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Archive for 2012

Against ‘Free Feline Friday’

Dec 5th, 12 / 0 Comments

If you live in Bloomington, Indiana, you may have heard about the local man who was arrested for torturing and killing several cats. The story, ripped directly from the Bloomington-Herald Times*, is below.

Lennox, stolen shelter kitten abused by Bloomington man, found alive

By Abby Tonsing 331-4245 | atonsing@heraldt.com
December 5, 2012, last update: 12/5 @ 1:53 pm

Lennox, the 3-month-old orange and white kitten, stolen from the animal shelter and later abused by an Indiana University student is alive. The found kitten is expected to make a full recovery.

Bloomington police said 19-year-old Christopher Charles Gugliuzza admitted he slapped, threw and tied a computer cord around the neck of the kitten he admittedly stole from the shelter on Monday. He told police he wasn’t sure if the cat had died.

Laurie Ringquist, director of Bloomington Animal Care and Control, said that as she was reading online comments on a news article about the cat abuse Tuesday evening, she found some from students, saying a stray kitten matching Lennox’s description had been found.

“They just found her there in a wooded area near those apartments,” she said.

Police and animal control officers picked up Lennox between 9 and 10 Tuesday night, Ringquist said.

The cat was taken to College Mall Vet, where a microchip verified it was indeed Lennox.

“The xrays didn’t show any damage to her organs or fractures to her ribs or limbs. She is running a fever, so the vet wanted to keep her another 24 hours for observation.”

“We’re really grateful, and they did the right thing by taking in a kitten, seeing an animal in need and taking it in and giving it the care it needed,” Ringquist said. “I’m just very grateful and pleased that they were willing to step up and do the right thing by this kitten.”

Police first arrested Gugliuzza, 365 E. Varsity Lane, on a preliminary charge of theft after he admitted he stole the kitten from the shelter because he had no money.

As Gugliuzza was being released from the jail after posting a $705 bond, Bloomington police took him into custody for the second time Monday after a woman reported he may have killed the cat he stole and detailed his history of killing and abusing other cats.

The woman told police she saw Gugliuzza throw Lennox against the wall of his residence several times, choke the cat with his hands, use a computer power cord to tie around the cat’s neck, drag the cat around the apartment and into a nearby wooded area and throw the cat into trees. She told police she saw Gugliuzza pick up a large rock and throw it at the cat, causing the cat to go limp and stop crying. She told police she wasn’t sure if the cat died, and police could not find the cat on Monday.

The woman told police that Monday’s incident with Lennox wasn’t the first time Gugliuzza has abused or killed cats, according to Bloomington police Sgt. John Kovach.

Gugliuzza admitted to police he strangled and killed a cat named Misty, because he was mad that it had scratched him, and buried that cat in a wooded area on 17th Street. Police found the remains of the buried cat on Monday.

He told police he had another cat, Rosie, that died in its sleep after falling down the stairs.

And then there’s Peaches, who Gugliuzza said ran away after it hurt its ankle after jumping off a counter. But the woman told police Gugliuzza returned from a visit to a veterinarian to say Peaches had to be put to sleep.

Police arrested Gugliuzza a second time on Monday, this time on preliminary charges of preliminary charges of cruelty to animals. He was released from the Monroe County Jail at 10:30 a.m. Tuesday after posting a $905 bond.

This, for the record, is one reason why I feel sort of yucky about the decision by many animal shelters (Bloomington’s included) to promote free or very cheap animal adoptions. This summer, the Bloomington Animal Shelter participated in the ASPCA Rachael Ray $100,000 Challenge, which was a national competition among 50 shelters to find homes for as many animals as possible, as quickly as possible. One strategy used by the Bloomington shelter was a promotional event called “Free Feline Friday.” On Fridays, for several weeks during the summer and early fall, the shelter waived adoption fees for all cats and kittens. (Presumably, adopters were still responsible for medical costs.)

This is a bad idea, you guys. Everybody knows that if you want your kittens to go to good homes, you have to charge people to adopt your kittens. Everybody knows that free kittens are way less likely to find a good home than kittens who are sold–even if they’re sold for a pittance, like five or ten dollars.

Now, god knows I’m not suggesting that people who adopt free kittens will go on to torture and kill them. In fact, a lot of people who adopt free kittens go on to become excellent, excellent cat owners. (I have adopted two free kittens, myself, and I consider myself to be an excellent cat caregiver.) But events like Free Feline Friday and its accompanying attitude of “let’s find a way to send everyone who walks through this door home with a pet!” cheapens the act of committing to animal ownership. It emphasizes getting animals adopted over matching animals with owners who are ready and willing to take on the commitment.

Because here’s the thing they don’t tell you about owning pets: It’s really freaking hard. A cute puppy with boundless energy can tip so, so easily into a behavior problem. Dogs need your time and your discipline. They need you to be their alpha dog, and if you can’t do it they’ll tear up your shoes and bite your neighbor and pee on your floor. Even if you do it right they’ll still sometimes tear up your shoes and bite your neighbor and pee on your floor. (I know it was you, Lucille Suzette.) Cats track litter across your counter and eat your favorite houseplant and climb across your face at 4 a.m. and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Even if you do it right, even if you and your pet are a match made in heaven and you’ve learned how to discipline your cat or dog and you’ve gotten into a rhythm and you’re happy, happy, happy together, some day your cat or dog will get sick. Dogs tear their ACLs like they’re movie tickets, and surgery is expensive. Dogs also eat things like pennies and the shoe they tore up yesterday and the neighbor’s trash and EVERYTHING YOU HAD IN YOUR CUPBOARD and then they need to get that fixed too. Sometimes cats get sick so young, you guys, and you have to spend thousands of dollars and half of their lives trying to keep them well.

It always ends the same: You love them, and then you have to help them die. And there are very few things in life that are harder than that responsibility, the responsibility of knowing when it’s time to help your pet die, and doing the right thing when that time comes.

It’s worth it. It’s fucking worth it–worth every minute of pain and frustration and sadness and grief.

But it’s not easy. Don’t ever think it’ll be easy. And don’t let things like Free Feline Friday trick you into committing to a responsibility that you’re not ready to take on.

*As I’ve noted elsewhere on this blog, the publishers of the Herald-Times have decided to erect a paywall around its content. Since it’s the only local daily newspaper in this community, this amounts to limiting residents’ access to important information. For this reason, I choose to copy and paste the Herald-Times’ web content here when necessary.

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Zoe Weil on humane education

Nov 18th, 12 / 1 Comment

Here’s a Tedx talk by Zoe Weil, the founder of the Institute for Humane Education:

About halfway through her talk, Weil talks about a game she does with students that she calls “True Price.” The idea behind the game is that she shows some item–a fast food hamburger, a bottle of water, a store-bought T-shirt–and discusses all of the costs, both positive and negative, associated with that item. In this talk, she demonstrates with a t-shirt. She explains that the shirt is made of cotton which was most likely grown in Uzbekistan, where we know that a million children work in fields to harvest that cotton…that the dye used to color the shirt is toxic, and that about 30% of the dye runs off into our water supply…that

–and here is where I left the video running while I got up to refill my coffee mug, because the story Weil tells is one that I know so well that I no longer pay attention when it’s told. I mean, I don’t know the specifics, but I know the broad strokes: Global economy / items sold cheaply in the U.S. at the cost of the quality of non-U.S. lives / poisons and toxins that disproportionately hurt the poor and the nonwhite and so on and so on and so on.

Zoe Weil argues that it’s unfair not to provide kids with what she calls a humane education. I wonder if she has thoughts on the risk of a humane education leading to total emotional shutdown. This may be especially likely for kids, who don’t have the kind of agency over their lives that (we like to think) adults do. I’m an adult, which means I make my own money now and can decide whether to use it, for example, to buy an entire week’s worth of groceries at Kroger or an entire evening’s worth of groceries at Bloomingfoods. I can decide whether to buy cheap, socially yucky clothes at Target or cheap, socially less yucky clothes at a thrift store. I get to make decisions about where to put my energy and money and time, and for the most part I’m committed to making the better decision on most things. But once you learn that there is a better decision for most things, you learn that everything you do has all these consequences, and that if you want to be better, you have to try to be better about everything.

What happens when we teach this lesson to kids, who have almost no control over where they shop and what they buy and what they eat and where they go?

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National Coming Out Day: Smash ALL the closets.

Oct 12th, 12 / 0 Comments

Yesterday, Oct. 11, was National Coming Out Day. I made this image in honor of the event:

Then, on Facebook, I posted this:

I really do believe in the importance of people coming out as LGBTQI allies. If queer and questioning folks who are afraid to come out know that they are surrounded by people who will love and support them and will try to keep them safe, they are far more likely to come out, and stay out. I say this not only as a queer myself #smashALLtheclosets but as a queer who, out of fear, stayed closeted for decades.

Dudes, I knew I was gay. I knew it when I was 11 years old. I knew it, knew it without a doubt, and I believed I had to hide it from everyone, and I spent 20 years trying to make myself straight. I spent 20 years feeling like a total fake, 20 years feeling miserable and sad and alone. I can’t tell you how lonely it was, all those years I spent sitting in that dark lonely closet.

This is the thing that I think is hard for people to understand. If you have this huge secret that you’re trying to hold on to, you can’t afford to let anyone get close to you because there’s this whole part of you that you have to cordon off and protect. This isn’t just about romantic relationships–you can’t have close friends, either, because what if they find out? And your friends, no matter how awesome they are, no matter how close you feel with them, will never never really understand you because you have to keep this piece of you, this really fucking important piece of you, buried deep inside.

Anyway, here’s something awesome that happened for National Coming Out Day: All of my immediate family members changed their Facebook profile pictures to this:

My entire immediate family. My mom and my sisters. They all, independently, without me asking them to, changed their photo to an LGBTQI Ally badge. Because they’re awesome. And because they love and support me.

I’m critical of the well known “It Gets Better” video campaign, for lots of reasons. (1. It presents a white, middle class, upwardly mobile picture of queerness, which means it exercises its own form of oppression on nonwhite, non-middle class, rural queer and questioning youth. 2. It avoids pushing people to take responsibility to make it better, and treats bullying as if it’s just the gauntlet that we all have to run, instead of loudly proclaiming that bullies suck big-time and it’s the responsibility of anyone who’s willing and able to fight bullies with everything they have. 3. It paints a picture of queerness as ‘just like straightness except with different body parts,’ which I think is not only inaccurate but also problematic because it erases the experiences and needs of non-mainstream queers.) But my frustration with the “It Gets Better” campaign has nothing to do with the campaign’s primary message.

It does get better, you guys. It gets so much better. Like, better than I ever imagined it could get. When I was that scared, closeted kid, I truly believed I would just never be happy. I believed I would never fall in love–I believed I was incapable of love. I believed there was something broken inside me that made love, and joy, and happiness impossible for me.

And I was wrong. I’m not broken. Well, at least no more broken than we all are. And I think that no matter what happened after I came out, I would still have found myself capable of experiencing love, joy, and happiness. Even if my family had disowned me and my friends had walked away. But my family and friends have largely chosen to stay. And yesterday, my immediate family members, independently and without any prompting from me, chose to publicly show their support for me and for other LGBTQI folks. Which is pretty goddam awesome.

Thanks, guys. You’re pretty great and I love you a lot.

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Ani DiFranco is bumming me out.

Sep 27th, 12 / 0 Comments

I’ve been a fan of Ani DiFranco since the late 1990s, when I bought cassette tapes of Little Plastic Castle and Out of Range–still my favorites, of the nearly two dozen albums she’s released. During that phase of her career, Ani was an out and proud queer punk feminist dirty folksinging ladydude and I was all about it. I mean, here’s this performance of the title song from Little Plastic Castle:

And this one, the title song from Out of Range:

So that was cool, especially for a babyfeminist who was trying to figure out the politics of being a ladydude in a culture that doesn’t particularly like ladydudes. I was 20 years old, and I was starting to get angry, and also by the way I was starting to worry about how grossed out I was by biodudes and how interested I was in bioladies and whether I was going to have to figure out that whole sexuality thing if I ever wanted to try being, you know, happy.

At the time, when I was 20 years old and basically a naive white kid from suburban Detroit, I really liked Ani’s brand of feminism. It was simple and clear, and contained a few key talking points:

Dudes aren’t really all that nice to ladies.

“I am not a pretty girl / that is not what I do / I ain’t no damsel in distress / and I don’t need to be rescued / so put me down punk / maybe you’d prefer a maiden fair / isn’t there a kitten stuck up a tree somewhere” (Not a Pretty Girl”)

The Man wants to stick it to you, primarily by banning abortions.

“I opened a bank account / when I was nine years old / I closed it when I was eighteen / I gave them every penny that I’d saved / and they gave my blood / and my urine / a number / now I’m sitting in this waiting room / playing with the toys / and I am here to exercise / my freedom of choice / I passed their handheld signs / went through their picket lines / they gathered when they saw me coming / they shouted when they saw me cross / I said why don’t you go home / just leave me alone / I’m just another woman lost” (“Lost Woman Song”)

Ladies are pretty and I can have sex with them if I want to.

“We can touch / touch our girl cheeks / and we can hold hands / like paper dolls / we can try / try each other on / in the privacy / within new york city’s walls / we can kiss / kiss goodnight / and we can go home wondering / what would it be like if / if I did not have a boyfriend / we could spend / the whole night” (“The Whole Night”)

And of course all of the above points are totally valid and important to address. But they’re also the easiest parts of feminism to embrace, because they place the blame elsewhere and open up space for some good old righteous anger. In this respect, they represent an an early, immature version of feminism–a kind that can, given time, proper care, and lots of sunlight, mature into full-blown, complex and nuanced feminist politics.

As a feminist gets older, if she’s paying attention, she starts to see that the world is a little more complicated than she thought, and that a lot of different types of prejudice and oppression are acting on people all at the same time, and sexism and racism and classism and ableism and heterosexism and other forms of oppression are all wrapped up together. As a feminist gets older, she starts to see that the way a man treats a woman is just a symptom of a larger illness: Institutional disease. Our institutions–culture, education, government, religion–are all wrapped up in perpetuating oppression as a means of keeping themselves afloat. It’s baked right in to everything we do, every interaction, every transaction.

Not only that, but an American feminist–if she’s white and middle class–should start to see how “mainstream” feminism tends to focus on issues of relevance to white middle class women, to the exclusion of the interests and needs of nonwhite, non-middle class women. (It often takes a while, if you’re a white, middle-class feminist, to realize that your feminism can be a form of oppression of women who don’t look like you.) And she should start to see how feminism cannot stand alone as a belief system: A feminist who wants change needs to be critical of government and the law, needs to see the complexities of social action wielded for the public good. A feminist needs to be critical of feminism. She needs to be critical of herself. A feminist needs to change, in other words. She needs to get more complex and use that complexity to treat the world she’s fighting through as more complex as well.

Since Ani DiFranco is, as Wikipedia explains to me, “widely considered a feminist icon,” I’ve been holding out hope that her music would move from that immature, buzzword feminism to a more mature version that embraces complexity and confusion. But instead I got this, the title song from her newest album, which is a remake of a Pete Seeger protest song:

Let me just repeat some of the lyrics, in case you missed them. Heck, I’ll just go ahead and include the entire song!

They stole a few elections,
Still we the people won
We voted out corruption and
Big corporations

We voted for an end to war
New direction
We ain’t gonna stop now
Until our job is done

Come on all good workers
This year is our time
Now there some folks in Washington
Who cares what’s on our minds

Come one-come all voters
Lets all vote next time
Show ‘em which side are you on now
Which side are you on

Which side are you on now / Which side are you on / Which side are you on now / Which side are you on

Which side are you on now / Which side are you on / Which side are you on now / Which side are you on

30 years of diggin’
Got us in this hole
The curse of Reaganomics
Has finally taken it’s toll

Lord knows the free market
Is anything but free
It costs dearly to the planet
And the likes of you and me

I don’t need those money lenders
Suckin’ on my tit
A little socialism
Don’t scare me one bit!

We could do a whole lot worse
Than Europe or Canada
C’mon Mr. president
C’mon Congress make the law

Which side are you on now / Which side are you on / Which side are you on now / Which side are you on

They say in Orleans parish
There are no neutrals there
There’s just too much misery
There’s too much despair

America who are we
Now our innocence is gone
Which side are you on now
Which side are you on

Too many stories written
Out in black and white
C’mon people of privilege
It’s time to join the fight

Are we living in the shadow of slavery
Or are we moving on
Tell me which side are you on now
Which side are you on

Which side are you on boys / Which side are you on / Which side are you on boys / Which side are you on / Which side are you on boys / Which side are you on / Which side are you on now / Which side are you on

My mother was a feminist
She taught me to see
That the road to ruin is paved
With patriarchy

So, let the way of the women
Guide democracy
From plunder and pollution
Let mother earth be free

Feminism ain’t about women
No, that’s not who it’s for
It’s about a shift in consciousness
That’ll bring an end to war

So listen up you fathers
Listen up you sons
Which side are you on now
Which side are you on

Which side are you on now / Which side are you on / Which side are you on now / Which side are you on

So are we just consumers
Or are we citizens
Are we gonna make more garbage
Or are we gonna make amends

Are you part of the solution
Or are you part of the con?
Which side are you on now
Which side are you on?

Ok, so a couple of things:

Actually, feminism is about women. That’s actually the definition of feminism. I’m on board with you arguing that feminism is for everyone and that a natural result of feminism is peace, but don’t tell me that feminism isn’t about women. Two big middle fingers up on that one.
Uhhh ok so this song includes a lot of buzzwords, dudes: I don’t think any song in the history of ever has found a way to include Reaganomics, socialism, free market, patriarchy, and mother earth ALL IN ONE SONG! So that’s cool. But on the other hand…buzzwords suck as lyrics. The first rule of creative writing, as you probably know, is show, don’t tell. Buzzwords tell. And they are therefore not the most awesome language to use in song lyrics.
I wonder if Ani really thinks we the people really did win in the last election. Sure, we got a better President than any we’ve seen so far this century, but by no stretch of the imagination can anyone argue that electing Barack Obama led to a mass exodus of corrupt politicians and corporate lobbyists from Washington, D.C. Politics are as corrupt as ever, our Supreme Court is invested in maintaining corporations’ power over legal and political institutions, and most of the time when we watch “Congress make a law” these days it’s a law that works against the best interest of those who are most in need of Congress’s help: Women, the underclass, gays, nonwhite minorities. These days, I prefer that Congress not make a law, thank you very much.

If a person has been identifying as a feminist and practicing feminism for more than two decades, as Ani DiFranco has, we should hope that her politics would become more finely honed with time. Instead, this latest album has Ani relying on buzzwords and the most simplistic political messages: Vote, you guys! If you vote, the people win! It’s a disappointingly naive message, one that echoes the simplistic messages of her earlier albums–only this time, without the righteous anger.

Ani DiFranco is a female folksinger who has fought her way to her spot as a prominent contemporary folk singer who has been selling out concert venues for two decades. Along the way, she’s not only had to battle an industry that didn’t particularly want her, but she’s also had to deal with her fans’ criticisms of her life choices. Most significant among these criticisms was the shock, outrage, and disappointment expressed by her lesbian fan base when Ani got married to a man–and then divorced him and married another man. I’m not trying to judge Ani DiFranco as a person here–she’s had enough of that over the years. (Although I’m firmly in the camp that believes that she can do whatever she wants with her personal life, but if she chooses to talk about her personal life in her music she shouldn’t be surprised when people are disappointed in the paths her life takes–she made her life choices fair game for analysis when she decided to include them in her lyrics.) But I do think that what happened to Ani DiFranco can serve as a cautionary tale for younger feminists. Our society wants you to get your righteous (and deserved) anger out while you’re young, then it wants you to settle in to a set of political beliefs that don’t cause too much hassle for anyone.

There will be so many different pressures on you that are set up to turn an angry young radical feminist into a calm political moderate. By “political moderate,” I mean “anyone who thinks that voting for the better of two choices for President of the United States is sufficient to lead to victory for ‘we the people’.”

It’s our job as feminists to stay angry for as long as we can sustain our anger, because there’s plenty to stay angry about. It’s our job to put our queer shoulders to the wheel.

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Jenna McWilliams: still not a seminal thinker

Sep 12th, 12 / 0 Comments

Almost three years ago I explained why I hate the words ‘seminal’ and ‘disseminate.’ Here’s the explanation, in brief:

Both words come from the latin root seminalis, or seed, from which we also get the word semen.

Now: seminal, disseminate, semen. All linked to the notion of the seed, the germination of all things that can grow: the sowing of ideas, of genes, of the next generation of people, texts, and theories. The terms, though we may not think of it in daily use, are innately masculine–innately male. A seminal idea is one that has taken root, has grown, has spread; it engenders offspring in which we can see (genetic) elements of the initial idea, text, or approach. There’s not even a feminine equivalent. What would we say? He’s an ovulant thinker in his field?

As a female scholar, I resent the notion that my ideas may, if I’m lucky, be likened to the very masculine process of impregnation. I resent the paradigm that leads us to consider seminal ideas that allow other thinkers to bear fruit.

Since that post, I’ve made some headway in convincing some members of my scholarly circle to either replace those words with the dozens of alternatives provided within the English language, or to use those words but be aware of the way they sound to some Alert Feminist Readers.

At the same time, I’m still finding myself in conversation with people who think I’m a) overreacting, b) looking for something that’s not there, or c) being overly simplistic in my analysis of these terms. Lately this issue has taken on fresh meaning for me, since I’m studying for my qualifying exams and the word seminal, in particular, keeps rearing its ugly head.

So, at the risk of repeating myself, I want to reiterate my objections to the ongoing use of these terms. This time I’ll do it by outlining some general principles:

1. Cultures simultaneously reflect and reproduce belief systems. These belief systems include ideas about what counts as knowledge, what kinds of behaviors, values, and beliefs are “better” than other kinds, and who gets to be in charge of things like government, schools, law enforcement agencies, universities, and religious institutions, and what sorts of authority we’re going to bestow upon those leaders and the institutions they lead.

2. Language is one key area in which a culture simultaneously reflects and reproduces its belief systems. This includes not only the words that come into use (or fall out of favor) in a culture but also extends into how a language is structured, what sorts of words, metaphors and analogies are available to its users and how words are appropriated and recruited for use in new contexts. For example, in America we use the term “kindergarten” (German for “children’s garden”) to refer to a child’s first year of school because it aligns with our schoolish metaphor of cultivating learners. But “kindergarten” is not a universal term for that first year.

3. Over time, a culture’s vocabulary changes. This is true for a big huge pile of reasons, three of which being that certain words or terms get recognized for limiting our thinking, for being too limited in scope for some new purpose, or for being overtly offensive. For example:

The word meme was first coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins, but took off within the last decade to account for the wildfire spread of new cultural products, inside of which were contained new behaviors, values, or ideas. Think honeybadgers, lolcats, someecards.com, and Antoine Dodson. Before the emergence of the internet, there was no need for the widespread use of the word meme, and now there is a need for such a word.

In America, the terms Negro and colored to describe Black people and American Indians to describe Native Americans or First Nations people have long fallen out of favor and are generally viewed as racist.

4. Some words in a culture may reflect yucky aspects of that culture’s belief system. This is so regardless of whether individual speakers of a language are explicitly aware of the connection between that word and its connection to yuckiness. This is why we tell kids to stop saying “that’s so gay” even if they aren’t aware that the phrase is linked to homophobia and heterosexism.

5. Individuals who are part of a nondominant group (i.e., are removed from power by dint of their gender, race, class, physical attributes/abilities, neurologies, or other characteristics) are far more likely to recognize words that reflect yucky beliefs about their group than are individuals who come from dominant groups. For a long time, I used the word “lame” to refer to things I didn’t like. I used “lame” like it was going out of style. As a non-disabled individual, I wasn’t primed to notice on my own that “lame” is a term that is characteristic of ableist language.

6. If an individual from a nondominant group (or an ally who is not part of that group) is able to articulate why she thinks a given term reflects yucky cultural beliefs, the person who has used that term is responsible to either justify continued use of the term or agree to abandon that term.

7. Justifications that do not count as reasonable include:

“But there’s not a better term to replace it with!” (Because if a word reflects yucky cultural beliefs, there’s always a better term, although it may require you to think harder about language than you want to.)
“I think you’re overreacting / seeing something that doesn’t exist / focusing on something that doesn’t matter.” Members of nondominant groups (and their allies) often see things that are not recognized by members of dominant groups. Because dominant groups get to be dominant, they get to spend a lot of time ignoring people who see things differently. That doesn’t make them right; that makes them oblivious. It’s not even necessarily their fault! They’re conditioned to be oblivious by a culture of power whose continued existence relies on nobody questioning the culture of power.

8. Justifications that do count as reasonable include:

{this space intentionally left blank}

9. Because if a term feels yucky to a member of a nondominant group, why in the name of all things awesome would you want to keep using it? Seriously. That makes you part of the problem. And who wants to be part of the problem?

The words seminal and disseminate are yucky to me. Because they are linked to the word semen, and because the word semen is a definitively masculine term with definitively masculine connotations in our culture, they reflect masculinist views of knowledge production and reproduction. Dissemination–the literal spreading of semen, or seed–often happens without consent, and is therefore a matter of physical violence, most commonly perpetrated on women.

Dissemination–the literal as well as the metaphorical ejaculation of semen, or seed–also reflects a heterosexist worldview. If I’m a seminal thinker, that’s because my seeds have germinated–because they were fertilized, and took root, and grew. Because the spreading of seed also requires germination, now we’ve headed into the world of male-female sexual activity. You can tell me the root of the term is botanical, not biological, but you can’t argue that the root word, semen, is more strongly botanical in our culture than it is biological. Which means that in general use, the words semen, seminal, and disseminate are at least more strongly linked to the biological activity of heterocopulation than to the botanical activity of plant reproduction.

Here are some other words you can use. They may require you to think more deeply about what you’re trying to communicate, because each of these words means something slightly different than the others, but that’s what Good Thinkers do anyway!

seminal: critical, crucial, fundamental, important, influential, original, primary, distinctive, distinguished, esteemed, extraordinary, famous, foremost, incomparable, leading, notable, noted, noteworthy, preeminent, prominent, formative, generative, ingenious, innovative, unprecedented, untried, unusual

disseminate: distribute, scatter, broadcast, circulate, diffuse,disperse, promulgate, propagate, publicize, publish, radiate, sow, spread, strew, radiate, bestow, deal out, deliver, devote, disburse, dish out, dispense, mete, communicate, declare, decree, make public, spread, proliferate

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Why I won’t be at the Chick Fil-A counterprotest

Aug 1st, 12 / 0 Comments

…and why you can’t win for losing, these days.

A bunch of queerfolks around the world plan on queerin’ up Chick Fil-A today as a counterprotest to “Chick Fil-A Appreciation Day” (aka: “take a stand against those fags”).

I won’t be participating.

This is one of those instances of small groups of like-minded people stepping up on public platforms and talking directly at themselves. People who hate gays enough to spend thousands of dollars to bus people to a fast food restaurant don’t care what a bunch of queer activists have to say. And queers who are angry enough to mobilize around a counterprotest…well, you’ll forgive them if they don’t care to listen to anything a group of homophobes has to say.

Protests work when they change opinions. Political demonstrations work best when they show the world that more people than anybody previously believed care about x or want to change y. In this case, though, media coverage of Chick Fil-A Appreciation Day is going to outshine the simple fact that Chick Fil-A has dropped in general public popularity in the days following its COO’s announcement that it opposes gay marriage and, well, gays in general:

I imagine the popularity drop was only partially about Dan Cathy’s anti-gay marriage stance, since it has been known for a while now that Chick Fil-A money was being directed to anti-gay organizations like Exodus International. I suspect that people are just annoyed that politics has officially marred their enjoyment of what is by many accounts a really good chicken sandwich.

I guess another nice side effect of political protest, as a friend and coworker just now noted to me, is the ability to connect with like-minded folks. I bet that’s going to be awesome, the meeting and connecting with like-minded folks. But in my neck of the woods, protesters plan to hang out at the KFC just down the street. You guys, KFC got a mediocre rating–45 out of 100–on the Human Rights Campaign’s Equality Index report. And Greenpeace International reports that KFC is one of several companies complicit in destruction of our rain forests.

I guess you can’t win for losing, these days.

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Greek politician slaps female rival on TV, carries his party to victory regardless

Jul 26th, 12 / 0 Comments

file under: don’t you dare think it doesn’t happen in the United States too.

The symbol of Greece's Golden Dawn party. Many have compared this symbol to the Nazi swastika.

You may have missed this, if you live in the United States. A Greek (male) politician named Ilias Kasidiaris attacked two female rivals on television: He slapped one woman, three times, and threw water in the face of another. Kasidiaris is a spokesperson for the far right Golden Dawn Party, a party which, as the British newspaper The Guardian explains, marches behind a flag that closely resembles the Nazi swastika and features members who regularly greet each other with variations on a Nazi salute. Golden Dawn is, by all indications, a neo-Nazi party and it is on the rise in Greece.

Kasidiaris is the spokesperson for Golden Dawn. And, on live television, he threw a glass of water at one female, left-wing politician and slapped–it seems more accurate to say punched–another female, left-wing politician. And, a week later, his party took just under 7% of the vote in a national election.

In the video below, Kasidiaris–a former army commando–clearly comes across as the schoolyard bully picking on people he perceives as weaker than he is. His victims do not fight back; instead, the show’s host attempts to intervene (nonviolently) and the show quickly cuts to commercial. (Kasidiaris was apparently confined to a room in the studio, and he is missing from the table when the show reconvenes.)

Golden Dawn is a party rife with bullies. And it’s not alone. Here in the United States, far-right parties use their platforms to attack people who can’t or choose not to fight back: Illegal immigrants (who can’t speak up for fear of persecution and prosecution). Legal immigrants whose first language is not English (who can’t speak up because of a language barrier). These parties seek targets they believe will not fight back: Gays (because of a perception that gays–especially gay men, who are portrayed as the biggest threat–are too effeminate to defend themselves). Women (because they’re “the weaker sex”).

If you’re the kind of person who’s predisposed to bullying behavior, it feels good to bully. It feels empowering. It feels like nothing else. Then there are those of us who believe you don’t fight bullying with any form of violence–physical, verbal, or emotional. So we get to feel good about ourselves for doing the “right thing,” while all the bullies see is that nobody’s retaliating.

And this, this is why bullies continue to bully. Because nobody stops them. Nobody tells them to stop being an asshole. It’s as true in the schoolyard as it is in politics.

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Susan Powter is a lesbian.

Jul 12th, 12 / 0 Comments

file under: things you suspected but stopped really caring about for a while there

You remember Susan Powter, right? Of Stop the Insanity! fame. She lost a ton of weight, cut her hair super short and dyed it platinum, and ran around telling people to start moving for chrissake. She started getting called a “fitness guru,” got a TV show for a season, and faded out of the spotlight.

She’s still around, actually, and still proselytizing about how awesome it is to be thin and hot. Her newest book is called The Politics of Stupid: The Cure for Obesity. These days she looks like this:

Anyway, she’s a big old dyke now. It’s not clear how long she’s been gay or how long she’s been out…because she sort of disappeared in there. But I remember when her book came out in the mid-90′s, and looking at her pictures, and being sort of…obsessed with what she was doing with her look and her opinions and her body.

Anyway.

Here’s a video of Susan Powter going all ableist on Oscar winning actor Gabby Sibide. I’m really glad that Powter counts herself as a “radical feminist lesbian woman“–we need all the radical feminist lesbian women we can get. And I don’t think she’s exactly wrong in what she says about the health effects of obesity. I just wish her rhetoric didn’t stray at times a little too far into exactly what they want women to believe about themselves.

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music review: Lucas Silveira’s “Mockingbird”

Jun 20th, 12 / 8 Comments

[post updated Friday, June 22, 1:46 p.m. EDT: The earlier version of this post failed to acknowledge Hill Kourkoutis's involvement in the production of the album discussed below. I further presumed, based on a live performance I attended in late June that featured Silveira supported by male-bodied band members, that the Cliks are now a male-bodied band. Kourkoutis's comment below clarifies and corrects my (erroneous) assumption.]

It can’t be coincidence that the first song on Lucas Silveira’s 2011 solo album, “Mockingbird,” is a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “I’m Your Man.” The song starts like this:

If you want a lover
I’ll do anything you ask me to
And if you want another kind of love
I’ll wear a mask for you
If you want a partner
Take my hand
Or if you want to strike me down in anger
Here I stand
I’m your man

photo by skye chevolleau

Silveira is a transgendered male and has been fairly open and public about his transition. As the lead singer of the Cliks, he reportedly avoided taking testosterone in order to maintain his (female) singing voice, but in 2010 the Cliks split up, Silveira went solo, and his voice dropped noticeably as he began taking testosterone.

By the way, I’ve never accepted the media’s (mainstream, queer, or alternative) coronation of Laura Jane Grace (formerly Tom Gabel) as our first transgendered rock star. Silveira–whose band the Cliks were signed to Tommy Boy Records–has Grace beat by years. But with a single exception–Chaz Bono–media outlets are so unsure of what to think about transmen that they tend to simply ignore them altogether. Look at this Forbes piece that discusses Grace’s bravery, listing only MtF rockers as her precursors:

Gabel isn’t the first transgender pop musician, or even the first musician in recent memory to come out as transgender: New Orleans‘ bounce scene has recently gained plenty of exposure thanks to a number of artists–Big Freedia, Sissy Nobby, Katey Red–that identify as transgender. But those artists aren’t nearly as popular as Gabel: Gabel’s band, Against Me!, has released music through Sire Records, a label in the Warner Brothers empire; it’s an act that’s landed on the Billboard 200 with arena-sized punk tunes; it’s a group that has played those songs in arena-sized venues.

But I digress. The point here is Silveira’s slinky, kinky, sexy album, which–in case you haven’t been paying attention to the changes in Silveira’s body and voice–slides right up and announces where things stand from the very beginning: I’m your man.

“Mockingbird” is a cover album (with two original songs penned by Silveira, about which more below) that uses that label to play with gender and sex. Silveira has chosen songs with lyrics that have him referring, in various ways, to his own penis:

“She find pictures in my email / I sent this bitch a picture of my dick / I don’t know what it is with females / But I’m not too good with that shit” (Kanye West’s “Runaway”)
“The dark of the alley, the breaking of day / The head while I’m driving, I’m driving / Soft lips are open, knuckles are pale” (Kings of Leon’s “Sex on Fire”)
“I’m talkin’ big boy rides / And big boy ice / Let me put this big boy in yo life / The thang get so wet, it hit so right / Let me put this big boy in yo life” (TI’s “Whatever You Like”)

Or–smooshed into the middle of an unabashedly queer song, embraced unabashedly by many factions of the queer community–to someone else’s penis:

“I want your psycho / Your vertigo stick / Want you in my rear window / Baby you’re sick” (Lady GaGa’s “Bad Romance”)

Then there’s that opening song, “I’m Your Man.” It’s the utterance of a man who is so utterly lost in passion for another that he will do anything she asks–whatever it is she wants, he assures her, “I’m your man.”

If you know anything about Silveira’s personal trajectory, it becomes impossible to listen to this album without thinking about gender and gender identity. This is compounded by the fact that so many of the songs he’s chosen are the kind that might make a feminist or queer activist wrinkle hir nose in revulsion. But that’s gender play, gender politics, at their most delightful: Impossible to label, impossible to grasp. “Mockingbird” is simultaneously genderqueer and heteronormative, simultaneously sexy, heterosexist, and sex-not-otherwise-specified.

But of course a healthy dose of (gender)queerness and sexplay isn’t the only reason you should give this sweet little album a listen. Silveira doesn’t just cover a song; he claims it. Take a look, for example, at what he does with Kanye West’s “Runaway.” West’s version first, then Silveira’s:

And here’s Kings of Leon’s “Sex on Fire,” their version first, followed by Silveira’s:

And then there’s the matter of those two original songs, “Forever Again” and “Mockingbird.” In line with the sound of the rest of the album, both songs are spare and slow, and both showcase Silveira’s thin, strong voice.”Forever Again” is a bitter song about a failed love affair:

Heart please don’t break so hard
I can feel my delusion coming back to the top
She can’t save me now
She’s got different eyes inside
She can’t save me now
I forgot to be the prize

“Mockingbird” takes Silveira’s voice back up into his-pre-T register, this time a little less comfortably. This final, title song starts with the acoustic sound of the previous 7 songs but falls suddenly into the hard electric sounds–drums and electric guitar–that were part of the Cliks’ repertoire. And that’s how it ends: Suddenly, inside of a new sound that is neither the Cliks nor the acoustic, solo Silveira. It’s a nice teaser for the next project, a brand-new album from a reconfigured version of the Cliks. The previous iteration of the band had an androgynous–but definitely female-bodied–lead singer backed by androgynous–and definitely female-bodied–musicians; this new version features a masculine-bodied Silveira backed by male-bodied musicians. What that album will sound like is anybody’s guess, but one thing’s for certain: It won’t be anything like anything we’ve heard so far.

photo by j.mcwilliams

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robo-readers do what teachers can’t! Or, how we turned writing literacy into an algorithm

Jun 7th, 12 / 1 Comment

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has this weekly radio show called “Spark.” It is, in my opinion, the best technology-focused show that Americans don’t know about.

This week’s show included a story on the use of computer tools to read and score student writing on standardized tests. Spark host Nora Young interviewed Mark Shermis, the Dean of the College of Education at the University of Akron, who had this to say about how so-called “robo readers” assess writing:

They don’t necessarily use the same logic that you or I would in evaluating an essay. Those that use natural language processing will look for structures of arguments, so for example they might be looking for key words like ‘first,’ ‘second,’ ‘third,’ and ‘finally.’ Or if they’re looking for the main point, they might look at the topic sentence and try to identify key words that would be associated with an essay that was on topic. Or if they were looking for a conclusion they might be looking for something like ‘in conclusion’ or ‘in summary.’

Guess what, dudes–I’m not down with this approach to assessing writing. As a pretty decent writer myself, a former college composition instructor and a current instructor of preservice teachers who will one day be teaching our young people how to write, I tell my students the following:

Don’t use the phrase “in conclusion” to end your essay–any reader who’s paying attention can tell that they’ve hit the end of your paper, and “in conclusion” is therefore redundant, throwaway information.
Key words like ‘first,’ ‘second,’ third,’ and ‘finally’ are often lazy transitions, and ones that extremely strong, creative writers almost never use. While they work just fine, they often make a reader feel like s/he’s reading a set of driving directions.

Then I tell my students some things about how good writing is writing that meets the needs and interests and expectations of the reader while also jarring or provoking the reader in some significant way. Often, this jarring can be brought about through creative, unexpected use of language–precisely the sort of thing that robo-readers cannot detect.

Young asks Shermis about the creativity aspect, noting that computers can’t effectively assess this element of good writing. Shermis concedes the point, but adds that

this notion of creativity is kind of a curious one. If you take a look at the actual curriculum, when kids graduate and they go to the university, most colleges and schools aren’t looking for creative writing; they’re looking for somebody who can string together a subject, predicate, and nominative–that is, that they can communicate effectively. When you actually do an analysis of 95% of the writing that goes on even at the university level, it’s not creative. It’s simply a communication pattern that’s been ascribed to by professionals in the field.

Sure. But given that so much of the writing that young people are doing is not directed toward professional or career goals, given that so much of how young people learn, communicate, and participate in social and civic life is through written but informal text online, it just seems silly to put faith in the idea that writing skills are, at their base, about following ‘conventions’ agreed upon long before the internet was even a glimmer in anyone’s eye.

Anyway, go take a listen to Spark if you’re into technology. It’s a cool, fun show that deserves more listeners on the American side of the North American borders.

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