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crossdreamers · 4 years

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What's the difference between radical feminism and liberal or intersectional feminism? I'm confused ^.^"

What is the difference between liberal, radical and intersectional feminism, and what does this mean for transgender people?

Any attempt at reducing feminism to distinct, neat, types or categories will ultimately fail, as there is much diversity and feminism is in constant development. That being said, here is a very simplified presentation of various types of feminism, as they are often understood in an American and North European context.

Note that these categories are overlapping, both in space and time.

FIRST WAVE -> Liberal Feminism

There has been a female liberation movement going as far back as the 18th century, but in the Anglo-Saxon context the first wave is considered the one that started in the 19th century with the suffragettes and the women’s right to vote movement.

Suffragettes, London.

Many of the ideas of first wave feminism is found in what these days is referred to as liberal feminism. The idea is that you may gradually change the system from within, making people see that women are in no way inferior to men, and that they deserve the same rights as men, both as regards property, work, education, political influence and pay.

Liberal feminism does not challenge liberal, capitalist, democracy as such. These feminists want to improve it. They share the individualism of liberal democracy, and fight for women’s right to personal autonomy and freedom.

In many ways this approach has been a success, as is seen in the increasing participation of women in working life, culture and politics.

The limitation of this kind of feminism is, as I see it, that these feminists tend to think of the social system as a rational system. The point is to make people understand that the current system is unfair and oppressive. When people do understand, they will change their behavior.

As we have seen with the recent traditionalist backlash, many people – both men and women – do not care so much about facts or rational discussions. They see traditional gender roles as a part of their identity, reality be damned, and feel threatened by anything that may weaken their fragile view of the world.

These days most liberal feminists support the rights of transgender women. However, it should be pointed out that there was a time when liberal feminists argued that even lesbians should be excluded, as their presence might undermine the legitimacy of the feminist movement. Betty Friedan did not want to allow what she called “the lavender menace” into the US National Organization for Women back in 1969.

I have no idea what she thought about trans women at the time, but you will sometimes see the same kind of embarrassment among some liberal feminists today as regards the presence of trans women.

SECOND WAVE -> Radical Feminism

The second wave appeared in the 1960s. Radical feminists believe that the system that oppresses women, by them referred to as “The Patriarchy”, is a system created by men to control and exploit women. You cannot achieve victory within this system, they argue, as it permeates everything around us: laws, language, mythologies, art, entertainment.

The Ladies’ Home Journal sit-in 1970

The system makes it hard to think differently, as the oppression is integrated within social institutions like marriage, the traditional nuclear family, and the health care system, as well as in the words we used (”woman” understood, for instance, as someone who is assigned female on the basis of genitalia).

In the Patriarchy, being a man is the default. Women are “the Other”. The goal of radical feminism is a society where your genitals no longer define your role and influence in society.

Radical feminists see pornography and prostitution both as signs of, and tools for, the oppression of women. Some lesbian radical feminists even see heterosexual sex as a tool of oppression. Lesbians have freed themselves from male domination by not having sex with men, they say.

Radical feminists have criticized the liberal feminists for wanting to become like men. The point is not to gain the right to do what men do, they argue, because that leads women to devalue what women do.

Influential radical feminists like Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, John Stoltenberg and Monique Wittig, recognize trans women as women, which makes sense in a movement who is based in the idea that genitals should not define your worth, your role or your status.

Radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin viewed surgery as a right for transgender people.

There is another strand of radical feminism, however, known as trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERF), people who argue that trans women are men in disguise, and that they perpetuate the ideals of the Patriarchy. The trans women want to take over “womyn’s spaces”, they say.

In order to prove that trans women are men, the TERFs point to the fact that some trans women are sexually attractive (thus living up to the sexism of the Patriarchy). At the same time they use stories and photos of those that are not living up to the aesthetic standards of the fashion industry to prove that all trans women are men.

The fact that many cis women try equally hard to please the male gaze is ignored. The diversity of transgender women is ignored. Nor do the TERFs consider that trans women who have been raised as men have been harrassed and bullied for their female identities and feminine expressions throughout their lives. In other words: That they are also victims of the Patriarchy.

Recently much of the transphobic radical feminism has degenerated into biological determinism, as in “genitals or chromosomes determine whether you are a man or a woman”. Many of these “radical feminists” also deny the existence of gender, as in the cultural definition and expression of gender roles and gender identities. This is the exact opposite of what radical feminism was meant to be. These “gender critical” activists are, as I see it, not true radical feminists.

Among the transphobic radical feminists we find people like Germaine Greer, Janice Raymond, Sheila Jeffreys, Julie Bindel, and Robert Jensen. They have very little support in the US, but have managed to gain some influence in the UK. The Norwegian organization for radical feminists, Kvinnefronten, welcomes transgender women.

THIRD WAVE -> Intersectional Feminism

The third wave of feminism began in the early 1990s (although you will find its roots back in the 1970s). It embraces individualism and diversity.

Both the first and the second waves of feminism have been dominated by white, cis, middle and upper class women from “Western” countries. Many of them are academics. They are not representative of women in general.

Because of this they have been criticised for generalizing about the female life experience on the basis of their own lives, ignoring the unique experiences of – for instance – women of color, women in developing countries and trans, nonbinary and queer women.

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw.

The term intersectionality was introduced by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in 1989, and it was soon adopted by third wave feminists. Intersectionality reflects postmodern insights into the way the current social and cultural systems creates hierarchies of oppression.

This oppression is not only about men oppressing women (or the upper class exploiting the working class). In a world dominated by privileged white, straight, and “masculine” men, everyone who does not live up to their ideals are oppressed, whether their “otherness” is caused by sex, skin color, sexual orientation, homeland, religion or gender identity.

The third wave has also been strongly be influenced by queer theory and gender theory, which look at the social and cultural constructions of masculinity and femininity, sexualities and gender.

The third wave is often seen as sex positive. There are “girly”, “lipstick”, feminists who embrace feminine gender expressions and female sexuality and who argue that noone, not even feminists, have the right to to define or control how they should dress, act, or express themselves.

Needless to say you won’t find many transphobes among third wave feminists.

Some have also coined a fourth wave of feminism. It seems to me to be a continuation of third wave, intersectional, feminism, with a strong focus on the use of modern media. Some TERFs have tried to appropriate the term, joining right wing extremists in their attacks against queer gender theory, but do not be fooled by this. They are, at best, to be considered an offshoot of the second wave. They do not represent women. They do not represent feminists. They do not represent radical feminism.

Top illustration: iStock

See also:

On lesbians,transgender people and feminism.

Transadvocate on transgender feminism.

The rise of anti-trans “radical” feminists, explained

Idol Worship: Julia Serano Talks To Autostraddle About Fixing Feminism

Andrea Dworkin Was a Trans Ally

#feminism #radical feminism #liberal feminism #intersectional feminism #transgender #trans

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sometimesrosy · 4 years

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I am worried about inclusiveness in my story. I've had these characters in my head for more than 10 years, maybe even 15. When I created them I was a child. As I grew up, I started "upgrading" my story & making it much more fitting to my age now, an adult. However, I don't have much inclusiveness in it. It's in a high fantasy world. The main character is bisexual, & his ex-boyfriend has darker skin. But other than that... I'm having a hard time changing the characters from what I imagined them.

This is a good and complicated question. I’m glad you asked.

There are problems here, and I think you’re finding you’re confronting them but you can’t quite identify them.

The thing about inclusiveness, about adding diversity to your work, is that it can’t really be solved by surface changes like-- oh this character is black now, all better. BECAUSE diversity is actually about more than just the color of a character’s skin.

Diversity is about differences of life experience, culture, mindset, history, perspective, values. It’s about recognizing that the world is not just one, standard existence, but a multiplicity.

We are in a time now that is *changing* the way we understand people and identity.

You started this story when you were a child and didn’t recognize all these complexities, and to tell the truth, society itself didn’t really recognize them at a larger level. There’s a reason why you as a kid didn’t see them.

Because our culture as a whole has identified white people as the default people. Specifically white, middle/upperclass, christian, able bodied, straight, cis men as the default person. ANYTHING you have other than that has to be identified, otherwise, we assume they are the default person.

The HERO is always this default person until we define them as otherwise, female, Black, poor, atheist, deaf. Oh look. There’s a new character who has a distinctly different experience than our default person. And you then have to WRITE them with that experience in mind, or you’re just writing the default person in a mask that is only skin deep.

So what I’m trying to tell you is that it’s not really diversity if you just change the color of your character’s skin without letting it reflect upon who they are as a person. And then how that affects your story. You can’t JUST make someone in a wheel chair without changing their part of the story on a fundamental level, don’t you think? If you switch your character from non stated but assumed Christianity to Judaism... how does that affect your story or character? And if it doesn’t, well lets say it’s irrelevant to the story, then how do you share that bit of background of the character, make it authentic and not seem as if you’re just checking boxes on the diversity list? Do you even know enough about Judaism to write them fairly or will you just toss in some yiddish-- “Oy, what a shmuck!” and leave it at that? Ok well maybe your fantasy world doesn’t have Jewish people. Fair enough.

But now I need to question your world building. Is everyone in your book of the same culture? Are there different races, religions, creeds, classes, ethnicity? If there aren’t, why not? Are you writing a world where no one travels? Where there’s an oppressive force that requires everyone to worship the same gods? Even JRR Tolkien had multiple races, languages, belief systems and cultures. I say “even” because Tolkien is often taken as the “whiteness model” of fantasy. The British/northern European ideal.

You might be attached to the way your characters look. You’re also probably attached to the world view that white is the default. We all are, frankly. The first novel I wrote I made it about a blonde white woman from the Bronx, where I am from, where blonde white women are few and far between. And I didn’t address how this white woman lived in The Bronx surrounded by mostly brown Latinx people. To be honest, I think I had internalized that concept of white people being the default, of ALL books being about the white experience and that was just how you write a story. If I were to rewrite that book now, I would make her Latina. I could keep the main story the way it was, but switching her to Latina would require a hefty rewrite as her character, experiences, understanding, perspective and the way she looked at herself and her world would be different.

What you need to do, IF you want to add diversity to your novel, is to do a major overhaul of your understanding of what it means to be human and how our differences and intersections shape our identity and experiences. That means a major overhaul of your story.

OR you could leave your story the way it is and don’t add diversity to what seems to be a complete story already, just to fit the times and concerns of the day, STILL do the work of overhauling your personal understanding of diversity, and then in the next book, build that diversity in from the bottom up.

Even if you leave the book with everyone looking the way they already do, you might try adding an AWARENESS of race, diversity, otherness, bias, bigotry, etc. White people ALSO move through this world with people who don’t look like them. Acting like white people don’t have any repercussions from living in this racist society is making a statement that not only is the white experience the default experience and the way things should be, but also racism is just a given and doesn’t need to be examined, since it only affects POC.

Any way you take it, it’s a lot of work. That’s because confronting your own biases, blindspots, assumptions and unspoken prejudices is HARD and takes constant work.

#writing advice #rosy writes #diversity #writing diversity #confronting our biases

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humansofhds · 3 years

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Don Abram, MDiv ’19

“In the same way that the Black Church has been queer through its very existence—by operating on the undersides of power, by existing in the margins, by advocating for the least of these—me advocating for LGBTQ rights is simply an extension of that tradition. It is an extension of that Black, freedom-loving tradition. I want to be able to walk congregants through this as we center the lived experiences of LGBTQ+ folks in the Black Church.”

Don Abram, MDiv ’19, is the founder of Pride in the Pews, a nonprofit that seeks to amplify the voices and experiences of queer Christians in the Black Church.

A Call to Identity and to Faith

I grew up on the far South Side of Chicago, and I was raised by a single mother and a very active Jamaican grandmother. Every Sunday I attended a hand-clapping, toe-tapping Black Church right down the street from my house, within walking distance. I attended every Sunday, initially reluctantly because I didn’t like waking up in the morning. I would come up with a myriad of excuses and reasons for why I could not attend on Sunday, including not being able to find matching socks or not being able to find the right tie. It never worked.

At the age of 14, I was called to preach. I moved from the pews to the pulpit, which was really a paradigm-shifting change, especially in the Black Church, wherein the Black pulpit is often centered over and above other positions and places in the congregation. At the same time that I was called to preach, I was also introduced to my sexuality. But what I knew instinctively was that I could not embody both of those identities without losing both my community and my calling.

So to put it simply, I did not embody both of those identities, at least not on Sunday mornings. When I would preach in my church or go to different churches for revivals, I was a straight preacher. Outside of the four walls of the Black Church, I was able to explore my queerness – still in the shadows, but not nearly as tucked away as when I was in the pulpit. Frankly, I didn’t have an opportunity to explore the theological foundations I was brought up under until I arrived at HDS. That was the first time I was able to take a deep dive into toxic theologies, unpack them, and reconstruct a theology that spoke to the fullness of who I am. And I did all of that from within the radical Black religious tradition.

I was reading folks like James Cone and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as folks like Fannie Lou Hamer—all of these amazing scholars who took seriously the Black Church as an institution. Not just what transpired at the spiritual level, but the ways in which the Black Church showed up in the public square. And the Black Church historically showed up pursing justice and pushing back against systems of oppression. I was able to reconstruct this theology and I loved it. I was able to reconcile my faith and my sexuality. There was no distinction between the two. I saw them as inextricable.

An Invitation In

I would also travel back home, to the far South Side of Chicago, to the same old hand-clapping, toe-tapping Black Church, where folks did not have access to the same sort of conversations I was having at HDS, or to the same thinkers or luminaries who were engaging in prophetic critique of Black Church theology. I wrestled with how to invite my church into these conversations around the intersection of race, religion, and sexuality.

At HDS, we didn’t talk a whole lot about how to translate what we were learning, or how to engage in conversations with folks who didn’t have access to that space. And that’s really where Pride in the Pews emerged. I wondered, how might we think of a sustainable way to engage congregants, on the South Side of Chicago and in cities like it across the country, in these conversations that are central to our theology and our understanding of ourself as an institution? That is where it began.

And then came the George Floyd murder, after which I was protesting. Alongside me were Black pastors and clergy, and they were chanting along with me, Black Lives Matter. My immediate retort was, does my life matter to you? As a Black queer man who shows up Sunday after Sunday to a sanctuary where my sexuality is demonized and condemned? I realized that now is a great time for the Black Church to recommit itself to pursing justice for all people—for those who exist at the margins of society, for those who are on the underside of power. I launched Pride in the Pews in the hopes that in this particular socio-political moment, we would be able to take a deeper dive into our commitments and the way we carry them into the world.

Different Faiths, Same Justice

Religious communities like the one I come from—Black Baptist, fundamentalist communities—are quite skeptical of “out-there,” liberal places like HDS. There’s this fear that you’re bringing folks of all different faiths together, and they’re just going to steer you away from Jesus. Steer you away from God. But what I found was that being in conversation with Buddhist, agnostic, and atheist colleagues, with folks who practice Indigenous African religious traditions, did not bring me away from my faith, but actually brought me closer to it. My colleagues were asking questions and framing the pursuit of justice in ways that pushed me to ask, how might Jesus see this? In doing so, it actually gave me permission, or offered an invitation, for me to think more critically about the values that I hold as a Black Christian—and more specifically, a Black, Queer Christian in the Black Church.

For me, this was an opportunity to take a deep dive into my convictions, both theological and philosophical and spiritual, and begin to ask the scary questions. The questions that would lead to answers that I didn’t already have. Being willing to engage in that humble inquiry, that audacious questioning, presented an opportunity for me to say, ok, let me re-imagine the way I’ve interpreted the gospel. Let me reimagine the way I understand harm and violence and white supremacy and homophobia.

I got to the place where I was able to see both my queerness and my faith as inextricably connected, but also where I was able to go broader than that. I was able to say, when I’m talking about the injustices caused by queerphobia in the world, those are intimately connected to white supremacy. Those are intimately connected to patriarchy and homophobia and transphobia. These things are not separate and independent from one another. What we are really talking about is interlocking systems of oppression. My colleagues from different faith traditions and I, we were able to work together and agree on the fact that we should be pursuing justice. We should be doing good in the world. Whatever it is that we deem ministry or our calling or the philosophical tenets that we subscribe to, it should all work toward a world where we are safer, more whole, and more free.

“Can I Get a Witness?”

I started Pride in the Pews not only when this country was confronting a racial reckoning that was catapulted by state-sanctioned violence against Black bodies. It also happened when we were seeing unprecedented and historic attacks against the Black community, with a specific emphasis on attacks on the rights of trans-folks to exist. At the same time as we saw this racial reckoning, we saw these concerted attacks across the country on LGBTQ folks. That’s the intersectional context that Pride in the Pews emerged into. That intersectionality makes Pride in the Pews so powerful. We recognize that we’re fighting on multiple fronts. We’re fighting for our right to exist as Black people, and we’re fighting for our right to exist as queer-embodied people. For me, that context was key. It gave this push power.

Context is important. Since I’m trying to reach folks in the Black religious tradition, any content that I create, any story that I tell, any voice that I lift up, needs to reside within that tradition. One thing that is central to our tradition is storytelling. It is with this in mind that we started with the Can I Get a Witness Project, which aims to capture the stories of 66 Black Queer Christians within the Black Church. Whether it’s my enslaved ancestors who didn’t have access to the scriptural texts to be able to read them, who accessed the word of God through story; or whether it is my African ancestors who were passing on sacred religious traditions, not by writing them down, but through word of mouth—that oral tradition is rich. That’s the one I’m centering in this project.

When we’ve collected all 66 stories, we hope to take all of the wisdom, all of the insights we’ve been able to gleam from our conversations with Black queer Christians, look at the trends and salient points, and turn that into a curriculum. A curriculum that is shaped and fashioned by the Black religious tradition.

The Black church was born fighting systems of oppression and dehumanization. I want to bring that history in. I want to bring in the history of folks like Reverend Jesse Jackson, who was the first Democratic politician in this nation’s history to ever advocate for LGBTQ rights. That’s a part of our tradition. And I want to bring in the history of Dr. King, the freedom fighter, truth-teller, and table-shaker who decided to speak truth to power, and in doing so, lost his life. These are the traditions we are part of. I want to lift that up and say, in the same way that the Black Church has been queer through its very existence—by operating on the undersides of power, by existing in the margins, by advocating for the least of these—me advocating for LGBTQ rights is simply an extension of that tradition. It is an extension of that Black, freedom-loving tradition. I want to be able to walk congregants through this as we center the lived experiences of LGBTQ+ folks in the Black Church.

We are going to turn some of these stories into case studies. We are going to read and hear the stories of the Black queer folks as sacred texts. We’re going to take them seriously, to wrestle with them, and to create tools that combat queerphobia and transphobia and homophobia as it shows up historically in the Black Church context.

A Call to Action

I would like to invite folks to participate in the Can I Get a Witness Project. If they identify as Black, Queer, and Christian, we’d love for them to be a part of this work and of this project. We have just over 30 folks that we’ve interviewed, and we have just over 30 to go. And of course, for all the allies out there who don’t identity as Black or Queer, you can support us by following the work that we’re doing, contributing financially to the work we are doing, and sharing our work. Our work will spread by the willingness of folks to share their stories and to open up those spaces where liberation and love do not abound, so that we can make it abound.

Interview by Gianna Cacciatore; photos courtesy of Don Abram

#harvard #Harvard Divinity School #Black Church #queer #christian #faith #chicago #Religion #large

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rapeculturerealities · 4 years

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“BUTCH” HAS LONG been the name we’ve given a certain kind — that kind — of lesbian. The old adage applies: You know her when you see her. She wears men’s clothing, short hair, no makeup. Butch is an aesthetic, but it also conveys an attitude and energy. Both a gender and a sexuality, butchness is about the body but also transcends it: “We exist in this realm of masculinity that has nothing to do with cis men — that’s the part only we [butches] know how to talk about,” says the 42-year-old writer, former Olympic swimmer and men’s wear model Casey Legler. “Many people don’t even know how to ask questions about who we are, or about what it means to be us.”

Many of us wear the butch label with a certain self-consciousness, fearing the term doesn’t quite fit — like a new pair of jeans, it’s either too loose or too tight. The graphic novelist Alison Bechdel, 59, doesn’t refer to herself as butch but understands why others do. “It’s a lovely word, ‘butch’: I’ll take it, if you give it to me,” she says. “But I’m afraid I’m not butch enough to really claim it. Because part of being butch is owning it, the whole aura around it.”

What does owning it look like? Decades before genderless fashion became its own style, butches were wearing denim and white tees, leather jackets and work boots, wallet chains and gold necklaces. It isn’t just about what you’re wearing, though, but how: Butchness embodies a certain swagger, a 1950s-inspired “Rebel Without a Cause” confidence. In doing so, these women — and butches who don’t identify as women — created something new and distinct, an identity you could recognize even if you didn’t know what to call it.

By refuting conventionally gendered aesthetics, butchness expands the possibilities for women of all sizes, races, ethnicities and abilities. “I always think of the first butch lesbian I ever saw,” says the 33-year-old actor Roberta Colindrez. “This beautiful butch came into the grocery store and she was built like a brick house. Short hair, polo shirt, cargo pants and that ring of keys … It was the first time I saw the possibility of who I was.” And yet, to many people, “butch style” remains an oxymoron: There’s a prevalent assumption that we’re all fat, frumpy fashion disasters — our baseball caps and baggy pants suggest to others that we don’t care about self-presentation. But it’s not that we’re careless; it’s that unlike, say, the gay white men who have been given all too much credit for influencing contemporary visual culture, we’re simply not out to appease the male gaze. We disregard and reject the confines of a sexualized and commodified femininity.

ETYMOLOGICALLY, “butch” is believed to be an abbreviation of “butcher,” American slang for “tough kid” in the early 20th century and likely inspired by the outlaw Butch Cassidy. By the early 1940s, the word was used as a pejorative to describe “aggressive” or “macho” women, but lesbians reclaimed it almost immediately, using it with pride at 1950s-era bars such as Manhattan’s Pony Stable Inn and Peg’s Place in San Francisco. At these spots, where cocktails cost 10 cents and police raids were a regular occurrence, identifying yourself as either butch or femme was a prerequisite for participating in the scene.

These butches were, in part, inspired by 19th-century cross-dressers — then called male impersonators or transvestites — who presented and lived fully as men in an era when passing was a crucial survival tactic. We can also trace butchness back to the androgynous female artists of early 20th-century Paris, including the writer Gertrude Stein and the painter Romaine Brooks. But it wasn’t until the 1960s and early 1970s that butches, themselves at the intersection of the burgeoning civil, gay and women’s rights movements, became a more visible and viable community.

From their earliest incarnations, butches faced brutal discrimination and oppression, not only from outside their community but also from within. A certain brand of (mostly white) lesbian feminism dominant in the late ’70s and early ’80s marginalized certain sorts of “otherness” — working-class lesbians, lesbians of color and masculine-of-center women. They pilloried butchness as inextricably misogynist and butch-femme relationships as dangerous replications of heteronormative roles. (Such rhetoric has resurfaced, as trans men are regularly accused of being anti-feminist in their desire to become the so-called enemy.) Challenged yet again to defend their existence and further define themselves, butches emerged from this debate emboldened, thriving in the late ’80s and early ’90s as women’s studies programs — and, later, gender and queer studies departments — gained traction on North American and European college campuses.

The ’90s were in fact a transformative decade for the butch community. In 1990, the American philosopher Judith Butler published her groundbreaking “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,” and her theories about gender were soon translated and popularized for the masses. In her academic work, Butler argues that gender and sexuality are both constructed and performative; butch identity, as female masculinity, subverts the notion that masculinity is the natural and exclusive purview of the male body. Soon after, butch imagery infiltrated the culture at large. The August 1993 issue of Vanity Fair featured the straight supermodel Cindy Crawford, in a black maillot, straddling and shaving the butch icon K.D. Lang. That same year, the writer Leslie Feinberg published “Stone Butch Blues,” a now classic novel about butch life in 1970s-era New York. In Manhattan, comedians such as Lea DeLaria and drag kings such as Murray Hill took to the stage; it was also the heyday of Bechdel’s “Dykes to Watch Out For,” the serialized comic strip she started in 1983. In 1997, Ellen DeGeneres, still the most famous of butches, came out. Two years later, Judith “Jack” Halberstam and Del LaGrace Volcano published “The Drag King Book” and the director Kimberly Peirce released her breakthrough film, “Boys Don’t Cry”; its straight cisgender star, Hilary Swank, went on to win an Oscar for her portrayal of Brandon Teena, a role that still incites contentious debates about the nebulous boundaries between butch and trans identity. These artists and their legacies are the cornerstones of our community. As Legler says, “This is where we’ve come from, and the folks we look back to. If you identify with that lineage, then we’d love to have you.”

LIKE ANY QUEER subculture, butchness is vastly different now than it was three decades ago — though the codes have been tweaked and refined over the years, younger butches continue to take them in new and varied directions: They may experiment with their personas from day to day, switching fluidly between masculine and feminine presentation. There are “stone butches,” a label that doesn’t refer to coldness, as is often assumed, but to a desire to touch rather than to be touched — to give rather than receive — and is considered slightly more masculine than “soft butch” on the Futch Scale, a meme born in 2018 that attempted to parse the gradations from “high femme” to “stone butch.” (“Futch,” for “femme/butch,” is square in the middle.) And while there remains some truth to butch stereotypes — give us a plaid flannel shirt any day of the week — that once-static portrait falls apart under scrutiny and reflection. Not every butch has short hair, can change a tire, desires a femme. Some butches are bottoms. Some butches are bi. Some butches are boys.

Different bodies own their butchness differently, but even a singular body might do or be butch differently over time. We move between poles as our feelings about — and language for — ourselves change. “In my early 20s, I identified as a stone butch,” says the 45-year-old writer Roxane Gay. “In adulthood, I’ve come back to butch in terms of how I see myself in the world and in my relationship, so I think of myself as soft butch now.” Peirce, 52, adds that this continuum is as much an internal as an external sliding scale: “I’ve never aspired to a binary,” she says. “From day one, the idea of being a boy or a girl never made sense. The ever-shifting signifiers of neither or both are what create meaning and complexity.”

Indeed, butch fluidity is especially resonant in our era of widespread transphobia. Legler, who uses they/them pronouns, is a “trans-butch identified person — no surgery, no hormones.” Today, the interconnected spectrums of gender and queerness are as vibrant and diverse in language as they are in expression — genderqueer, transmasc, nonbinary, gender-nonconforming. Yet butches have always called themselves and been called by many names: bull dyke, diesel dyke, bulldagger, boi, daddy and so on. Language evolves, “flowing in time and changing constantly as new generations come along and social structures shift,” Bechdel says.

If it’s necessary to think historically, it’s also imperative to think contextually. Compounding the usual homophobia and misogyny, black and brown butches must contend with racist assumptions: “Black women often get read as butch whether they are butch or not,” Gay says. “Black women in general are not seen, so black butchness tends to be doubly invisible. Except for studs: They’re very visible,” she adds, referring to a separate but related term used predominantly by black or Latinx butches (though, unsurprisingly, white butches have appropriated it) who are seen as “harder” in their heightened masculinity and attitude. Gay notes that “people tend to assume if you’re a black butch, you’re a stud and that’s it,” which is ultimately untrue. Still, butch legibility remains a paradox: As the most identifiable of lesbians — femmes often “pass” as straight, whether they want to or not — we are nonetheless maligned and erased for our failure of femininity, our refusal to be the right kind of woman.

ANOTHER LINGERING stereotype, one born from “Stone Butch Blues” and its more coded literary forebears, particularly Radclyffe Hall’s “The Well of Loneliness” (1928), is the butch as a tragic and isolated figure. She is either cast out by a dominant society that does not — will not — ever see her or accept her, or she self-isolates as a protective response to a world that continually and unrelentingly disparages her.

When a butch woman does appear in mainstream culture, it’s usually alongside her other: the femme lesbian. Without the femme and the contrast she underscores, the butch is “inherently uncommodifiable,” Bechdel says, since two butches together is just a step “too queer.” We rarely see butches depicted in or as community, an especially sobering observation given the closure of so many lesbian bars over the past two decades. But when you talk to butches, a more nuanced story emerges, one of deep and abiding camaraderie and connection. Despite the dearth of representation, butch love thrives — in the anonymous, knowing glances across the subway platform when we recognize someone like us, and in the bedroom, too. “Many of my longest friendships are with people who register somewhere on the butch scale,” Peirce says. “We’re like married couples who fell in love with each other as friends.”

Legler, for their part, recognizes a “lone wolf” effect, one in which some young queers initially love “being the only butch in the room.” In organizing the group portrait that accompanies this essay over the past months, Legler was curious “what it would be like for butches to just show up together and to be able to display all of their power, all of their sexiness, all of their charisma, without having it be mitigated in some way.” And not only for butches of an older generation, but for those still figuring things out, transforming the scene in ways that both defy and inspire their elders. “It’s been centuries in the making, the fact that we are all O.K.,” Legler adds. “That our bodies get to exist: We have to celebrate that. You can do more than just survive. You can contribute.”

#trans #transgender #butch #gender roles #Gender essentialism #gender binary #LGBTQIA

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cardentist · 5 years

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the transmisandry “debate” and the attitude towards trans men is so transparently a retreading of literally every exclusionary movement of the last few decades and Yet it’s being perpetrated and tolerated by what otherwise should be inclusionist spaces because it’s once again being pointed at a more “acceptable” target

like, on some level I understand the gut reaction, the term itself is associated with a lot of negativity and “mens rights activists” and the like have made the idea of men specifically facing oppression for being men at best laughable and at worst a red flag for violent misogyny. it’s one of those things that a lot of people in left leaning spaces take for granted as being true across the board, something they don’t need to think about or examine. and to be clear “they” included me for quite some time, I do understand where the feeling comes from

but it’s not about oppression for being men, it’s oppression for being trans men, it’s transmisandry for the same reason that transmisogyny is transmisogyny. it’s a term specifically meant to cast a net over the broad array of experiences that people have specifically as trans men to give them an outlet to both examine their experiences in relation to the wider community of trans men and to specifically seek and give reassurance and solidarity to each other.

the bigger problem with this argument is that many people will resort to denying what I’ve just said in order to reject the proposed term, whether it’s something they’d actually believe once they examined the situation in earnest or not. because people act as though acknowledging that trans men face oppression for being trans men will open up the floodgates leading to cis straight white men convincing people that they’re oppressed for being men. so trans men Can’t be oppressed for being trans men because trans men are men and men aren’t oppressed.

so leading from this line of thought what you’ll generally see is the argument that what trans men experience is “just” transphobia, and if you press the issue or bring up a personal example you’ll almost as commonly get that anything else is “just” “misdirected” misogyny. and just, there’s so So much to unpack there that I’m almost tempted to just leave it where it is, but ignoring the issue won’t make it go away and I wouldn’t be writing this post if I didn’t want the issue to change.

the point with, I think, the least baggage is one that I’ve already touched upon, that being that the experiences of trans men and trans women are just naturally going to be different from each other and it’s useful for both parties to have language to talk specifically about their experiences, in the same way that it’s useful to examine the differences between the experiences of binary and nonbinary trans people. it doesn’t matter who you think has it “worse” because this isn’t a competition to see who’s oppressed enough to Deserve having their experiences heard. the urge for trans men to make a term to describe their experiences isn’t some way to try to argue that they’re more oppressed, it’s born from the inherent need to be understood and to see that other people exist in the way that you have. it’s the solidarity that brought the trans community together in the first place

a point leading off of that with probably significantly more baggage is the idea that queer and lgbt+ spaces are a contest to measure your oppression in the first place. don’t get me wrong, it Is useful to recognize different axis’ of oppression, to recognize larger patterns of violence faced by specific groups of people at a disproportionate rate. it helps us, as an entire community, identify the most vulnerable groups of people so we can lean into helping them on both a systemic and individual level, so we can see whose voices need to be boosted so they can be heard both in and out of the community. and moreover having these numbers and experiences together can help people outside of the community see that it’s is a problem as well.

however, the issue comes in when perceived theoretical oppression is used as a social capital to decide who is and is not allowed to be heard. I’m sure I’ve already lost the ace exclusionists ages ago by now, so that’s a perfect example. at it’s most extreme ace exclusionism is blatant bigotry and hatred justified with the excuse that they’re protecting the queer and lgbt+ community from privileged invaders, and even when in it’s milder form ace exclusionism is powered by the idea that asexual people don’t face oppression. marginalized people are denied resources, solidarity, safe spaces, and voices because they’re painted as not being oppressed or not being oppressed Enough. this wouldn’t be able to happen if your worth as a member of the lgbt+ community wasn’t measured by how oppressed your particular minority group is, if it didn’t have the sway that it has. creating a power structure in any way at all leaves people with the ability to exploit that structure, and the specific one that’s emerged within the queer community and leftist spaces in general allows people to exploit it while hiding it as moral, while hiding that they’re causing any pain at all. it’s the same frame of mind that’s made bullying cool in activist spaces

another reason why this hierarchy tends to fail on an individual level is, of course, that the level of oppression that an entire group faces does not dictate someone’s lived experiences, which is an idea that goes both ways. the argument over whether or not asexuals are oppressed is ultimately a meaningless distraction from the lived experiences of asexual people. it is a Fact that asexuals face higher levels of rape and sexual assault than straight people, you can deny that what they’re facing counts as oppression specifically but what does that matter? there are people who are suffering and that suffering can be lessened by allowing those people into our community, shouldn’t that be enough? likewise, comparing the suffering of individual people as if they were the same as the suffering of their respective groups combined is absolutely absurd. someone who is murdered for being a trans man isn’t less dead than someone who was murdered for being a trans woman. a trans woman isn’t Guaranteed to have lived a harder life than any and every other trans man just because of a difference in statistics, and the same can be said for literally every other member of the lgbt+ and queer communities. other community members aren’t concepts, they aren’t numbers, they’re people with unique lives and sorrows and joy. neither you or I or anyone else is the culmination of our respective or joint communities and some people need to learn how to act like it.

again, there is Meaning in seeing how our oppression is different, it’s not inherently wrong, but creating a framework where it can be used to paint a group of people as both lesser within the community and less deserving of help is creating a framework that can more than readily be abused. and because it positions the abused as privileged it creates a situation where the abuser can justify it to themselves. you use another minority as an outlet for the pain you feel under the weight of the same system that hurts them while denying their pain.

but to pull the conversation back to trans men specifically, lets examine lived experiences for a while longer. “misdirected misogyny” and “just misogyny” are both employed commonly in exclusionist spaces to deny that either someone’s oppression happened to them for the reason they say it did or to deny that their oppression is their own, and often times it’s both. for instance, the claim that ‘asexual people may face higher rates of sexual assault but That’s just because of misogyny (and/or misdirected homophobia)’ is used to deny that what asexual people face is oppression for being asexual. if you can’t deny that an assault victim was assaulted without either violating your own moral code or the moral code of the community you’ve surrounded yourself with then denying the cause of their assault is a more socially acceptable way of depriving them of the resources they need to address that assault. their pain wasn’t their own, it belongs to someone else, someone who’s Really oppressed.

in the context of trans men the argument is, of course, that they’re men. if they just so happen to face misogyny then it’s because they were mistakenly perceived as women. this works a convenient socially acceptable way to deny the lived experiences of a group you want to silence both in the ways that I’ve already illustrated And with the added bonus woke points of doing so while affirming someone’s gender identity in the process.

again, I want to reiterate, even if it were objectively true that all trans men face transphobia and misogyny totally separately, like a picky toddler that doesn’t want their peas anywhere near their mashed potatoes, that is ultimately an insufficient framework when talking about individual lives. there’s literally nothing wrong with trans men wanting to talk about their lived experiences with other trans men in the context of them Being trans men. being black isn’t inherently a part of the trans experience but being black Does ultimately affect your experiences as a trans person and how they impact you and it’s meaningful to discuss the intersection of those two experiences on an individual level.

but it just, Isn’t true. this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, but trans men were born in bodies that are perceived as being women, misogyny is a Feature to the experiences of trans men inherently. even trans men who are fully transitioned, have full surgery, have all their papers worked out, completely pass, move to a new state and changed their name, and have zero contact with anyone who ever knew them before or during their transition still lived a significant portion of their lives under a system that was misogynistic against them. of course there’s still a spectrum of personal experiences with it, just like there are with cis women and trans women, but to present the misogyny that trans men face as “accidental” is just absurd. and moreover, most trans men Aren’t the hypothetical Perfect Passing Pete. I’ve identified as trans for seven years now and I frankly don’t have the resources to even begin thinking about transitioning and won’t for what’s looking to be indefinitely, I don’t even begin to come within the ballpark of passing and it Sure Does Show. misogyny is just as present in my life as it would be for a cis woman but the difference is that I’m not supposed to talk about it. and even barring That there are transitioned trans men who face misogyny specifically because they are trans men, before during and after transition. you could argue that that’s “just” transphobia but you could do the same for transmisogyny. if we can acknowledge that trans women have experiences that specifically come from their status as women who can be wrongly perceived as men then we should all be able to acknowledge that trans men have experiences that specifically come from their status as men who can be wrongly perceived as women and that both the similarities and differences between these experiences are worth talking about.

another issue with painting it as “just” misogyny that ties pretty heavily into what I was just talking about is the fact that men don’t have the same access to spaces meant to talk about misogyny that women do. again, this is something that makes sense on a gut level, it’s not like cis men are being catcalled while walking to 7/11. but like, a lot of trans men are. misogyny is a normal facet in the lives of trans men but male voices are perceived as being invaders in spaces meant to talk about misogyny, both in and out of trans specific spaces and conversations

trans men lose a solidarity with women that they do not gain with men. there’s a certain pain and othering that comes with intimately identifying with the experiences of a group of people while being denied that those experiences are yours, of being treated the same way for the same reason but at once being aware that the comfort and understanding being extended isn’t For you and feeling like you’re cheating some part of your sense of self by identifying with it.

part of that is just the growing pains of getting used to existing as a trans person, but that in and of itself doesn’t mean that we aren’t allowed to find a solution. if trans men can’t, aren’t allowed, or don’t want to speak about their experiences in women’s spaces then why not allow them to talk about their experiences together? the fact that we even have to argue over whether or not trans men Deserve to talk about their experiences is sad enough in it’s own right, but even sadder is inclusionists, people who should frankly know better at this point, refusing to stand up for trans men because someone managed to word blatant bigotry in an acceptable way Once Again.

#discourse #transphobia #trans men #transmisandry #inclusionism #long post #hi yes hello everything I say is exactly two ideas in a trench coat

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katieclark27 · 4 years

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Gloria Steinem: the ultimate public intellectual

What does it mean to be a feminist today? When you think of how feminists are perceived in the classroom, at home, through the eyes of the media, or in politics, how do you feel? I feel hopeful — hopeful that women, particularly well-educated, strong women, will change the way females are represented politically, academically, creatively, and socially. With every women’s rally, march on Capitol Hill, or a new elected female in politics, we make progress towards fair representation, equal pay, the right to choose, and so on. But being a “feminist” carries a tremendous amount of dangerous weight. Many still hold the belief that feminists argue for female superiority. Feminists endure a large amount of oppression, backlash, and persecution. In some spheres, identifying as a feminist will give you an invisible “target” on your back — you threaten patriarchy, the system, or gender and social norms. We have certain individuals in our society who take the oppression against females and fight harder against the backlash — Simone de Beuvoir, Betty Friedan, Oprah, and Emma Watson are all women who boldly fight for gender equality. We are fortunate enough to currently be entering into fourth-wave feminism, a sector of feminism that recognizes intersectionality. Fourth-wave feminism is changing how equal gender rights are perceived in the workplace, in the media, in education, in politics, and so on. Fourth-wave, which began in 2012, acknowledges the complex and intertwined systems that contribute to the oppression of highly marginalized groups. More specifically, we must understand that to be a woman of color is more “difficult” than it is to be a white woman. When we look at feminism through an intersectional lens, we see factors like race, socioeconomic status, age, and disability all playing a factor in how certain groups are more oppressed than others. So, who helped us get to fourth-wave feminism? How did we get to this modernized definition of feminism where all types of women are accepted, acknowledged, and advocated for? Perhaps the most famous feminist of all time — Gloria Steinem. Steinem is a feminist, a journalist, a political leader, an esteemed academic, undercover writer, and an author. Simply put, she is a “big shot” in the world of feminism. But she’s not particularly special because she is all of these things at once. Steinem advocated for women so fiercely in the world journalism, politics, academia, and writing that feminism’s trajectory has changed because of her. Steinem’s main thought, that the purpose of feminism is to free the unique qualities within a person and see that both men and women are complex, alike, and independent, is the reason why fourth-wave feminism exists. Rather, once we notice how unique we all are, and how some are born more privileged than others — we can accept, progress, learn better, and understand.

Steinem spent the beginning of her Journalism career fighting for a voice in the news-room. In a field dominated by white men, Steinem struggled to write news-worthy, meaningful stories as her writing was considered weak. She was assigned to articles called “the women’s pages,” where she wrote about lifestyle, wellness, fashion, and nylon-stockings. Constantly seeking to write something with purpose and intention, Steinem finally gained attention when she worked undercover at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Club in 1963. In her expose “A Bunny’s Tale,” Steinem revealed the sexist, unglamorous, and underpaid lifestyle of “the bunny.” So, what was Steinem’s purpose of writing this muckraking reveal? Her objective, at its core, was to prevent men from defining sexuality. If men are the only ones who determine what it means to be a sexual woman, female autonomy is jeopardized. To uncover sexism is to revolutionize females. The ideas behind “A Bunny’s Tale” were not to popularize the Playboy Club itself, but to diminish its founding principles that women are for the male gaze or for male entertainment. She interviewed the bunnies — without makeup or costume — and discovered each woman was a complex, unique individual with substance, meaning, and background. She started the conversation that females are strong and capable, but underrepresented and accounted for. After gaining national press, Steinem was able to continue to shine light on the inequalities females face. She started New York Magazine, where she reported on women’s rights, progressive social issues, and political campaigns. Steinem aimed to make it evident that things absolutely matter. The language we use, the history we reference and the truths we hold, all add up to a large superstructure of how we interact as men and women. Therefore, language is fragile. Be gentle but truthful with the words you use — treat language with respect, because it holds tremendous weight for how we see ourselves and the world. Steinem dedicated her journalism to women’s rights. She used journalism as a platform to discuss ideas about gender and equality, and people listened. Some found her politics defiant and disorderly, others found hers to be refreshing and new. However, regardless of how you perceived Steinem, she understood that getting people to hear her ideas was the ultimate goal. Specifically, it’s “not whether the people are listening, but whether they’re hearing things worth talking about.” She was controversial in the fact that she saw everything as gendered. She often remarked how journalism is supposed to be unbiased and balanced, but this is wrong. This idea contributes to male domination. If we see journalism as having two sides, then we are creating a gendered perspective on news. There are never “two sides to every issue.” There is the truth. Steinem used journalism as a way to communicate ideas on money, power, sex, greed, poverty, love, and age. Her most famous piece, “The International Crime of Female Genital Mutilation,” which was published in 1979, unveiled the 75 million women suffering with the results of genital mutilation. In her article, Steinem articulates:

“the real reasons for genital mutilation can only be understood in the context of patriarchy: men must control women’s bodies as the means of production, and thus repress the indepdent power of women’s sexuality.” But Steinem also defends men’s sexuality as well:

“these patriarchal controls limit men’s sexuality too … that's why men are asked symbolically to submit the sexual part of themselves and their sons to patriarchal authority, which seems to be the origin of male circumcision, a practice that, even as advocates admit, is medically unnecessary 90% of the time.”

Her ideas are extreme and progressive. Discussing genital mutilation was radical in 1979. News was supposed to be conservative or traditional. But Steinem saw the future as a time for freedom of thought and change. If we can expose the danger within societies that have genital mutilation, we can fix the issue at hand: patriarchy. Her journalism also critiqued pornography. She explains that pornography exists because the drama and tension within porn come from the idea that one person is dominating the other. There is no equality in pornography, just control. Steinem’s entire brand is exposing how corruption affects women. She is blunt, outspoken and explicit — but change occurs when we are transparent. She recognized that news can only be informative if it evokes change and emotion — do not sugarcoat patriarchy (even if the topic at hand, like pornography or genital mutiliaton, is controverrsial). Steinem took her straightforward and candid rhetoric to create the iconic feminist magazine Ms., in 1978. Her most famous essay, “If Men Could Menstruate,” reflected on the power systems that shape politics and the economy. She creates a world in which men have menstrual cycles and how this would shift power. Ms., created by women for women, was meant to highlight the various ways in which women are exploited. From opinion pieces about abortion to motherhood, Ms., displayed the female struggle in an honest, entertaining, and witty way.

Steinem understood that females are not free until political action occurs. If we are restricted by the law, in ways that men are not, we are in danger. We are controlled by two forms of power — political and social. Political power restricts our voice and how we perform in society. More specifically, political power is responsible for democracy — how we vote, female reproductive rights, the wage gap, and so on. Social power is how we are raised as men and women or who is viewed as the dominant gender. Both of these types of politics coerce us to act a certain way. Traditionally, women are meant to be homemakers, wives, or mothers. Men are the money earners, ultimate leaders, and fathers. Steinem saw these two behaviors as ideas we must unlearn. Rather, the first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn. In order to move forward, politically and socially, we must leave behind these learned behaviors that control how we perform. Steinem argued that marginalized groups, such as women or people of color, cannot advance if to be female is to be submissive, or to be black is to be inferior. Steinem saw much of our political system to be purely imbedded behaviors that intensely control our thinking. She then became the face of women’s rallies across America. Coining the term “pro choice” rather than “pro abortion,” Steinem made it clear that no female is for abortion — we are for the power over our own bodies. Steinem insisted that reproductive rights are the most important right of a woman: "opposing women's right to control our own bodies is always the first step in every authoritarian regime.” Steinem aligns closely with another famous feminist icon, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The two women, born in 1933 and 1934, see reproductive rights as a human rights, not a privilege. Both of these women hold the belief that you create change when you are vocal, outspoken, and strong willed. Their politics are controversial but controversy is their brand. Both exist in different spheres of politics — Steinem, in front of the camera, is on the cover of magazines and is an iconic activist throughout the media. Ginsburg does the work behind the scenes — she sets the precedent for how women are treated socially and politically. They compliment each other perfectly, proving that activism does not exist without politics, and vice versa.

Steinem stressed the importance of grooming future generations for a more progressive world. She comments:

“we've begun to raise our daughters more like our sons, but it will never work until we raise our sons more like our daughters.”

To raise “sons more like daughters” is crucial for feminism to continue. If we fail to teach boys skills like empathy, kindness, diligence, and cooperation — skills often deemed feminine — we set them up for failure. This is where fourth-wave feminism comes into play. Steinem’s view on feminism was never narrow. She perceived feminism to be applicable to both men and women. Rather, everyone has something to gain from being a feminist. Steinem was a global thinker.

“she understood that race, class, and caste (she traveled for two years after college in India) tend to double and triple the degree of oppression to which women are subjected.”

From this, Steinem worked relentlessly to create a system in which women from every race, class, and caste are supported. She preached the importance of women’s studies, black studies, and sexism just as much as mathematics, science, history. We cannot have a world where one field of study is represented — a comprehensive education is the key to progression. An education where students can view oppression and privilege through the context of their peers will create a world in which we can recognize our similarities and differences. From this, fourth-wave feminism is made possible through Steinem’s theory on intersectionality. This sector of feminism is defined by the recognition of race, class, and gender through education. If we do not teach future generations the importance of equality through education, we are basing feminism off of white women — which is not an accurate or fair representation of the female struggle. Steinem has remarked that black women have more commonly been feminists than white women. She comments:

“Intersectional feminism examines the overlapping systems of oppression and discrimination that women face, based not just on gender, but on race, sexuality, socioeconomic status, physical ability, and other marginalized identities.”

Because intersectional feminism recognizes factors like race, sexuality, socioeconomic status, and physical ability, marginalized groups are more likely to be feminists because they have been the result of systematic racism and sexism. Marginalized groups are subject to hate, persecution, or oppression. Steinem’s commentary only strengthens those who have been oppressed, and allows their struggle to become legitimate. This has changed the trajectory of feminism — would intersectionality exist without Steinem? I say no. Without her outspoken rhetoric, constant commentary, and controversial brand, feminism would look much weaker, narrower, and limited today.

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lame-and-corny-blog · 6 years

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Anti-Blackness in Asian-American Communities

In the wake of the nazi and white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, I have heard much talk about the need for solidarity among people of color. However, in order to eliminate white supremacy together, it is necessary for non-black people of color to confront the pervasive anti-Blackness in their communities. Anti-Blackness is not only perpetuated by white people - speaking from the non-Black Asian-American (specifically Japanese-American) perspective, we uphold this harmful ideology as well.

Anti-Blackness permeates Asian American communities in many ways. Whether we recognize it or not, it extends through both our American communities and Asian cultures. Many Asian Americans are taught from a young age to hate dark skin - by our parents urging us to use skin-lightening or bleaching creams and family members refusing to go out in the sun for fear of tanning (both common in many Asian countries, including India, China, Korea, Japan, Malaysia, and more). Light-skinned Asian models featured in fashion and makeup advertisements also reflect this beauty standard. K-Pop groups have been known to use Blackface and to profit off of Black culture by appropriating dreadlocks, cornrows, African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), and other forms of hip-hop culture. In the United States of America, anti-Blackness in Asian American communities is exemplified by incidents such as the shooting of unarmed black man Akai Gurley by Chinese police officer Peter Liang. In November of 2014 Liang was charged and convicted of manslaughter, leaving many Asian-Americans angry and claiming he had been used as a “scapegoat”. Their reasoning was that, if no white police officers had ever been convicted, why should he have been? Sadly, the severely misguided protests against his charges were apparently the largest public display of Asian-American activism in 20 years. The protests were anti-Black because Asian-Americans were attempting to secure a privilege (typically afforded to whites) for themselves, and callously disregarding a life that was unjustly taken to do so. What all Asian Americans really should have done was support Akai Gurley and protest his wrongful death, no matter the race of the offending police officer. Instead, these Asian American protestors failed the Black community at a time when, as the whole nation was watching, their speaking out might have helped to bridge communities and brought to light the common threat of white supremacy. Another area ripe with anti-Blackness is the concept of the “model minority,” typically used to describe East Asians and Indians in particular. This myth that “Asian-Americans” as a monolith are economically and academically successful, naturally smart, and the ideal that other races should aspire to be is harmful to all Asian-American communities, Black folks, and other people of color as well. The model minority myth was actually purposefully crafted around the 1950’s to 1960’s, when the media began primarily featuring Asian success stories, despite many stories of struggle in our diverse community. By 1987 when Time Magazine ran the cover story “Those Asian-American Whiz Kids,” this new stereotype was solidified. The model minority myth drove a wedge between communities of color, and is still perpetuated not only by white people, but, unfortunately, also by many Asians who are proud to be the “better minority.” It would probably pain these people to know that instead of Asians simply becoming more successful, what really happened was that American society changed its form of racism towards us in order to use us as propaganda, and to deny rights to Black folks. Jeff Guo from The Washington Post argues, “The image of the hard-working Asian became an extremely convenient way to deny the demands of African Americans. As [Ellen] Wu describes in her book [The Color of Success], both liberal and conservative politicians pumped up the image of Asian Americans as a way to shift the blame for black poverty.” The model minority myth is still used against other communities of color to suggest they are simply not working hard enough, when people say, “if Asians could make it, why can’t you?” Asian-Americans are still systematically oppressed in America, but the model minority stereotype was created to further a narrative that could be used to separate and contain communities of color. In this narrative, Asians are “too smart,” Black folks are “too unintelligent,” and conveniently, white people get the occupy the space of “just right”. This theory, known as "The Three Bears Effect" or the “Goldilocks Effect,” holds Black people as inherently inferior and Asians get to celebrate their perceived success, not recognizing how much it actually works against us. This system also erases mixed Black and Asian folks, who are expected to place themselves in a narrative that paints Black and Asian communities as completely separate, and that doesn’t account for their existence. The Model Minority Myth is rather cunning in its oppression. The stereotype that Asians are all “good at math, straight-A students, successful, and do not complain”, while seemingly positive, does not allow us any room to make mistakes. As a result, in part, suicide is the 8th leading cause of death among Asian-Americans, and we are also highly unlikely to mention symptoms of depression or seek treatment, for fear of being seen as weak and as failures. This myth also completely tends to erase Asian communities that are not succeeding economically, which is prevalent especially among communities of immigrants from poorer nations or with a large population of refugees. The restrictiveness of the Model Minority Myth also causes Asian-Americans to rebel against it - which is not inherently bad, except their method of doing so relies upon Black culture. A prime example of this is chef and author Eddie Huang, who once said, in response to a question about his affinity for hip-hop, “I feel like Asian men have been emasculated so much in America that we’re basically treated like Black women.” Huang then proceeded to appropriate AAVE and disrespect the Black women who called him out (a distinct form of intersectional violence called “misogynoir”). When Asian-Americans take Black culture as their own and do not respect the very people who created it, they are perpetuating anti-Blackness.I have been talking a great deal about the shared identity of “Asian-American,” but it is important to acknowledge that as a community, we are far from a monolith. East Asians (Japanese, Chinese, Korean) have unique light-skinned privileges and are treated differently than South, Southeast, and Central Asians. One of these privileges is that East Asians are often centered in dialogue concerning Asian issues and other Asian communities’ struggles are largely ignored. It is important to note that along with anti-Blackness, we must also eliminate the privileging of lighter skin over darker skin, known as colorism/shadeism, in our communities and work to center non-East Asians. These struggles, ultimately, are all interconnected through the broader goal of solidarity and the collapse of white supremacy.Black folks have been fighting for our collective rights, and the dismantling of white supremacy, for ages. They have extended gestures of solidarity in the past, only to largely get stepped on by Asian-Americans in our attempt to “get ahead”. Though there have been movements such as “Letters for Black Lives” and “Asians for Black Lives” recently, “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power” during the civil rights movement, and a number of individuals who have committed their lives to solidarity activism, we cannot expect Black folks to continue fighting for our rights, nor can we expect them to trust us, given our communities’ rampant anti-Blackness. Only when we eradicate anti-Blackness from our communities will solidarity be possible, and this is an imperative. As Mari Matsuda put perfectly in her speech to the Asian Law Caucus in 1990 titled “We Will Not Be Used”:“The role of the racial middle is a critical one. It can reinforce white supremacy if the middle deludes itself into thinking it can be just like white if it tries hard enough. Conversely, the middle can dismantle white supremacy if it refuses to be the middle, if it refuses to buy into racial hierarchy, and if it refuses to abandon communities of black and brown people, choosing instead to forge alliances with them.”And so we must decide: in the struggle against white supremacy, which side will we choose?

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louiseisfucked · 4 years

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Rose-Colored Glasses and The Ambiguity of Privileges

https://thoughtcatalog.com/nat-mullins/2015/11/this-is-my-perspective-on-privilege-as-a-white-woman/

“You don’t know what you don’t know,”

stated Nat Mullins on her blog post titled This Is My Perspective On Privilege As A White Woman. Those seven words arranged in an ambiguous order is her way of describing privileges. Frankly, I believe Donald Rumsfeld might have a better saying in this as stated, “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.”

As there are some circumstances in which we are fully aware that other kinds of privileges and oppressions exist and are occurring to other people but we will never be able to relate to them on a certain level in order to know. If so, what happens to people who experience multiple forms of oppression at the same time? How are we able to relate to them in order to examine the disparities between people, learn from these disparities, and implement change accordingly; as what Nat Mullins would hope from humanity as written on the last part of her blog post. How does simply knowing the various identities and privileges might change our perspective and view on the world? With all of these questions being asked, how does the writer’s usage of language answer these issues?

The first and the main issue that is being covered in her post is regarding privilege. We can see her description of privilege as written in, “Privilege has manifested itself in many ways - some more visible than others. Race and ethnicity seem to be at the center stage of the discussion, and rightfully so, but it is important to remember that there are a multitude of other demographics affecting privilege. These other elements are deserving of attention and can be seen in citizenship, religious affiliation, socioeconomic status, education level, physical/mental ability, age, sexual orientation, gender, the list goes on.” Now, what does she mean by this? In order to grasp her intention in regard to that sentence, we should know what privilege is itself. Cambridge Dictionary defines privilege as the special right that some people in authority have that allows them to do or say things that other people are not allowed to. Indeed, many people have never been asked or expected to focus on their own privileged status, and as far as racial identity is concerned, doing so may feel uncomfortable or even discordant over the years with the common narrative of social and political change.

What role does privilege exactly have in our society?

First of all, certain groups are oppressed due to privileges. As explained by Wildman and Davis (1995), members of the privileged group gain many benefits by their affiliation with the dominant side of the power system. Privilege is not visible to its holder; it is merely there, a part of the world, a way of life, simply the way things are. Others have a lack, an absence, a deficiency. Privilege exists when one group has something of value that is denied to others simply because of group membership and not based on what a person or group has done or failed to do (Johnson, 2006). The challenge for those who regularly take advantage of privilege is not to simply deny its existence

Recognizing that privilege is part of the reality that benefits some while impeding the experiences of others is essential. For example, while being a female or a person of color does not necessarily directly decide an outcome, such attributes may make these individuals less likely to be recruited, noticed, or rewarded in a variety of situations easily and quickly.

Unfortunately, recognizing privileges isn’t as easy you might think. Especially for people who benefit from it the most. A straight white cisgender man has freedoms, white privilege, cis privilege, and male privilege. Though, it is very visible for those to whom privilege was not granted. It is sort of like asking fish to notice water or birds to discuss air. Nevertheless, I will often see these straight, white cisgender males upset at being labeled privilege from my own experience. That's a little odd, because if you're offended by being called privilege, then you're actually fortunate given that there's a whole language out there just to mock marginalized people.

Do all men have advantages over all women? Do all white people have advantages over all colored people? That is not very likely as some women or colored people are born with lots of money and advantages that many men or white people don’t have. The second issue discusses these questions, though it is implied and not as clearly shown by the writer. We could identify such an issue in, “While I have unquestionably benefited from privilege based on my race, education level, religion, and socioeconomic status, my gender is what allows me to see the topic from a different yet unforced perspective.” By saying this, she is aware of how some privileges benefit her and some may harm her. This is where privileges intersect and this is an important aspect in our society that we should be aware of. People can be oppressed in many different ways, and privileged. Most commonly, you hear of gender, race, sexual orientation. That is where the pressure comes into play because these are the most common structures in which you hear. Not only is a straight, white cisgender man privileged. Other systems do exist out there. Perhaps, he comes from a lower socioeconomic status. For this, he is persecuted. He may not be of Christian faith. He may be oppressed for that. He may have a physical disability, likely has a mental health problem. He may be marginalized too for that.

The last issue that I could identify from her blog post— and the most important one— is based on the question, how might your identity and privilege—your social position— impact your view on the world? We could see this issue being implied in, “I couldn’t see my own privilege until it was shown to me, and I do not apologize for that – I can’t. Because you don’t know what you don’t know. I was perfectly content with my rose-colored glasses, that is, until someone gave me an opportunity to see the world without them.” That very issue is called positionality. I’ve only just discovered this word and I find it very interesting— how our identity, the ones we cannot help about ourselves, could impact how we view the world and society’s views on us. To further more elaborate, positionality is the social and political context that creates your identity in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability status. Positionality also describes how your identity influences, and potentially biases, your understanding of and outlook on the world. Positionality was applied to gender and sexuality in a 1988 article by philosopher Linda Alcoff called “Cultural Feminism versus Post-structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory.” Alcoff further argued that one’s position as a woman, queer person, straight person, etc., isn’t inherent to us but rather it is created by social and political forces that are constantly changing. Nat said it best in her blog post where she said, “Those who are not forced to recognize their own privilege are typically those who benefit from it the most. Examining privilege is not a means by which to seek out a figure for blame; examining privilege is a means by which we can examine the disparities between people, learn from these disparities, and implement change accordingly.

Whether looking in the mirror or looking at your surroundings, it is difficult to create change if you cannot see where it is needed.”

I found Nat Mullin’s blog post to be very interesting and raw as it delivers its message clearly by using first-person view and inclusive words in order to make it easier for us readers to be able to put ourselves in her shoes. Her words are used in a way to sound demanding and emotion and thought provocative as we can see in, ”You don’t know what you don’t know. And I sure as hell didn’t know anything until a few years ago." She also arranged her sentences in small snippets and used enjambment to make it easier for us to self-introspect and get emotionally engaged. She would also describe where her privileges intersect by combining her dominant and non-dominant privileges without elaborating which is which. By doing so, it enforces us, readers, to identify it ourselves in order to help with self-introspection.

To end this essay, I would like to point out that Nat Mullin’s blog post couldn’t be more honest and straight-forward. Although some people would be against her straight-forwardness, it is an important wake-up call for our society to take a step back and recognize these issues.

#privilege #white privilege #white woman #intersectionality #positionality #society #writing #blog post #english assignment #help #me #ib #is #tough

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yuanyuanxu-me · 4 years

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What is Critical Race Theory (CRT)?

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a framework for analyzing (as well as changing) the realities of race and racism in society. A way of critically looking at race relations today.

Like Critical Pedagogy, CRT is not a thing in and of itself. CRT continues to inspire and inform Critical Pedagogy and critical educational discourse.

CRT is set of lenses (tenets) we can use as critical educators to check ourselves and look at the policies, stories, curricula, and other narratives around us and our students.

Colorblindness

Inspired by MLK ‘I have a dream speech’ - but altered meaning to focus on not seeing difference, rather than original intention/reference towards equality.

Allows you to avoid talking about race, a form of denial (‘ostrich in the sand’), but in the meanwhile Whites face reverse racism.

Connected to differences between Equity and Equality - equal resources do not help equal the systems in place that disadvantage unequally

Does not address inequity directly

Children are aware of racial difference, adults must address but often avoid

Teachers talk of ‘Fear of…’ reinforcing stereotypes, mis-stating, pity, etc.

Seeming neutrality

“The normalization of whiteness produces the coloblind ideology.” (Dipti Desai)

See: CRT Chapter, p. 26; Gloria Ladson Billings, p. 29; Racial Awareness, p. 2-4

Whiteness as property

bell hooks addresses intersection of race and gender, rape as assertion of dominance/dominion “racism and sexism are interlocking systems of domination which uphold and sustain one another” hooks, Race and Sex, p. 59

US was conceived and built on notion of property - connected to citizenship (who could vote, and who could not)

Whiteness connected to privileges - financial benefits and invisible/unearned privileges

Reproduced within structures of capitalism: based on originary system of chattel slavery and violent colonial disposession of indigenous land (bc they did not believe in notion of property/ownership of land), continues through more recent systems of disenfranchisement: Black codes, Redlining, legal definitions of whiteness (Dred Scot, Plessy v. Ferguson)

“Whites know they possess a property that people of color do not and that to possess it confers aspects of citizenship not available to others. Harris’s (1993) argument that the ‘property functions of whiteness’ (p. 1731) - rights of disposition, rights to use and enjoyment, reputation and status property, and the absolute right to exclude - make the American dream of ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ a more likely and attainable reality for Whites as citizens.” -- Ladson Billings, p. 26

Explains the expanding wealth gap.

See: Gloria Ladson Billings p. 25-26; Cameron Rowland, 91020000;

Meritocracy (Yuanyuan)

Similar to colorblindness, meritocracy is known as a political effort admitting individual efforts, talents and achievements towards equality regardless of one’s social class and race, aiming to deconstruct oppressive racial structures and reconstruct equitable and socially just relations of power in schools.

Meritocracy creates socioeconomic disparity, which directly affects the distribution of resources and quality of education.

It is closely correlated with high-standard entrance exams/placements, which is dominant by most financially rich and socially powerful elites and aggravates social and financial segregation. -Segregation Has Been the Story of New York City’s Schools for 50 Years, New York Times

Embedded with individual equality, the practice highlights the efforts of individuals, but fails to recognize the function of social, historical, or institutional process. (Ladson-Billings)

Meritocracy doesn’t practically resolve social/political/racial inequality with the existence of “bipartisan support for the privatization of school through charters and vouchers, and high suspension and expulsion rates for Black and Latina/o students at schools”.- Seneca Falls, Selma, Stonewall, Moving beyond Equality. P31-p32

Meritocracy remains dominated by the power structures, as Angela Davis states, “policies of enlightenment by themselves do not necessarily lead to radical transformation of power structures.”

Intersectionality (Alexis)

Recognizing the interconnectedness of social justice movements. It is also a way to recognize people and their identities as complex. Intersectionality does not hold one social justice cause above another, but rather recognizes the link of oppression under systemic constructs. For example, in 1972 the Gay Sunshine: A Newspaper of Gay Liberation published an article called We Are All Fugitives that, “Visually connected queer struggles with anti-prison, anti-colonial, feminist, Black Power and other liberation movements” (Quinn and Meiners P. 30). bell hooks says, “Black liberation struggle must be re-visioned so that it is no longer equated with maleness. We need a revolutionary vision of black liberation, one that emerges from a feminist standpoint and addresses the collective plight of black people.” She’s saying that with out a feminist framework applied to black liberation, the efforts will disproportionatley aid black men and not women. It is the intersection of black liberation and feminism that is necessary for progress.

“There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not lead single-issue lives.” Audre Lorde

Interest Convergence (Sarah W)

Some CRT scholars suggest “interest convergence” in response to contention that civil rights laws serve the interests of whites

Defined as “the place where the interests of whites and people of color intersect“ (Ladson-Billings).

Example of Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday commemoration in Arizona:

State of Arizona originally deemed MLK Jr Day too costly and wouldn’t recognize the holiday for state workers and agencies. African American groups and supporters began boycotting. When the NBA and NFL suggested high profile games not be played in Arizona, the decision was reversed. When the position on the holiday could have negative effects on tourism and sport entertainment venues, state interests converged with the interests of African-American community

“Converging interests, not support of civil rights, led to the reversal of the state’s position” (Ladson-Billings).

Deficit Model (Sarah S)

Focuses on students’ weaknesses

“Critical Race Theory suggests that current instructional strategies presume that African American students are deficient. As a consequence, classroom teachers are engaged in a never-ending quest for “the right strategy or technique” to deal with “at-risk” students.” African American students thus are addressed in a language and manner denoting failure and are often involved in some sort of remediation. When using a set of teaching techniques, the students instead of the techniques are found to be lacking. (Ladson-Billings)

Children are aware of racial differences as well as racism and begin picking apart societal negatives (or weaknesses) which apply to themselves at a young age (Derman-Sparks et al.)

Microaggressions (Zack)

Microaggression is a term used for brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative prejudicial slights and insults toward any group, particularly culturally marginalized groups. (Sue, Capodilupo, Torino, Bucceri, Holder & Nadal, 2007).

The term racial microaggressions was first proposed by psychiatrist Chester M. Pierce, MD, in the 1970s, but psychologists have significantly amplified the concept in recent years.

From Buzzfeed, here are 15 Microaggressions heard by employees:

1. What are you?

2. So what do you guys speak in Japan? Asian?

3. You don’t act like a normal black person, ‘ya know?

4. Courtney, I never see you as a black girl.

5. So, like, what are you?

6. You don’t speak Spanish?

7. No, you’re white.

8. So, what does your hair look like today?

9. So, you’re Chinese, right?

10. You’re not really Asian.

11. Why is your daughter so white?

12. You’re really pretty for a dark skin girl

13. Can you read this? (A Japanese character)

14. Why do you sound white?

15. Can you see as much as white people? You know, because of your eyes?

Anti-essentialism (Victoria)

Has a lot of connection with intersectionality

“No person has a single, easily stated, unitary identity. A white feminist may also be Jewish or working class or a single mother… An Asian may be a recently arrived Hmong of rural background and unfamiliar with mercantile life or a fourth-generation Chinese with a father who is a university professor and a mother who operates a business. Everyone has potentially conflicting, overlapping identities, loyalties, and allegiances.” (Delgado, Stefancic, 2001) Not all people of the same race have the same experiences. There’s a wide variety of experiences within one race, and oftentimes we’ll have multiple identities that will overlap or conflict with each other.

Hegemony (Ari)

-Hegemony is the internalization of dominant structures in society

-internal agreeance & submissiveness of power structures, sometimes because of not wanting to face furthur discrimination (example: refraining from using a non-english language in public)

-attempts to deconstruct hegemony is known as “counter-hegemony”

-power structure examples: white person & POC, male & female, thin person or large person, elder (wise) & younger (inexperienced), able bodied person & disabled person

-being hyper-aware of these and allowing them to continue, joining this system of oppression

#philosophy

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untiediknot · 5 years

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Tico Phillips - ID # 620091551

When it comes to gender representations and stereotypes in mainstream media, it’s difficult to contend with how it might benefit women and men - or even to reconcile with the various changes needed in the way gender is represented - without first recognizing the many nuances which exist within media itself and outside of it. Let me begin by saying that this is a really complicated, contentious issue. Entire books, lengthy ones at that, have been devoted to media and its impact. Nonetheless, I will try my best to unpack a few points. First of all, because “mainstream media” encompasses such a wide variety of platforms and products, it is difficult to address these kinds of issues directly without first breaking down this term more thoroughly. Broadly speaking there is print and broadcast, whether it be music, film, television, books, news and the internet to name a few. Any one of these would merit its own deep dive into the topic of representation of women and men.

In my opinion, mainstream media (at least in its current state) is by design and definition hegemonic. It both reflects and projects normative values - it may challenge those norms but ultimately cannot pose a fundamental threat to them. Representations of men and women in mainstream media may be progressive, even transgressive, but only to a certain point. The limits of mainstream media to “accurately” represent anyone or anything is a perennial argument for the importance of independent media. For instance, the other day, I recently watched the 2019 movie Hustlers, whose plot mainly consists of a group of female strippers who conspire to rob wealthy Wall Street men.

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While on the surface this narrative does sound transgressive (take for instance, the idea of the film itself being exclusively female led - by a diverse case of women of colour no less - or the premise of disenfranchised sex workers taking control of their lives and exercising autonomy using their wits - instead of their bodies - to get ahead), one cannot forget that the whole ‘point’ of the movie is heavily reliant upon its conformity to and position within outdated tropes of women primarily as sex objects and men primarily as financial providers. Even if it seeks to represent an experience that is for the most part ‘inspired by a true story’, its presentation is, for lack of a better term, tired.

Mind you, I thoroughly enjoyed the film - and I would recommend everyone go see it whenever they get the chance - but what with its thematic focus on sex, materialism, vanity and greed (especially through a gendered lens), it quite frankly doesn’t tell us the viewers anything we don’t already know (or haven’t already seen) time and time again about male/female power dynamics. In fact, the closing line of the film was particularly poignant. One of the main female leads, Ramona retorts, “The whole country is a strip club. You have people tossing the money and people doing the dance.” With that being said, men (particularly the ones behind the scenes ‘pulling the strings’ as it were) are almost always tossing the money in their funding of these projects and women (particularly the ones on the world stage) are almost always ‘doing the dance’, struggling to keep up - especially if job prospects and opportunities are limited.

Representation matters, no doubt. It’s just that I think that the politicalization of representation is an intentional capitalistic strategy by these powers that be (i.e. the bigwigs). Media is a consumable good, that goes without saying. It can also be used as a tool to distract. In fact, Brooks and Hebert argue that “much of what comes to pass as ‘important’ (or not important) is based often on the stories produced and disseminated by media institutions.” For instance, getting politically unaware people to dialogue about representation in media is a way to get them to interact with media, and at the same, preempt actual political work. People may know for instance the names of all of Kim Kardashian’s children, but ask them to name the elected members of parliament from the House of Representatives and they blank out. They may know precisely how many females/blacks/LGBT identified individuals are on their favorite TV shows but not on their city planning or school boards. Why is this? As discussed in section 1 of Whose Perspectives, the gatekeepers of the media are for the most part, responsible for “selecting, constructing and representing perceived realities - while obscuring others”, mostly for their own gain, financial or otherwise. After all, there’s nothing more dangerous than an educated public, so if they (the public) are kept ignorant (and pacified), they (the elite) can continue to push their agendas and continue to line their pockets, because they know that the public will ‘buy’ whatever they sell - literally and figuratively speaking.

Mind you, to say that media’s influence is purely negative would be negligent at best. I think that while there are definite drawbacks, there are also definite benefits. For instance, seeing people who look, act, or represent themselves the same as you can be comforting if you struggle with a sense of belonging or feeling alone or alienated from your peers. Consequently, as a society we're seeing a lot more diversity now, especially on television, and that's really exciting, especially since media tends to mimic and mirror society itself. Take for instance the critically acclaimed TV series ‘Pose’ on FX which explores how race, class, sexuality and gender intersect within the lives of the queer, trans and gender non-conforming participants of the underground ballroom scene in New York City. It should be noted that this is the first ever show in history with the largest cast of transgender actors (and characters).

youtube

If someone had no prior concept of the struggles faced by these minority groups, just engaging with the show might influence how they treat and interact with the oppressed and disenfranchised in their own neighborhoods, inadvertently teaching them compassion and tolerance which may (hopefully) result in them advocating for equitable legislation that benefits everyone - inclusive of people from all walks of life. Thus, when it comes to gender representations and stereotypes in mainstream media, perhaps we should not contend with how it benefits (or does not benefit) men and women across all walks of life, but rather the various responsibilities that we have as individuals (and as a collective) to create content not with the intent to sell or make a profit (as the gatekeepers are prone to doing), but rather to advance civilization forward in meaningful ways.

References

Brooks, D. & Hébert, L. (2006). Gender, race, and media representation. In B. J. Dow & J. T. Wood The SAGE handbook of gender and communication (pp. 297-318). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc. doi:10.4135/9781412976053.n16

Donald, P., et al. (2011). Gender and Media Content. Whose Perspective: A Guide to Gender-Aware Analysis of Media Content

Ryan Murphy Productions (2019). Pose (FX) Trailer HD - Evan Peters, Kate Mara series. [image] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_t4YuPXdLZw [Accessed 16 Sep. 2019].

STXfilms (2019). Hustlers Trailer #1 (2019) | Movieclips Trailers. [image] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUG2U-IxPx0 [Accessed 17 Sep. 2019].

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threesheetsjen-blog · 7 years

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Blade Runner 2049 - Full review

SPOILERS BEHIND THE CUT. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, stick to my hot take in the previous post. You have been warned!!!

It’s been 35 years since the original Blade Runner was released - a film that only gained its standing in pop culture well after its initial run in theaters. Despite not connecting with audiences at first glance, Blade Runner made its way up the ranks to be considered a sci fi classic, not only for its stunning and innovative visuals, but because of the heart at its center. An artificial heart - not of its protagonist Rick Deckard, but of its villain, Roy Batty, an android (’replicant’ in the language of the film) rebelling against the constraints of his short, brutal life. The first film is a haunting classic, so when the sequel was announced several decades later, the question was immediately asked - why do we need another one? Is this just a shameless nostalgia grab, another hamfisted attempt to cash in on the unique joys of 80s pop culture? Somehow, the answer turned out to be a resounding no.

By some mad stroke of luck, the perfect filmmaker for this project had just made a major awards contender out of a sci fi drama, Arrival, and it was good enough to convince the studio system to actually let him take a chance and make Blade Runner 2049 as contemplative and explorative a film as the original. The result is likely something that won’t gain much headway with audiences until later - it’s not the type of film to immediately make a splash. But it is a brilliant expansion on the universe of the first film, both visually and thematically.

It’s impossible to overstate how beautiful and thoughtful the design of this film is. Every frame has been crafted with immense care, to convey mood, emotion, setting, and exposition. It’s a completely immersive landscape, laden with so much detail that very little exposition is needed from the characters. It’s all there on the screen. You don’t need to see the first film or read the source material, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, to understand the background of the story. Apart from a title card that bridges the gap between the first movie and the next, explaining how the Wallace Corporation absorbed the Tyrell Corporation and changed the design of the replicants, the filmmakers trust us to follow the story ourselves.

By choosing to follow one of these new replicants, a futuristic cop (the titular ‘Blade Runner’) named K, this sequel is able to explore much more deeply the intersection of humanity and technology. K has been programmed to eliminate his own kind, older models of replicants that have gone rogue or pose a threat to their creators. When the story opens, he is able to destroy his targets because his consciousness gives him no room to disobey. He has been made with a purpose, as all replicants have. But when he stumbles on the bones of a replicant female who clearly had died in childbirth, K’s world rips right open. He’s at the center of two opposing sides, who see this discovery as the key to the missing link between humanity and artificial intelligence. Wallace, the creator of the new line of replicants, desires the missing child of this woman to unlock the secrets of procreation, so he can meet the demands of production through natural reproductive means. He seeks to exploit this possibility as a further way to control his slaves - as he himself admits they are - and give himself an even more godlike sense of control over the future. Meanwhile, K’s employer, Lieutenant Joshi, a human woman, recognizes the danger this secret poses to her people. If replicants are given that last missing link between them and humanity, there’s nothing left to stop them from demanding to be equal, to be given the chance that Roy Batty killed and died for, to live a free life.

The mystery of this missing child links the sequel to the first film, but what I’m more interested in is how this central question explores the desire of artificial intelligence to be “real.” The original Blade Runner portrayed replicants with short, violent lives, desperate to gain some kind of bodily autonomy and to understand their place in the world, beyond being subservient to their master they were created for. As a disposable workforce, they were soldiers and mercenaries, prostitutes and showgirls, factory workers and perfectly polished office drones. If they wanted anything other than the life they were designed for, they had to kill for it. This is largely still true in the universe of the new film. However, an extra layer is added to this conflict of what makes a human - K’s love interest in the film is a holographic operating system in the form of a dream woman, much like Samantha in the brilliant 2013 movie Her, only this version is embodied by a beautiful girl who saddles the line between corporeal and projection. This character, Joi, seems to be developing real feelings for the replicant who bought her, even putting her entire existence on the line just so he doesn’t have to be alone. But when K later sees an advertisement for the original “product,” he has to wonder, did her love and devotion towards him come from anywhere other than her code? Does she have the apparatus from which she can love? (A soul, perhaps, or just.. self awareness? The ability to want something bigger than oneself?)

As K explores the possibility that he may be born, not made, he follows the journey of so many of the great robot heroes of speculative fiction. Along with Westworld, A.I., Battlestar Galactica, Ex Machina, Metropolis, and the aforementioned Her, much of the best sci fi imagines a future in which we have created beings that want to be us, and must break free of the oppression they were created in. Blade Runner 2049, like its predecessor, seems to offer forward the idea that these sentient creations are in fact, ‘more human than human.’ The final scene of the film, both bleak and hopeful, brings forth the idea that eventually, there will be only humanity, no matter how it came into the world. And that’s what elevates this film far beyond its visual brilliance, into the realm of something as haunting as science fiction has ever reached.

#film #movies #filmblogging #review #blade runner #blade runner 2049 #sci fi

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sometimesrosy · 6 years

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people keep saying kim is racist and said some racist stuff about bellamy white washed him and stuff is that true? They also said she created becho and clexa and that gives me a little anxiety since you know she's back in s6? Sorry for the negative ask i've just not been around that time she was part if the writers room and that stresses me a bit out.

kim is problematic. but the people calling her out for whitewashing bellamy are problematic, too.

you wanna know how i know? because those same people have been whitewashing and silencing me, a mixed race latina, for years. and if i point it out, i get told I am “playing the victim.” so basically, they’re fine with white washing mixed race people who do not agree with them, but if they can attack someone they do not agree with by using cries of “racism” and “white washing,” they will do that without any allowance for a person being imperfect, ignorant, or flawed. Problematic all around.

i held this ask for a while, because i don’t particularly want to be attacked again for having opinions, as a mixed race person, about the things that mixed race people go through. and tbh, people usually ignore me completely about it. because they don’t really recognize what it means to be mixed race until they can use us to forward their personal agenda. whether it’s for a ship or for their own power. we are, pretty much always, considered either white, or POC, and the fact that we are both (or multiple minority ethnicities) does not ever factor into it, because it doesn’t suit the agenda of either the majority or the most vocal minorities. People have a tendency to use our mixed race identity as a tool to further their own platforms. It’s almost as if we don’t exist as our own particular set of intersections, with our own issues and oppressions. It’s almost as if we are invalid unless we can be used to prop up someone else’s ideas. Hmm. An “exotic” to add a little bit of color to an otherwise white story? A character to fixate on as “one of us,” while not really accepting them as fully POC, nor allowing their issues to be taken into account? Watch me get called a “white feminist” for saying mixed people have a valid perspective that is unique. I will tell you that I am quite a bit bitter about how this community has erased mixed race characters, actors and fans, whenever it serves their needs. So that’s where I’m coming from.

As for the writer’s room? Kim did not create b/e or cl. The writer’s room did. All of them. They are telling a story, not having a ship war in there. Kim has said that all the ships have different paths and some of them are longer and twistier than others. And this is not a problem. This is a story.

The story of The 100 has, at it’s center, the relationship between Clarke and Bellamy. This is what JR, the showrunner, has said, and it is HIS vision that is seen on screen. And that we can FOLLOW Bellarke as the central relationship of the show, for five seasons, and watch as it gets more intense and deeper, and more romantic, means that he is not baiting us, but actually letting the story play out. Kim has ALSO been involved in the long term telling of Bellarke. All the writers are telling the same story.

The side relationships that Clarke and Bellamy have come in and out of relevance. But Bellarke is the core. Kim does not change that. She helped create it.

#the 100 fandom #problematic #whitewashing #being mixed race #hypocrisy

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coldalbion · 7 years

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Look I get it: Cultural Appropriation & Anthropocentrism

All the posts regarding cultural appropriation from closed cultures make sense - some have proper channels you can go through to get initiated. Others don’t. That’s fine, and people from outside the closed culture must respect that.

But there’s a glib phrase that often gets tacked on - some variation of “People are more important than spirits/non-corporeal entities.” And it is glib, because while the phrase is meant to highlight that structural racism and colonialism has occurred; that it has been and continues to be, damaging to varying cultures across the world, and thus the wishes of one human should not supersede or usurp those of entire cultures? It nonetheless neglects the ontological status of those same spirits and non-corporeal entities. The interactions with those same spirits and landscapes form the root basis of those same cultures.

By glibly saying that people are “more important,” one is privileging humanity over over other entities - whether that be animals, plants (surprise: some non-human spirits are corporeal) landscape spirits or human dead. There’s a word for that: anthropocentrism. And you know what? Anthropocentrism is ingrained; so much so that scientists are now calling the age in which we find ourselves the Anthropocene. They’re doing this because humans have had such an effect on Earth that it’s rivalling major epochal events in Earth’s history - mass extinctions, climate change, geological and atmospheric shifts - you name it. Unless you have been raised in an indigenous society, (and sometimes even then) you’ve swallowed anthropocentrism hook, line, and sinker. It’s as much part of the Invisible Architecture of Bias as structural racism and gender inequality. Humans are the centre of the universe, the chosen species, the ones to whom all other wights and beings are subservient. (Spotting the Abrahamic bias you never noticed, yet? It’s even interesting from a Gnostic perspective - the arrogance of the Demiurge passed down.) Doesn’t that narrative also enable racism? Throughout history colonizers have treated native populations as sub-human or Other-than-human. Even indigenous and historical societies Othered their enemies, often making them out as monsters or bad spirits! Here’s where it gets tricky:

If every single one of us is enmeshed in anthropocentrism, what can we do? I’m a hard polytheist and it’s taken me years to recognise even the potential ontological implications of this. In an animist model, the ontological status of spirits or wights is both incredibly simple and mindbogglingly complex.

It’s simple because it boils down to this: wights (an Old English word which roughly translates as conscious being thus a useful catch-all term which includes gods, spirits and humans) have an ontic status. For those who know your Heidegger, see also Dasein. That’s to say, wights have presence, a Being-There-ness. The properties of a specific wight are distinct from the quality of their Beingness-in-the-world.

Once we acknowledge that presence of that which is other than ourselves, whether that be other humans, or spirits or gods, we must also acknowledge that sense of that presence is felt - that is to say, perceived by ourselves through our embodiment. For example:

I perceive my partner via my eyes and other senses, this perception allows me to acknowledge her presence in the world. I do not know for certain that she is capable of similar cognition or modelling as myself but I extrapolate those qualities from observing her behaviour. However, such observation and extrapolation of her qualities is separate from her presence.

I assume the presence of other entities in the world, even if I cannot directly sense them - readers of this piece, the 44th & 45th Presidents of the United States, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, @wolvensnothere, my cat, etc.

Even though I cannot directly currently perceive the above, I assume their Beingness-in-the-world using the same embodied cognition which feels the presence of my partner. The quality of that feeling, its nature, is irrelevant here. It nonetheless occurs, even if I am not consciously aware of it. It is this occurrence which levels things.

The assumption that all that is the in world has Beingness is now my baseline assumption. It is the root of my life. More than that, it is the root of all things. What does this mean?

This base is my way, my first few steps at an “intersectional” spirituality: if all Others have a root presence in the world, it is as if there is a vitalist commonality. This shared Beingness means that we cannot separate the intersections of landscape, wights and humanity. All are connected by Beingness.

As such, interactions with spirits must be performed on fundamentally equal terms as with humans or animals or other entities. Note that this is not anthropomorphism - rather, it is a fundamental philosophical (and theological) axiom. The properties of each wight or entity must be considered on a case by case basis, as should their intersections with other entities I consider my extended kin-group (friends and family, and connected wights). Over time, the fundamental connection of Beingness provides us a path to recognize further intersections and connections between entities. For example, the genus locii/and/or landwights of a deprived neighbourhood might be investigated or contacted; they might be hostile, and even if not, they might require appeasement, or be willing to come to some arrangement for the benefit of all parties. Meanwhile work with the ancestral spirits of those in the neighbourhood might improve the personal economic situation of individuals who find they can now afford to donate to community causes. This sense of shared community leads to mutual support in times of trouble which means that relations improve, the landscape becomes more well treated, etc.

It is impossible, in this methodology, to separate both the presence and suffering of living communities from their Dead - and even more so in the case of oppressed folks. The memory of the community, the felt-sense of those-once-living held in the hearts of their loved ones, must be maintained, and from that, stretching back. To know one’s history is to find connections; the oppression of today is rooted in the sufferings and actions (good or bad) of the Dead. To bring them forth, to interact with them as part of the world in which we now find ourselves? They are not cast-off husks, having served their purpose in order to engender us. On the contrary, it is they who give us our current vitality. Those slaves who died, those colonizers who took them; those who died in wars, and those who started them; those who loved freely and died of AIDS, and the cops who beat them. All these have Beingness, intersections with the communities in question. This is not about morality, after all.

We are but one node in a net, one arbitrary point made by intersection. There is no centre. To combat anthropocentrism is to engage in a difficult battle, because it requires us to hold several ideas in mind at once: 1. That we, as individuals, are not the centre of the universe.

2. That we as a species are not the centre of the universe; that we are not ‘set apart’; all that makes us ‘human’ is not better or worse than any other behaviours, be they organic or inorganic. It simply is.

3. All our moralities are rooted, at base, in felt sense - even if that felt sense is either empathy or that engendered by recognition of our own mortality.

4. That nothing we do matters.

5. That our actions and felt sense nonetheless create meaning.

6. That we are unaware of the majority of our actions and feelings.

You might note there are some potential contradictions in this list, and that’s rather the point. To be able to hold contradictory ideas in mind and recognize them as such is important. Note also that these ideas are just the starting point I began at.

When idiots try to compare the Holocaust to factory farming? Or American slavery to Roman? Ask yourself why they are idiots. Go beyond the reflexive anthropocentrism; think instead of all those lost, all the connections and interrelations, the sonder of every single being, whether they be Jew, Rromani Black, LGBTQ+ or disabled, or some Other that has been persecuted or enslaved - think on their unique life and story. Think on the way their culture was torn away from them, how their family history was lost. And when that felt sense arises - when you have finished weeping and swearing never again, if you are so inclined - be aware of their presence. Even though they are dead, they are nonetheless in the world, influencing it - as individuals and as a whole. Beingness is outside of time. So here, we return to the notion that interaction with the world as manifold-presences in a particular area is the basis of all culture. These interactions and intersections between wights and a landscape enlivened by Beingness, set in motion the actions and reactions which build a given culture.

Realising this blew my mind; that arguments over ‘existence’ were a blind alley. Cultures form out of particular survival methodologies and customs. That is the first step; ensuring your people stay alive and prosper. Pacts are made theophanies occur; bulwarks against an indifferent yet presence-haunted world.

To say “People are more important...” is to unknowingly benefit from thousands of years of precarious navigation through a living world; to benefit from centuries of habitat destruction and ruthless hunting to extinction; to cast spite into the teeth of ancestors and living indigenous traditions who consider the landscape an ancestor, or fight to protect their land from rapacious corporations seeking to risk poisoning rivers and causing earthquakes purely for profit.

Despite its good intentions, statements such as this isolate us from the living whole, creating illusions of safety and false superiority where there is little to be found - only hard work and clear eyed acceptance of how things are, before we attempt to make them as we wish them to be. Pardon the pun, but the idea of hermetically sealing ourselves off in our own domains, whether they be those of identity politics or living spiritual practice seems counter productive. Instead, we should realize we are merely one of the Many - and act accordingly.

#polytheism #spirit work #kosmic gnosis #animism

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shirlleycoyle · 4 years

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Algorithms Are Automating Fascism. Here’s How We Fight Back

This article appears in VICE Magazine's Algorithms issue, which investigates the rules that govern our society, and what happens when they're broken.

In early August, more than 50 NYPD officers surrounded the apartment of Derrick Ingram, a prominent Black Lives Matter activist, during a dramatic standoff in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen. Helicopters circled overhead and heavily-armed riot cops with K-9 attack dogs blocked off the street as officers tried to persuade Ingram to surrender peacefully. The justification for the siege, according to the NYPD: Ingram had allegedly shouted into the ear of a police officer with a bullhorn during a protest march in June. (The officer had long since recovered.)

Video of the siege later revealed another troubling aspect of the encounter. A paper dossier held by one of the officers outside the apartment showed that the NYPD had used facial recognition to target Ingram, using a photo taken from his Instagram page. Earlier this month, police in Miami used a facial recognition tool to arrest another protester accused of throwing objects at officers—again, without revealing the technology had be utilized.

The use of these technologies is not new, but they have come under increased scrutiny with the recent uprisings against police violence and systemic racism. Across the country and around the world, calls to defund police departments have revived efforts to ban technologies like facial recognition and predictive policing, which disproportionately affect communities of color. These predictive systems intersect with virtually every aspect of modern life, promoting discrimination in healthcare, housing, employment, and more.

The most common critique of these algorithmic decision-making systems is that they are “unfair”—software-makers blame human bias that has crept its way into the system, resulting in discrimination. In reality, the problem is deeper and more fundamental than the companies creating them are willing to admit.

In my time studying algorithmic decision-making systems as a privacy researcher and educator, I’ve seen this conversation evolve. I’ve come to understand that what we call “bias” is not merely the consequence of flawed technology, but a kind of computational ideology which codifies the worldviews that perpetuate inequality—white supremacy, patriarchy, settler-colonialism, homophobia and transphobia, to name just a few. In other words, without a major intervention which addresses the root causes of these injustices, algorithmic systems will merely automate the oppressive ideologies which form our society.

What does that intervention look like? If anti-racism and anti-fascism are practices that seek to dismantle—rather than simply acknowledge—systemic inequality and oppression, how can we build anti-oppressive praxis within the world of technology? Machine learning experts say that much like the algorithms themselves, the answers to these questions are complex and multifaceted, and should involve many different approaches—from protest and sabotage to making change within the institutions themselves.

Meredith Whittaker, a co-founder of the AI Now Institute and former Google researcher, said it starts by acknowledging that “bias” is not an engineering problem that can simply be fixed with a software update.

“We have failed to recognize that bias or racism or inequity doesn’t reside in an algorithm,” she told me. “It may be reproduced through an algorithm, but it resides in who gets to design and create these systems to begin with—who gets to apply them and on whom they are applied.”

Algorithmic systems are like ideological funhouse mirrors: they reflect and amplify the worldviews of the people and institutions that built them.

Tech companies often describe algorithms like magic boxes—indecipherable decision-making systems that operate in ways humans can’t possibly understand. While it’s true these systems are frequently (and often intentionally) opaque, we can still understand how they function by examining who created them, what outcomes they produce, and who ultimately benefits from those outcomes.

To put it another way, algorithmic systems are more like ideological funhouse mirrors: they reflect and amplify the worldviews of the people and institutions that built them. There are countless examples of how these systems replicate models of reality are oppressive and harmful. Take “gender recognition,” a sub-field of computer vision which involves training computers to infer a person’s gender based solely on physical characteristics. By their very nature, these systems are almost always built from an outdated model of “male” and “female” that excludes transgender and gender non-conforming people. Despite overwhelming scientific consensus that gender is fluid and expansive, 95 percent of academic papers on gender recognition view gender as binary, and 72 percent assume it is unchangeable from the sex assigned at birth, according to a 2018 study from the University of Washington.

In a society which views trans bodies as transgressive, it’s easy to see how these systems threaten millions of trans and gender-nonconforming people—especially trans people of color, who are already disproportionately policed. In July, the Trump administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed a rule that instructs federally funded homeless shelters to identify and eject trans women from women’s shelters based on physical characteristics like facial hair, height, and the presence of an adam’s apple. Given that machine vision systems already possess the ability to detect such features, automating this kind of discrimination would be trivial.

“There is, ipso facto, no way to make a technology premised on external inference of gender compatible with trans lives,” concludes Os Keyes, the author of the University of Washington study. “Given the various ways that continued usage would erase and put at risk trans people, designers and makers should quite simply avoid implementing or deploying Automated Gender Recognition.”

One common response to the problem of algorithmic bias is to advocate for more diversity in the field. If the people and data involved in creating this technology came from a wider range of backgrounds, the thinking goes, we’d see less examples of algorithmic systems perpetuating harmful prejudices. For example, common datasets used to train facial recognition systems are often filled with white faces, leading to higher rates of mis-identification for people with darker skin tones. Recently, police in Detroit wrongfully arrested a Black man after he was mis-identified by a facial recognition system—the first known case of its kind, and almost certainly just the tip of the iceberg.

Even if the system is “accurate,” that still doesn’t change the harmful ideological structures it was built to uphold in the first place. Since the recent uprisings against police violence, law enforcement agencies across the country have begun requesting CCTV footage of crowds of protesters, raising fears they will use facial recognition to target and harass activists. In other words, even if a predictive system is “correct” 100 percent of the time, that doesn’t prevent it from being used to disproportionately target marginalized people, protesters, and anyone else considered a threat by the state.

But what if we could flip the script, and create anti-oppressive systems that instead target those with power and privilege?

This is the provocation behind White Collar Crime Risk Zones, a 2017 project created for The New Inquiry. The project emulates predictive policing systems, creating “heat maps” forecasting where crime will occur based on historical data. But unlike the tools used by cops, these maps show hotspots for things like insider trading and employment discrimination, laying bare the arbitrary reality of the data—it merely reflects which types of crimes and communities are being policed.

“The conversation around algorithmic bias is really interesting because it’s kind of a proxy for these other systemic issues that normally would not be talked about,” said Francis Tseng, a researcher at the Jain Family Institute and co-creator of White Collar Crime Risk Zones. “Predictive policing algorithms are racially biased, but the reason for that is because policing is racially biased.”

Other efforts have focused on sabotage—using technical interventions that make oppressive systems less effective. After news broke of Clearview AI, the facial recognition firm revealed to be scraping face images from social media sites, researchers released “Fawkes,” a system that “cloaks” faces from image recognition algorithms. It uses machine learning to add small, imperceptible noise patterns to image data, modifying the photos so that a human can still recognize them but a facial recognition algorithm can’t. Like the anti-surveillance makeup patterns that came before, it’s a bit like kicking sand in the digital eyes of the surveillance state.

The downside to these counter-surveillance techniques is that they have a shelf life. As you read this, security researchers are already improving image recognition systems to recognize these noise patterns, teaching the algorithms to see past their own blind spots. While it may be effective in the short-term, using technical tricks to blind the machines will always be a cat-and-mouse game.

“Machine learning and AI are clearly very good at amplifying power as it already exists, and there’s clearly some use for it in countering that power,” said Tseng. “But in the end, it feels like it might benefit power more than the people pushing back.”

One of the most insidious aspects of these algorithmic systems is how they often disregard scientific consensus in lieu of completing their ideological mission. Like gender recognition, there has been a resurgence of machine learning research that revives racist pseudoscience practices like phrenology, which have been disproven for over a century. These ideas have re-entered academia under the cover of supposedly “objective” machine learning algorithms, with a deluge of scientific papers—some peer reviewed, some not—describing systems which the authors claim can determine things about a person based on racial and physical characteristics.

In June, thousands of AI experts condemned a paper whose authors claimed their system could predict whether someone would commit a crime based solely on their face with “80 percent accuracy” and “no racial bias.” Following the backlash, the authors later deleted the paper, and their publisher, Springer, confirmed that it had been rejected. It wasn’t the first time researchers have made these dubious claims. In 2016, a similar paper described a system for predicting criminality based on facial photos, using a database of mugshots from convicted criminals. In both cases, the authors were drawing from research that had been disproven for more than a century. Even worse, their flawed systems were creating a feedback loop: any predictions were based on the assumption that future criminals looked like people that the carceral system had previously labelled “criminal.” The fact that certain people are targeted by police and the justice system more than others was simply not addressed.

Whittaker notes that industry incentives are a big part of what creates the demand for such systems, regardless of how fatally flawed they are. “There is a robust market for magical tools that will tell us about people—what they’ll buy, who they are, whether they’re a threat or not. And I think that’s dangerous,” she said. “Who has the authority to tell me who I am, and what does it mean to invest that authority outside myself?”

But this also presents another opportunity for anti-oppressive intervention: de-platforming and refusal. After AI experts issued their letter to the academic publisher Springer demanding the criminality prediction research be rescinded, the paper disappeared from the publisher’s site, and the company later stated that the paper will not be published.

Much in the way that anti-fascist activists have used their collective power to successfully de-platform neo-nazis and white supremacists, academics and even tech workers have begun using their labor power and refuse to accept or implement technologies that reproduce racism, inequality, and harm. Groups like No Tech For ICE have linked technologies sold by big tech companies directly to the harm being done to immigrants and other marginalized communities. Some engineers have signed pledges or even deleted code repositories to prevent their work from being used by federal agencies. More recently, companies have responded to pressure from the worldwide uprisings against police violence, with IBM, Amazon, and Microsoft all announcing they would either stop or pause the sale of facial recognition technology to US law enforcement.

Not all companies will bow to pressure, however. And ultimately, none of these approaches are a panacea. There is still work to be done in preventing the harm caused by algorithmic systems, but they should all start with an understanding of the oppressive systems of power that cause these technologies to be harmful in the first place. “I think it’s a ‘try everything’ situation,” said Whittaker. “These aren’t new problems. We’re just automating and obfuscating social problems that have existed for a long time.”

Follow Janus Rose on Twitter.

Algorithms Are Automating Fascism. Here’s How We Fight Back syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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dorcasrempel · 4 years

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The elephant in the server room

Suppose you would like to know mortality rates for women during childbirth, by country, around the world. Where would you look? One option is the WomanStats Project, the website of an academic research effort investigating the links between the security and activities of nation-states, and the security of the women who live in them.

The project, founded in 2001, meets a need by patching together data from around the world. Many countries are indifferent to collecting statistics about women’s lives. But even where countries try harder to gather data, there are clear challenges to arriving at useful numbers — whether it comes to women’s physical security, property rights, and government participation, among many other issues.

For instance: In some countries, violations of women’s rights may be reported more regularly than in other places. That means a more responsive legal system may create the appearance of greater problems, when it provides relatively more support for women. The WomanStats Project notes many such complications.

Thus the WomanStats Project offers some answers — for example, Australia, Canada, and much of Western Europe have low childbirth mortality rates — while also showing what the challenges are to taking numbers at face value. This, according to MIT professor Catherine D’Ignazio, makes the site unusual, and valuable.

“The data never speak for themselves,” says D’Ignazio, referring to the general problem of finding reliable numbers about women’s lives. “There are always humans and institutions speaking for the data, and different people have their own agendas. The data are never innocent.”

Now D’Ignazio, an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, has taken a deeper look at this issue in a new book, co-authored with Lauren Klein, an associate professor of English and quantitative theory and methods at Emory University. In the book, “Data Feminism,” published this month by the MIT Press, the authors use the lens of intersectional feminism to scrutinize how data science reflects the social structures it emerges from.

“Intersectional feminism examines unequal power,” write D’Ignazio and Klein, in the book’s introduction. “And in our contemporary world, data is power too. Because the power of data is wielded unjustly, it must be challenged and changed.”

The 4 percent problem

To see a clear case of power relations generating biased data, D’Ignazio and Klein note, consider research led by MIT’s own Joy Buolamwini, who as a graduate student in a class studying facial-recognition programs, observed that the software in question could not “see” her face. Buolamwini found that for the facial-recognition system in question, the software was based on a set of faces which were 78 percent male and 84 percent white; only 4 percent were female and dark-skinned, like herself.

Subsequent media coverage of Buolamwini’s work, D’Ignazio and Klein write, contained “a hint of shock.” But the results were probably less surprising to those who are not white males, they think.

“If the past is racist, oppressive, sexist, and biased, and that’s your training data, that is what you are tuning for,” D’Ignazio says.

Or consider another example, from tech giant Amazon, which tested an automated system that used AI to sort through promising CVs sent in by job applicants. One problem: Because a high percentage of company employees were men, the algorithm favored men’s names, other things being equal.

“They thought this would help [the] process, but of course what it does is train the AI [system] to be biased toward women, because they themselves have not hired that many women,” D’Ignazio observes.

To Amazon’s credit, it did recognize the problem. Moreover, D’Ignazio notes, this kind of issue is a problem that can be addressed. “Some of the technologies can be reformed with a more participatory process, or better training data. … If we agree that’s a good goal, one path forward is to adjust your training set and include more people of color, more women.”

“Who’s on the team? Who had the idea? Who’s benefiting?”

Still, the question of who participates in data science is, as the authors write, “the elephant in the server room.” As of 2011, only 26 percent of all undergraduates receiving computer science degrees in the U.S. were women. That is not only a low figure, but actually a decline from past levels: In 1985, 37 percent of computer science graduates were women, the highest mark on record.

As a result of the lack of diversity in the field, D’Ignazio and Klein believe, many data projects are radically limited in their ability to see all facets of the complex social situations they purport to measure.

“We want to try to tune people in to these kinds of power relationships and why they matter deeply,” D’Ignazio says. “Who’s on the team? Who had the idea? Who’s benefiting from the project? Who’s potentially harmed by the project?”

In all, D’Ignazio and Klein outline seven principles of data feminism, from examining and challenging power, to rethinking binary systems and hierarchies, and embracing pluralism. (Those statistics about gender and computer science graduates are limited, they note, by only using the “male” and “female” categories, thus excluding people who identify in different terms.)

People interested in data feminism, the authors state, should also “value multiple forms of knowledge,” including firsthand knowledge that may lead us to question seemingly official data. Also, they should always consider the context in which data are generated, and “make labor visible” when it comes to data science. This last principle, the researchers note, speaks to the problem that even when women and other excluded people contribute to data projects, they often receive less credit for their work.

For all the book’s critique of existing systems, programs, and practices, D’Ignazio and Klein are also careful to include examples of positive, successful efforts, such as the WomanStats project, which has grown and thrived over two decades.

“For people who are data people but are new to feminism, we want to provide them with a very accessible introduction, and give them concepts and tools they can use in their practice,” D’Ignazio says. “We’re not imagining that people already have feminism in their toolkit. On the other hand, we are trying to speak to folks who are very tuned in to feminism or social justice principles, and highlight for them the ways data science is both problematic, but can be marshalled in the service of justice.”

The elephant in the server room syndicated from https://osmowaterfilters.blogspot.com/

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