Category: feminism

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Gaga Feminism Blog Tour

J. Jack Halberstam’s new book, Gaga Feminism, is out, and it is a fascinating read; I highly recommend it. For those of you who are turned off my academic writing but like gender theory, give this a try. It’s funny, first of all, but it’s also the kind of book that leads you to think in new ways and to ask new questions. I had a revelatory moment thinking about the inter-generational quality of queer culture, and honestly, that’s only mentioned in passing. This one sends off really useful sparks.

I asked the author to comment the intersection of basic legislative issues that have been in the news – saying “vagina” in the state house, “legitimate rape”, issues of choice/abortion, etc., in the context of gaga feminism, and here is Halberstam’s response:

When did “vagina” suddenly become a fashionable term? First Lisa Brown, a state representative for Michigan, shocked her Republican colleagues when she used the word “vagina” to try to debate anti-choice legislation in her county. When Brown and another colleague were silenced for supposedly turning a polite conversation into one lacking in decorum, Eve Ensler pulled into town to save the town with another long speech on vaginas – The Vagina Monologues!! Meanwhile, Republicans got into their own hot water while debating vaginas – Republican Rep. Todd Akin called upon an apparently vast and deep reservoir of knowledge about the female body and its reproductive potential when, in defense of his indefensible position that rape victims should not have access to abortion, he suggested that in a “legitimate” rape, the female body would mysteriously reject the offensive sperm and protect itself from pregnancy. And then of course, feminist writer Naomi Wolf put out her own take on the suddenly hot topic and provided us with a “biography” of the vagina.

Wow! How to make sense of all these vaginas, some of them with brains (Wolf), some of them with primal prophylactic powers (Akin), some of them with so much to say (Ensler). In my new book, Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender and the End of Normal, I do not use the word vagina at all! Instead of pitting bodies with vaginas against bodies with penises, I argue that we are living in a new world where the categories of male and female are rapidly being updated all around us. In this world of sperm banks, IVF, queer families, butch daddies, transgender men and women, heteroflexible women, pretending to be offended by the use of the word “vagina” in a public speech or making insupportable claims about rape and pregnancy are not just quaint and old-fashioned, they signal a deep ignorance about the world we live in and the enormous changes that have taken place within it in the last two decades. So rather than making the vagina talk back to the idiocy of Christian or Republican hypocrisy by giving it a biography or a monologue, it is time to move on from simple, genital genders and start actually engaging the many forms of gendered embodiment that are moving us out of the age of normativity and into a new era of going gaga!

The next stop on the tour is at Queer Fat Femme, who is generally and specifically amazing, so do go check that out.

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Who’s Poor? Women

With all of this blather about financial bottom lines, I’d just like to point out a small fact: the majority of the poor people in this country are women. So any budget plan that cuts funding for the poor is cutting funding for women, especially single mothers with children.

It’s embarrassing that we have the largest gap in poverty rates between men & women in the Western world.

Here are some other useful facts the next time someone starts going on about budgets and bottom lines and how there’s no need for feminism:

  • 13% of women over the age of 65 are poor; only 6% of men that age are.
  • The poverty gap between women and men widens significantly between ages 18 and 24—20.6 percent of women are poor at that age, compared to 14.0 percent of men. The gap narrows, but never closes, throughout adult life, and it more than doubles during the elderly years.

Why? Not just because of the wage gap, which is still significant – 77 cents on the dollar these days – but also because

  • women provide far more unpaid care giving than men,
  • they are still responsible for most of the unpaid childcare,
  • women still get pregnant and lose jobs as a result, and finally,
  • women lose paid work days dealing with the sexual and other violence.

So how about we actually work on a plan that eliminates sexual violence against women to balance the fucking budget, instead?

(h/t to Dylan.)

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Queer Derby: Vagine Regime

Always forward, never straight – how it is in roller derby.

Erica Tremblay is making a documentary about the queer subculture within roller derby, and she needs funds.

Cool.

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RIP Helen Gurley Brown

You don’t have to like Cosmo to have admired Helen Gurley Brown. You only have to appreciate how rare her voice was at the time it appeared: Sex and the Single Girl came out a year before The Feminine Mystique.

And she was, of course, a pro-sex woman’s voice which in the 1960s and 1970s was not very acceptable in mainstream feminism.

RIP, Ms. Brown. You did good.

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Male Femme Responds

A transvestite of my acquaintance has written a very interesting response to the radfem anti-trans position that is worth reading. Jeffreys, and other radfems, seek to disenfranchise trans women on the basis that they are just transvestite men, and this male femme takes on why, exactly, that doesn’t make sense either.

This section is particularly interesting:

After that digression, in her final section Jeffreys asks the (for her, rhetorical) question: “Transfemininity – Transgressing Gender or Maintaining It?”, reiterating once again that “Femininity is exciting because it is the behaviour of subordination” and, further, that “it is because it is the behaviour of subordination that it cannot be preserved.” From my own perspective, femininity is not intrinsically the behaviour of subordination, so any move to eliminate it is unwarranted (never mind being hopelessly impractical). Instead, what is required is the negation of gender stereotyping, so that people are able to develop their gender freely and are free to express it as they need or wish. As for Jeffreys’ question itself, I think the answer is pretty much “neither” in all cases:

— For trans women (with whom Jeffreys is primarily concerned at this point) the question has no relevance, since trans women are not inevitably feminine; their gender is as variable as that of any other woman. (Jeffreys merely confuses sex and gender here.)

— For male submissives transgression does occur in a sexual sense, in that maleness is disassociated from stereotypical expectations of sexual dominance. Sissies might appear to render this ambiguous by coupling femininity with sexual submission, but it is still in essence male submission. In either case gender transgression is not really the point.

— For male transvestites cultural gender rules are certainly transgressed, but that doesn’t imply any real gender transgression either. As Jeffreys’ selective evidence indicates, some transvestites (like anyone else) can have quite ‘traditional’ views on gender. (A penchant for cross-dressing is no assurance of progressive values.) Moreover, transvestites’ default stealth (i.e. closetedness) rules out meaningful transgression for most of us, whatever our politics. The best that might be said is that transvestites are potentially transgressive. If we were all out and open about our (varied) gender expression, so that the assumed correlation between femininity and femaleness was shown to be false, we might well be gender transgressive. But, with a few notable exceptions, we mostly aren’t.

As much as I would rather see this embarrassing radfem position just go away, it won’t, until or unless pro-trans radfems are willing to speak up and provide logical theoretical reasons for why trans people should be included in a radical feminist agenda.