Does anyone else remember that in the 1970s and 1980s, there were multiple movies which featured the “comic” situation of a man somehow getting stuck in a gorilla suit, and then being stuck in a cage with a randy male gorilla? The not-very-subtle implication was that the man was raped by the gorilla, which in the 70s and 80s was apparently considered hilarious.

IIRC, 70s comedies did this gag frequently enough to be a bit of a cliche — but this was decades ago, when I was a kid, and I can’t remember which specific movies featured this gag. Sometimes I’ve wondered if I didn’t just imagine the whole thing. But a few days ago I was watching a 1983 Eddie Murphy / Dan Aykroyd comedy, Trading Places, and there it was — the wacky man-in-costume-raped-by-a-gorilla gag. (In Trading Places, it’s the wacky fate suffered by a corrupt government official who the good guys need to dispose of).

There’s also an episode of the Simpsons which included this gag — Homer gets stuck in a panda bear costume, then is raped by a panda bear — but the scene in the Simpsons is so over-the-top brutal, the writer must have intended it as a parody of the gorrilla-suit-rape gag trend I recall.

And in the movie Top Secret, the male villain dresses in a cow suit and then is raped by a bull.

The wacky violent rape raped-by-an-animal scene — which, as I recall, almost always happened to male villains — has pretty much disappeared from TV and movies.¹ I suspect that gag wasn’t done to female characters as often because having a female character suffer involuntary violent rape would have seemed too disturbingly real to be funny (not unlike the way fat jokes are considered funnier and more acceptable when they’re directed at thin actors wearing fat suits).

(I can think of examples of women being raped in 80s movie comedies, but the rapes are by deception rather than violence. In Revenge Of The Nerds, the protagonist disguises himself as a stuck-up sorority girl’s boyfriend in order to trick her into having sex with him. There’s some similar rape comedy in Sixteen Candles — except in that case, it’s that the stuck-up girl is too drunk to know the difference between her boyfriend and Anthony Michael Hall. In both these movies, the rape is justified post-hoc because the victim enjoyed the sex.)

Anyone else recall any movies in which a character in an animal costume is raped by an animal? And what the hell were moviemakers smoking back then?

1. It’s still pretty common for characters to joke about prison rape, however; like the animal rape gags, prison rape gags are usually about male characters. (back)

A recent, much-disparaged thread on I Blame The Patriarchy turned into a reprise of feminist arguments over transsexuality. Because the thread is on the long side, it has the benefit of providing several examples of feminist anti-trans arguments, as well as (thankfully) many feminist rebuttals.

I think the anti-trans arguments are wrong in every case. In most cases, I think they’re also bigoted and hateful. Let’s take a tour.

Argument #1: The argument from freeform, irrational hatred of transsexuals.

Luckynkl provided such an exaggerated example of drooling, bile-soaked hate that if I hadn’t known her for years, I would suspect she’s a sock puppet intended to discredit feminism. Here’s a couple of examples, drawn from a dozen or more similar statements:

You want to know how men can hurt women? **chuckle** You’re joking, right? Oh wait. I’m supposed to believe men in drag are women. And if you put on a werewolf mask, will you also expect me to believe you’re a werewolf? […]

This is about what all this nonsense amounts to. In short, trans are nutjobs. The bathroom is about the last place I want to be alone with a male nutjob. These unfortunate, but seriously disturbed individuals belong on the 5th floor in a straight jacket. Not in a women’s bathroom.

In Lucky’s view, all transsexuals are “male nutjobs,” and they belong in an asylum.¹

In this case, the important part of Lucky’s argument isn’t the argument itself (which is based on the nonsensical notion that men — or transwomen — who are apt to break the law by being violent against women in public bathrooms, will be stopped by the sign on the ladies’ room door). Lucky’s real argument here isn’t what she says. It’s her derisive, sneering tone: the point is to let transwomen know that they are “men” (in Lucky’s view, men are evil) and that they are semi-human objects of contempt.

The most reasonable reply to Lucky’s argument is (to quote Brownfemipower): Fuck you. Lucky’s a bigot and an asshole; the difference between Lucky and a Klanswoman is only in which oppressed minority her hate is focused on. (I should note that although Lucky was the most extreme, several feminists joined her in her hate-fest.)

In an excellent post at Desperate Kingdoms, Winter writes:

I did not come to feminism for hatred; I did not come to feminism in order to use my power and privilege as a white, middle-class, cisgendered² woman to oppress a group of people more oppressed than myself; I did not come to feminism in order to set up new hierarchies or take up the role of oppressor. I came to feminism because I believed, and continue to believe, that as part of anti-oppression activism, feminist theories and philosophies can offer ways of being, thinking and relating which could make life better for all of us, whether we identify as men, women, or something else altogether.

Argument #2: The argument from essentialism.

SaltyC: “Knowing that someone is a woman does not tell me anything about her fate, but it does tell me she knows what I know about what it’s like to bleed.”

Luckynkl: “Sex is static. It cannot be changed. Men cannot be frogs, they cannot be giraffes, they cannot be trees, they cannot be rocks, and they cannot be women. Get over it.”

Maribelle: “Case in point: my friend’s two year old daughter was so cute the other day my ovaries started to throb…. Face it—women are inexplicable. We are born, not made. We are created. We cannot be made by human hands, sculpted from the rib of Adam. We are something else again.”

All of these arguments are based on the idea that there is an essential, universal “womanhood” which “women born women” have access to, but transwomen do not.

This argument assumes that our essence is determined by what’s between our legs at birth. In this view, our abilities and potential is determined not by our individual talents, desires and actions, but by which box the doctor checked off on the form a few minutes after we came screaming into the world (”we are born, not made”). Women are the class that feels longing when faced with a cute two-year-old; men are the class that, I dunno, feels a longing for power tools or something.

Haven’t we heard this before? This is the conservative, anti-feminist vision of gender that feminism has been fighting against for centuries. Feminism was born to fight against this vision; to fight against the harm done to women and men who are shoehorned into these obsolete, confining gender roles; and to fight against the warped culture created when people are taught that gender roles must be respected.

That some feminists are willing to throw core elements of feminism overboard in order to exclude transsexuals speaks volumes.

Note that essentialism isn’t limited to just biological essentialism. There is also “experience essentialism”; in this case, certain experiences are said to define womanhood, always in a post hoc manner designed to exclude some unwanted class of women.

As Brownfemipower points out, making “womanhood” an exclusive space in order to keep out unwanted, marginalized groups is not something new, or something that has been done exclusively to transsexuals. Throughout history, the experiences of relatively empowered women has been positioned as the norm; the experiences of other women is then positioned as non-representative of “womanhood.” This has happened (and is still happening) to women of color, to lesbians³, to Jewish women, and it is currently happening to transwomen.

To my eyes, a lot of the “womanhood is our exclusive domain” arguments strongly resemble anti-same-sex-marriage arguments. “Womanhood,” like “marriage,” is described as if its implications and social meaning has never changed in thousands of years; this false description of unchanging history is then used to argue that all change must therefore be not only bad, but a threat to those who are currently married and/or women. Consider this quote from Magickitty, arguing against accepting transwomen as women:

Why should a newcomer to my knitting group insist that I re-define the meaning of my group? This person has never been to my knitting group before, which I’ve had for thousands of years. This person shares no history with the other members of my group, and yet demands full status in the circle. I am sympathetic; this person had always wanted to knit (since birth, even) but only recently learned, this person is oppressed within their own world because they are a knitter, and this person strongly identifies with my group. But why would this newcomer want to claim equal status when they’ve only been knitting for a short time, and why would they want to insist that knitting includes crochet, when in all the thousands of years of the circle, we’ve only ever knitted?

And to be really crude… the newcomer knits English. My group knits Continental. The finished product may look exactly identical, but… well, you know.

The above quote could be used, without any alteration, to argue against same-sex marriage. It’s the same argument.

Argument #3: The argument that the word “transphobia” is a form of censorship.

Sly Civilian quotes this comment, left by Heart at BFP’s place:

Here, my experience, again, is, if someone offers a differing view of transgender issues than the one you hold, bfp, then that person gets immediately labeled “transphobic.” At that point, the discussion really ends. There’s nothing more to be said.

(By the way, Heart’s description of how BFP acts is unfair; there are myriad examples of BFP disagreeing with people about transgender issues without immediately labeling them transphobic.)

Conservatives frequently use this exact argument to try and put discussions of racism, sexism and homophobia out of bounds.⁴ The idea is that because these concepts make (some) people in the majority culture so uncomfortable that they hesitate to speak, these concepts should therefore not be included in our discussions.

The emptiness of Heart’s argument is, I think, obvious. Transphobia does not become an illegitimate concept to discuss merely because discussing transphobia makes some cisgendered² people uncomfortable.⁵

It’s true, of course, that someone could be accused of being transphobic when they’re not. This is obviously hurtful when it happens, but not nearly as hurtful — or harmful — as refusing to talk about transphobia at all! The need for transsexual and transgendered people to be able to talk about how bigotry harms them outweighs whatever “need” cisgendered people have to not be pushed outside their comfort zone.

Argument #4: Transsexuals are dupes of the medical establishment.

Over at Little Light’s blog, in comments, Ravenmn writes:

One of the more sensible arguments that some radfems make against transgenders is the idea that you are choosing to mutilate and drug your body, therefore are some kind of dupe of the medical establishment.

(Ravenmn wasn’t endorsing that argument, only referencing it.) Nanette responded:

I, of course, am not attempting to answer for anyone who is transgender and has had surgery or anything, but I am not sure I would consider that a sensible argument, unless they are just anti medical or surgical intervention for anything, as a general practice. If not, (or even if so) then someone’s personal medical decisions are none of their business, any more than it’s anyone else’s business if you get your tonsils out, have an abortion (that’s also one of the arguments anti abortion people use), have moles cut off, have cochlear implants (some in the non hearing community oppose that, as well), and so on.

The only way they can make that argument, in my view, is if they feel the same sense of ownership over the bodies of transfolk as the right wingers and others feel they have over women. Funny how sometimes the language, actions and tools of oppression or marginalization take such familiar and similar forms, across beliefs, political views and boundaries.

I agree with Nanette, but I’d add that it’s true, historically, that the medical establishment has used access to medical treatments (like prescription hormones and surgery) as a means of forcing transsexuals to endorse and live by traditional gender roles. As far as I can tell, this has become less true in recent years, to a great extent because many transsexuals have actively resisted the conservative status quo of the old medical establishment.

Finally, it’s worth noting that the “dupes of the medical establishment” analysis ignores the fact that not all transsexuals and transgendered people seek medical help to transition. There are a wide variety of trans narratives: One persistent flaw of the anti-trans critiques is that they frequently are framed as if male-to-female surgical transsexuals who describe themselves as “women trapped in male bodies” are the be-all and end-all of transsexual and transgendered experience.

Which brings us to the next anti-trans argument….

Argument #5: Transsexuality implicitly endorses essentialism and traditional gender roles.

In the I Blame The Patriarchy thread, Edith (of the blog Because Sometimes Feminists Aren’t Nice) wrote:

Radical feminists are also against oppression and against gender roles, but they simply do not see being transgender as a good way to fight gender roles — rather, they see transgender as a way of ENFORCING gender roles. […]

If gender is inborn, something neurologically wired, then being “born” in the wrong body makes sense. But actually, radfems tend to believe that gender is socialized and therefore, no one is “born” in the wrong body. […] In this way, I personally think that the more modern, “biological” view of transgender is the more essentialist.

I agree with Edith that the “female brain trapped in a male body” — or the “male brain trapped in a female body” — view of transsexuality is essentialist. But it’s hardly as if “X brain trapped in Y body” narratives are a fair way to describe all of transsexual and transgendered thought! There’s no doubt that some individual transsexuals — like some individual cisgenders — have essentialist views. But to take disagreements with how some transsexuals view gender as a criticism of the entire idea of transsexuality is unwarranted.

In a sense, those transsexuals who move from one sex to the other “entrench the system” of gender as a binary, because they are willing to dress and be identified in society as one gender and not the other. But all of us go along with the gender-binary system in some ways, whether its women who shave their legs or faces, men who avoid wearing dresses and gowns, or any of a thousand ways people adapt to the gendered society we live in.

It’s simply unfair to single out transsexuals for criticism on this score. (I discuss this in more detail in this post). To (once again) quote from Winter’s excellent post:

Moreover, why are transgendered and transsexual women scapegoated and made responsible for upholding gender roles and the patriarchy when every single one of us upholds gender roles every day of our lives? I uphold gender roles every time I call myself a “woman,” every time I answer to my gendered first name, or use my patronymic surname, every time I buy an item of clothing classed as female in a shop for women, every time I use the toilet with that symbol on the door which is supposed to denote womanhood. We are all of us thoroughly gendered under the current conditions. If gender eventually disappears, it will go in its own time; we cannot just get rid of it and we certainly can’t get rid of it by denying other people their rights to their own gendered embodiments.

Further Reading

There have been a lot of excellent responses to the thread at Twisty’s; some are direct rebuttals, others are just thoughts brought to the fore by the current mess. Some of the posts I especially enjoyed: Little Light, the entire discussion at Women of Color Blog, The Silver Oak Leaf, Angry Brown Butch, and Tiny Cat Pants.

1. Spotted Elephant has a good post decrying anti-disabled rhetoric used by some folks on both sides of this debate. (back)
2. Cisgendered is a term meaning, roughly, “not transsgendered or transsexual.” (back) (back)
3. Remember when Betty Friedan argued against “The Lavender Menace”? (back)
4. One prominent anti-gay-marriage blog, Family Scholars Blog, in effect banned all discussion of homophobia from its comments. Later on they banned comments altogether, which was probably a mercy for all concerned. (back)
5. I think a lot of what I wrote about how white people react when criticized for racism also applies to many cisgendered feminists criticized for transphobia. (back)

This is an historic moment - for the Congress, and for the women of this country. It is a moment for which we have waited more than 200 years. Never losing faith, we waited through the many years of struggle to achieve our rights. But women weren’t just waiting; women were working. Never losing faith, we worked to redeem the promise of America, that all men and women are created equal. For our daughters and granddaughters, today we have broken the marble ceiling.

–Nancy Pelosi

Curtsy: Pam.

From Shakespeare’s Sister:

It remains a radical act to be fat and happy in America, especially if you’re a woman (for whom “jolly” fatness isn’t an option). If you’re fat, you’re not only meant to be unhappy, but deeply ashamed of yourself, projecting at all times an apologetic nature, indicative of your everlasting remorse for having wrought your monstrous self upon the world. You are certainly not meant to be bold, or assertive, or confident—and should you manage to overcome the constant drumbeat of messages that you are ugly and unsexy and have earned equally society’s disdain and your own self-hatred, should you forget your place and walk into the world one day with your head held high, you are to be reminded by the cow-calls and contemptuous looks of perfect strangers that you are not supposed to have self-esteem; you don’t deserve it. Being publicly fat and happy is hard; being publicly, shamelessly, unshakably fat and happy is an act of both will and bravery.

I quite agree. There’s more at SS’s place.

I heard about this today on BBC:

In a case fraught with ethical questions, the parents of a severely mentally and physically disabled child have stunted her growth to keep their little “pillow angel” a manageable and more portable size. The bedridden 9-year-old girl had her uterus and breast tissue removed at a Seattle hospital and received large doses of hormones to halt her growth. She is now 4-foot-5; her parents say she would otherwise probably reach a normal 5-foot-6.

The case has captured attention nationwide and abroad via the Internet, with some decrying the parents’ actions as perverse and akin to eugenics. Some ethicists question the parents’ claim that the drastic treatment will benefit their daughter and allow them to continue caring for her at home..

I’m really shocked by this case. I don’t want to be overly critical of parents raising severly disabled kids because I do think there is no good support system in place for them, but I’m shocked that doctors and a medical ethics board were willing to go along with this.

One of the things that really caught my attention was the quotes about breast removal from the blog that the parents have created to explain the surgery:

Ashley has no need for developed breasts since she will not breast feed and their presence would only be a source of discomfort to her. This is especially true since Ashley is likely destined to have large breasts, given her maternal and paternal female lineage; for example, an aunt had a breast reduction operation at age 19. Large breasts are uncomfortable lying down with a bra and even less comfortable without a bra. Furthermore, breasts impede securing Ashley in her wheelchair, stander, or bath chair, where straps across her chest are needed to support her body weight. Before the surgery Ashley had already exhibited sensitivity in her breasts.

And then soon after there is this quote:

Large breasts could “sexualize” Ashley towards her caregiver, especially when they are touched while she is being moved or handled, inviting the possibility of abuse.

I am at a loss for words :-O :-O

I definitely think this is a feminist issue and a disability rights issue. The the desexualization of the disabled combined with the extremely gendered nature of this treatment just astonishes me. To me feminist reproductive rights advocates should be lining up to challenge this treatment (But if I was a betting women, I’d bet most of them won’t say much.).

I went over to Blue’s site to see if she has responded. She said she will put up a comment soon.

What do you think?

In the thread where I outlined my views on the 2006 trends in race and racism.  A few people challenged this statement:

There seems to be a sense among many white Americans that any programs designed to remedy the effects of racism and segregation discriminate against whites. This stems in part from the false belief that opportunities are equal and that racial and ethnic minorities somehow have great advantages over whites.

On my site, one commenter suggested that the second sentence was debatable, but the actual research shows fairly consistent patterns of discrimination. 

Let me provide one very blatant example of racial discrimination documented by Professor Devah Pager.  Pager won the American Sociological Association dissertation award in 2003 for her dissertation, which examined how a person’s race and criminal background affected their likelihood of getting job call backs.  Pager created an experiment where black and white male testers with similar resumes were sent out to apply for low wage jobs.  Pager assigned testers resumes with or without felony convictions, and they went into the field to conduct tests in the city of Milwaukee.  You can read part of the study here (PDF)., Pager found White testers with felony convictions were MORE likely to get callbacks from employers than Black testers without felony convictions.  Here is a results table from Pager’s dissertation conducted in Milwaukee: 

The solid black bar represents those with felony convictions, and the grey bar represents those without felony convictions.  Recently Pager and Bruce Western conducted a similar study in New York city (PDF).  The findings were fairly similar, but they also included Latinos, who fared better than blacks and worse than whites. Pager and Western go on to say,

In this study, Calibrating the magnitude of the race effects to the effects of a felony conviction presents a disturbing picture. Blacks remain at the very end of the hiring queue, even in relation to (white) applicants who have just been released from prison. The results here point to the striking persistence of race in the allocation of employment opportunities. Employers faced with large numbers of applicants and little time to evaluate them seem to view race as an adequate means by which to weed out undesirable applicants upon first review.

I don’t know what evidence of racism in the workplace could possibly be more apparent.  It probably doesn’t surprise people that felons fair worse than non-felons of the same race, but the fact that Black men without criminal records are viewed similar to white men with felony convictions reveals the strong impact of race in just one stage of the hiring process.

Given this evidence, what can we do to stop this discrimination? (Note to Robert.  The links include more thorough discussions of the experiment for your reading pleasure.)

An AP article reports on a new study, published in this month’s Pediatrics. The study found that teen girls who “frequently read magazine articles about dieting” five years ago, are two to three times more likely to use means such as fasting, laxatives, induced vomiting and cigarette smoking to lose weight, compared to girls who don’t read such articles as often.

It didn’t seem to matter whether the girls were overweight when they started reading about weight loss, nor whether they considered their weight important. After taking those factors into account, researchers still found reading articles about dieting predicted later unhealthy weight loss behavior.

44% of girls reported reading such articles, compared to 14% of boys. The study didn’t find any effects of the articles on boys.

There’s a sort of “duh!” response to articles like this - I mean, of course girls who read lots of articles about weight loss are more likely to be sticking fingers down their throats or fasting or whatever. What’s surprising to me is that no such effect was found among boys, since I’ve read several articles suggesting that boys are becoming more body-conscious and fat-phobic.

So here’s a thought: If we can ban trans fats in restaurants to protect health, can we also ban diet articles from teen girl magazines to protect health?

I have a bad cold today; I feel like my head’s stuffed with cotton, and I have next-to-no ability to concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time. So rather than attempt to write an original post, I’m going to quote from an excellent article from The New Republic about fat, health, and weight-loss. It’s an excellent article, and I’d highly recommend reading the whole thing.

What accounts for the conflict between studies that claim being “overweight” is a significant health risk and those that suggest such weight levels might actually be optimal? The biggest factor is that researchers fail to point out that, in practical terms, the differences in risk they are measuring are usually so small as to be trivial. For example, suppose that Group A consists of 2,500 subjects and that over the course of a decade five of these people die from heart attacks. Now suppose that Group B consists of 4,000 subjects and that five members of this group also die from heart attacks over the same ten-year span. One way of characterizing these figures is to say that people in Group A are subject to a (implicitly terrifying) 60 percent greater risk of a fatal heart attack than those in Group B. But the practical reality is that the relevant risk for members of both groups is minuscule. Indeed, upon closer examination, almost all studies that claim “overweight” people run significantly increased health risks involve this sort of interpretation (or, less generously, distortion) of their data. […]

In a decided majority of studies, groups of people labeled “overweight” by current standards are found to have equal or lower mortality rates than groups of supposedly ideal-weight individuals. University of Virginia professor Glenn Gaesser has estimated that three-quarters of all medical studies on the effects of weight on health between 1945 and 1995 concluded either that “excess” weight had no effect on health or that it was actually beneficial. And again, this remains the case even before one begins to take into account complicating factors such as sedentary lifestyle, poor nutrition, dieting and diet drugs, etc. “As of 2002,” Gaesser points out in his book Big Fat Lies, “there has not been a single study that has truly evaluated the effects of weight alone on health, which means that ‘thinner is healthier’ is not a fact but an unsubstantiated hypothesis for which there is a wealth of evidence that suggests the reverse.”

And from later in the article….

If fat is ultimately irrelevant to health, our fear of fat, unfortunately, is not. Americans’ obsession with thinness feeds an institution that actually is a danger to Americans’ health: the diet industry.

Tens of millions of Americans are trying more or less constantly to lose 20 or 30 pounds. (Recent estimates are that, on any particular day, close to half the adult population is on some sort of diet.) Most say they are doing so for their health, often on the advice of their doctors. Yet numerous studies–two dozen in the last 20 years alone–have shown that weight loss of this magnitude (and indeed even of as little as ten pounds) leads to an increased risk of premature death, sometimes by an order of several hundred percent. By contrast, over this same time frame, only a handful of studies have indicated that weight loss leads to lower mortality rates–and one of these found an eleven-hour increase in life expectancy per pound lost (i.e., less than an extra month of life in return for a 50-pound weight loss). This pattern holds true even when studies take into account “occult wasting,” the weight loss that sometimes accompanies a serious but unrelated illness.

And here’s a point I wish Campos had developed further:

Americans… long to believe that medical experts can solve the problem of their expanding waistlines. The reason for this can be summed up in six words: Americans think being fat is disgusting. That psychological truth creates an enormous incentive to give our disgust a respectable motivation. In other words, being fat must be terrible for one’s health, because if it isn’t that means our increasing hatred of fat represents a social, psychological, and moral problem rather than a medical one.

Again, I recommend reading the whole article.

Over at Abyss2hope.

Included in this edition is a post that explores why people are taught that it is selfish to take self-protective actions based on what our intuition tells us about the people we interact with.

Editor’s Note: The women of Racialicious asked what the big trends in race and pop-culture were in 2006, and I thought I would respond with my own post. I came up with a list on my own, and then I went and read the comments section on their blog to see what others were saying. Based on those comments I added one more thing to my list, but I was in agreement with several of the commenters over there.

Rather than judging “hot” trends, I thought it would be useful to take a past, present, and future perspective, focusing what topics were out of fashion in 2006, what topics were most popular, and what topics I think are going to be predominant in 2007. I have decided to divide the list into three parts–1)The Been There Done That List of Unfashionable Racial Issues 2)The I’m So Hot I’m on Fire List of The Most Fashionable Racial Trends 3)The I’m About To Catch On Fire List of Racial Trends. I’m only posting the main this list on Alas. You can go over to my site to read the others.

The I’m So Hot I’m on Fire List of The Most Fashionable Racial Trends of 2006

So what racial trends were prevalent in 2006? Here is my list in no particular order. I initially created this list without reading the comments over on the Racialicious post, but after reading the comments I realized one big trend that I left of my list–the Africa is hip and cool trend, which was really big in ‘06. It is interesting because most of the other trends people mentioned I had on my list, too. So here goes….

1)The Racialization of Muslims and Middle Easterners: I wrote a post about this a while back, and I know that Tariq is one person who is on board with me. Every time people talk about “racial profiling” of Muslims, it adds a little more fuel to the racialization process. This is an ongoing trend that has been in vogue since after September 11th, but I actually expect it to die down soon; however, this will hinge in part on the Census decisions about racial categories for the 2010 Census. Last time some people tried to get Middle Easterners listed, but their attempts failed. I don’t think it will be listed on the Census this time either.

2) Return of Minstrelsy: Blackface was everywhere, as where crazy buffoonish caricatures of African Americans. We saw numerous cases of college students dressing in blackface, and bloggers manipulating photos to make them look like blackface. Some felt that minstrel hip hop had become a genre, and the popularity of “Flava of Love” also added to the trend. I expect this to continue in 2007.

3) Return of Old Fashioned Racism: I guess this is an extension of minstrelsy, but it also extends to the use of racial slurs and other forms of more blatant bigotry. We even had a potential Presidential candidate bragging about how his state was a former slave state. This type of bigotry had been declining for years, but there appeared to be an upsurge last year. From the anti-immigrant backlash to the Michael Richards rant, and all of the blackface incidents, it felt like we were moving backwards.

4) Europe Confronts It Racism: Many European countries have been very critical of the US on racial issues, but 2006 was a year for them to look in their own backyards. This trend became obvious in 2005 when French suburbs went up in flames, but in ‘06 this extended to other areas. In particular, international soccer officials spent the entire year trying to control racist fans. Right wingers continued to try to block out non-European immigrants. Expect this trend to continue over the next several years as European countries confront a demographic crisis that could destroy their social welfare systems. I think the answer to this problem is immigration, but many disagree arguing that immigrants can never truly be French, English, German, etc.

5) The Non-Apology, Apology: This was everywhere. We could start with Rosie O’Donnell, who apologized for her “ching chong” joke, but followed it up with “I might do it again because that’s how my brain works.” The most common version of this was the “I’m sorry you were offended” apology, which posits that the person making racist or prejudiced comments really didn’t say anything wrong, and the upset person just overreacted. In many instances, these apologies were about saving face, but not admitting any wrongdoing.

6) The Death of the Predominantly Black Cast and the Rise of the Multiracial Ensemble Cast: I am very disappointed to see few TV shows with predominantly Black casts, but the disappearance of predominantly black cast shows seems to be to the benefit of the multiracial ensemble cast. So we don’t have many Cosby Shows, but we now have shows like Grey’s Anatomy, Lost, or ER. I have mixed feelings about this trend. I like multiracial ensemble casts. I liked them going all the way back to Fame and Hill Street Blues, but I also wish we still had more predominantly black, Asian, Latino, or Native American shows. I predict this trend will continue in 2007.

7) Anti-Immigrant Sentiment: I don’t even know where to begin. Several towns decided to ban day laborer sites and prevent illegal immigrants from getting work, housing, or any other social benefits. Commentators like CNN’s Lou Dobbs, lead the anti-immigrant backlash by blaming immigrants for the “decline in the middle class.” This issue also seems to cross political party lines, with both Democrats and Republicans speaking for and against immigration. I think this issue is replacing crime as the new political boogeyman issue. Expect it to continue through the next Presidential election.

8) Africa Becomes Hip and Cool: It seems like Hollywood types (besides Bono) discovered African poverty this year. From anti-poverty and anti-AIDS programs to the genocide in Darfur, Africa became a cause d’celeb. Of course, we can’t forget the “I want to adopt an African baby trend.” I have mixed feelings about this. It is nice to see these problems receiving attention, but I also worry that 1) this is just a fad and 2) some of the important issues like global capitalism, “structural readjustment,” and the legacy of colonialism were not addressed. I think this trend will die out in 2007, which is typical of most causes that celebrities take up–in one minute out the next.

9) The Assault on Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Programs: Michigan joined California in banning affirmative action, and the Supreme Court heard a case regarding voluntary desegregation programs (which will likely be overturned). There seems to be a sense among many white Americans that any programs designed to remedy the effects of racism and segregation discriminate against whites. This stems in part from the false belief that opportunities are equal and that racial and ethnic minorities somehow have great advantages over whites. This trend has been going on since the 1980s, but it may be reaching it’s peak. I expect it to continue indefinitely.

10) Liberal Racism: From the Joe Biden slave state comment mentioned above to the infamous racism at a liberal blog called Firedoglake, liberals were ready to prove that they were just as racist as anyone else. Is this the beginning of a political shift, where the left and the right converge on racial issues? I don’t really know, but it is cause for concern. It indicates that those of us who are involved in anti-racist activism need to think about some convincing frames that we can use in the battle for social equality. We may have to think about different ways to talk about “racism,” “diversity,” and “equal opportunity.”

What do you think? Do you think there are any trends I missed? Do you think I’m off in my assessments?

Racialicious writes:

Apparently there’s been a lot of anti-semitism in Seattle lately, prompting their alt-weekly to devote an issue to Jewish issues. But check out the graphic they chose to illustrate one of their regular columns. Textbook hipster racism.

That’s the graphic over to the right. Racialicious is one of my very favorite blogs, but I’ve gotta say, this case doesn’t look so textbook to me. I asked about it in Racialicious’ comments, and Lyonside wrote:

The drawing is reminiscent of the hooked-nose portraits of Jewish men so common to the medieval and modern era. A more subtle dig may be the thinning hair on top, but in general, the nose that was longer than the cartoon’s HEAD (in profile) is the obnoxious part.

I’m sure it was meant to be ironic, but I see it as a lack of taste. And awareness.

It’s just not true that the nose is longer than the profile’s head. It’s a big nose, but it’s not that big. And although the nose is exaggerated, it’s not distended and freakish, like the noses in “classic” antisemitic cartoons often were. Look at the noses (especially the husband’s) in this German cartoon from 1934, for example:

Look: I have a big nose. And it hooks. Many of my relatives also have relatively big, hookish noses. It’s a common trait among Jews whose folks came to the US from Eastern Europe. Are cartoonists supposed to pretend that me and thousands of Jews like me don’t have this nose? And how will wiping out representations of Jews with a classic Jewish nose — those Jews, in other words, who are least likely to be mistaken for gentiles — be a blow against antisemitism?

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.]

I thought I’d do a proper retrospective, with my favourite post from each month. It’s been a funny year for me; I think it shows in my writing. I had two months of insanely intense activism, so that I couldn’t think about anything else (see March and September below). But those months almost threw the rest of the year out of balance - I know I did a lot but it’s hard to see every other month as anything but empty.

January Why I call Myself a Feminist and don’t qualify that statement:

There’s an interesting discussion on Alas: ‘Is The Oppression of Women The Root Of All Oppressions?’ Now I’ve given my response to that argument in the comments (Short Answer: Don’t know, don’t care. Slightly Longer Answer: Will you shut up with comparing black men to white women already; I’m glad that the rest of us have learned a bit from the 19th Century), but I thought I’d take this opportunity to write a little about why I just call myself a feminist, and don’t put anything before or after it.

I wasn’t that into any of my posts in January last year, but this post outlined some of my ideas about feminism quite nicely. I wanted to include this post, just because I liked the pull quote I would have used:

I’m finding it really hard to believe that there’s anywhere in America or New Zealand where a teenage girl is sitting thinking “I really want to know what the low-fat alternative to ice cream is, but I just don’t know where to find that information.”

February Being Purple:

Maybe that’s not even what I mean - maybe I mean: the experience of being fat is part of being a woman in the society I live in - whatever size you are.

This was the first post where I wrote about something that was hard for me, something I still don’t do enough (if anyone - except my friend Besty) can identify where the title of this post comes from I’ll write a post on the topic of your choosing, but your guesses in the comments).

March I Believe Louise Nicholas:

The jury has found Brad Shipton, Clint Rickards, and Bob Schollum not guilty of raping Louise Nicholas.

[deleted]

Obviously some members of the jury believed Louise Nicholas, or else the deliberations wouldn’t have taken this long. I pay tribute to them, and wish they could have had the evidence that would have convinced the rest.

The post that is there now isn’t actually the post that I’m talking about - read this for an explanation.

April East Beasts:

I was talking about high school with a guy who had recently left Rongotai (the male version of my Wellington East). When I mentioned that I’d gone to Wellington East he started a chant I’d forgotten about (if I ever knew about it in the first place, paying attention to the world around me wasn’t my forte in high school):

East Beasts
Thunder Thighs
Eating all the Georgie Pies

Ten years later I found it funny. But it reminded me that this is what boys, particularly those at all-boys schools, chanted at East Girls. In a way I’m impressed at how much they managed to pack into 9 words, at how many different degrading sexist and racist attitudes can be conveyed in so little time.

The first moral of this story is don’t send your sons to all boys schools.

May Geeking Out This was mostly a list of my top 5 most feminist, and top 5 least feminist episodes of Buffy:

3. Lullaby Ok I know this is actually an Angel episode, but it flew from one franchise to another powered on nothing but it’s own misogyny, so I had to include it. The plot is that Darla is pregnant with Angel’s child, and having a good human being inside her has stopped her from being evil. It looks like the child will not survive giving birth so Darla stakes her (evil) self in order that her (good) child can live.

I watched this episode with my friend Betsy and said “wow everyone who had anything to do with this episode must have hated women with a firey passion.”

I enjoyed writing this post more than is healthy.

June Women are Really neat People:

I think there is some danger that this sort of analysis leads to the sort of paralysis that comes when feminists talk as if ‘choice’ was the most important thing for women. I used the word ‘actions’ rather than ‘choices’ in this post, and I’ve did that deliberately. To me the point of feminism isn’t to give women choices, but to make sure that we don’t have to make them. We don’t have to be virgins or whores, or career women or housewives. We have to make shitty choices every single day - for me the point of feminism isn’t to celebrate shitty choices, but make sure we don’t have to choose.

This was my piece about Carol Hanisch’s article The Personal Is Political, as I’d said earlier in the year:

Before I go any further, I have to interrupt our regular programming with some words from the rant department. The phrase is “The Personal is Political” not “The Political is Personal.” There’s a really important difference there, and it gets lost (although to be fair less lost in the feminist blogsphere than it does among hippy types).

The feminist revelation wasn’t supposed to be that by buying fair-trade coffee, not shaving your legs, going braless, having lots of sex, charting your fertility, boycotting tobacco companies, dumpster diving, dressing butch, dressing femme, not doing the dishes, vacuuming the floor, boycotting Domino’s, working as a lawyer, raising children, or whatever other individual decision you made, could change the world. These decisions are all fine decisions but they’re not political actions and they’re not going to change anything.

What women’s liberation was saying was that things we experience as individual problems: sexual harrassment, unwanted pregnancy, body hatred, unconcensual sex, domestic violence, depression, housework and so many other parts of being a woman, were actually political problems. They weren’t just things individuals were experiencing and they weren’t things individuals could fight - they had to be fought collectively. Almost the exact opposite of what the phrase is so often reduced to now.

Every time I hear that phrase so bastardised, so trivialised, and so misrepresented I imagine the members of those early women’s liberation groups turning in their graves - and most of them aren’t even dead yet.

July Beautiful Boy:

My friend has an 11 month old baby boy. When she was pregnant someone she knew was raped and we talked about the not-yet-child inside her. She didn’t know whether the Frog was going to be a boy or a girl and we didn’t know whether it was worse to raise a girl and be afraid that when she grew up she’d be raped, or a boy and be afriad that when he grew up he might rape someone.

This was the post that made my friend’s baby (known as the frog) pitied by right-wing men all over New Zealand. The thought that there was a little boy out there that was being raised by women who didn’t want him to rape anyone, terrified them (yeah I wish I was kidding).

August Motherhood

Until we acknowledge that caring for children is work - and restructure our society accordingly - women are going to continue to be screwed over by the double shift. I’m not suggesting it can be done under capitalism (I don’t believe it can). But I think we can fight for changes in the right direction - anything that makes it easier for parents, that makes space more accesible for parents, that offers more support for parents, and makes child-rearing more a collective responsibility, will make women’s lives better.

The more I think about it, the more I write about, the more I realise how central my analysis of reprdouction is to my feminism.

September My favourite post was definately Take it Easy but Take it:

But out at Ford, here’s what they found,
And out at UPS, here’s what they found,
And out at Stagecoach, here’s what they found,
And down at Progressive, here’s what they found:
That if you don’t let the red-baiting break you up,
And if you don’t let the racism,
And if you don’t let the sexism break you up,
And if you don’t let homophobia break you up,
And if you don’t let red-baiting break you up,

You’ll win

Obviously more for the sentiment than the content - that was the day we won the lockout (I think my favourite post of any substance is my post on Section 59, it was one of those issues where the debate was infuriating me, even though I was very firmly on one side).

October I’m not even going to touch the ‘oh my god she’s had sex’ subtext:

Look I’m a middle-class white girl, I find the idea of having a baby before I’m economically and socially secure terrifying, but I get to think that one day I will be economically and socially secure. Not everyone grows up with those set of assumptions about their life, and if you don’t have those assumptions your feelings about pregnancy and motherhoood are going to be qutie different.

The response to Keisha Castle-Hughes’s pregnancy in the New Zealand media infuriated me.

November Mutually Abusive:

‘Mutually abusive relationship’ as the default setting creates the idea of a perfect victim. If anyone who fights back is in a ‘mutually abusive relationship, then the only way you are entitled to support is if you don’t fight back. But if you react to the abuse, physically defend yourself, act jealous or fucked up by what’s happened to you, then you don’t deserve support, and people around can wash their hands and walks away from what they term a mutually abusive relationship.

As a feminist, as a human being, it is my duty and my desire, to support the powerless against the powerful, and to not wash my hands of women who fight back.

My favourite posts are the ones where I can bring together personal experience and link it to a wider debate. A lot of my posts about violence against women recently have been based on what I’ve seen among people I know.

December Maia vs Winz: wrk4u:

The whole thing was in essence creating opportunities to shove people down the cracks. What makes me so angry is that it won’t be the people who need the benefit least who don’t get the benefit under this system, it’ll be the people who need it most. I’m fairly certain that I’ll get the benefit, and I’m also fairly certain that the woman sitting next to me, who’d been on the student allowance and was wearing a Gucci bracelet, will too. But the guy who’d been on the independent youth benefit and didn’t have a passport or a birth certificate, he probably won’t.

This has definately been a year of beneficiary bashing in New Zealand and I’ve written a bit about it, but you can’t quite comprehend the complete distance between WINZ-land and reality until you experience it first hand.

Onwards and upwards, I start 2007 unemployed, wondering what to do next with my life, and with a shockingly tidy house.