Tonight is the last night that we have to write for our blogging assignment. I’m so excited. I thought it might be fun to get paralytic drunk before writing and then hope to be all witty and stuff… but I have to work tomorrow morning, and that just wouldn’t be pretty. While my blog readers will never really know if I imbibed tonight, I am going to take advantage of my temporary positionality to become “a subject who consciously fictionalizes stability in order to write…” The ability “to resist, and to act” will come later when I sober up enough. My first act of my new existence of resistence will be to simply end this assignment, and my interpolation into its discourse, with a hearty cheers and a return to my poker game.

Rhodes, Jacqueline. "Substantive and Feminist Girlie Action: Women Online."

In 2004, the UK announced the Gender Recognition Act, an act through which transsexual people may apply “for legal recognition of the gender in which they now live.” The policy reform in the UK is quite revolutionary in that it deems that transsexuality is not a mental illness. The policy also calls for government intervention in industries and agencies in order to educate them about their possible dealings with transsexual people. According to Leslie Feinberg, a known transgender activist, the UK government may have taken important first steps in the liberation of many oppressed groups.

Feinberg argues that there is strength in unity, and that the unity of oppressed people can be achieved through an understanding of why oppression exists and persists. Placing liberation of the oppressed as a fight between classes, Feinberg sees the working class as capable of a revolution that will unite many despite, and indeed because of, their differences. Has the UK government become an ally in this struggle? According to Althusser, a main apparatus in disseminating and reinforcing dominant ideology is the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA). Since ISA’s include schools, churches, the legal system, etc., it would seem that the UK government is merely doing their part to subsume a minority of resistors in the dominant ideology. If that is the case, the UK government is more of an enforcer than an ally. Is this policy part of reform or is it a warning…?

Learn more about the Gender Recognition Act.

The campaign for gender-neutral bathrooms on campus gets attention in the Edmonton Sun.
"A gender-bending issue"...hmmmm...

Check it out.

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Please click here to view the "Peeing in Peace" resource guide.

Bound and Determined

In discussing the development of women’s body image, Carla Rice argues that women resist dominant beauty ideals, and as such the regulation of their bodies, through rebellious practices on the body such as hair cutting, tattoos, and piercings (326-327). Rice also suggests that resistance must include many provisional strategies, for by rebelling against one ideal resistant women are creating another ideal (328-329). Indeed, women can reappropriate their bodies and redefine their body image through a process similar to Kipnis’ refunctioning.

With Rice in mind, how can we negotiate resisting both dominant body image and gender identity ideals? It is clear that reappropriating regulation of our bodies can (though does not necessarily) include resisting dominant gender identity ideals, but I wonder if gender identity must be positively defined before it can be part of a struggle against the regulation of body and body image? If gender identity is only defined negatively (by what it is not), then does body image remain negative? How does that impact resistance to any dominant ideal? To bring the issue back to Kipnis, is refunctioning possible without first establishing which soapbox we will stand on?


(Rice, Carla. “Between Body and Culture: Beauty, Ability and Growing Up Female.” Open Boundaries: A Canadian Women’s Studies Reader 2nd ed. Eds. Barbara Crow, Lise Gotell. Toronto: Pearson, 2005. 320-332.)

Before the midterm on Thursday I attended the talk by David Harrison, “Anything You Ever Wanted to Ask a Transsexual”. David started with his youngest recollection of feeling like he was in the wrong body, and told his life story about being an actor, a transsexual, a psychic, and a professional dom. David’s talk left me with a lot of questions, which I unfortunately couldn’t work up the nerve to ask him. However, there is one question I can’t get over because it seems like it might open a floodgate of other questions. David’s story seems to resonate with a lot of feminist theory I’ve read in the last year, but at the same time, his life challenges important aspects of that theory.

One example I remember is David feeling more ‘flow’ with who he was, and yet feeling more stable as male. From a theoretical perspective, David’s life is full of contradictions and tensions that could be critically analyzed for ‘cracks and fissures’. Yet, from a material perspective, David is a walking ‘refunctioning’ of theory into practice; he IS being, not simply part of a class of beings. Sitting in that room, listening to his life story, I couldn’t help but think how absurd it is to think of the man in front of me as an application of a theoretical concept. The challenges of transitioning must be so incredible, and yet students and academics take liberty to theorize about (trans)identity. Don’t get me wrong, theory is important, as are considerations of its application. I just never want to forget that no matter how constructed our identities are/can be, there are challenges in life that can not be overcome with rationally applying theory to the lived world.

View David Harrison's web page

As Feminist Popular Culture students this term we are required to keep a weekly writing assignment schedule. We are to repeat the blog as practice throughout the term, and we are given a space where we all know our own place as students both in the public online and in the classroom. Additionally, we are punished or rewarded for our blogs in the form of grades that establish a normative dialectical discourse for the project throughout our term, and in the future of other Women’s Studies 320 classes. Indeed, the blogging assignment serves to regulate our student bodies so we will not resist, for to do so would cost us our grades. Does this all sound familiar? It should. This blogging assignment is a prime example of Foucault’s Science of Disciple.

Admitting ourselves as docile bodies allows for a reading of Adorno and Horkiemer’s theory of the Culture Industry, in which it would seem that we, as Feminist Popular culture students, are automatons alienated from our work because it can never truly be ours but only a representation of exchange value. Our blogs become false needs that are standardized and repeated, and through which we participate in our own oppression. That being said…I’m still going to do it.

“Of all the gin joints in all the world…”

Of course I would miss the last class based on our readings, and of course that class would be the one to tie everything together. It’s perfect. After all, I find if you make things harder on yourself, life is always interesting. Then again, according to Baudrillard, nothing really matters in the end of things anyway. Everything is a simulation, any attempt to attend to that simulation in ‘real time’ merely leaves you without meaning or purpose, and without meaning the future becomes unimportant and the concept of the past becomes incoherent.

The vanishing point is a concept I would like to hear more about though. Baudrillard talks about original concepts, essences, vanishing when it seems like they are altered from their natural state. But that doesn’t sound right, I have to have read this wrong. It seems obvious to me that an essence moving along a linear timeline would be constantly moving, and constantly adapting its essence in time; there is no original except that which is. Unless you are willing to posit a necessarily existent being at the beginning of all essences, don’t you have to admit an ever-evolving non-history? Maybe that is what Baudrillard meant by the Christian need to anticipate the end?

Last night I drove an hour and a half in a mostly east direction, and found myself standing at the base of a giant egg. I scaled the base of egg because, well, if one should find oneself at the base of an egg, the only sensible thing to do is climb it. Having conquered the giant egg, I turned my attention to the giant elk that was awaiting mounting not a block down the road. As you can see, I captured both of my conquests last night on film. Do my acts last night count as the politicization of art?

Benjamin argues that art can be revolutionary. Art, specifically sound film and photography, serves to distract and shock us in such a way as to hit and register on our bodies. Though my pictures may be somewhat shocking or distracting, I hardly think they have the tactile impact that Benjamin was talking about. John Fiske, however, argues that popular culture, as an act, is excessive. When considered as excessive then, popular culture becomes revolutionary in that it shines light on dominant ideolgical discourse, preventing it from being so sneaky. Which brings me back to my original question, do my acts last night count as the politicization of art? I think the obvious answer to that is no, my acts, individually, do not. But, further consideration of the images of last night's jackassery might be in order. Does using the pictures for a political end draw pop culture/revolutionary status?

postmodern daftness

I worked doing grounds maintenance at a home for retired nuns this summer. One day during lunch, a male co-worker related a story about a beautiful young woman who had come to stay at the home to finish her nun training.∗ The punch line of the story was that it was a waste for her to become a nun. I then spent the majority of my summer wondering, what was being wasted? Could it be that because there would be no penis entering her vagina, she was wasting? If women are being objectified as no more than sex objects, that would be an essentializing identity discursively produced by a dominant ideology, would it not?

Let us assume that women’s bodies and sex have a long history of conflict. How may a woman’s action(s) interrupt the dominant ideology that is informing her subjectivity? This week’s class discussion focused on 50 Cent using rap as a tool for empowering nihilism. As I understand it, 50’s empowering nihilism includes packaging an over-the-top version of the discursively produced black man and throwing it back at the white bourgeois male, who gladly pays out his ass for the music. If 50 can gain an empowered identity and create a network of shared sensibilities through empowering nihilism, then why can’t women? Next time I’m at the strippers and a nearly naked, extremely talented woman comes my way off the catwalk, I’ll be sure to yell: “you go girl, wrap up those stereotypes and shove them right down my throat! Here’s a bill for ya!”

∗ My apologies to the Sisters for this crude term, I don’t know the right word for it.

Happy Monday...did you remember your pants?!

Jumping off a cliff, Adorno & Horkheimer in hand....

Adorno and Horkheimer talk about technology, the culture industry’s greatest achievement, as simply being an assembly line of standardized products. These products are so well designed and mechanized that there is nothing that escapes appropriation by the culture industry. Style of products becomes no style at all when they are all mass produced to masquerade as unique, and natural. Thus, the culture industry creates a veil of ideology in which individuals buy into their falsely needing the industry’s standardized products. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, the culture industry is selling the dominant ideology’s dream, and we are lapping it up like the good Pavlovian mutts we are.

What I don’t understand is, if all the culture industry’s products are predictably the same, and nothing ever changes, then there is a sense in which what it means to be human, in a technological environment, never really changes either. Adorno and Horkheimer mention that there is no escape from appropriation by the culture industry, and that “anyone who resists can only survive by fitting in”. To be clear, then, within a Marxist paradigm, the economic base determines the culture industry, which determines the superstructure, which feeds back to the capitalist that determines the economic base. Therefore, what it means to be … is essentially to fulfill this economic circle of life. For anyone not in the capitalist class, there is no freedom to choose, no historical situation or social context that can alter your inevitable obedience to the culture industry. How do Adorno and Horkheimer explain the history of human existence before or without the culture industry? And would that defense prove without a doubt their prescribed nature of human being in the future? Or does the future even matter?

The other day I sat in a classroom and listened to a classmate explain that a contemporary feminist movement could not effect change because knowledge and power are held, and disseminated, by government officials, “the higher-ups”. I said nothing.

In the same classroom, I sat in amazement as another classmate insisted that segregated bathrooms were integral to Canadian society because challenging sex difference would shatter the foundation on which many legal and statistical institutions are built. Again, I said nothing.

The next day, walking through HUB mall, I wondered if the sideways glances and the judgmental stares directed at me were issues that I should take up with my MLA. For that matter, perhaps next time I am asked if I am in the right bathroom, I should be thankful that there is at least some government agency that has my gender identity checked neatly in a box.

What does this have to do with the blog assignment? As Jacqueline Rhodes pointed out in this week’s reading, the internet can be an invaluable tool in allowing feminists to become at once both writers and activists. Acting from a false stability of identity created by association with links and themes, feminists can create a network of “fictive coherence that serves as a point from which to work for change”(128). I believe blogging this term will be the "fictive coherence" that brings our class together, and, for shy people like me, the seemingly ever-changing subjectivity of identity online is a huge benefit.

I look forward to the opportunity that blogging will afford me to voice my feminism, including challenging hetero (and homo) normatives through theory, and incorporating such feminist theory in public and private life. With such a view of feminism in mind, the purpose of my blog is to build and maintain a network with the 320 radicals that serves to interrupt and integrate academic theorizing with action.

Let there be blog!