State of Emergency

State of Emergency has moved to http://gauchesinister.wordpress.com/

Revisiting my last post: Of course, the most obvious response is sexual refusal. And while those who have no other power exaggerate the value of their fuckability just as much as those who want to fuck them may feign powerlessness, the power of sexual refusal is grossly overestimated.¹ I am so frustrated by young women who confuse femininity with fuckability, and fuckability with power — the exchange value is not so high as you might imagine, and the market is flooded.

But apart from it being a predictable strategy for any femme, I think it’s damaging and wasteful to withhold something you want, in order to punish someone else. Punishment may bring its own satisfaction, but it’s ineffective for the change I’m seeking, and I think you know how I feel about self-denial. But what compels change? Merely addressing something doesn’t alter it, and "calling out", from what I’ve experienced even in relatively supportive communities, can be arduous, traumatic and futile.

1. I agree with Max Attitude that "someone always likes someone else more", and in some situations that means the latter has a lot of power over the former — I think in other situations the latter is much more replaceable than either party might realise. Sometimes the power dynamic in a relationship is an exact inversion of each partner’s power in the wider world, and it’s their relative positions in the rest of society that enable the temporary and limited inversion in their relationship. For example, I think this is true for most cases of the "hen-pecked" husband or "pussy-whipped" boyfriend (it’d amuse me to analyse the difference, but it’s an unnecessary diversion) — and in the remainder of cases, probably the majority, the woman doesn’t even have more power in the relationship. In more casual encounters where the transaction is simpler, I think both the value of fuckability and the interchangeability of fuckable bodies is more evident.

Meta: I’ve posted a bunch of writings that I’d first put up elsewhere — they’re backdated roughly to when they were written.

This has been my summer of femme: I’ve been fairly consistently made up, dressed up, and chatted up as a super girly supergirl. And I love that, I love playing princess and twirling my skirt and drinking tea with curled pinkie. I think I make it clear that it’s not all I do, but I do love it.

But I’ve met a fair few people through kink in the last several months, who’ve never known my history of more eclectic gender display, and with whom I haven’t really discussed politics at all — which might not sound so shocking but really it’d been years since I’d met any substantial number of people outside of activist circles, with whom I couldn’t readily assume certain values. Instead I’ve been trying to assume the best of people, and mostly I’ve been pleasantly surprised.

There have been instances where I’ve been uncomfortable, though, and realised that my arguments aren’t prepared for dominant culture, that I rely on the terrain of a particular discourse. When I launch my rhetoric leaps without this, they start shaky. Sometimes I don’t start at all — without a community to back up calling someone out, without recognising that as a specific cultural intervention and being able to call on all the strategies and wisdom that involves, it’s just too scary.

Being a young, thin, femme woman who fucks men means that men talk to you like you might agree with what they think of other women, who they think aren’t you but who you know may as well be you — who you will be, one day. It’s not enough to call yourself a feminist, to provide your alternative viewpoint somewhere further down the conversation. You can be horrified, but most likely your horror isn’t palpable, because that’s not what’s on his mind. You have to say it: This upsets me, this is unacceptable to me. But often I don’t.

It’s not just men, either — I’m no less devastated by women who deride all the ugly/old/fat/butch women on the scene. But either way it’s a feminist problem, because people rarely talk about men like their only worth is their fuckability. Not that men don’t have to grapple with that, but that there’s something outside it for them. And obviously (again again) I don’t have a problem with people having physical preferences, but there’s a difference between saying what you like and saying how you think other people should be.

[ Aside: I find it strange (and frankly, hilarious) that people assume that I’m only attracted to women who look like me, especially when those people are men trying to get into my bed. (If that theory holds, it won’t work for you, mister.) I have fucked people double my age, double my weight, a foot or more taller, and with hair in entirely different places. But also my femme identity depends on that being an option, not a requirement — if you take away the intentionality, you take away all my pleasure. ]

So maybe I should say here, because someone might read it: I will always, always take the side of the woman you scorn. I will always empathise with her, even if it seems we’re categorically different, because I know we’re serialised the same. Even if I’m silent, even if I sleep with you anyway, I will mourn the moment later, and feel ashamed.

A few days ago there was this furore in the blogosphere over whether the Australian Classification Board had banned female ejaculation and small breasts. People justifiably understood this as problematising certain bodies and certain desires, and took issue.

Upon further investigation, it appears there hasn’t actually been any clear change to the Australian Classification Board’s guidelines or code, but that:

a) the guidelines don’t specify female ejaculation, but golden showers are refused classification and the Board has not responded to questions on whether they make the distinction between female ejaculation and urination - resulting, the Eros Foundation claims, in banning depictions of female ejaculation where the ejaculate lands on someone’s body or mouth.

b) the code refuses classification to any material that describes or depicts a person who is or appears to be a child under 18 - even, according to Fiona Patten, in some situations where the participants are proven to be over age. Nothing in the code specifies as to breast size but Patten claims that this was cited as a reason for one image to be refused classification, which has informed what the industry will import and publish in the future.

For those who don’t know me well, I’ll start by stating that I oppose both these bans — and most censorship, even of things I find abhorrent — but I want to talk about the values behind it a little more.

The first issue differs remarkably from the second in that the ban on golden showers is itself problematic. If your sexual politics is primarily founded on consent, even with the caveat that there are some things you can’t consent to, it’s pretty difficult to see how that would extend to golden showers. But any failure to distinguish between urination and female ejaculation is a massive oversight, in a culture that maintains a wilful misunderstanding of female bodies.

The second issue is an example of one of the most popular problems in censorship — the elision of the thing and the image of the thing. I think the response has been somewhat hyperbolic in that the publications Patten cites (titles like Barely Legal) market themselves on the appearance or approximation of adolescence. It may be unfair and unreasonable for breast size to be taken into consideration — and I think it is — but it’s also disingenuous to claim that it is incidental in the case of an image or publication that is selling childishness.

Of course, this is a labour issue as well, and for workers with small breasts in a market that often prefers the reverse, it may be in their interest to work that angle. Equal employment opportunity might not be the first issue that comes to mind here, but the interests of the workers are especially important when they’re appropriated for policies against workers’ interests, as they so often are in the sex industry.

But while I think breast size is an inept and offensive way to think about age boundaries, I don’t believe that resolving the issue of participant exploitation answers the questionability of certain images. It’s easy to conceive of a situation wherein a problematic image is produced without any exploitation of participants - and as animation becomes both more realistic and more popular, I hope it helps the two issues further disconnect. Does the right of adults to participate in various representations of their specific bodies trump the rights of all serialised others, to refuse such images space in their culture?¹ Can I make child porn, because I’m not a child?² Would it become ageplay porn, because I am an adult? Does it matter whether the viewer can tell the difference?

References:
- Somebody Think of the Children, Classification Board Responds
- Ms Naughty, Female Ejaculation Films to be Banned in Australia
- Sydney Morning Herald, Weird Politics of Small Boobs and Bodily Fluids

1. I’m talking about a much broader issue of non-consent, I think, though any question of children incites more panic and vitriol: eg sexualised rape in films that supposedly have some moral resolution (where I think the visual meaning and the stated meaning often differ), and BDSM scenes of "consensual non-consent" (where I guess the meaning for the viewer depends on how much you can see of that context of consent).

2. Obviously I think it’s fine for people who might look young to make porn where their presented age isn’t the focus. Personally I think that student/cheerleader/Catholic schoolgirl/etc dynamics are fine too as it’s age-ambiguous roleplay. I’m talking about when someone is made to look like a child. I want to think about this more though, especially in relation to ageplay and parent/child roleplays — message me if you’d prefer to discuss it elsewhere.

I don’t enjoy being fetishised for my race. I generally don’t enjoy being racialised at all. But I get it if you like straight black hair and smooth bodies — that’s alright, I have certain preferences around physical attributes too; probably everyone does to some extent.

I’m much more put off by those who fetishise "Asian culture" and assume that will connect with me. I’ve lived in Melbourne since I was four. My intellectual inheritance is very much Western. I’m not westernised. Culture is never native, but Australian culture (including Asian Australian culture) is naturalised to me. My aesthetic, moral, political and intellectual values, as some kind of critical theory grrrl punk or whatever, spring from and struggle within a Western genealogy. Not that there’s nothing similar within various Asian cultures, or that similar strands there are necessarily imported. But when I say counter-culture, it’s counter to the dominant culture in my life.

My family has been through the Cultural Revolution followed by transnational migration, so I’m pretty aware that even the cultural practices I think of as Chinese are often unique to my family. Migrants from any country adapt their traditions to their new context. Besides which, culture is rapidly evolving in China itself too, as it is everywhere in the world.

When I first started identifying as a person of colour, I was so struck by the depth of my affinity with my new-found peers, I forgot for a moment how that affinity was constructed — as a very specific, strategic, deliberate political project. As Iris Marion Young might put it, we were a group that arose through a common intention in relation to our serialised condition - but the series itself is not already a group.

I’ve had friends and lovers from different backgrounds, and there’s no rule for what makes a strong connection. Two people may have "a lot in common" in terms of experiences, but it’s how we understand and respond to those experiences that creates affinity. Some of the most extreme instances of cultural dissonance I’ve experienced have been with people who have a very similar background. The fissure between our identities and thoughts was so much more dramatic from having been produced out of such like experiences, the same trajectory suddenly diverged. And there are people I’m really close to because we’ve been through a lot of the same shit. We have this camaraderie which is so precious to me. It’s precious because it’s rare, and it’s rare because it’s a potent mix of similarity and solidarity — of experience and desire. The intersection of culture and subculture, seriality and intentionality is what positions me as a queer POC feminist, rather than a pansexual Asian woman, or a radical democrat.

For others, overlaying culture/subculture on seriality/intentionality won’t be appropriate. Many subcultures are founded around aesthetics, and people won’t consider their moral and political desires as situated in or in any way related to their subculture. While I can identify the former independently of the latter, and certainly it’s refreshing to speak to those with similar values who are outside these subcultures, my own subculture is very much a community of political intentionality, and I think locating my values within it helps keep them fresh and fighting. I’ve been grappling with a lot of subcultural resentment lately, but I have a lot of appreciation too. Behind the bandannas, black jeans, faux-hawks and glitter, sometimes there is some real serious support and solidarity.

So I was thinking about why I’m not going to Reclaim the Night tonight.

And there’s a bunch of fairly decent reasons: I’ve never been clear on the purpose of the event, more so than for other actions because there’s no policy goal. If the goal is to raise awareness of violence against women, I think it achieves that — within a small community perhaps, but deeply if temporarily. If the goal is to lessen such violence, the impact would be indirect and impossible to measure. If the goal is to strengthen women and feminist sisterhood, I think it succeeds there also. And maybe the answer is all those things, but I’m frustrated with purposes that allow no measure of failure or success.

I would like to know what I’m asking for, and from whom. I would like to imagine and articulate how feminism could engage with known perpetrators of violence, and I’d like to acknowledge that we all have the capacity for violence, while remaining conscious of its gendered dynamics.

I think the name "Reclaim the Night" recalls a tradition I want to respect and uphold on one hand (just because feminist history is precious to me) and radically renew on the other. Here I share a friend’s anxiety at whether it’s ever appropriate for non-Aboriginal Australians to claim space in this manner. I remembering hearing a young non-Indigenous activist calmly disregard an Indigenous activist’s dissent at an RTS during G20 2006 and continue ‘reclaiming’ the streets.

Reclaim the Night has also been anti-trans, and anti-sex worker, in a violent manner. Also I think the name places improper emphasis on violence in the streets, reinforcing the myth that women are most at risk in public space with mysterious strangers, not in their homes, or on the streets but at the hands of police, or in a detention centre, or a psychiatry ward …

I wonder if focusing on sexual violence helps to reveal the gendered aspects, or individualises experiences of violence and obscures intersections. Current definitions of intimate partner violence now incorporate many forms of abuse beside the physical and sexual, such as financial abuse — would broadening the understanding of violence complicate the issues in a way that is necessary or unproductive? If a definition of violence becomes so general as to refer simply to domination, does that just collapse the conversation? Or is consideration of a wider context of power relations inevitable, and integral to a better understanding of what sustains violence?

I want to think outside feminist tradition to explore whether different forms of violence can be thought of together, fought together, or if we need to suffer again through being torn apart. But I don’t want to abstract concepts beyond what is possible either — even if I have already. It does matter that I want what is immediately enact-able, even if I dream on.

*

But really I’m not sure why I feel compelled to defend my absence, especially given that I think it would be more a show for my friends and "community" than anything with wider impact. More than anything else my absence is because I’m lazy, and because I’m in imminent-academic-doom mode, where I can’t seem to do anything except sitting around in my pyjamas worrying about overdue essays, least of all write them.

Loki reminded me that I’m not an activist anymore, and haven’t been for a while. I seem to have trouble letting go of the label, as much as I started to hate it as soon as I won it. There’s just nothing to replace it though, nothing that says "these things concern me", without the awful arrogance of -conscious or -aware. But I’m really not an activist, now, certainly not as an occupation, not even as an identity if it means sustaining genuine hope in the future. It didn’t used to matter, really, to fail. Now I’m not sure it matters to try. Burn-out is a kinder term for it, but really it’s just faithlessness, a lack of stamina coupled with the most caustic pessimism, parading as apathy. Between drinks, these things still concern me. But I can’t separate this anxiety from a more general one, and I can’t have my politics pathologised. They’re still precious, I guess. But maybe something like a memory.