I have it on good authority that OrcaCon 2017 (AKA OrcaCon 2, AKA OrcaCon the 2nd, AKA OrcaCon 2nd Edition) is thoroughly awesome. I am not in attendance, but someone I know is, and my friend’s pictures alone should wind up any gamer old enough to have played D&D in the 1980s: [Read more…]
What is the difference between a Steven Soderbergh who creates art including violent imagery and men locked away for an entire string of actual murders?
I’ve been reading about Brandon Duncan’s and Aaron Harvey’s lawsuit against the fascist policing of San Diego and the fascist police RUDY CASTRO and SCOTT HENDERSON: I’m having trouble figuring it out. Soderbergh has sometimes lived in San Diego. He’s definitely created depictions of violence there. Duncan and Harvey have lived most of their lives in San Diego. Duncan has certainly created depictions of violence there. Soderbergh, however, is not suing San Diego and the very, very clever cops Castro & Henderson for violations of federally guaranteed civil rights.
While Duncan, AKA (when performing rap) Tiny Doo and Harvey don’t mention Soderbergh in the complaint filed with the federal district court for the Southern District of California*1, it’s hard to escape the obvious conclusion. Brandon Duncan grew up in a gang-plagued area of San Diego with Aaron Harvey and other friends. Unlike many people with more money and more privilege, Duncan stayed in the same area as an adult. Neither Duncan nor Harvey were gang members in any sense, but they did know some some members of the Lincoln Park Blood gang (“LPK”). These men were people who grew up near Duncan and Harvey, and apparently they remained on friendly enough terms that cell-phone photos were taken of some of these LPK members and Duncan, Harvey or both in the same frame.
What did the photos show? They weren’t mowing down targets at a gun range. They weren’t smuggling drugs across the border. They weren’t, y’know, committing some horrible crime like waterboarding someone or something. Instead, they were merely chillaxing, or other such moderate behaviors as I am told one’s homies, on occasion, will tend to do with one.
But this did not fool the police.
Good morning:
Do not attempt to adjust your audio, there is nothing wrong. We have taken control as to bring you this special show. We will return it to you as soon as you are grooving
While Nadéah’s Too Drunk To Fuck cover is certainly amazing, and while it comes fairly close – far closer than most musical acts – to what I would play if I could create my own music, that doesn’t mean it’s the only musical style worth knowing or playing. If I had technical skill, but no musical creativity, I would sure as heck play Bootsy Collins when my friends came over. While Trump is inviting a Bruce Springsteen cover band to play his inaugural, my (imaginary) cover band will be tuning up and tuning in to an entirely different art form: not soulful rock, not even soul, not even simply funk. As amazing as James Brown was without the (original) JBs, as amazing as George Clinton was in his solo work, Bootsy Collins gave the work of those men – and so many others – a kick like no other. Michael Hutchence couldn’t come close to a kick like that. No, as long as you’re going to give me the funk,
Taking nothing away from the importance of the post on the birth of intersectionality, it was both a bit long, and it was focussed more on what Kimberlé Crenshaw thought than my thinking about her thoughts. There are some nuggets that I think are important, things that we will need to remember as we continue to explore Intersectionality. But I think they are best placed in this separate PostScript:
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Just a shout out to Jessica Valenti for this wonderful (though three years old) response to Twits:
To People on Twitter calling me a whore:
Being called a ‘slut’ as a young person is part of the reason I became an activist. So keep it up, assholes: every time you call a girl a whore, a feminist gets her wings.
Of course, that only happens if a wing producing-allele is present in a girl’s local population, so let’s keep spreading feathery, free-flying thoughts, shall we?
Brandon Duncan and Aaron Harvey served eight and seven months in jail, respectively, because of the fascist policing of San Diego specifically, and the United States more generally. I’m working on a longer post about these two (ETA: This post is now up here), who just this week filed a lawsuit under the Civil Rights Act-established cause of action for official violation of citizens’ rights (42 US Code ss 1983).
The cases against Duncan and Harvey (such as they were) were different, though they arose out of the same underlying acts (acts committed by persons who were neither Duncan nor Harvey). The cases against each were ridiculous, and thrown out of court after the two had each spent months unable to post bonds of hundreds of thousands of dollars. While the one against Harvey is arguably much more scary in its plain overreach by police and prosecutors, the case against Duncan has received more attention.
Intersectionality as we know it today was given life by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor and social theorist. In the talk that brought the metaphor of the intersection into public discussion, she first noted:*1
in race discrimination cases, discrimination tends to be viewed in terms of sex- or class-privileged Blacks; in sex discrimination cases, the focus is on race- and class-privileged women.
She then explained some of the consequences of this:
This focus on the most privileged group members marginalizes those who are multiply-burdened and obscures claims that cannot be understood as resulting from discrete sources of discrimination. I suggest further that this focus on otherwise-privileged group members creates a distorted analysis of racism and sexism because the operative conceptions of race and sex become grounded in experiences that actually represent only a subset of a much more complex phenomenon
But why not simply include Black voices in feminism and women’s voices in anti-racism and call it good? For Crenshaw, it was because the effects of multiple oppressions are not merely linear increases, not merely additive.
So, like just about everyone, I’ve had my fantasies of musical competence, even of musical creativity. Sometimes I’ve even fantasized about being so good people might drop a looney or two in a bucket set up by the front door of a café where I’m playing. In my absolute wildest dreams, I’ve even managed to convince a few gullible people who can actually play real music to make me a part of their band, and then have people show up to drop a looney in the bucket to see my band play.
But unlike most of the people that I know, I don’t have fantasies of playing rock and roll. Unlike a significant minority of people I know, I also don’t fantasize about playing orchestra or symphonic music. No, I (futilely) aspire to something much different.
There have been many attempts to create a model that simplifies gender, sex, and sexuality enough to easily communicate important concepts without either simplifying it so much that the concepts are lost altogether. Now that we know something about social models, let’s look at a model I shared some time back on Pharyngula’s (now obsolete) Thunderdome.
The model came up in response to the suggestion of the Genderbread Person as a teaching model. As I noted then in other words, the metaphor is not the concept, so all models will fail to communicate some aspects important to a concept. The question is whether there is a better metaphor available. As a teacher or someone attempting to articulate a concept, the responsibility is still on you to know the limits of the metaphor and be able to address questions, ambiguities, and extensions. If you aren’t aware of a metaphor’s limits and able to address them longhand, using any model is risky. If you are, any model is adequate, but the models that minimize those longhand conversations are better than ones that only somewhat reduce them.
It’s with this in mind that (many years ago) I abandoned the Genderbread Person and adopted a different model, one that permits a shorthand visual model to combat multiple myths at the same time.
I originally titled this post, “Japan to Korea: Thou Shalt Not Remember Rape”. I quickly realized, however, that the command not to remember rape is so common that over the course of this blog, I’m likely to have quite a few more posts referencing the command than referencing Japan’s government talking to Korea’s government. Moreover, writing the headline as if the important bit were the identities “Japan” and “Korea” only feeds into Japan’s odious framing that governments’ speaking to each other is much more valuable than the ability of humans to remember our own experiences generally and our rapes specifically. Newspaper-headline conventions be damned, then.
This post comes about courtesy of a wonderful website, Hyperallergic, to which our own Caine, writing the wonderful blog Affinity, just introduced me.