Reproduction, sex, pleasure: defining a woman

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...

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

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

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?

"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 willingness to accommodate otherness is perceived as a betrayal of Australian culture, yet continuing high levels of immigration from diverse sources demand cosmopolitan tolerance [...] It is argued that, from the cosmopolitan perspective, Australian cultural integrity remains the intact and dominant host of smaller, harmless or 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

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

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.