Brilliant breakdown of twerking and bodily representation. Smart insights from Kimari Brand about power and the significance of the dance form (film by Irma L. Garcia). Brought to me by the ever-on-point Feministing. Good preview of the video by Sesali Bowen in Feministing:
Utilizing multiple experiences — including a course on performance, feminism and social justice, a trip abroad to study Afro-Caribbean culture and politics, and her experiences as a Black girl at an institution of higher education that prioritizes white supremacist “credibility and status” — Brand has reframed the dialogue about twerking.
I think twerking is at the heart of a lot of the moral panics about young women’s sexuality. More particularly the moral panic attached to twerking is represented along racial and/or sexual and/or class lines depending on the expected audience (Miley Cyrus). Worth discussion and re-presenting which Brand and the filmmaker Garcia do really well.
The editor of the Vanderbilt student newspaper wrote a nice opinion piece about the visibility of rape culture on a fraternity message board. After summarizing the toxic discussion, Andre Rouillard shares his conclusion and noted that he had saved the message board discussion and posted it for posterity:
If all of this isn’t rape culture made manifest, then I don’t know what is. I’m not going to waste my limited word count railing against the enabling power of anonymous message boards and social media, the insularity and cliquey-ness of Greek life, or other favorite targets of those who write on this subject but who don’t pay witness to it. This single, 44-post thread is a glimpse into a rape culture that is alive and well here at Vanderbilt. It’s alive in dorm rooms, Greek houses, classrooms and public spaces. It is a culture that commits rape and then comes together to shut down its victim.
“Consider yourself lucky if no one finds this thread,” warns one user. Well, now no one can: The thread was deleted from the website yesterday after 8 p.m. However, you’ll be able to find the entire thread saved here, with the name redacted.
It is plain now that there are groups of individuals at this prestigious, beautiful, diverse institution darkening its classrooms and hallways and making it a less safe and accepting place for the women in attendance. After all of the steps forward that Vanderbilt has taken in my four years here, this thread represents one hundred steps backward. I am deeply ashamed to share classrooms, professors and the name on my soon-to-be-printed diploma with the students represented in this cesspool of destructive gossip and self-serving intimidation. I’d like to think we at Vanderbilt, the lucky few, are better than this — but now, I’m not so sure.
In a badass moment of solidarity, another student has written a shared letter declaring that she is the ‘girl who ratted.’ Sharing risk and making the threats of retaliation visible are both smart responses to the incident. Julia Ordog explained her strategic thinking:
“I wanted to just do something to make my thoughts on it heard in a concrete way,” she added. Ordog also wanted to demonstrate her support for the alleged victim.
“I came up with this idea of ‘I am the Girl That Ratted’ because in my head, I was thinking about how it really could have been anyone, and how even though I haven’t been a victim myself, it’s something that I feel very passionately about,” she said. “I wanted it to be an ally statement, but also more powerful than that.”
She only circulated the letter to about 60 people initially, who she says were students she had talked to about the online postings, students who she knew were passionate about the issues involved, and close friends. The message spread throughout campus during the course of the day, with Ordog being contacted by several students requesting permission to forward her email along to others.
This week is sexland at Humboldt State University. A similar event in Tennessee garnered the condemnation of the state legislature.
For real?
The most important issue in a whole state is whether college students learn more about sex?
The student-initiated educational event is a pretty good example of the leftist backlash that comes in the era of the internet. I think it is a kind of resistance to the political policing when the club would lose their budget and then have private donors refund them in 48 hours.
We were defunded last year — two-thirds of our budget was taken away from us about two and a half weeks before the event, and we had to raise about $11,000 back. And we did that in less than 48 hours, because support came in from across the nation …
Last year was much more difficult working with the university. This year they’re being more supportive.
Organizer Brianna Rader is interviewed in Salon and gives a great example of flipping the expectations of thoughtful conservatives:
How did you end up co-sponsoring an event with one of the Christian groups on campus?
We had an event last year called “Religion and Sexuality” … One of the guys that sat on that panel was the director of Cru, which is a more conservative Christian organization. And he was nervous at first, but we tried to get him to understand where we were coming from. And he actually really loved the event, and he loved that we were able to talk about these complicated issues … in a frank and open manner. And so we talked to him again this year, and we said: Hey, would you like to do more with us? And he really loved the idea. And so he proposed bringing these speakers from Colorado in, who he was familiar with, and running an event with us [“Long-Term Intimacy: Commitment and Sex”] …
We’re not promoting, like, one sexual lifestyle. We’re just promoting sex-positivity. Which means that is inclusive of abstinence and all different beliefs.
Thanks to the organizers who promote dialogue, healthy sexuality, consent and safe-sex. Salute to Salon and Josh Eidelson for the cool interview. And of course, I found the link at Feministing‘s Daily Feminist Cheat Sheet.
The interwebs are structurally sexist – with whole areas where women are disrespected and policed through abuse and threats of violence.
Recently some academic dude wrote some article suggesting that professors learn about twitter and blogging. A good reminder to “ask the other question” (Matsuda) when Gwendolyn Beetham points out the risks to women who enter the internet public sphere.
In fact, I cannot think of a prominent woman in the public sphere who has not been the target of sexism, usually in the form of being threatened with sexual assault, which in the case of women of color undoubtedly takes a racist tone. Amongst countless others, recent incidents of female public scholars who have had these experiences include Mary Beard (@wmarybeard), who was threatened with rape and having her home bombed via Twitter, and Brittney Cooper (@ProfessorCrunk), who was physically threatened while speaking on a panel at the Brecht Forum in New York. If you’d like to do your own test of this, read the comments of any article published by a woman in a mainstream news media outlet – or read almost any mainstream account of women in the public sphere. Indeed, as Mary Beard recently stated in a talk at the British Museum (recounted in The Guardian ), the very real, and very negative, push-back against women who enter the public sphere is nothing new in Western culture: it extends all the way back to Homer. Although not surprising, it is nevertheless disappointing that Kristof and others continue to ignore the risks that women have faced when entering the public sphere for the past two millennia.
Science video blogger Emily Graslie has a crisp response to the nasty emails she receives. Graslie hosts her show the Brain Scoop. I like the performative readings of the emails themselves.
Thanks to Laurie Penny (author of Cybersexism: Sex, Gender, Power and the Internet) for a few insightful quotes about fighting sexism on the internets. I happen to agree about the rising moments of accountability.
Look. The internet makes dicks out of us all, but it means that for a few people, the perceived costs of extreme douchebaggery are far lower than they would be otherwise. But that sense of inviolability is beginning to erode. Men — and I do believe that it’s mainly men, even though I’ve had troll encounters with women and others — are beginning to realize that there are actual consequences to behaving like this. It’s happening in “the real world,” too. Comedians now think twice before making rape jokes. Tech conferences think twice before lining up scads of all-male panels. And it’s happening because of the internet. I think.
Capitalist patriarchy hurts everyone, not just women. What I really hope is that this explosion of debate and discussion about gender and sexuality, facilitated by the internet, will give men permission to speak honestly about what capitalist patriarchy does to them.
Right now, though, it seems men only feel empowered to speak of how gender affects them when they’re directly attacking women and girls or bawling artlessly at feminists. I meet a lot of MRA’s who genuinely seem to believe that an attempt to make the world fairer for women and freer for everyone is a direct attack on men, and that calling someone sexist is worse than actually being sexist. Those are lies, and we need to stop treating them as adult arguments.
If women are shamed and harassed out of full digital participation online, everyone loses.
And perhaps one of the greatest approaches to internet trolling:
But none of that is terribly helpful when all you want to do is slam the laptop shut and never look at Twitter again.
At which point I’d advise a long walk, a strong cup of tea, and a healthy dose of spite.
Spite is underrated. Sometimes, on dark days when I believe every awful thing mouth-breathing misogynists say about me online, when all I want to do is give up, I remember how important it is not to let the fuckers win.
John Spong has a narrative essay in Texas Monthly describing the rebellious country music scene around Austin Texas in the early seventies. A few of my favorite quotes:
JERRY JEFF WALKER I had a whole lot of money available, and I knew what people like the Band were doing. You buy the equipment, make your record, and when you’re done, you own the shit! I thought that might be a good thing to do.
BOB LIVINGSTON Someone had gutted the old Rapp Cleaners on Sixth Street, put burlap on the walls, and made it one of Austin’s first recording studios. We’d been with Murphey in a Nashville studio, and now we’re with Jerry Jeff in this funky little place, plugged into a sixteen-track tape recorder in the middle of the room, with no board, no nothing. We’d get there about seven each night, and Jerry Jeff would be standing in the doorway, mixing sangria in this big metal tub.
JERRY JEFF WALKER The sound engineers wanted to bring in this souped-up equipment. I said no. This needed to be like one of those nature shows: [He whispers in an affected English accent]“This is the first time we’ve ever seen the birthing of a Tibetan tiger baby.” I figured if somebody could sneak up on a tiger, we could be recorded where we’re comfortable.
I like this next quote by James White about letting these new country rebels play at his club. Maybe it’s because he judges everyone so much on their shoes. And of course — musical integration comes because five hundred hippies will buy a lot of beer.
JAMES WHITE opened the Broken Spoke in 1964. They drew over five hundred people. And I guess about 70 to 80 percent were hippies. Some of them were barefoot or wearing moccasins or tennis shoes, like a PF Flyer. None of them could two-step. They all did a dance I called the Hippie Hop, jumping around like old hoedown dancing. But there were five hundred of them, and I figured anybody who can draw five hundred people is okay.
I know that Willie Nelson is fundamentally bad-ass, but this article gives me a whole new perception. Here he is calming down redneck violence during the transition:
STEVE EARLE I saw Willie play this joint in Pasadena called the Half Dollar. Pasadena was where the Ku Klux Klan clubhouse was in the Houston area. It was as redneck as Texas got, full of refinery workers who went dancing every weekend. But that night, a bunch of us hippies wanted to sit on the floor and watch Willie play. So as the regulars go around the dance floor, they’re kicking us in the back. Willie stopped in the middle of a song and said, “You know what, there’s room enough for some to dance and some to sit.” That chilled it out.
Austin gave Tom T. Hall a lesson in gender politics. Visible here is the understanding that the power/disempowerment of gender dynamics is the pleasurable thing for male-dominant sex:
TOM T. HALL My show at the Armadillo was the first time I was ever propositioned by a woman. I came out of Kentucky and had this naive notion that men were supposed to chase women. That was the sport of it. So this beautiful, blond-haired girl came out of the audience looking like one of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. She said, “Hey, you want to go screw?” I said, “Oh, I don’t think so.” The charm had gone out of the thing.
I’ve got to search for the first season of Austin City Limits.
BILL ARHOS That first year of Austin City Limits was crazy. Doug Sahm was on, and the air in the studio turned purple from marijuana smoke. I had to throw a guy out for spraying silver paint up his nose. Seriously. And God, Jerry Jeff was supposed to tape one night, but he’d gone to Miami to see the Cowboys play in the Super Bowl. If they’d won, he would’ve never shown up. But they lost, and he came, walking onstage while the Gonzos were singing “London Homesick Blues,” just grinning like an idiot. I said, “What the hell?” And someone said, “There’s a guy in the audience wearing a gorilla suit.” There was.
Perhaps the best musical defense against a drug charge by Waylon Jennings:
RICHIE ALBRIGHT The next day Waylon was booked for possession, and that was big news in Nashville. And it was funny because Willie played in Nashville that night and had Waylon come out onstage. The place went nuts. The day after that, we were at the lawyer’s office, and Waylon said, “You got a guitar around here?” They did. He said, “You’ve got to hear this new song.” He started playing “Don’t You Think This Outlaw Bit’s Done Got Out of Hand.” He got to the part where he says, “They got me for possession of something that was gone, long gone,” and the lawyers faces all drained. They said, “You can’t say that.” Waylon goes, “Hell, it is gone.”
Interesting how common gun play was at this point:
RAY BENSON We were filming a show at the Alliance Wagon Yard, and I’m in the video truck with a guy from CBS Records named Herschel. I put my hand on the board and suddenly go, “Ow! Was I just shocked?” and then Herschel goes, “Ow! My leg!” and I turn and see his jeans going dark with blood. One of Willie’s guys had shot at Joe Gracey’s brother with a .22, and the bullet went through the side of the van, grazed my left hand, and then went into Herschel’s leg. But when CBS found out who shot him, they decided not to press charges. They didn’t want to alienate Willie.
LEON RUSSELL That was my video truck. But I figured that if you send your million-dollar truck down to Austin, you’ve got to expect to get a bullet hole or two in it.
Consider this a juxtaposition to the clip about Paul McCartney and Fela. Here is Fela narrating a portion of his life. Included in this film are some great musical moments and some insights about what made Fela so dangerous.
In my opinion the liberated space he embodied and willingness to share risks make him a poignant anti-colonial force. Of course I have problems with Fela’s sexism, but the quotes from the queens in this film give us some insight into their experience.
Of course when you google “Fela’s queens” you get western women reprising the roles of the women who married and risked with Fela. Perhaps this is colonialism, that I can’t find any interviews with the “queens,” but I can find interviews with Americans playing Fela’s wives on broadway. Some communications pushes out other communications.
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Life of refinement 
The Brain Scoop on bullying
Science video blogger Emily Graslie has a crisp response to the nasty emails she receives. Graslie hosts her show the Brain Scoop. I like the performative readings of the emails themselves.
Thanks Feministing for the link.
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