Blood on the Sun!

This title is hilarious, and this movie is sort of hilarious too, except that it wants to be very serious.

Blood on the Sun is a James Cagney movie with the tagline "Cagney's Mightiest!". In it, he is an aikido-trained, hard-bitten reporter working for an English-language newspaper in Japan right before World War II.

Cagney plays the kind of character who doesn't do what he's told and likes to upset his superiors by telling them the truth when no one wants to hear it.

The film is a fascinating curiosity. It is a fictional retelling of the story of the Tanaka Memorial, which was a fake story about a document written by Japanese Prime Minister Tanaka Giichi for Emperor Hirohito that explained how Japan could take over the entire world. First Manchuria and Mongolia, then China, then all of Asia. A short version of this document was actually a published story in an English-language newspaper in 1931 in China, but the whole thing was an elaborate anti-Japanese hoax.

The plot of the film involves Cagney and a double agent in the employ of the Japanese (a beautiful woman played by Silvia Sidney with whom he falls in love – because of her principles) getting ahold of the original document, which they want to publish for the world to see, so we can all see that Japan is trying to take over the world just like Hitler.

To hear the story right now, it immediately sounds like propaganda. As I watched the movie, I instantly thought to myself, well this sounds like typical American wartime nonsense. Sure enough, it is (it was released in the Summer of 1945).

But the movie has its pleasures, particularly Cagney's martial arts fights, which are really delightful, and there are enough of them to make this movie worth watching. There's an entire sequence where Cagney fights three guys in his house in Japan and basically destroys the place. It's fun watching Cagney fight hand-to-hand instead of playing the gangster with the gun. And I have to confess that I love classic Hollywood versions of China and Japan. These old movies where white people play Asians, with "oriental-style" music in the score, that underline how mysterious the "East" is and how no one can be trusted over there. They fascinate me.

Also, this movie is in the public domain and so you can watch it on YouTube, which is what I did.

Dope

If you want to see a clever, exciting, funny film that also happens to be smart about race, get thee to a cinema and check out Dope. As its title hints, Dope is a film about drugs. But the title also refers to being an idiot, a dope, if you will, as well as to the 1990s slang term for something that is cool. As Wiktionary offers: That party was dope!

Dope is about three highschoolers in Inglewood who are '90s geeks. They are, in other words, obsessed with '90s-style clothes, music, movies, etc. But these kids are geeks. They get good grades and get beat up in school. So, of course, they find their way into a ridiculous party at some point and then the eponymous dope gets stuck in a backpack. What is a group of nerds supposed to do with a couple of pounds of molly? This is the plot of the film, and Dope charts the changes that happen to this group of friends and the hilarious happenings of the people around them as they try to get out of the situation with their lives.

I don't have much to say about Dope, in all honesty, because the whole thing just works so well. There are plenty of parts where I thought director Rick Famuyiwa could've tightened things up or taken a different emotional approach, and a couple of performances that I thought were terrible (Roger Guenveur Smith wears some bizarre facial hair and giving the weirdest performance in the film), but all must be forgiven, because if Famuyiwa's directing is not great, his screenplay sure is. This screenplay is excellent. Just. Excellent.

And the acting, for the most part, is also excellent. The cast is headed by Shameik Moore, and he is supported by Tony Revolori and Kiersey Clemons. This trio has great chemistry and impeccable timing, and they are hilarious from the very beginning of the film. But there are some other really superb performances in Dope, too. Rapper A$AP Rocky gives a beautiful performance as the drug kingpin, and Quincy Brown (Sean Combs' son) is really funny as a wealthy drug-dealer's kid. In any case, the whole thing is filled with hilarious and poignant moments.

Comparisons to last year's Dear White People are inevitable with Dope, mostly because both films are interested in thinking about what blackness is, how blackness is perceived and how black people experience the constant and difficult racialization that the world throws at them. But while DWP is interested in lecturing us about how lots of black people don't fall in with black-people stereotypes (really??), Dope is much more interested in dealing with the way stereotypes materially affect black lives. Dope is much much smarter than DWP, and it is also much much funnier. DWP was filled with righteous indignation; this is, of course, merited, but I did not exactly find it enjoyable to watch in its stridency. Dope alternates deftly between being quite serious and laugh-out-loud hilarious. Famuyiwa calibrates this tone very well (if not always perfectly)m and the audience can transition from laugh to gasp quickly.

Both DWP and Dope are also heavily indebted to Spike Lee's filmmaking, and Dope's penultimate sequence (the protagonist's application letter to Harvard) is a Spike Lee flourish that is hard hitting, excellent, and tough as nails.

Just go. You will laugh and you will love it. It is smart and funny and intense and sexy and it just plain works.

As a Latina...

A couple of years ago, I was at a conference and I was working on a committee to plan the following year's conference and when the committee asked for feedback on the current year's events, several people complained that the events were not as inclusive of people of color as they might have been, and made some very valid critiques. One of the planners at this point got rather indignant and said, Well as a Latina...

I can't actually remember what she said after that. This, to me, was the worst kind of positioning. This woman was attempting to use her own subject position as a woman of color to excuse the way that the conference she had helped to organize had been insensitive to women of color. I have identity with other women of color and therefore I should be excused from being considered insensitive to women of color even though many people here actually feel slighted by my behavior. Um, no.

I've used that phrase As a Latina to make fun of this kind of positioning ever since. And since then I've noticed the phrase As a... also crops up when people do not want to take the time to justify their own credentials. As a person who researches x / As a historian of x, here is my opinion about x... Or you could just make an argument that makes your point clear and demonstrates why your theory is workable or interesting. As a person who thinks about x / As a person who is a longtime fan of x... These are somehow even worse. Wait, wait, you think about this topic? That's the way you're going to describe your subject position here? Or you're a fan? And that is supposed to give credence to your argument in some way?

In a way, I think this kind of strange positioning, the active claiming of a specific position in the world before making an argument, is descended from Pierre Bourdieu and the idea that we ought to analyze our own subject positions as a part of the analysis we are doing. I am totally on board with this, but the As a Latina formation actually occludes analysis. Instead of interrogating how this position might color or otherwise affect the argument being made, the position almost always is intended to make the argument seem more accurate – as a person like the person I am, my argument is going to be more sound than someone who does not have this position – or it is intended to excuse behavior that ought not to be excused – as a Latina, I ought not to be considered at fault for whatever anti-Latina sentiments you perceive.

I haven't thought about this phenomenon seriously in a while, but I've been thinking of it again lately because I am revisiting some scholarship on manhood and masculinity. And I am noticing this weird "guys like us", "for us men", "feminist critiques have often misunderstood what we as men actually understand about ourselves because we've lived it" kind of thing. In other words, the theorist I'm reading at the moment (who shall remain nameless) keeps beginning sentences by saying, sometimes obliquely, sometimes literally: As a man.

The reason I am thinking about this positioning seriously is that although I write about masculinity, I cannot actually imagine ever writing anything equivalent to the phrase As a man. In fact, I don't think I would ever use that phrase even in conversation.

As a man...

It just looks weird to me.

First of all, one's position as a man does not give one any particular access to understanding masculinity writ large. And secondly, to be a man is specifically to claim not to be so many other things. Why would one want to do that? I have often felt the need to quote one of José Muñoz's critiques of masculinity, the one that notes that “masculinity is, among other things, a cultural imperative to enact a mode of ‘manliness’ that is calibrated to shut down queer possibilities and energies. The social construct of masculinity is experienced by far too many men as a regime of power that labors to invalidate, exclude, and extinguish faggotry, effeminacy, and queerly coated butchness.”

But also, I don't actually understand myself as a man, at least not as a man without qualifiers attached. I refer to myself as a gay man often enough, I guess, but never as simply a man, never as a man undiminished by faggotry, weakness, sensitivity, pacificism, shame, or bookishness. In fact, I like the idea of whatever manhood I might possibly claim being somehow always diminished.

In any case, I have no intention of beginning any arguments by saying as a gay man or as a person who is often racialized as white or as a person who listens to a lot of Philip Glass, but I often think it is interesting when other people do. Why are we positioning ourselves and what advantages do we feel that these positions offer us? I am not arguing that who we are ought somehow to be absent from our scholarship or that we ought to try to excise our own subject positions from our scholarship. Not at all! But wouldn't it be best if it were the argument itself that made this position clear? If I have argued well, my argument ought to state my position quite clearly, at least whatever one (or several) of my identity positions that is relevant to the current argument.

As a Spanish-speaking Packers fan invested in the anarchist movement in France in the late nineteenth century and also captivated by queer issues and also interested in the political history of black America and also fascinated by the work of Seneca, my argument today will be that the original reception of Bernard-Marie Koltès's play Dans la Solitude des Champs de Coton (1985), with its too-intent focus on issues related to AIDS, overshadowed Koltès's own focus on economics, much to the detriment of the play itself.

Sometimes one's subject position just isn't relevant.

My Lives as a Dog

I have had a ticket to the one-time only screening of Kornél Mundruczó's Fehér Isten (White God) for weeks now, and I was extremely excited to see it yesterday.

I was so excited to see White God that I got ahold of a copy of Samuel Fuller's White Dog a couple of days ago and watched that in anticipation. Some thoughts on Fuller's movie first. White Dog is a movie about a young actress (played by Kristy McNichol) who accidentally hits a beautiful white german shepherd and then cares for it, takes it home, and adopts it. The dog saves her life when a rapist breaks into the house, but the dog also doesn't seem to like her boyfriend very much. Ennio Morricone's eerie score also makes the whole thing seem like we are headed for very bad things.

We are. The white dog starts killing black people. He attacks a garbageman in the middle of the night without getting caught, but then he is on a movie set and attacks Kristy McNichols' friend. Everyone wants her to put this attack dog down. He is a time-bomb waiting to go off, but she wants to have him retrained. This retraining will be attempted by Paul Winfield, who fully commits to the task: It isn't the dog's fault that some racist motherfucker of an owner programmed him to hate dark skin.

White Dog is a parable of USAmerican racism. It is about racial hatred as a disgusting, learned behavior, but it is also about the way that racism is latent: the dog is loving and sweet and not the least but violent when it is around a person he loves, but then when a black person is around he immediately sees red. And the film asks the question, can racism be unlearned, can we learn to retrain our own racist attitudes and begin to see each other with more equality? The end of the film reflects Fuller's own attitudes toward this, certainly, but the film itself is perhaps more interested in the question. As for the dog, White Dog is about animals only sofar as it is about training and teaching. A dog, in this sense, is the same as a child in Fuller's film – and the movie makes this explicit in a third-act scene with two small girls.

Just for the record, this is also a very good film. The image of this white dog's beautiful fur covered in blood resounds poetically several times, and we frequently see his mouth dripping with blood, and there is lots of suspense and a great deal to think about in this movie following an attack dog. I loved it.

White Dog was never released in theatres in the U.S. In the early 1980s films about race became less and less common – there were plenty of great films about race in the 1970s. But in the 1980s we were supposed to be post-race (you know, like right now), so many many people objected to Fuller's film. It got great reviews in Europe, however, and it was released by the Criterion Collection in 2008 (twenty-six years later) where you can find it on DVD.

* * *

I want, also, to add a side note and say that while waiting to see White God last night I was reading a collection of plays by (the amazing) Adrienne Kennedy and I'll be damned if I didn't read a one-act called A Lesson in Dead Language from 1968 that includes a group of small girls at school learning lessons from their female school teacher who is actually a white dog from the waist up. This was a total coincidence, I swear! The play is about girlhood and menstruation and has nothing to do with any of the movies I'm talking about, but the character is called White Dog.

* * *

Kornél Mundruczó's White God begins in an abattoir. We watch a man inspect the carcass of a cow. They cut the cow in half. They cut open its belly and its viscera spill out. The man cuts the brain in half and inspects it. Then he stamps it: cleared for consumption. In other words, it is clear from the very first moments of White Dog that this isn't a movie only about humans' relationship with dogs but about our relationships with all other animals. Watching this cow being butchered is fairly disgusting, and I was surprised some of the more squeamish in the audience didn't get up and leave right then and there.

The plot of White God, though, is about a girl named Lili and her dog Hagen. They are separated when her total jerk of a father gets angry at her and abandons the dog on the side of the road. From here we follow the dog and its friend Lili in two different places, sometimes trying to find one another, sometimes forgetting about one another. We follow Hagen (a beautiful brown mixed-breed dog you will love instantly), as he runs from dogcatchers, and then goes into the service of a panhandler/dogseller in Budapest. From here Hagen is purchased and drugged and then trained to be an attack dog. These scenes are very difficult to watch, and I wasn't surprised when several people walked out of the picture at this point. Some people are kind to the dog. Most are not. And we follow the dog's own journey and from his perspective.

In this way, White God is, more than anything else, like Stanislav Rostotsky's beautiful 1977 film White Bim Black Ear (Белый Бим Чёрное Ухо). White Bim Black Ear is also about a white dog, the runt of a litter, who is adopted by a kind old man and then has a million adventures when the two are separated by the man's illness and the betrayal of an evil neighbor. There are also three children and a schoolteacher who befriend the dog at various points in the dogs picaresque journey across (it would seem) half of the Soviet Union. But this is where White God's similarity to any other dog film ends.

The reason you need to see White God is that the dog escapes. And the dog raises an army. And the dog comes back for the people who have hurt him. This beautiful animal, who is tortured into becoming an attack dog, forced to kill other animals, leads a revolt – of dogs against the humans who have mistreated them. All of a sudden, White God becomes a kind of horror film. At one point it occurred to me that I had no idea what kind of movie I was watching anymore. It moves outside of its genre. It becomes a thrilling and terrifying revenge film, where the revenger is a handsome brown dog, whom we know and understand very, very well.

But, as I said, Mundruczó has made a movie about the ethics of human interaction with animals. This is a film about how we care about the world in which we live and how we care for the other creatures that inhabit that world.

And god? I had simply assumed that White God was riffing on the title White Dog, and now that I've seen both movies I am not totally sure if it is or not. The original title is in Hungarian where there is no such pun, but it must be a riff on Samuel Fuller's title, right? That Mundruczó keeps the word white in the title, ought to be a clear indication that his film, too, is about racism.

The concept of a "white god" refers to colonialism and the idea that white people could go to other lands and assume a kind of deity, where they fantasized that the inhabitants of these places saw them as gods, where they could order them around, careless of their actual lives, treating them as slaves and creatures less than human. The parallels here are quite clear, and the film is about inequities among humans, as well as inequities among the other beings in our lives: dogs, cows, chickens, and other animals. Does a dog see a human as a kind of white god, does he look at us, waiting for orders, happy only to serve? Or is that simply our own fantasy about that dog: a fantasy we need so that we can believe in our own superiority, shoring up an idea of what humanity is? The film asks these questions masterfully, and the journey of this is absolutely thrilling. White God is an absolutely extraordinary film, peopled (haha) with real dogs, not digital re-creations. It is not for the squeamish, but it is not to be missed.

In Search of a Culture That Isn't Appropriate/d

A few weeks ago an essay called “Dear White Gays: Stop Stealing Black Female Culture” appeared on the website of Time magazine and went viral.¹ The sentiment has caused some angry (and some epically stupid) responses from a variety of sectors.² I want to try tonight to think through some of this stickiness about cultural appropriation. Before I do that, I want to note that it would be impossible for anyone to respond to the entire stream of nonsense that passes for knowledge or cultural critique on the internet, still less possible to respond to it in a knowledgeable or sensitive way. Although let me just say that recently the performance artist Ann Coulter wrote a bizarre, nationalist anti-World-Cup column in which she said that “what sets man apart from the lesser beasts, besides a soul, is that we have opposable thumbs” and I did want to comment on the absurdity of this.³ I don’t have anything to say about souls, but as anyone who has spent any time reading Georges Bataille – or anyone who has eroticized feet as much as I have – knows, what separates us greater beasts from the lesser beasts is the big toe.⁴ Apes simply don’t have them: in fact, they have more opposable thumbs than we do. In any case, football uses the big toe liberally, and Ann Coulter ought to read more Bataille.

So: cultural appropriation. Two stories. When I was small, nine or ten years old perhaps, I learned that my parents, who are both white people, were concerned that I was spending too much time with my older sister LaTonya, who is black, and that I had started acting “too black”. LaTonya – who hilariously used to call herself The Root, a nickname she invented – told me that my parents thought that I was acting blacker than she was and that she needed to calm down her influence on me. I, of course, had no idea that I was doing anything, that I was performing a particular style of any kind or, indeed, that that my parents would racialize that performance. I was a kid. And I thought my big sister was the cleverest, coolest, most hilarious person in the world. What I think fascinating about this moment in my life is that, although my mother doesn’t remember it this way, I am positive that what my parents saw in me and what they perceived as threatening was neither blackness nor femininity per se but what blackness and femininity meant to them. For my parents, my performance of what they perceived to be a combination of blackness and femininity meant that I was going to grow into a gay teen who would later become a gay adult. (They were mostly wrong about the teen part, I guess, and mostly right about the adult part.) But was I being black? Was I being gay? Was I being feminine? Female? Queer? I know I was not thinking about gay culture at all, because I didn’t know a thing about it, and spent the majority of my time reading the story of Esther and Haman in the Old Testament. In any case, I hesitate to answer yes to any of those questions, mostly because I was a child and I can’t remember very well what I thought I was doing or what I wanted to be. All I remember is that one of the disciplinary systems in my life named my nine-year-old style as “too black”, and that, 25 years later, I now perceive this naming as racialized code for “too gay”.

Second story. Two years ago at my institution a straight white woman directed a production of Angels in America Part One and I sort of hated it.⁵ I was really frustrated by what I perceived as “straight boys up on stage going through their gay paces”. So I blogged about it. “They're up there on the stage playing gay characters,” I complained, “which is (I am sure they think) very admirable and brave and all, but the more I watched the more wrong the whole thing felt.” I further complained – and I am going to keep quoting here – “This isn’t theirs, I thought. […] They don’t understand it because it isn’t for them, or rather, it isn’t about them. This is not theirs.” Still quoting: “The implication here is, of course, that Angels in America is somehow mine, and […] the more I think about it, the more true I think that is⁶ – as laughable as that sounds.”⁷ My friend Brian Herrera’s response to this post was “Are you becoming something of a cultural separatist in your post-PhD years?”. I didn’t take Brian’s bait then, so I’m taking it now, and I (re)tell this story mainly because I sympathize with the feeling (apparently in the exact same words as the author of the Time piece) that I am a part of a culture and I don’t like when that culture is represented in what I perceive as a hollowed-out way.

But now two more thoughts about this: It seems to me that in the two stories I’m sharing from my life, one is about style and the other is about a specific cultural object. (Both stories are, of course, about performance.) It isn’t that I think co-opting a style is any more or less pernicious than co-opting a cultural object, but I think the two things are different. Ought we to call twerking a cultural object or a cultural style? Is a reference to Come Back, Little Sheba or Mommie Dearest an object or a style? Is my way of saying “Ain’t that some shit” an object or a style? I will agree that if I perform any of these things – to twerk, to reference Come Back, Little Sheba – I locate myself within what we might call culture, but I am not sure with what culture I necessarily identify as I perform each of these. I do know that I didn’t invent any of them any more than Ann Coulter invented the opposable thumb. If I use any of these gestures I place myself within something that existed before I came along. And not just that! I might give a word or a gesture a flair I would call my own, but I also know that I can never fully possess a gesture or a word. If it is mine, it is so only for the briefest of instances, before others start reading into it and onto me – like my parents read blackness/gayness/femininity, where I thought I was just being me.

My final thought has to do with the way “culture” is made. I’ve been reading a lot about early twentieth-century black Communism these days, and one of the debates among the poets of the 1930s and ’40s is what “authentic” black culture looked like. The differences between the work of Sterling Brown and Langston Hughes illustrate this beautifully. For Brown, southern, rural black culture was the “real” black culture – the folk. Northern urban culture was a culture co-opted by white people, corrupted by capital, stultified by industry. Some scholars have argued that Brown’s poetry dealing with “the folk” is just as inauthentic as urban jazz, and they are probably right. But more importantly, what I hear in the work of Sterling Brown – and I don’t hear in the current discussions of black female culture vs. white gay male culture, is a desire to escape mass culture. I find Brown’s poetry beautiful, and if he failed to access an “authentic blackness”, he was attempting, nonetheless, to move away from the cultural forms that he felt were being forced upon him by the producers of mass culture. Brown understood that there is no authenticity in mass cultural forms, and so he tried to get back to something authentic.

Now, it is possible that there is no authentic culture anywhere, and – as some have argued – that all cultural forms are examples of hybridity and the encounter with an other. But here’s what I think I know: Beyoncé and Orange Is the New Black and Scandal and Frank Ocean and even RuPaul’s Drag Race are products of USAmerican mass culture. And we may enjoy any and all of those cultural products, but none of them is ours, none of them is oppositional, and for any of us to lay claim to any of them means that we have begun to buy into the delusion that mass culture is a culture that we produced ourselves, and that those cultural products express us when, as we ought to know by now, mass culture is chiefly disciplinary; it doesn’t express a style of our own, it tells us how we ought to style ourselves.

---

This essay first performed as a part of ATHE's LGBTQ preconference 2014.
1. or, How to Pretend You’ve Invented the Opposable Thumb with a Straight Face
2. Sierra Mannie.
For epically stupid, see Steve Freiss. See also: Ali Barthwell, Anthony Michael D’Agostino, Daniel D’Addario,
Madison Alexander Moore.
3. Ann Coulter.
4. Georges Bataille, “The Big Toe,” trans. Allan Stoekl, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, (University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
5. Said in the manner of David Alan Grier and Damon Wayans from In Living Color. And if you don’t know what this is, educate yourself here.
6. Impossible to say without giggling.
7. Aaron C. Thomas.

Citing My Sources

While writing my dissertation I am making it a point to always go back to the original source. I am quoting hearsay, viewers' experiences of certain pieces of theatre, that sort of thing, and reviews are paraphrased and taken out of context and made to appear more positive than they originally were – all sorts of things. Biographers and other writers are trying to tell their own stories, so it makes sense that they would place things in a certain light.

Which is why it's always good to go back to the source. (Plus, the Chicago Manual of Style says to.) I've always thought, incidentally, that when authors used the old parenthetical phrase "quoted in..." that it betrayed a kind of laziness on their parts, and I am interested, generally, in always projecting my own hyperproductivity. (Just keepin' it real, y'all.)

So.

When Pamela E. Barnett quoted Amiri Baraka in her book Dangerous Desire: Literature of Sexual Freedom and Sexual Violence since the Sixties, which is a fascinating read, I looked up her source. She is quoting Baraka's essay "American Sexual Reference: Black Male," which begins (provocatively) "Most American white men are trained to be fags. For this reason it is no wonder their faces are weak and blank, left without the hurt that reality makes—anytime. That red flush, those silk blue faggot eyes." Etcetera.

Silk blue faggot eyes. I've got to read the rest of this.

Except that this is what Barnett's source looks like.

Aside from the fact that Sidney J. Lemelle spells his name with an m and not an n and that both he and Robin D.G. Kelley are usually cited with their middle initials, their book does not include Baraka's essay – under the name LeRoi Jones or any other name. And anyway Baraka's essay is not from 1994; it's from the mid-1960s: an enormous difference.

I cannot tell you how many times this same thing has happened while I have been working on this dissertation. And I have only been working for a couple months so far. Issues of journals are dated incorrectly. Pages numbered wrong. Titles wrongly reported. It happens all the time.
Last month I came across a quote about John Osborne where the author had inserted into the quote the brackets [African-American playwright] John Osborne. Osborne is neither African nor black nor even American.
And a book that has impacted me in a huge way cites an essay by Warren Beatty Warner from Diacritics 13.4. I always thought it was weird that this guy was named Warren Beatty Warner and it wasn't until I looked it up that I realized that that isn't his name at all. It's William Beatty Warner. (P.S. I love Warren Beatty.)

I am not sure where this post is headed, really, but, well, all of this inaccuracy sort of bowls me over. I clearly do not want to write this chapter on which I am working. Instead I am posting about other people's bad record-keeping.

This post is absurd. I'll stop now.

The Briefest of Reviews from 1973

This movie manages to figure black people as both primitive and (somehow also) villainous. But, I love me some Yaphet Kotto, and he was great in this picture, and, well – truth be told – more than anything else Live and Let Die is interested in

A) Roger Moore's upper body

&

B) crocodiles 

I rather enjoyed it, liking, as I do, both crocodiles and shirtless men.

All Before 2.00p

Two stories. Unrelated. Mostly silly.

I

I went to a series of talks this morning on campus that is supposed to be educational for graduate students as they try to find faculty positions. When the University sponsors these things things I like to go, and it was really helpful, actually, and there was free food at lunchtime.

But at some point this one boring guy was talking about funding and the office of funding on campus or somesuch business – it was boring; I've forgotten – and he referred to something as a "Mexican standoff" and then awkwardly sort of said "sorry about the metaphor" in this way that people have nowadays where they acknowledge the fact that they know what they've said is inappropriate but that they don't actually care whether or not it is inappropriate and that we oughtn't to either.

Now, I am not really sure if I think the phrase "Mexican standoff" is offensive. Mostly because I don't know why it would be offensive, but the moment this guy says it, and then follows it up with his not-at-all-an-apology apology, I get a little angry. I'm mad, of course, at the fact that he thinks it is unimportant that we  care about whether or not language is offensive. In other words, what is offensive is his attitude, here, not his "Mexican standoff" phrase.

And then a lovely young woman at my table says to her companion: Why does it have to be a Mexican standoff? Why can't it just be a standoff?
Thank you, I said. What about this standoff (in the office of the United States government, it should be pointed out) makes it Mexican?

II

And then on the way home, I am behind a rather nice, family sedan:

 

The bumper sticker says I see your point but I still think you're full of shit. 

You'll notice that on the sticker itself the last three words are considerably larger than the rest of the text. This means that the person behind this car reads full of shit before she reads the remainder of the sticker. The overall effect is quite classy.

The Heterosexual Within! (Like What Lies Beneath, Only Scarier)

I'm supposed to be studying for a four-hour test tomorrow on critical race theory. Instead, I have some musings I want to share on queerness that have come out of this reading. To wit:

One of Paul Gilroy’s important projects in The Black Atlantic is a challenge to seek out the legacies and formative influences of Western (white) culture within Anglo-African culture. What he points out is that the two are implicated in one another. The reverse of this has, of course, been argued by many African-American scholars; in other words, many have argued that not enough attention has been paid to the history of black Americans in the formation of USAmerican culture. So much of what we think of as USAmerican culture comes to us directly from black American culture, and therefore the two are imbricated. USAmerican culture is a hybrid of forms, a kind of (and Gilroy uses this word from Gloria Anzaldúa) mestizaje of its own. Gilroy’s argument is that cultural studies is too nationalist and that nationalism is dangerous and (of course) racist.

What this provokes me to think about is the way that cultural studies of so-called gay ethnicity—I really hate that term but its use is increasing, it seems to me—have ignored the legacies and influences of straight culture on queer culture. I will use the term queer culture as a broad sweeping designation. (There are, of course, numerous cultures within the so-called LGBT community, but there are cultural formations which we might simply call countercultural formations which specifically address themselves to the entire queer community and are received as such by the queer community at large as queer cultural formation.) What I am getting at is that queer cultural formations refer to both other queer cultural artifacts as well as cultural artifacts coming out of the larger, Western, mainly heterosexual tradition. And we do not acknowledge readily enough the impact of these heterosexual elements within our own cultural formations and artifacts. To say this simply, of course, I only need to say that in order for us to queer something we need something to queer and that something is definitionally not queer before we have a chance to queer it. But makers of queer culture also take portions of heterosexual culture and keep them. There is a legacy of heterosexual culture within queer culture and it has too long gone unacknowledged. To move out of the realm of art and into the realm of queer subjecthood, I think it important to also point out that the vast majority of queer people were raised by heterosexual parents, and the influence of these heterosexual life models upon our own queer subjectivity is (although often unremarked) undeniable. Even those of us who were raised in queer families have taken heterosexuals as models, gurus, coaches. The model of heterosexuality has had an undeniable impact on our queer world-making, and it is important to note that this impact has (to refer momentarily to La Volenté de Savoir) not always been a repressive or Victorian one. To speak more accurately, this heterosexual influence on our own queer subjectivities has often been productive, positive, even worthy of celebration. 

I am not a particularly family-oriented person, and so I have often noted with wonderment that many of my friends are devoted to their parents, consider their parents their best friends, call their mothers every day. I’ve been on dates with men who have reported to me: “the first thing you need to know about me is that family comes first.” Personally, I am always put off by statements of this variety, but surely such a devotion to family cannot be explained fully through the lens of repression or guilt. It must be said, then, that the heterosexual family and heterosexual relationships in general affect queer subjectivity in productive ways that—if not central to queer world-making—are at least essential to it. Queer history is, in part, heterosexual history. To trace the legacies handed down to us as twenty-first century queer subjects, we need also to trace the heterosexual components of those legacies.

Thoughts? I'd love to hear some of my wise friends weigh in on this.

When Wahima Is Right

My friend Wahima posted this on her facebook yesterday and I just couldn't help repeating it here because it is so well said..

Wahima: There is a public event titled "Straight Pride Day". Why does the majority feel the need to copy and make fun of the minorities? Even in jest it's offensive. You celebrate your pride every moment you are allowed to be YOU without consequences.

Fascism Now?

As I read Klaus Theweleit's two-volume opus Male Fantasies, I came across two sequences that reminded me of today's politics in the United States. The word fascism makes me a little uncomfortable when transferred into our current idiom, but I just couldn't help but think of the USAmerican political climate while reading these words:

From Vol. 1:
it is on the basis of a distinction made unconsciously, an opting for a stream or dam (and not on the basis of any analysis of interests of class membership!), that the fascist sees anyone different from himself as a "communist." "Girl! Raging storms at sea! Hurricane!"—this is enough. [The fascist thinks:] Only a cultural Bolshevist could have written these words. To the fascist unconscious, the distinctions it makes appear accurate—a fact that Left consciousness refuses to perceive. The argument that a social democrat is not a communist, a communist not an anarchist, and that none of these categories has anything to do with Jews, has never had much effect. The fascist unconscious perceives an essential sameness in all of the categories (and in the many others that made the spectrum of concentration-camp prisoners so diverse that Rudolf Höss tried to classify them like so much exotic fauna.)

More than anything I see this as a warning to the Left that distinctions between different factions on the Left mean nothing to those on the extreme Right, and that clinging to definitions and distinctions as though they will exempt one or the other of the factions on the Left from annihilation by those on the Right is simply foolish. So, too, does this remind me that it is the task of those who consider themselves on the Left to identify with others of those on the Left. In other words, I am a person of color, I am an oppressed religious minority, I am a transgendered person in need of medical care, I am an undocumented worker, I am a lesbian who wishes to serve openly in the military, I am an Iraqi civilian, I am homeless. If I cannot imagine these and more identifications, I am capitulating to nonsense because those on the far Right already see me as identical with those marginalized bodies. The word liberal itself is meant to marginalize in just this way.

From Vol. 2 of Theweleit:
No matter how the fascist leadership is portrayed: as racketeers (in Brecht's Arturo Ui); as stand-up comics (Chaplin, in The Great Dictator) [...] every one of these denies the nature of fascism as a popular movement (albeit not a movement of the people in its entirety).
In the early Freikorps period, the fascists were known only as work-shy "soup troops"; they were dubbed "bloodhounds" only when witnessed in action. An initial attitude of mocking arrogance (fascism as stuff-and-nonsense) then gave way to accusatory fury. Such was the development we traced in the German Communist Party's (KPD) attitude toward the Freikorps; and it was later precisely mirrored by their response to NSDAP victory: by their ill-judged "conviction" that the Nazis, incompetent as they were, would either throw in the towel after a few months in government or would be perfunctorily dismissed by a newly enlightened people. The party responded to defeat by adopting the posture of victimized innocent [...]; it limited its resistance to a few ineffectual insults imputing to the fascists a lack of aptitude for government.

Theweleit was writing in 1978.

To continue to mock those on the far Right who many (on the Left) perceive as ignorant or stupid or incapable of effective governance is to ignore a) those persons' very real popularity and b) the very real damage those persons could do if and when they achieve the power they seek. To refuse to engage these apparently ignorant or ineffectual voices and to, instead, mock them or remain bemused by them is to have already granted them power. This is the history Theweleit charts in the 1920s in Germany.

White America

If you haven't seen the cover of the Village Voice and the BRILLIANT article "White America Has Lost Its Mind," you MUST check it out. It is a phenomenal dissection of the racism that is currently permeating USAmerican political rhetoric.

I loved this piece so much that I personally emailed its author to tell him how much I appreciated his work.

Seen Around Talla-Classy #6

I know I am constantly calling images and movies and narratives racist or homophobic or both. It's a habit of mine; and I'm probably not going to stop any time soon, so just go with me, okay?

Anyway, here's a new one. This is a billboard I have seen two places around Tallahassee so far. I snapped this picture on my way into work the other day: The advertisement isn't hateful outright, of course. A small white boy, who is the focus of the advertisement, appears to be doing some kind of writing project while two white girls, who appear to be in a similar learning environment, look, not at their own assignment, but at the boy's assignment. Their middle-aged white teacher also looks directly at the boy's writing assignment. Everyone in the image appears to being enjoying the scenario. The boy (clever young man that he is) has obviously written or drawn something quite delightful.

From here, I look at the text in the advertisement. What do these happy white people want me to buy? NORTH FLORIDA Christian School ...Your best option. It is here where I start to get a little irritated. The phrase "best option" asks me to immediately imagine options other than the one in the image. And what are those options? Well, in Tallahassee, a city with a white population of 60% and an African-American population of 35%, those options would definitely include a school with at least one black kid, I am guessing. There are two middle schools that are fewer than six blocks away from this billboard and neither of them (OBVIOUSLY) has an all-white population. ...And yet this advertisement seems to say that an all-white education is an option. You don't have to send your kids to those other schools. Send them to our all-white Christian school!

The other element that I want to talk about in this image is the androcentrism of the image. Clearly the boy's education is the focus of this advertisement. The woman and the two girls have their attention focused on the white boy at the image's center. But where are the other boys? For that matter, are there male instructors at this school? The image seems to me—and you may call this a stretch if you like—to be deliberately avoiding any notion of homosociality between both boys and other boys or boys and grown men. What is going on here?

Perhaps it is the too-sensitive gay man in me, but I see heterosexism all over this image. Again, this has to do with the ideas the advertisement itself suggests. "Your best option" asks me what the other options are. And what are the other options? Aside from those options including people of color, they might also include other boys or perhaps male instructors. Instead, the image says that those options are not the "best option." Instead, send your little white boy to our school and we will make sure that he grows up without any other males around him! He will socialize only with women and he will grow up to love them and get married!

It should go without saying that the advertisement is not at all interested in the education of either of the two young women in the image.

I find this advertisement fascinating, even stunning. I suppose it is unremarkable, really, but I feel like I have never been around racism as much as since I have lived in the South. It is really intriguing to me. And I find that almost every time I see an image that strikes me as racist, that image is linked somehow with a privileged heterosexuality. I suppose, after all, racism and homophobia go hand in hand. An attempted sexual control over a population is necessarily and inevitably going to be related to a notion of racial purity. I mean, why else even bother with sexual purity except to keep my family from biologically uniting with that family over there.

What do you think?

Blind Sides

I found The Blind Side rather charming. I was ready to hate it—The Blind Side is, after all, recycled neoliberal Hollywood treacle about a good white family who helps a good black boy achieve his dreams—but I found the film hard to hate.

This mostly has to do with Sandra Bullock. I have never been a fan, but she is truly a delight in the film, and I won't feel the least bit bad if she wins the Oscar this year. The performance reminds me of Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich more than anything else. It's the performance of a star at the top of her game who doesn't really need to work very hard to carry a film anymore, but who is willing to do so and has become so good at carrying films that she makes it look easy (sort of like, say, Brad Pitt in Oceans Eleven).

My favorite performance in the movie, I should say, is Adriane Lenox. She plays the young boy's mother and has a single scene that she simply tears up. It is a fierce, heartbreaking little performance that I found devastating and brilliant.

Let's be clear, though, The Blind Side mobilizes the same, tired, racist ideas that we have come to expect from a Hollywood movie. So the film makes it really clear that there are "bad" black people, who live in the projects, do a lot of crack, have children out of "wedlock" (people still actually use that word--at least in the film), drink forties and carry guns. Mostly, though, the "bad" black people don't do anything; that is, they are not trying to do anything to get out of the projects. Contrasting those "bad" black people are the "good" black people (there are only a couple of those in The Blind Side) who are protective of white people, non-violent, shy, grateful, and sensitive.
There are "bad" white people and "good" white people, too. The film shows us people who are overtly anti-black, and these "bad" white people are chastised by the "good" white people at the film's center. We need the "bad" white people, of course, so that we are very clear as to what white racism looks like. (Turns out, it looks like snobby rich white bitches or bearded uneducated country folk.) Racism in the film is represented by these two groups of people. Or rather, these groups of people are described clearly as racist groups so that we can understand better that the film's central characters do not have racist ideas.

The Blind Side, then, isn't exactly harmless entertainment, but it is a charming little fairy tale, and the film's central performance is delightful and spunky.

Azucar

I know you haven't seen Sugar but you really must. Sugar was released in indie theatres in April or so and is the new film from Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, the duo who made the brilliant Half Nelson.

Sugar follows a young pitcher from the Dominican Republic as he moves from a baseball training camp in the DR to Houston TX to playing Double-A baseball in the middle of Iowa. When Sugar moves to Iowa he boards in the home of an older midwestern couple, attends their church with them, and eats meatloaf.

This film is superb. It is a fascinating exploration of the globalization of baseball, but also a moving story of a young man who dreams of "America." It also is an interesting new perspective on ever-present USAmerican issues like race and poverty.

It's also a baseball movie, but light years away from a film like The Natural. Sugar is about how hard baseball can be. It is about growing up and leaving home and following your dreams. It is also is really smart about the Nationalist/Patriotic sentiments which inhere in baseball fandom and how those sentiments square with supporting players who are not only from other countries but speak only Spanish. The Great (Pan-)American Pastime indeed.

At any rate, you really must see this movie. You will remember that Half Nelson was a very high #3 on my list for 2006. I loved that film and I love this one.

Animation!

I have seen two absolutely great animated films in the last week. I actually don't have much to say about either movie, except that you need to see both of them

Fantastic Mr. Fox is the new Wes Anderson movie. It is also his best movie, if you ask me, since The Royal Tenenbaums. It is a tight little story, beautifully characterized. Jason Schwartzman is his typical anxious, delightful self--this time in the body of a young fox. The film is stop animation and is at times absolutely stunning, visually. It is also absolutely hilarious. It's frequently absurd, often bizarre, and at times completely nonsensical. I loved it.

The Princess and the Frog is the new film from Ron Clements and John Musker, the guys who gave us Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, Treasure Planet, and Hercules. I love all of their previous collaborations, obviously, and I loved this one too.
The Princess and the Frog is, of course, notable for several reasons: It is the first Disney princess movie with a black girl at its center. It also breaks from the Disney princess tradition of absent mothers. Tiana's mom is alive and well, and tells fun stories (and is played by, um, Oprah [!])
Another thing I loved about Princess/Frog was its constant attention to money. The film does not only extol the value of hard work, it steers clear of the sentimental trope of awarding money to two young people simply because they are in love. Tiana and Naveen get jobs after they fall in love and get married. They are a prince and a princess but they work, y'all.
Princess/Frog is really, really funny, too. The actor who plays Prince Naveen, Bruno Campos, has excellent timing, and he is hilarious throughout. Anika Noni Rose (who plays Tiana) has a fabulous voice, obviously (you should remember her from Caroline, or Change--for which girlfriend won the Tony--and the film version of Dreamgirls.) Randy Newman has written some delightful songs, and she sings them beautifully. The hand-drawn animation is gorgeous. The side characters are funny. The large amount of jazz in the score is fun, danceable, and always upbeat. The villain is Keith David!
I could go on and on about Princess/Frog, actually. I thought it was great. And I really hope Disney has already started on their next animated film with a black protagonist; Tiana is good enough that she deserves a little company.

Bill O'Reilly on the Topic of White Men

I see his point. He's an idiot, but this is standard neo-conservative fare and no more racist than his usual nonsense. The new link to the video is here (YouTube took it down):

What I don't get is how he can say that the supreme court is not "stocked with white men" just because of Justices Ginsburg and Thomas. I mean, two justices of the current nine are not white men. And the entire history of this country's interpretation of the law (that is, 99 of the 101 justices prior to the Roberts court) were also white men. That means that ALL of the rulings of the supreme court for its ENTIRE HISTORY have been decided by a majority of white men. ALL. By which I mean Every. Single. One.

In other words: The law in the United States for the entire history of the United States has been written and interpreted by a majority of white men. This is not debatable.

The statement of these facts enrages powerful white men because they wish (like Senator Lindsey Graham) to pretend that questions of race do not influence their decisions. The truth is, of course, that these powerful white men know that race influences their decisions, otherwise they wouldn't be so worried about race possibly influencing one of Justice Sotomayor's decisions.

This racism is so blatant it is shocking. What do they think that Sotomayor is going to do when she gets on the court? I'll tell you what they think: they think she might somehow manage to infringe on the base of power that these white men have built for themselves. That is what threatens them. And this betrays just how white and male the power base already is.

Some More 2009 Movies from July

Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker is the best movie of 2009 so far. Easily. This movie is intense and moving and, well, just plain awesome. It's a movie about a bomb-defusing squad in Iraq (I know films about the Middle East are not popular with the USAmerican public, but there have been a couple of really good ones lately.) Bigelow's film is the most suspenseful movie I've seen in years, though. The bomb sequences are intense and crazy, and I found myself not breathing for pretty much the film's entire running time. At two points in the picture my jaw dropped at the The Hurt Locker's sheer audacity. This movie is incredible. Go see it. Unequivocally recommended.

Brüno is, as it turns out, a lot like Borat. Except that it doesn't work as well. The film, in fact, doesn't really work at all. Still, Brüno is a really funny movie and has some cracking good jokes. I laughed pretty much all the way through it. And I think the film is occasionally clever, too. It is certainly very clear about its stance on homophobia—Brüno is very scary in this respect, too: it shows just how unsafe it is to be queer in the mid-west United States. But Brüno also left me feeling empty. Its message isn't that interesting, and star Cohen and director Charles don't really uncover anything we didn't already know about middle America. I am not sure any of us realized how racist many people in the U.S. are, but we all know how homophobic everyone is, don't we?

At any rate, Brüno is missing something. Perhaps that something is likable characters, or perhaps that something is a real narrative for which one can root. But whatever it is, Brüno doesn't have it.

I thought Todd Phillips' The Hangover was pretty funny. I also thought it was homophobic and racist. But, then, I am surprised when various cultural products are not homophobic and/or racist.

The Hangover is also completely absurd. The stars of the film are less interesting than, say, the stars of Wedding Crashers or Dan in Real Life, but the situations in The Hangover are still pretty funny. Plus it's about Las Vegas. And, as you all know, I love me some Vegas.

More Sotomayor

Is it just me or is Senator Lindsey Graham a bit... well, dumb?

I was listening to a little of the Sotomayor hearings (I am in love with her, obviously) while I was driving around Los Angeles yesterday. First I heard Senator Schumer question her. He focused on demonstrating that Justice Sotomayor is not empathetic with anyone in a way that impedes her ability to decide questions of law based on the rule of law. The questioning was rather boring but it was pointed and intelligent (and had a very clear agenda.)

Then Senator Graham started questioning her. And I got confused. He seemed really upset that Justice Sotomayor was on the board of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund (PRLDEF). What he seemed most upset about was that PRLDEF has said in briefs (evidently quite frequently) that to deny public funds for abortions for impoverished Latina mothers is a form of slavery. PRLDEF and its lawyers obviously were interested in advocating to gain access to funding for abortions for poor women of color.

Graham seemed to want to trap Sotomayor into saying that she actually believed that such a point of view was an accurate one. He is not intelligent enough to actually trap Justice Sotomayor into doing anything, but what I don't understand is the issue itself.

How is this not an important issue of race? Public funds are issued to help people who are out of work because of injuries, they are issued to help women and men who lose their spouses, they are issued to parents with children who have disabilities. But what we don't want to do is issue funds to a poor woman who doesn't wish to have a baby. These are the same men who complain about "welfare queens" sucking the state dry. Why shouldn't these women have access to healthcare? Because they are not white?

Am I simplifying this issue too much by seeing it simply as an issue of race? It is also, obviously, an issue about sex. (Discussions of race almost always involve discussions of sex, I find.) This white man is afraid of the sexuality of these young Latinas. And he is interested in controlling that sexuality, regulating it. Because young women of color cannot be trusted to regulate their own sexuality.

This is racist and misogynist. There is really no other way to put it.

It seems to me, though, that it would be nice for someone to call the Senator out on his racism and blatant misogyny. There is a lot of discussion of race at these hearings—as far as I can tell this is only because the white men who oppose her are bigots—but it seems to me that all of these gestures toward pluralism are very silly.

At some point Senator Schumer was asking Justice Sotomayor if she had empathy with some black policemen who sued because they were discriminated against because of race and I was thinking: doesn't everybody? The answer, of course, is NO. Everybody doesn't have empathy with people of color who suffer discrimination. Many people in this country do not believe that we have a problem with racism here.

These hearings are just another example of the fact that we indeed do have a race problem in the United States, and that many, many people actually still think it is okay to hate people of color.

Okay, I am depressed now.

Family Values

This post is not about family values.

I have been reading Richard Dyer's fantastic book White. (Although, I have to admit I am not really sure why I decided to revisit this book this summer.) At any rate, the book is about white people and how they are constructed as white: the ways that photography, news reportage, etc. construct whiteness as "normal" and invisible. The book is also about how white people are associated with light. Dyer's analysis is also sensitive to the ways in which heterosexuality is constantly invoked in the service of racial purity (i.e. white racial purity).


And so on my way home when I saw the "Family Values" license plate above, I immediately thought of the book I am reading. Now, obviously, the Family Values plate is intended to combat an invisible enemy. The very notion of "family values" is invoked against the group of people who are anti-family values, that is queers. The father and mother as well as the son and daughter in the central image all look away from the viewer. The family values toward which they point are in the mother herself (on the left side of the image) and at the image's vanishing point (on the right side of the image). That is to say, family values are not in the viewer, but away from the viewer, in her future, or in the image of the white woman inside the image.

Since I have been reading Dyer, though, what struck me the most about this image was not its obvious homophobia—the phrase itself is constantly used by anti-gay groups and so the homophobia in the phrase has become explicit and ubiquitous—but the pervasive whiteness of the central image. This is interesting not only because (obviously) queer people have both families and family values, but that indeed people of color also have both families and family values. What is made explicit in the central graphic of this Florida license plate is that both queers and people of color are excluded in the vision of heterosexual family values espoused by this car's driver.

It seems obvious to me that everyone in the future toward which the father in the image is pointing is white. The future toward which he points is both free of queers and free of people of color. (We should note also that the white people in the central image are actually standing inside the sun. As Dyer points out, white people are constantly associated with light (that is, with both knowledge/enlightenment/brightness and fairness/paleness) which is, in turn, constantly associated with the divine: a construction which serves to bolster whiteness and associate it with goodness/godliness and intelligence/wisdom.)

One of the particular anxieties about homosexuality is that "well, if we were all homosexual, who would populate the planet? We would all die out?" (This is discussed intelligently and thoroughly by Lee Edelman in No Future.) The notion of everyone becoming homosexual seems rather ridiculous, of course, but what this fear really points to is an anxiety not about human beings as a species dying out, but about white people becoming extinct or (and this is actually a much likelier prospect) becoming a racial minority in the West.

What this license plate so clearly states is that this ubiquitous coded phrase "family values" not only represents and advocates heterosexual family values but white family values. The racial constitution of the family in the license plate's central image is just as important as the genders of that family. And make no mistake, the families with which the driver of this car wants to populate the future are not gay and they are not lesbian, but neither are they Latino; they are not black; they are not Asian; they are not Native American; and even more importantly, they are not interracial.

It seems to me that while the future envisioned by this license plate may be one filled with light and one shined-0n by the sun, it is a future that is grim indeed.