MY OWN SYNTAX

YES, I HAVE seen Avatar. Yes, like the rest of the known world, it would seem, I have many comments on it. Most have been said. Most I won’t repeat. Only thing that’s been jumping my mind is this: It is amazing to me that we could even have a movie like Avatar; that one could imagine the technology necessary, then develop that technology to create it; that one (namely, James Cameron) can imagine this fantastic, new world filled, itself, with new (neuro) technology; and with new creatures; and with new languages; everything made new—and yet. We can still only imagine sex & gender in the same, old comfortable binary. And yet. We can still only imagine, it would seem, the same, old comfortable heteronormativity & heterosexual subplot. And yet. The white hero, like always, wears our clothes & saves the day.

Save yourself the ten dollar movie ticket. Read a poem.

FORWARD: Once upon a time I managed another blog, which is now retired. There are, however, some blog entries that I at least still enjoy and would like to bring back to light. Following this is the first of I-don’t-know-how-many, a blog which treats one of my favorite authors in her own words: Toni Morrison.

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For several days now I have had the urge to write a blog. This usually coincides with any sort of break, when I am able to read and think casually. I have been reading a number of books ranging from Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s most recent , “Wizard of the Crow,” to some that I’m reading for a LGBT literature class next semester. These books—Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and “De Profundis” and I’m just beginning Henry James’ “The Bostonians—are, well, very white. I am conscious of this as I read the texts, but I cannot say that this fact has exactly spoiled my potential liking of them. In regard to Wilde, while his opinions of women and female-bodied persons are less than enjoyable (but whose opinions weren’t for the time?), I have realized he was a very interesting man, to say the least, full of Thoughts. When I use this word and capitalize it, I do so purposefully to express statements that seem “true” (dare say, universal) for all persons. In other words, passages that touch, speak from or on the “human experience or condition.” But what is this condition and how is it we’ve come to feign an understanding of it?

I am reminded, now, of a moment sometime last semester. I was at a friend’s party. In that smoked-choked and crowded space, I found myself near the apartment’s bathroom. Like the other partygoers, I was jubilant and I believe it is for this reason, principally, why I held my tongue as certain events unfolded. If memory serves, the party’s host came up to me and we struck up a conversation that—really, my memory is very weak here—had something to do with a novel. The host and I had been in the same African American Literature course the year prior and this was the general topic. We were speaking of that, rather loudly I’m sure, when the host’s roommate entered the conversation. You must excuse my messy memory earlier, but what he said I remember clearly. Something to the effect of: You know, we just need to stop talking about all of this—black perspective versus white perspective—and just start talking about the human experience. He was jubilant as well, but began to start speaking about a literature course of his, a class on Dostoyevsky.

Like I said, I held my tongue, preferring just to let his thought linger in the air, but what had he meant? Do stories rendered from a certain “perspective” (black or white) not reach the “human experience?” I’m tempted, now, to really assert my opinion now that it’s really those stories from the black perspective that do not “extend.” I say this since the host’s roommate—who, if it matters, is white; the host, himself, is black—only felt the need to share his opinion while the host and I spoke about African American Literature and the experiences of black (American) persons. Before I expound on this, I want to resurrect another memory of a Charlie Rose interview with Toni Morrison. In the conversation Morrison spoke of her newest book, which at the time was “Paradise.” There came a point when the interviewer, reiterating a question previously asked of Morrison, wondered if she could “imagine writing a novel that’s not centered about race.” Morrison nodded her head (“absolutely”), the interviewer followed: “Will you?”

Morrison responds: “I answered the question [the earlier interviewer] didn’t pose. Tolstoy writes about race all the time, so does Zola, so does James Joyce. Now if anybody can go up to an imaginary James Joyce and say: ‘You write about race all the time. It’s central in your novels. When are you going to write about—’ What? Because you see, the person who asks that question doesn’t understand that he or she is also raced. So to ask me when am I going to stop, or if I can, is to ask a question that, in a sense, is it’s own answer. Yes, I can write about white people. White people can write about black people. Anything can happen with Art. There are no boundaries there. Having to do it or having to prove that I can do it is what was embarrassing or insulting.”

Morrison continues, explaining why such a question is insulting: “The question was posed as if it were a desirable thing to do: to write about white people or to write not about race. That’s what that means to me. That it was a difficult thing to do, a higher level of artistic endeavor or it was more important, that I was still writing about marginal people, and why don’t I come into the mainstream … What does that question mean?” Finally, Morrison admits this: “[The question] only works if I can go to … somebody, major, white and say, as a journalist—” The interviewer completes her statement: “—Can you write about black people?” “That’s right,” Morrison adds, “Can I say that?”

The interview follows thereafter. That bit is actually wedged somewhere in the middle and I would encourage everyone to watch it on the youtube clip that will follow this blog. I apologize, now, for the lengthy transcription, but I thought the complete script was necessary for my argument. Morrison raises an incredible array of points in her answer. There’s something very informative, albeit distressing, when Morrison begins to almost ramble about the assumed desirability of writing about white people—to, in effect, not write about race. For it points to the invisibility whiteness assumes as a racial classification in this society, this invisibility made possible by its treatment as normative. In other words, there are (white) people and then there are derivatives: people of color (in the say way that there are men, and then wo-men; straight people, and then sexual deviants). And when Morrison speaks about how this—writing about white people—is considered in society to be “difficult,” a “higher level of artistic endeavor” and, inevitably, “more important” than writing about—like her novels do—the experience of black people, I can only be reminded of the party, the conversation with its host and the assertion by the host’s roommate: we need to start talking about the human experience.

Is it fair to say, as I have hinted earlier, that coded under his language I am sure he meant: we need to stop talking about race and all those other trifles of the past (say, slavery) that obscure the possibility of reaching the “human experience,” which have been undertaken by a field a white (mostly male, likely heterosexual) writers—say Dostoyevsky. While, in the beginning of this blog, I regard that Oscar Wilde writes passages that touch on the “human experience,” I think I should recant that. I think I should say: Oscar Wilde—whose works, by the way, are as much centered on race as Morrison, albeit whiteness (better yet, English-ness)—writes Thoughts that touch on a “human experience.” It seems to me that what we have solidified as the human experience (read: white, bourgeoisie experience) is but one human experience.

I want to move one step further because, while what I have just said may be true, while it may be the meaning beneath our words, in contemporary society “the human experience/condition” still comes to mean and is considered a work that regards the experience of white people. In the way that we can argue well that race is a social construct, it is nevertheless a construct we still image as “true” or “real” and, discursively, continue to perpetuate. In this way, we need to regard reality, as I like to say, “as it behaves” and not, primarily, as it ideally should behave. So, in reference to topic, this is what I want to say:

If people of color in America are incapable of writing of (or, you may read this as, if the works of people of color are incapable of expressing) the “human experience or condition,” it is because white-skinned people in American have made this so. We, people of color, throughout our turbulent histories, have been treated as anything but—have been dehumanized or animalized, have been rendered simply to the faculties of our sex, which are considered (pick any) sinful, pathological or unnatural. We have had to prove, first to ourselves, and then to our perpetrators, our humanity: an admission not only of our existence, but also our worthy living. This is reflected in our writing, song, dance, our Art and—I would bargain—always will. If white-skinned people in America are capable of (or, apply tactic of previous parenthetical) writing of the “human experience or condition,” and we should regard this capability as the epitome of high Art, it is because of these former, though tragic, realities—all of which white-skinned people have used in the construction of themselves as the universal Human subject.

For an American, reading the account of a young black girl raped by her white slave master in the American South, either out of lust for flesh, profit or both, and the pain, grief and confusion that follows is not an expression of a “human experience,” but reading the account of (presumably) an Eastern European “gentleman” exiled and imprisoned in Siberia, and the horror I’m sure which follows, is…?

(Does this blog speak from/for “the human experience?”)

3 January 2009

As many are likely aware, Morehouse—a historically black, all-male university—has recently revamped its college dress code, promising with it a stricter regime of regulation. Much, much, much has been said about this—here, here and here—to the point where I need not enter the kitchen with just another steaming pot. To be brief, I will say that I agree with those critical thinkers who understand the new regulations as still ascribing to (white) assimilationist tactics/protocol of black respectability and/or as unapologetically heteronormative, which is to say anti-gay and anti-gender variant.

Do I need to expound on the very latter of that paragraph a bit more? If one should read the Morehouse’s new regulations, rule #9 explicitly forbids students of Morehouse from wearing “clothing associated with women’s garb” and then goes on to provide a short, but specific list. In another word: dress “like a [Morehouse] man.” Not only does this exclude genderqueer, transwomen, etc., from entering the campus as students, it also participates in creating a climate where those possibly genderqueer students already present on the campus are in social, bodily and academic danger (apparently, students not conforming to the rules will be dismissed from class). It’s interesting that Morehouse has just fired an employee for her homophobic email regarding the marriage of two men, yet would still implement such a rule. Even before I learned of Morehouse’s new dress code I don’t think I agreed with the firing of the employee, as much as I would have advocated for mandatory anti-oppression/anti-discrimination training for employees (for more on this, click here: number 2); but now, after the learning of the policies, I most certainly don’t agree: the college’s tactics seem disingenuous: firing the employee in order to appear progressive and non-homophobic, while simultaneously drafting a policy that is exactly the opposite.

But instead of going further into this morass—for, as I’ve said, many have already done this—I want to relate to this current news an article I just read in the New York Times. “When Girls Will Be Boys” is the profile of Rey, a former student at Barnard College, an all-women’s college, and his experiences as a transmale there, as well as a profile of some other historically all-women’s college. Interestingly, Spelman—a historically black, all-women’s college and neighbor to Morehouse—is absent from the profile’s list. I didn’t say “surprisingly;” no, I wasn’t surprised. Here’s a quote from the article:

… “There’s no safer place for transmen to be than a women’s college because there’s no actual physical threat to us,” he told me, adding, “I have more in common with women because of that shared experience than I do with men.” And even though Rey chose to leave Barnard for a coed school, he also says that women’s schools can — and should — act as havens for transmale students, that they are, in fact, natural beacons for trans people, because “feminists and trans activists are both interested in gender.”

Earlier, the article suggests that women’s college—and let me just be frank: northeastern, historically white women’s colleges—have historically served as sites for where feminism and other radical concepts regarding gender and sexuality not only were worked out in theory but in practice. The article writes:

The schools that decided to remain single-sex in the 1970s, when many colleges around the country went coed, represented a significant and even controversial challenge to liberal ideas about gender equality. And in refashioning their identities for the time, many became loci for the interrogation of gender roles. It was, after all, at all-female schools that many young women first began to question the very notion of femininity. And this questioning found echoes in the curriculum. Scholars like Esther Newton, Gayle Rubin, Anne Fausto-Sterling and Judith Butler ushered in an era that reconceived gender as a social construct, distinct from both a person’s sex and sexuality. For Butler and others, femaleness did not automatically produce femininity and maleness did not produce masculinity: gender was fluid and variable, something to be fashioned, and could shift in character depending on the culture or the time period. As some see it, the presence of trans students at single-sex colleges is simply a logical extension of this intellectual tradition.

But just a page later the article admits that not everyone—particularly alumnae—are not pleased with this “trend”:

Colleges must also navigate the attitudes and expectations of their alumnae. While some alumnae have readily accepted the presence of trans students on their campuses, others, like Suzanne Corriell and Regis Ahern, graduates of Mount Holyoke, see it as a betrayal of the foundational principles of their alma mater. Corriell and Ahern recently wrote an angry letter to The Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly, charging that admitting transmale students was, in effect, a way of “passively going coed” and that the “lifestyle choices” of these students was a bald negation of a women’s college charter. Trans students, they wrote, were simply “men seeking to take advantage of Mount Holyoke’s liberal and accepting atmosphere.

To read the rest of the article, click here.

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So here is where I stop my list of quotes, and begin my list of questions.

Why do you think Spelman wasn’t included when referencing historically all-women’s colleges? What role does race play (visibly, invisibly) not only in this article, but also in the politics of these same-sex schools? How is it that women’s colleges have been the sites for such radical gender theories (as the article suggests), whereas the current men’s college (such as Morehouse) seem to be, in terms of gender at least, stagnant? regressive? Are Morehouse’s new policies (in terms of gender, but also in general) stagnant? regressive? … Questions of race and gender, indeed.

tag: femiphobia, race, sexuality, trans, transphobia