In “Animating Animacy,” Mel Chen discusses “how the fragile division between animate and inanimate… is relentlessly produced and policed and maps important political consequences of that distinction” (2). Thinking about the concept of animacy opens up the potential to interrogate a wide range of hierarchical, dualistic boundaries embedded in our languages and cultures, including those that divide human/object, animate/inanimate, living/non-living, active/passive, and subject/object. Reading Chen’s article led me to consider prescribed (hetero)sexual roles, fetishes and objectum sexuality in terms of animacy.

Hegemonic heterosexuality typically casts men as active (fully animate) and women as passive (less animate). The objectification of women is built into our language and culture, and is often taken for granted. For example, in heteronormative sex (penis/vagina penetration), the active male “penetrator” is assumed to be acting upon the passive “penetrated” female. By contrast, it is extremely uncommon for people to label the woman the “engulfer,” and the man the “engulfed,” although this terminology would also be accurate. These naturalized sexual roles extend to social roles: men are expected to be the active “pursuers,” while women are expected to be “pursued” and passive. They have also crossed over into gay, lesbian and kinky subcultures. Regardless of sex or gender, those who take on the “feminine” role of “the penetrated” are often referred to as “bottoms” and are assumed to be passive/submissive, while those who take on the “masculine” role as “penetrators” are called “tops” and are assumed to be active/dominant.

While women are often denied full animacy in our culture, some people ascribe animacy to inanimate objects. Objectum sexuality describes the feelings of emotional, romantic and/or sexual attraction that some people have for certain objects. It is a clear example of how interpretations of animacy can blur traditional boundaries between human/object, animate/inanimate, living/non-living, active/passive, and subject/object. According to the Objectum-Sexuality Internationale website, objectum-sexuality “is not a fetish… Fetishists do not see the object as animate as we do and therefore do not … develop a loving relationship with the object.”* Objectum-sexuals thus seem to employ “animacy as a central construct, rather than … ‘life’ or ‘liveliness’” (3). They provide a potent example of animacy’s “capacity to rewrite conditions of intimacy …and [revise] biopolitical spheres, or, at least, how we might theorize them”(3).

*https://peoplewholoveobjects.wordpress.com/objectum-sexuality-os/ 

Over the course of hip-hop history, individual female African American artists have negotiated and expressed their own identities, representation, sexualities, and autonomy in different ways, through their music, lyrics, videos, and personal style. In this blog post, I will draw upon objectification theory, scripting theory, and Black feminist epistemologies as discussed in Theresa Renee White’s article, “Missy ‘Misdemeanor’ Elliott and Nicki Minaj: Fashionistin’ Black Female Sexuality in Hip-Hop Culture—Girl Power or Overpowered?” to briefly consider some aspects of Erykah Badu’s song and music video, “Window Seat.”

In “Window Seat” – which was filmed in one take, ‘guerrilla style,’ without permission from the City*– Badu walks through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, the site of JFK’s assassination. She begins the video fully dressed, in baggy, comfortable-looking clothing and sunglasses. As she walks, ignoring everyone around her, she removes her clothing piece by piece, at her own pace, in a way that is not overtly sexual(ized). When she arrives, fully naked, at the site of Kennedy’s assassination, we hear a gunshot and she collapses onto the ground. Both her face and her genitals are blurred, and blue letters spelling “groupthink” leak from her head onto the pavement. Like Missy Elliott, Badu “[challenges] the stereotypical, sexualized image and fashion of women in hip-hop” (619). In this video, she consciously and overtly politicizes her body. She asserts her right to take up space as an autonomous subject, and to control her body and how it is viewed. In this way, she effectively resists dominant sexist and racist scripts that cast black female bodies as sexual objects; although she is naked, her body is not sexualized or objectified. She is ‘naked,’ rather than ‘nude’; the representation of her body is not shaped by heterosexual male desire (or capitalism), but by her desire to assert her right to her own identity and self-expression.

White writes that “the Black body has become a text in which all behaviors are visual and discursive representations to be read as alien, unless those bodies are complicit in almost every sense with dominant cultural norms”(610). This resonates powerfully with the conclusion of the video, when Badu states: “They play it safe, are quick to assassinate what they do not understand… They are us. This is what we have become – afraid to respect the individual. A single personal event or circumstance can move one to change. To love herself. To evolve.”

Here is a link to the music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hVp47f5YZg.

*Eric Martinez and Kevin Hayes, “Erykah Badu Window Seat Video: Is Her Stripping Illegal or Just in Poor Taste?” CBS News, accessed November 20, 2015, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/erykah-badu-window-seat-video-is-her-stripping-illegal-or-just-in-poor-taste/.

In “How Tiger Woods Lost His Stripes,” Henry Yu uses Nike’s popular ad campaign featuring multiethnic golf prodigy Tiger Woods as a lens through which to examine popular understandings of race/ethnicity in the United States in the context of global capitalism. The campaign illustrates that the mainstream conception of ‘race’ is highly problematic, and closely tied to white supremacist (pseudo)biological classifications. It also highlights the connection between racial representation and neoliberal capitalist strategies.

The ways in which Tiger’s race/ethnicity was taken up in popular media highlight how flawed ‘race’ is as a way of classifying people. When he became a professional golfer, the media reported racially loaded coverage of him, including bizarre calculations that broke down his race/ethnicity into fractions corresponding to the “purported biological ancestry of [his] parents and grandparents” (225). As Yu observes, these reports were disturbingly reminiscent of racist pseudoscientific discourses that were used to justify slavery and segregation. Although we know now that race is a socially constructed category, not a biological one, popular conceptions of race still harken back to the reductionist, white supremacist idea that “a single drop of black blood made a person colored, and no amount of white blood could overwhelm that single drop to make a person pure again” (225). Within this simplifying framework, Tiger’s individual identity and heritage are rendered irrelevant; he becomes classified as black. Indeed, the title “How Tiger Lost His Stripes” cleverly refers to “the process by which the complexities of human migration and intermingling … become understood in the simplifying classifications of race” (225).

In reducing the complexities of Tiger Woods’ mixed racial/ethnic identity/heritage to empty racial signifiers, Nike was able to profit from marketing (and associating with) him as a “black” sports star. Nike held up Tiger as an example of a black man who became successful in a sport dominated by wealthy, white men. In doing so, they conveniently put the onus of social change onto the individual through the myth of meritocracy. Moreover, the campaign obscures the systemic racial inequalities perpetuated and exacerbated by global capitalism generally, and by Nike specifically. Focusing on one prosperous, American person of colour detracts attention from the many people of colour Nike exploits behind the scenes in its factories in other countries. 

In his essay, “Pedro Zamora’s Real World of Counterpublicity,” José Muñoz imagines “an ethic of the minoritarian self” (144): working on the self for others, in an effort to facilitate the development of real, autonomous minoritarian (counterpublic) subjectivities. Muñoz contends that disidentification can be used as a tool for achieving this ethic. In my understanding, disidentification is the means by which minority individuals recognize themselves as self-determining subjects, through recognizing and resisting dominant majoritarian ideology. Acts of counterpublicity (a mode of disidentification) have the potential to disrupt majoritarian scripts by “[publicizing] and [theatricalizing] an ethics of the self” (147). However, Muñoz qualifies this idea by acknowledging that some “representations of counterpublicity are robbed of any force by … the ‘marketplace of multicultural pluralism” (147).
Muñoz’s consideration of counterpublicity as a means of achieving “an ethic of the minoritarian self” provides insight into the political value of LGBTQ+ pride parades. In some ways, pride parades constitute acts of counterpublicity: LGBTQ+ people disrupt majoritarian scripts by openly expressing and celebrating their sexualities and identities in public spaces, which are usually presumed to be heterosexual (and cisgender) by default. Participants performatively affirm their own subjectivities, recognizing and playing with hegemonic ideas about sexuality, gender, normalcy, and propriety. They are performing their selves for others, and their audience includes minoritarian and majoritarian groups. However, in other ways, pride parades do not subvert hegemonic ideology, and may actually reinforce it. Many LGBTQ+ people criticize pride parades because they are capitalist (corporate sponsors increasingly dominate parades), they reinforce what some people view as negative stereotypes about LGBTQ+ people, and they tend to be dominated by middle-class white cis gay men (and even straight cis people). A new counterpublic has now emerged in response to the original counterpublicity: people have begun to stage alternative pride events, and even protest mainstream pride parades. This highlights the conundrum of disidentification (and revolution generally): once a counterpublic practice or group achieves positive recognition/acceptance in majoritarian discourses and society, it is no longer revolutionary.