thinking difference

The Suburb Mentality

2010-10-27T08:22:00.003-06:00

A suburb is an upgraded village: a spatially bounded space where people live under the illusion of knowing each other, of feeling protected by their belonging to the community, of fulfilling the middle-class (North-American) dream. You know the dream: a Stepford wife, a little box made out of ticky tacky (hope there are no hurricanes in your area!) in the middle of nowhere (preferably in a gated community, God forbids the coyotes or the immigrants come anywhere near us!), a Bimbo box (can't help but love Neal Stephenson's nickname for the SUV) where the Stepford wife can safely anchor the car-seats of the children (at least two, cause a). it's our Christian duty to reproduce ourselves, b). we 'all know' that the only-child comes with permanent psychological damage...).

One cannot understand the suburb and its mentality until one lives in North America. The suburb is a white, sanitized and monotonous place where everyone has to look the same, feel the same, behave the same. "We are in the Burbs, where it is better to take a thousand clicks off the lifespan of your Goodyears by invariably grinding them up against curbs than to risk social ostracism and outbreaks of mass hysteria by parking several inches away, out in the middle of the street (That's okay Mom, I can walk to the curb from here), a menace to the traffic, a deadly obstacle to uncertain young bicyclists." (Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash, 1992).

A true middle-class individual (and hey, everyone is middle-class in North America, except those who aren't, but even they are middle-class!) dreams of setting down, finding the Stepford wife (partner, to be politically correct) and buy that cardboard house with 5 bedrooms (guest rooms required!) for which they'll pay 10 times the actual price and probably 10 times what they can truly afford. A slave to the bank, a slave to the cardboard house, a slave to the bimbo box, the individual becomes a slave to the suburb mentality. The long commute downtown sucks. So many cars! The downtown sucks too: thank God we have a doorman at work, otherwise we would end up with the homeless begging right at the door of our office on the 100th floor of the prison - oops, meant office - tower. The lunch time rush to the unavoidable franchises sucks too: there are simply too many people, this city can't take any more foreigner, immigrants, minorities! We're already over-crowded!

The suburb is the place where mass hysteria grows out of conformism. Out of sanitized - yet worthless - environments, whose only value derives from the quantification of our middle-class desire: we're willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for an ugly cardboard box that is worth shit just to live in a 'good community', where your neighbors have been selected by banks based on how intensely they desire to throw out of the window the money they don't have. The suburb hysteria comes in the forms of gates, of speed bumps and 30km/h speed signs. It comes in the form of community churches with stupid signs (Jesus loves you!), strip malls along the highway and yellow school buses. And it calms down at the sight of our trusted police buying their coffee at Starbucks; their mere presence, a token of suburb conformity itself, reassures us: they're here, we're protected from the awful unknown outside the suburb.

The suburb mentality is a dangerous one. It is an essentially anti-modern mentality, based on fear and born out of our capitalist desire to segregate ourselves from those who don't have the same earning-potential (under the false belief that earning potential makes us all the same). It's the belief of the capitalist slave, colonized by capitalism so that s/he no longer feels it as an ideological yoke, but as a free choice based on hard work (work hard, and you'll reach the stars; visualize, and you'll succeed).

The suburb mentality breeds fear, ignorance and intolerance. It breeds fascism. It prepares the mind for the radical populist-nationalist politicians who will shamelessly capitalize on the suburb hysteria to propel themselves to power. It makes people afraid, but more importantly, it makes them unable to cope with an urban environment, where good and bad co-exist, where people step on each others toes and parade their difference on a daily basis.

Photo credits: ulybug

The (Ideological) Dupes

2010-07-28T14:41:00.005-06:00

I've been thinking a lot lately about what makes a statement racist. Is it the statement that is racist, the individual making the statement or the individual decoding that sentence? From a theoretical perspective, each of these three possibilities is tied to a particular understanding of the world:

a statement is racist --> words carry the meaning, people are simple filters through which these words circulate. Who carries the responsibility for being a racist here?
the individual making the statement is racist --> the words we use reflect who we are on the inside. The 'racist' is a clear-cut identity inside us that is expressed through these words. In such cases, the individual carries the responsibility of being racist.
the individual decoding/ interpreting the sentence is racist --> in this case, the individual interprets everything said through a racist lens. Everything makes sense to h/ir only through the racist perspective s/he espouses. Again, the locus of responsibility is within the individual.

Of course, there are always other options than these three. In fact, the mere fact that I only list three options here betrays a worldview: an understanding of communication as a message that moves from the source to the audience.

During these past few days, I was reminded of how complex the questions of 'what counts as racism' and 'where is racism located' are. Part of me, the politically engaged part, cannot escape the feeling that some of these experiences were clearly tokens of racism. But pinpointing exactly what made them so and how were they racist became increasingly difficult. I know that for some, things are easy to interpret: if it smacks of racism, then it is racism. But I'm a theorist, and nothing is simple for me.

I was reading a long and heated thread on Feministe. The topic - parenting - elicits everyone's opinion. Parents and nonparents alike, we all believe there's an objective 'proper way' to raise kids and integrate them in the pre-existing social setting. During this chaotic online conversation, someone qualified their statement as being true regardless of race, gender or ethnicity. In itself, this may be a reasonable statement: "I believe kids can misbehave, regardless of their or their parents' race, gender or ethnicity". As a performance, this kind of statement seeks to counter any accusation of racism, sexism or nationalism. The speaker seeks to reassure the audience that the statement is not uttered through the racial, gender or ethnic lens.

But the audience rejects this assurance. In fact, the audience is quick to point out that the statement itself is racist. Is anyone so deluded to think that normative statements about behavior can be uttered in a space devoid of race, class, ethnicity or gender? No, the mere fact that such a sentence is uttered only reinforces the audience's belief that it is actually racist, classist, sexist etc. No one who has been subjected to racism or to class-based discrimination would ever believe that such a sentence can be 'neutral' (if I may even use this qualifier) . It is uttered from a particular racial, ethnic, gender, class perspective - meaning, the person who utters it is probably white, middle-class.

By extension, all members of the audience who read that utterance and find it non-racist, non-sexist, etc. are themselves racist, sexist, classist etc. because they fail to recognize that the possibility of uttering such a statement is only opened for their class/ race/ ethnicity/ gender.

The other case is of a quite different nature, but it ends up pretty much in the same place. I see this person on a quite regular basis, without being friends or even acquaintances. We live in the same neighborhood and in time, we started saying "hello" to each other. One day, I saw a person that looked just like her, but yet a bit different. My friend confirmed the similarity. We didn't know if it's her or not; being confused, we focused on identifying her instead of being polite and missed the chance of greeting her - whether she was our neighbor or not.

The next time we ran into our neighbor, we told her the story and offered a variant to "save face": maybe it was her sister or a relative? No, she said. It's probably the fact that "all Asians look the same" she said, and then added: "But even my brother was convinced he ran into me once, and it wasn't me". She had offered us another "save face" variant, but one that didn't sit well with us because of its implications: we were white, and as the stereotype goes, "all Asians look the same" to white people. We protested the implied racial framing in a quite clumsy manner. But were we reading too much into it? Could it be that we were actually hearing what she said from a racial perspective? Could it be that the source of our confusion was a racialized vision in the first place? Did she mean it in a racist way or was she simply trying to be nice by offering a possible explanation? Would she have offered the same explanation if we were not white?

* * *

I do not sit well with the idea that we are always first and foremost making a statement from a racial, gender, ethnic, class position. While that's partly true and needs to be recognized and interrogated, it is not the whole truth. If we can think only "as whites", "as women", "as Americans", then we find ourselves in an impossible world, born into these pre-established categories and unable to truly understand each other. These being said, it is only a few of us that have the privilege (or maybe the burden?) of affording to question these things.

On Snow Peas and Normality

2010-07-08T07:25:00.005-06:00

As I child, I learned that peas were to be unshelled, boiled and then eaten as a side dish. Nobody cared about the shells; we simply discarded them. The real prize was the small, green and round pea. Nobody would think of eating them raw.

And so I grew up thinking I know what peas are and how you should eat them. Of course, there were variations in terms of the recipes one used to cook them. But the basics stayed the same: unshell and boil.

Little surprise that when I first saw someone eating a raw pea pod, I was taken aback: how could they do it? It contradicted everything I knew about peas. More than that, it contradicted a shared norm of eating and cooking peas. How could they eat a raw pea pod when everyone knew peas had to be boiled and the shells had to be discarded? Eating them raw was simply 'abnormal'.

Curiosity aside, my stomach also decided to make a stand. As it grumbled at the thought of putting a raw pea pod in my mouth, it reinforced my decision on eating raw peas: abnormal. It just wasn't right and my stomach simply knew it!

Normality was thus born as a seemingly biological thing: eating raw peas is not good for you, and that was the end of the story. The fact that so many other people did not seem to buy into this normality wasn't disconcerting. After all, the world is full of exotic and eccentric people! I knew what was 'normal' and I was gonna stick to it because that was the right thing to do!

We often fail to see that 'normality' is contextual: it becomes 'normality' by virtue of being accepted and enforced by those around us. Confronted with difference, we become rigid and loose our curiosity, hanging on to that false sense of self-reinforcement that 'normality' brings along. What counts as 'normal' when it comes to food is even trickier, as I wrote a long time ago, mostly because growing accustomed to a type of food becomes intertwined with our sensations and biological reactions. Even today, when I know that snow peas can be eaten raw, my stomach still protests to the idea, making it quite easy to forget that this reaction is part of a long process of socialization, that shaped my taste buds but also my sense of 'good food'.

Photo credits: Snow peas by little blue hen

Letter to my radio station: Good bye, au revoir, arrivederci.

2010-06-02T15:20:00.004-06:00

Dear radio station,

I am leaving you. I know you don't really care, because you probably have hundreds and thousands of fans. But I'm sick and tired of your constant repetitions and redundancies. How about you give me some 'diversity'? It's not that I don't like Beyonce. But listening to her latest song (which incidentally, was produced by the same owner that owns you, my dear radio station) 30 times a day feels a bit like brainwashing. Maybe it wouldn't hurt you, dear radio station, to tap a bit into the wealth of music that's being created out there, outside the studios of your owner. Maybe, just maybe, you'll find that there's actually rhythm and emotions that do not need to be in English - or whatever your 'official' language is.

I'm dreaming, I know. Who on earth wants to hear Stromae when Adam Lambert is playing on American Idol? And why would you ever trade the daring Lady Gaga for Manu Chao (yeah, yeah, I know, it's distracting that he keeps on switching from one language to another)... Hey, it make more sense to hum "my hump, my hump, my hump" than "we no speak americano"...

So, my dear radio station, I'm leaving you. I'll come visit you once in a while, mostly in the morning when you pretend to give me the 'news'. But for the rest of the day, I'm switching over to my own list of songs. It's still Anglophone, I know. But I'm working on it every day, collecting more of the sounds that make me wanna dance. I'm kind of sick of all the crap you throw at me. Good bye, au revoir, arrivederci...

Are we becoming more conservative?

2010-05-04T19:21:00.002-06:00

It's nice that we can write blogs and tell everyone who cares to read what we stand for. Or analyze the latest trends, crazes and ideas. It's nice that we can express ourselves and find other people who care to comment. Or not. But in the end, does it really matter? I mean I'm most likely to read the bits and pieces that already fit my values and worldviews. What I read adds to what I already think, but it doesn't change it.

If I am against abortion, I probably won't be reading Feministe (unless I want to trash them). And, it turns out, more and more young women are against abortion. I'm speechless. I simply cannot understand how a woman can be against abortion - unless she's brainwashed by religious beliefs. After all the fight that previous generations had to put up to get to the point where a woman could claim her right to her own body, some still fail to understand the importance of this right. And the price some people had to pay for it. Fighting for the right to abortion does not mean that all women get pregnant and have an abortion. It's like saying 'we are against condoms, because they encourage promiscuity'.

And if I am against abortion, it's most likely that I believe in the sanctity of my cause. Each year, some students in an university in a conservative city put up billboards on campus that equate abortion with genocide. The images are graphic, the students are believers. I'm speechless again. How can it be that students, who used to represent the revolutionary wave, have become the prophets of intolerance, blind faith and conservatism? Their 1968 French fellows must be really disappointed... Students used to represent the commitment to critical thinking and reason (I know, a heavy concept, but maybe it's time to reclaim it). Not anymore. Not since the university has become the labor-processing plant, serving the needs of governments and industry. Critical thinking is a dying breed - nobody needs it anymore.

Photo credits: Liverpool Street Station by victoriapeckham

What's wrong with day care?

2010-03-10T08:47:00.006-07:00

I was once told that you should keep your child at home rather than send her to day care.

I do not fully understand the day care system, but I wonder why some people see day care as such a bad thing for their kids.

I'm pretty sure the idea that a woman has to be a mother first and foremost, and therefore tend to her kids is still strong. Although many women feel this to be something biological, it is not. It has to do with social factors, with being taught from an early age that a girl cares about the babies, that a woman has to be a mother, and so on.

But beyond the gender discourse, I think this fear of day care also has a lot to do with the day care/ kindergarten system in North America. As said, a system I still don't fully understand: what's the difference between them? Are these institutions public or private? Are people working there educated and licensed? Why some institutions are affiliated with churches? How come day cares are in private homes? Who decides on the curricula?

I mean, I do understand the historical circumstances and the institutional dimension, but I think it's simply wrong. And if you really espouse gender equality, you need to ensure that there is a reliable, secular education system where kids can develop intellectually and emotionally.

I grew up in a different part of the world and went to kindergarten. Our kindergarten was a huge brick building, with a big backyard and a wonderfully huge swing. Oh yes, small kids were allowed to use the swing... That was back in the time when kids were supposed to fall and hurt themselves. I did fall, and I did hurt myself but I survived and not really cared about it.

Our kindergarten had nice and not-so-nice teachers. Mostly women, it is true. But they were all educated and they all made sure our day was neatly divided into play time, learn time, eating time and nap time. I really really hated the afternoon naps.

Each morning, we would have breakfast there. That's when I met my friend M, who always skimmed the milk for me. Yes, that was during the time when milk came with all the natural fat and formed a disgusting creamy skin on top when warmed up.

We then went to our different classrooms and played. I had to learn that one doesn't always get what one wants. And that playing involves taking other kids into consideration. I also learned that I'm not very good at fighting for my toys, but that if you annoy me, I'll make sure I get what I want from you.

We also drew a lot of pictures and sang songs and learned funny things that make kids happy. A very important gift that I got in kindergarten was an extensive range of those annoying diseases kids get. They are to be experienced when you're young enough not to remember them.

My mom picked me up at 4.30 pm. Some days she was late, and I was crying my heart out fearing she has abandoned me. I survived, and I wasn't permanently damaged by my tears.

The point is: the kindergarten was a place that parents trusted. The stay-at-home mom was rare and usually frowned-upon: why was she at home instead of working? They never gave us junk to eat. They insisted on our morning milk and our afternoon veggies. We did NOT watch TV. We played with toys and with each other. We played outside almost every day, summer and winter. Yes, kids cried in the morning because they wanted to stay at home. But hey, it was a great lesson in growing up. And I made a friend for life there. So I guess in the end, it was actually good for me.

Photo credits: Seattle Municipal Archives

Facebook Intolerance

2010-02-02T12:16:00.004-07:00

Your friend's friend makes an intolerant comment on your friend's profile. It's highly offensive, almost bordering fascism from your point of view. But you are not sure what to do. It's not addressed to you, but it's in a cvasi-public space - a friend's wall. You do not know that person, but in a way it's just like being in a shop and witnessing a blatantly intolerant act. What do you? Do you comment? Or do you ignore it? Should you tell yourself it is just a private comment? Or should you rather respond to it, precisely because if a private comment in a public space remains unaddressed, it may look like everyone else endorses it?

Speaking Chinese...

2010-01-22T15:53:00.003-07:00

"You're speaking Chinese again", a friend told me the other day. I wasn't actually speaking Chinese, but in the language she was using, 'to speak Chinese' stands for saying something that cannot be understood. It's an idiom, but a revealing one. The way we speak, even if we do not mean it, often indicates a variety of things:

how certain groups or certain differences have been constructed in that language and the ethics surrounding this construction;
how we, as individuals, may consciously or not buy into these constructs, often perpetuating a problematic construction of difference as something to be feared, as something that cannot be surmounted, as something that has to be avoided at all costs.

When 'speaking Chinese' comes to stand for 'saying something that cannot be understood', the underlying implication is that Chinese is an exotic language that cannot be understood. Something that is so different that it becomes incomprehensible.

This is an interesting construction of difference - and I'd be curious to hear if this idiom has any sense at all in English or if readers can relate to it in any way. Here, difference comes to stand for something so apart from our ways of understanding the world, that it can no longer be made sense of.

As we learn our languages, with their biases and suggested views of the world, we also learn how to categorize the world. With this problematic idiom, Chinese comes to constructed as something incomprehensible. It is an exotic Other with whom we can have little if any rapport.

Such a viewpoint may often frame the way we come to relate to individuals we identify as belonging to the group. Often times, the incomprehensibility becomes a source of patronizing irony: "It's in Chinese, so you won't understand a thing, but it sounds so funny!". If you've ever seen someone of Asian background for whom English is not the first language trying to explain something, while other English speakers keep laughing at every word, then you know what I'm talking about. It is interesting though to think about how our perception of difference is informed by such an intricate web of cognitive, linguistic and social dynamics.

Photo credits: Steve Snodgrass

When the French need to prove they're French...

2010-01-21T08:09:00.004-07:00

Who decides on your race, ethnicity or nationality? What are the features you need to have in order to be placed in one of these categories? While I am usually more concerned with deconstructing such categories and with showing how unsustainable they are, this post will be slightly different.

A few days ago, TIME published an interesting story on how the French must prove they are French. The idea was that children born abroad to parents that were French nationals are having a hard time getting their nationality recognized by France. If this nationality is not recognized, then you cannot be a French citizen. However, to be recognized as such, you need to be either born out of French parents, or to be born and to have lived in France until you reach adulthood. The TIME story traced the saga of one of the children born outside of France from French parents who were working abroad at the time.

Without getting into the intricacies of the law here, it is interesting to observe the struggle around defining what nationality is, who has the authority to recognize it and by what means it can actually be attained.

Nationality is a notoriously hard to define concept. Back in the 1950s, Karl Deutsch defined it as "a term which may be applied to a people among whom there exists a significant movement toward political, economic, or cultural autonomy” (1953, p. 3). There were obvious problems with this definition, and Deutsch was the first to notice that: just how do you measure that? It is fine to say "a people with a common will to being autonomous", but just what does the 'common will' mean here? Do you count those who are not in favor of that autonomy? Do you count those who do not recognize themselves as belonging to the group in question, but still live with the group?

And even if you come up with seemingly more 'objective' features to define nationality, such as language or common history, you're in trouble again. For instance, language is not as uniform as we want to believe it. In fact, language is better understood as 'languages', where the plural emphasizes the lived diversity of spoken dialects.

However, trying to understand 'what nationality is' is by far less interesting than trying to understand 'how nationality becomes the main principle of categorization' within modern world. Since most people are social beings, they have always lived in groups. What's different in modernity is the nature of the group boundary as well as the importance of the group as an essentializing force acting upon the individual. To the extent that nationality becomes the political principle justifying the organization of the state, nationality also becomes the most important category defining who is in and who is out, who has access to resources, and who has rights or not.

The overlap between nationality and the monopoly of authorized violence (the state) is the most intriguing and the most problematic one. With this overlap, the main authority in placing you within groups resides with the state. The state takes over the possibility of negotiating this placement in everyday life and rigidifies it into a set of rules that establish your location within a system of rights and exchanges.

Photo credits: fdecomite
References: Deutsch, K. (1953) Nationalism and Social Communication. An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality. NY: The Technology Press of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology & John Wiley & Sons, I nc.; London: Chapman & Hall, Ltd.

Gender and Sexuality in Advertising

2010-01-20T16:05:00.005-07:00

The commercial says: "Be smart. Be attractive to the opposite sex!"

What is this commercial about? You have three guesses:
Excel, the gum that whitens your teeth.
Toyota, the car that makes you socially desirable.
London School of Economics, the higher education institution that makes you very employable.

If you guessed "Toyota", then you've got it! Not because there's something intrinsic to Toyota (the car or the brand) that makes you both smart and sexually attractive. But because the advertising/ marketing team has decided that wits and sex cannot possibly go wrong. Who doesn't want to have them both? And if all you need is a car, then hey, I'm in! The political correctness of this commercial - as well as its stupidity, unfortunately the two go hand in hand here - was compelling. It's a little treasure, revealing how intellectual concerns and criticisms about economic issues make their way back into the world of economics and get reincorporated in the economic logic of profit making.

This commercial may be a nice example of what sociologist Anthony Giddens has once called the reflexivity of the modern world:

“The reflexivity of modern social life consists in the fact that social practices are constantly examined and reformed in the light of incoming informatoin about those very practices, thus constitutively altering their character.” (Giddens, 1990, p. 38)

When some consumers get upset or feel left out, the good advertiser knows that all you need is a re-branding, the miracle touch that transforms the gender-oppressive product into a gender-bender, gender-celebratory one.

Buying the product gives you the two things feminists have nagged us about: sexual attractiveness and intelligence. Because we all know how hard it is to be both smart and attractive. Yet, with this product, the two become seamless.

The product is not designed exclusively for men or women. And while it is unfortunately still designed for the heterosexual group (I guess the creative team could not come up with a word that would please everyone... And you have to agree that 'Be attractive to whomever or whatever you are attracted to' does not really sound very neat...), both men and women can benefit from its magical, sexual effects. No more "Mini-Cooper is a car for gays" or "VW Beattle is car for women"... No, sir/mam, this car's magic bestows sexual attractiveness in a (almost) politically correct manner.

Photo credits: DavidHT
References: Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990

Motherhood

2010-01-15T17:51:00.004-07:00

When asked what she is doing, an acquaintance answered she is a mother. And added: "The best thing a woman could be". I had to disagree. As a child, I always wanted to hear my mom say that I am the best thing in her life. But growing up, I started to think that my mom was so much more than just my mom: she was a professional, she was an intellectual, she was a human being whose life extended beyond her role as a mother. My mom took pride in who she was, as a human being. And I am thankful for this, because it taught me that I am first and foremost a person. That biological sex is one of the many aspects of my life, and it needs not be the one that totally defines me.

It's true that being a mother is not easy. Nor does it come naturally. Like all other things humans do, it requires learning. To master it, you need to practice and to be patient. You rely on the existing knowledge, you seek information and you adjust what you find out to fit your view of the world. If anything, one can say that being a mother - better, being a parent - is one of the toughest jobs ever, because there's so much at stake. Not to mention that it is a round the clock, year round job. And that it never really ends...

But being a mother is not "the best thing a woman could be". It may be your personal calling, but that's not a consequence of you being a woman. It is the consequence of a choice you made, a choice stemming from your worldview. Women are not one and the same, defined by their capacity to procreate. Not all women are able or want to have children. Does that mean they will never reach their potential as human beings?

We all try to make our own choices about our lives. But to say that motherhood is the best a woman could be is highly problematic. You may say that motherhood is the best thing you chose to be, because it fulfills you. In such cases, you want to convey to others that you are happy and satisfied with what you have in your life. But one size does not fit all!

Photo credits: seanmcgrath

Negotiating Name-Calling

2009-12-21T18:37:00.006-07:00

Warning: The contents of this post may be offensive. Or maybe not. Maybe it's just my political correctness. I may become 'old school': the kind of people who tried to fight consciously and unconsciously abusive labels and name-calling. But as the fight unfolded, so did a form of resistance that sought to reclaim the labels and to reinvest them with a new, empowering meaning.

The other day, I was looking for an unprotected wireless internet network that I could use for a mobile device. In the middle of a commercial area, the only unprotected network available was "niggerfaggot". I was taken aback: how should I read this? Could I read it in any other way than being utterly offensive? Did I even have the right to 'read' it in the first place, given that it most probably meant to be private? And what was I supposed to do about it? Report it? Connect to it? Ignore it?

I decided not to use the network. But my feelings didn't vanish: uncertainty, anger, wonder. Mostly uncertainty. What was the name's meaning? What was its role? We all name our technologies: my car's name is Sharky, mainly because it resembles a shark from the profile. Sometimes, the name is meant to be a joke. Which in itself doesn't mean the joke may not rest upon ethnic, racial or gender stereotypes.

We are meaning-making creatures: unless we make sense of things, we cannot move on. How am I to make sense of a network named "niggerfaggot"? What sets of criteria should I use to interpret it? Let's pretend for a moment that the name is reclaimed by someone who wants to challenge the mainstream hateful connotations of the words. Does this moment of personal empowerment matter in terms of the system? Would people sense the alleged irony or resistance?

The construction of difference is not something stable or unitary. It remains contextual: to understand, you need to know the context of the name. It also remains fluid over time: today's discrimination may be tomorrow's resistance. But most importantly, it remains historical: you need to understand the way in which the name was used throughout time to mark a particular type of difference.

Photo credits: Kelly Santos

Everyday Inconspicuous Discrimination

2009-11-25T08:26:00.004-07:00

At the lab were I usually get my blood tests done, there is a person of the same nationality as me. We have never been 'properly introduced'. The first time I went to the lab, this person overheard me speaking the language and immediately jumped into the conversation. Like when you travel abroad, and someone overhears you speaking the same language and they immediately feel an imaginary (yet hardly real...) connection. They feel you share something, although you are complete strangers. They want to establish rapport, although given the same situation in your own country, they'd never approach you.

But how can you tell such persons you are really not interested in establishing rapport just because you happen to speak the same language... After all, you so happen to speak this language with some other 29 million people but you do not have a relationship with each and every one of them. Frankly, you probably don't even want that.

Yet, when someone tries to be nice, regardless of the reason, it's hard to be rude. Hard to tell them: You know what, I don't know you and frankly, I'm not really interested in knowing you just because we speak the same language, have the same skin color or drive the same car. How can you tell them that in fact, what drives them to approach you is annoying and offending, because it discriminates? Because it identifies you a priori with something you may not be, feel, share or want? Because it categorizes people, and you don't support that?

Funny thing is, every time this person realizes we speak the same language, they try to be extra kind, to serve us first, to bypass the lineup. All just because we happen to speak the same language. I know this seems insignificant, but let me assure you it is not. It is at the root of many discriminatory practices; and with time, such practices became institutionalized networks of influence and distribution of resources. Their discriminatory core becomes obscured; all it's left is the result: discrimination.

Techie Complaints...

2009-11-23T09:21:00.005-07:00

While women sang, acted in dramas, and played music on radio, there were few women announcers in the early days of broadcasting. This was partly because so many stations were one-man bands where the announcer was also the engineer and manager, and partly because station owners thought men's deeper voices lent more authority to broadcasting (Nash, 2001, p. 45)

Jane Gray became one of the first female broadcasters in Canada. She began by reading poetry in 1924, but was discouraged by her husband, her priest and the radio station owner "who told her that women belonged at home, not on the air" (Nash, 2001, p. 45). By the 1920s- 1930s, she became the most prominent female broadcaster in Canada.

I like these reminders of how women and technology became separated throughout history. It helps me understand why, in spite of the gender equality awareness today, women still feel a world apart from technological processes. I know many women who love using gadgets, but could not be bothered with their inns and outs. Fair enough, they don't care. As long as the tool works, as long as it serves its ends, everything's fine.

But it's not. A tool works in particular ways, for particular purposes, with particular methods. On a general level, not being interested - and not understanding these inns and outs - also means buying into what is already pre-established as a your role vis-a-vis that technology. And, if you choose not to use them (partly because you cannot buy into their pre-established purposes, routines and impositions upon you), you're out of the (social) loop.

Often times, what bothers me most is not being able to do stuff with my computer. I mean, real stuff. Of course, I use it. And I probably know a bit more than just writing a text or putting up a powerpoint presentation. But that's not the stuff I want to do: for instance, I'd really like to be able to write an avatar-creation soft that would allow us to customize avatars beyond gender stereotypes.

But just like early female radio voices, relegated to the status of melodic entertainment but not allowed to enter the serious arena of authoritative broadcasting (read news, politics... serious stuff...), with digital technologies women are often relegated to the status of users. Maybe producers of 'soft content' - blogs, social networking sites, uploading photos, sharing what the kid had for lunch with the extended network, checking the latest health news.

But when I think of software or hardware producers, all I can see in the back of my mind is a male-dominated world. I may be wrong. It may all be just a stereotype. But, just as the radio station owner who told Jane Gray that women belong at home and not on air expressed the prevailing reasoning of his time, my stereotypes feed from a world of imagery constructed by the social norms at play within my social environment. There may be lots of female soft/hardware developers out there, but we often do not think of them as legitimate players in the field. More likely, they're exceptions...Like Sandra Bullock in "The Net"...

References
Nash, K. (2001) The Swashbucklers. The Story of Canada's Battling Broadcasters. McClelland and Stuart Ltd.

Photo Credits
The US National Archives

Consuming Diversity

2009-11-17T07:52:00.007-07:00

One of things I like when visiting a metropolis is its diversity: you can have lunch in Chinatown and dinner in Little Italy. Everywhere you walk, diversity surrounds you. I qualify as a 'diversity-seeker', a person who actively looks for diversity.

But what exactly do I do with this diversity? And how does this inclination of seeking diversity translate in terms of social engagement, social practices and social ties?

Well, according to a recent study published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, diversity-seeking may translate into ... well, consumption of diversity. But from consumption to engagement with difference it's a big step, one that involves challenging your own routines and values, re-adjusting your own expectations and practices, and striving to open yourself up instead of closing yourself down to difference.

Blokland and van Eijk (2009) have studied the residents of a small neighborhood in Rotterdam (the Netherlands), asking some pre-determined questions on their attitude to and engagement with diversity. The neighborhood in question is an ethnically diverse one, recently transitioning from being perceived as a 'bad' neighborhood to being perceived as a 'cool' one, with small shops and fancy restaurants.

Although the study itself remains limited by the pre-determined set of questions that were asked of people (we do not know how people themselves made sense of their own position in those neighborhoods and their own relation to diversity), it is interesting to see that what diversity-seeking often translates into is consumption:

Diversity-seekers frequented restaurants, bars and shops more intensely than other residents, but did not show more (or less) social or political engagement with local neighbourhood affairs than other residents.

The article itself is responding to Richard Florida's now famous discussion of the rise of a new middle-class, the creative class, roughly defined by its involvement in creative industries. The creative class, Florida contends, is more inclined to be tolerant and to seek diversity in their residential locations. But exactly what does 'seeking diversity' means remains an open question: just because one eats Chinese food and drinks Greek ouzo doesn't necessarily make that person more willing to question hi/er belief system and daily practices. Blokland and van Eijk (2009) echo this when they conclude that

a taste for diversity means little to social network diversity. As far as diversity is brought into the practice of daily life, using cmmercial neighborhood facilities is all that diversity -seekers do more... even for those who, whether middle-class or not, come into a mixed neighborhood with openness to diversity, this openness does not translate in more diverse networks (p. 327).

As I said, there are limitations to this study. In fairness, it sheds little light on how people actually relate to diversity, beyond statistically correlating their demographic data with their answers to some pre-determined questions that the authors take as measuring diversity in our lives. In my building, there are at least three or four recognizable ethnic groups. I do not socialize with my neighbors simply because the way I come to make friends involves an intellectual rapprochement, and it's hard to have that interaction with one's neighbors out of various reasons (including the Western attitude towards sharing an urban space). Yet, the study does bring forward an interesting observation: that consumption of diversity does not equal living with diversity.

Photo credits
Puroticorico

References: Blokland, Talja and van Eijk, Gwen(2009) 'Do People Who Like Diversity Practice Diversity in Neighbourhood Life? Neighbourhood Use and the Social Networks of 'Diversity-Seekers' in a Mixed Neighbourhood in the Netherlands', Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 36: 2, 313 — 332

The need to classify

2009-11-13T12:46:00.004-07:00

We classify. Maybe because we want to master the world around us, by putting order into it. Maybe because our brains work with a tree-like structure, placing things into categories and drawing branch like relations between them. We classify, and in this process we buy into the order of things*: we accommodate things within a pre-determined system of beliefs and interests that underlies every classificatory order.

No classification is innocent.

- I'm going to a concert tonight. There's a famous piano-player from Canada playing.
- What's her name?
- Sarah Cheung.
- Oh, she's Asian then.
- She's quite famous in Canada.
- Yes, of Asian origins. Cheung does not sound ... well, how shall i put it, Canadian.
- It may not sound Western.
- Yeah, that's what I meant.

Canadian, Asian, Western... we need to put people in categories. It's not enough to say what a person does or where a person now lives. To properly place that person in our nicely fitting systems of categories, we need to find out "where is s/he coming from". As if, by ticking the little box of birth-place and/ or ethnic group, all of a sudden there's order. And we can breath out, relax and hear the rest of the conversation.

*The Order of Things is the title of one of Michel Foucault's books, dealing with the relation between power and knowledge.

Personal Globalization

2009-11-12T07:40:00.004-07:00

Warning: The following notes smell like middle-class, I-have-it-all, I-can-afford-to-be-cosmopolitan bragging... not my intention, but the smell persists...

The other day, a friend from Romania asked her network on Facebook to vote for a band in Germany. She's dating one of the members of the band, who's also from Turkey. Funny things is, me and this friend met in Turkey... the Westernized, touristic part of Turkey where people go to forget their frustrations and enjoy life by the sea, sipping on a margarita. That part of Turkey where's water in abundance and where everything is white and neat, just like the tourists... What stayed most with me however was the overwhelming feeling I had stepping into the Istanbul bazaar... Istanbul

Istanbul: There was this person I knew from Istanbul whom I actually met in the subway in Budapest. I was talking to a friend of mine who happened to be from Greece, and just like in a comedy of errors, this guy thought we were talking about him. The friendship between a person from Athens and one from Istanbul, as unlikely as it sounds to some ears, was actually a natural... Friendship

Friendship: So was the friendship between this person from Athens and a person from Skopje. Hey, who would have every thought... There's nothing more powerful in destroying ethnic stereotypes and nationalisms than friendships. The three of us formed a trio, always together - also known as "The Triplets"... Triplets

Triplets: Having triplets is no easy job, but for my friends it looks like a piece of cake. You'd think having three kids at once would transform the mom into a perpetual slave to diapers and baby food. Not this mom... She's just amazing, travelling almost every month to Strasbourg and Bruxelles. Hey, the European Union itself is asking for her! So she goes to beautiful Bruxelles, to mingle with all of those politicians and bureaucrats we only get to see on TV... When we visited Bruxelles, my mom told me: "Look, we are now running around in the backyard of Europe". Not quite a 'backyard', but still a huge, white (here comes whiteness again...) meeting place. A place where my former colleague, who so happens to be from Bulgaria, shops for fine chocolates and gateau aux abricots... Bulgaria

Bulgaria: I owe a huge debt to a person from Bulgaria, who once had faith in me and told me "you can do it". So did a person from Hungary and two from Norway: they gave me courage and skillfully guided me through the jungle of social theory. Theory and morality. Just and unjust wars. Social responsibility and peace. Peace

Peace: Peace is exactly what my friend from Kenya hopes and lives for. But when you work in a conflict area, thousands of miles away from your own family, peace seems like a rich-people privilege... My friend tells surreal stories about kidnappings, gun-attacks and violence. And I can only listen, a world away, hoping somehow nothing will touch my friend and the world will get a better place.... Cheers to bourgeois ignorance... I once had a roommate from that area. I remember she had never seen snow in her life before we were in Norway. But then again, neither did my friend from Athens - though it so happens that after we saw snow in Budapest, Athens all of a sudden started getting snow... Blame it on the climate change. Climate change

Climate change: My friend from Costa Rica keeps a calendar of the days left til the Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change. It's a one-person fight: every day, he reminds all his friends of the summit and of climate change. Every day, he asks us to think about what each and every one of us could do to change things. It's like a daily mantra we came to expect: tell us something about climate change. And it works for us, his friends... Friends

Friends: My friends are spread all over the world. And if I'm to add my acquiantances to my network of friends, I get to cover quite a lot... From Asia to Europe, from Australia to North America, from Africa to ... well, what's left? Hm, no friends from the two Poles, though I can still brag with some friends who live above the Polar Circle...

Be polite, or we'll know exactly which group you belong to...

2009-11-09T07:41:00.003-07:00

I went to a see a play the other day. Though marketed as a comedy, the play was in fact quite heavy: troubled relationships, troubled lives and the past haunting the present, delivered to the audience in a funny wrapping. And the thirty-something people in the audience laughed here and there, whenever appropriate. Except one. One person laughed at the... er... wrong times?

You know the type: usually in the middle of the room, this person has obviously got it all wrong. They never laugh when everyone else is laughing; they laugh on their own, as loud as they can, enjoying themselves, oblivious to the annoyance they bring upon you...

What's wrong with them, why don't they get it?

But it's so easy to get annoyed with other people, to see the wrongs in them... If only they would follow the rules... the norms... the conventions...

Because, in the end, that's all it comes down to: rules, norms and conventions. Social rules around what is appropriate behavior during a play. Social cues to be read in the play, in the actors' behavior. Social conventions defining what counts as funny, appropriate, acceptable. And laughing on your own, finding your own relationship to a play and to its meaning, that's just not 'legitimate' with us: you have to laugh when the others are laughing, and you have to clap when the others are clapping...

Have you noticed that nobody - and I mean Nobody! - throws rotten tomatoes at actors anymore? Or that nobody shouts at them "You suck! Find another job!" (only Simon Cowell still has that privilege...)? Oh, that would be funny... I fantasized about that during quite a few performances... but I would never have the courage to break the social rules of legitimate behavior. I missed my chance with some hundred years... ah, the time when audiences chatted during a play (gosh, imagine the disorder!) or when they "hooted and jeered" (Gossett, p. 174).

The unwritten yet powerful rules of politeness and legitimate behavior. We can't do without them (really, don't start throwing rotten tomatoes at people you don't like, ok?). Yet they also hide away the real lines of separation under the veil of 'appropriate behavior'. Separation along class lines or majority/minority lines, when the you just 'know' from a person's reaction that s/he's not 'well-mannered' or 'from here'.

Norms, rules, conventions, symbols, words, ways of talking - all of these form for Pierre Bourdieu the 'symbolic capital' through which we communicate. The currency we use to obtain other people's endorsement, support or even love. They position us in the social hierarchy. Our use of them reveals us as 'insiders' or 'outsiders', as 'powerful' or 'power-hungry'.

"To speak is to appropriate one or other of the expressive styles already constituted in and through usage, and objectively marked by their position in a hierarchy of styles which expresses the hierarchy of corresponding social groups" (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 54)

And it is not only speech - the choice of words, the way you construct a sentence, a.s.o - but also gestures, postures, proximities; we rely on them to communicate with others. They position us in particular nodes of power structures; and we use them as guides in interpreting other people, in positioning them within the social hierarchy.

In fairness, this time I actually enjoyed this lonely audience member's laughter. But most of the times, I resent it. It's hard to move beyond the resentment: it's way easier to study the social norms and their power dimensions than it is to actually live with them. But I suspect the hardship comes from the rather rigid boundary social groups have constructed around them. Any tresspassing of the boundary, of the 'common sense' and 'social expectations' is troubling and distressing. And it's always easier to point to the "Other" as an "Other", than to be suspicious of your own labelling of people.

References:
Bourdieu, P. (1991) Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity Press
Gossett, P. (2006) Divas and Scholars: Perfoming Italian Opera. University of Chicago Press

Will you work for a chick?

2009-11-02T07:38:00.004-07:00

I know someone who didn't get along with their boss. A female boss, I should add. So, when he was fired, he said "I will never work for a chick again". I have to confess this comment stayed with me; its derogatory labeling of women as 'chicks' kept bothering me. Women in power, that's even worse! Chicks in power sounds so much less threatening! Chicks are cute, chicks are innocent, chicks are brainless...

A recent TIME issue was devoted to the the state of women in America today. I didn't know there was no female FBI agent in the early 1970s, when TIME first covered this topic. From the 1970s up to now, there has been quite a change: a quantitative change, with more women taking on jobs as well as claiming decision-making positions, but also a qualitative change, with both men and women complexifying their definition of gender roles and expectations.

There is a gender-related change, no doubt about it. But there must also be a healthy dose of skepticism about the scope and depth of this change. There's little doubt in my mind that there's plenty of men out there, who consciously or not, truly believe there's no way they would 'work for a chick'. Yes, they do need a serious system upgrade; patches won't do. But they are also the fathers raising up the next generation of sons who 'won't work for chicks'. Of sons who won't read 'chick lit' or watch 'chick flicks'.

What on earth is a chick flick anyway? It turns out, the fathers and sons who won't work for 'chicks' also won't study the same 'chick' curriculum. I remember reading about this boys-only school where boys won't be made to read literature targeting girls (translation: anything that deals with nurturing, bonding, raising, problematizing, discussing). 'Cause boys cannot identify with that, they need to identify with trains and cars, with explosions and guns, with the real issues boys face in the real world (yeah, like trains and guns...). As the guy in charge of this school explained, most boys fails school because the curricula is 'girl-oriented'....

Chick flicks, chick lit, chick curricula, and, let's not forget, chicks-in-power. Some things do change, but exactly how deep is this change - and how the change itself is reinterpreted by some groups - remains open for debate. There should be enough reason to stay optimistic, but at the same time, there's plenty of reason to be very cautious.

One of the most important Marxist thinkers, Antonio Gramsci once argued that dominant ideologies - like patriarchy in our case - work through hegemonic processes: they seduce us into consenting to their worldviews as much as they force us. And, when change threatens the worldview that patriarchy proposes, there will always be an attempt to reincorporate that change back into the dominant ideology, by redefining its terms so that they are less threatening. Like calling women chicks. Like re-drawing strong gender lines, where real boys don't cry and definitely don't watch chick flicks. And where chicks themselves reclaim the label for themselves, rejoicing the (questionable and tricky) sexual power a chick has over a man, and calling only on their moms and girlfriends to go out and watch a chick movie (cause you know, my husband doesn't really like chick flicks...).

Photo credits: Dominic

DO NOT remove Ganesh

2009-10-02T15:35:00.004-06:00

Although I'm finding less and less time to write here, the other today I thought of writing something on this rather disturbing news: apparently, a group of 'concerned Christians' wants a statue of the Hindu god Ganesh removed from the Calgary zoo on grounds that the 'good Christians' are finding it offensive.

As a non-concerned - and obviously not a very good - Christian, I'd like the statue to stay where it is. I can only hope the 'good Christians' are not as successful as they have been in getting an Oppenheim sculpture removed from Vancouver. The historical entitlement that such Christian groups have felt in deciding just what should count as art has been a powerful barrier to both aesthetic diversity and critical thinking. But that was during medieval times, the so-called 'dark ages', where darkness came - at least in part - from religious prohibitions to creativity and knowledge.

But when you see the trace of such controlling attempts today, you cannot help but wonder: who on earth are these people, these 'concerned Christians'? I bet you they look exactly like our next door neighbors: you have no idea what boils underneath their kind appearance... But how do they get so intolerant? What twisted interpretation of Christian doctrine makes them unable to move out of the dark ages? And, most importantly, what is it that they do for a living, since they seem to have a lot of free time on their hands to take up - pardon my French - rather stupid religious crusades...

Reproduction, sex, pleasure: defining a woman

2009-08-22T09:28:00.004-06:00

I once saw a birth depicted in a movie. As a child, the lengthy and painful process made a powerful impact on me: I could never understand why anyone in their right mind would subject themselves to this willingly. That memory stayed with me throughout my adolescence: if there was one thing to be avoided, that was pregnancy. There was always abortion, but that in itself was yet another invasive procedure at the time (plus the social stigma associated with it). Not to mention the whole anguish associated with a mere visit to a gynecologist: I always wondered why nobody would come up with less invasive methods for a checkup. I had a hard time believing that, with all the other non-invasive methods of investigation and even surgery, women's reproductive apparatus could only be properly tended to through invasive methods.

In time, I came to realize that I may be part of the problem too: why did I take it as invasive? What was the root of my horror, disgust and fear with gynecological checkups, pregnancy, abortion? Beyond the sheer fear of pain, a disempowering vision of women's sexuality was lurking behind my understanding of 'being a woman'. After all, it's still called the 'reproductive apparatus' - why not the sexual apparatus? Or the pleasure apparatus? And then again, maybe calling it a 'reproductive apparatus' focuses the medical profession only on its 'reproductive' function, stripping it of any other possible understandings.

What's wrong with reproduction, you'd wonder. Isn't it the most wonderful thing on earth, the possibility to bring someting into being? But 'wonderful' is not exactly the word I'd use: it's part of the cycle of life, I do agree with that. But it's as common as breathing: look around, everything gets to reproduce, then die. There's no transcendental mystery to it. It's intriguing how it happens, but it does happen a lot, on a daily basis, and no other species gets to fuss about it so much as humans do.

And then, maybe that's precisely the problem: that all other living creatures are doing it, but then nobody gets to tell them if they 'should' and how it 'must be done'. Nobody gets to define them as the 'reproductive pool' of the species (well, nobody except humans research them, of course).

Better not read history anymore...

2009-07-15T14:39:00.003-06:00

I hope I learned my lesson: never again buy pop-history books. I am sure there are plenty of interesting ones out there, but my last attempt has been - yet again - a complete failure. I am sure it's all my fault: I can no longer behave like a good reader, taking in what the author is giving me. I've increasingly become dissentious and recalcitrant. I pick on every single word and I'm not letting it go.

On the bright side of things, my little encounter with the heavy and colorful tome entitled "Modern History. From the European Age to the new Global Era" (J. M. Roberts) did remind me how important it is we keep on challenging both nationalism and Europeanism. You see, every now and then, immersed in the hundreds of academic books I have to read, I get bored and I loose perspective: who cares about this s...t anyway, I ask myself. Who gives a damn about nationalism or about colonialism or about technological determinism? We're living exciting times, Michael Jackson is dead, global warming has screwed up the weather this year, and the new Harry Potter is out.

But the heavy and colorful tome about "Modern History" gave me back my so-much-needed perspective. Exciting times, indeed, but the way we understand them cannot be divorced from the ways we understand our past. An understanding that means forgetting that today's meaning of words is not the same as 100 years ago. An understanding that also means erasing people, ideas, values from the past, giving us a purified, santized version of a history meant to make us feel proud to be who we are.

Proud, and ignorant. In any case, I got stuck on the very first page - page 11 (of a total of 912 pages), when the author wrote about our age as the age of "truly world history... dominated by the astonishing success of one civilization among many, that of Europe". I crossed out "success" and replaced it with "imposition" and "oppression". All of a sudden, Europe didn't look that astonishing - or that saintly - anymore.

A couple of pages down the road, and my worst fear became true: this history I'm trying to read is a history of 'nations', understood as a priori groups of people, existing from immemorial times. Well, at least since the times of the Roman empire, when we learn that the "Italian under imperial Rome" had the same chances of surviving as an Indian peasant in the 1950s. An Italian under imperial Rome... this must be honey to the ears of nationalists in Italy, it only proves what they have always tried to tell us: that the Roman empire is really an Italian empire. After all, each and every true nationalist dreams about showing the rest of the world that hir nation was once an empire, a true, magnificent, powerful empire. Of course, this mere detail should be enough of a proof for a variety of claims, but we won't bother with this here.

The point is that in spite of giving us bits of uncontextualized and unconnected information - that peasants in medieval France didn't really consider themselves French, and that they were in fact extremely diverse populations - the book shamelessly continues to talk about the French, the English, the Germans.

Oh, how I miss the boring, dull and abstract discussion of modernity as a complex interplay between various economic, political and social processes (Stuart Hall and Bran Gieben, 1992, Formations of Modernity). But granted, it is easier to say that history of modernity is a history of nations than to give readers the blah-blah talk about how modernity should be conceptualized as processes, out of which the creation of nations was an important social engineering practice, equally engaging political will, economic processes, education systems and most importantly, the development of a particular symbolic universe out of which "the construction of a sense of belonging which draws people together into an 'imagined community' and the construction of symbolic boundaries which define who does not belong or is excluded from it" (Hall & Gieben, 1992, p. 6) emerged.

Hey, who got the last paragraph, raise your hand!

The Gendered Care of the Self

2009-06-22T01:04:00.004-06:00

Foucault's discussion of the 'care of the self' has followed the same interesting path from a concern with how we are shaped and constrained by power to how we create our own spaces within the web of power. In his own words, from being 'acted upon' to becoming 'works of arts' of our own making... It's an interesting shift, which seems to me closely related to the whole post-modernist hype emphasizing our own power to act upon our identities, resisting prescribed values and recipes.

What I find really interesting however is the overlap between this scholastic attention to individual power and the neoliberal discourse presenting the individual as all powerful, able to do things and to make things only by virtue of being determined and committed. Think of all those Hollywood movies where the main character succeeds because of her/his determination.

The care of the self, the duty to take care of and to form yourself into a worthy individual becomes an act of will, of determination and of commitment. But it is so rare that we stop and reflect on exactly what are the ideals that we aim for, what are the values informing them, who gets to profit out of those values, and what are the sanctions applied to those who refuse or, for that matter are unable to conform to them.

Someone very close to me has this very nasty habit of reminding me of how I fail to take care of myself. I'm more and more reluctant to use nail polish or hair dye, mostly for health reasons. But in a world of appearances, my refusal to use certain products and do certain things to my body is seen as a failure to take care of myself. I'm no longer properly groomed, as if my colorless nails are not enough. Truth be told, you seldom have any reasons to reflect on the constraining tyranny of 'looking good' when you conform. The act of conforming isn't even perceived as such: you find those shinny, long, red nails so very attractive. As a child, you're fascinated by them; but as a teenager, you learn their sexual power. A power you may start craving for. And you conform. And your nail polish becomes your most pretious ally, helping you climb the social ladder. So what's the big deal?

Try giving it up. Try persuading yourself that your natural nails are just as sexy as your red ones. Try persuading the your partner of that. Just as you have come to terms with it, try facing the your close friends and family. Then, maybe, you'll recognize how powerless we are in the face of the mainstream recipes for taking care of yourself. Moments like this one remind me that Foucault's idea of the care of the self as an empowering act of creation needs more meat to make sense.

Beauty's in the Eyebrow

2009-06-09T16:38:00.004-06:00

Beauty is no longer in the eye of the beholder, but in the shape of your eyebrow... But who decides what shape is to be beautiful? And even more, how do we know what shape is beautiful for women and what shape works for men?

- "My doctor", the cosmetician says, "has really really wild eyebrows. No really, like her eyebrows are twisted, so she needs to use gel on them".
- "Really?"
- "Yes. What about your eyebrows", she says, "they are so thin..."
- "Well, that's how they have always grown. " I feel the panic taking control over me... I always thought my eyebrows were perfect. After all, as the story goes, when I was born, the doctor told my mother 'This baby's gonna be an actress, she has perfect eyebrows. Thin and arched as if they were drawn by an artist'
- "Oh, I thought you plucked them," the cosmetician says trying to mend my broken heart.

But the damage is all done. How will I ever look at my eyebrows again without the fear that their thinness does not mean perfection, but in fact, a lack of it?

- "Yeah, my doctor's eyebrows are really twisted," she jumps back to her previous thought. "She inherited them from her dad. But they are not nice for a woman".

So, not too thin, but not too man-like either - and especially not twisted... What to do, what to do? And what makes some eyebrow shapes more manly? I remember reading somewhere an article about Brooke Shields' eyebrows and how she, against all odds, made thick eyebrows beautiful. Against all odds, since Barbie's eyebrows are thin and precise...

Photo credits: dreamglow

Why is he back to Canada after being away for 34 years?

2009-05-23T14:28:00.004-06:00

"Why is Michael Ignatieff back to Canada after being away for 34 years?"

The new conservative ad attacks the leader of the Liberals in Canada on the basis of his alleged unpatriotism: he has been away from Canada for 34 years! This means, he doesn't care about and he doesn't know 'Canada' anymore. He's a selfish traveler who has returned for opportunistic reasons, and not because he's a patriot.

In the context of Canada, a country where the official rhetoric is one of multiculturalism and welcoming of immigrants, being away from one's country shouldn't be much of a stigma, right?

Wrong, because the reliance on this trope equating 'being away from the nation-state' to 'not being a patriot' betrays more than the imagined worldviews of conservative constituencies. It betrays a pervasive nationalist trope that permeates, in spite of the official policy of multiculturalism, the particular understanding of what Canada is: a nation-state.

In a recent article about cosmopolitanism in Australia, Calcutt et al. argue:

The cosmopolitan willingnessto accommodate otherness is perceived as a betrayal of Australianculture, yet continuing high levels of immigration from diversesources demand cosmopolitan tolerance [...] It is arguedthat, from the cosmopolitan perspective, Australian culturalintegrity remains the intact and dominant host of smaller, harmlessor manageable cultural fragments.

Similarly, the various official discourses about multiculturalism, about respect for diversity and rejection of racism and xenophobia co-exist quite nicely with nationalism: the idea that there is a Canadian nation, characterized by noble values (hey, tolerance, diversity, multiculturalism, social welfare - beat this if you can!), to which the Canadian state belongs. Thus, being a Canadian and feeling proud of it becomes constructed as a positive thing, closing down the intellectual space in which the idea of 'Canadianness' and of a 'nation' can be critically engaged with and deconstructed in terms of both their homogenization (we're all defined by the same metaphysical Canadian essence) and in terms of their problematic ethics (we vs. them ethics).

It is in moments like the Tory ad that these problematic ethics of nationalism emerge: exactly what is wrong with living in several countries? Why is this even raised as an issue which will - allegedly - make people distrust, dislike and ultimately reject the person who has lived 'abroad'?

References:
Calcutt, Woodward, Skrbis (2009) "Conceptualizing Otherness," Journal of Sociology 45(2), 169-186

On Chick Lit, the Feminizing of Stupidity and Gendered Language

2009-04-23T08:53:00.004-06:00

Most of the times, English is a gender-neutral language. Yes, it's true you can say 'chairman' or 'chairwoman', thus betraying your gendered-vision of the job market. But for most of the times, one cannot guess if the noun is feminine, masculine or neutral. Take French for instance: la femme ignorante/ l'homme ignorant. The epithet (adjective) changes with the gender of the noun - and in French, like in other Romance languages, the noun is always gendered.

So, when a man wrote the other day in one of these Romance languages: "I'm new here and I do not know the details of this problem, but I'm asking like a 'stupid' one", he used the feminine for the word stupid, and put it in between inverted commas, to emphasize the fact that it should be read in a connotative manner.

But what is the connotation here? That to ask stupid questions is always a female way of dealing with things? Most probably, yes...

The other day, someone else wrote to say he's reading "chick lit!" I was intrigued... what exactly makes literature 'chick'? Could it be because it is about poultry? Probably not... As I was pondering the 'depth of this comment' (*sarcastic tone*), I took out the newspapers and happened to come across an article about the 'feminization of the school curriculum', where 'poor boys' (*sarcasm, again*) are being forced to read those annoying Jane Austin books... Consequently, due to this 'outrageous discrimination' (*sarcasm, again), the boys' grades were going down the drain, so the professor replaced the 'chick lit' with books where the boys can read - in a manly fashion! - about the adventures of a young boy. Go, boys, go!

I wonder if people ever ponder the mangitude of such words, deeds and feelings. If they ever stop to ask themselves: why am I labeling this 'chick lit' or why is stupidity always bound to be a 'female' attribute?

Here's my biased two cents: in most cases, I suspect telling people that using such a language is derogatory, betraying a sexist and patriarchal vision of the world, will only bring a smile and maybe a polite acknowledgment: "Oh, but I didn't mean it in that way". Maybe you didn't, but then again, you did mean exactly in this way and maye not because you 'intended' it, but because that's the only language you're comfortable with, and you don't give it a second thought. But you should.

Democracy and Ageism

2009-04-14T07:53:00.006-06:00

The students are discontented with the election result. Most of the people who voted for communism are old people, but old people are dying and there are more young people voting now than before. So the result is definitely not true. It's not logical.

The story behind this comment can be found here. In a nutshell, the comment was made by a student in the Eastern European country of Moldova, where there is growing discontent among the youth against the results of elections. Sympathetic or not to the protesters, it is quite interesting to take a closer look at this argument:

Democracy: Exactly what is a democracy? Who should have a right to vote, and what happens in cases when there's a tie? The comment above is interesting in undermining the idea of democracy as the rule of the 'many' - when 'many' is no longer one group, but several, what constructs the difference between the voting groups and what legitimizes the rule of one over the others?

Ageism: just because a voter is older, so s/he may die soon, does this make hir less legitimate to vote? It is interesting how this comment frames the democratic argument within a discriminative discourse against age: those voters who voted for this party are old enough to die soon, but the country belongs to young people, and they would have voted for someone else. I am doubtful that indeed young people have (or would) all voted for one party. But it is interesting how age difference is framed here as an impediment to the realization of the democratic dream.

Gender and Blogging

2009-04-13T09:36:00.005-06:00

The Gender and Technology blog with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society has posted an interesting note on Arab female bloggers:

And while there are certainly well-known female bloggers discussing issues unique to women, many female bloggers in the Arab world face a unique challenge: to speak out about women’s issues often means going against the grain of family and society.
Still, for those who do, blogging is a potentially liberating experience.

Yet, in spite of this, the post proposes that many Arab female bloggers are getting out of the bloggosphere, mainly because blogging is constructed as a 'masculine' (made me wonder what exactly is meant here by 'masculine' - is it a male practice, like in saying 'men are interested in politics'; or is it a practice shaped by particular values associated with masculinity, like in saying 'men are rational'?). A Libyan blogger adds a new layer of explanation: women who blogged were probably reprimanded by family and friends for doing this, so they either opted out of the bloggosphere or restricted their blogs 'by invitation only'.

There's one argument I often hear: that the bloggosphere - or the internet for that matter - is a safe space. As if the 'safety' is a feature of the space. But it is not. What makes a place safe is not its physical characteristics, but the people and social structures inhabiting it.

First, a blogger is never fully safe - the precise location of your averagely tech-skilled blogger is easy to pinpoint. Furthermore, should the blogger subscribe to the many various services that aggregate your digital traces, the blogger's identity may be inadvertently disclosed. Say you have a Facebook account to keep up with your friends. You list your blog there, thinking it's only them who have access to it. But you forgot to set your privacy settings - and a simple search by either name or blog may bring that info up. There are also things you cannot control: say a friend adds you to her blogroll, but instead of using your blog's name, she uses your real name.

But there's yet another way in which the blog is never fully safe: it has to do with the emotional involvement in building your digital life. In many cases, the comments people post may be supportive, pleasant and educational. Yet, in many other cases - and particularly in the case of posts about gender relations - the comments are stereotyped, destructive and even hateful. If you think you're safe from such comments just because nobody knows who you are, that they won't mean anything just because you're blogging from the comfort of your couch or bedroom, you've probably never blogged. The emotional toll such comments may take on you is almost never discussed by researchers. Maybe because it's deemed as a 'feminine' trait?

I think many of our biases in approaching blogging stem from the fact that we get blindsided by its so-called 'empowering potential'. We forget to ask ourselves exactly whom we want (or think of being) empowered and what are we missing because of this assumption. We also tend to think that blogs will collectively contribute to the advance of democratic, liberal and tolerant values. Again, we forget to question the assumption that if people have the means to express themselves, they will participate in the rational public sphere and reveal themselves as critical thinkers. This assumption is closely connected to that of 'understanding via information': let there be information, which will allegedly reveal the 'truth', and there will be mutual understanding, acceptance and ultimately a redress of oppression. Such assumptions are in great need of more deconstruction, particularly in the social construction of new communication technologies.

Photo credits: bohPhoto

Those hairy feminists...

2009-04-08T07:20:00.007-06:00

It seems that everything I'm getting angry about these days relates to gender issues.

The other day for instance, I got mad over a disgusting article in a newspaper in Eastern Europe talking about how feminists are stupid, have a mustache and grow chest hair?!? Do I need to say that the article in question was (allegedly) written by a woman?

Not that I buy into the 'sisterhood' thing, but I find it extremely dangerous that in a country where gender equality was an official state policy, things can change so dramatically against women once equality is no longer publicly heralded (there still are equality of opportunity policies, but nobody - politicians included - truly support it publicly). What does this say about the real mental pictures people hold about 'women'? What does this say about the real shared understandings of what a woman is and where she belongs?

If decades of equality didn't do much to actually change collective gender stereotypes and patriarchal worldviews, exactly what will? (OK, I'm exaggerating a bit: it was a public equality, but not necessarily equality in the private sphere, in the everyday life of households).

But hey, not everything bad happens outside the 'civilized' world (note sarcasm here). As a woman has been killed while jogging in BC, the RCMP representative commented something along these lines: "women have to ensure their safety when they go out jogging in a park"?!?! Excuse me?!?! Again, women have to do something to protect themselves: how about, for a change, society collectively makes an effort to de-legitimize violence against perceived members of a group - be they women, gay, immigrants and so on. How about we live in a society that takes collective responsibility for such gender-motivated (and for that matter, ethnic and race motivated) hate and violence, and ensures that punishment is adequate and that social discussion in the public sphere takes place?

I just finished reading a review of the new movie Polythechique, recreating the massacre of women in Montreal's higher education institution way back in 1989 (incidentally, the same year when communism fell in Eastern Europe, putting an end to the official communist policy of gender equality). I don't think there's anything that can be said here, but then maybe something should be said: what is it that makes some individuals hate the fact that other individuals are to be treated as equals? That they have rights, and that they have the right to say 'no'?

You'd think that after so many years of discussion on gender equality, there will be less and less individuals prone to thinking that men and women are two separate biological entities, defined by their reproductive system and therefore pre-ordained to a given social hierarchy. But I'm looking around and many male friends cannot cope with the reality of an equal female partner. Rationally, they think they're all for equality. But the truth is that they cannot deal with equality. Emotionally, they are not ready for it. They are not ready to be told "no, I'm not gonna sacrifice my life to have a child now" or "no, I'm too busy working, and too tired in the end of the day, so I'm not gonna cook, wash or iron". They are not ready to be told "you have no right to tell me what to do, and if you continue imposing your views on me, I'll dump you".

That's the society we live in: an official policy can accomplish only that much in affecting the everyday life of people. And the irony of it all is that sometimes it's the mothers raising up the boy as the king of the family - and, guaranteed, that boy is gonna grow up emotionally unable to cope with gender equality.

It seems all I do is rant about gender lately. How can I not? I opened the newspaper today, and like everyday in the past week, there's an item there about Michelle Obama's sense of fashion. This one got on my nerves: a cartoon (click here to see it, I'm not sure I can reproduce it here because of damn copyright concerns...) summarizing the collective imaginary of the relation between men and women. I know that a cartoon intends to mock by exaggerating traits - and I think this one does a very good job of showing us what we actually think: clothes are for women, brains are for men... I beg to differ!

Photo credits: nyki_m

You've (Not) Got the Looks!

2009-04-07T09:27:00.003-06:00

Two business men are sitting at the bar, checking two women. One man says to the other: "Women after 30... they look like the lights went down on them". The other replies: "What do you mean?". "Women are glowing before they reach 30, they loose the glow after that", and he smiles nodding at one of the women.

The scene is from Mad Men, the popular TV series about advertising world in 1960s New York. It's set in the 1960s, but it could well be set in the 2000s. After all, that's when a female friend of mine was interviewing for an advertising position but she didn't get it because... well, let's put it this way, she wasn't a Barbie doll. Of course, nobody in the top management would ever admit to that, but they whispered off-the-record that she doesn't have what it takes - the looks.

But I'm not at all surprised, really! You see, I went to school with some of the men now in advertising. I remember a conversation we had - a conversation which only mirrored avant la lettre the world of Mad Men. We were talking about women, and my male colleagues were quick to make the distinction between women you marry and women that are best to be your lovers (in other words, women you cheat your wife with). Just like Don Draper, who kept a lovely wife at home (here's his mistake, according to my colleagues, she was just too beautiful) and a lovely yet fiercely independent lover, my colleagues argued that you marry the not-too-beautiful woman who worships you and waits for you at home with the hot soup on the table. The other ones - whether you are attracted to beauty or wits or both - are best kept outside the home.

Why is that, we asked? It's because you don't want to worry too much about what is at home. You want to come home and be taken care of. If you want the thrill, the fight, that's what lovers are for.

You think this is the past? Think again! This is very much today. And this is going to be the future as well. There will always be lazy and insecure people who want the quick way out. It's always easier to buy into stereotypes and live accordingly. And, truth be told, the society in which we live favors your looks, your appearance, your compliance to mainstream standards of beauty. Yes, there's way more room for contestation - but there's a difference between being tolerated and being seen as part of the 'normal' definition of everyday life.

Home, Sweet Home

2009-04-06T15:41:00.007-06:00

I must have been a Roman in a past life, cause for me, ubi bene ibi patria. Which of course makes me less suited for living in the modern world. For once, I always get annoyed when people assume that 'my place' or 'my home' has to be my place of birth.

Yes, I confess to the huge sin of moving out of my birthplace city and not missing it a bit. And why should I? The world is so big, filled with so many wonders, I couldn't resist it... I know that many people who leave their birthplace cannot escape it: they long for it constantly, romanticizing their life there and missing the trees, the birds, the air, the water - pretty much everything. Or, better said, their memory of this 'everything': the memory of a place that no longer exists, but only in their imagination.

The other day, a friend said "come back home". But I am home. Maybe I'm like a snail: I carry my home with me. Why do homes have to be rooted in a place? For David Morley (2000), the boundary constructing what is 'home' and what is 'elsewhere' is a shifting terrain, particularly in the context of global mobility and information flow. 'Home' came to be associated with a stable place, a stability derived not only from your position in the family structure, but also from the sharing of similar norms. At home, one simply knows. One doesn't have to 'learn' - it is easy to take things for granted, not to challenge the given 'order of things', to paraphrase Foucault's famous book. In my own experience of moving, I found out that the hardest thing to do is to remain open to change: to be willing to learn, to be willing to challenge yourself. One learns street names and meeting points quite quickly; but one has a very hard time getting used to the smells, the tastes and the rules of interaction.

Of course, no discourse loves 'homes' more than nationalism, linking 'nation', 'state' and 'home' in one unitary and powerful symbol, eliciting loyalty and uncritical adoration. The nation is not only a home and a family - it is a magnificent one. It is exceptional, which of course makes your own little pathetic life look more important than it is. In fact, nationalism is an ideology of 'geographical monogamy': you can only have one home in one national place. The promiscuous one is the one living in many places (Agnes Heller quoted in Morley, 2000, p. 41); s/he who has a home everywhere is not credible. How can s/he be loyal if s/he belongs to more than one family?

Yet, there was always someone who has inhabited that promiscuity, who has moved from one home to another. At least in patriarchal societies, that someone was the woman: born into a family, married into another, and sometimes creating a new family altogether. Medieval aristocracy knew this too well: the value of a woman was not only in her dowery, but in the bridges she could create across families. Anthropologists noted this pretty early in the study of non-Western, patriarchal societies: the woman is inahbiting that liminal space, being an "Other" to the family as well as a "Mother" of it. She's perpetuating the family, yet she's also merely a tool for this; it is not her lineage that counts, but that of the man. Like Dalilah, the woman brought into the family remains an "Other", a (needed) intruder who cannot be trusted because her home lies elsewhere.

Photo credits: suika*2009(ins&outs)
References: Morley, D. (2000) Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity. London and New York: Routledge.

When a Woman Marries a Rich Guy...

2009-03-12T10:35:00.006-06:00

A long, long time ago, when newspapers and TV shows were closed off to the comments of the public, we decried their lack of transparency and openness. Now, most online newspapers and television shows allow us, the mighty public, to critically engage with them. In theory, this is a process of democratizing the media, of coming closer to what Jurgen Habermas thought a free public sphere - where people engage each other in a critical, rational manner to discuss political decision-making - should be like.

But, up to now, the main thing I get from reading the comments posted on various news items is a feeling of narrow-mindedness. One may say this is because the access to the public sphere is not free, as Habermas requested. Not everyone participates; and not everyone participates in a critical manner (which I think is Habermas' main fault: assuming the human being is a rational being).

In most of the cases, those news items gathering hundreds and thousands of comments are those touching upon ideological issues: patriotism, women's role in society, politics and politicians, religious beliefs. Today's perusal of online news was no different. The story harvesting most of the public's comments (being surpassed only by a couple of political news) is the one of a woman's conflict with her husband.

Behind the story is the question of a woman's social behavior vis-a-vis men and other women. And because the woman married a rich man, the story is also about class relations, intertwined with gender issues. To summarize, this woman is a well-known pop culture star, an icon of beauty and a role-model for 'women who make it'. But the story is about her marriage to a rich man, with whom she lives for 10 years and has a child. The marriage breaks up, and the ensuing divorce is being carried out in the open: she alleges he wants to destroy her and that he has the means to do it.

No divorce is an easy story - and nowhere is truth harder to find than in such a context. Assigning blame is always complicated: what do we impute each person? Based on what values do we label their interactions as 'wrong', 'faulty' or 'immoral'? How do we think about marriage, what does it mean for us and why? All of these questions are means to probe into the underlying worldviews behind our evaluation of the situation.

Reading the comments people left on this beautiful-woman-divorcing-rich-man story is a saga in itself - and requires a tremendous deconstructive effort to understand just what prescriptions of gender roles transpire out of them. I have a few quick favorites to share:

- the theme of retribution rooted in a class antagonism: she got what she deserved for marrying a rich guy, cause we all know those rich guys are all jerks. She should've known better, but she wanted to enjoy his richness, now she has to pay. He might be a jerk, but hey, that's what rich people are!

- the theme of religious kindness: a loner in the comments section, the religious devout cries out for forgivness and kindness. Yes, she made a mistake, but hey, we're all human, so we should help her out. We should not envy her material well-being and hate her for indulging in it, but we should forgive this to her because all human beings err.

- the theme of retribution rooted in a frustrated feminism: it's all her fault, because she didn't want to make it on her own in life. She relied on a rich man even if she knew being what being a trophy wife implies (namely, her degradation as a woman), so ultimately she gets what she deserves.

- the theme of the oppressed male: she probably married him for his money, because that's why beautiful women marry rich guys. But, with all this gender equality stuff, she's gonna take all his money in court, and the poor guy - a jerk, yeah, but still a guy - will pay the price of being rich and married.

- the theme of retribution rooted in the patriarchal thinking: she is to be blamed, because she married a younger man and because she is really a whore who married for money, not like a real woman who works hard by her man's side to sustain the family. She should protect the child, and not create a public scandal out of the divorce. Let her give up her fancy cars and pay for her child's upbringing instead.

Photo credits: Kevin Dooley

Women and Doctoral Degrees

2009-03-10T11:00:00.004-06:00

As a child, I used to ask my tutor: "Why is it that there are only men composers and writers, but no women?" My tutor was a single woman herself, so she always told me: "It's because women put their families and husbands above their own interests and dreams". For someone who came into being in a place and at a time where women were - at least rhetorically - proclaimed as equal, the depth of this answer was hard to grasp. It was only when I've started my own phd that I came to understand it. It was not only that women were sacrificing themselves for their husband's career, but that women were programmed to feel unfit, failed and potentially replaceable if the household space was not properly taken care of. And, let me tell you: if a phd does anything to you, then it blinds you to the material conditions in which you leave.

My friends have told me: I've never lived in such a messy place before going to grad studies. Or, my favorite: I've never cleaned and baked as much as when writing my thesis. The two might seem mutually exclusive to you, but believe me - they aren't! When you do your graduate studies, your entire life consists of reading, writing and thinking. And these are not activities to be taken lightly: you cannot read for 10 minutes and wash dishes for the next 10. You wake up, and you start the reading-writing-thinking process - before you know it, it's time to go to bed. At the same time, if you are a woman, what better way of procrastinating than fixing the mess - the mess that tortures you, that infiltrates upon you and demands to be considered as a mess - in the household? Hence, the vacuum cleaner comes out, the oven is heated and the little housewife in the female graduate student gets her patriarchal fix: as she contemplates the cleaned house and the proper meal, she feels better. She forgets this was a wasted day when it comes to what her purpose is here: to do her graduate studies.

And it's not only the household, it's her appearance too: "My supervisor prohibited me from doing my nails before I finish writing". The woman inside the graduate student catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror and suddenly feels deeply, irremediably depressed: she could use a facial, a haircut, a new dress...Hey, she could use a fitter body, since the reading-writing-thinking process has transformed her female body into something else, something no longer appealing to the patriarchal gaze. She needs to get rid of that ponytail, of the black bags underneath her eyes, of that sloppy pijamas she's wearing. The thesis calls upon her: no time to waste! But the shared social wisdom warns her of the losses she'll incur if she listens to her thesis calling: the loss of her beauty, the only mask that defines her in the social sphere. It's not the thesis and the wisdom that get one's attention, but the looks. Just like her household, her facade is in danger. And she's caught between the two, unhappy, depressed and unable to move on.

Yeah, I'm ranting. It's true that in the last three decades, the percentage of women getting a doctoral degree has increased considerably. There seems to be a parity between men and women when it comes to doctoral degrees. But the parity, I'd argue, is misleading: its toll on women is higher than its toll on men. And the parity is recent: in 1980, in one of the leading gender equality countries - Norway - there were only 19 women awarded a phd as compared to 168 men. Today, there are 560 women doctors as compared to 684 men. In the US, things look pretty similar: in 1990/1, women's doctoral degrees account for 37% of the total degrees awarded, but the percentage grew to 54% in 2005/6. I'd love to know how these numbers correlate with divorce, single moms, and single women, but I cannot do more research now cause my house is a mess and really, I have to do something about it...

Photo credits: spoon

How the media framed my world today...

2009-03-04T20:30:00.008-07:00

“The whole world is passed through the filter of the culture industry". Thus spoke Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer way back in 1944.

And this is how one particular newspaper framed my world today:

- First, it told me that even if there's proof for being guilty, you can escape by blaming the system. After an inquiry report found that cancer tests in one province in Canada were ridden with failures at all levels, the provincial health minister declared that this is not a reason to point fingers, because there's little value in looking for culprits. Ah, thank God, I really feel relieved knowing responsibility is sooo outdated!

- But it's not as easy as it seems, as the system cannot be blamed under all circumstances. So, you'd better learn the exceptions to the rule: when it comes to 'normal' people under 'normal circumstances', the system can be comfortably blamed for any problems. But then there are those who are 'abnormal' - the mentally ill. In such cases, it's no longer the system, but the individual who's responsible, and needs to be removed from the body of society. This other story sharing the front page with the previous one, details the first day of trial for a gruelsome crime in which one person was beheaded for no apparent reason by another person, who - as it turned out - was schizophrenic. That it was a tragedy, there's no doubt about it. And let me be honest here, I'm talking from the distant position of the one not directly affected by the event. It is from this position that I'm pointing out at how we scapegoat and assign blame without looking for... well, the system!

- Last, but not least, the front-page of the newspaper also taught me that once an immigrant, always an immigrant. And once you have an accent, you'll always be identified first and foremost through it - hey, it just adds a bit of color to the picture. After all, who wants to read that the accused simply answered "Not guilty"? It is: " 'not guilty' with a trace of Chinese accent" that always catches our eye making our representation of the situation sooo much accurate...

Hey, now that I think about it, I learned a lot about the world today!

Bella: A beautiful movie with a strong message

2009-03-03T07:46:00.004-07:00

I found this movie interesting, moving and different in so many ways. As I was browsing the movie's website, I came across this small quote which I think sums up the experience of the movie in a powerful way. Mind you, this is not a movie about inter-ethnic relations - but a movie about love, responsibility and life:

Several years ago, he (singer and actor Eduardo Verástegui) abandoned his career track determined to make films that do not exploit media stereotypes of Latino men as gangbangers, bandidos and Latin lovers. “My goal is to elevate and heal and respect the dignity of Latinos in the media,” the Antonio Banderas look-alike said in a recent phone interview. (from LA Times, December 4, 2007)

Multicultural and multinational groups

2009-03-02T15:08:00.007-07:00

In a recent article, Caron and Laforest (2009) argue that in spite of multiculturalism being more and more on the public agenda, Stephen Harper's understanding of multicultural Canada seems to be molded on the monistic nation-state ideal. The authors introduce the distinction between multicultural and multinational states, where multicultural refers to acknowledging various (ethnic) cultures within the same state, while multinational refers to acknolwedging various national cultures within the same state. So what's the difference between ethnic groups and nations? Following Will Kymlicka's discussion, national cultures are:

associated with substate/minority nationalisms, that is "a regionally concentrated group that conceives of itself as a nation within a larger state (like Scotland in Great Britain or Catalonia in Spain) and mobilizes behind nationalist political parties to achieve recognition of its nationhood, either in the form of an indepdent state or through territorial autonomy within the larger state"." (p. 28).

What interests me in this discussion, as always, is how the nation is being defined, who defines it and on whose behalf.

1. How the nation is being defined: First, I always had this huge problem with the idea of a 'regionally concentrated group' - Exactly what does that mean? To take Quebec only, the population in this region includes various ethnic groups. How are we to think of these people, as eternally an 'Other' to the 'proper' inhabitants of the region? Or maybe it's just my vision: maybe the Quebec nation is not one premised on ethnic differences, but on something else - but then what legitimizes this claim for being a 'group'? What are those features that make people a group/ a nation, in this case? What are the reasons/ values/ features for drawing the line of inclusion in/ exclusion from the 'nation'?

2. Who defines the nation/ group? Is it academics? Is it politicians? Based on what do they draw the boundaries of inclusion/ exclusion? I find it interesting that it is this macro talk, this big-picture-big-labels type of discourse that effectively erases those who do not mobilize behind the national agenda, those who (although members of the ethnic group) might not necessarily care too much or bother with such things or- why not - oppose the whole nationalist apparatus. All of this diversity of opinions, of views disappears - we no longer see it. We see the 'group' mobilizing for 'national' recognition.

3. On whose behalf? I think the inclusion/ exclusion mechanism works to create the subjects of this nation: if you are not part of the 'nation', then you are probably not interpellated by it - and therefore you are not part of it. It is a very circular process within which we are being forced to recognize ourselves - to think of ourselves- as members of the group, and thus we feel compelled by its political agendas.

* * *

That people and leaders may find a powerful ally in nationalism to legitimize their claims, requests or simply their recognition is quite obvious. Yet, just because something is empowering, it doesn't mean that it is morally unproblematic. Or that it derives from some intrinsic features of the group (as opposed, say, to being constructed by political and economic interests). I'm finding I have the same resistance to the ideology of 'race' and 'gender': the more one strives for the recognition of her legitimacy on the basis of one's difference, the more one exposes herself to being objectified by that difference. And this increases the gap between 'Us' and "Them", between our ethics/ morality and theirs, between our interests/ values/ cultures and theirs.

I wonder how you, reader, see this?

References: Caron, J.F., Laforest, G. (2009) "Canada and Multinational Federalism: From the Spirit of 1982 to Stephen Harper's Open Federalism," Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 15(1): 27-55

Ageism, Nudity and Sexuality

2009-02-25T13:05:00.006-07:00

The story goes like this: somewhere in this world, a 65 old woman declares on tv her wish to be a porn star. Everybody laughs at her, including people her age. There's just something 'unnatural' about a 65 old wanting to show her naked body to everyone, and even more troubling, while engaged in sexual intercourse. It's hilarious and yet sad, I'm being told, that such things make it on the public agenda.

But why is it so? What makes us see this woman's quest as illegitimate? What sends those shivers of disgust throughout our young bodies? Is it the fact that she's 65 and her body looks, well, old? Is it the fact that beauty means firm, cellulite-less and wrinkle-less? Is it the fact that at her age, women should be decent grandmas, where decency means 'no sexual allusions whatsoever'?

I was told I'm twisting everything. Do you think it's natural to see an old woman making sex on tv, I was asked. I'm puzzled as to why I shouldn't see it as 'natural'. I'm not a big fan of sex on tv or of any type of porn whatsoever. In fact, I'm quite against it. But this does not mean I cannot question the underlying assumptions and worldviews that make us mock the woman in this story. A while ago, the Globe and Mail ran a series of articles about elders and their life, including their sexual life. The articles did raise the issue of society's expectations and norms for 'proper old age behavior' - and those norms do not include either nudity or sex.

Andrews (2003), writing on the 'calendar ladies' phenomenon, argued that:

"the notion of middle-aged woman as sexless is a 20th century one; the origins of domestic, middle-class womanhood as a negation of sexuality can be traced to constructions of class in the emerging bourgeois culture (as opposed to a working-class or aristocratic culture) in the first half of the 19th century" (2003: 387)

This process consisted in creating a 'class' of 'proper women', differentiated from the 'improper ones', associated with sexuality and promiscuity. Needless to say, this bore heavy racist tones: white-decent women were the respectable mistresses of the house, of the domestic, while black-sexual women were the temptation of the flesh, of lust and of carnal sins. While many of the themes of this discourse of feminity and sexuality have been displaced, sexuality and nudity remain seen as the privilege of the young.

In her analysis, Andrews (2003) believes that the discourse of sexuality has been dislodged throughout the various public culture sites pushing the boundaries of our acceptability. While my theoretical self agrees with her macro view, my everyday life self, confronted with the story above, wonders about the long way from acceptance of (what may be perceived as) alternative art (think the calendar women, for instance) to everyday understanding and evaluation of our own subjectivities and of the others.

References: Andrews, M. (2003) "Calendar Ladies: Popular Culture, Sexuality and the Middle-Class, Middle-Aged Domestic Woman," Sexualities 6(3-4): 385-403
Photo credits: Sukanto Debnath

Feminism and Academic Thought Routine

2009-02-11T10:07:00.003-07:00

In 1991, communication scholar H.M. Newcomb wrote:

Part of the problem here is that in the tradition of the humanities, in their contribution to the human sciences as opposed to the contributions of what we generally know as social sciences, one too often feels compelled to write 'as if' one's claims are stronger or larger than they actually can ever be. It would be wise for many of us to write more tentatively, but editors have a way of suggesting that those who hesitate are lost already, and unworthy of serious consideration (p. 44)

An interesting point, vastly popularized by post-modernism's insistence on the impossibility of definite knowledge or meta-theory. Yet, post-modernism itself needed to 'state' things to be heard out. It's almost as if we need to be determined, harsh and compelling if we are to be heard.

I find it almost impossible not to think of the feminist critique of reason: men state things, women apologize. Men think, women feel. Genevieve Lloyd writes:

The connotations of 'rationality' are of objectivity, abstraction, detachment (p. 165).

And if a statement is objective, detached and logical, then it has to be definite. There's on room for hesitation. And definitely no room for apologies.

In one of my early classes, my feminist professor stopped me abruptly and admonished me: "Stop apologizing", she said. "Stop being so deferential". And believe me, I'm really not a deferential person. If anything, I evaluate my colleagues through this lens: she's not there yet, I say to myself, because she's too deferential to authority.

But exactly what makes an academic authority? What makes good academic work? Back to square one: big guys state things. And, if you do not state them, you are told you should: this will show that your thought becomes valid, that you finally developed your 'own' argument. After all, a phd is all about bringing 'your original contribution' to the field. But how can you bring a contribution if you are hesitant?

Many female academics I know have often complained about the academic routine: it's all about stating things, about egos and authorities, about crucifying the arguments made by others. Never about cooperation and collaboration, always about proving wrong (hey, even constructive criticism may fall into this).

So I hesitate: I like to make statements. But I also see them as provisional. I like to point out the inconsistencies - and 'like' here comes from the fact that I have often moved forward in my thinking exactly by thinking through these inconsistencies. But I also remind myself there's no 'perfect argument' (and yes, it is painful when it comes to your own work...). I'm not sure I want an entirely apologetic academic culture, paralyzed by relativism. If anything, I think this relativism has got to Marxism and almost killed the only strand of critical thinking left in academia. But I am not sure I want an entirely proud academic culture, unable to question itself and to hesitate.

Could this be why I never seem to get published?

References:
Lloyd, G. (2000) "Rationality" in Alison M. Jaggar and Iris Marion Young (Eds.) A Companion to Feminist Philosophy. Blackwell Publishing
Newcomb, H.M. (1991) "The Search for Media Meaning" in Communication Yearbook 14, ed. James A. Anderson. Sage Publications, pp. 40-4

Empowerment: What exactly does that mean?

2009-02-10T07:58:00.003-07:00

Empowerment is the word of the day in the academic setting. People empower themselves in everyday life, by resisting the structures of oppression. Computer users empower themselves by resisting the given softs and hards and creating new things. Consumers empower themselves by choosing not to give in to advertising. Women empower themselves by wearing high-heels and make-up for themselves, and not for the male gaze. And the list goes on and on...

Empowerment is posh. I'm not sure where it came from, but someone should do a genealogy of the concept. I'm willing to bet though that Gramsci's notion of 'hegemony' and Foucault's notion of 'resistance' played quite a big role in boosting 'empowerment. Michel De Certeau famously popularized the idea of 'strategies and tactics' in everyday life power/resistance.

But where resistance has sense, empowerment fails to convince me. In a recent research on gender in virtual worlds, I felt that the empowerment one can take out of being in virtual environments in respect to one's gender identification can - at best- be described as subjective (both in terms of recognition and effects) and limited. Such empowerment hardly has any impact on the material infrastructure or the given norms of the social environment.

In fact, I am not sure 'empowerment' is the right word: just because you take your moment of pride, of liberation, does that empower you? Does that allow you to act differently in the world? Does that give you a say in decision making that affects you?

Say the people in your community suspect for some time the industry next door is bringing a plague to them: cancer. Say they took their precautions, they resisted the industry in every way they could - but the law, the institutional setting places constraints on them. Say the experts find out that indeed the industry next door is polluting and can be linked to the unusual incidence of cancer rates in this commmunity. In my mind, when your life is endangered by man-made things that can be removed (at a cost, I agree), that's quite a huge thing. So, in an ideal world, people have the right to life (and this includes, to me, the right to a healthy life). What happens? Well, nothing so far. We need more reports. We need more info. We are unsure that the link is indeed causal, yadda-yadda, blah, blah. Read the rest for yourself here.

Exactly where is the empowerment? Yes, maybe (but maybe not) you have the means to move out of that community. Maybe you resist the industry next door, you refuse to buy their products, you lobby against their polluting the environment. And yes, you blog, you post comments on stuff, you participate in the town hall meetings, cause - hey! - that's your moment of power, the exercise of your democratic, civil rights. Does that empower you? I must have the wrong definition of empowerment in mind, cause it seems rather futile and helpless to me...

Photo credits: Dominic

When Racism Interpellates...

2009-02-06T07:13:00.004-07:00

Althusser's discussion of ideology is notoriously complicated. He sees ideology as an on-going practice in which we all participate. By 'practice', I think he means our lifestyles, our behaviors, our perceptions of things.

The complicated part comes with his argument of 'interpellation'. Fiske (1991) describes this argument through a parallel: you're on the street, and someone says "Hey, you!". You may turn around - cause you understand what was said. Or you may refuse to turn around, cause you understand but nobody talks to you like that. In either case, you understand the interpellation and you react to it (There's the third scenario, when the words and the speech act mean absoultey nothing to you). In the first case (you turn around), you become complicit. In the second case, you resist. Fiske says this is how ideological interpellation works.

The other day, I've heard the story of an aquaintance from Europe who went to visit her daughter in a Nordic country. Upon her return, she said she was deeply disappointed with the Nordic country: she saw so many drunk women on the streets. She was also unhappy with all the drug-addicts roaming freely on the streets. And, last, but not least, she was upset with the presence of all 'those Somalis' on the streets of the Nordic city, as it looked like the entire Somalia has been moved there.

Yes, I know that racist interpellation too... (Shame one me!) I admit to being interpellated by racism in that way - and responding to it. I went to buy a phone card, and the guy in the booth asked me "Where are you from?" (Well, I was speaking English in a Nordic country). I responded unwillingly (always these questions annoy me), and, without thinking twice, I asked "Well, were are you from?" Now, might look innocent to you, but the guy in the booth was of the different skin color, and at that time, I noticed those things. I noticed them as part of the 'order' or 'muddle' (to use Bateson's famous metalogue "Why do things get in a muddle?") - in other words, my vision was racist, so I assumed a priori a black guy cannot be a nordic.

As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I realized the stupidity of my question, but by then it was too late. The guy was kind enough to smile and respond naturally: "Well, I'm from here". And that was the end of it. But the incident stayed with me. I realized the racism behind my vision: I saw black. And black and Nordic do not match. It is often said that white racism is inconspicuous, because you never think of places or people as being white, and in that case, I think it was true. It never occured to me that I'd question someone's 'belonging' (now, I have problems with belonging as a concept...) based on skin color - but I did it, and I did it through a routine and unconscious vision framing what I saw in the world.

So, I cannot be too tough on the lady who was bothered by the Somalis on the streets of the Nordic city. What bothered her, I asked myself? The same interpellation of racism "Hey, you, there's black in the white place. Black is different. Is not 'from here'. It 'muddles' things". It muddled her expectation of a Nordic city as a white city.

Now, here comes the irony - or the paradox. The lady in question has been married to a black guy. Her daughter, whom she was visiting, is herself black. So, I wonder, how can racism still interpellate the mother in this way, when her own daughter has mostly likely been objectified by racism in the same way?

References: Fiske, J. (1991) Introduction to Communication Studies. 2nd edition, London & NY: Routledge
Photo Credits: Brad Florescu

Made in US and O Canada

2009-02-02T08:26:00.002-07:00

The new economic stimulus package proposed by the US president has been seen in Canada as promoting a 'buy-in-US' protectionism. Not that Canadians are not exhibiting their own nationalism: only recently, a New Brunswick school was ordered to resume singing O Canada each morning. A Very Public Sociologist blogs about the "British Jobs for British Workers" discourse. It looks like we're back to the old national(ist) protectionism!

Or maybe we're not back - maybe 'nationalistic thinking' was always there, lurking in the background and we chose not to see it anymore because of this ultra-optimistic globalization rhetoric. Nationalistic thinking means we think about the world as divided into nations, each nation with its own state - a state meant to protect not the citizens (regardless of their characteristics), but the citizens-as-nationals, the nation. "National pride is commendable, but we can love our country without all standing to attention beneath a loudspeaker," wrote a Globe and Mail reader in today's newspaper.

Well, I never thought any type of national pride is commendable. But as I grew older, I came to realize that societies need mechanisms of cohesion, and rely on nationalism as one such mechanism. I'm still not sure such mechanisms need to encourage the 'in-group' / 'out-group' (or the Us vs. Them) thinking, but I'm still thinking this through. National pride - exactly why is it commendable? That we are all buying into it - in various degrees - has been quite well researched. We know that our 'buying into it' has more to do with the education system and mass media, then with our 'inner needs'. National belonging is not a metaphysical thing - take a child born in the Czech Republic and raise her in the US, and she'll be an 'American' (Caveat: of course,the child has to look like the mainstream definition of the nation, otherwise she'll be rejected by the group for the visible difference).

We do buy into nationalism, and we do think there are good versions of it (like the reader quoted above). We seem to believe that nationalism is benign if kept within reasonable limits. Exactly what those limits are vary of course with the circumstances: economic crisis in sight? Well, depending on whose 'national' you are, American nationalism is bad and Canadian nationalism is good...

Nationalism is not benign, but always problematic. Nationalism is a discourse: it divides the world into nations. It creates the boundary of 'our-group', links it to a territory and a state, and ascribes it an objective reality. Like any discourse which creates boundaries of difference - racism, ethnocentrism, sexism etc. - it is problematic. And particularly dangerous in the ways in which it creates different ethics for the in-group vs. the out-group. And particularly dangerous in the ways in which it becomes normalized as a method of legitimizing actions and behaviors in our everyday life interpretation of the world.

Stereotypes on the Radio

2009-01-28T08:29:00.003-07:00

Just listened to one of those highly stereotyped and utterly embarrassing radio moments. Each morning, the radio station I tune in pays the bills of listeners who sent them the respective bills. Today, they picked up a woman with a 'strange' name. Well, strange according to an English-speaking environment because it sounded Russian. So, the anchors keep on rambling about the name; they're not able to pronounce it, so they masquerade what sounds to them as a Russian accent. And they have a very good time with this: hey, it's not everyday you get to make fun of a Russian name.

Now, here's the irony: the lady calls in. "Oh, you have a Russian name" the achors are quick to confirm their stereotypes, anticipating some fun in the air with the name. But, surprise, surprise, the lady answers in a perfect English: "Yes, it is" and she goes on minding her own business. "At least we got the accent right", the anchors reply.

Duh?!? Well, in fact, they didn't; but that's another issue. The point is that, in spite of living in a multicultural society (hey, it's North America!), there still is a mainstream expectation that if your name sounds 'different' (read not Anglo-Saxon), you're not from 'here'. I've blogged in the past about the relation between 'language' and 'dialects' and 'accents' - a relation specific to the age of nationalism, where language becomes homogenized, swallows all other similar languages under the label 'dialects' and, thanks to an intellectual elite, becomes canonical, with a set of 'proper' speaking/ writing rules. It is against this background that accents become problematic (even if it seems they are just funny), as they betray the speaker as an "other", an "alien" in the corpus of the nation.

Photo credits: aloshbennett

Constructing Cultural Boundaries in Academia

2009-01-23T08:45:00.004-07:00

The main paradigm in the study of communication remains undoubtedly Western. Perspectives from African (Asante, 1980) and Asian (Chen, 2006; Miike, 2006) worldviews have challenged the underlying Eurocentrism of the values embedded in the main paradigm: control, individualism, linearity, static view.

Chen (2006) talks about the alternative epistemology offered by Asian worldviews. He first goes about the identify the 'essence of Asian Communications', then discusses the 'yin and yang of Asian communication studies' and finally he proposes the 'Tao of Asian communications'.

I have a Western worldview, and that explains why yin and yang, Tao say very little to me. My sense of them is mostly from secondary literature and not first-hand experience. It is easy to mistrust them, because the information I get from such literature is not part of lived communal experience, which heightens my tendency to resist them.

Take for instance the concept of 'harmony' Chen describes as a main feature of "Asian communication". Exactly what is harmony? And how is harmony achieved? I have had this discussion over and over again: there are no human communities which do not have power structures and do not perpetrate violence to some. So, I'm suspicious of what 'harmony', 'whose' harmony, etc. Chen writes harmony is internalized by each individual as an understanding that we all are part of the whole, and this gives us a certain responsibility. Harmony implies "hard work, respect for learning, honesty, self-reliance, self-discipline, and the fulfillment of obligations", as well as "an orderly society, respect for authority, consensus, and official accountability" (2006, p. 298). Well, doesn't it sound exactly like the discourse legitimizing the feudal system? To each their place, that they have to accept.

We are talking generalities here. I am sure there are people living in Asia who are neither accepting of the social order and the status quo, nor eager to self-discipline themselves. Maybe the trouble is the application of 'harmony'. I'm also thinking the silent half of the Western world - women - have been recuperated by feminist literature as the workers of harmony in their family. 'Harmony', as a female value, may not be a visible value in the Western system of thought (hold on, what about feminism?) - but then, just because women were silenced, does it mean their values are not 'Western'? Oh, and to complicate matters: what am I say, there are no 'women' as a homogeneous category! ...

As I go on and read Chen's arguments, I'm resisting the idea of an 'essence of Asian communication'. I take his points that alternative worldviews have different normative universes; but I'm also thinking we do a gross generalization when we speak like this. Chen also recognizes the dilemma: "With such a vast geography and a great variety of cultures, and religions, it is extremely risky to generalize the essence of a so-called 'Asian communication'. However, in addition to the internal variety of Asian communication, evident similarities as well exist in it" (2006, p. 296).

And here is where he makes a choice, a choice based on his values and purposes: to talk about the 'essence of an Asian worldview', even when such an enterprise is problematic because of the internal diversity. Chen has a project - and it is that project which prompts him to draw the boundaries. He criticizes the imperialism of Western knowledge, and to do so, he needs to do two things: 1). to generalize Western knowledge; 2). to oppose to it an equally powerful generalization: Asian knowledge. As much as this is the source of empowerment (the source of the forcefulness and legitimacy of the argument), it is also the demise. The problem lies also in the underlying visions for generalizations: what are the criteria we choose to generalize? Based on what?

We always choose to see the similarities across some borders, across some geographic and linguistic boundaries, and not others. Indeed, the power structures in which we live prohibit us from this: there is a power (im)balance - or rather a power negotiation - between those boundaries Chen invokes (and thus constructs). But the reverse - there is always a reverse - is that we end up placing essentialized entities in opposition and conflict (going precisely against what Chen calls the 'essence' of Asian communication, namely achieving harmony).

References:
Asante, M.K. (1980) "Intercultural Communication: An Inquiry into Research Directions." In D. Nimmo (Ed.) Communication Yearbook 4: 401-410
Chen, G.M. (2006) "Asian Communication Studies: What and Where to Now," The Review of Communication, 6(4): 295-311
Miike, Y. (2006) "Non-Western Theory in Western Research? An asiacentric Agenda for Asian Communication Studies," The Review of Communication 6(1/2): 4-31

On First Ladies and First Gentlemen

2009-01-22T12:19:00.006-07:00

What wore Michelle Obama? Is she:

...ready to assume the role of both first lady and fashion icon... (Globe and Mail, January 21, 2009)

Oh, the joys of being a woman... of having the world looking up to you just to check out the latest fashion trends... That must truly be what all women in the world aspire to: to reach the top and be scrutinized for their sense of fashion.

Quite on the contrary, those boring men whose wives - by some paradoxical twist of nature - end up at the top, are making it clear that they are of "no interest" to the public, as Joachim Sauer (none other than Angela Merker's spouse) pointed out. In fact, Mr. Sauer is an university professor (again, what's Michelle Obama's profession... hm, my brain didn't bother to register that rather useless information, after all, she is a woman...), who - imagine that!:

... is so allergic to publicity that he didn't bother to attend her inauguration in 2005. While she was being sworn in as arguably the world's most powerful woman, he was hunkered down in his chemistry lab in Berlin, though government officials insist he did tune in to watch the ceremony on television. (Washington Post, June 2007)

When in public, Mr. Sauer is 'entertaining' the wives of other EU leaders. Der Spiegel online didn't give us any details of Mr. Sauer's sense of fashion (is he a true fashion icon? is he setting the standards of male fashion in Europe?), but it did emphasize that Mr. Sauer was "an authority in the field of quantum chemistry".

Go, girls, go!

Mixed Feelings

2009-01-20T08:04:00.004-07:00

Half of my social network is cheering for Obama. The other half may be paying attention, but goes on with daily life. I, for one, feel ambiguous. Across the ocean, people are feeling less emotional: an historic moment, yes (between us, the owl of Minerva only flies at dusk). But lots of skepticism over the future. In some parts of the world, people left their worries behind to rejoice and fill themselves with hope.

The King is dead. Long live the King!

I've heard this one a lot of times. And history teaches us to be cautious: rulers are embedded in a complex decision-making mechanism which does shape (yet without determining it fully) their vision and action.

I guess what scares me most is the need for mass catharsis. I've always been afraid of masses, and for good reasons, I think. Unlike the dominant scholastic paradigm of 'people's empowerment', I tend to notice the irrational, the violence and the collective hatred that masses for me encapsulate (yes, I do realize it is debatable, but this doesn't make it any less valid). That has been my experience, and the source of my worldview.

Today, I cannot escape my skepticism. Today, I feel the need for critical thinking. Maybe it's because I feel intellectuals should not be enrolled by politics - they should stand against it, warning of its propagandistic and manipulative strategies. This summer, in Barcelona, Philip Schlesinger gave an interesting talk entitled "Intellectuals and the Politics of Cultural Policy", which he summarizes in under a minute here (source: MediaResearch):

Nannies, Mothers and the Career Woman

2009-01-19T14:45:00.004-07:00

A long, long time ago (one can say in a different lifetime), a psycho-therapist (pun intended) told me a woman needs to make a choice: either be a submissive Barbie-doll, fully embracing her duties of mother and wife - or be a career woman, with unshaved legs (no kiddin', that's what he said) and no sensitivity whatsoever (cause we all know that true women have to be sensitive).

I still remember pondering the dichotomy: either this, or that. But that's the trouble with dichotomies: if you let yourself caught into them, then you miss the point they insinuate altogether. The whole context of talking about women as either good mothers/ wives or careerists is a patriarchal one, which tries to control women's bodies (and souls) by prescribing categories in which they 'have to' fit.

A few nights ago, the either/or insinuated itself in an after-dinner conversation, when the mother said: "I don't know about this woman and how she takes care of her child! They have a nanny, you know, cause she's all traveling and she's just never there. And the father is working to, so probably he's quite busy. So the child is all alone with the nanny". So what if the child is left with the nanny? Shall I remind you that nannies are a long, long, long tradition (at least for the Western feudal aristocracy)? Shall I mention that in non-Western settings (and even Western ones) the women of the family - or of the community for that matter - all take tuns in taking care of children?

I simply do not understand why is it that only women are supposed to take care of children - what about the men? Are they exempt from changing the diapers, making soup and answering the endless 'why' questions? Me, I was raised by one mom, so I have to confess how hard it is to understand (and accept) having more than one mom: I remember reading a book written by a guy born in Africa, who talked about the many mothers he had. The whole concept of motherhood was different, yet the child turned out to be just fine and grew up into an inspiring author.

I look at how some of my friends have distributed the burden of child-raising within the family, enrolling not only mother, sister and father, but also neighbors and friends - and it all makes sense! Why wouldn't you rely on cooperation? Yes, you want the right people around your child, but where did this nonsense about a woman needing to give up everything to take care of the child come from?

An acquaintance made the point crystal clear. Reconnecting after many years, I congratulated her on her career. She responded: "Oh, not that much of a career. Unfortunately, when one has children, one has to make sacrifices. But it's all worth it!" Is it? Hold on, I meant, why is it a matter of making sacrifices? At the risk of sounding rather naive, I'd say it is like this because women agree to see child-raising in terms of either being at home/ or being a career woman. I know of women who choose to stay at home, and to work from home at the same time. I know of women who just gave birth, and are traveling across the world. I know of women who went on to pursue their masters and to change the world, while the children are left with their extended families. And I remember my mom was a career woman, something I took great pride in as I grew up.

I've seen that having a child needs not be about giving yourself up. It needs not be about 'making sacrifices'. And it simply does not mean that the child has to be raised by the biological mother: father, siblings, grandparents, and yes, nannies, are there to help out. And there's no harm with that. No harm, unless you cannot escape the patriarchal rule of motherhood: either a good mom and wife, or a career woman...

Photo credits: kevindooley

Do Nationalists Have a Sense of Humor? Check Out Entropa...

2009-01-15T16:00:00.002-07:00

I'd say no, nationalists have no sense of humor when it comes to that abstraction they hold so dear to their heart: the nation. An abstraction, true, but with a hard-to-deny material presence: the nation-state. So, whenever they come across stereotyped images of their beloved nation - negative images, I should stress - nationalists get even more obnoxious. They complain 'the Others' don't understand them (well, how could they, given that they are 'the Others'). They find themselves collectively humiliated and feel the bitter taste of what they do to 'Others': they're lumped together under a label they dislike.

Entropa does just that. A modern art exhibition recently opened in the heart of Europe, it dares to depict Bulgaria through an installation of oriental toilets, France as a continuous complainer, Italy as a collective soccer-obsession and so on, and so forth. Oh, and it dares to skip the UK altogether... My oh my, what courage. Of course, the Bulgarian government gets all offended and presses for an official reaction. Ironically, in so doing, they only play within the boundaries of the stereotype: an oriental (put your Western glasses on, and read 'backward' - apologies for perpetuating the violence yet again) 'nation' with conservative views. Constipated? (Disclaimer: I don't mean to pick on any one in particular, but these are the actors of this story...).

I, for one, would like to congratulate the artist for his resistance, for his wit and for his humor.

'Sculpture, and art more generally, can speak where words fail.

A Work of Art

2009-01-13T15:29:00.005-07:00

Some time ago, I saw an exquisite dance show. "Shadows of Light" is an amazing representation - it left me with the feeling that the dancer controls each and every muscle - better, every cell! - in his body. But during the show, I also felt alienated, unable to comprehend and to relate. In the section in question, the artist dances on the stage; on the background, a multimedia projection follows the naked artist dancing on a white bed. In the beginning, there's only a tiny spot of blood staining the whiteness. As he continues dancing, the spot grows and grows, covering his entire body until everything turns red.

My first reaction was "yuck!". I checked with my party, and they said "yuck" too. I had a feeling the dance had something to do with menstruation. But I couldn't escape the feeling that it also had to do something with giving birth. And maybe also violence.

The juxtaposition of menstruation and violence upsets me. I've written here about menstruation - moon time - as a celebration of being. Trying to make sense of my own reaction, I thought that maybe it is the patriarchal underpinning of seeing menstruation as pain, as violence, as blooding that annoyed me. I cannot say for sure, because all such rationalizations are meant to partly make sense of something embodied and pre-cognitive. My rejection or shut down can also be caused by the association of this blood with giving birth. I've always wondered why giving birth must be so painful and violent way - and couldn't find any reasonable answer.

I also thought the whole dance could have had something to do with the myth of androgyny; hence the juxtaposition of a male body covered in blood. While I'm writing this, it hits me that I saw similar images on campus, paraded by the anti-abortion coalition. They were bloody, but that was not what impressed me: the idea of someone else deciding over my body and telling me I cannot have an abortion, that was the most disgusting part. Whenever I see such bloody, fetus-like images, all I can think about is patriarchal control over women's bodies.

I might have missed the significance of the blood. Maybe - as with other forms of modern art - I missed the whole point of the art project: it's not about meaning-making, but about feelings. Maybe it was meant to unsettle and upset. Maybe it was meant to provoke. When art breaks away with convention, frustrating our expectations and violating our sense of 'normalcy', "the audience is frequently offended or outraged by the way an artist has broken artistic convention, in just the same way as they would be if the artist had been socially impolite to them" (Fiske, 1990, p. 15).

But I was left wondering about the things that make us 'click'. A good work of art is, for me, one that leaves you wondering. And even if I didn't like the blood, I am still wondering...

References: Fiske, J. (1990) Introduction to Communication Studies. 2nd Edition (2004) London, New York: Routledge.

Photo credits: Bogdan I. Stanciu

Phone Etiquette

2009-01-07T08:17:00.004-07:00

Julian Hopkins blogs about being introduced to phone etiquette in Malaysia:

What things were very different for me here?
• Not introducing oneself at the beginning of the call.
• Asking for personal information – what was ‘Mrs Wong’ doing, what’s her handphone number.
• The lack of polite niceties, such as ‘Hello’, ‘please’ and – in particular – putting down the phone without saying goodbye! That one took a lot of getting used to I eventually learnt that conversations usually end with the end of the matter in hand, and a word such as ‘OK’, or ‘Thanks’.

Initially, I would find myself being distinctly disgruntled at such calls, in particular the perceived rudeness of (for me) cutting off a conversation without proper disengagement. I learnt to deal with it, and now often don’t say goodbye, depending on who I’m talking to...

From my own experience, I know it is hard to deal with such 'differences' in everyday life. Since such etiquettes are tied with notions of politeness and proper behavior, the easiest way of dealing with them is to label them as 'improper'/ 'rude'. I remember several instances when I was annoyed - if not irritated - with people on the other side of the phone: some seemed (to me) to 'demand' things. Others would never say 'hi' or 'goodbye'. And yet others sounded harsh and insisted on something that I had already explained was not the case or was not possible.

Writing this post, I'm thinking how all these emotions and reactions have to do with that complex boundary which delimits the norm from the difference. The 'right' ways of doing things are definitely embodied, connected to our emotions as well as our chemical responses (yeah, the rush of adrenaline when I feel pissed off). This only makes the feeling that 'this is right/ wrong' stronger: after all, we 'feel' it.

The hardest thing when moving from one context of practices to another is understanding that yours are by no means the best or the righteous. But I feel there is quite a gap between rational understanding and enacting the consequences of realizing this in everyday life encounters.

I want more hunks on TV!

2008-12-29T12:37:00.005-07:00

I would really really like to see more hunks on the TV screen. You know the shows:

Me, I'd want less of the 90/60/90 babes and more of the those good-looking guys. I mean, why are most of the TV shows' hosts male, old and ugly yet surrounded by those perfectly build Barbie dolls - especially on RAI channels? And why is it that only curvaceous women dance lasciviously? I'd like to see some hot men with really tight t-shirts and leather-pants lasciviously dancing on the little screen... Then - maybe, just maybe - I'd become a TV fan...

Man! I feel like a woman!

2008-12-28T14:36:00.003-07:00

But not the way Shania intended it. I am violently forced to think of myself as a woman, defined through my body shape and my reproductive abilities. I'm visiting my hometown, where patriarchy still rules. In the first ten minutes of being there, two taxi drivers have already managed to remind me that patriarchal systems are all about oppression. It's the middle of the night, and two women head towards their car, passing by the two taxi drivers. There's no man around the two women, and this absence makes them vulnerable. The taxi drivers start making comments about the women. It doesn't matter to them the women could potentially be paying customers: they are - first and foremost - women. In other words, a prey. A prey to be verbally abused.

This was my entry into my hometown. At first, I felt angry. I'm no longer used to being labeled a 'woman'. I am no longer used with being approached and related to as a 'sexual object'. But can I start a fight with two men in the middle of the night in a parking lot? Maybe I should. Maybe I should tell them to shovel it. But I don't. The men know I won't. And even if I dare say something, they know they hold the upper hand: they'll only start calling me names and become more and more vulgar, reminding me of what I am to them - a sexual object. They'll laugh and make obscene sexual signs to me. And, if I piss them off too much, they may even cross that thin barrier that holds them back and start tossing me around like a toy. Because they can. So I swallow my anger, and I am left empty and humiliated. The only thing that could have saved me would have been the presence of a man around me. Then, and only then, the taxi drivers would show respect - but not to me, to the man to whom I (even if temporarily) belong.

I've been thinking about this incident for the past couple of days. I have been thinking about how this oppressive system rests upon the internalization of our gendered roles. And upon the humiliation of women. Anger giving way to powerlessness giving way to frustration giving way to humiliation giving way to numbness and conformity. There's nothing more powerful than taking away one's dignity. If the only way I am to preserve my dignity is to have a man of my own, then I'll do it, just as the other women before me have done it. That's what I'll tell my daughter, just as my mother has told me. Not because I want her to internalize the patriarchal rules of the game: but because I want her to be safe, to protect her from humiliation. Isn't this a vicious circle?

Gendered Dilemmas

2008-12-27T13:21:00.003-07:00

"I never wanted a girl", the woman sitting in front of me said tonight. "I really, really wanted a boy, cause you know, boys are so great". "Oh, yes, indeed, my husband wanted a boy very much too... Now we have a girl... I guess it's OK with me, but he really really wanted a boy".

As I watched the group of women talking about their pregnancies in one corner, and the group of men talking business in the other corner of the room, I had to ask myself just what kind of mentalities we still carry on into the future. Of course, many things have changed: men are now entering the kitchen, that forbidden territory their mothers inhabited. And occasionally the women are now able to tell them "bring this plate to the dining table, dear". But deep down inside, what do we think of each other? "Boys will always be boys," somebody once told me. "No matter what, when it comes down to gender, the truth is that one is born a boy or a girl, with certain features. A boy will always want the car, a girl will always go for the baby-doll". Will he or she? And is it the boy or the little girl who 'wants' the toy, or is it us, the parents, pushing the car onto the boy, and the pinkie thing onto the girl.

A few days ago I bought some Tylenol for my friend's baby. At the drug store, I was faced with a dilemma: do I buy the cherry-flavored Tylenol with a baby-girl on the box, or do I buy the blueberry-flavored one with a baby-boy on it? Guess what? I bought the 'girlish' one for a baby-girl... I just couldn't help it, I guess... Call it stereotype, call it a habit. The truth is, we routinely divide babies into gender. Each year, I bring a photo of a baby and show it to my students. I tell a third of them the baby is a girl, a third the baby is a boy and I do not provide a gender for the third group. Then I ask them to pick toys for the baby. And guess what! They always pick a doll for the girl and a car for the boy. The third group feels handicapped: they want to know what sex the baby is before they go on with the task. The Baby X experiment never ceases to amaze me; it puzzles my students and yes, it does provoke a vivid discussion. Truth be told, we go on reproducing the same gendered thinking in our everyday life choices and small talks.

And truth be told, the men still congregate in one corner, talking cars, business and sports. The girls are fluent in the language of the household, pregnancy and infant diseases. And why is it that almost all women find all babies 'beautiful', 'cute' and 'absolutely lovely'? It's almost as if there's an unspoken wall that, sooner or later, will divide the party into two genders. Of course, it is heterosexual men and women that fit this picture, but hey, there was no one challenging the gender categories at the party tonight... Maybe just me, an awkward fit, uninterested in the household talk, wishing the kids will stop screaming and not finding them that gorgeous after all...

Seavey, C.A., Katz, P.A., Zalk, S.R. (1975) "Baby X" Sex Roles, 1(2): 103-109

Anthropological Fieldwork in Refugee Camps

2008-12-22T14:29:00.002-07:00

Culture Matters has an interview with Dr. Alice Corbet about fieldwork in refugee camps. We know so little about the everyday life of these camps that such accounts are indeed necessary to raise awareness. I especially appreciated the point made about the reasoning behind food rations: avoid making people 'want to stay' in camps. The underlying assumptions of such reasoning are so far away from humanitarian principles and so hypocritical, that it is hard to believe we do nothing to challenge them:

"Dr Corbet has spent over five years performing research with the Sahrawis in refugee camps along the Moroccan/Algerian border. She has faced cholera epidemics, landmines, dehydration, flying sand scorpions, faced slavery and even assisted in births and deaths in the most unsterile of conditions."

Untitled, Unlabeled

2008-12-18T08:44:00.005-07:00

Sabina was a painter. It so happens that she lived in communist Czech republic. The fact that we are born in a place is an accident. We could easily be born somewhere else. Of course, being born somewhere carries some heaviness with it: the places and people you grow accustomed to, the social rules of interaction you come to know, the food your taste buds come to enjoy, all mark you. But they don't define you. It's what you make out of everything around you that comes to define you. And that's the trick most people fail to grasp. It is so much easier to simply stamp people with your ignorant stereotype of what they - a woman, a Czech, an Asian - allegedly should be like, then to take on the burden of paying attention to the individual.

When the Soviet troops invaded Prague, Sabina left for the West. But in the eyes of many Westerners, she was defined by her upbringing in a communist Czech environment. Sabina was first and foremost an oddity, an Other from another country and political regime. When her first exhibition opened in Germany, everyone assumed it was about living under communism. When she protested that, she wasn't heard:

"Do you mean that modern art isn't persecuted under Communism?
'My enemy is kitsch, not Communism!' she replied infuriated.
From that time on, she began to insert mystifications in her biography, and by the time she got to America, she even managed to hide the fact that she was Czech. It was all merely a desparate attempt to escape the kitsch that people wanted to make of her life"

(Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 1984/ 2008, First Olive Edition, p. 275)

Should adultery be a crime? In South Korea, it is...

2008-12-17T13:11:00.005-07:00

BBC invites readers to post their ideas on the topic "Should adultery be a crime?" ... no, really, should it? In my ignorance, I had no idea that in fact adultery is considered a crime in South Korea. As BBC reported today about the case of a Korean actress accused and sentenced for adultery, I was forced to ruminate - once again - over how gender remains a deeply political matter.

As I teenager, I had read the Bible and was astonished to find that people stoned to death women who had committed adultery. Not that I agreed to adultery, but to stone someone over sleeping around could hardly justify killing them. As a teenager, I've also discovered that it is much more easier for men to get away with sleeping around than for women. One only has to think of poor Madame Bovary... But no, Lord Byron could get away with all his love poems to his many lovers...

But to find out that in some places people may still be imprisoned for this... I mean, this is hard to swallow. I ran a quick search to see where adultery is a crime. According to Wikipedia's entry on adultery, here's where sleeping around can get you in trouble:
- the United States (some states, like Maryland, Pennsylvania and Michigan)
- South Korea
- Taiwan
- Iran
- Pakistan
- Uganda (until 2007)
- In 2004, Turkey tried to pass a law incriminating adultery.

The trick is that sometimes it's the woman who gets punished for adultery, while men are free to do whatever they want. I guess some things are the same as in Madame Bovary's time... Some people point out that adultery should be punished because it is immoral or because it undermines the morals of a society. Well, so do politics and capitalism, but when did morals ever stopped politicians or businesses? Hell, when did it stop priests and churches of all kinds? And exactly who is supposed to be the guardian of morality, who decides what is 'good' and 'bad', and based on what?

Hey, adultery is not the best thing in life. And yes, when your partner is guilty of it, you're not the happiest person on earth. But that's a private matter, not a public one. Each case is different. And each case is differently resolved by the people involved. But not by the state. Not by the police. Not by the court system. Yes, I can see in some situations, when the man decides to leave, the wife remains powerless and sometimes broke. So, there is a need for some mechanisms of support, but this does not in any way call for criminalization of adultery.

Photo credits: Smirnoff Sweetie

HBC: A Survivor, A Nation Builder... of White Canada

2008-12-17T09:08:00.004-07:00

I like Ivaylo Ditchev's essays "Machines of Forgetting" because it brilliantly summarizes the violence of remembering and forgetting: "to forget is not only a ritual, a cultural or psychological strategy: we find it at the core of the political. In fact, to act politically means to liberate the present from the past" (Ditchev, 1998).

As I read today's newspaper, an article in the Business section hit me as a machine of institutionalized forgetting. The article in question, entitled "Feting HBC: A survivor, a nation builder" celebrates the wonderful things the company HBC (Hudon's Bay Company) did for the creation of Canada. In fact, the author writes, "Among commercial entreprises, HBC is a very rare thing, a unique thing, a company that turned itself into a country".

Right. And there's more: "In its first hundred years, HBC established a network of forts that would become Canada's most strategic outposts, and some of its principal cities, including Winnipeg and Edmonton". Indeed, how wonderful it is that such enlightened capitalists chose to come and establish wonderful cities in the virgin land of Canada.

Oh, wait a second, I have heard the story before. Was it "Heart of Darkness" that talked about the enlightened capitalists who were modernizing the indigenous savages in Africa, all of course in a very peaceful way? Or was it by destroying lifestyels, taking control of resources and turning people into slaves... gosh, I cannot remember... (sarcasm!). But I do seem to remember I couldn't sleep for weeks after reading the book... I wonder why...

Back to HBC, the cherry on top of the cake was this: not only did HBC helped create a country (presumably out of a virgin territory), but the photo accompanying the article is that of aboriginal people (hey my whitness kicks in, I think they may be Inuits but can't be sure) smiling submissively at the white man, with the caption: "The Hudson's Bay Company's incorporation is the No.1 business event in Canadian history...". No other mention of Aboriginals in the article. But of course, why would you talk about them when it comes to the wonderful act of creation of the Canadian state?

I'm not an expert in Canadian history. But I do have to wonder what the Hudson's Bay's story erases from history. Not to mention, how it played into the subsequent power arrangements between colonists and indigenous populations (hey, Canada wasn't a virgin land after all).

My blog is both male and female!

2008-12-17T07:58:00.004-07:00

As I was browsing through Autist's Corner latest posts, I saw one which quickly caught my attention: a software able to identify the gender of the writer. This is not something new, and I could probably guess what type of things the software is trained to identify and classify as male/ female. But I still find it amusing that, in these times and ages, people would sit down and occupy their time with creating this type of software. Ah, the desire to classify, to order things, to create order out of chaos...

Anyway, if interested, I'm 57.9% female and 42.1% male. This says a lot about me, really... (no, it doesn't!). You can also analyze what type of blog you have: this one's an INTP category = the thinkers... (Oh, yes, this does indeed make my heart burst with pride... finally, recognized as such... - in case you had doubts, this is meant to be sarcastic!). And, fair enough, the soft goes on to recommend some books I can purchase from Amazon... Oh, so this has been just a marketing stunt?

A Wonderful Little Book Called Embroideries: A Glimpse behind the "Muslim" Curtain

2008-12-15T08:37:00.006-07:00

As other Westerners, all I know about the "Muslim" world is filtered through the Western lens. Yet, I've also learned that it is hard to claim one "Muslim" world, just as it is hard to claim one "Western" lens. Though I do not know much about the historical background of non-Western countries, I've always made a point in telling people that it is hard to think of one "Muslim" world or of one "Muslim" religion. All I had was to do was think of say Christianity, or the debates over what makes the "West" to know that there is no such thing as 'one version' of things or 'one religion'.

Yesterday I found this little gem of a book by Marjane Satrapi. Some of you might know her as the author of the book behind the movie Persepolis, which got a lot of attention back in 2007 at the Cannes Festival. The little book I got yesterday was Embroideries - as I said, a wonderful little book opening up the big black box of women's lives in Iran. And not just any type of lives, but their sexual lives.

It is a delightful easy read which leaves one wondering about the 'difference' between those all too often invoked lines of difference between West and East, North and South, Christian and Muslim, and so on and so forth. An autobiographic book, Embroideries is the story of many stories told by women about their sexual lives, about the power relations which structure their lives but also offer them the opportunity to bypass them and make their own choices.

Here's a short interview (in French) with Marjan Satrapi about her life and writing such a political (yet banal) novel about women's lives in Iran:

Photo credits: Random House

Creating Reality: What's the deal with Greece these days?

2008-12-11T07:38:00.005-07:00

Don't know if you've heard, but there have been quite violent street clashes in Greece over the last days. I've read it first on BBC and I had a hard time understand what was going on. Why were the youths on the street? In what context did the police shoot to death one teenager? The story talked about 'groups of youth' and 'anarchists' and 'rioters', and I couldn't get my heard around that. A few hours later, a friend over in Europe spoke of the situation using yet another label: it's the hooligans. Mind you, I've heard about 'hooligans' taking the streets before in many politically sensitive and complex situations (May 1968 Paris is a good case in point). But it did make me realize that:

1. I do not have all the context information I need to understand what is going on in Greece. I mean, why were young people on the street anyway? Are we talking about 10-20 young people coming from a soccer game, filled with adrenaline and ready to pick a fight? Are we talking about an organized protest? Who were the supporters, why were they on the streets, how come the police resorted to violence? Just what is the context?

2. What I do know from media are in fact labels: depending on my political orientation, 'anarchists' can be good or bad, welcomed or threatening. The label implies an explanation of the situation by appealing to that complicit information between the media outlet and the readers - or, better said, that complicit information that the media outlet assumes readers to share with it, by virtue of reading/ listening to that outlet.

I wish there would be more about the social context in Greece, about the frustration with transnational capitalism, with the 'Great Powers' and their control in/of the European Union, with the economic situation, with the centralist state and so on and so forth. I wish there would be more context about xenophobia in Greece. As a friend put so rightly, should there have been a Roma people killed by the police, nobody would complain about the interventionist, totalitarian police or state. Double standards.

I do not know what's my position. But I do know it is hard to take a position because things are more complex than the media depicts them. And I do know that there are things to which I will agree and support, and things to which I cannot adhere. In the end, it all comes down to one's ethical commitments.

Photo credits: ethanlindsay

Nationalism made in Canada

2008-12-05T07:44:00.008-07:00

I'm not an expert on the Canadian political or electoral system. I don't quite understand the fuss over the current political situation. The summary goes like this: Conservative leader and prime-minister Stephen Harper asked for elections. Got them, and Conservatives got a minority government with 143 seats in Parliament (House of Commons). The liberals got only 77, the socialists got 37 and the Bloc Quebecois got some 49 seats.

Now all is good, until the opposition parties decide to form a coalition. No big deal here, I've seen coalition governments in other parts of the world, and there's nothing illegitimate about them. But in Canada, it seems there is. No party can ever claim to fully represent the "NATION", simply because in any elections a number of people do not vote (so they are not represented in any sense). People also vote for different parties, which is, again, the whole point of a DEMOCRACY.

In the case of a minority government or a coalition government, what we have is partial representation. If politicians would really take into consideration their voters, then they would always create governments where all elected parties would be represented - then we can start talking of a fully representative government.

But politicians only care about their own agendas. And politicians know that the citizens are easily manipulable. Politics is not about what is right, it is about who frames the problem more eloquently. And nationalism has always been a very successful way to legitimize speakers: "I am speaking on behalf of the nation". The claim, as shallow as it is (who can speak for millions of people with millions of different opinions?), mobilizes, galvanizes and in/excites.

I've been told over and over again that there is no nationalism in Canada. But all it takes is for opposition parties to form a coalition, and nationalism is being brought back to the public agenda by the prime minister itself: this coalition, he basically says, is treason. It is undermining national unity. The Bloc Quebecois is separatist, and therefore the coalition is going against the Canadian nation. The coalition undermines the will of the Canadian nation, who voted for the Conservative government.

Well, excuse me, since when 46% of a 59% voter turnaround represents the will of the nation??? That politicians have always used nationalism is no news. But one needs to ask exactly where do all those journalists, intellectuals and everyday life people buying into this discourse stand? Is nationalism solely a political question? It is solely a top-down ideology which mesmerizes the masses?

The other day, someone I know received a propaganda email circulated at work which asked people (informally referred to as 'friends and family') to resist the separatists and the undemocratic coalition. What does it say about people spreading such propaganda by forwarding it to their address list? Let me spell it out: a coalition is not undemocratic. It represents a percentage of the votes. And it is legitimate. And let me ask, once again: how is it possible that nationalism holds such a power over our minds? How can we not see beyond the 'national unity' talk? Why do we buy into it? And what does that say about nationalism as a meaning-making process?

Photo credits: Got the photo from AngryFrenchGuy's blog. Don't know more about its copyright...

No Ingles aqui: When does language become political?

2008-12-04T08:03:00.004-07:00

One of the best things about cities is the bistro. That small bistro, squeezed between a shoes shop and a travel agent, loudly featuring a lunch menu for 9Euros. Last week, we had lunch in one such bistro in a fairly touristic area of Barcelona, right by Placa d'Espanya. I do not speak Spanish (at least not enough to understand the various types of food available), so I asked for an English-language menu. "No Ingles aqui!", the waiter shouted harshly and left the table. Shocked more with the body-language than the actual statement, we started talking. But we didn't speak English among ourselves, and as soon as the waiter in question noticed that, he came back with a big polite smile on his face and handed us the English-language menu.

There's something so 19th century about this... The debate on English as an imperialistic language aside, I kept on wondering just what makes us turn language into a political issue in everyday life encounters. I know we cannot fully divorce this from the power context, but I've always wondered about the irony of trying so hard to create and distinguish languages from each other instead of rejoicing the benefit of being able to communicate. When I was young, I couldn't possibly understand why Serbs and Croats would insist on building two separate languages - Serb and Croat, out of the Serbian-Croat linguistic field. I remember the mix of envy and amazement I felt when my Armenian friend started negotiating the price with the Bulgarian merchant in Plovidv. I couldn't do that; but here were people who shared one or two words or sentences, who were communicating.

But in modern times, language is not about communication. It is about politics. Language authorizes speakers: to be listened to, to be respected, one has to talk in the right language. The clever politician talks in Catalan in Barcelona, in Spanish in Madrid and in English in London. We frown upon 'improper' uses of language. Just what the heck is 'whadda' or 'kinda'? We insist on the 'right' way of talking, on constructing grammatically correct sentences, and, occasionally, on avoiding the use of imported words. Au revoir email, bien venue courrier electronique. Language sets symbolic boundaries and symbolic borders. It differentiates between 'us' and 'them', between 'natives' and 'second-language' speakers. We are taught, from an early age, that our language defines us. That's where you can find the metaphysical connection to your soul: in the language which makes you more profound, more sensitive, more poetic or more rational (depending on the national rhetoric...). Romanian-born and raised writer Emil Cioran refused to speak and write in Romanian after he set his residence in Paris. Maybe he instinctively knew what Bourdieu had to say about language: that it not only confers symbolic power. It becomes the locus of such power, and thus a political issue.

Top 100 Anthropology Blogs

2008-12-04T07:15:00.003-07:00

A list of anthropology blogs complied by OnlineUniversities.com.

I cannot read Bertrand Russell...

2008-11-14T07:17:00.009-07:00

Since I`m travelling these days, I took Betrand Russell`s book Authority and the Individual (1949) from my bookshelf. I was anticipating an interesting read about the underpinning philosophical debates of social cohesion. So, imagine my disappointment when I got stuck right on the second page.

I have found this a lot with philosophical debates: the generalized statement of how things are. If you do not accept it, if you have some problems with the premises, to use the language of logic, then you`re in trouble.

"In all social animals, including Man, co-operation and the unity of a group has some foundation in instinct. This is most complete in ants and bees, which apparently are never tempted to anti-social actions and never deviate from devotion to the nest or the hive" (p. 12).

What`s going on in this paragraph? The first sentence frames the context: social animals; it further places man (really, what`s meant is human beings...) under the category of "social animals" and it calls for understanding this category in terms of "instincts".

Now, exactly what counts as co-operation and unity is debatable: critical approaches to science (read Donna Harraway for instance) have shown that we tend to see the animal kingdom through the lenses of our social vision. For a long time, the dominant paradigm in seeing sexual practices in the animal kingdom was that of male domination and possession of the passive female. Feminism comes into the picture: scientists start noticing that females are not passive, but in fact make active choices and select male partners.

My point: what we see as unity or co-operation depends on what we take as such. To what extent these are based in instinct - that`s again highly debatable. Instinct is a very good black box: it provides an explanation for a behavior without really explaining it. These things aside, I am not sure ants and bees never ever exhibit anti-social behavior. Nor am I sure their lifestyle is a `devotion` to the hive. Even the use of the word `temptation` here is highly important: anti-social behavior is like a temptation, a deviation from the norm. So really, social cohesion is the norm. Yet, the parallel with the animal kingdom has a specific function in the text: it frames the explanation of social phenomena within the `natural world`, a world which cannot be challenged because, well, it`s natural!

It shouldn`t come as a suprise that a few pages later, Russell furthers the argument of social cohesion and unity are first and foremost visible in the family, the basic social cell (as Lenin was fond to say...). And, like any good nationalist, he continues:

"Social cohesion, which started with loyalty to a group reinforced by the fear of enemies, grew by processes partly natural and partly deliberate until it reached the vast conglomerations that we now know as nations" (p. 16)

The teleological development of human communities, from families to tribes, from tribes to clans, from clans to nations... starting from the premise of cooperation and unity as an instinct. The argument of the need to be part of the whole, the need to belong to a group is very suspicious to me (not to mention there`s no clear reason as to why nations and not, say, cities... but I`m not going to cover this side of the critique here). There`s a functionalist explanation of it which I find important, but incomplete. I`m still not sure cooperation and unity are a natural necessity - nor am I sure what exactly that means. The more I think about it, the more confused I am about "nature" and "instincts".

What counts as art? Context!

2008-11-13T20:14:00.005-07:00

As I walked my way through the museum, I realized I didn`t seem to value the pre-columbian or the chinese exhibits in the same way I did with the Western Renaissance paintings collection. Some time ago, I had the exact same feeling while visiting a North American Native museum: I just couldn`t bring myself to seeing the beauty, the catharsis and the meaning of the collection. It was dry. All I saw were everyday life items, like shoes or belts or wooden sticks, and all of them said to me `mundane`, `banal`, `pragmatic`.

Every now and then, I would notice the craftmanship. I would spend time to look at the detail, trying to appreciate the exquisit skills needed to saw or to sculpt, and yet it was not art to my eyes. A recent conversation made me realized the hierarhical categorization system shaping my vision of things: craftmanship was not art. And why is that, I wonder? Is it the fact that I`ve been taught to draw a very fine distinction between art, High Art, and crafts, folklore? It is not sophisticated enough, I was told. Hierarchies of class were no doubt at play in classifying something as art or craft. Art belongs to museums. Crafts to fairs. Art is exhibited. Crafts are an amusement.

And hierarchies of class melt into nationalism: folk is what the proto-nation does, what the nation`s intellectuals collect and catalogue to prove the persistance of the nation. But art is what the established-nation seeks to create so that it reclaims its place in the cultural Pantheon of the world.

But that was not all: beyond class and national(ist) histories, or maybe together with them, there was something else at play in my classification of something as art versus craft. I looked at the China porcelain and I remembered the ones we had at home. Chinese porcelain was very popular with our grandparents`generation (again, as a sign of social status). I thought of the Western context in which Chinese porcelain became an important signifier of social class, of being of part of aristocracy. But beyond this, there was nothing else I could use or rely upon in making sense of the symbols, the images and the colors.

Show me any Western Renaissance painting or sculpture and I`ll easily talk about it for hours... I`ll see the links with the previous works, with the historical context, with the religious context, with the everyday life context... And that`s the key: CONTEXT. Today, as I looked at the pre-columbian exhibits, I could not make any sense of them. I could not place them within a context, within a network of relations that provides meaning. The only experience they could provide was the one accesible through my senses, and that was not satisfactory enough. I guess I should start reading more about non-Western histories before I can claim myself an intellectual...

Photo Credits: Mark Cartwright

Where cats undermine the tyranny of nationalist grammar...

2008-10-30T09:31:00.003-06:00

Ever thought about why some of us get so annal when it comes to grammar, accents and 'speaking correctly'? After all, who decides what the correct way of spelling or saying something is? And according to what criteria?

There's a nationalist (and sometimes racist) history to this, and it has to do with classifying the 'correct' version against all other versions labeled as 'deviation' or, in this case, 'mistakes' (for instance, making the distinction between language and dialects; or between speaking without/ with an accent). I'll give you a few examples of what I mean by that:

1. The notorious legal attempts in France to prohibit the use of non-french words in public arenas. While it is certainly a form of protest against the hegemony of English language, it is equally a nationalist form of linking who you are, what you can think/say to a language. Au revoir 'email', bien venue 'courrier electronique'.

2. Purging a Romance language of its Slavic elements as part of a state project: take Romania, an Eastern European country priding itself with being 'an oasis of Latin in a Slavic sea'. While Romanian is a Latin language, the influence of the multicultural composition of the region has certainly shaped the language too. After some 50 years of being under the influence of Soviet Russia, which also shaped language too, nationalist intellectuals decided to purge the language of (at least some) Slavic influence by changing the spelling of certain words. And, from one day to another, students in Romania found themselves policed by an army of professors, teachers and intellectuals ready to penalize them if they misspelled a word... So, who decides on the right spelling?

3. Closer to the North American context, a particular type of English predominantly associated with African American or Latino groups has become more and more popular, primarily through music (think rap) and other forms of popular culture. Try writing like this in school...

Well, the only point of this long post was to introduce a short movie about Cats undermining the norms of grammar, spelling, and 'proper speech'. This may well be a literacy project, but in my mind it is a very good example of how everyday life people challenge the dominance of nationally defined languages. An interesting art project which, for me, opens up the space of thinking about language as an organic, everyday life process which disregards national or racial boundaries:

Autism and Difference: Thinking about Another Way of Thinking

2008-10-27T20:38:00.002-06:00

I have just followed CBC's documentary "Positively Autistic". I'm posting here a video made by a person living with autism about her way of thinking, communicating and interacting with the world. I have to say it is hard to understand and think about what the author has to say, and most probably the difficulty does come from being educated and thus shaped by a particular idea of what reason, thinking and social interaction is supposed to be. The author wonderfully explains this in the second part of the video, where she translates things for us.

Othering techniques

2008-10-21T12:58:00.007-06:00

I have recently asked an audience about the 'ethnic' core of the Canadian nation. Someone whispered: Aboriginals? Right - and wrong! It is certainly an acceptable, politically correct answer - if one does not look at the (not so distant) history of Canada. Then, along with various historians, one realizes the white, Anglo-Saxon, Christian core of the Canadian nation - a vision of an 'imagined community' which has lasted (is still there?) in policy as well as in everyday life stereotypes for a long time (think for instance of the Chinese head-tax).

As I browsed the newspaper, I was reminded not only of this conversation, but also of Billig's argument that the nation is flagged (and thus re-constructed) on a daily basis, in the little things the audience is supposed to share in common. The front page article entitled "Resignation paralyzes residential schools commission" is interestingly placed under the banner "Native Issues" (paper-based version). The long-standing and thorny issue of the residential schools - and the ensuing Apology offered by the Canadian prime minister to Canadian Aboriginals - has a thick context, involving not only institutionalized oppression but more importantly, a longstanding Canadian social imaginary in which the Aboriginal is an internal Other, to which the nation is intrinsically connected. Partly guilt, partly desire to assimilate the Other (the present reminder that this is not 'our' country, but that 'we' have only recently made this territory our own, drawn our national boundaries and took posession of it).

The article presents the problems within the Indian (?!?) Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which culminated yesterday with the demision of the chair. Apparently, the issue at stake is the positioning of the commission as merely truth-seeker (institutionalizing a particular 'official' memory) or as also reconciliatory (which, in my understanding, brings along a new set of responsibilities on both parties for the healing process). Regardless of what is truly at stake, the way in which the story is framed says a lot about who is the intended audience of this article, what is the relation between Canada and Aboriginals. It is definitely not about people's experience (and indeed a previous analysis of Canadian media coverage of the Apology that I undertook together with a colleague of mine shows that Aboriginals are positioned primarily as political subjects, with the result of re-colonizing the group as a national subject and re-assessing its demands, needs and contexts within the frame of the nation-state). It is definitely not about 'our' experience - but about 'theirs', the "Native issues". Most importantly, the article is not about the implications of truth vs. reconciliation, but about decision-making and authority lines.

A good literature review on globalization and culture

2008-10-21T09:08:00.004-06:00

If you're looking for a good lit review on globalization and culture, clarifying some of the major trends in looking at the relation between globalization and nations/ nation-states/ national cultures, then you may try Kevin Archer, M. Martin Bosman, M. Mark Amen and Ella Schimdt (Eds.) (2008) Cultures of Globalization. Coherence, Hybridity, Contestation London & New York: Routledge.

In the introduction, the editors lay out the contemporary debates on globalization and culture, which they divide into two major lines of argument:

- culture-of-globalization (also called 'cultural turn'), focusing primarily on how culture is being co-opted and deployed by capitalism.
- globalization-of-culture (also called 'global turn'), focusing on the flow of cultural products (images, symbols, lifestyles etc.) via mass media.

The final recommendation - which I find quite pertinent for anyone interested in the alleged dissolution of the nation-state under global pressures - is to move away from simply looking at the economic and cultural dynamics on macro scale, and to rather focus on "the response - or impact - side of globalization; that is to say, how it is actually understood, interpreted, employed, reshaped, resisted, or even rejected by the targeted consumers of its material and symbolic content" (pp. 9-10).

Michel Maffesoli on the postmodern society

2008-10-20T15:30:00.003-06:00

In french, but worth listening to. I've discovered Maffesoli via Mike Featherstone's work, which makes me wonder about some of the academic lines of conceptualizing a subject like globalization.

The difficulty of talking about nationalism

2008-10-20T11:09:00.005-06:00

I'm having a hard time talking to an audience about nationalism. I've tried to understand what's the source of my problems: is it that I don't explain what nationalism is? Is it that my explanation and the audience's understanding of nationalism differ? Is it because my expectations on what 'understanding' should be like are misplaced?

Truth be said, defining nationalism is a problem in itself. Worldview, discourse, ideology - exactly what are these terms supposed to refer to? A way of thinking about the world. Seems rather weak, I agree. Bourdieu offers a nice - though still problematic - way of talking about 'isms': a web of statements defining the core term (in this case, 'nation'). So, nationalism could be understood as the words, phrases, ideas, meanings etc. which explain what the nation is.

The problem with this definition is that it doesn't provide any further qualification to the core concept - the nation. In other words, what is it about the nation that makes it so important. We don't talk about house-ism or table-ism; we do talk about national-ism and liberal-ism and race-ism. So what sets these core concepts of nation, liberal, race etc. apart? What is it about them that puts them at the center of a web of statements dealing with their nature, features, implications etc.

The pair nation-nationalism refers to a particular type of community, which has political and moral implications. To put it differently, they talk about groups of people, providing an explanation for a particular form of political organization, which subsequently has moral implications. We still miss here the territorial aspect: this political form of organization predicates a 'natural' link between people, territory and political organization.

I'm not sure how one can easily talk to an audience about these things... Part of the problem seems to stem from their abstraction. To talk about discourses, worldviews, ideologies requires you to talk about the relation between language and reality, a relation which we take for granted in social constructivist oriented environments, but which is far from being a common-sensical view. Trying to define nationalism - or to explain the idea of the nation - requires a discussion of how concepts referring to the social world are necessarily constructed through language, as well as through a material infrastructure which derives from the way in which we come to talk and think about the social world. Grrrr, things are getting complicated again...

Race and Biology

2008-10-02T08:06:00.005-06:00

The last issue (vol.5 issue 38) of Social Studies of Science deals with the complex and disturbing question of race, genetics and disease. I've only went through the introduction to this issue, as I've been ambivalent on this topic and I found others shared my ambivalence. I do understand that, on a macro scale, populations are shaped by their environment: we've seen this from the time white colonists brought the flu to North-American indigenous populations. We can still say today that African Americans, on the whole (and whatever that means), are more affected by certain conditions and diseases. There's also the possibility of tracing down where your genome 'comes from' spatially - like Whoopi Goldberg did.

I'm trying to say that there are certain benefits from thinking of race in terms of genetics. But I'm a scholar (and from the vantage point of not being directly affected by any of those alleged benefits) and I feel deeply disturbed by the whole context of this linkage: genetics is intrinsically linked to racism. Let me put it differently: genetics, searching for the biological proof of races, was developed for - and cannot be easily divorced from - racist purposes. You might say we no longer believe in the hierarchy of races and that our purposes driving our genetics research have nothing to do with eugenics, with creating the 'pure' breed. Maybe. The point is we might no longer believe in the hierarchy of races, but when we believe in - and look for - the biological proof of racial difference, we classify people into races in a way that cannot be contested (not to mention that this way of looking at things already frames the reality that we subsequently investigate). We start from saying each race has particular health problems - and mind you, what the hell does it mean a 'race' in the first place, how does it homogenize us etc. From different races-different health, we come to different diets, different education, different medication... and before you know it, we have DIFFERENCE written all over the place. Now, I'm not sure this is different from racism...

Photo credits: MASH DNArt

Stuart Hall: Why does 'difference' matter?

2008-10-01T10:13:00.004-06:00

As I was re-reading Stuart Hall's work on representation and identity, I came across this discussion about why does 'difference' matter*. It is a rather theoretical discussion, tracing some of the academic reflections on the role of difference in the ways we make sense of things.

Hall outlines four arguments about difference which have something to say about how we perceive and relate to difference.

1. The linguistic argument (made by Ferdinand de Saussure) that difference is central to making sense of things. We make sense of 'white' by comparing it to 'black', of 'male' by comparing it with 'female' and so on. Yet, this way of thinking emphasizes the opposites - there is a range of grays in between black and white. One may choose to see how black turns gradually into white; or one may choose to see black versus white. I'm talking about colors; but one can easily talk about race, ethnicity, gender in the same way.

2. The dialogic argument (made by Mikhail Bakhtin) that difference is central to understanding and communication, because we communicate and make sense of things in a dialogue with another person. It is by participating in this dialogue and by confronting the different ideas we have that we make sense of things. So, difference is seen here as central to understanding.

3. The anthropological argument (made by DuGay and Hall; Mary Douglas) that each culture gives meaning by classifying things. Classification means emphasizing the difference; better said: when you classify something, there is a principle according to which you decide it is different or similar - so it has to go into this class of things (e.g. chairs) or the other (e.g. dogs). The idea here is that difference is created by those principles of classifications (those things which you highlight as central to defining a chair versus a dog). Though it make look like those principles are 'natural', 'logical' and 'immutable', they are in fact social conventions (heavy to swallow, but i won't go into details here).

4. The psychoanalytical argument (made by Sigmund Freud) that the "Other" - different from Self - is central to how we form our identities. Psychologists and psychoanalysts like to point out how, as children, we come to understand ourselves as different from the others in a painful way (e.g. we throw things on the floor and they don't come up to us and thus we form a sense of the Self as different from the world). Furthermore, for Freud, this process of defining the Self from the Other has - yeah, i know, big surprise - a sexual dimension. The drill is well-known: Oedipian complexes for men and identification with mothers for women etc. etc.

I found these insights really interesting: they do influence the general framework through which we come to think of difference - whether racial, gendered or simply the difference between a chair and a dog...

* Stuart Hall (1997) "The Spectacle of the 'Other'," in Stuart Hall (Ed.) Representations. Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage and The Open University, pp. 223-279

Photo credits: KaCey97007

Racializing crime

2008-09-28T09:58:00.004-06:00

I wanted to write about stay-at-home moms and patriarchal systems, but A very Public Sociologist posted an interesting anecdote about racializing crime. I have heard the story of particular ethnic or racial groups being seen as the criminal elements in particular areas over and over again.

The one I know most about is that of Roma in Eastern Europe, which are often being portrayed by the media as organized crime outside and above the law. As a child, I was often told to stay away from Roma, because they are thieves. My grandparents in the countryside hated Roma because poultry disappeared when they were around - and the causality was quite clear to them. And I vividly recall the day when one guy - whom I instantly identified as Roma - inappropriately touched my girlfriend on the street. I hit him with an umbrella, yelling and shouting after him, calling him racialized names that I won't repeat today. I hated 'them' too. I was afraid of 'them'.

Since then, I've heard the stories over and over again. "You don't know what they do to us", the refrain went, "they abuse us, they steal from us, they swear at us, they attack us". Without having a clue about race and racism at that time, these were powerful mechanisms of making sense of the world around me. Of drawing the lines of trust and the boundaries of the community to which I allegedly belonged. It took me a long process of learning and gradual understanding to be able - and most importantly, to be willing - to remove the racial lens I used in interpreting the world around me. While it is true that race relations do shape events and interactions, those are not determined by race. These being said, I can see what a powerful meaning-making mechanism racism is - and I can also see why, when you are a victim, no amount of critical thinking would deal away with your feelings of loss and trauma.

As I learned more and more about the history of Roma people in Eastern Europe, as I came to think about how we stereotype and how we draw the boundaries of 'our group', I came to understand things differently. But it took me years to realize that I was seeing people first and foremost through their race/ ethnicity, without ever questioning that. It was as if race/ ethnicity defined them. And I knew nothing of their circumstances, I completely disregarded them. I assumed everyone had the same opportunities as I did; and that there's only one right set of values - mine, of course. Not that circumstances or different values might justify criminality, but criminality always signals something else: an inescapable circle of poverty and oppression; a corrupt rule-of-law system; a weak civil society, etc.

The price of love

2008-09-25T20:00:00.007-06:00

I've recently watched a documentary I'd warmly recommend: The Great Happiness Space - Tale of an Osaka Love Thief. From a Western perspective, I've always found it interesting how the fashion magazine style has been so embraced - and to quite an extreme - by young people living in Japan. I noticed this first in Hawaii, where the young girls and boys on holiday seemed to have descended from the pages of Vogue or Cosmo. I was told many would sacrifice their own personal lives and bodies to earning enough to pay for the latest Channel jacket or Gucci bag. I was surprised to discover this in the documentary, along the intricate lines of love, social status and money.

And there was something else in this documentary that caught my eye: the question of power. When you'll see the movie, think of who's in control there, who actually has the power. You'll see things shift and maybe, like me, you'll wonder about the ways in which our own feelings of being in control make us - lacking better words - controllable.

Heritage, multiculturalism and religion

2008-09-06T12:47:00.005-06:00

It so happens that I've just finished reading the impressive reader Representing the Nation: Histories, heritage and museums* when I came across an interesting article squeezed on the first page of the newspaper: "Heritage department takes aim at religious radicals". In a true stereotyped fashion, I thought to myself: I wonder if this is about Islam, once again. After all, as a Westerner, I have come to expect that any Western voice talking about religious radicals is talking about Islam - unless the person in question is a feminist, then my stereotype says s/he probably refers to anti-abortion extreme right Christians.

Lo and behold, I was right. Still pondering Broken Mystic's discussion of Rudy Giuliani's islamophobic remarks, I started reading the article in question: The Canadian federal government, in an attempt to make multiculturalism meet modern demands, has identified religious fundamentalism (especially among youth) as its main enemy.

To see how my brain works, the first thing I thought about was the series of articles on the trial of the alleged terrorist conspiracy by a bunch of youngsters in Toronto. The youngsters were identified as radical Muslism (somehow ignorant of their own religion and Westernized - they loved going to Tim Hortons - to the point that their radicalism was treated by the media as a bad joke).

I was not an ardent follower of the case, so I had to google it; but this says a lot about how our synapses work, fostered by our media consumption. Interestingly, the book I just finished makes the connection between the role of heritage in the nation-state and its intersections with media consumption and public education. Speaking about museums in India, Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge see heritage as sites where "spectacle, discipline, and state power become interlinked with questions of entertainment, education, and control" (p. 418). And that is exactly how I would interpret my own connections and reading of the article in question.

Six paragraphs later, the article - and the Heritage department - spells it out: "The slides point out that Islam is, by far, the greatest gorwing religion in Canada..." blah blah blah. I know the drill without reading the rest. But I continue, and true enough, it's about the 'clash of cultures' and how immigrants need to be integrated and religious extremism combated. No more mentioning of Islam, but scholars of critical discourse analysis have long learned that the implicit argument is equally - if not more - important.

"People are not merely legal citizens of a nation - writes Jessica Evans in the book mentioned above - in an important sense a nation is also a symbolic community which creates powerful - and often pathological - allegiance to a cultural ideal" (1991: 1)

Multiculturalism works as an ideal, a discourse of Canadian nationalism. But what is the particular image of what being Canadian means? In this case, we are reminded that immigrants can be Canadian, in a legal sense: they can become citizens, but do they become 'nationals'? The multiculturalism of Canadian society is a difference we love to state, to showcase. But when it comes to living with it, the Department of Heritages spells it out quite clearly: "shifting demographics mean the government must 'adjust multiculturalism programming' in order to 'advance core Canadian values'"

Stuart Hall argued that "The capacity to live with difference is, in my view, the coming question of the twenty-first century" (1991: 42). And I think he's absolutely right. Yet, so far, we lived with difference by asking it to become less threatening by Westernizing and commodifying itself. And we lived with difference by assuming culture is something of the soul, something metaphysical which marks us profoundly and inexorably. It's hard to think of difference in this paradigm.

Reference: Boswell, D., Evans, J. (1999) Representing the Nation: A Reader. Histories, Heritage and Museums. Routledge & The Open University
Photo credits: PhotoFusion

After the virgins, here come the Asians...

2008-09-06T11:16:00.004-06:00

Serbian state secretary wants to 'import' some 100,000 Asian women because Serbian men don't have enough women to marry and have strong, little Serbs... Should I laugh or should I take it seriously, and dissect the intricate ways in which nationalism, colonialism and patriarchy work together? To think of Asia as a reservoir of vaginas - or rather a reservoir of submissive female workforce in the household plus a vagina that can be colonized and impregnated with the 'white' male seed - has been the latest colonial fashion at least in North America. I realize there's a lot of generalization here - and I apologize for seemingly putting everyone in the same basket. But my point is that such practices are not so unacceptable as they may seem or relegated to the 'uncivilized' parts of the world (see previous post).I guess the most scary thing is that such practices are still pervasive today, framing our ways of imagining the world and our relation to other human beings.

Photo credits: tanakawho

Feminists and bare-breasted virgins

2008-09-05T12:57:00.004-06:00

I came across the story of the 'bare-breasted virgins' dancing for the Swaziland king's attention at a time when I was pondering the questions of agency and empowerment in everyday life. I guess the problem can be trivialized like this: are we, the common people, powerful in our everyday lives or not? Powerful here can be understood in many ways: can we change or affect the political structures in which we live; can we change or challenge labels such as gender, ethnicity, race; can we resist economic or political repression, and so on.

The story of the bare-breasted virgins (and apologies for perpetuating this stereotyped, Westernized vision) is a good case in point. Trivializing: young women present themselves to the king in the hope of being chosen as a wife. There's undoubtedly a very patriarchal picture here: here you have these thousands of young women who offer themselves to the king. But there's also the empowering picture: the young girl who takes control of her life and goes to present herself to the king because this is a way of taking care of herself, of making it into the world of the rich, who do not have to work anymore.

I guess feminists know the story all too well: first there was the 'liberation'. Then there was the painful realization that oppression is not so easy and that some women - oppressed from one point of view - were in fact supporting the oppressive system precisely because that was their way of gaining an advantage, of having access to power - of being in control if you want.

I realize my story is superficial - but I think my dilemma stands: how can we talk about power from a micro level? How can we talk about empowerment - or oppression - from the level of individual people? Some have chosen to get rid of the term 'empowerment' altogether and to acknowledge that our agency is always within the constraints of the social system in which we live. We do have the power to act, to choose for ourselves, to resist those things we feel are oppressive; but this does not mean that we influence the oppression. We cope with it - and this is where our empowerment.

Photo credits: lumkness

On Being Cosmopolitan

2008-09-02T11:00:00.004-06:00

I've always liked being a 'citizen of the world'. It simply made sense to me that one should be able to go wherever one pleases and call home wherever one chooses, and that this should be the end of it. I subscribed to ubi bene ibi patria.

I guess I felt strongly about this precisely because I was born in a place where one could not just pack and go wherever one wished. Experiences of humiliating lines at embassies and consulates, instances of realizing you are absolutely powerless in front of the bureaucrat behind the glass, moments of simply not understanding why you going somewhere else was such a big deal.

A recent article* by Craig Calhoun brought me back to thinking about feeling cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitanism - the discourse around cosmopolitan places, choices and lifestyles - is not as simple as it looks: it is not a matter of choice, but a matter of having that choice. As Calhoun puts it: "it obscures the issues of inequality that make ethnically unmarked national identities accessible mainly to elites, and make an easy sense of being a citizen of the world contingent on having the right passports, credit cards, and cultural credentials" (2008: 437).

As much as I like cosmopolitanism, I have to agree with Calhoun: it is not a matter of choice. It is a matter of passports, of the institutions regulating our lives and seting the parameters within which we are able to make our choices. It is wishful thinking more than lived reality. And that's why it stirs so much anger: it speaks of a world in which we are equal. But we know for a fact that we are not. We know that not all passports are equal, not to mention that not all people are equal. We know that we need money to go somewhere - and that for some, the cost of a train ticket (not to mention a plane ticket) is simply beyond one's possibilities.

So is cosmpolitanism something like white racism? Where you wonder why people still get bugged by racism, when you yourself are not (and hey, you are white by the way, and have never been part of the margins)? Is it a new form of mainstream dystopia (or myopia for that matter)? I confess I still like cosmpolitanism as an idea, even if I realize it is not a reality. I like the potential of imagining a world where identity and location are not intrinsically linked. But I doubt it is possible.

* Calhoun, C. (2008) "Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism," Nations and Nationalism 14(3): 427-448
Photo credits: Mishel Churkin

On students, revolutions and nationalism...

2008-08-28T10:29:00.004-06:00

When I was an undergraduate, I mostly devoted myself to studying really hard so that I can get good grades. Some years later, when I became a graduate student, I understood a lot about the context of my undergraduate years. Among others, it forcefully hit me that I was a nationalist. That I have never really critically engaged with this idea that there is a nation, and I am a part of it, thus sharing its features. Living in a multicultural country, I never registered the signs of multiculturalism. I should have: I would always travel past the Greek cultural center on my way downtown. I have heard a lot about the Gypsies - and would not shy away from calling them Gypsies to their face (not to mention the fear of being 'stolen' by one of 'them' or of having my gold earrings violently pulled from my ears by Gypsies...). And every now and then, stories of mixed ethnicity in my family were retold at family reunions.

Yet, I never registered them with a critical eye. They never told me that there is something else beyond the nation to which I was belonging. Hey, they never told me that my nation was to be questioned, dissected, or interrogated. I was a believer. But then I switched sides, and I 'blame' it all on grad school. My colleagues and professors made me want to look for more, made me think of those things I took for granted. I read, I learned, I started paying attention - first and foremost to myself. And I became convinced that - just as in 1848, students actively stirred the social unrest and participated in the shaping of their cities - students nowadays will once again shape their societies by challenging and deconstructing racism, intolerance, xenophobia, sexism, nationalism and so on. I embraced the May 1968 events with the (somehow bizarre) optimism that universities are the last bastion of critical thinking.

As I'm now doing some reading on nationalism, my own story as a student came back to mind. The article I'm just reading - Jon E. Fox (2006) "Consuming the Nation" - briefly reflects on the role of students in nationalist movements. Students, writes fox, are the "torchbearers of their respective nations". Yes, with the caveat that some of them do change into the critiques and challengers of nations altogether.

Photo credits: Somewhere on the internet...

The constraints of national identity

2008-08-26T13:42:00.004-06:00

I have discussed Wayne Norman's book on Negotiating Nationalism in a previous post. Here I want to talk about national identity - and why I find it so limiting, annoying and unsuitable for a world in which we would like to be mobile, to have our human dignity recognized and to challenge/ change/ sanction physical and systemic violence. In chapter 2, devoted to National Identity, Norman outlines some of the underlying assumptions, beliefs and sentiments that make the national identity. And here is exactly why I think we need to become creative, get rid of national identities and imagine new ways of mobilizing loyalties and justifying the social contract:

National identity, argues Norman, is based on the following sets of:
- beliefs: that there is a nation of which I am a member, which has a homeland. Furthermore, you cannot become a member of the nation just by moving there, although in some situations (certainly not if you are of Turkish background in Germany for instance) being born there out of immigrant parents may qualify you as a national. In other words, one remains eternally (or at least for the duration of one's life) defined by his/ her nation and his/her homeland. One is eternally doomed to be a stranger, should he or she decide to move somewhere else. One cannot never be 'part of us'. Now, I find this not only narrow-minded, but increasingly unsuitable for our contemporary world (read a very interesting article on this by Arash Abizadeh)

- still under the rubric of beliefs, national identity is informative - in that it tells something about yourself to those who do not know you. Now, again, this is not only paternalistic, but also absurd. If I tell you I'm Canadian, you'll feel you know something about me. But what you think you know are stereotypes. You'll make assumptions and you'll place a label onto me - without ever trying to get to know me. How can 33 million people be defined by some common traits?

- last, but not least, national identity means I'm morally obliged to my fellow-nationals - and more so than to non-nationals. This is what I would call a double standard: one cannot be committed to the idea of human rights, of individual dignity and respect derived from one's humanity, and to the idea of the nation. How can one believe in human rights, but apply two different sets of moral principles to co-nationals and 'others'?

- and finally, my favorite: even if I live in another country and become a citizen, I would always be a citizen of my nation.

No, I am not. I beg to differ. I realize I am embedded in a Western system of thinking, but I am who I am. I am not who the group decides for me to be. I may be marked by the things I have lived through, but the way I have experienced them is mine in a way too complex to even start describing. I share experiences, symbols and ideas with my friends, but not with 33 million people. And more likely my belonging to the middle class has marked my tastes and values more than anything else (well, class and the books I've loved to read throughout my life).

Now, before you jump and say: oh, you are so wrong, you are marked by your national identity in ways you cannot even began to grasp, through education and socialization, through being immersed in an universe of meaning and symbols yada yada... let me ask you to think of your own identity:

- You think (assuming you buying into the Western ontology) that you are a distinct human being. Do you think it's legitimate to have one morality for yourself and one for say your brother, your friend, your teacher - who are all 'distinct' and therefore 'others' to you?

- Are you exactly the same as you were 15 years ago? Have you reconsidered some of the things you believed in when you were a child?

- How do you react when others tell you who you are? When they tell you what you believe in, what are your traits, what and how you think?

Then why would you still buy into this national identity thing?

The male gaze

2008-08-22T13:16:00.007-06:00

Broken Mystic, via Racialicious, wrote about the first female muslim Xmen character (hm, i just realized they are called 'men'...). She talks about how Dust may bring female muslim presences into the mainstream public sphere, only to quickly realize that it is in fact an object of 'male gaze' (as she puts it, male gaze refers to "female characters being depicted and presented in ways their heterosexual male writers, artists, and audiences would like to see them"). Or rather, a western heterosexual male gaze, where an image of the 'woman-in-burka' is becoming a label for muslim women.

I'm struggling with putting my thoughts together on yet another type of characters, the avatars of Second Life. If you've never heard of it, it's just an online virtual world where you interact with other people through an avatar you build and customize.

There's something very sexual about this world. Everyone is so fit, so sexy and so scantly dressed. Or at least that's how it appears to me. So, I'm torn between wondering how my own system of values and my own fears play into my view of the world. I see the liberating potential: you can feel empowered by building yourself any way you want and by interacting with others without any inhibitions/ constraints you may have in face-to-face communication. But I also see how feeling liberated by fitting into a particular shape of a woman is in fact reintroducing a very patriarchal vision, where women are first and foremost sex objects. Where women come to measure themselves up to this avatar ideal of big boobs, small waists and long legs, of weaving hair and perfect symmetry ...

It's not a 'bond', it's nationalism

2008-08-20T15:30:00.003-06:00

I'm always surprised by how 'nationalism' does not feature in the North American vocabulary. It is as if the whole critical scholarship on nations and nationalism has been almost absent from the public discourse on this continent, maybe except references to Anderson's 'imagined community' (which I personally think are more a matter of being fashionable and quoting a popular author without really understanding where the author is coming from).

I read an article the other day on the Canadian Chinese diaspora's newly discovered bond with the former homeland. I'd like to challenge this title: it's not about 'fostering a bond' - it is all about plain and simple nationalism. In the article, a radio show host talks about how the Canadian Chinese audience is no longer willing to accept any criticism of China (and in particular things like human rights violation or censorship), accusing those who voice them of being traitors and diminishing the Chinese nation.

Mr. Kwan, who admits to a new-found sense of pride himself, said he worries the sentiments being expressed will be mistaken for "ugly Chinese nationalism" instead of shows of dignity and cultural pride.

I do understand that for some people there is a difference between 'ugly' nationalism (by which they generally refer to violent xenophobia) and patriotism. And I do understand that the latter can be a source of empowerment especially for those relegated to the periphery of the West (read Eastern Europe, 'Third World' countries etc.). But the only difference between the 'ugly' and the 'good' side of nationalism (yes, patriotism does count as nationalism - you are proud of your country, of its implied territorial boundaries, of its assumed common national values, ideas, sensibilities etc.) is the visible violence it may or may not entail.

As long as culture remains a political domain, as long as collective identities are the basis of ethnic politics, as long as we identify with an amorph and unknown mass of people called the 'nation' (with whom we share nothing in common, except we happen to inhabit a common state whose boundaries were arbitrarily drawn) - as long as these things are still there, in the background of feeling proud and feeling 'part of' the nation, then we remain nationalists. We are not 'open' and 'tolerant'. We see the others in terms of 'belonging to a particular group', on a particular territory. We defend our culture against the 'invasion' of the foreign elements (and I'm not saying here we should all accept cultural imperialism, quite on the contrary). We still remain subjugated by a national label which we have to carry with us like Sisif had to carry his stone.

Pride Parade Vancouver

2008-08-19T12:25:00.008-06:00

Photos taken at the Pride Parade, Vancouver, August 1, 2008.

Married with children

2008-08-17T21:32:00.003-06:00

I was thinking earlier about those men who tell their girlfriends that they won't continue the relationship unless they want to have children. I was thinking how patriarchal this is. And how it objectifies those women. What does it mean, that if she doesn't want to have kids, he is no longer interesting? So, what really interests him? Her? Or her womb? And what happens if, say, down the road, after 1 year of dating and getting engaged, she suddenly gets sick and cannot bare children anymore. Will he dump her? Will he look for another woman who can give him what he truly wants - the children?

I have this friend who's on the market for a girlfriend. He'd like to marry and have kids. And he met this girl in her '30s who was planning to go for med school. "But when will you have kids then", he asked her. No wonder she never called him back. I know I wouldn't.

Where not all citizens are equal...

2008-07-24T12:16:00.003-06:00

Back in October, I was thinking of the different labels that fix as us part of the body of the nation or outsiders to this body. Today, I was reminded of these labels, albeit in a different context. Apparently, the Canadian government tries to keep a Canadian citizen away from Canada because he is on the US no-fly list.

Senior Canadian intelligence officials warned against allowing Abousfian Abdelrazik a Canadian citizen to return home from Sudan because it could upset the Bush administration, classified documents reveal. (Globe and Mail, July 24, 2008)

I have no idea who this guy is, why he's on the no-fly list. I'm not aware of his politics, nor do I know whether he has ties in Sudan. But I am interested in this idea that a government can keep a citizen out of the country. What is the relation between citizens and states? What is the relation between governments and citizens? And how is this relation in the context of imperialistic relations? What about accountability of the government - is it in front of the imperial power (and then the principles of the Westphalian order need to be requestioned) or in front of the citizens (as liberal democracy would have it)?

Of course, my own stereotypes kick in: I'm curious if this guy is indeed treated like this because he's a naturalized Canadian. Or even a first generation Canadian from immigrant parents. Whether he has ties with Sudan - and whether these ties are in any way part of the reason why this is happening to him.

Remember Ethnic Violence

2008-07-23T07:54:00.002-06:00

The former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was finally caught and is being brought to justice for the ethnic-cleansing crimes in the violent wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. It took over 13 years to catch the guy, and they caught him in Belgrade. It makes you wonder though, with all this talk about how we are living in a surveillance society and how the Big Brother is always watching us...

Human Rights Watch: Bosnia: Karadzic Arrest a Blow Against Impunity. EU Should Push Now for Detention of Mladic

(New York, July 21, 2008) – The arrest of Radovan Karadzic, the former president of Republika Srpska, marks a major blow against impunity for the egregious crimes committed in the Balkans, Human Rights Watch said today. Karadzic is charged with genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, including the massacre of up to 8,000 Bosnian men and boys after the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995.Despite the gravity of the alleged crimes, Karadzic was at liberty for 13 years after his initial indictment.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has twice indicted Karadzic on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. One indictment is for crimes committed in Srebrenica, where Bosnian Serb troops detained and executed thousands of men and boys. Eyewitnesses interviewed by Human Rights Watch at the time described horror as the victims were lined up in front of mass graves and shot.

Technological utopianism

2008-07-20T10:55:00.003-06:00

I had an epiphany the other day. I do wonder sometimes what's the use of being in the academia, of teaching those complicated theories that make my students sleep or the use of creating those complex researches that nobody -- besides you and your cohort of similarly indoctrinated peers -- makes any sense of. But every once in a while something happens and all the pieces of the puzzle finally fall in their place and you see it: those abstract theories and research become utterly important. Crucial. You see the power of their explanation. And it makes sense.

That's what happens to me the other night. I listened to an enthusiastic young man talking about how the Web 2.0 - or the new social software like this blog or Facebook - are changing the face of the world. About how they are constituting a new you, a new basis for economic activity, a new framework for our actions, thoughts and behavior. He was, of course, selling something: they all do, these enthusiastic young people who feel they got the future figured out (hey, I was one of them too!). Their energy is catchy, their vision is glaring.

But there's more to their story. Behind the optimism, there must be introspection. And we have to understand what is it that we do, and who gets to benefit from our deeds. In my case, I'm wondering how we build a technological vision of a social world which hides away the inequality, the oppressiveness, the divides. I wonder how technology is shaped by our values and visions, and how it comes to exclude, to tell us who we are or whom we should be. I remember a student saying that people are in Europe are technologically backward because they do not use Facebook. They only emailed, she said, and are not even doing this all day long... I wonder how come we do not see the economic interests behind these technologically driven visions. How come we buy into them and feel empowered, when we are becoming sources of profit - like the human bodies in the Matrix, providing energy for a society that develops at our expenses and in which we do not get to participate, but only to provide. I guess we need a new Marx, one immersed in the Web 2.0. lifeworld :)

Photo credits: http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/

Are You a Canadianist?

2008-07-15T12:50:00.003-06:00

A friend asked me about the meaning of "Canadianist". I had never come across this word before, but it sounded familiar from the various discussions on the role of intellectuals in the process of drawing the boundaries of the nation. The word itself seems to refer to those intellectuals involved in studying various aspects of the Canadian culture. Google the word, and you'll find various academic groups gladly borrowing the label.

I remembered a discussion at an academic conference. I was attending the annual editorial meeting of an academic journal. I won't name it, but it's one of those beginning with the word "Canadian". One of the members of the editorial board was lamenting the fact that the journal doesn't feature enough "Canadian" research. Given my interest in nationalism, I asked her why necessarily "Canadian"; shouldn't an academic journal feature 'quality' research, 'critical' research, 'interesting' research? Why do we need to see research as 'Canadian'? And what would make it such? Would an American scholar working in Canada produce a Canadian research? ...

Scholars of nationalism have called this perspective 'methodological nationalism': formulating a research question from the premises of an existing national space. It doesn't matter if we do not agree on what defines this space - in fact, instead of noticing the impossibility of such a space, we take it for granted and dig into it. In the above mentioned discussion, the member of the editorial board dismissed my question arguing that the Canadian academic market is dominated by the American market. And this was the end of the discussion.

Defining Nationalism: Wayne Norman - Another Canadian Perspective?

2008-07-10T08:31:00.003-06:00

I'm reading Wayne Norman's 2006 book Negotiating Nationalism. Nation Building, Federalism, and Secession in the Multinational State. My interest - as always - lies in exploring the various attempts to understand nationalism and propose alternatives to its presence in our lives. I find Norman's book going in the same direction as Will Kymlicka's work (not surprisingly, since the two seem to have been working together) - a pragmatic approach to propose, justify and ultimately legitimate liberal political action moving away from ethnic politics/ nationalist solutions. I'm still not sure how one can ultimately divorce the institution of the state from the idea of the nation - I'm not saying it cannot be done, but I find it hard to see how it could be done, given the legitimation a politician can achieve by appealing to national identity, but also given the fact that many of the state's symbols are engineered to connect to this national identity.

Norman's definition of what makes a discourse nationalist is useful: the grounds/ sentiments to which a discourse appeals, whether explicitly or not make it nationalist ("any political issue... can become imbued with nationalist meaning and value" p. 12). Norman offers the example of demands for administrative control of immigration on provincial levels in Canada: British Columbia's demands are not nationalist, he says, because they are justified by a pragmatic need to accommodate an influx of Chinese-speaking immigrants. Quebec's demands however are nationalist because they are justified by a desire to integrate immigrants into the French-speaking culture (a nationalist rationale, justified by the greater aim of preserving Quebecois identity).

However, even in British Columbia's case, we still talk of state/ province (locals, citizens, legitimate constituents) vs. immigrants. It is still a matter of territorial arrangements, where the unit of governance is local, representing the people within it. The newcomers come from somewhere else; they bring a challenge to the local, a challenge which has to be managed somehow. And the challenge is a different language/ culture.

Nevertheless, this is an interesting and appealing approach for scholars of nationalism. It clearly argues that it is not the issue at stake which is 'nationalist' , but the way in which this issue (be it unemployment or housing or immigration) is being approached. If approached from the perspective of building or maintaining the nation, then it is nationalist.

Technology as Progress

2008-07-09T08:51:00.003-06:00

I did this class activity with my students the other day. We were talking about our own understandings of technology in our society, and I made them look at this photo of an Amish girl and read some of the comments people left on Flickr about it:

"It's like stepping back in time!"
"I can imagine the youngsters get bored though"
"We passed one teen-aged girl who was out mowing the weeds next to the road with a manual rotary push mower. She was bare foot and didn't look like she was enjoying the labor"
"Straight from the 19th century!"

I then asked them to think about the values and beliefs that we hold about technology and its role in society, and how those values inform the ways in which evaluate a society as being 'advanced', 'modern' and 'progressive'. As we started talking about it, I came to think about the many ways in which we create difference.

We are trained to see technology as convenience, as progress and as advancement. We do not question why that is the case, why we see things in this light. It seems to hard to argue that a society that is not technology-prone will survive - but what are our Darwinist assumptions at work here? Why do we always start from the assumption that life is survival, struggle - is it something we observe in nature?

Or is it something that our Western worldview prompts us to observe? We tend to dismiss cultures centered on a harmonious communion with nature. In The Western culture, we see struggle, we strive to control nature. Conflict is central to our view of the world. But to what extent this is just a way of selecting our focus on the world?

Photo credits: Sleestak66

On Women and Men. Again.

2008-06-26T16:56:00.004-06:00

Somehow the media became interested in the story of an Albanian woman who became the man of her family. No, this is not about sex surgery. But it is about the ways in which we think of men and women, and the arrangements in our societies around this. The New York Times (and then many others) ran a story about an Albanian woman, now in her 80s, who has taken the alpha-male role in her family: she gave up her woman lifestyle, took on male clothes, sworn herself to virginity (unclear why, as someone pointed out to me today, 'real men' are not expected to do this...) and became the head of the family. From that moment on, she was accepted by everyone as a man (except for this virginity thing, I know), since - says the story - this is an old custom in Albanian communities.

I have read of a species of fish where there's only one male per flight, but if he dies, the alpha female changes her sex and becomes male. Trying to figure out where I got this info from, I ran across a lot of other interesting stuff about sex changes in fish. Now, I've said it again, I know we are not fish, but I think it is interesting that we tend to ignore this information and regard any transgression of our 'given' biological sex (we assume it is a given, and there's no doubt about it) as an anomaly. I wonder how would we think of men and women - and those who do not comfortably fit in these two labels - if we would adopt a different viewpoint.

Challenging the Homogeneous Nation from Within

2008-06-20T10:15:00.003-06:00

I've finished reading Michael J. Shapiro's book Methods and Nations (2004, Routledge). It is an interesting reflection on collective imaginaries of the nation: how we imagine our nation is not only shaped by our own context (education, social status, class, gender, race, ethnicity, access to power and resources) but also by the public discourses around our nation. Shapiro argues - following the foucaultian framework of power/resistance and Terdiman's discussion of discourse/ counter-discourse - that such public discourses are not as uniform and homogeneous as they claim to be, but are always negotiated and challenged by various voices in our societies in theater, music, painting, and film.

These are interesting discussions, though primarily focused on the US context and the erasure of the Native history from the narrative of the (US) American (white) national identity. I resonated with one of the examples: as a child, far away from the American continent, I read Fenimore Cooper's books about the far wild west. I remember feeling sad for the last of the Mohicans. And I remember feeling happy about the white'n'red friendship between the two main characters, the settler and the last native of the tribe, trying to re-enact the spirit of their adventures in my backyard, with a bike instead of a horse... But, as Shapiro points out, I never questioned the narrative, the context it presented me, the view of the North American continent as a vast and impressive land to be conquered by the settlers. I never questioned why the Mohican was last of his tribe. I took it for granted. I never thought there could have been civilizations on that empty land - and if they were, I never wondered why they disappeared (after all, history did teach us that some civilizations do in fact disappear - at least, that's the story we are used to).

Cooper's scripted account of western landscape is therefore of a piece with the process through which the imposition of a European state model of social and political organization 'overcoded' the prior affiliations that were to become, cartographically speaking, a vanishing 'Indian country'. (Shapiro, 2004: 110).

Coincidentally, in a group discussion last night, I was reminded that we do tend to view history as the history of the survivors. And that we still tend to disregard the importance of everyday, peaceful life - after all, once the ancient Egyptian or Mayan civilizations were gone, what was left was the evidence of their rulers' greatness (read the pyramids or other historical sources describing the life of the most important leaders of that society). It is surprising, given our Western obsession with individualism, that we are also eager to accept that in the 'grand scheme of things' we do not count. It is only NOW that the individual can and should matter; in history, we're not interested in her/him. Maybe this has something to do with the ways in which we accept the decimation of some non-Western societies as a matter of fact, a matter of historical social Darwinism...