The Sexual Politics of Meat

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Tough Guise, Weak Personality

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

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 issueannual 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?

Disney's Animal Pedagogy

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

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.

Mascots: Representation and the Trivialization of Violence

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?

Meat Water... wtf, mate?

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

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.