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grubbyduck · 4 years

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No Man’s Land - an essay on feminism and forgiveness

I have always proudly named myself a feminist, since I was a little girl and heard my mum proudly announcing herself as a feminist to anyone who would listen.

But I believe the word 'feminist' takes on a false identity in our collective imagination - it is seen as hard, as baked, severe, steadfast, stubborn and rooted. From a male perspective, it possibly means abrasive, or too loud, or intimidatingly intolerant of men. From a female perspective, though, these traits become revered by young feminists; the power of knowing what you think and never rolling over! My experience of being a feminist throughout my life has been anything but - it has been a strange and nebulous aspect of my identity; it has sparked the familiar fires of bravery, ambition, rage, sadness and choking inarticulacy at times, sure, but at other times it has inspired apathy, reactionary attitudes, bravado and dismissivness. And at other, transitive times, it caused me to rethink my entire outlook on the world. And then again. And then again.

In primary school, I read and re-read Sandi Toksvig’s book GIRLS ARE BEST, which takes the reader through the forgotten women of history. I didn’t feel angry - I felt awed that there were female pirates, women on the front line in the world wars, women at the forefront of invention, science and literature. I still remember one line, where it is revealed that NASA’s excuse for only hiring six women astronauts compared to hundreds of men was that they didn’t stock suits small enough.

When I was 13, I tried to start a girl's rugby team at my school. I got together 15 girls who also wanted to form a team. We asked the coaches if they would coach us - their responses varied from 'maybes' to straight up 'no's. The boys in our year laughed at us publicly. We would find an old ball, look up the rules online, and practise ourselves in free periods - but the boys would always come over, make fun of us and take over the game until we all felt too insecure to carry on. I shouted at a lot of boys during that time, and got a reputation among them as someone who was habitually angry and a bit of a buzzkill. Couldn't take a joke - that kind of thing.

When I was around 16, I got my first boyfriend. He was two years older (in his last year of sixth form) and seemed ever so clever to me. He laughed about angry feminists, and I laughed too. He knew I classified myself as a feminist, but, you know, a cool one - who doesn't get annoyed, and doesn't correct their boyfriends' bulging intellects. And in any case, whenever I did argue with him about anything political or philosophical, he would just chant books at me, list off articles he'd read, mention Kant and say 'they teach that wrong at GCSE level'. So I put more effort into researching my opinions (My opinions being things like - Trump is a terrible person who should not be elected as President - oh yeah, it was 2016), but every time I cited an article, he would tell me why that article was wrong or unreliable. I couldn't win. He was a Trump supporter (semi-ironically, but that made it even worse somehow) and he voted Leave in the Brexit referendum. He also wouldn't let me get an IUD even though I had terrible anxiety about getting pregnant, because of his parents' Catholicism. He sulked if he ever got aroused and then I didn’t feel like having sex, because apparently it ‘hurts’ men physically. One time I refused sex and he sulked the whole way through the night, refusing to sleep. I was incensed, and felt sure that my moral and political instincts were right, but I had been slowly worn down into doubting the validity of my own opinions, and into cushioning his ego at every turn - especially when he wasn't accepted into Oxford.

When I was 17/18, I broke up with him, and got on with my A Levels. One of them was English Literature. I remember having essay questions drilled into us, all of which were fairly standard and uninspired, but there was one that I habitually avoided:

'Discuss the presentation of women in this extract'

It irritated me beyond belief to hear the way that our class were parroting phrases like 'commodification and dehumanisation of women' in order to get a good grade. It felt so phony, so oversimplified, and frankly quite insulting. I couldn't bear reading classic books with the intent of finding every instance that the author compares a woman to an animal. It made me so sad! I couldn't understand how the others could happily write about such things and be pleased with their A*. As a keen contributor to lessons, my teacher would often call on me to comment in class - and to her surprise, I think, my responses about 'women's issues' were always sullen and could be characterised by a shrug. I wanted to talk about macro psychology, about Machievellian villains, about Shakespreare's subversion of comic convention in the English Renaissance. I absolutely did not want to talk about womb imagery, about men’s fixation and sexualisation of their mothers or about docile wives. In my application for Cambridge, I wrote about landscape and the psyche in pastoral literature, and got an offer to study English there. I applied to a mixed college - me and my friends agreed that we’d rather not go if we got put into an all female college.

When I was 19, I got a job as an actor in a touring show in my year out before starting at Cambridge. I was the youngest by a few years. One company member - a tall, handsome and very talented man in his mid-twenties - had the exact same job title as me, only he was being paid £100 more than me PER WEEK. I was the only company member who didn’t have an agent, so I called the producers myself to complain. They told me they sympathised, that there just wasn’t enough money in the budget to pay me more - and in the end, I managed to negotiate myself an extra £75 per week by taking on the job of sewing up/fixing any broken costumes and puppets. So I had more work, and was still being paid 25% less. The man in question was a feminist, and complained to his agent (although he fell through on his promise to demand that he lose £50 a week and divide it evenly between us). He was a feminist - and yet he commented on how me and the other woman in the company dressed, and told us what to wear. He was a feminist, only he slept with both of us on tour, and lied to us both about it. He was a feminist, only he pitted me against and isolated me from the only other woman in the company, the only person who may have been a mentor or a confidante. He was a feminist, only he put me down daily about my skills as a performer and made me doubt my intelligence, my talent and my worth.

When I was 20, I started at Cambridge University, studying English Literature. Over the summer, I read Lundy Bancroft’s book ‘Why Does He Do That’ which is a study of abusers and ‘angry and controlling men’. It made me realise that I had not been given the tools to recognise coercive and controlling behaviour - I finally stopped blaming myself for attracting controlling men into my life. I also read ‘Equal’ by Carrie Gracie, about her fight to secure equal pay for equal work at the BBC in 2017-2019. It was reading that book that I fully appreciated that I had already experienced illegal pay discrimination in the workplace. Both made me cry in places, and it felt as though something had thawed in me. I realised that I was not the exception. That ‘women’s issues’ do apply to me. In my first term at Cambridge, I wrote some unorthodox essays. I wrote one on Virginia Woolf named ‘The Dogs Are Dancing’ which began with a page long ‘disclaimer for my womanly emotions’ that attempted to explain to my male supervisor how difficult it is for women to write dispassionately and objectively, as they start to see themselves as unfairly separate, excluded and outlined from the male literary consciousness. He didn’t really understand it, though he enjoyed the passion behind my prose.

The ‘woman questions’ at undergraduate level suddenly didn’t seem as easy, as boring or as depressing as those I had encountered at A Level. I had to reconcile with the fact that I had only been exposed to a whitewashed version of feminism throughout my life. At University, I learned the word Intersectionality - and it made immediate and ferocious sense to me. I wrote an essay on Aphra Behn’s novella ‘Oroonoko’, which is about a Black prince and his pursuit of Imoinda, a Black princess. I had to get to grips with how a feminist author from the Renaissance period tackled issues of race. I had to examine how she dehumanised and sexualised Imionda in the same way that white women were used to being treated by men. I had to really question to what extent Aphra Behn was on Imionda’s side - examine the violent punishment of Oroonoko for mistreating her. I found myself really wanting to believe that Behn had done this purposefully as social commentary. I mentioned in my essay that I was aware of my own white female critical ingenuity. For the first time, I was writing about something I didn’t have any personal authority over in my life - I had to educate myself meticulously in order to speak boldly about race.

As I found myself surrounded by more women who were actively and unashamedly feminist, I realised just how many opinions exist within that bracket. I realised that I didn’t agree with a lot of other feminists about aspects of the movement. I started to only turn up to lectures by women. I started to only read literary criticism written by women - not even consciously; I just realised that I trusted their voices more intrinsically. I started to wish I had applied to an all female college. I realised that all female spaces weren’t uncool - that is an image that I had learned from men, and from trying to impress men. The idea that Black people, trans people, that non binary people could be excluded from feminism seemed completely absurd to me. I ended up in a mindset that was constructed to instinctively mistrust men. Not hate - just mistrust. I started to get fatigued by explaining basic feminist principles to sceptical men.

I watched the TV show Mrs America. It made my heart speed up with longing, with awe, with nerves, sorrow, anger - again, it showed me how diverse the word Feminism is. The longing I felt was for a time where feminist issues seemed by comparison clear-cut, and unifying. A time where it was good to be angry, where anger got stuff done. I am definitely angry. The problem is, the times that feminism has benefitted me and others the most in my life is when I use it forgivingly and patiently. When I sit in my anger, meditate on it, control it, and talk to those I don’t agree with on subjects relating to feminism with the active intent to understand their point of view. Listening to opinions that seemed so clearly wrong to me was the most difficult thing in the world - but it changed my life, and once again, it changed my definition of feminism.

Feminism is listening to Black women berating white feminists, and rather than feeling defensive or exempt, asking questions about how I have contributed to a movement that excludes women of colour. Feminism is listening to my mother’s anxieties about trans women being included in all-female spaces, and asking her where those anxieties stem from. Feminism is understanding that listening to others who disagree with you doesn’t endanger your principles - you can walk away from that conversation and know what you know. Feminism is checking yourself when you undermine or universalise male emotion surrounding the subject. Feminism is allowing your mind to change, to evolve, to include those that you once didn’t consider - it is celebrating quotas, remembering important women, giving thanks for the fact that feminism is so complex, so diverse, so fraught and fought over.

Feminism is common ground. It is no man’s land. It is the space between a Christian housewife and a liberated single trans woman. It is understanding women of other races, other cultures, other religions. It is disabled women, it is autistic women, it is trans men who have biologically female medical needs that are being ignored. It is forgiveness for our selfishness. It feels impossible.

The road to feminism is the road to enlightenment. It is the road to Intersectional equity. It is hard. It is a journey. No one does it perfectly. It is like the female orgasm - culturally ignored, not seen as necessary, a mystery even to a lot of women, many-layered, multitudinous, taboo, comes in waves. It is pleasure, and it is disappointment.

All I know is that the hard-faced, warrior version of feminism that was my understanding only a few years ago reduced my allies and comrades in arms to a small group of people who were almost exaclty like me and so agreed with me on almost everything. Flexible, forgiving and inquisitive feminism has resulted in me loving all women, and fighting for all women consciously. And by fighting for all women, I also must fight for Black civil rights, for disabled rights, for Trans rights, for immigrant rights, for homeless rights, for gay rights, and for all human rights because women intersect every one of these minorities. My scoffing, know-it-all self doing my A Levels could never have felt this kind of love. My ironic jokes about feminists with my first boyfriend could never have made any woman feel loved. My frustration that my SPECIFIC experience of misogyny as a white, middle-class bisexual woman didn’t feel related to the other million female experiences could never have facilitated unity, common ground, or learning to understand women that existed completely out of my experience as a woman.

My feminism has lead me to becoming friends with some of those boys who mocked me for wanting to play rugby, and with the woman that was vying with me over that man in the acting company for 8 months. It is slowly melting my resentment towards all men - it is even allowing me to feel sorry for the men who have mistreated me in the past.

I guess I want to express in this mammoth essay post that so far my feminist journey has lead me to the realisation that if your feminism isn’t growing you, you aren’t doing it right. Perhaps it will morph again in the future. But for now, Feminism is a love of humanity, rather than a hatred of it. That is all.

#Feminism #yooo i have written a thesis lol #didn’t mean to do that it all kind of flowed out #intersectional feminism #forgiveness #carrie gracie #mrs america #why does he do that #lundy bancroft #equal pay #equal rights #literature #university #school #oroonoko #aphra behn

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bookandcover · 3 years

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The first book I finished in 2021! I’ll keep track more closely of how many books I read this year because these late update posts make everything funky....

The December book for our family’s Anti-Racism Book Club, “So You Want To Talk About Race,” felt quite different than the other books we’ve read so far, and its different purpose is clearly stated in the preface. Ijeoma Oluo writes that this book to made to be used, like a manual, like a playbook, enabling fundamental, necessary, and numerous conversations about race.

At first, I admit, this put me off a bit (please stay with me, I’ll explain how I examined this reaction in myself). The simplification of the purpose of the book initially rankled; the statement that these were answers to questions about race, definitions without room for debate, caused me to want to push back to say, “while surely there are many perspectives on these topics among Black writers, thinkers, activists, and political leaders.” That rankling was something this book caused me to examine in myself. To what extent was my “high bar” for these kinds of conversations, my conviction that any writer ought to admit she’s offering her perspective while others may disagree, born of my deeply-ingrained, racist viewpoint? What are my assumptions about what scholarship and scholarly conversation look like? Because those very assumptions are developed within a white supremacist educational framework.

As I moved through this book, I increasingly saw Oluo’s direct approach as a tool. Throughout she uses strong and persuasive language, and in not allowing room for debate or complex variations, she presents a persuasive dialectic (which is, I should note, a tool used by white men through generations of writing, and not something I had any right to call out in Oluo). This approach also fits the purpose of her book. She does not intend to cover any topic exhaustively. This book is a starting point. It sets some ground rules and then it sparks conversation. This is the kind of book that needs to be persuasive and pervasive, that needs to exist as an universal starting point. Did I want more involved discussion of intersectionality? Absolutely. Can I get that by seeking out the work of other Black Feminists who intend to be exhaustive in their approach? Absolutely. Can I use the Works Cited pages of “So You Want to Talk About Race?” as a reading guide? Absolutely.

I saw the ways in which my assumptions about direct address were my own brand of—subversive, dangerously subtle—tone policing. I wanted this talking about race to look like the academic discussions I’ve been trained to expect (again, by that white supremacist educational framework).

In a similar vein, I also, at times while reading this book, said to myself “this is a strong perspective, a lot of other Black people must have varied perspectives on this topic.” And while this is undoubtably true—there are varied perspectives on everything—what was it in me that made me need to say this to myself? To counter, or soften Oluo's perspective? That raises a lot of alarm bells about myself and my thinking. Do I expect more “couching” of one’s perspective, more acknowledgement that this is “a perspective” from Oluo because she’s a Black woman? Would I excuse directness and persuasive language differently in someone else? Is her perspective actually strong or extreme, or am I just seeing it that way?

Trying to answer some of these questions, I spent time digging through Oluo’s R Kelly tweets (which she refers to in passing in the book) and reading the comments responding to her, looking at the profiles of these responders and trying to assess the thoughts of other Black men and women on this topic. There was a lot of variation in perspective. I thought about how the perspectives of her responders are also shaped and influenced by their contexts (we all have internalized racism and sexism). I came to the conclusion, ultimately, that someone needs to present the perspective Oluo offers, and even if not everyone agrees, there is meaningful discussion that occurs because she takes a directly-worded stance. I’m still examining this conclusion in myself, though, as I know there is a lot buried, ingrained, and assumed here. And, one clear sign of how deeply ingrained my racism around tone and academic approach is is the fact that tone and approach are things I thought about a lot while reading this book and that we talked a lot about in our family discussion. Not the content of the book (although we did cover a lot of that), not what we can do (although we did eventually get to that, but in too passing of a way), but the tone and the approach of the book was the first focus of our discussion…that’s concerning.

The sections of the book I thought the most about were the sections on checking your privilege and on tone policing (relevant to the above). In the section on police brutality, I had the horrifying realization that, multiple times over the past several years, I have gleefully told people “I’ve never gotten a speeding ticket! I’ve never even been pulled over.” I’m 30 years old and I’ve been driving for 14+ years. This statement implied, for me, “I’m a good driver.” And it NEVER ONCE occurred to me that the correct logic is, in fact: “I’ve never been pulled over! And that’s because I’m white.” I tried to think back to who I’ve said this in front of or to. I thought about how Oluo would feel hearing this statement from me when she, probably also a good driver, has nevertheless been pulled over a lot. I know said “I’ve never been pulled over” like I thought this was something to brag about. So, that was an important realization.

In the section on checking your privilege, I was incredibly inspired by the idea—and I never thought about it in quite these terms before—that in examining your privilege you should be aware that, in the areas where you have the most privilege, you can make the biggest positive impact for others without that same privilege. “Check your privilege” doesn’t need to only mean “stop rubbing it in others’ faces.” It can mean check in with it, understand it, and use it. Wherever you are privileged, you are powerful. You can use that power to make a difference. I had a lot of thoughts about ways I can do this. This also built my confidence a lot. I know I have a lot of privilege. I’ve been so often someone who is listened to and I have so many opportunities to lever that—both in speaking up and in creating spaces for others to speak, to listen with attention that makes other white people follow my lead in listening, to talk about racism actively with other white people, to work on projects in my community that need care and time and energy. I found this really motivating!

I’m grateful for Oluo’s book and grateful for this as a reading cornerstone of our Book Club. I’m also grateful to my sister, who chose this book for us to read, because that is the value of a book club…you are not always the book chooser. I don’t think I would have chosen this book—that, again, worth noting to myself—and I’m glad I was asked to read it.

[Note: I write these Book and Cover posts for myself, but I’ve continued to put them on the internet…that means they have the potential to be visible to others. If I’ve written something here that you disagree with, or that you want to discuss, I hope you feel you can reach out to me. I never want to ask that of someone else. But I do want to at least say, a small thing, that I would like it if you did. I know I am out of my depth here, in so many ways I can’t even see.]

#so you want to talk about race #ijeoma oluo #anti-racism #important reading #check your privilege #tone policing #tw: discussions of white supremacy #first book of 2021

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jyndor · 3 years

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so I was talking to my friend @timelordthirteen about some shit and I decided to just share with you all about the importance of actually explaining shit instead of just saying it. the Left, I am looking at you bitch (ily bitch but)

lol would put a read more but tumblr's being a petty little bitch today ❤

shitposting is fun. dunking on asshat right wingers is fun. you know what is not fun? seeing people not understand the basic terminology that we use in the ~discourse*

but. if we are going to use terminology, if we are going to inject regular old laypeople conversations with (imo) unneccessary amounts of academic terms, then we should try to use them correctly** because in many cases misusing them means we as leftists do not have a full understanding of what the fuck we're on about. this dilutes both the meanings of these terms and their purposes. I know I am wordy as fuck and can be hard to understand sometimes (thanks adhd) so what I am about to say is a little ironic, but clarity is fucking important when it comes to strategy and organizing.

so I am going to examine some commonly misused concepts and terms today. yay.

1. THEORY, PRAXIS AND FRAMEWORKS FOR ANALYSIS weeee yes I am fun at parties tyvm

what is a framework? a structure, in this case, for analyzing some bullshit we deal with irl. that's it lol but I use it a lot so I figured I'd define it here. examples of frameworks are: intersectionality, marxism, queer theory. seriously, if you can think it, it has already been analyzed through the queer lens.

what is theory? ideas, knowledge in the abstract based on looking at shit happen and analyzing that shit. it is useful because it can help us articulate what we are going through in our shitty lives. this is why I often recommend people learn about chomsky's manufacturing consent (theory of why we get the info we get from the media tl;dr), not because I think chomsky is the ultimate leftist grandpa but because this site needs some media literacy lmao. and btw, this clip narrated by amy goodman is a great, trippy little 4:30 min long video that explains the basics of manufacturing consent so you don't have to open a book or use drugs!

theory can help serve as a framework to understand what the fuck is happening to us irl, but imo is kind of an incomplete understanding of shit without lived experience (aka - theory v praxis). this is one reason why we should listen to marginalized groups on their own shit and not talk over them - because all of the research and theory in the world does not make me a Black woman living in Flint (aka - ground up organizing v technocracy). it is not about being nice, or politically correct, although we should be nice and we should care about people just because they're people. if you understand the why of listening to marginalized groups, you understand that it is mainly about communities knowing their own problems best and therefore having the best solutions for those problems.

2. MARXISM, CAPITALISM AND OTHER BUZZWORDS (and leftists need hobbies)

so marxism is a framework for socioeconomic analysis observed by mr kpop himself, karl marx (and his sugar daddy friedrich engels). because leftists love to argue, there are so many kinds of marxism, and if you ever feel like you are shouting into the void too much, just look up some arguments between stalinists and trotskyists. it's just... magical. no, I am not defining tankie here.

as many people smarter than I am have said (read: kwame ture seriously watch this video it's iconic), karl marx did not discover socialism or invent it or whatever, he observed capitalism and saw how shitty it is, like any other sane person would do. the point of marxism is not karl marx (which he would say) or tankies or fuckin guillotines***

things that marxism is:

- an analytical tool for looking at the world

- a theory which was used to develop the basis of different kinds of post-capitalist economic systems like communism and socialism

things that marxism is not:

- a system of economics or government lmao marx did not govern dick

- scary

marx looked at capitalism and said "this is definitely gonna fail someday because it's clearly unsustainable, I mean the proletariat is bigger than the bourgeoisie who owns everything uh yeah so I can do basic fucking math. if I have one capitalist and fifteen hundred workers, eventually that capitalist is gonna lose his damn head because he is gonna hoard all that wealth and his workers are gonna get pissed that they don't have their basic fucking needs met. lmao now put on some kpop, freddy" or something. idk that might not be a direct quote.

what is capitalism? (besides horseshit) a system of economics where industry is privately owned. and yes, this includes publically traded corporations because they are still owned by individuals (shareholders) even if they aren't privately owned by one person or a group of partners. truly a nightmare to live in, and we hate to see it.

what is the proletariat? well, the working class. and the bourgeoisie is the owner class, the capitalist class. the rich.

and this is something else that we need to discuss, tumblr. if you are going to say "eat the rich" please understand who you are talking about. we're not talking about random actors or musicians, or doctors or lawyers, even if they make better than a liveable wage. even if they often have zero class consciousness, meaning they don't ~see class, like colorblind racism for classism.

anyone who has to sell their labor for wages and is not part of the owner class is working class. this includes people who cannot work for any multitude of reasons (disability, can't find work, caretaker, etc) and also white collar workers who might be well off in relatively high paying jobs because they don't own the means of production, or capital that is used to produce shit. so yes, that rich actor who is a part of a union is actually part of the working class in marxist theory. when we say eat the rich, we mean jeff bezos, not john boyega. jeff bezos owns the means of production. john boyega is a working actor who is in a union.

this is important not because we shouldn't get pissed off when actors and celebrities do tone deaf shit like singing about imagining no possessions in their mansions while people starve during a pandemic. they need to put their money to good use, have some class consciousness, instead of asking fans to donate to causes that they could fund. but they are not the bourgeoisie until they start owning the means of production. and there is no doubt that many of them do, which is why we might eat gwyneth paltrow but we won't eat john boyega.

and by the way, eating the rich is metaphorical, a reference to french revolution-era philosopher jean-jacques rousseau's quote: "when the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich." obviously I don't even need to explain it but I will anyway. basically, the people will forcibly redistribute the wealth of the rich if they have nothing else. this is why there are some very smart capitalists who are in favor of reforms and raising taxes, because they recognize the danger to their necks in not providing for basic needs of the working class. no, "eat the rich" does not mean be pro-cannibalism. but there are many capitalists who would prefer to die than lose their hoard so

oh, and one last thing. "no ethical consumption in capitalism" is tossed around a lot and it's a million percent true, but I need all of us to understand that it is not an excuse to support harmful practices but it is also not meant to shame consumers. it is rather an understanding that we as consumers are not responsible for the monstrous impact of capitalism. we live in it, we have no choice but to consume, and sometimes (most of the time) that means we have to buy shit that was produced in unethical ways. unfortunately supply chains being what they are, all consumption causes harm in some way.

it is a reminder that individual actions are not going to have the impact of collection actions. this is why plastic bag bans, though well-meaning, are not going to have the same impact on climate catastrophe as, say, banning fossil fuels would.

I am a vegetarian and I can recognize that I am doing a whole lot of nothing by not supporting factory farms, and when I was a vegan I wasn't doing much either. boycotts without mass support don't have much evidence of working. this is why bds exists - boycott divestment and sanctions. boycott, meaning don't support goods from various conpanies connected to something, divestment, meaning get companies/countries/institutions to remove their money from something, and sanctions, meaning getting countries to penalize a country for their bad behavior until they comply.

this is what the anti-apartheid south africa movement did and what palestinian rights organizers support for israeli apartheid.

do not allow legislators to put the burden of fixing the ills of society that capitalism created on consumers' shoulders.

3. INTERSECTIONALITY (because it deserves its own section)

I don't have as much to say on this as I did the last bit because holy shit capitalism, man.

intersectionality, a term that was coined by law professor kimberlé crenshaw in the late 80s to serve as a framework for people to critically assess how legal structures impact Black women differently due to class, race and gender. it is not incompatible with marxism (in fact marxism has been argued to be a form of intersectionality).

intersectionality can and should be used to examine why the Black queer experience is unique, for example. I also want to acknowledge that professor crenshaw isn't the only person to come up with intersectionality; sojourner truth spoke about it even if she didn't coin the term, for example. patricia hill collins, another influential af Black feminist academic****, created frameworks for viewing intersectionality. also you can read her book black feminist thought here for free.

intersectionality has been used - improperly - by liberal feminists***** to excuse bad behavior from leaders who pretend to care about women while creating and enforcing legislation that harms women. anyone who stans politicians at all needs help. it has also been misrepresented as essentialism, which it is also not (essentialism is the idea that everything has some assets that are necessary to its identity) because intersectionality isn't saying that every Black queer woman has the same experience, just that Black queer women might experience similar issues because of a system that negatively views them as Black and queer and women.

intersectionality does not excuse kamala harris for prosecuting poor moms of truant kids.

okay if you guys have things to add please do because I want us to educate each other instead of always talking shit. both is good.

* I am not calling out people for not being academic enough or not speaking english or not reading enough theory because LOL I am a 2x neurodivergent college dropout who radicalized by working retail and not by hearing karl marx talk dirty to me. also, not everyone speaks english like, I am truly not shitting on people.

** I recognize that language is fluid and ever changing, and that is a good thing. But diluting terms that serve specific purposes is not ever going to be good.

*** and I don't want to dismiss intra-leftist theory discourse (🤢) because I know how annoying it is to hear bernie sanders lumped in with liz warren, or bernie sanders lumping himself in with post-capitalists lmao of course I get it. but twitter discourse is not dismantling capitalism so ANYWAY

**** actually crenshaw built on collins' work (black feminist thought) and the collins built on crenshaw' work we love to see it.

***** I should go ahead and define liberal feminism as well as rad fem and terf and shit because people use them all very very loosely, especially terf (not every transphobe is a terf but every terf is a transphobe, it's like the rectangle/square thing). but I am exhausted with this so next time.

#marxism #word vom #intersectionality #kpop idol karl #truly apologize for my mess

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thisdiscontentedwinter · 5 years

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“I do see exclusion as an inherently bad thing, yes, and nothing will change my mind on that. Simply because women are not a monolith, and being born with a vagina does not mean we all share the same experiences of how being female relates to the world. I believe in intersectional feminism, and that transwomen are very much a part of that.” And this is the core thing, isn’t it. I actually held this same opinion until a couple of years ago. I started seeing a certain kind of rhetoric from trans activists online - some of whom, upon reflection, probably represent an extreme view that shouldn’t be taken too seriously - that had me doing double takes and started changing my mind. I’ll back up and try to explain how my mind changed and why I struggle with this topic. I agree with you that women are not a monolith and that women in general have different experiences. I also agree that being born with a vagina does not mean we all share the same experiences of how being female relates to the world, but I disagree with what that implies and how you’ve interpreted that - those different experiences are because of the different cultural takes on what that vagina means. The presence of the vagina is inherent and necessary. The fundamental principle of feminism that I grew up with is that the category of woman is given to people with the female reproductive system, and that category was seen and treated as inferior for no good reason in all cultures. What ‘woman’ actually is (gender roles, gender expectations, treatment by wider society etc ie “gender”) is culturally malleable and constructed and varies slightly from place to place; the universal consistency is that this category is placed upon people born with the female sex (distinct from gender) in order to control and oppress them. Like, it’s key to feminism that the sex provokes the ‘woman’ category, and females are socialised into the ‘woman’ role. The oppression women face isn’t due to a demonstrable lack of intelligence or capability or physiology, it’s because someone looked at our genitals as babies and went 'okay, this is what we call and how we treat people with this biology.’ So that’s my understanding. Women are historically oppressed due to abitrary negative stereotypes placed on them because of their biological sex. How that oppression manifests is different according to culture, geography, ethnicity, religion. Where intersectionality comes into it, for me, is acknowledging all those differences in experiences and including them in feminist progress in dismantling these stereotypes and the unequal treatment and discrimination resulting from them. (some) Trans women state that they are women because they essentially 'feel like it’. They claim an internal sense of 'womanhood’ and this means they are women. When I saw this I was like “:/ okaaay, but how do you measure that, what does that actually mean.” This internal sense seems to be explained in terms like “I preferred pink and playing with dolls as a child, and I always got along better with girls, I preferred doing girly things.” This is more of a call on gender stereotypes than a satisfactory explanation - identification with the performance of the arbitrary, cultural construction of gender, something which changes over time and with which many (cis) women do not identify (yet are still discriminated against - their feelings don’t matter to people who look at them and treat them differently). They have this idea of womanhood and identify with that. I know trans people say that cis people don’t understand that internal sense of 'manhood’ and 'womanhood’ because in them it’s all aligned with their sex - I disagree. If there’s this strong of an internal sense of being a woman or being a man, surely a reasonable proportion of all women and men would report experiencing it. Again, I’m falling prone to the anecdote thing, but in my case, I don’t 'feel’ like a woman. I’m a person in a meatsack who is treated unfairly because of stupid ideas about the meatsack that have nothing to do with my qualities as a person. My female and male friends report the same kind of feeling. If I woke up tomorrow in a male body, I’d probably miss some things about my female body, but I’d be able to go through life in a male body without too much concern. I would then be a man and not a woman, despite my previous few decades in a female body; the concept is a nothing concept so it doesn’t matter. I am open to the idea that people have an innate sense of womanhood or manhood, but it’s so subjective it’s not very useful as a key identification measure for a political group. This is a very different definition of 'woman’ and to me, it completely undermines the key principle underlying feminist discourse. What is also confusing to me is that the transgender community seems roughly split into two groups - those, like above, who *feel* aligned with the opposite sex; and those who say there is a physical miswiring somewhere that causes a mismatch between their internal sense of themselves and their sex, this is a medical condition called gender dysphoria, and the best treatment is transition. Ie you’re trans if you think you are, you’re a woman if you think you are, and you’re a man if you think you are, versus you are trans if you have gender dysphoria, you think you are a woman but biologically you’re a man and you can’t expect to be treated as a woman (or a man) until you physically transition, which will ease your dysphoria. These are two quite different experiences underpinning the definition of transgender. To me, all this confusion over what it even means to be transgender doesn’t represent a cohesive front or group to meaningfully discuss this stuff with. The big thing that got me criticising the issue of inclusion of trans woman is the above realisation, that that definition undermines the ideological foundation of feminism that has brought so much progress to women. It’s an ideological difference that’s fundamental. Other things that bolstered it was accompanying rhetoric I saw online. - eg it’s transphobic/exclusive to discuss things like uteruses (uteri?), menstruation, FGM in feminist spaces, if you do it, you’re a bigot. That doesn’t feel like progress to me, to tell women they can’t discuss the bodily stuff that is the basis of their oppression, and still is for girls and women around the world, in the context of their experiences as women and as people in the world. It feels like misogyny by another name. - eg it’s transphobic to have genital preferences. I think this is a horrible thing to say. Some people do not care what genitals are involved in the sex they’re having, that is fine. Some people do, and that is also fine. Dating and who you have sex with is inherently exclusionary - not everyone is attracted to every person in their identified pool - and it involves bodies, it involves hardwired preferences, and these things can’t be changed if you just think about it really really hard. 'Preferences’ is not a good word for the concept, it implies a choice that I don’t think is there. I really don’t think people choose what they’re attracted to and what turns them on in sex. Examining your sexual self to understand how you operate and what you like and don’t like is an excellent thing to do. I also agree that trans people find it hard to date people. But calling people transphobic - especially lesbians, this seems to happen more with lesbians and trans women than gay men and trans men - because of something innate is just shitty behaviour. I was really disgusted by this. No one is owed sex. - eg there are no real differences between trans women and cis women. Any differences noted in discourse are a result of the person stating them being transphobic. A person who says they’re a woman has female biology because of this statement. This is an attitude I see a lot - any criticism of things like the above, any reference to any differences between trans woman and cis women, and suddenly you’re a bigot, a terf, a transphobic asshole, wrongthink in action! This worries me. Because there ARE differences, and shouting them down is not the way to bring people to your way of thinking. - eg gender dysphoric children should be encouraged to transition or go on puberty blockers. There’s a study out there that states something like 70-90% of gender dysphoric children desist by the end of puberty. Telling them they’re trans and putting them on drugs is not the right way to treat these kids, sensitive and appropriate counselling is. This in particular really worries me. - eg detransitioners exist and have a lot to say, but because it’s critical of transgenderism, they’re ignored. This rubs me the wrong way - they have insight into the interplay between self-understanding, sex, gender and culture, that’s valuable to general understanding of the self, sex, gender, and culture. I could go on, but this is so long. So I was originally supportive - I really was. I’m now more critical, because I don’t see a clear cohesive movement that is, ironically, inclusive, or that supports feminist issues, I’m seeing something that aggressively undermines the one movement that has truly progressed women’s rights. It strikes me that women and feminists are arguing about this more than men are, that men aren’t saying 'trans men are men’ in the same way women are expected to say 'trans women are women’. That also says something to me about the overall issue, and it’s not a good thing. It’s entirely possible that I’m hanging out in the trans part of the internet that has the assholes in it. Every group has its assholes. I also acknowledge that radical feminist groups have their hateful assholes too - but the reason I went into radical feminist spaces was to see what those evil terfs are saying and why they’re so bad, and I didn’t find evil, I found them addressing the concerns I had. They’re talking about the above things, whereas in the supposedly inclusive spaces with trans people, those topics weren’t allowed to be discussed. But I haven’t seen many answers to some of the problems trans people face - violence and discrimination in employment and housing is a real thing, and that does need to be addressed. By feminists? I’m not sure. Trans people are more than capable of organising in their self-interests - if they could find a common ground and common interests. I do think trans women face violence in male spaces and can be accommodated in female spaces - within reason. The case of Karen White in the UK is a good example of how that’s not a good rule of thumb. There’s also a domestic violence shelter in Canada that’s being sued by the women who were in it for allowing a trans woman inside, because the trans women acted in a very predatory way that caused the women distress in a place where they expected safety. I also know of one trans woman in Vancouver who tried to have a rape crisis shelter defunded because it didn’t support sex workers - that’s a valid criticism, but defunding it isn’t the action I would hope to see from any woman; it’s pointedly aggressive coming from a trans woman. For me, I do wonder whether people such as yourself are seeing the same stuff I’m seeing. I guess not. I find it very difficult to go back to the whole 'oh yeah, trans women are women and share our oppression’ stance, because I just don’t see that in evidence. In our conversation I notice that we’ve got a really fundamental difference in how we interpret and approach the world, for example the exclusion thing. Perhaps it’s too fundamental a difference and we won’t find much to agree on. I don’t know if you’ll take the time to respond to this, because it’s so long, but if you could articulate why this inclusion makes sense to you, I would actually really appreciate it. If not, that’s fine, we’re both busy people. Thanks for reading anyway, and thanks again for the conversation and for engaging with me. I *am* sorry about the length :S

DW:

For me, it’s not a matter of “transwomen are women and share our oppression.”

It’s a matter of “transwomen are women and are oppressed because they are transwomen.”

Their oppression might not be exactly the same as mine, but neither is the oppression of a 12 year old child bride on the other side of the world.

Simply put, it intersectional feminism can make room for all the different types of experiences of women–cultural, and economic, and religious, and social, and geographical–then why not widen the umbrella to include transwomen?

There’s also a domestic violence shelter in Canada that’s being sued by the women who were in it for allowing a trans woman inside, because the trans women acted in a very predatory way that caused the women distress in a place where they expected safety. I also know of one trans woman in Vancouver who tried to have a rape crisis shelter defunded because it didn’t support sex workers - that’s a valid criticism, but defunding it isn’t the action I would hope to see from any woman; it’s pointedly aggressive coming from a trans woman.

There will always be anecdotes, and there will always be assholes, but judging all transwomen by the actions of a few is not helpful to anyone.

When it comes to women’s shelters, there are plenty of shelters who don’t allow boys to stay, forcing families out onto the streets in cases of domestic violence because a mother doesn’t want to be separated from her son–who is a child. I think that’s unfair and wrong, but I’m not going to claim from that that all feminists are anti-child.

I’ve taken calls from women’s shelters before where women were being threatened by other women and the workers were requesting the police. The women there also had an expectation of safety, but gender doesn’t come into it, and the implication that the transwoman was predatory because she is trans is drawing a very long bow.

In the case of the Vancouver rape crisis shelter, why aren’t sex workers supported? That seems discriminatory. Also, why it is more “pointedly aggressive” coming from a transwoman than from anyone else? Given that transwomen are over-represented in sex work, why wouldn’t a transwoman have every right to want to fight this?

And you can bring up Karen White if you like. And I can counter with articles about transwomen who have been raped in male prisons, which I hope you would agree is just as heinous.

In the end, nothing is going to change my mind on this. I think that being a woman is more complicated than a biological function, and I think that transwomen, while not oppressed in the same way as ciswoman, still face oppression because of their gender. And I think that there is plenty of room to be inclusive.

#t #submission

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raptured-night · 6 years

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Hullo! I'm sure you've seen the recent news about Nagini by now. I'd be curious to get your thoughts?

Hi there, my friend!

First, let me start by apologizing for being slow to respond to this ask. When the news of Nagini first broke, I made a conscious decision not to comment and assert “my opinion” right away. Fandom dinosaur that I am, I’ve been around long enough to recognize that a common response when issues of racism or offensive representation are brought up is that too many of us white fans presume we can jump in to either explain (i.e. whitesplain) why “we” don’t see a problem or we try to go on the defensive in some fashion or form and accuse the people who are trying to draw attention to the issue of making fandom more “divisive” by being too “sensitive” or “just looking for something to criticize/be angry about.” As a rule, and because I do believe that a conscious effort to promote intersectionality belongs in all our social interactions, including but not limited to social media, I do make a point to remain silent and to pay attention to what is being said before I begin to voice any opinions of my own. Indeed, I feel that as a white woman in fandom it is important that I try to remain conscious of my privilege and the way that “my opinions” can often be given more priority and weight within fandom spaces than those of the people whose voices should be at the center of any conversations that are taking place (in this case, Asian fans of HP, specifically South Asian fans and East Asian fans). White (cis-het, etc.) fans have a very terrible habit of treating issues of racism and representation as if they were just another bit of discourse, no different than debating the relative merits of one ship or character over another, and so we weigh in as if we’re just as entitled to decide what is or is not racist, or what is or is not offensive representation as are the people whose race, culture, sexual orientation, etc. are being represented.

However unintentional, I want to be careful that the simple act of asserting my opinion doesn’t become a tool of oppression or a measure of silencing or speaking over the voices of the people we should be listening to, first and foremost. Additionally, I often find that one’s first response to learning that something within a fandom they enjoy is being received negatively by a marginalized group and that it is offensive or harmful is to attempt to provide some kind of defense for why that isn’t the case, largely so we feel we will be able to continue to enjoy fandom content without feeling guilty or “problematic” for doing so. There is this fallacy of thought that you cannot be critical of the content you consume and also still enjoy other aspects of it that pervade within a lot of fandom spaces and it often goes hand-in-hand with the very worst examples of people using their privilege to silence or speak-over the people who should be at the center of any conversations being had (not to mention the way it contributes to the proliferation of white-feminist arguments and appeals to anti-intellectual rhetoric that would discourage any critical analysis of the content we consume by framing it as an act of hostility, censorship, or “reverse-oppression/divisiveness”). That being said, having taken my time to consider how best to respond to your ask, I do believe I’m better equipped to give what I hope will be an informed and thoughtful response to your question @idealistic-realism00 .

To begin with, I would like to highlight a very important point that @fandomshatepeopleofcolor recently made and one that I have been seeing with some frequency as well. That is, the issue of people conflating criticism of Nagini that is independent of her in-universe portrayal in the Fantastic Beasts franchise with an in-universe critique. Often, a person may be arguing one issue only to have their argument derailed by in-universe focused defenses of Nagini that hold no real bearing on the larger implications out-of-universe (i.e. the real-world connotations) of Rowling’s or the movie’s choices in terms of casting or representation present us with. Ultimately, the problem in this approach should be self-evident, as it does become easier (even when that isn’t someone’s deliberate intention) to invalidate, dismiss, or ignore the valid criticisms that are being discussed and, I do believe, should be discussed within the Harry Potter fandom. Ultimately, if one person is focused on criticising the decision from a larger, non-fictional context and the other person is debating the merits or demerits for any of the decisions or backstory we do have in-universe then you have two people having two very different conversations.

As such, I would like to begin by breaking up the critique of Nagini into two parts. I’ll begin first by focusing on the out-of-universe issues that are being discussed and why I do agree that they are not only valid but important for us (especially those of us who are not Asian and who do not have any of the learned or firsthand experience with the racism or racial microaggressions that Asian people face daily) to not only examine and reflect on but to also acknowledge for their real-world connotations without allowing our (i.e. white/non-Asian HP fans) own biases or privileges to convince us that we get to be/should be the deciding vote on what is or is not racist, offensive, or harmful to other people in our fandom. Once I have accomplished that, only then will I attempt to explore and highlight some of the core issues with Nagini’s in-universe portrayal (based on what information we have so far) that have been raised by those whose voices should be most central to this discussion and criticized as racially offensive, potentially sexist, and/or characteristic of poor representation.

So, let me begin by addressing one of the leading arguments that I have seen against any criticism of Nagini and its fallacy. The insistence that we do not already have enough existing information to form an impression about what kind of representation Nagini might bring (i.e. good or bad, harmless or harmful, inoffensive or offensive) or to acknowledge racially offensive connotations in her characterization. I support the arguments that vehemently disagree with this idea, especially as this response so insightfully observes, this notion contradicts the very purpose of releasing movie trailers, which is to formulate an opinion based on what content and what information we do have about whether we like the content based on what we have seen or if we would like to see more of it. Beyond that, as I have already said, out-of-universe critiques do not look to the in-universe content in order to arrive at a determination. It is the real-world connotations that we will be looking at and we already have a sufficient body of evidence to make a valid case for Nagini’s concept being a poor example of representation with a lot of racist overtones.

Case-in-point, we know from what information Rowling has provided us with that she claims to have had this twist for Nagini in mind for twenty years and that she chose the name Nagini because of the connection to the Naga mythology, which she solely credits as having originated in Indonesia when, as has been pointed out to me, the Naga mythology originated in India and then spread throughout South Asia where it evolved with the different cultures. Now, a second argument I have seen circulating is that any attempt to critique Rowling’s writing or the franchise she has built constitutes as an unwarranted or vicious attack against her or should be relegated to the same corners of fandom hate as the antis who send people death threats. I would counter that this is nothing more than a further effort to silence inconvenient (and necessary) criticism and conversations and impose on fandom a laissez-faire attitude that can only further advantage the privileged members of fandom (i.e. white/non-Asian) over those who should be central to this issue. Moreover, the defense or “plea of ignorance” appeal that Rowling merely didn’t know what she was doing, didn’t mean to cause harm, or should be given yet another chance to grow is yet another argument in favor of privilege (not unlike the Affluenza Teen we are, quite literally, arguing that because Rowling is white and privileged we should excuse her inability to accurately and inoffensively represent other races and their cultures) and prioritizes what we believe Rowling’s “intentions” were over the impact that poor and/or racist representation and appropriation can have on the people who are being offensively reflected in her body of work.

As this response by @diaryofanangryasianguy illustrates, it only makes us (re: white/non-Asian) complicit in supporting racist, colonial mindsets that permit a wealthy, white author to not only appropriate from the culture of another race and misrepresent them and/or their origins but to also profit from that misrepresentation. Furthermore, the argument can be made that this latest instance with Nagini only supports a pattern on Rowling’s part, one which this poster illustrates, of incorporating other races or cultures into her series and either misrepresenting them (e.g. her offensive use of Native American skinwalkers, spirit animals, and the very fact she portrayed Native American magic-practitioners as being less skilled or educated than their European counterparts until someone from Europe educated them on wands and their use, which harkens to Imperialist and colonialist thinking) or improperly crediting them. Indeed, Rowling has even insisted in interviews that when she uses mythological creatures in her world, she does attempt to conduct thorough research. Notably, when crafting her in-universe mythology for the “obscure” hippogriff, Rowling can be quoted as saying:

“But you’re right, yes, children, they know, obviously, they know that I didn’t invent unicorns, but I’ve had to explain frequently that I didn’t actually invent hippogriffs. Although a hippogriff is quite obscure, I went looking, because when I do use a creature that I know is a mythological entity, I like to find out as much as I can about it. I might not use it, but to make it as consistent as I feel is good for my plot. There’s very little on hippogriffs. I could read…”

This brings me back to the main issue, which multiple people have addressed on this site and elsewhere (source, source, source, source, source), which is the glaring fact that the origins of the Naga mythology are from India although, again, they did proceed to spread through South Asia and assume unique mythological characteristics among the different South Asian cultures, including Indonesia. Which means that Rowling is not only incorporating South-Asian mythology into her opus but treating South-Asian people as if they and their culture are interchangeable by crediting only Indonesia for being the origin of the Naga mythology when, as has been pointed out, its origins can be traced to India from which is spread and took on new form as it became a part of South-Asian mythology overall. Now, if Rowling has had this twist in mind for over twenty years, as she claims, and we know that she allegedly likes to “…find out as much as [she] can about [mythology]” before she uses it then we must acknowledge that the issue and criticism is certainly valid and that is just based on what information we already have. So, I reiterate what others have said when I say that Asian people and their culture are not interchangeable and should not be treated as if they were. If Rowling can devote the time, effort, and energy into thoroughly researching mythology as obscure as the hippogriff (which has Greco-Roman origins) for her series then there is no excuse for her failure here to accurately represent the Naga mythology and to clearly communicate that she is not erasing or failing to acknowledge that while the origins of the Naga mythology may have begun in India and spread through South Asia, she is choosing to focus on Indonesia’s unique Naga mythology specifically rather than just seeming to credit their culture alone as the point of origin for the Naga myths.

Again, just based on that information alone, we can make a valid argument that there are issues of racism and offensive representation for Nagini that have larger real-world connotations. Not all representation is good representation (e.g. see the “token” character trope where any character of a marginalized group is inserted into a primarily all-white cast for the diversity points with no interest or intention of developing the character in any complex or meaningful way), which is often taken to mean that the only kind of representation for Black characters or characters of color must be heroic. This, also, is a fallacy and it misses the point of what representation is and why it matters. Good representation is when a character is portrayed in a way that does not adhere to existing and harmful stereotypes, racist tropes, or otherwise. Importantly, a character can even be a villain and still be an example of good representation (e.g. Black Panther’s Killmonger) so long as they are written in a manner that accurately represents their race and culture and does not pander to stereotypes or racist tropes. Rowling, however, has demonstrated her lack of knowledge (and if we are to accept that she does do thorough research based on her own words, then we must even ask if she has not demonstrated a lack of interest when researching the mythology of a culture that is not Western and Euro-centric) when it comes using South Asian mythology in a way that does not give the impression she is overlooking, misattributing the origins of, or erasing the cultural contributions of one South Asian people (i.e. Indian) while claiming to have drawn inspiration from another (i.e. Indonesian). Especially because, in-so-doing, she does become guilty of cultural erasure.

The reality is that Rowling is a white author who, courtesy of her wealth, also has access to a greater number of resources available to her than the average fan-fiction writers, many of whom do often seek out Brit-pickers and sensitivity-readers to beta-read their fan fiction when they make no profit off of their efforts outside of reader-feedback. According to Rowling, she will take the time to thoroughly research obscure mythology, like that on the hippogriff, and she also claims to have written her series with the deliberate intention of interweaving an allegory of anti-prejudice, anti-racism, and anti-discrimination into her books (something I’ve also been critical of in discussions for what I believe is a failure of her narrative to convincingly acknowledge that prejudice and racism are systemic issues and not just a matter of extremes), yet when it comes to taking the time and making the effort to provide her readers with correct and accurate portrayals of a mythology from a culture that is not her own (i.e. Western and Euro-centric), we continue to see examples of poor, inaccurate, offensive, or appropriative representation. As others have pointed out, when issues of representation are brought to her by her fans (no matter how politely or informatively they are worded, as yet another defense for Rowling’s liberal use of the block feature and defensiveness towards any kind of criticism is that she is protecting herself from angry fans who threaten her which, while certainly understandable, should still not be an excuse to ignore all critical feedback or refuse to, as some fans insist we allow her to do, take the time to reassess her choices and grow) Rowling does not acknowledge any validity in those complaints, she does not apologize if communities feel her portrayal of them and their culture is harmful, offensive, or appropriative. What she does do is double-down on the “rightness” of her stance, reference her activism as if it was a shield/get out of jail free card that balances everything out and excuses her from any further criticism, and defends herself against her fans from a position of greater (white) privilege to the effect that often those (marginalized) fans who try to bring their issues to her attention are then subjected to harassment and threats themselves (sometimes even pushed out of their own fandom).

I do not believe there is anything wrong or contradictory in the idea that fans of the Harry Potter franchise can both enjoy her world and be critical of it. More to the point, I do not believe there is anything wrong or contradictory in the idea that fans of the Harry Potter franchise can both enjoy her world and be critical of Rowling’s creative choices, her response to instances of valid criticism especially as they concern the issue of representation or racism, or even how those responses might influence one’s perception of her politics and/or ideology as a feminist or social advocate (i.e. it’s not “wrong” or an example of being a “hater” to have these conversations and ask ourselves if Rowling isn’t an example of white feminism, or if she isn’t failing to address her own privilege, or if she isn’t a teaching-lesson for white writers, a category of which I count myself among, and what not to do). In fact, I will always support the willingness to critically approach the content that we consume and I firmly believe that it is important if we are to call ourselves advocates or allies to always be mindful and aware of our own privileges and how they may influence our perspectives as content-consumers (speaking as an intersectional social justice advocate, an academician whose field depends heavily on critical thinking and analysis, and someone who could be said to be “anti” anti-intellectualism, exegesis is vital to human understanding and empathy).

Which brings me to yet another glaring out-of-universe issue of representation; one that is also very specific to Nagini’s portrayal in the film. The character of Nagini, which was based on South Asian mythology (although Rowling claims to have based her canon on the Indonesian Naga mythology specifically), will be played by Claudia Kim, who is a South Korean actress. So, now we have an issue of South Asian mythology being conflated with East Asian mythology in the film (something which, I want to be clear, should not be seen as a criticism of Claudia Kim or an attack on her, as she is not the issue, the people who made the decision to cast her over an Indian actress are). Once again, Asian people and their culture are not interchangeable and should not be treated as such, and when you do that it is an example of racism and racial microaggression (it is NEVER good representation). This is why I do agree with the people who are pointing out that the casting-choice could be criticized for its erasure and potential colorism, especially as Korea has its own unique snake mythology. For this reason, I do believe that fans (especially those whom Nagini is now supposed to “represent”) do have a perfectly valid reason to view the film with a critical eye and that we should be asking why they opted not to cast an actress in the role of Nagini who is Indonesian if Rowling is going to be using Indonesian Naga mythology. Again, just based on this information alone, we can look at the latest Fantastic Beasts film and acknowledge that the criticism coming from some segments of the Harry Potter fandom is more than valid and there are issues of representation present.

To summarize, we can now make a case for offensive representation and racism on two points, just based off what we already know from interviews and the trailer. First, there is the issue of the way that Rowling specifically seems to credit the Naga mythology as having originated from Indonesia alone when that is not entirely accurate (i.e. it came from India and spread to different cultures in South Asia), which is a form of erasure by failing to clarify that she is using Indonesia Naga mythology for Nagini but that the Naga mythology is not just from Indonesia. This, despite the fact that Rowling claims to have been considering this twist for Nagini for twenty-years (in fact she claims it was the inspiration for naming the character Nagini ) and that she typically does a lot of research before incorporating mythology into her canon. Secondly, there is the issue of the film casting a South-Korean actress to play a character that has its mythological origins in South-Asian culture when Claudia Kim is from East-Asia, which opens the film up to further criticism for its erasure and colorism.

For these reasons (among the many obvious), I do not believe it is the place of any white/non-Asian fan of the Harry Potter series to attempt to assert that there is nothing racist, offensive, appropriative, or harmful in the way of representation in Nagini’s characterization as it is. While I do not doubt that opinions vary even within the different Asian communities where Nagini is concerned (a fact that I do acknowledge as I have been quietly following the discourse to the best of my abilities for as broad of an understanding as I can have) that is very much a intra-community conversation that I, as a white fan, have no place interjecting myself into. Rather, I will continue to argue that it is not my place or the place of any other white/non-Asian fan of the series to presume that I/we get to decide or cast the final vote on whether or not Nagini’s representation is racist, offensive, appropriative, bad representation or speak over Asian fans who do feel that it is because “my Asian friend/this Asian person in fandom says it’s not an issue so that makes it acceptable for me to tell every Asian person criticizing this choice that they and their feelings are wrong.”

Moving on, now I will begin to examine some of the in-universe criticism of Nagini’s characterization just based on what information we do currently have. I would like to begin with one of the most common complaints, which is that Voldemort is a “Nazi” and connecting an Asian woman to a Nazi is racist in-and-of-itself. However, I think a clarification first needs to be made whenever these arguments surface (and in general when it comes to our discourse around fictional Death Eaters and Voldemort’s ideology or character) so that we can avoid falling into Godwin’s Law rhetoric, which does effectively trivialize the trauma and experiences of victims of Nazi ideology and white supremacy by reducing it down to an inadequate fictional comparison. That should not be our intention, and we should take care to distinguish between the argument that Rowling wrote Voldemort and his Death Eaters with certain parallels in mind to Nazis and white supremacists (something which can also be open to criticism as to how effectively Rowling managed to convey those parallels) and “Voldemort was a Nazi!” No, he was not, he is a fictional character and we should not be responding as if a fictional character is as terrible or even comparable to actual Nazis and the real atrocities and harm they have committed (and continue to commit or perpetuate) to Jewish people, Romani people, Black people, peoples of color, and lgbtq+ people.

That being said, we can argue that Rowling has said she has written parallels between Voldemort and his Death Eaters to Nazis and white supremacists in her construction of blood prejudice (I tend to be critical of this for the fact that she has constructed the DE to represent something of an all-purpose social commentary on any/all form(s) of prejudice, which effectively strips the different forms that prejudice can take within different communities of their nuance and systemic structures while also establishing a type of prejudice that we mostly see represented by having middle-class white characters like Lily Evans-Potter as the target or, at best, racially ambiguous but still middle-class characters like Hermione Granger; this while she also handwaves real-world examples of racism and prejudice any of her existing Black, POC, or lgbtqa+ characters could face by declaring those are solely Muggle failings, which contradicts her own message given that suggests Muggle-born children simply come into that world without those prejudices or lose them via assimilation and the necessary casting off of Muggle identity-politics and social precepts, negative or positive). As Rowling does allege that a parallel was her intention, then we do need to take such a parallel into consideration and the implications of that pre-established parallel to this new revelation about Nagini. As has already been observed, the fetishization of Asian women by white supremacist men is very much an issue. When Asian women are fetishized by white supremacist men for stereotypes of submissiveness or hypersexuality and Rowling presents us with an Asian woman (one who, I reiterate, is going to be portrayed by an East Asian actress instead of a South Asian actress in the film) who has become the inhuman pet to a character she wrote to parallel certain Nazi and white supremacist ideology it is valid for fans to respond to that critically and to be offended or concerned.

Once again, I would like to address a further fallacy in the argument that we should or must wait for the film before we attempt any criticism because we lack sufficient information. The fact is, while we may currently be unaware of the full details of Nagini’s experience in Fantastic Beasts, we already have a large body of existing information about what happens to Nagini after those films in the Harry Potter series. We know what happens to her, we know how she dies, and we already have enough information to reflect critically on how these new details about her being an Asian woman alter our perception of her relationship to Voldemort and within the Harry Potter series. For instance, Voldemort draws strength from Nagini by “milking her” venom (i.e. a lot of jokes are circulating and there are assumptions that she was literally milked for actual milk but, speaking as a former snake-owner and snake-lover, when someone says they’re going to milk a snake that means it is venomous and that they’re milking their fangs for their venom), he implants a portion of his soul into her and makes her into his vessel as well as his pet, and whether or not he has control/command over her or she aligns herself with him we still have one of two issues to consider: Voldemort is either forcing her submission or Nagini is offering it willingly, which could play into stereotypes of the fetishized, submissive Asian woman. Also, for the sake of preempting any argument that Voldemort may not have known what Nagini was, let us not forget that he was a Parseltongue and was canonically shown to be able to converse with her.

There is a lot of discourse circulating that this could be interesting or that Nagini could still be made into a sympathetic villain in the movie. The problem that arises with these arguments is the fact that Fantastic Beasts is a prequel to an existing series. One which Nagini as a character was, narratively speaking, already previously established as unsympathetic and a monster (one who we now can argue became a cannibal given she liked Voldemort to feed her people, a detail that could also be scrutinized for the way it might harken to Imperialist stereotypes, many of which still proliferate, about Asian medicinal practices and cuisine that were often cited as supporting cannibalism or, even today, joked about in terms of the offensive “Asian people eat weird things like cats, har har” stereotype). As a result, Rowling’s narrative in her Harry Potter series was structured to support a specific and intentional perception of Nagini, which Fantastic Beasts can either contradict, attempt to subvert, or support. The problem is that Rowling’s own information already suggests that she will be contradicting her own pre-established canon. Especially as she has already demonstrated a contradiction in attempting to make the South Asian Naga mythology fit into the Western fantasy motif that the Maledictus curse presents us with. As she describes the Maledictus curse in her own words, “The Maledictus carries a blood curse from birth, which is passed down from mother to daughter.” Indeed, the origin of the Latin prefix of Mal can be translated to mean “bad,” “wrongful” or “ill” while the Latin Dictus means “spoken,” so that, when combined, you can have a meaning roughly along the lines of “spoken ill of,” or “cursed.”

This differs drastically from the different Naga mythologies of South-Asian culture, in that the Naga (males) or Nagin/Nagini (females) were typically described as divine or semi-divine deities who typically dwelled in Patala and could assume a human-form, a serpent form, or a half-human and half-serpent form respectively (please note that while I do make a point to study mythology from different cultures in order to better recognize the significance of their iconography and symbolism in any of my literary analyses, I do acknowledge that there may be people on this site who are better informed than me on Naga mythology because it is specific to their culture and I would invite anyone who would like to provide additional context or corrections who may know more to do so if they feel the need or desire). As such, the Naga were not depicted as tragically cursed women or, in Nagini’s case, women with the potential to become venomous, cannibalistic, monsters as the Maledictus curse would suggest. Ultimately, Rowling’s claim that she drew her inspiration from the Naga in defense of Nagini implies that she either does not understand and did not bother to research Naga mythology thoroughly, was merely making the suggestion to defend Nagini in context of the criticism she received, or has intentionally taken South-Asian mythology and portrayed it in a way where it is a “blood curse” versus a source of divinity and Naga are relegated to the role of tragic-figures and/or monsters rather than deities. Indeed, one could argue that if Rowling wanted to introduce Naga mythology into her series then she could have easily done so, absent of Nagini, or she could have introduced the concept of the Maledictus curse through other characters aside from Nagini and written her as a proper and accurate representation of the Indonesian Naga mythos in such a way where she could be both a villain and escape from being either a stereotype or a source of appropriation.

Moreover, I believe that this response highlights a very good point about the sexism inherent in Rowling’s use of the fantasy motif of a blood curse specific to women and Rowling’s failure to properly subvert it as a result of her established canon for Nagini in the Harry Potter series and I would go even further to observe that it can not only be read as potentially sexist but also racist due to the additional context of Nagini being an Asian woman. Overall, we can read her as a woman with “cursed blood” that will make her inhuman (i.e. gradually dehumanize her) and once she has become inhuman she will eventually be distinguished throughout the Harry Potter series as the subservient and dangerous pet that Voldemort uses as a vessel for his soul and to fulfill his agenda (among which blood purity is a motive, even if it is not the sole motive for his actions in the series). By the end of the series, Nagini dies by beheading as an evil and inhuman creature whose death we cheer and whose slayer we champion (however much I adore Neville, he still remains a white, European, pure-blood wizard) as a hero in a chiastic parallel to Harry versus the Basilisk.

Further, to reiterate a point made in the post I have linked above, even if Rowling was to have not opted to subvert the existing themes within the “women with cursed blood” motif in order to make it into an intentional social commentary on misogyny then this intention is effectively undermined in the film solely by the fact that they continue to support the casting of an actor (i.e. Depp) in the role of a titular character (i.e. Grindelwald) who has a history of violence against women and who Rowling and the film’s producers continue to defend. A fact that does tend to make any such defenses or claims that Nagini may simply be meant to function as a social commentary on misogyny ring insincere. Rather, I would argue, it does just seem like an excuse to dodge any further criticism about racism, appropriation, or poor representation when proposed by either fans, Rowling, or film affiliates. As the poster I have linked to above illustrates, “a critical commentary of misogyny in your own work of fiction is ultimately meaningless if it is acted out by a man who beats women in real life.”

Not to mention, any social commentary that Rowling could otherwise have made by utilizing this motif without attempting to subvert it does ultimately fail in this context because the existing Harry Potter series arguably does not make a convincing case for representing the unique way that an Asian woman’s experience with misogyny would also intersect with her experience of racism. Thus, Rowling is still guilty of using a motif that is an example of a form of misogyny white, Western women experience without considering the additional implications for this motif (i.e. a blood curse) when it is applied to an Asian woman and the additional steps she would have needed to take in order to provide the reader with an accurate social commentary that clearly communicates a condemnation of the unique stereotypes, racism, fetishization, and misogyny an Asian woman would experience. Further, this cannot just be accomplished retroactively by revealing a new aspect of her story twenty-odd years later in her newest film franchise.

For Nagini’s characterization to be viewed as a legitimate, defensible, and intended social commentary Rowling would also have needed to show this in the main body of the Harry Potter series up to the very point of her death. Which Rowling does not effectively do, largely because her narrative “as is” does not enforce any such reading or “ah-ha!” moment independently of the Fantastic Beast franchise and it’s reveal of who Nagini is (and we cannot say Rowling is just unskilled at writing subtly or at writing big, plot-twisting reveals because Snape’s character arc, whether one likes him or hates him, does stand as a point of contrast and a testament to the fact that she is). Moreover, Nagini’s costume design in the film only furthers the issue of racial insensitivity, as it does seem to heavily play to Western stereotypes of the East Asian “Dragon Lady.” As this post already thoroughly demonstrates this point and goes into some detail on what the “Dragon Lady” trope entails, I will merely voice my agreement with their assessment and acknowledge that, in combination with the film’s decision to cast an East Asian actress in lieu of a South Asian actress, I do think that a valid case can be made for not just racism and colorism but also fetishization in how Nagini seems to harken to the Western media portrayals of the East Asian “Dragon Lady” femme fatale (who are typically characterized as hypersexual, exotic, mysterious, and dangerous).

Now, in addition to any parallels to Nazism or white supremacy, I would also argue that Rowling draws a clear parallel between Voldemort and a Satan/Lucifer archetype (a strong case can also be made for Harry as a Christ-figure, Dumbledore as a God-figure, and Snape as a subverted Judus archetype). Indeed, we know that Rowling has said herself that Christianity and its themes were a heavy source of influence in the Harry Potter series. Notably, Christmas specifically is the holiday that we see celebrated (versus Hanukkah, Kwanza, or even the pagan holiday Saturnalia, etc.) at Hogwarts and when Harry overhears carols being sung in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire they are Christian Christmas carols (which, again, presents us with a contradiction in her world-design when it comes to Muggle social structures and their transference to the wizarding society by having Christian influences present while handwaving complicated issues of racism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, etc. as strictly a Muggle problem). I bring this up because it further supports my point above that Rowling’s original series does not communicate an awareness or intent to incorporate social commentary on the specific misogyny or racism an Asian woman would experience.

Notably, the Harry Potter series could be said to have been written with a very Western-minded emphasis on a type of serpent iconography that did more firmly align with Christian perceptions of snakes as subjects and/or harbingers of evil, corruption and/or a fall from grace, disease, and sin. This contrasts with the South Asian mythology of the Naga (and other examples of Asian snake mythology and iconography), in that snakes are not necessarily viewed as creatures that are inherently malevolent to humans or representative of extreme, negative connotations to the same degree that they are in Western-Christian mythology. The Naga, for instance, is said to be capable of being dangerous and it is quite venomous, however, in many South Asian myths they are frequently shown not to be malicious or hostile to humans unless they are forced to be. One could argue that Rowling may intend to draw from this bit of the Naga mythology and that it may have inspired her to craft a more sympathetic origin story for Nagini, wherein she becomes evil and dangerous because humanity forced her, yet the issue remains that, rather than presenting us with an accurate portrayal of the Naga as a magical creature in the franchise, Nagini is a Maledictus whose blood curse far more accurately aligns with the Western/Christian associations to serpent iconography and symbolism (i.e. corruption, disease, evil, and sin).

So, either we accept that Rowling has been planning this twist for Nagini all along and that we can return to her main opus of the Harry Potter series and find strong evidence that supports her intentions for Fantastic Beasts. Which would mean also acknowledging that Rowling has, subsequently, attempted to insert her Western-Christian serpent iconography and symbolism onto the existing South Asian Naga mythology in an act that would be highly inappropriate and appropriative (a white, Western woman blending only components of South Asian myths that she likes with a Western mythos that presents snakes as inherently evil to create an Asian character like Nagini is the very definition of Imperialist thinking and white privilege; we may as well wade deep into The Last Samurai or Memoirs of a Geisha territory). Or, we admit that this latest incarnation of Nagini is, quite likely, not the product of twenty-years of planning so much as it is yet another example of retroactive world-building and canon ret-conning that we’ve already seen via Pottermore for years now (in fact, Fonda Lee wrote a very solid critique on this point that I thoroughly agree with). In which case, we do still have to acknowledge that Nagini was likely written into the Harry Potter series to align with themes, motifs, and allegories that were very intentionally inspired by Christianity and that do represent a serpent iconography and symbolism that carries very different connotations in that respect.

I would argue that any consideration of Nagini’s character “in-universe” cannot be divorced entirely from her relationship to Voldemort and the Western-Christian inspired allegory that Rowling wrote into the Harry Potter series without one’s critique being regarded as either incomplete or disingenuous. Especially as Nagini, as we have known her in canon so far, was so thoroughly intertwined and connected to Voldemort’s character that she not only became his vessel but an additional window through which Harry (and the reader) could view into Voldemort’s mind and glean some of his intentions. We cannot ignore or overlook that Voldemort’s own character functions as a Lucifer-Satan archetype and that the snake motif, as it is assigned to him and his Death Eaters/followers, is wholly focused on embodying Christian concepts of corruption, evil, sin, disease, etc. Notably, Voldemort is portrayed in his youth as charismatic but deceitful and wicked (traits recognized by Dumbledore alone, our God archetype); he bitterly loathes his father (not unlike Lucifer) and his origins and one could argue that his paternal resentment motivates much of his anti-Muggle agenda (just as Lucifer’s aims are to undermine God, his father, in Christian theology) while his primary goal to obtain immortality for himself again harkens to Lucifer and his banishment from heaven (indeed that the Riddle household was once quite wealthy and affluent and yet Voldemort grew up in an orphanage is symbolic of a heaven/hell dichotomy).

Just as Lucifer becomes Satan and is associated with certain marks (e.g. the “Mark of the Beast”) and symbols (e.g. inverted crosses and, later, pentagrams), Tom Riddle becomes Lord Voldemort and is recognized by his Dark Mark and the symbols of serpents, Death Eater masks, and so on. During the first war, we are told he amassed a large following, and that Dumbledore is the one person he feared and could rival him in power. Further, it is by his own pride and inability to understand love that he falls when an infant-son is born who is prophesied to be the savior/Chosen One. As Lucifer is in Biblical scripture, however, Voldemort is only temporarily vanquished (a detail, yet again, known only to Dumbledore and imparted to Snape, our subverted Judus archetype) and for him to truly be defeated “The Boy Who Lived” must sacrifice himself willingly and in an act of love that renders Voldemort powerless and solidifies Harry as a Christ-figure. In particular, because he rises from the dead following a brief meeting with Dumbledore in the afterlife. Also similar to Lucifer, Voldemort was said to have been handsome in his youth but it is significant that as he descended further into darkness, especially upon his return to power, his features became more serpentine. This effectively enabled Rowling to foreshadow the fact that Voldemort, like Lucifer, would fall to pride and evil as a creature of sin “cursed” to “roam the Earth on his belly” as in the Creation Myth of Christian theology found in the Book of Genesis. As such, the fact that Voldemort can, quite literally, occupy the mind of Nagini (a woman who very literally becomes a serpent by a “blood curse”) and that she could be said to be his most “prized pet/possession” (not unlike Dr. Evil and his iconic white cat, Nagini functions as something close to a signifier in her relationship to Voldemort in the Harry Potter books) all assume far different connotations for the fact that Nagini also becomes an identifiable agent of evil most closely connected to Western-Christian iconography and serpent mythology versus the South-Asian Naga mythology in-and-of-itself.

Inevitably, when conversations of representation occur within fandom one presumption seems to be that any representation should be read as good representation. As I have already addressed some of the fallacy behind this line of thinking above and provided links to discussions that better detail the difference between representation and appropriation and why some forms of representation can be harmful I will only highlight another issue with Nagini as a source of representation, one which this poster further illustrates as well. That is, the fact that Nagini represents what is already only a very small sample of Asian characters within Rowling’s series. First, we have Cho Chang; a character that Rowling has often been (rightly I feel) criticized for due to the name she chose for her (as this video breaks down thoroughly for how offensive it is), especially as it is a Korean surname for a Chinese name, and for her characterization given that her portrayal mainly identifies her as a romantic conquest/infatuation for Harry and then an inconvenient, annoying, and far-less-perfect-than-he-idealized-her-to-be girlfriend for Harry to discard before moving on to Ginny. We have the Patil sisters, Pavarti and Padma who are also portrayed as either silly (e.g. Pavarti and Lavender are both characterized this way for their love of Divinations) shallow (e.g. in contrast to the film, Pavarti is shown to be jealous and catty towards Hermione when she sees her dressed up and with Victor Krum) or one-dimensional (e.g. also in contrast to the film, Padma is in Ravenclaw and featured less) and they are also notably used (i.e. they are the last resorts for Harry and Ron when the women they desired turned them down and they still needed dates) then cast aside by Harry and Ron at the Yule Ball while they both jealously fixated and brooded on the women they did want to go with.

Beyond this, we are told that there is a wizarding school in Asia “with the smallest student body of the eleven great wizarding schools” from Pottermore (the details of which also appear to be a blend of primarily of East Asian culture and East Asian stereotypes that seem to be drawn from Western “Orientalist” ideas of East Asian culture). Notably, while Rowling does echo the one-magical-school system she used for Hogwarts, Durmstrang, and Beaubaxtons I would argue that, as with criticism for the-one-magical-school idea for a U.S. magical school, this system is decidedly more impractical and problematic in this context. Largely because a single magical school for all of Asia reflects short-sightedness when it comes to the sheer diversity and geographical scope of what “all of Asia” would imply (i.e. Asian people are not all one big conglomerate and their cultures should not be treated as interchangeable). In addition to that, the fact that Mahoutokoro is said to have the smallest student body when “all of Asia” would be such a large geographical area to cover does raise questions as to why it is the Asian wizarding school that is portrayed as potentially more inferior or less populated. Thus, we are again confronted with an example of representation for Asian people that more than merits criticism and scrutiny in Rowling’s wizarding world. Finally, the name that Rowling chose for her magical school in Asia literally just translates to “magic place/site/spot” ( 魔法 or mahō can mean sorcery, magic, or witchcraft while 所 or tokoro can mean place, site, or spot), which does not suggest a lot of time spent ruminating on either a creative name or a culturally respectful backstory and design for Asia’s one magical school.

Which brings me back to Nagini and the argument that we should not treat the fact she is an Asian character who is a Maledictus as automatically offensive or poor representation when it could be interesting. Beyond all the reasons I have already provided for why it is still an issue and that we should respect that members of the Asian community have valid reasons to be offended and/or critical (i.e. that the Maledictus curse contradicts Rowling’s claim Nagini is to be based on South Asian mythology, that Rowling has imposed Western-Christian themes and allegories into her main series that overwrites or complicates South-Asian serpent myths for Nagini due to how she has connected her to Voldemort in her series, that the fantasy trope of women with cursed blood has its origins in motifs that are inherently misogynistic and any social commentary it could have provided would need to have been written with an awareness of the way Nagini’s own experiences with misogyny would intersect with her race, etc.) the limited sample of Asian representation that Rowling has already included in her series and her wider wizarding world and the objectionable nature of even that small sample we do have is yet another reason why I do agree that criticism of this latest development with Nagini is more than valid –it’s justified.

Moreover, because our first introduction to the concept of the Maledictus in the Harry Potter canon will come through Nagini, a character whose canonical future and death we already know from the Harry Potter series, a specific impression is being set (as @somuchanxietysolittletime notes here). Notably, when fans criticize Rowling for retroactively revealing that Dumbledore was a gay character one of the many valid arguments I see being made is to the fact that Dumbledore’s relationship to Grindelwald seemingly being followed by a lifetime of celibacy can actually carry problematic connotations in terms of how it might represent lgbtq+ relationships. Indeed, the suggestion that Dumbledore as a young man have been “seduced” down a “dark path” by another charismatic man only to be “redeemed” or made “good” again by rejecting that path (and Grindelwald by necessity) only for him to have never been shown to have had any other healthy male/male relationships in the series does carry dangerous connotations in terms of negative representation for the lgbtq+ community (source, source, source). I make this point in order to argue that when there is a lack of representation or a very small sample to reference from, then the nature of that representation becomes even more critical. In a Harry Potter series that had multiple examples of lgbtq+ relationships ranging from healthy to dysfunctional, Dumbledore’s relationship to Grindelwald and then relative isolation would be less of an issue and could be read as Rowling likely intended (i.e. Dumbledore’s guilt, grief, and fear lead him to isolate himself from forming any other romantic connections after Grindelwald and the death of Ariana).

Likewise, in a Harry Potter franchise that contained several examples of characters with the Maledictus curse, ranging from good to evil to something more complex, then having Nagini as “just another” Maledictus could be treated to less scrutiny if Rowling also had also included more examples of nuanced and diverse Asian characters that were not offensively stereotyped or racist and if Rowling’s representation of Nagini as a Maledictus also took into consideration that a Maledictus is a concept disparate from Indonesian Naga mythology and should be treated as such. Or, as I previously argued, Rowling could have just introduced Nagini as a proper Naga from the very beginning and that would have been very interesting and could have allowed for either a sympathetic villain’s backstory (e.d. Nagini experiences the Imperialist attitudes of European wizarding society in how they subjugate the beings they classify as magical creatures and is treated poorly enough as a Naga caged in a circus that she is forced into malevolence, which would be actual social commentary if done correctly and mindfully) or one that is simply villainous barring we also had other diverse characterizations of Asian characters in the series that made it so one of the few South-Asian inspired characters isn’t just portrayed as a monster or a stereotype. Either way, the fact that Nagini is the very first Maledictus we will begin to build our framework of reference from and that she is one of a few Asian characters within the entire Harry Potter series, not to mention one who was previously only portrayed as just a venomously evil snake-monster that “belonged” to Voldemort (our erstwhile Satan allegory and nod to Nazism and white supremacy), does carry different connotations and I do believe we (i.e. white/non-Asian fans) should actually listen to the people who are saying this is not good representation and stop explaining/whitesplaining to them why it is or why it maybe-kinda-possibly-could be.

I have to agree with Fonda Lee in believing that Rowling likely has not spent the past twenty-years planning for this new information about Nagini to drop in a franchise she likely had not even planned to create at that point. Nor do I think that she planted any strong evidence, examples of foreshadowing, or indications in her main text to the fact that Nagini could have been a Maledictus. Aside from her name, which I would theorize Rowling chose not because she wanted to legitimately incorporate Naga mythology into her work so much as she wanted to reference it in Nagini’s name, there is little-to-nothing to suggest that Rowling wrote Nagini into her Harry Potter series with a mind for her being either human or Asian. Indeed, Voldemort originally claimed that he discovered Nagini in Albania which, while not a definitive confirmation that those were her intended origins, could still be read that way. Speaking as someone who writes and someone who has done my share of editing work, I do think this is a case of expanding what has become a very lucrative and popular franchise and for what I feel may be all the wrong reasons (i.e. profit). In my humble opinion, this latest from Rowling isn’t a convincing example of a writer’s effort to lovingly build on her world for her fans because it’s far too careless, contradictory, and hamfisted (especially in terms of mythological research) when compared to the original series. Structurally, Harry Potter was written with a very explicit chiastic design that did require a great deal of attention-to-detail, foreshadowing, and careful planning on Rowling’s part to effectively achieve. For all that her work was not faultless, during the 90s it was still arguably sophisticated for a YA series. Unfortunately, Rowling’s attempts at adding to her world within the last few years have demonstrated a lack of evolution on her part when it comes to what passes for progressive writing or thinking (e.g. from a critical standpoint, the themes that may have been read as feminist in Harry Potter during the 90s would now be read as borderline anti-feminist and her latest inclusions to her canon are representative of further reductive or even regressive, white-feminist thinking), at least from what I can see.

So, speaking simply from the experience of a writer, someone with some editing experience, and as someone with my degree(s) in literary criticism and theory/English Rowling’s new canon for Nagini is very transparently new canon and not even very well planned out new canon. However, when it comes to “my opinion” on whether Nagini’s portrayal is racist, appropriative, or offensive in terms of representation I don’t think it should matters half as much as the opinions of the Asian fans of Harry Potter that Rowling’s work is supposed to be representing. That being said, I also choose to support those fans and I hope that I have managed to effectively keep their voices and arguments central to this response as I do acknowledge that it is not my place, my right, or my business to decide what is or is not racist, offensive, or appropriative to other races and cultures outside of my own (i.e. I don’t get a vote). Instead, I opted to try to first listen to what was being said and highlight some of the arguments that are already being made and break them down to thoroughly demonstrate why I agree with them and do believe there are more than a few valid reasons to be having these conversations about Nagini and what issues are present in her characterization.

That being said, I would just like to close by making one final point of my own and from my own perspective. As I see it, it shouldn’t matter if there is only one reason or several reasons why Nagini’s portrayal might be offensive; if even one reason exists for people to say that her characterization is harmful, appropriative, or racist then that should be reason enough for those of us who are not a member of the Asian community to stop what we are doing and pay attention to what is being said. There is this defensive resistance within many fandoms towards doing that where we respond like we’re under attack, as if the “uwu the angry sjw puritans found something else to be unhappy with and want to take away something we love/enjoy again” mentality suddenly prevails anytime those “Hi! I’m x-person, my pronouns are x/x, and this blog supports intersectional feminism and social justice!” value statements we so proudly likely to display in our blog descriptions become a tad inconvenient for us and demand we do more than just uncritically hit reblog on any social justice posts that appear on our dashboards. We either need to stop using those (false) value statements if they’re only going to be performative and we’re going to be hypocrites when it comes time to practice what we preach, or we need to start checking our privilege and being mindful of how we respond when marginalized members of our fandoms bring issues of racism, representation, or anything else to our attention. Some of us seem to be so afraid that we’re going to be expected to boycott the films or give up Harry Potter entirely that we’re failing to do the bare minimum that the people who are criticizing Nagini’s portrayal are asking of us; that is, at least acknowledge that there are enough people who do believe there is a problem and who have provided valid reasons for why they feel there is a problem that we should be asking ourselves how we can support them as allies and as fellow fans of Harry Potter. We’re prioritizing our concerns and anxieties that we may lose something we like/enjoy over what the people most affected by Nagini’s representation stand to lose by having their culture or race misrepresented (again) in a major motion picture and popular film franchise.

Personally, I made the choice not to pay money to see the first Fantastic Beasts film because the movie was set to open around the same time that the news broke of Johnny Depp’s abuse. As I do have very personal experience with violence against women and that is an issue that I take very seriously, when the film and Rowling chose to proceed with him in their movies and defended his continued presence in the Fantastic Beasts films that were to follow I made the conscious decision that this particular franchise within the Harry Potter world would not profit off of me. As a result, I won’t be seeing this movie in theaters either and that is my personal choice and how I choose to respond to the issues I’ve seen in these movies so far. Others may feel differently or have different (and potentially no less effective) solutions but the fact remains that we still need to be having these conversations if we’re ever to arrive at a place where conversations about racism, appropriation, and what constitutes as quality/good representation are no longer as necessary and far more commonplace. So, that is where I stand and I hope that this very lengthy response to your question is sufficient as an answer. As always, I appreciate your ask and I hope that this reply finds you well.

Yours,

Raptured Night

Edit: It has been rightly pointed out to me that while arguing that Rowling’s answers about Nagini seem to credit and imply Indonesia alone is the origin of the Naga mythology (which erases the fact that the Naga myth did originate from India and spread through South-Asia where it was incorporated uniquely into the mythology of different South-Asian cultures), I also failed to properly credit Indonesian people for their own unique Naga mythology. While this wasn’t my intention that obviously does not matter because, reading back on what I wrote, I still did exactly that and I make no excuses for it and instead take full responsibility. When this ask was sent to me I made a point to invite anyone better informed than me to correct me or bring attention to any important detail I missed or overlooked. I did that mainly so that I could avoid doing the exact same thing that Rowling does in presuming to speak over her fans and ignore their criticism when issues of representation are brought to her attention. I have apologized to the person who was kind enough to bring this to my attention and I would also like to issue an apology here for failing to acknowledge Indonesian Naga culture when I absolutely should have. I have also corrected this post to hopefully better reflect the argument I was trying (and clearly failed) to highlight, as it had been brought to my attention on this site and elsewhere, which is that Rowling should not have communicated or suggested that the Naga mythology “came from Indonesia alone,” as it does erase the cultural significance and origins of the Naga mythology in India the way her answers have been phrased. l continue to invite commentary and criticism because, as I said, the issue of Nagini’s representation is not something I get to cast a deciding vote on and when asked my opinion I opted to essentially highlight the arguments that others have made and acknowledge their validity and the need of non-Asian fans of Harry Potter to respect that.

#raptured night responds #answered asks #harry potter #fbawtft spoilers #ftbawtft #nagini #racism #representation #cultural appropriation #intersectional social justice

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flauntpage · 6 years

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Thinks: Tim Ingold

Fiber Metaphors Weavers Don’t Hate: An Interview with Tim Ingold

Keeley Haftner: So to begin I’d like to go way back. You’ve been the Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen since 1999, but when you first embarked on your education you began with the study of natural sciences. Your father was the famous mycologist Cecil Terence Ingold, which piqued my interest as a closet wannabe mycologist. As our readers may not know, you have a fungus, Ingoldian Fungi, named after you on account of his research!

Tim Ingold: I do, yes!

KH: I was wondering if Terence’s profession had any influence on your latter academic interests, particularly with regard to ecological approaches to anthropology?

TI: It had a very strong influence, although he wouldn’t admit it. My dad, who considered himself to be a good empirical scientist and a very firm atheist, never really understood why I went into anthropology. Yet he really loved his microscopic fungi. He was completely in love with the beauty of nature and wanted to celebrate it through drawing and researching, through examining all the mechanisms by which they worked. He was a very rational man, so he would have never accepted this idea. So that’s what rubbed off on us as his children. We didn’t learn about the technicalities of the fungi but we learned what it meant to be to be in love with the things we study in the world. Two other lessons come to mind: the first being that he was one of the first to emphasize the importance of field study in botanical sciences when he was teaching in the 1930s. In those days everything was done in laboratories and students studied things pickled in jars, and the idea that one would go out and look at plants or fungi in their natural habitat seemed rather strange. So obviously that’s something that I picked up. The other thing is that there is a very close relationship, I think, between mycology and anthropology.

Ingoldian Fungi

KH: How so?

TI: Because in the botanical sciences mycologists are the awkward squad. Fungi don’t behave as organisms are supposed to; they’re very weird. They do odd things, you can’t describe their boundaries easily. It’s difficult to talk about them as if they were bounded organisms surrounded by an environment, because they’re just all these fibres that go every which way. If the fungus had been taken as the prototype for a living organism, then the whole of botany would be different. So if you’re a mycologist you have to think in rather unorthodox ways about boundaries and relationships. Moreover, the critique that mycology makes of mainstream bioscience is almost identical to the kind of critique that anthropologists make of the standard model of mainstream social science. Because anthropologists are also saying that when we’re studying people, we can’t think about them as bounded entities. They’re just bundles of relationships. I wrote an article in the mid-nineties in which I introduced a notion of the “mycelial person” and tried to draw a parallel between the fungal mycelium and they way we think about relationships in anthropology.

KH: I saw you speak at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts where you described your research regarding architecture as a form of weaving, which of course relates to other metaphors you’ve used from fiber arts like thread lines and knots. Can you talk about your weaving analogy, and what thinking about architecture in this way does to shift our perception of the built environment?

TI: Well, I got into architecture by accident. I started doing this work on lines in the mid-2000s for reasons that had nothing to do with architecture. I was interested in writing and the history of musical notation.

KH: Yes! And you’re a cellist as well, is that right?

TI: Yes I’m a cellist as well, which also comes into it. So this stuff on the boundary between anthropology and music is what really got me into lines in the first place. But then, people would say to me, “do you realize that what you’ve been talking about is architecture?” I didn’t, but people from architecture departments kept inviting me to talk, so I learned about it through experience. I was also supervising a PhD student from an architectural background at the time, namely Ray Lucas, now a distinguished scholar in his field, so we had lots of long discussions about lines and architectural drawing. I discovered that a big issue for architects is that mainstream architecture was still thinking in terms of building blocks, whereas I was into weaving and knotting. Then I discovered, as every student of architecture knows, that this debate goes back to one in the nineteenth-century, between Gottfried Semper and his opponents. Semper was actually the first to assert that architecture begins with weaving. His work had been sidelined because it went against the mainstream, but is now being rediscovered. So this whole discussion has quite a pedigree in architectural history. Well-known writers in architecture like Kenneth Frampton have been writing on “tectonics,” and Japanese traditional architecture is of course very much a woven form. I went to Japan to speak to architects, and discovered that there is much interest in these ideas in contemporary Japanese architecture as well. So I found an open door to the architectural imagination of the moment, which was quite exciting.

Reema Abu Hassan, Weaving Architecture, American University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE, 2014.

This affects the way we think about the built environment by forcing us to rethink the nature of the ground and of surfaces in general. If you have building blocks, then you think of the ground as a kind of platform, and you put things on it like a child building with bricks. You want to build a big tower, so you start with a level base, and then you add brick after brick and build something up. That’s the standard model. But if you start with the idea that you’re not “building” but “weaving with lines,” than the ground ceases to be a baseline or foundation. Instead you get a unity of earth and sky. And where they meet is not just a simple surface, but a very complicated and interesting place where everything is happening. So all these things come together in thinking about fibres and lines and knots.

KH: Looking at your research in a broader perspective, it seems you have always had a fairly interdisciplinary approach to writing. You began early on with focus on the intersection of what you’ve called “The Four As”: anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. It seems to me that this sort of intersectionality is very critical in our twenty-first century, and one would hope that more researchers understand the importance of disciplinary overlap. As someone who has been thinking about this for a long time, have you seen a shift toward interdisciplinary thought since embarking on this research, or do you see academic research as remaining quite siloed on the whole?

TI: Yes and no. The negative part of the answer is with anthropology, in that the last people to show any interest in what I’ve been doing, by and large, are my anthropological colleagues.

KH: (Laughs)

TI: They’re stuck in a kind of rut and I often get the feeling that they’ve gone in one direction and I’ve gone in another. A lot of this comes down to a separate debate we’re having at the moment, concerning the relation between anthropology and ethnography. I’ve tried to argue that these are quite separate things. I’ve argued that anthropology is fundamentally a speculative discipline concerned with the conditions and possibilities of the human world – how we could live and should live – and therefore that it can adopt an experimental approach. The classical approach in anthropology has been ethnographic, which is largely retrospective. An experimental approach is more speculative, more artistic in that sense, and part of the argument about linking anthropology to art and architecture was to show that we could think about future possibilities and not just past states. Classically, art and archaeology point in quite different temporal directions. I’ve been trying to turn that around, but there’s still a long way to go with anthropology. All the interest has come from art and architecture. They’re very happy about it, because they think anthropology is great!

Tim Ingold, Lecture: “Telling by Hand: Weaving, Drawing, Writing Photography” at Text and Textiles Conference, University of Aberdeen, 2012. Photography by: Patricia Pires Boulhosa.

KH: Yes! In my own experience, your ideas have really entranced a lot of artists and architects. I’ve been thinking about that seduction, and why makers respond to your work. So I’m wondering firstly, did this come as a surprise to you, or was it obvious to you early on that cultural producers might respond to your ideas?

TI: The answer is that I was completely taken aback. It was a great surprise. I’ve always felt slightly in awe of artists and architects – that I’m a mere anthropologist. So when they started getting in touch with me and saying “I’m interested in what you’re saying,” I was delighted! The level of interest did come as a surprise because I had no background in either discipline, and I don’t really know much about them. I felt a bit like an intruder. But is seemed to be an intrusion that was welcomed, and that was very nice.

KH: Well, I wouldn’t say that it’s very surprising to me. From my position one of the reasons your research is so seductive to makers is because you place such an emphasis on thinking through making, which is something that artists have always done, whether they’ve had the words for it or not. Your research funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board was undertaken in conjunction with a fine art department in Dundee, and very directly combined approaches from fine art and anthropology using a practice-based approach to learning and making. Did you find your students responsive to this approach, and did it lead to any surprising outcomes?

TI: It goes back a long way, to when I was still based in at the University of Manchester. I was there from 1975 to 1999. During the mid-1990s, a number of our PhD students in anthropology also happened to have backgrounds in architecture or fine art. So we thought we’d form a little group and have an informal seminar, which was very exciting. During that seminar we discovered that if wanted to talk about issues on the border between art, architecture, and anthropology, we would have to be doing something practical. Otherwise you just get stuck in a rut. So we started doing practical things, and that’s where it all came from. Then I moved to Aberdeen in 1999 to develop an anthropology program and a department of anthropology from scratch. I had to build this thing up, so I needed some sort of vision for what it was going to do. I had two ambitions for it: that it would become the leading centre in the world for anthropology of the northern circumpolar peoples, because that’s my other hat. My northern circumpolar hat…

KH: Yes, I’m aware of this hat. (Laughs)

TI: (Laughs) And the other ambition was to continue with this project that was started in Manchester. The project you mention was a joint effort between us in Aberdeen anthropology and the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee, and it ran from 2002 to 2005. My undergraduate course on “The Four As” was developed as part of the project. Students were reading from all four disciplines, but we also made models, went into the field, did trips and so on and so forth. Obviously there were lazy students who thought of these as fun things to do, but there were good students who produced amazing work. They tended to comment on how different this was from any other course they had done. Many things came from it: further grants, various PhD projects, and so on. It is hard to pin down particular findings. The thing I would stress is how it’s affected my understanding of the relation between research and teaching. This interest in education was the topic of my most recently published book, Anthropology And/As Education (2017).

Exhibition Poster for “Fieldnotes and Sketchbooks”, Aberdeen Art Gallery, 2005. Available from: Wendy Gunn, 2016.

KH: I can say that coming from what has historically been the production side of human culture, we artists often fall victim to conventional ways of thinking of matter as material onto which we can impose form. You’ve spoken about metallurgy and attending to the flow of materials – that this is a creative process that is more like dialogue than dictation. Can you talk briefly about the “hylomorphic” model of creation, and why it is important for us to view matter in a different light?

TI: I think it’s very important to view matter in this light! There’s a particular diagram somewhere toward the beginning of my book Making (2013), where I show the difference between thinking about objects and images and thinking about material flows and flows of awareness. It means turning things around ninety degrees. Instead of thinking of an interaction between an object and image, you consider the object as just one pent up moment in the flow of materials, and the image as just one pent up moment in the flow of awareness, and then see how those two flows correspond. Now I can look back and it seems obvious to me where these ideas came from; you can even find chapters in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari where they’ve said such things already. In the old days nobody took materials seriously, and material culture scholars were only interested in objects. The idea of moving from objects to materials was very controversial when I first came up with it. Now it is old hat.

It’s hard to put my finger on exactly what triggered this idea, but it probably goes back to my reading of Henri Bergson. Everybody’s talking these days about Bergson, and also Whitehead, but I read him in the early 1980s and was completely bowled over. This guy said everything I had been trying to say! His ideas sank so deep into my consciousness that I’ve been thinking with them all these years without realizing that’s what I’ve been doing. Originally I was looking for something else in the library and discovered his Creative Evolution by accident. When I first opened the book I started sneezing, because nobody had opened it for decades. The dust! (Laughs)

KH: (Laughs) Well, as you say, these ideas are becoming more and more fashionable. You’ve said that “things are not reducible to objects,” which seems to me to echo ideas found in Object-Oriented Ontology, New Materialism, and Speculative Realism. Many of these theories are attempting to do away with an anthropocentric viewpoint. Do you align yourself with contemporary writers like Timothy Morton or Graham Harman, or do you see yourself as quite distant from what these philosophers are up to?

TI: I see myself as very distant from them. I don’t like Object-Oriented Ontology! I think it’s dreadful.

KH: Tell me about it! I want to hear more about that. (Laughs)

TI: (Laughs) I don’t like Graham Harman’s writing, and Timothy Morton’s drives me insane. I met him once and I found him arrogant and pretentious – like his writing. So I’m definitely not in that camp. I’m not quite sure how to start with it… It’s partly just that I think this kind of philosophizing is tedious and unnecessarily obscure. It’s just not rigorous. You name something, whatever you feel like, and it’s an object. The rain, my curtains, this thing that I put my coffee cup on… ah, what the hell … it’s an object. This seems to me utterly pointless. But more than that, the kind of world the Object-Oriented Ontologists conjure up is fossilized. Nothing moves. There seems to be no sense of ontogenesis, of the development of being. Thinking of things ontogenetically is absolutely key to my thinking, which also resonates with that of Gilbert Simondon, another philosopher whose work is coming more to our attention these days. As far as I can see, in OOO there is no understanding or consideration of ontogenesis at all.

Tim Ingold, Perception of the Environment, 2011.

Thus the world they’re displaying is fundamentally dead, whereas I think the world we should be interested in is fundamentally alive. I read something by Harman, where he said anything you like can be an object, except time. Time is not allowed to be an object. He was talking about rain falling on a tin roof, and saying that the rain is fundamentally in itself and the tin is fundamentally in itself. But so far as I can see, the rain is not just drops of water; rain is drops of water falling down. It has movement. You can’t have rain if drops of water are standing still! As soon as you bring the movement in then this whole sense of “things in themselves” no longer makes any sense. So it’s like the world is completely frozen, which seems wrong. And I think its wrong politically as well. It leads to what has happened rather similarly in anthropology with the so-called “ontological turn,” where you can more or less name anything and it’s a world for you, and you can have as many worlds as you like. I’m very insistent – and I’ve written about this – that there aren’t multiple worlds. There’s one world, and it’s the only world we’ve got. We need to look after it, and everything we do matters for it. I’ve really been trying to push the notion of “one world” – not in a British Airways or corporate capital sense – but one world of infinite difference. It’s full of difference and yet one world all the same. You can have a world of difference because things are forever becoming. And that’s really terribly important to me.

KH: I’m glad to hear you speak from that perspective! At the beginning of your speaking about OOO you began talking about this trouble with language, one which I think perhaps all academics share, which is the problem with, in your words, the “overwrought, puffed up and self-serving phrase-mongering of so much that nowadays passes for scholarship” …

TI: Absolutely! (Laughs)

KH: (Laughs) I’d say, comparatively, that the accessibility and clarity of your writing feels like a breath of fresh air. Does intellectual obscurity and protectionism still dominate in your own field or the fields in which you research, or have you noted a shift toward legibility?

TI: I don’t know; I hope for such a shift! It’s hard to say if it is happening or not, because as always there’s good writing and bad writing. I couldn’t say if the proportion of good writing has increased or of bad writing decreased. I’m a little pessimistic. I do believe there is a crisis in academic writing. It’s not just obscurity, although there’s plenty of that. It’s a crisis that’s been brought on to some extent by pressures that are beyond the control of individual academics. We have pressures in the United Kingdom for research assessment and demands on productivity. Basically, if you’re a young scholar and you want a job, you have to pump out papers for publication in approved journals, which means these papers have to take on a particular form, and have to be packed with bibliographic references so that none of the peer reviewers can complain that you’ve left something out. This is utterly destructive of any kind of literary creativity, and it’s doing terrible damage to academic writing. People know it. Scholars know it. They would like to write differently, but are sometimes bullied – certainly pushed and pressured – into producing their journal articles. And once they’ve done that, once they begin teaching, they don’t have any energy left. So yes, there is a crisis.

Much academic writing is appalling. It doesn’t carry any sense that it’s really the author who is writing it – no sense of their hand or their heart! It sounds detached and phony. We have a lot to do to fix it – part of what I’ve been trying to do is find another way so that we can say “this writing is scholarly,” even if it isn’t academic. But to do that is to work against the institutions of the academy and the politics that hold these institutions up. I think we have it worse in the UK, but it’s spreading to other countries.

KH: One of the ways in which your own writing is humanized, besides through language and content, is through the use of examples, artworks in particular, to describe and in some cases to illustrate your ideas. I’m thinking about your use of Henri Matisse’s “Dance” (1909-10) to describe the importance of lines and blobs in social connection, and your writing about the work of an artist like Carol Bove – her “The Foamy Saliva of a Horse” – a piece you’ve included in your recent collection, Correspondences (2017). You’ve called yourself a fan of art, and I’d say perhaps you’re a bit more than that, but I’m wondering what leads you to choose the particular artworks that you do, and why is art a useful demonstrative tool for you?

Carol Bove, The Foamy Saliva of a Horse, Exhibition at The Common Guild, Glasgow, Scotland, 2013. Photography by Ruth Clark.

TI: A lot of art is not. (Laughs) It’s the same for everybody. There are some kinds of art that one responds to, art that speaks to you and that you feel you could have a conversation with, and there are some kinds that just don’t register at all. You can’t ever generalize about art. It’s such a variable thing. Some kinds of art, I think, are intuitively very anthropological, even though they don’t announce themselves as such. But most of the art that quite self-consciously calls itself anthropological doesn’t really work. Often the artists that I come to work with or write about are people to whom I’ve been introduced, not of my own initiative but on the initiative of someone else. A curator might get in touch with me and say, “we’re doing an exhibition of this artist and I think you’d like it,” and usually they’re right. They know something of my work, they know something of the artist’s work; they’ve seen a connection. For example, about a year ago I went to Turin to visit the studio of Giuseppe Penone, a renowned founder of the Arte Povera movement. A curator for an upcoming exhibition of Penone’s work in Philadelphia had asked me to write an article about his work. So we arranged for me to meet him, and I found it enormously interesting. I got lots of ideas from it because he was working particularly with trees and aspects of the growth of trees. With Carol Bove, the people running a gallery in Glasgow called The Common Guild got in touch with me and said “we need a couple of people to write for the catalogue for this work.” So I went along to look at the exhibition, and indeed, I found it enjoyable to write about. In my Correspondences book there are several others like that. So I’ve had artists chosen for me.

KH: Right! That’s very convenient. You don’t have to wade through the muck like the rest of us. (Laughs)

TI: I don’t have to waste my time, making lots of mistakes!

KH: Well Carol Bove is one of my favourite artists, so you were well met on that. Is there anything else you’re working on, recent or otherwise, you’d like to mention?

TI: As I mentioned my newest book, Anthropology And/As Education, has taken me into the field of education, which is where I’m going now. It is the result of all the things I’ve been doing up to now, to try and break down the boundary between teaching and research, and to recognize the fundamental pedagogical issue of what education is. I didn’t think at the beginning that this was going to be such a fundamental issue, but it is certainly fundamental now. At the moment I’m finishing up a big project funded by the European Research Council, entitled Knowing from the Inside: Anthropology, Art, Architecture and Design. It is a five-year project that ends this May. So I have to wrap that up, and then the big plan is that I’m going to retire this year. Of course that doesn’t mean I’ll stop doing stuff. But I can stop carrying all these administrative responsibilities so that I have more time to do my own thing. The plan is that once I get all this art and architecture stuff out of my system, I shall I go back to being an old- fashioned ethnographer. I’ll go back to fieldwork in northern Finland I did in the 1980s, and write it up properly.

KH: (Laughs) But I thought that was a bad word, ethnography!

TI: (Laughs) It’s not a bad word in itself. The problem is mixing it with anthropology. I’m going to simply write a historical book about this area that I got to know rather well, because I owe it to the people who live there. It’s been a guilty thing that I’ve carried with me for decades, and people have been wondering why I haven’t done it. So I need to do it. (Laughs)

KH: (Laughs) Alright, so you’re tidying up matters so you can properly play!

TI: I’m tidying up, yes.

KH: A well-deserved retirement. Take care!

TI: You as well!

Tim Ingold is an anthropologist based in Aberdeen, Scotland. You can find his complete bio here.

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Episode 610: Karolina Gnatowski

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Thinks: Tim Ingold published first on https://footballhighlightseurope.tumblr.com/

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