Living “As Usual”

Posted on January 17, 2014 | Leave a comment

One of the themes of The Handmaid’s Tale that I found most compelling, but also most worrisome was Atwood’s firm assertion that people can get used to anything, given time and “a few compensations.”

Early on in the novel, Offred reminisces on the time that she spent with Luke in the early days of their affair.  She recalls how happy they were, though they thought they had problems, and remembers their complacency regarding the growing number of incidences of violence against women in the news. Prior to the rise of Gilead, no one had imagined such a state was possible- but once the Republic had formed, Offred was shocked to look back and realize just how different things had been.

“Is that how we lived then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is usual. Even this is usual, now. We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.” (The Handmaid’s Tale, Chapter 10)

Reading through chapter 10 a second time I was struck by Atwood’s comment that if society had changed so quickly to afford women greater rights and freedoms that it could change back just as quickly.  When I imagine the advances that have been made within my lifetime alone, I am horrified to consider the possibility that they could change, for worse and not better, just as quickly.
Human Rights and social justice are constantly making headway. Health care and access to it is improving world-wide. More and more states and countries are legalizing LGBTQIAP+ marriage, or at the very least, decriminalizing it.

But the seeds of hatred are always as present as the foundations of justice.

Violence and open, irrational hatred against LGBTQIAP+ individuals is still on the rise. First Nations women in Canada go missing and the government doesn’t seem to be too concerned. Last year I read a news story about a woman in North Dakota who’s rapist fought for custody of her child- and won.

“In a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.” (Chapter 10)

One of the things which also strikes me as ironic about Atwood’s novel (and similar dystopias that were written around the same time) is that the rise of an oppressive regime is almost always concurrent with an increase in government surveillance of civilians. Shortly after 9-11, a bombing not unlike the terrorist attack that launched the fictional Republic of Gilead in Atwood’s novel, legislation around government surveillance was amended in many countries including Canada and the United States.

Over the last couple of years, especially with the increased media attention paid to “whistle-blowers” like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden it’s become very clear just how much information different governments are privy to. But while there has been a lot of protest, there are also many who feel that being spied on by their own government is a fair trade off for being kept safe from attacks similar to those on the Twin Towers.

“Humanity is so adaptable, my mother would say. Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.” (Chapter 41)

Times change, and with the rate the world moves at today, those changes can only come faster and faster. What worries me is not that we cannot adapt to our rapidly changing world, but that, as Offred’s mother feared, we are too adaptable. Like Offred, we may move quickly from reminiscing about days when we had no problems to forgetting that we have problems of a greater scale in the present, and if we do, I fear we may fail to notice that the bath water is getting warmer, and our world is taking a turn for the worse.

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#OptimisticPostIsOptimistic

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Let’s Talk About Sex!

Posted on November 29, 2013 | 1 comment

When Pitch Perfect hit screens last year I was desperate to see it. It was everything I dreamed it would be and more. But the best part, hands down, was that it reminded me of an old favourite band: Salt-n-Pepa.

For those of you who don’t reminisce fondly on a ’90s childhood with a couple of cool cat cousins from downtown Detroit who sold you their old gameboy colors and introduced you to the sweetest tunes, Salt-n-Pepa were (hands down) the best hip hop girl group of the decade. Possibly of all time.

But they were more than that- they were hardcore feminists of the best variety: honest, confident, and willing to rap it out to a generation that was quickly falling in love with, arguably, the most sexist music industry in memorable history. Childhood me lived for that stuff.

Salt, Pepa and DJ Spindarella were pop industry feminists well before their time- even now mainstream music is packed with girls who churn out stereotypical, pining-for-my-prince chart toppers year after year, with the occasional F***-you-I’m-over-your-stupid-face variation. If the music industry were a movie it would never clear the Bechdel test, all the women ever talk about is men. Today, the trio still stands out as a breath of fresh air- and their song “Let’s Talk About Sex” is radical enough that it could shock some of the more liberal sex-ed teachers I met in high school.

So let’s talk about sex.  Not the fun kind, I’m afraid, but the which-parts-are-in-your-panties kind. Why does such an insignificant thing run so much of our world? Why do we segregate peeing? Why is there still a wage-gap? Why is women’s medicine still so under-researched? Why does the government get a say in what I do with my uterus and when?

And most importantly, why is the music industry, with all of its shock factor sexuality, not much much more progressive? We talk about sex a lot, but we’re still really bad at talking about the issues that surround it. Which is why I’m really (really) excited to discuss the biopolitics of gender in ASTU next semester.

Some closing remarks:

Another thing which brought Salt-n-Pepa to mind again recently was an example of music industry feminism I found a lot less impressive. Like the M.I.A video Heather posted a couple days ago, it’s a little controversial. Unlike M.I.A’s there are few blurred lines:

The internet community has responded, as one might expect, with a great degree of outrage.

I must admit that I was predisposed to love this song. It’s catchy, the lyrics are great, and I love Lily a lot. The music video was off to a great start, although the liposuction scene made me a little ill.  But then Allen juxtaposed her line “don’t need to shake my a$$ for you, ’cause I’ve got a brain” with women of colour twerking in the background, pulling the ultimate white feminist faux pas: forgetting that if your feminism isn’t intersectional, it isn’t feminism. I love Allen’s anger and her attitude, but we head down a slippery slope when we whine about discrimination while demeaning others who don’t share our privilege.

So let’s talk about sex, and let’s really talk about it. The world could use some dialogue across races, genders, and sexual expressions about the measures by which we discriminate against each other that extends well beyond the academic spheres of gender and women’s studies. Because it’s only by airing our species dirty laundry and engaging in these subjects openly and earnestly that we have any hope of putting this dark era of sexist, racist music behind us.

Thanks for a great semester guys! I’m looking forwards to the next one.

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Look Mom! No Hyphen?

Posted on November 16, 2013 | 6 comments

After contemplating the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, discussing disencapsulation, reading Obasan and my fellow classmates’ blog posts about hyphenated identities, and considering the process of othering through the lens of District 9, I feel I’ve begun to sift through my ideas about race and ethnic identity enough to craft a single statement based on my emerging ideas: Race, cultural heritage and ethnic identities are complicated things.

The older I get, the younger I feel.  When I was young I assumed, as many of us do, that growing up would give me all the answers.  In my early teenage years I was passionate and vocal about a lot of social issues.  Race featured among them, but so did sexism, homophobia, ableism, and several others.  The world was black and white.  Injustice was everywhere and it was easy to point my fingers at it and say: “There! That is the wrong that needs fixing.  And this is what needs to be done.”

It doesn’t seem quite that simple anymore.  Injustice is ever visible and easy to identify.  A solution?  Not so much.  The complexity of identity isn’t reducible.  It’s easy to say “we’re all one race!  The human race!” or “We all have the same sexuality, we’re all into people!” or “Forget gender, we’re the same species after all.”  But it isn’t that simple.  Ignoring the things that make us different doesn’t make them go away.  In fact, ignoring the things that make us different is a way of dehumanizing ourselves that is even more despicable than focusing on our differences.  Instead of demeaning others by stripping them of their rights, we demean those around us by stripping them of themselves.  Things like our ethnic and racial backgrounds, our gender and sexuality, and our physical appearance and capabilities make us who we are.

No one is champion of their own destiny.  We are all products of circumstance, shaped by the invisible hand of random occurrence.  To disregard things like race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and our physical attributes is to deny the unique voice those things lend us as individuals.  Had Obasan’s Naomi been white, her story would not have been as heartbreaking.  Had District 9’s Christopher Johnson been a human, the movie would not have been as great a tale of injustice.

The trouble with these aspects of our hyphenated identities isn’t our acknowledgement of them- its the pretension that we can use them to define ourselves and each other.  No one is just “Japanese-Canadian.”  Naomi was a female-cisgendered (I think?)-introverted-able bodied-second generation-Japanese-Canadian, and even that is a reduction of her personality.  These strings of identifiers don’t tell us any more about a person than a photograph would; they are incomplete reflections of the inconceivable complexity that lies within a human soul.  To imagine that we can understand and categorize one another by the labels we adopt or apply to ourselves and our acquaintances is dangerously naive.

But more dangerous still is the unfamiliarity of the privileged with life inside the hyphen.  As Toni Morrison once said: “In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.”  I must confess, consciously thinking of myself as having an ethnic background feels strange to me.  But at the same time, how many of us honestly refer to or think of ourselves as able-bodied?  As able-minded?  I don’t think of my privileges as being some of my most salient attributes, but in honesty, they are.  I am the product of my labels as much as anyone is.

So what do we do with our labels?  They can’t define us, can’t explain us, can’t categorize us, but they do provide some background information for why we are the people we are. Should we hyphenate?  Should everyone hyphenate?  Or are our salient attributes visible enough that we need not share them through identifiers like “Japanese-Canadian?”  Is there a simple answer to any of these questions?

 

No.

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Scrap Metal Flowers and the Essence of Humanity

Posted on November 8, 2013 | 1 comment

Three years later, I’ve finally finished watching District 9.  Peter Jackson and Neill Blomkamp’s film is my younger brother’s favourite movie. He bought it for $6.99 a few years ago at a local Blockbuster when they were phasing their extra copies out of their “new release” section and has cherished it ever since.

Prior to watching the film in ASTU, I’d seen about half of it, right up to the bit where Wikus is unceremoniously removed from the surprise celebration of his promotion and taken to… well to be honest, before tonight I hadn’t watched enough to know.

Fast forward to Monday of this week, and I began writing a post called “The Aliens Among Us.”  From my limited knowledge of the film planned to write a concise, tame, and (somewhat?) intellectual discourse on dehumanization and the true nature of “humanity” by highlighting similarities between Obasan and District 9.  But there was a definite flaw in my plan.  I stopped watching District 9 three years ago for a very valid reason: I simply could not stomach it.

Gore on its own is a put off- I’m not a big fan.  However, what made District 9 so repulsive to me, right from the get go, was the same thing that puts me off of war films, makes it impossible for me to read serial-killer thrillers, and prevents me from watching documentaries about the war crimes I am so comfortable reading about (that’s relative, mind you. Everything is relative; words on paper are easier to swallow than videos on a screen).  I have no spine for this stuff.  It devastates me.  I started crying shortly after Wikus’ father in-law tells Tania (Wikus’ wife) that she wouldn’t likely see him again and didn’t stop bawling until well after the credits stopped rolling.

All that to say, if you’re looking for my tidy post, look somewhere else.  I lost track of it somewhere between the bit where the MNU scientists attempt to vivisect Wikus and the gruesome scene in which several aliens rip Venter’s head off his body.

Here’s what I could salvage:

Depending on which archaeologist you speak to, you’ll hear different reports about what makes modern humans unique among our hominin relatives.  Many start at the genesis- we have the ability to speak, to think conceptually, to think symbolically.  We have the cognitive capacity to plan, to create complex tools, to use complex tools.  But the archaeological record points to another distinctly human gift: the ability to create art.  Creating art utilizes both our gift of symbolic thought and our capacity to create and use tools.  Art is the definitive human pursuit.  We incorporate aesthetic, myth, mysticism into other aspects of our day to day lives, but art is something beyond even these.  Art is the marriage of our most indefinite symbolic notions and our most concrete tools- our bodies and our surroundings.

The Johannesburg of District 9 is an artless world.  The buildings are functional, the people dull, no one moves with any grace or behaves with any sincerity.  Amidst the mess of people scrambling tooth and nail to make their way in the world there are two creative minds, one striving in secret to find a way to head back home against the backdrop of a hostile and oppressive society and one a bumbling bureaucrat with a small inclination to whimsy.

“Wikus was always making me things.  He said that way, they just mean so much more.”

Wikus’ creations for his wife are clumsy at best, but they are wrought out of a place of genuine meaning- his love for her.  Over the course of the film, as Wikus devolves from mindless bureaucrat into something resembling the sentience and empathy that, in an ideal world, would be the hallmark of all humans, Wikus’ love for his wife is the one constant he holds.  Every other thing he holds dear is stripped away.  By the end of the film, when Wikus sits amidst the junk of district 9 folding a flower from scrap metal, his love for Tania is all that remains of the man he was the day he was sent into the alien slum to begin evicting the “prawns.”

There are a lot of speculations about why people create art.  Archaeology provides no answers as to its origins, and similarly, the explanations of any field seem profoundly lacking.  If I, uneducated as I am, could make an unsubstantiated and indefensible suggestion, it would be that art is born out of our desires to make our most symbolic hopes and ideas concrete.  Christopher Johnson’s ship is the physical incarnation of his hopes to return home and his longings to set all the wrongs in his reality right again.  Wikus’ metal flowers are the physical incarnation of the same hopes and longings, and the essential indicator of his humanity long after all other trappings of it have ceased to be.

If to be human is to be an artist, a dreamer and a visionary, these two “aliens” are the only humans to be found in or outside of district 9.

 

Apologies for the length and desultory nature of this post.  Thanks for reading.

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Subtle Elitism Embedded in Van Peer’s Argument

Posted on October 21, 2013 | Leave a comment

As much as I hate to be the keener with an extra post on her ASTU blog, it looks like that’s the way things are going to pan out- because  I’m hoping the post for the next deadline will be about Obasan, so this one isn’t going to be it.  On the other hand I still have one last point to flush out about Van Peer.

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I’ve really enjoyed reading Van Peer.  As a reader, I find his assertion of the importance of literature as an agent of social change and progress very compelling, and so academically I found it very easy to jump on the Van Peer bandwagon.  But after some closer reading and consideration of the in-class discussion on the stance he takes opposing romanticism, I began to notice a more sinister logic embedded in his arguments.

Although I wrote my summary on, in part, the danger of seeing literature as an entertainer and not an educator (a challenge to educational literature being, in van Peer’s vein of logic, a challenge to social progress and the advancement of human rights) I still strongly feel that van Peer is, in spite of his focus on enlightening encapsulated cultures, an elitist at heart.  Politically, he is for disencapsulation.  Socially, he supports encapsulation to a nearly archaic degree.  The canon van Peer holds so dear is exclusive and socially stratifying, undemocratic at the core and therefore, in opposition of the advancement of true equality.

I draw my claims about van Peer’s elitism from two main aspects of his argument.  First, his protest against Romanticism.  While the romantic movement in some ways diluted the educational impact of art, it was also a democratizing force in the art world, suggesting that art and its appreciation wasn’t something exclusive to the upper classes.  While van Peer might be right to question its effect on some of the effects it had on the quality of art, that doesn’t mean its effects on society itself were negligible.  Second, van Peer’s argument for the creation of social change through literature depends on the members of the encapsulated culture being the ones to read literature and shape change.  His argument completely ignores and undermines the valuable impact of the lower, or excluded classes and cultures as shapers and creators of social change.  Even when he addresses other publications outside of the category of fiction that shape society (like The Communist Manifesto) he isn’t adressing other, unwritten factors in cultural progress.

In short, van Peer isn’t writing from an inclusive perspective of society, but an exclusive one.  He isn’t writing a narrative from the perspective of the excluded as well as the encapsulated members of a society, but one from a strictly elitist perspective.  His words claim social progress, but it’s a progress that exists in legislation alone, not in thought or culture, and the bias of his argument shows that.  In van Peer’s article, there is no mention of the revolution of the masses and its impact on society after the industrial revolution.  There is no mention of the suffragettes or the Civil Rights Movement.  Van Peer spins a pretty narrative about Hard Times and how literature shaped the thoughts of the upper classes and says absolutely nothing about the lower classes.  The lower classes are as voiceless in van Peer as they are in the encapsulated worlds he writes of.  And that’s not really indicative of progress, is it?

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