wild crows inhabiting the city use it to their advantage - David Attenborough - BBC wildlife

Birds With a Memory to Envy

Christian the Lion

Leopard seal teaches photographer how to catch penguins

Monkey kitten

Crow adopts kitten

MUST WATCH: A Lioness Adopts a baby antelope. A short documentary that will open your eyes.

Leopard saves baby baboon

HIPPO SAVES IMPALA

Why Dogs Smile and Chimpanzees Cry Part A 3/5

Why Dogs Smile and Chimpanzees Cry Part A 4/5

Shirley and Jenny reunited

Dog Cat Rat

Dog and Elephant, odd couple

snake Hampster

The Orangutan and the Hound

The Tortoise and the Hippo

Mississippi Baby Squirrel Adopted By Mother Cat Learns How to Purr

Polar bears and dogs playing

Existential Animal: The Inhumanity of Man

2010-09-01T02:11:00.007-05:00

Philosophy in Film:
Existentialist Film Series

Fridays 2-5pm @ ENV 190

What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance. Man wants to know that his life has counted, if not for himself, then at least in the scheme of things, that it has left a trace, a trace of meaning.

The paradox is that evil comes from man’s urge to heroic victory over evil. The evil that troubles him the most is his vulnerability; he seems impotent to guarantee the absolute meaning of his life, its significance in the cosmos... Men cause evil by wanting to heroically to triumph over it, because man is a frightened animal who tries to triumph, an animal who will not admit his own insignificance

-Ernest Becker in Escape from Evil (1975: 4, 135, 151)

INTRO

[SEP 10] Waking Life (Richard Linklater 2003)

DEATH

[SEP 17] The Seventh Seal (Ingar Bergman 1957)

[SEP 24] Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa 1952)

IDENTITY

[OCT 1] Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman 2008)

[OCT 8] Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze 1999)

MEMORY

[OCT 15] La Jette (Chris Marker 1962, 26min)

[OCT 22] Memento (Christopher Nolan 2000)

POSTHUMAN

[NOV 5] Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru Oshi 1995)

[NOV 12] Blade Runner (Ridley Scott 1982)

APPLICATION

[NOV 19] Flight from Death (Patrick Shen 2003)

* Also watch some great animal documentaries.

The Humane Myth: Le Sang des Betes

2009-07-26T09:50:00.005-05:00

Gastronomica:

This 22-minute documentary established Franju as a formidable French filmmaker, and the slaughterhouse as a horror house within contemporary society. Here, a peaceful Paris suburb also yields an endless carnage of sheep, cattle, and horses, bludgeoned to feed meat-loving humans. Franju's work is viciously graphic and surrealistic, perfectly and simultaneously attractive and repulsive.

I think it is naive for people to think that industrial slaughter has made killing more humane or cruel than it was previously; in some ways it may have become even more "humane." Niether "Old MacDonald's farm" nor "humane" killing of animals ever existed ni the past. Both are romanticised images of a past that never was and never will be--just as is the "noble savage." Each are abject misrepresentations, revisionist apologetics, a denial of our own crimes.

Anyways, I think Franju's Le sang des bêtes (1949) may be one of the first documentaries on slaughterhouses and illustrates this point. I at least cannot watch the scene with the calves and not feel the perversity of such a relationship between humans and other creatures. Slaughter can never really be a compassionate and dignified act. At its worst, it is cruel, unnecessary, and arrogant. And at its best... well such only exists ni the abstract, an abstract whereby we intend only human character and experience, not the experience of the animal other who falls victim to our whims.

[Fastforward to 3:00, 7:50, 14:00 for the "best" of the worst examples. From 14:00 on, it's difficult not to be moved to anger andd/or tears or both. I think this video highlights the wrongness in killing naimals much better than Meet your Mea and similar videos that concentrate more on the suffering/welfare (it seems that death may even be a good thing in the case of those CAFO animals). Here we do not care how well the animals are treated before, we are regardlessly disgusted by the disloyalty and arrogance inherit within slaughter]

Mascots: Representation and the Trivialization of Violence

2009-07-26T09:43:00.001-05:00

In Thinking Animals, human ecologist, Paul Shepard, argues that animals are core compenents of human cognitive development following Claude Levi-Strauss's famous words, "animals are good to think." Shepard points to the affluence of animal symbology throughout cultures, even within those societies, such as the United States, which is often said to be alienated from nature. While many people find the use of such symbols romantic, spiritual, empowering, closer to nature, etc. often these symbols occlude the historical and representational violence done to particular animals belonging to such categories such as "bear," "bull," "tiger," etc.

To understand this, let's first take a look at how sports mascots appropriate other people's cultures and trivialize the genocide of those people. There has been much controversy over the use of Amerindian mascots, particularly the "Fighting Illini," "The Fighting Sioux," "the Seminoles," the "Cleveland Indians," the "Boston Redskins," etc.

Representation, Appropriation, & The Logic of Genocide
Caricatures can sometimes be very fun and even have a prodound truth to their simplicity--as is evident in the best politicla cartoons--, however they can also trivialize and occlude actual violence. According to Wikipedia, a caricature "exaggerates or distorts the essence of a person or thing to create an easily identifiable visual likeness." In other words, caricatures are representations that signify a "truth" that is truer than truth (the presence of the actual person/group being depicted) itself through distortion. However, these caricatures of Amerindians do not only function as stereotypes, they also appropriate and signify the logic of genocide. In "Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy," Andrea Smith argues that the

[logic of genocide] holds that indigenous people must dissapear...non-native people then become the rightful inheritors of all that was indigenous--land resources, indigenous spirituality, or culture... why would non-Native people need to play Indian--which often includes acts of spiritual appropriation and land theft--if they thought Indians were alive and still capable of being Indian themselves.

Likewise, Brenda Farnell notes that the passionate supporters of such mascots "defend a "White public space" in which any contemporary NativeAmerican presence is positioned as disorderly." Of course, such a White public space can only exist by exlcuding Amerindians, who are majorly opposed to such symbols, from the public shere. As Charles Springwood explains, White people claim "Indianness" "not to realign themselves psychically or sympathetically withNative Americans but rather to obscure, if not dissolve, Native voices." "Demolishing the mascot slot," argues Pauline Strong, "is a prerequisite for full cultural recognition and participatory citizenship for Native Americans."

Because the appropriation and genocide of Amerindians in American culture is a historical "tradition," it is oftena ccepted as "natural" and or valuable as such colonialism is itself proudly part of the American narrative/identity. However, when European people who survived genocide are used as sports mascots, the perversity of such exploitation/appropriation becomes all the more apparent. Take for example the Dutch soccer team the Ajax Juden, or Jews. Lisa @ Sociological Images notes

This brings up some interesting issues about the appropriation of cultural symbols...Critics of American Indian mascots often ask questions along the lines of “What would happen if a team called itself the Fighting Jews?”... but it’s always presented as an unimaginable, completely hypothetical situation. And yet it turns out not to be so hypothetical after all

Just as it is difficult for many Americans to give up their supposed-entitlement to their tradition of characterizing Amerindians so it is the same for Ajax fans. According to a New York Times article "forcing the fans to change their behavior was a daunting task... because it has become part of their identity."

Ajax fans are proud of their "Jewish Club," eventhough they themselves know or care little about Jewish affairs and culture. They adorn themselves with Star of David tatoos and wave Israeli flags (which is itself unessential to Judaism). Meanwhile, their opponents will adorn themselves with swastikas, calling themselves the SS and shout anti-semitic rhetoric such as "we're hunting Jews," "death to the Jews," "Ajax to the gas chamber."

during a game against a German team late last year, a group of Ajax supporters displayed a banner that read “Jews take revenge for ‘40-’45,”

Ssssssssssssssssssssssssss… (the hissing sound of gas)
We’re hunting the Jews!
There is the Ajax train to Auschwitz!
Sieg! Sieg! Sieg! (German for ‘victory’, yelled while performing the Hitler’s Salute)

While such rhetoric may seem more obscene to Americans than rhetoric surrounding Amerindian mascots--painting them as savages--, it is not so different from the "cowboy and indian" games/themes affluent today. In both cases, the "logic of genocide" is in action in which both groups "must always be dissapearing;" both are treated as history despite the oppression of both groups today; both trivialize the very real violence; both stereotype and reduce.

Animal Symbols: Anthropocentrism and the Rhetoric of Genocide
There seems to be a formula for going about token-fying an entire group of individuals as a symbol. First, one must recognise that group as an Other--without doing so, one cannot objectify. If one did belong to that group, the mascot would not be so much a symbol as a marker of one's own identiy, one would be the subject of one's own discourse, thus subjectivity would be rretained. This requires then, secondly, that the Other must be made into an object through the denial/ignorance of their subjectivity--they have no right to signify themselves. Third, the Other preferaly ought to dissapear so that one has the absolute authority to objectify them, as their would be no other subjectivity to challenge such a representation. Further, through their dissapearance, the symbol takes on more truth as it is "alive," the last survivor of the group.

Finally, the objectified, extinguished Other is celebrated. We celebrate everything it stands for not it in and of itself; we hold romanticized views of it an mourn the past, a presense in which we terminated. We love these mascots/symbols because they fit within a romantic narrative about our past orpossibilities that could have been; we relive the past (or rather, a truncated history) by cheerishing these icons and "eat the other" as bell hooks would say. We appropriate that otherness and assimilate it into our own self-project with little if any recognition of the full otherness of those beings. The same process occurs within the ecocide of developers, when, once the habitat is cleared, the developers name the property after the community hthey wiped out: Park Ridge, Redwood falls, etc.

This brings us back to the question of animal representation and symbology. Animals in art and stories tend to be treated as props and symbols rather than characters themselves (for instance, in a creative writing seminar I was told that choosing the right prop for a story is essential and that if a cat doesn't work out, substitute n a dog). In another post at Sociological Images, Lisa explains how, like animals, women are often always representing something for men as allegorical figures:

Male figures appear in these paintings too, but almost always as gods or Biblical figures, people with names. Men are characters, women are symbols...Is it any surprise that women’s bodies are treated as a public concern? The entire culture is accustomed to seeing them used as metonymies for our highest (and lowest) values. The long historical pedigree of anti-woman sentiment means that the fact that women’s bodies contain women’s minds has always been elided, in favor of metaphorical elevation or degradation. We always have to stand for something, and what we stand for is everyone’s business... This is why objectification isn’t just the province of misogynists, by the way. Often you’ll hear Nice Guys protest that they don’t objectify women — no, they worship them! So instead of just being sexual receptacles, women stand for all that is good and beautiful in the world. (my emphasis)

Though animal others are in a sense subjects, they (mostly) are not capable of self-representation through language–at least not to humans. As such, they have often been de-particularized and objectified into tokens for human virtues and vices (much like women’s bodies have). I’ve been wondering whether the Bears and the Bulls (among other animal-named sports teams) are similarly "wrong" as the Red Skins, eventhough they may not offend "animals" themselves. Both de-subjectify and stereotype the category of beings represented.

Such de-subjectification, I think, rationalizes their literal and figural disappearance as equals (whether through genocide, eviction, or cultural marginalization). And of course, Amerindians, women, and animal others don’t produce and distribute these images–they are not in control of their own signification. Rather, the privileged construct and consume these images in a dominating way as discussed by bell hooks in “Eating the Other.”

One objection may be that "animals" are more biologically determined, so they do not vary as much as humans, and thus that such stereotpes about species is justified. I would argue, however, that is stipulated in always already thinking about animals as categories rather than singularities. similarly, just because "animals" may not themselves be subjects the tokenfying gaze's presupossition tiself may be violent, though it does not de-subjectify. For instance, say Amerinidians of jews were no longer in existence; would these macots be honoring them in any true way, or ought we still be disturbed by their token-fied representations of those people, a trace of colonial genocide? I'd say the latter.

Thoughts?

Shrinking Animals

2009-07-25T11:48:00.003-05:00

While humans have in the past deliberately bred animals (think "toy" dogs and cattle) to be small, so have humans incidentally "selected" for smaller animals through their eating habits. It is a well known and still contested theory that our ancestors wiped out the mammoth megafauna during the end of the last ice age, just prior to the Neolithic period, but it is less well known that humans though "over-fishing" and sports hunting are modifying gene pools where the smalle rand younger survive.

Earlier this year, Wired magazine featured an article on the phenomenon by which human hunters "genetically shrink their prey" and the potential consequences of such shrinking are.

Size is really, really important...If there is one [species] that has changed dramatically in size, its relationship to natural predators could be lost...As a consequence of targeting large adults, we're targeting reproductive age adults, so those that [reproduce younger] have an evolutionary advantage... The problem is that these younger mothers don't produce as many babies, which could have major impacts on how humans estimate fishery population and potential... [Finally], even if you could stop hunters and fishermen from pressuring the population, genetically altered animals would have to re-evolve their previous phenotypes, or forms.

Just recently, scientists have confirmed that not only human hunting has been influencing the size of animals, but human climate change as well. As has long been observed (at least in mammals), there is a negative correlation between size and temperature. US News reports that

As Earth's climate continues to warm, life might become the province of the small... Two such ecological changes [resulting from climate change] that have been noted and predicted are [1] the shift of species' ranges to higher altitudes and latitudes to keep within their temperature comfort zones and [2] the shift in the timing of key events in the life cycle of organisms... A third change can now be added to that list: [3] As temperatures rise, organisms get smaller, from the , from the scale of whole communities down to the individual.

Meat Water... wtf, mate?

2009-07-23T14:25:00.006-05:00

No... this is not a joke.

Meat Water--the High Efficiency Survival Beverage--is quite real and infinitely more disturbing. There is so much wrong with this product I don't even know where to start.

Perhaps it is the liquifying of the corpses of animals into a cold and refreshing work-out beverage. Perhaps it is the advertisments' heavy machismo which promote the product as having/giving you "more balls." (are they referring to the balls of the (male) consumer or the liquified testees that he is drinking?).

Perhaps it is the fact the drink comes in flavor ranging from haggis to peking duck to numerous other "meats" which I have never heard of. Perhaps it is the idea that "meatwater" is more nutritious than tap water, that one can eat a full "english breakfast" in a bottle of liquid--a classic example of nutritionism.

Or perhaps it is the marketing of male identity or the perpetuation of the "High efficiency" philosophy of modernity can befriend the viril romantic's obsession with "the will to power."

Got Sexism?: The Absence of Female Agency

2009-07-23T11:58:00.009-05:00

What we learn from Gotmilk.com is that men do things with their bodies and women have things done to theirs; men produce things, women have things produced for them.

Slav, Igor and Sergie work their muscles to solve a puzzle; Mr. Osseous works the assembly line saving a valuable product, and Chuck assembles cartons for shipment. A nameless steer even drives the milk truck. On the other hand, Miss Dowdy needs to be *given* a makeover by blasting from a cannon into a pool of milk filled by the truck driver and Mother Hen needs your help because she is "tense and irritable" from her PMS. While the male animals are productive laborers, the female animals are either ditsy blonds or cruel old hens not worthy of the same honor, but still customers who need milk.

While the male animals perform all the labor in the games, the literal labor of female cows giving birth in order to begin lactating as well as the exploitation of their bodies' labor in producing all of the milk is completely absent. It is as Joan Dunayer writes in Animal Equality: within the dairy industry, "Milking is done to her rather than by her."

The political-economy of milk consumption (the hundred million dollar ad campaigns, the hundreds of celebrity spokepersons, the federal subsidization, the bias within school lunch programs and cafeterias, the killing of dairy cows who don't produce enough milk or are too expensive to feed, the veal industry, etc.) becomes absent and (cow's) milk becomes sold as "Nature's perfect food" (though goats milk is much more similar to human milk) eventhough few people in the world ever drank or needed "fresh," unsoured milk before the Industrial Revolution.

The Power of Meat, a Matter of Taste

2009-07-21T02:01:00.013-05:00

Is the value of power just a matter of taste?

Last year, China Daily reported on an article publshed in the Journal of Consumer Research titled "The Interactive Effect of Cultural Symbols and Human Values on Taste Evaluation."

While a big, juicy steak may indeed be culinary nirvana for many, your taste for beef could be based in part on expectation rather than reality...

On the assumption that meat is associated with social power in some peoples' minds, researchers rated study participants on what they call a Social Power Value Endorsement measure, to determine their preferences for meat and their cultural perceptions of it. Participants were then told they would taste either a beef sausage roll or a vegetarian roll...

"Participants who ate the vegetarian alternative did not rate the taste and aroma less favorably than those who ate the beef product...what influenced taste evaluation was what they thought they had eaten and whether that food symbolized values that they personally supported."

The authors conclude that taste is neither purely objective nor radically subjective, but culturally constituted.

This research should not be surprising to any vegan who has experienced first hand the cynisism of certain omnivorous humans when invited to try vegetarian food as well as the "I can't believe it's vegan" rsponses after they unknowingly consume something made with vegan intent.

As French Sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, writes in his groundbreaking work Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste," taste is reproduced and policed through consumption used to mark distinctions in social statusin order to protect andmaintain boundaries of identity. "Meat" is sometimes argued to be universally preferenced over plant-based foods, and while their may be some evolutionary/nutritional truth to such claims, scholars have noted that such a prefernce is far from "natural" (i.e. objective and inevitable).

Though Bourdieu does not discuss food preferences in much legnth, his thesis about taste and consumption reflecting social values and identities, often centering around the tastes of the "higher" classes, is very relevant to understanding "meat." For instance, Carol Adams (1990) in The Sexual Politics of Meat discusses how meat signifies male privilege as meat is almost always disproportionately distributed to men cross-culturally. Similarly, Nick Fiddes (1991) in Meat: A Natural Symbol are es that meat within the modern Western tradition has symbolized the domination and/or control over "nature," Man's superiority to all others. prior to the present study, Julia Twigg (1983) in "Vegetarianism and the Meaning of Meat" had all ready studied the associations between meat and power held by both those who preffered and abstained from consuming animal flesh.

The power of meat as a symbol of class and gender prestige has even been demonstrated in the Chilean food riot just over a century ago: Banjamin Orlove argues in "Meat and Stregnth: The Moral Economy of the Chilean Food Riot" that unlike previous food riots, this one wasnot a matter of lack of "food," but lack of red meat which was a food consumed to distinguish the nomadic peasants from secure blue collar working men. Finally, meat can be seen as a symbol of national and cultural superiority and a rationalization and means of colonization and imperilaism. As food historian Rachel Laudan argues in her conference paper "Power Cuisines, Dietary Determinism and Nutritional Crisis: The Origins of the Globalization of the Western Diet," meat is the pinnacle of a "power cuisine" in modern times, which has been globalized through trade and conquest.

Of course, much of our taste for power comes neither from innate taste nor from symbolic culture, but from the political economy/ecology of our society. Thus, we can partially explain how American taste's have "evolved" from pork to beef to chicken. Though that's not to deny the nutritionism of the time does not also dictate preference (take a look at the doubleling of chciekn consumption from the 1970s to the 1990s based on the recommendations to eat "lean meat").

Do Feral Children have Language, Rights?

2009-07-20T21:39:00.004-05:00

In May, the BBC reported on a Siberian child 'raised by dogs.' According to the article:

Russian officials have taken a five-year-old Siberian girl into care, saying that... "For five years, the girl was 'brought up' by several dogs and cats and had never been outside"... The police said the girl had managed to master "animal language only", but seemed able to understand Russian.

Do many Siberians believe "animals" can speak a "language?" Many US linguists and philosophers would call such beliefs naive. And what is "animal language?" Is there a universal language all (nonhuman) animals are thought to share? Doesn't that suggest a break between humans and animals at the same time a continuity exits (i.e. language)?

In an essay "Feral Selves and Familiar Others," Peter Steeves briefly speculates that the ability of feral children to be socialized as a member of a different species suggests that in some ways many dogs are able to be sociallized into humans--a becoming-human if you will--(as are some other "pets" like monkeys).

One must wonder whether a feral child is entitled to less rights than a human socialized child because he is "only an animal." Or do we admit the (racist) importance of genetic heritage to moral considerability? At the very least, ought we not morally consider all animals who can potentially be socialized as humans just as we do with infants?

Sexuality = Animality = Mortality?

2009-07-20T20:15:00.006-05:00

Obviously, many snakes and spiders are highly venomous and potentially could give humans fatal bites. To what extent are these fears evolutionary and cultural constructs?

Is it possible that the fear of these particular animals has been heightened by not only their cultural construction but also the heigtened fear of death in many modern/industrial Western cultures?

A little while back, lisa @ Sociological Images made a post on the use of arachnids and spiders in safer sex PSAs to represent sexually transmitted infections.Interestingly, the snake--a mythologically feminine animal--here is associated with men (for obvious reasons). The spider, of course, is often associated with women (think about the Greek myth of the spider as well as other Spider woman myths around the world) as well as the film noir notion of the black widow who lures in men with her sexuality and murders them.

While the spider is an acknowledgement of female sexual agency, the symbolism represents it in a fatal way in which the archetypes of womb and tomb are resurrected in our conciousnesses. Women's sexuality (at least in many Western cultures) has thus been associated not only with procreation but also with the destruction of life--as is "the animal" or animality. Thus, the intersections between sexuality, women, animality, and mortality.

Are these intersections with mortality partially responsible for the loathing of women, sexuality, and animality in Western history?

ASLO: See more STI PSAs from Europe and the linking of sexuality to (male/phallic) violence: 1, 2

Meat Hats, More Disgusting than Leather Hats?

2009-07-20T19:22:00.004-05:00

We've all seen hats made out of leather (the skin of animals), but rarely do we see hats anymore made out of meat (the muscles and fat of animals).

Here's an excerpt from a webpage on the history of meat hats:

The expression “I’ll eat my hat” traces back as far as the 19th century, usually credited to Abraham Lincoln in reference to one of his trademark stovepipe hats, which were often made of tenderloin...The popularity of meat hats began to fade in the twentieth century, especially during the depression of the 1930’s. Indeed, few people had the luxury of wearing meat on their heads, needing instead to feed their families with it.

The hightened disgust is not simply the idea of matter being out of place; afterall, chocolate and vegetable clothing doesn't disgust us. So why is meat more disgusting to wear than leather?

Does meat make the death and fleshines of the animal more visible and disturbing? Or does it have to do with meat supposed to being "inside" (covered by skin or consumed) while leather is supposed to be adorned on the "outside" (hence the revulsion some people have toward eating leather)? Or is there an evolutionary reason: we're grossed out because spolied meat carries disease?

Welcome to Zoophobia

2009-07-20T18:52:00.003-05:00

Welcome to zoophobia!

Zoophobia is normally defined as the abnormal fear of animals, but it is my belief that the fear of "the animal" (or "animality") is actually the norm in modern and Western cultures. Bear with me (and my cheesy puns) as I document and deconstruct the normativity of zoophobia within online media.

Love,
zoo