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imomus1. Last week, talking about Polish theatre, I referred to a character in Roman Polanski's film The Tenant as a "tranny". (In fact, the man, played by Polanski himself, dresses up as the former occupant of his apartment, possessed by her spirit.)
2. Brigitte Godot, a commenter with a blank LiveJournal, informed me yesterday in a comment that this term is offensive to transsexuals and went on to suggest that I'm probably unaware of the multiplicity of genders beyond the male / female binary. As someone who's had sexual relations with a transsexual, I'm perfectly aware of this multiplicity. Although I'd prefer to say that there's a fluid identity-continuum between two fixed biological genders rather than a plurality of genders.
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3. So I refer the commenter to a Click Opera entry in which I wonder what would happen if there were 12 official genders instead of just two. I conclude, there, that this would lead to a lot of in-fighting because of Freud's narcissism of minor difference.
4. Difference is the important word here. As that entry says, quoting Sophia Phoca, the shift from feminism to postfeminism in the late 60s in Paris meant a shift from a quest for women's equality with men to the celebration of women's difference from men.
5. However, if you remove the idea of the pre-eminence of men (The Man as "the thing to be different from" or "the thing to be equal to"), what you get is a highly unstable system in which everyone asserts their own differences from everyone else. A baroque game ensues, of hair-paring self-definition, self-assertion, endless schism, and an overconcern with "the stigma treadmill". This becomes a politics we're all too familiar with, concerned with the policing of labels, and endless attempts to make other people -- accused of insensitivity and disrespect -- conform to our self-definitions.
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6. Brigitte Godot isn't interested in theory. She says I'm "evading admitting direct culpability" by sending her "to some ancient post commenting on some pseud's ivory tower blather on post-something or other drivel". Ivory tower, pseud, blather, drivel... they don't exactly resonate with respect, do they? What does it mean, that the author of Postfeminism for Beginners is derided so savagely by someone demanding a respectful terminology for herself?
7. Godot goes on to suggest that there's a slippery slope, "in the real world", between using the word "tranny" and murdering transsexuals: "I'm talking about the real world effect such terms have on the thousand and one genders that aren't clearly male or female, not intellectual mind games that torture sentences to wring the subtext out of the banal. This November 20 was Transgender Remembrance Day, honoring all those murdered for their lack of gender conformity. Tranny Day to you, mate. Sorry I missed your post on the subject, I was too busy mourning the dead."
8. I google to see whether "tranny" is generally considered offensive and find a Boston Herald headline Wife-killing tranny denied electrolysis for time being and a Wikipedia article which says "the transgender community typically use the short form "trans", or simply "T" as a substitution for the full word "transsexual", e.g. TS, trans guy, trans dyke, T-folk, trans folk. Some may even use terms that have become controversial to some, such as tranny and/or trans, despite others considering these terms to be offensive. Those who do use these terms claim that they are diminishing the power of the term as an insult..."
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9. I reply politely: "My point is that I'm quite aware of the multiplicity of genders, but that I think there's an inherent flaw in PC identity politics, which is that fine-slicing personal identity definitions -- and investing ever more in angry, self-righteous policing of labels and etiquettes -- is six political steps backward. This isn't ivory tower at all, it's very practical. As I put it in Three conflicts summarised, describing a conflict between RWOCs (Radical Women of Color) and black feminists:
"Here, enacted before our very eyes, is exactly why oppositional politics tends to disintegrate into bitter internecine squabbling -- much to the delight of the bigots it should instead be attacking. These people need to get behind a common cause, and preferably one unrelated to the assertion of ever-more-baroque personal identity differences."
10. I then say that insisting that the word "tranny" be seen as offensive and insulting might be politically counter-productive and even reactionary, a way of:
a) inducing guilt in an ally
b) alienating an ally
c) splitting a united front against bigots
d) actually re-introducing stigma into the whole idea of transgenderism
11. In last Friday's Judgment of Paris post, I suggested that my problem with late-period identity politics is that "there is a lot of sexism built into anti-sexism".
12. This relates to what I've jokingly called Humperson's Third Law of Meta, which states that:
"No critical statement is exempt from its own strictures. Every statement which seeks to summarize and critique a pre-existing statement will tend to exemplify, in itself, the things it deplores in the original statement, thus opening itself up to the same critique, and so on, recursively. And incrementally, for a summary of a statement tends to exemplify its faults more succinctly and intensely." As a critique of sexism, anti-sexism is open to the charge that it incorporates and intensifies the very thing it claims to combat.
13. This also relates to what I was saying in my entry The arrow and the frame, which suggested that an expressed opinion was less important than the framing presuppositions of an argument. In other words -- and as Google Adwords tends to confirm when it advertises racist products next to an anti-racist conversation -- stating you're against sexism or racism is less important than being "on the same page" with racists and sexists in the general framing of the debate. Letting them, in other words, set the agenda.
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14. Adam Curtis' Century of the Self gives a very valuable account of how the counterculture of the 1960s turned, in the 1970s, into narcissism and schism, both political and personal (EST, in particular, saw many reaching the revelation that the self is both everything and nothing), and how this "self-actualization" led fairly seamlessly into the nihilistic consumer-entrepreneurial ideology of the 1980s.
15. It's this narcissism which I think underlies the late-period identity politics which pops up in my comment columns so much. It's not so much "womanist" as "mannerist", both because it's a late, decadent development of 1960s radicalism and because it's obsessed with manners. Identity politics in the 60s and 70s fought for the public visibility of people who were different. In the 80s and 90s -- the Reagan/Thatcher years -- identity politics flipped polarities and entered its PC phase, becoming a campaign for the invisibility of differences. Late identity politics dovetails with Reagan/Thatcher politics: ban public advocacy of homosexuality, don't offend people, keep differences invisible, change language, assume and police stigma.
16. I am X, and I am different from Y. Other people are ignorant of the difference between X and Y. They must be educated. People, you must call me X and respect my difference from yourself, and from Y. You must refer to me by the term I have chosen to refer to myself by, and stay tuned for any changes I choose to make in this label, and new terms you must use to describe me -- those new terms which the stigma treadmill or reclamation of previously-taboo terms may, from time to time, make it necessary for me to substitute. If you self-define as X, you may participate in the reclamation of previously-taboo terms. If you don't, you must simply wait for us to tell you it's okay again to use terms like "queer" or "fag".
17. It's not so much "political correctness gone mad" as "rad gone trad".
18. Thin-sliced, baroque identity politics and the stigma-policing that is its main praxis is as far from a radical progressive politics as it's possible to get. Two steps forward, six euphemisms back.
2. Brigitte Godot, a commenter with a blank LiveJournal, informed me yesterday in a comment that this term is offensive to transsexuals and went on to suggest that I'm probably unaware of the multiplicity of genders beyond the male / female binary. As someone who's had sexual relations with a transsexual, I'm perfectly aware of this multiplicity. Although I'd prefer to say that there's a fluid identity-continuum between two fixed biological genders rather than a plurality of genders.
[Error: unknown template video]
3. So I refer the commenter to a Click Opera entry in which I wonder what would happen if there were 12 official genders instead of just two. I conclude, there, that this would lead to a lot of in-fighting because of Freud's narcissism of minor difference.
4. Difference is the important word here. As that entry says, quoting Sophia Phoca, the shift from feminism to postfeminism in the late 60s in Paris meant a shift from a quest for women's equality with men to the celebration of women's difference from men.
5. However, if you remove the idea of the pre-eminence of men (The Man as "the thing to be different from" or "the thing to be equal to"), what you get is a highly unstable system in which everyone asserts their own differences from everyone else. A baroque game ensues, of hair-paring self-definition, self-assertion, endless schism, and an overconcern with "the stigma treadmill". This becomes a politics we're all too familiar with, concerned with the policing of labels, and endless attempts to make other people -- accused of insensitivity and disrespect -- conform to our self-definitions.
[Error: unknown template video]
6. Brigitte Godot isn't interested in theory. She says I'm "evading admitting direct culpability" by sending her "to some ancient post commenting on some pseud's ivory tower blather on post-something or other drivel". Ivory tower, pseud, blather, drivel... they don't exactly resonate with respect, do they? What does it mean, that the author of Postfeminism for Beginners is derided so savagely by someone demanding a respectful terminology for herself?
7. Godot goes on to suggest that there's a slippery slope, "in the real world", between using the word "tranny" and murdering transsexuals: "I'm talking about the real world effect such terms have on the thousand and one genders that aren't clearly male or female, not intellectual mind games that torture sentences to wring the subtext out of the banal. This November 20 was Transgender Remembrance Day, honoring all those murdered for their lack of gender conformity. Tranny Day to you, mate. Sorry I missed your post on the subject, I was too busy mourning the dead."
8. I google to see whether "tranny" is generally considered offensive and find a Boston Herald headline Wife-killing tranny denied electrolysis for time being and a Wikipedia article which says "the transgender community typically use the short form "trans", or simply "T" as a substitution for the full word "transsexual", e.g. TS, trans guy, trans dyke, T-folk, trans folk. Some may even use terms that have become controversial to some, such as tranny and/or trans, despite others considering these terms to be offensive. Those who do use these terms claim that they are diminishing the power of the term as an insult..."
[Error: unknown template video]
9. I reply politely: "My point is that I'm quite aware of the multiplicity of genders, but that I think there's an inherent flaw in PC identity politics, which is that fine-slicing personal identity definitions -- and investing ever more in angry, self-righteous policing of labels and etiquettes -- is six political steps backward. This isn't ivory tower at all, it's very practical. As I put it in Three conflicts summarised, describing a conflict between RWOCs (Radical Women of Color) and black feminists:
"Here, enacted before our very eyes, is exactly why oppositional politics tends to disintegrate into bitter internecine squabbling -- much to the delight of the bigots it should instead be attacking. These people need to get behind a common cause, and preferably one unrelated to the assertion of ever-more-baroque personal identity differences."
10. I then say that insisting that the word "tranny" be seen as offensive and insulting might be politically counter-productive and even reactionary, a way of:
a) inducing guilt in an ally
b) alienating an ally
c) splitting a united front against bigots
d) actually re-introducing stigma into the whole idea of transgenderism
11. In last Friday's Judgment of Paris post, I suggested that my problem with late-period identity politics is that "there is a lot of sexism built into anti-sexism".
12. This relates to what I've jokingly called Humperson's Third Law of Meta, which states that:
"No critical statement is exempt from its own strictures. Every statement which seeks to summarize and critique a pre-existing statement will tend to exemplify, in itself, the things it deplores in the original statement, thus opening itself up to the same critique, and so on, recursively. And incrementally, for a summary of a statement tends to exemplify its faults more succinctly and intensely." As a critique of sexism, anti-sexism is open to the charge that it incorporates and intensifies the very thing it claims to combat.
13. This also relates to what I was saying in my entry The arrow and the frame, which suggested that an expressed opinion was less important than the framing presuppositions of an argument. In other words -- and as Google Adwords tends to confirm when it advertises racist products next to an anti-racist conversation -- stating you're against sexism or racism is less important than being "on the same page" with racists and sexists in the general framing of the debate. Letting them, in other words, set the agenda.
[Error: unknown template video]
14. Adam Curtis' Century of the Self gives a very valuable account of how the counterculture of the 1960s turned, in the 1970s, into narcissism and schism, both political and personal (EST, in particular, saw many reaching the revelation that the self is both everything and nothing), and how this "self-actualization" led fairly seamlessly into the nihilistic consumer-entrepreneurial ideology of the 1980s.
15. It's this narcissism which I think underlies the late-period identity politics which pops up in my comment columns so much. It's not so much "womanist" as "mannerist", both because it's a late, decadent development of 1960s radicalism and because it's obsessed with manners. Identity politics in the 60s and 70s fought for the public visibility of people who were different. In the 80s and 90s -- the Reagan/Thatcher years -- identity politics flipped polarities and entered its PC phase, becoming a campaign for the invisibility of differences. Late identity politics dovetails with Reagan/Thatcher politics: ban public advocacy of homosexuality, don't offend people, keep differences invisible, change language, assume and police stigma.
16. I am X, and I am different from Y. Other people are ignorant of the difference between X and Y. They must be educated. People, you must call me X and respect my difference from yourself, and from Y. You must refer to me by the term I have chosen to refer to myself by, and stay tuned for any changes I choose to make in this label, and new terms you must use to describe me -- those new terms which the stigma treadmill or reclamation of previously-taboo terms may, from time to time, make it necessary for me to substitute. If you self-define as X, you may participate in the reclamation of previously-taboo terms. If you don't, you must simply wait for us to tell you it's okay again to use terms like "queer" or "fag".
17. It's not so much "political correctness gone mad" as "rad gone trad".
18. Thin-sliced, baroque identity politics and the stigma-policing that is its main praxis is as far from a radical progressive politics as it's possible to get. Two steps forward, six euphemisms back.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 11:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 12:11 pm (UTC)The jury seems to be out on whether "tranny" is offensive, though, and it certainly isn't taboo. The Boston Herald would never headline a story "Wife-killing nigger..." (http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view/20091126wife-killing_tranny_denied_electrolysis_for_time_being/srvc=home&position=also) for example.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 12:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 12:48 pm (UTC)Why did they choose that specific phrasing with a picture that, arguably, is of an unattractive transgendered person with a sullen expression?
The "tranny" is being evalutated for her looks and poked fun at. I don't think you chose the best example here.
Also, you can hardly equate the use of the word "nigger" with "tranny" - even if "tranny" was similarly offensive and derogatory (which it isn't) you have to:
a) Keep a historical perspective
b) Consider that black people in America make up a larger segment of society and are more powerful and vocal politically than transgendered people and therefore it's far riskier for the newspaper to offend black people.
c) Remember that the dialogue on transgendered people is still in its early phases. Perhaps it is acceptable to call them "trannies" now in the paper as certain terms for homosexuals may have been acceptable to publish 30 years ago.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 12:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 12:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 01:14 pm (UTC)Now, if we're going to talk about the stereotypology of transsexuals in Hollywood cinema, and how it might compare with depictions of black people as maids and Uncle Toms, sure, I'd probably agree completely. There are far too many tranny killer stereotypes in films, even if -- as this story shows -- they do sometimes crop up in real life.
Not Just An Anti-Prejudice Revolution
Date: 2009-11-27 03:18 pm (UTC)I don’t want to get too confused in abstraction and claim that auto-affection differentiation need not fear the “other”—there is a history to the fear of the “other” that is well grounded in the survival of individuated species. But what about phrases like “they all look the same”: isn’t it true that, although minor differences may play into prejudice, people with prejudices often fail to look past these minor differences to see the even finer differences of members of an excluded group? To oversimplify, I think the mom-narcissistic/other-dad-fear dichotomy at the heart of some of Freud over simplifies things a bit.
On the ground, PC to me, meant learning more refined ways to show respect, like the elementary press lesson of using the term “firefighter” instead of “fireman”: the lesson itself showed how prejudices are built into language, and implies that we should change more than our language, but cultural power relations as well. I don’t think PC was meant as an end, but as a means to educate, if not re-program language to be more sensitive culture-wide.
Does the creation of more “refined taboos” (taboos on anything but the golden rule) really undermine the major taboos (of overt racism, sexism, classism, etc.) being exposed?... or even more, undermine the “deconstruction” of the architecture of power-relations of race, sex, and class in the world? I think this would be too strong a claim.
But I think Momus is right, that the tone can get people into to “ever more in angry, self-righteous policing of labels and etiquettes” that are too often preaching to the choir. It’s not “what would an anti-prejudice revolution look like?” but “what would a real revolution look like?”
Re: Not Just An Anti-Prejudice Revolution
Date: 2009-11-27 03:36 pm (UTC)Re: Not Just An Anti-Prejudice Revolution
Date: 2009-11-27 03:56 pm (UTC)But you’re lucky… in your model world, Momism is a crime! You could “sensitize” people with the real police.
Re: Not Just An Anti-Prejudice Revolution
Date: 2009-11-27 11:40 pm (UTC)Re: Not Just An Anti-Prejudice Revolution
Date: 2009-11-28 12:33 am (UTC)I say this as a schizophrenic who’s had his own cross to bear… the thought police right in my head with a microphone pressed to my inner ear (and my rear). It can get tiresome… but my own prejudices usually revolve around noticing differences that I wish I didn’t… or worrying that someone of an “other” stripe is paranoid about my behavior towards them—so consciousness raising is not always the answer. Sometimes, it’s just about spreading your own humanness, making more friends, accepting others, and learning to relax.
BTW: Momus, et. al. have you checked out this blog?:
http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2004/10/feminism-101.html
I think a broader strategy against bigotry (beyond educating or lynching bigots) is to get people’s ethical “systems” coherent/integrated – to show that our fundamental human values do not condone, say being anti-gay-marriage—that there is a fundamental conflict and contradiction in just about any value system that excludes groups of people who are not hurting anyone… people more often need to find their inner loving Jesus, not their inner raging Isaiah. This betrays that for me, beyond “political bigotry,” I have a hard time respecting psychopaths. But maybe that’s my hang up, having had one in my head for so many years.
Re: Not Just An Anti-Prejudice Revolution
Date: 2009-11-27 04:30 pm (UTC)Re: Not Just An Anti-Prejudice Revolution
Date: 2009-11-27 06:52 pm (UTC)What did I do? I did my time, and then went elsewhere. That's one reason I'm so eternally grateful to the Japanese. They were the first people to say to me "You're okay! You're good!"
I certainly wouldn't have wasted my time trying to raise consciousness at Creation (or boarding school for that matter). Just keep your head down, do what you can within tactical limits, rebel secretly and quietly, and wait for your chance elsewhere.
Re: Not Just An Anti-Prejudice Revolution
Date: 2009-11-27 08:09 pm (UTC)Re: Not Just An Anti-Prejudice Revolution
Date: 2009-11-27 11:30 pm (UTC)I do think that in order to change a system you have to be at least half-way reconciled with it. You have to share its framings.
Re: Not Just An Anti-Prejudice Revolution
Date: 2009-11-28 08:29 am (UTC)But this seems to be a good compromise, doesn't it? In any case, as you can't entirely escape these dominant framings, because they in turn have formed you. You're always talking about how you can't step outside of society, but you're always recommending stepping outside of the institutions you don't like. If we were talking about Japan here, I suspect your discourse would be different.
Re: Not Just An Anti-Prejudice Revolution
Date: 2009-11-28 10:18 am (UTC)Re: Not Just An Anti-Prejudice Revolution
Date: 2009-11-28 02:32 pm (UTC)Re: Not Just An Anti-Prejudice Revolution
Date: 2009-11-28 02:46 pm (UTC)As this article (http://www.ocregister.com/news/university-221525-california-protests.html) says, "in 1966-67, student fees were just 5.7 percent of the amount that the state contributed to UC. In 2008-09, student fees reached 53.4 percent of the state's contribution". What produced that change? Ronald Reagan.
Re: Not Just An Anti-Prejudice Revolution
Date: 2009-11-28 03:00 pm (UTC)Most likely this will be its downfall in the end because it is too much at once, although I love the idealism.
It's fascinating, though sometimes tedious..
Re: Not Just An Anti-Prejudice Revolution
Date: 2009-11-28 03:47 pm (UTC)Yes. This, weirdly enough, is a spin-off of peacetime priorities. The education I tend to approve of is the kind I got myself -- paid for by the British state as a result of a post-war and Cold War settlement in which the government funded health, education and research, afraid to fall behind the Soviet Union. (I talk upthread about how the idea of creativity itself was significantly boosted in the 50s and 60s by government funding after the Sputnik Shock.) As the Soviet threat receded, so did that settlement -- essentially an arrangement of things reached at the end of WW2. Education became oriented to money-making, and taken over by the private sector, with student-clients paying for their own education in the knowledge that it would give them an advantage in the high-Gini societies they were now living in, and corporations moving into education as part of their training schemes and entrepreneurial incentivisation. I think I mentioned here how I peeked into a lecture hall at Warwick University last month only to find a lecture being given about RyanAir's business model, and where it might go in the future!
Re: Not Just An Anti-Prejudice Revolution
From:(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 10:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-27 11:34 pm (UTC)But protection from people using the word tranny? That's a bit like me demanding protection from "Nick-Nicks" or "Momey" or something!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-28 05:23 am (UTC)