whoa!

So insanely fucked up.

http://jezebel.com/#!5780022/media-blows-it-with-pathetic-gang-rape-coverage

Evacuating 15 gigabytes of tears.

Today, January 21st, I decided to delete a large quantity of correspondences with an ex-partner – a very important one – that I had been saving in my email inbox for about four years, despite the sense that I would probably never talk to or see that ex again. I hadn’t wanted to delete the emails, but I also didn’t want to look at them, and there they were, accumulating space that was turning out to be badly needed for current communiqués.

I tend to run a somewhat tight and unsentimental email ship – except for my occasional sloppiness in getting rid of jokey and interesting correspondence that may or may not be of utilitarian value to me. I delete mass emails, things that are too abstract or belong to alternative trajectories that, I’ve decided, don’t belong to me anymore. Dry-eyed, I delete petitions on behalf of starving kids in Africa, raped and mutilated women in the Congo, pleas to sign a protest against the corruption in Chicago, newsletters for upcoming events of social and cultural import – these days, there’s very little that I don’t delete. For that which I truly need to save, I archive and file emails under labels – my favorite and most useful one being the long-winded “deserving of a response soon” – and then click the label and pull up those red-alert emails, those that need my direct attention. All others may get a star, which signals importance but is lower on the hierarchy than the aforementioned “deserving of…” and finally, for arcana that may be important somewhere down the road, I apply a more categorical label (“dissertation,” “theatre 369,” “Central America,” and the slightly chilling “JOB MARKET”).

And yet I awoke a few weeks ago to the notice that I was nearing the end of my Google cache. Even with my organizational systems in place, I was accruing emails at a rate and volume that were surpassing the capacity of the system. Google asked me to buy additional storage space. I gnashed my teeth and started deleting, going back in time to almost 2005.

We all knew that this would eventually be an issue, right? A person can’t forever gain information and yet stay within a limit. Isn’t there a mathematical theorem that might tell us something about our use of this space? And what of the coming demise of net neutrality?

Anyhow, as the warning repeatedly cropped up, I started trying to delete everything in sight, and today had me doing the same. I thought about that large stash of old, musty (or the virtual equivalent of) emails between myself and L., at first flowery, playful, and exciting, as we strutted our words and knowledge to impress each other – as we showed off, knowing that we were both incredibly smart and interesting, winning, sexy, lovely, humane individuals with synthetic abilities to integrate and share vast amounts of data. Then, a bit later, melodramatic, wistful, affectionate, ironical, jokey, masked, accusatory, bitter, frank, pointed, cutting, and sometimes abrasive…finally, utilitarian or occasional, and often indirect, as in “I think that your mother might like this link.” Those types of emails, as many of us might agree, mark the moribund end of the email chain, when the patient has all but flatlined.

Anyhow, today I decided, what the hell, might as well delete them. I knew what most of them said, and I didn’t take pleasure in retracing their dialogic lines and reacknowledging their cutesy bursts of cleverness, signs of a more naïve attempt at love and relationship-building. My own forays into that sort of sentimentality, especially with people who I might hope to date, have since been few and far between. I know how taxing it can be to shape and structure one’s words so lovingly, in a show of epistolary extravagance, and then later to note the diminishment of pleasure in that activity, as the vocabulary is shaved to the minimum, the written/verbal equivalent of throwing on an old sweatshirt and spending the night sedentary. I also wonder about the value of words – as words, especially the exchange of them, in media like email and physical letters, or phrases and references scribbled on the backs of old photographs and mementos lovingly dug up from strange archives to present as individualized gifts, were such an important part of our connection on many levels. I remember my extreme delight upon receipt of a letter from L., when we had just met, and I wasn’t sure about my level of interest in being with him. My occasional, sneaking feelings of tepid trepidation turned into certitude and joy as I followed the letter’s scrawl – his handwriting endeared itself to me, and I always recognized and recognize its inimitable structure and distribution. I remember feeling extremely fortunate and experiencing euphoria. Real euphoria, like I’d never had it.
Is it necessary for me to have that kind of wordy, emotive intimacy with a lover now? Even if I felt that our verbal exchanges were pitch-perfect, what about the other factors in the relationship that were off-kilter? Time and space were working against us, and those seemed to really overtake and embitter anything that words could sweeten. Either way, I know two things about the relationship, which I’ve established conclusively: 1) it was real; and 2) it ended because it needed to. So that’s my closure there. And I remember that even when we broke up for real, and I stared down into the Greek salad that I had ordered, suddenly unable to eat even a piece of lettuce, he laughed at a joke that I had just made and complimented me on my capacity for wordplay and verbal comedy.

In retrospect, ‘après le delete,’ I feel that maybe I should have saved all of the emails into a text file – but that thought did not occur to me, and I don’t even know if exportation of that magnitude is possible. When I hastily went back and ‘checked all that [applied],’ I found that there were almost two thousand emails between me and this person – a formidable volume, and something that suggests that we were very important parts of each other’s lives, and still should be, to some extent. Well, I already knew the former, but perhaps the latter isn’t possible…? I would hope that it is, but at the end we’d really run out of things to say, in the truest sense. A casual look at the emails’ volume and heft charts that precipitous decline, an almost embarrassing fall that parallels the protagonist’s arc from genius to mentally disabled subject in that book, Flowers for Algernon, that we all had to read in high school. (At least I think that that’s what happened. I may have skipped it.)

So I erased all 1938 emails – many more, really, if you consider that many of these were email chains with over 100 threads – and I guess that I want to monumentalize or commemorate this in some way. I can no longer access the information, and something about the action feels cold or even foolish, although part of me also knows that I’ll likely never read them again, and pragmatically speaking, I needed the space. Another part of me feels that the other person has likely done the same thing, and maybe years ago. I also feel that maybe it’s not a big deal to flush out these old things. Hoarding is unhealthy, or so the saying goes. In the past, I’d felt reluctant to delete so voluminously, so voluptuously, but now I felt okay about it, granted myself the permission, and there it went, and I don’t feel so bad. More like I’m watching a ship slowly pass through the Panama Canal. A kind of elbows-on-the-railing type feeling.

So consider this a verbal marker, paltry monument that it is, to what was an extremely rich conversation in my life. Hopefully I can find one as wonderful as that one was, or maybe I no longer need something of that exact nature to be satisfied. Maybe I’m romanticizing fruitlessly, for the sake of feeling worthy of being in love (especially because I haven’t really loved someone naively and fully like that since the relationship ended about 3-4 years ago). Maybe I’ve moved on and matured in my conception of what love or a relationship needs to function. Either way, I now have 17% empty space in my inbox, which I will doubtlessly fill in a year, at most.

“when to say nothing”

“When to Say Nothing”

 

The title of this post refers to my high school friend’s eponymous blog, although he tends to write about very different subjects. I chose this title, however, because I find myself thinking about and/or invoking this phrase on a semi-regular basis these days. In particular, I feel like we are currently living in a time in which too much is being said, all of the time, in all places, to everyone. And yet I’m not ready to propose a solution, so what follows will perhaps just gesture toward some of the points of the debate, namely around freedom of speech/censorship/incitement to violence or provoking words.

 

United States: Nation of Bombastic Immigrants

Exercising verbal discretion has never been a prized trait of the USAmerican citizen: if you think about it, over centuries the nation has been composed of migrants who forcefully elbowed their way to the front of the line, spoke well and charismatically and glibly to get what they needed, and otherwise employed many rhetorical tactics and flourishes to be in this country. (Note: I like taking a somewhat facetious cue from evolutionary psychology and thinking about the evolution of the U.S. nation-state, even if it is sort of tongue-in-cheek.)

 

I’m not entirely dismissive of attempts to theorize the culture of the journey, or the transformative processes by which immigrants become immigrants, and then participants in a new citizen body. I do feel that attempting to get a word in through the din and clamor of our public life has historically been, and continues to be, a central goal of representative ethnic politics…and now it’s transforming into something entirely different as the civil rights struggle gives way to partisan rivalries and weird little splinter groups form, like black and gay Republicans – capitalism seems to slice through the political pie, attempting to make certain identities intelligible but perhaps resulting in more illegibility where it counts.

Brief Background: Theories of the Left/Right Split of the 1950s (Plus Di/Transgression #1: Capitalism/Affirmative Action Rant)

There’s an interesting theory put forth by some people whose names I don’t recall that I remember reading in an undergraduate course called “Politics and American Film.” Helpful reference, I know – but the authors’ argument has stayed with me even during my tedious 6-year trudge through grad school. The argument goes like this: before the 1950s, there existed in the United States a sort of coalition between the middling classes with the radical left (Eugene Debs, the Pullman strikers, and people like the characters in Odets’s Waiting for Lefty), those who would be Communists, European style. However, during the Cold War and anti-Communist scare (not the first one in the U.S. by far), the middle class began to distance itself from the Left, using ethnicity and racial politics partly as a cover for its intensifying conservatism. Hence, the political life in the U.S. began to take a notably centrist turn, which it carries on today, implicitly using civil rights as a sort of screen for an unequal socioeconomic stratification. I don’t entirely buy this, but I do think that often ethnicity and racial identity are often used as attention-getting screens preventing the populace from confronting class hierarchies, which are often claimed not to exist in the U.S. At the same time, racialized groups, like African Americans, are notoriously marginalized in terms of class. Although this is the case, I think that the discourse tends to make the marginalization all about race – and yes, it is often very much about race – and not at all about class. There should be a political economy argument there as well. Until there is one, people will be promoted to positions of leadership based on racial taxonomy with the full knowledge – theirs and everyone else’s – that they have no intention of multiplying the effects. Why would they, in a society that rewards individualistic boot-strapping? To take on inferiors as a charity project, simply because they share the same skin color or through bonds of empathetic affinity, could result in these mentor figures’ lowered productivity, for which they’d be punished. What incentives, therefore, are they given to do this good work after having been promoted? Anyhow, clearly the capitalistic unfolding of affirmative action is one of its most troubling aspects, placing those who have benefited from a combination of their talents and the fact that they comply with a specific identity category in a difficult bind. I am totally in favor of affirmative action, don’t get me wrong. Despite its flaws, I think that it is a much-needed corrective to long-perpetuated sins in the United States. But one person cannot be relied upon to rectify the structural defects of a national system, right? For even one person placed in a position of substantial authority, the systemic race/class nexus is too powerful to be vanquished through, say, acts of grassroots community outreach and mentoring. What is needed is for racism to be acknowledged even as ethnic politics are put in their places and given over to a discussion of class politics, as these are shot through with widespread and institutionalized racism.

 

Digression #2: On the “Ethnic” Arts:

On the subject of ethnic cultural politics: Lately I’ve been hanging out with and translating some of the work of this really excellent Mexican-American playwright who is very interested in questions of the identities and psychic landscapes of migrants to the United States. Although Raúl has been chastised for his subject matter – apparently the lives of Mexican-Americans are considered by Mexican intellectuals too gauche and prosaic to be fitting objects of inquiry, and in the United States, Mexican immigrants, though extremely numerous, are basically invisible, or only sporadically glimpsed as they scramble between various work stations with differing degrees of legitimacy – he insists that the obligation of the artist is to figure/feature a certain community and be concerned with the problematics presented before that community – in other words, not to escape or be somewhere else, creatively speaking or speaking of the space of the mind, but to use art as a means of grounding oneself in the here-and-now and fostering a space for the analysis and processing of events that might otherwise fly by as news tickers and headlines, imbued with just enough novelty and gravitas to disturb our frames of reference but too rapidly for us to ingest on a more profound level.  Take the recent shooting of Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, for example: unlike many news stories, this one is receiving somewhat of a more nuanced treatment by editorialists and bloggers asking questions about how mental illness – conceived as a personal affliction – may link to the political debates unfolding in a society (ours) beset by a heated partisan rivalry. There is no question that the far right’s inflated rhetoric, interlarded as it is with paranoia and a sense of almost Manichean necessity to take the structural events of the world into one’s own, pasty/flabby/misanthropic hands, has attracted people who are already fermenting their own brands of crazy – this is, in fact, something that Jim Gilchrist complained about regarding the Minuteman Project, i.e., that in calling for the formation of a border vigilante group, he suddenly found himself surrounded by some serious, should-be-locked-away psychopaths looking to unload their clips into the targets of his cause, and oh, these people were not like him at all, he just being your average, harmless, mouth-foaming racist. Hm.

Anyhow, the point being that my friend Raúl’s sense of what an artist is obligated to do, at least in regard to his own creative output – which output, I should note, evinces a sort of fluctuating realist-absurdist mode, in which emotions are often superficially legible but sometimes the signscape isn’t, or isn’t as immediately accessible as we might initially assume it to be – leads me to ponder the ‘character’ of the USAmerican, in the here-and-now, and how that character has changed given certain circumstances. One of my major issues, which spends a large amount of time propping up my soapbox, is that the United States has everything to do with Mexico, and not just because of the beauty of theorizing the master-slave relationship, or the identity of the subject and its ‘other,’ on the margins, world-turned-upside-down, etc. Yes, people are often defined by that which they push to their farthest outskirts, the marginal, the abject/subaltern, and then which continually returns to haunt them, in the ‘return of the repressed.’ And of course cultures reassert themselves when faced with their unraveling, so that borders exhibit a dynamism practically unheard of anywhere else. The notion of “the border” ties into some integral human psychic formations. But I would hasten to bring into focus the issue of the actual border between the U.S. and Mexico, so that the symmetry and beauty of these border dialectics do not cloud the actual politics of the local context.

In 1848, the United States acquired a substantial portion of its current land holdings – including Texas, California, Colorado, and the Southwest generally – and delineated the U.S.-Mexico borderline at the Río Grande. The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War and brought about the sale of land from Mexico, intersected with some nationally-defining strands: the national project of Manifest Destiny, for example; the California Gold Rush (essentially, a rebuttal to the naysayers of the westward push, who had in fact been multitudinous); Native American massacres and forced relocations; the slave trade (as many of those who had opposed Manifest Destiny rallied their forces into abolitionist causes, sparking the Civil War); and other events in some way tied to the very crux of the U.S. imaginary. Racism, genocide, self-assertion, settlement, and land-grabbing are all, and have been for a long time, important parts of what constitutes the U.S. citizen – his/her identity traits and sentimental meanderings and apocalyptic fulminations, privatizing privations, prurient prudism, and conservative backwater nostalgia trips. To think that these strands are lessening, loosening, or are in some way non-intrinsic to the U.S. character (or ego-ideal, really) is to essentially miss what went on in our nation for the past, oh, 250-odd years.

And freedom of speech is crucial to the mix. On the face of it, anyone can agree on the importance of fostering a society in which people can speak their minds without fear of persecution. Words are just words, after all, and deeds are what will put you in jail (and in Hell!). Many are the political theorists who have held forth on the ins and outs of ‘freedom of speech,’ the “performatives” (Butler, Rawls, Derrida, Austin) being perhaps the latest wave, or the latest wave of which I am aware. I agree with the performatives, specifically Judy Butler, in her classic work Burning Acts, Injurious Speech, and feel that Butler makes an excellent case in ascribing new force and power to the word (as performative utterance). Rather than limiting herself to a mediating rumination on the texts of our times – as if textual analysis is really the best way to get at ideas about politics, I mean, come on now, really – Butler addresses a Supreme Court case involving a cross-burning by the KKK on a black family’s front lawn and, through her discussion of the conservative and liberal justices’ statements about this act, manages to create a fascinating argument about the ways in which hate speech can or cannot approach criminality, revealing in the process the lengths to which U.S. conservatives will go to hide behind ‘freedom of speech’ as a means of asserting the rights of provocateurs and supremacists of varying sorts. The polemic deserves to be read on its own merits and not paraphrased here, but suffice it to say that I consider this to be a major intervention in scholarly and philosophical considerations of what constitutes free speech and when speech crosses over into action, as well as the ethics of speech.

 

Palin’s Crosshairs: The Violent Tastelessness of Right-Wing Rhetoric

Recent conflagrations, in which people testing injurious speech incite (or, okay, fine, “just happen to coincide with”) actual physical violence, make me long for a new contouring of the U.SAmerican ability to hold forth, a curb on our collective national ability to speak. Perhaps we should all stand at the national mirror, American flag reflected in the background – one hand on the heart, the other holding the tongue. I wonder if it would be possible to inculcate a national “rhetorical mutuality” that would exercise discretion without everyone being legally mandated to do so. Already I think not. Even beyond the idea of political correctness – which is fundamentally flawed, as it only brings forth the impish desire to name that which has been excoriated and expunged from the increasingly anesthetized ‘proper’ speech of the public sphere – I wonder if we could potentially bring into visibility this connection between speech and actions by unleashing a storm of commentary on it, debating the methods and the ways in which speech acts have moral correlates as to physical acts. We do not all refrain from murder simply because it is illegal; neither should the illegality/legality of speech acts prevent us from saying that which we know will provoke an enraged response – speech acts designed to anger and incite rather than stimulate dialogue or move the conversation forward.

The news is always liberally peppered with idiotic questions about the connection between simulated violence – on TV, in video games – and actual violence. I think of these kinds of discussions as a leap directly into the void, or the masturbation of an oil slick, in which you will just get your hands full of slime and possibly never really emerge from the black whorl. A pointless endeavor that amounts to wheel-spinning and countless other clichés. Debating an issue does not always have to mean endlessly feinting or throwing out cues that your audiences will understand because of their well-trammeled familiarity; true debating might actually occur with the introduction of a radically new (and therefore thought-provoking) concept, and the search for these kinds of landmarks and landmines constitutes a lot of philosophical and humanities-oriented research. Anyhow, not to say that this is a new framework, but I want to shed light on the porousness of the public sphere, which endlessly fascinates us, and the ways in which what is not supposed to be said aloud is often said anyway, and is even more powerful for not being authorized. What is not supposed to be said but is said anyway is often the thing that actually rivets the nation, and yet because it is not supposed to be said, we are not allowed to talk about it – at least not in the civil, clipped speech of the public sphere – and ask whence it derives such power. This cycle of censorship, of marginalization of the comments on the margins (or underneath blog posts, or in chat forums) instead of placing them in the center of our national investigations into what is truly absorbing the USAmerican mind and acquiring all of its preoccupations, like a sponge filled with toxins, reduces us to a certain helplessness, in which the ‘high ground’ does not begin to touch at the festering wound off which the ‘low element’ – the far right – gleefully feeds, and from which it gains power. Case in point: Obama chastised the Democrats for being sanctimonious purists in wanting to reject the continuance of the Bush tax cuts. The tax cuts for billonaires suck, but the majority of the nation seems to be in favor of them, and politicians who want to keep their jobs are beholden to the people. In this case, the mass of the people are wrong and gaining power. In other words, wrongheadedness is holding sway. By ignoring this and voting their consciences, are the Democrats helping to reverse the tide? Are they? No. They are only being sanctimonious purists, further ensconcing themselves in their quiet Vermont homes and practicing their peaceable ways while the mob effectively rages outside. Obama, in his venal and self-interested way, was actually heeding/taking note of this mob. It is an important first step to recognize or acknowledge the ways in which power is actually shifting, even if you don’t agree with the orientation of the shift.

 

Has This All Been Said Before?

One thing that becomes noticeable after 29 or so years of life: people will take any opportunity available to come out with some of the worst, vilest ideas and thoughts. In the age of political correctness, they do this under cover of internet anonymity or among groups that they consider like-minded. We are actually seeing a reversal of PC culture, as people just increasingly start adding distasteful smears and provocative flourishes to the public sphere itself – a movement that is skewed rightward. You don’t see liberals calling for members of the oppositional party to be shot, while right-wingers’ language tends to be more violent and overtly racist, note Rachel Maddow and others. And then the release of the Nixon Tapes, for example – in which Nixon goes on an extended paranoiac diatribe against the Jews and Henry Kissinger, that penguin-shaped interloper, roundly agrees – demonstrates the extent of the hate speech, behind closed doors/inadvertently captured on tape/bursting out in public like the explosion of a raw, chapped blister’s contents.

 

Examples of the ways in which inappropriate speech oozes out of the lower and into the upper signscape abound. I will give some quick examples for easy reference:

Example A: Don Imus’s incendiary comment about “nappy-headed hoes.”

Example B: Speech hate groups like the Westboro Church

Example C: the Wiener Circle, Chicago*

 

*Note: I can go on about this, because I have actually experienced this licensed outpouring of hate speech that occurs nightly, needlessly, fruitlessly (and fruitfully for the employees, who make good on copious guilt-tips), but for purposes of expediency I will just direct you to Ira Glass’s televisual segment on it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo1LPf9mnyU

 

The question is, then, what to do with all of this. We can’t eradicate the thinking of these things in some of the population and, thus, the speaking of them. If we try to shame people into holding their tongues, the irrepressible hate-speech becomes more urgent in its need to exit their bodies and find a recipient or receptacle, occasionally emerging in the most inopportune ways. Yet we cannot condone hate speech or even give it a venue, as it will quickly grow out of control and overflow the constraints, as in the Wiener’s Circle example.

The first step must definitely be to take it seriously, and place it not just in the realm of speech. Speech must be seen as in some way on par with actions – not the same as an action, but an alarming sign nonetheless. Does speech offer a safety valve against harmful action? Here I might say yes, but I think that speech can lead to dangerous actions on the part of listeners. No one would argue against the power and influence that speech and writing can sometimes possess.

 

Is speech more effective an instigator than images of violence? I have no way of knowing or even speculating, so I’ll stay out of that quagmire.

 

To go beyond this for a second and get back to question of art/cultural production: I’m interested in the fact that everyone is continually delivering his/her opinion about every topic and text, regardless of whether he/she is qualified to judge…someone was complaining about this in a magazine that I read recently, framing it as a sort of elitist reaction to the popularization of literary/art criticism through organs like Amazon user ratings, IMDB, Netflix, Yelp, etc – consumer ratings are supposed to make us feel empowered or something, but the democratization of critique doesn’t always work. An extreme example is the market-based proposal for healthcare, in which we patients are supposed to review our options and choose the best one, without possessing a modicum of professional expertise about medical matters. The obvious pitfall here is that 1) as ailing healthcare recipients, our lives are in question, leading us to compound our lack of knowledge with the irrational knowledge of the moribund; and 2) while reason would seem to dictate more tests and diagnostics, we hear frequently now that too much testing is itself a menace.

Anyhow, the author of the article on the excess of popularized ratings systems was bemoaning the death of formal criticism, but I don’t care about that so much as what I see as an informational glut with no alternative but censorship/restriction (which isn’t really a valid option either). These days it seems that everyone is slavering with eagerness to deliver his/her opinion on everything, which leads me to want to write a novel or create an installation focusing on a character who bucks the trend, Bartleby-style, by remaining opaque and unreadable to his/her peers, finding strength in the withholding of information and the retention of a sort of private internal sphere/climate over and against those who would desire his/her opinion on all worldly matters. I am envisioning a character whose very inscrutability contains his/her power, in a way that mingles strands of Taoism (the potential of the uncarved block) with those of Stoicism, for maximum Eastern-Western fusion buffet.

 

I say all of this as one embedded in what I’m calling an ‘information competition industry’ (ICI), in which the sharing of information and opinions is what defines the discipline and sets the successful candidate apart from the failed competitor (unclear sharing, non-novel information, uninteresting interventions)…in light of that, the character who would refuse to share his/her information and inner thoughts, despite the need to do so and the screaming public demanding it, attains a new sort of heroism, that of the unreadable blank space.

 

And of course I recognize the irony in writing such a great deal on the need to not write so much. But in a way, I’m exercising my national cultural rights, and perhaps cartoonishly so. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m very much the ideal of the U.S. citizen: child of immigrants who built themselves up through a family-owned, multi-generational plumbing company, wanting nothing flashy – just a house in the Midwest and some kids through college. And even when it became more complicated than that, we retained a sense of our middling-class status (totally unsustained, I’d say, by this point, after our ivy league educations and entrepreneurial spirit, plus the inbuilt privileges of whiteness and general phenotypic desirability that got us in the doors of the ‘Big Houses’ of the New World). Anyhow, you know the story, because it’s the classic story – a fantasy, really, blowing into the desert winds of our direst longings…

So here I’ll stop. Perhaps I’ve laid out some rationales for ‘saying nothing,’ and my long-winded treatise might hopefully enlighten you a little bit about the peripheries of many topics, while not giving you a comprehensive knowledge of any one…but I think I’ve said enough. Following Lauren Berlant’s forthcoming book (Cruel Optimism) on the new ‘ambient citizenship’ exercised in a public sphere of audition (as in listening), lurking, passively spying, and quietly scavenging amongst the ruins of the American Dream, I’d like to hear what you have to say. Talk back!

-k

Shaking Politics: Sissy Bounce

On Saturday, October 16th, I biked down to Subterranean, in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood, to check out Big Freedia and her special brand of sizzling sissy bounce. I should preface/contextualize this performance review, as it were, by stating that I’m a student of theatre and performance analysis specializing in African diaspora forms and Latin American/Caribbean/black drama. Yeah. If the academy were a giant tree, I’d be nesting in that part of it (the underfunded one, with the spindly little leaflets and angry and resentful, or cheerfully and actively sublimating, birds, as well as a smattering of identity politicians who fly by and peck our wood every now and again, arousing ire and desire in equal measure). Aaanyhow, but all that aside, and built-in privileges well acknowledged, I really like what I do. Lately, for example, I’ve become rather fascinated by the links between African American popular music and afro-Caribbean popular dance forms, like passa passa, dancehall reggae, reggaetón, soca, and dance moves like the “temper wine.” (If you’re ever interested, I can say a lot about a theory that I have connecting Beyoncé to Jamaica and Trinidad via her choreographers and a certain point in one of her recent videos…it’s super-fascinating but really just a conjecture at this point.) But how does this all connect with sissy bounce? Read on…

Ever so long ago, when I first met her, S. introduced me to a subgenre of bounce called sissy bounce. Bounce is that type of hiphop that’s really popular in the south, predicated on rapid beats and women jiggling their asses really, really fast without really moving the rest of their bodies. A lot of mainstream artists, like Ludacris and maybe Juvenile (?), became famous as purveyors of bounce. It’s now in the general hiphop repertoire and known to many.

But sissy bounce is probably the most inspired iteration of the bounce umbrella category, at least from the perspective of this white, middle-class, female armchair expert. I don’t really know what I’m talking about, but this is just what I’ve seen/observed. The thing that really makes sissy bounce something extra is that it’s very much live – as in, the artists sing and rap the syncopation, the downbeats and breakbeats and all that, so they need to be keeping up with this very fast, like ass-shakingly fast, beat. Another quality that’s attractive about it is that the tracks are extremely catchy and original mashups of things, studded with rap solos or gospel-like song, with call-and response and incredible audience interaction. All of this might explain why sissy bounce artists like Big Freedia and Sissy Nobby consistently attract large crowds, and also why they don’t get beat up or even killed. Because sissy bounce also foregrounds the sexual and gendered identities and expressions of its artists: they’re gay, queer, transgendered, or however-identified, and that is at the crux of sissy bounce. “sissy,” as you may know (but which is worth stating all the same) is a derogatory term for homosexual. Despite this, they appear to have a very large mixed-gender and also mixed-sexuality following, including heterosexual couples and – again, I’m conjecturing here, and there deeeefinitely needs to be a reception-oriented study around this – perhaps even straight-identified men who have homophobic tendencies. Perhaps. I don’t know, but their audiences do not seem super gay-friendly. More about that in a second, since I really don’t know who attends a sissy bounce show in New Orleans, or how the demographics have changed now that SB has been “discovered” by a bunch of white, wealthy, college-educated hipsters. More about THAT in a second too. Essentially, I want to explore some of the complex vectors of this genre and ask questions about how it’s changing now that the audiences and touring structure are changing. Then I want to talk a bit about my own experience and see how it might have related to the whole concept of sissy bounce as it is now.

Pop-ethnomusicological treatments of sissy bounce: casually browsing, I found two: XLR8R’s documentary and mixtape and a short documentary clip made by Diplo, former partner of MIA and a deejay who is really into searching out genres, like baile funk carioca, and incorporating them into his performance to produce a sort of postmodern globalized techno music that is kind of fascinating in its way.

And I want to say that I feel personally that it’s cool to want to do this. Being inspired by street dance forms is a sign of being aware of people and taking them seriously even if they’re not white, straight, or rich. It can contain an element of exotification, or a hipsterization that might be even worse, but there’s a fine line. I think that XLR8R walks this line better than does Diplo, because the former took intensive time and resources to the task of appreciating the sissy bounce genre, attending and performing at concerts, getting to know the artists, and helping them to make more money. I feel like the work done by the XLR8R crew was, in a way, the best example of how scholarship (call it what you will) can actually benefit the ‘research subjects’ (so to speak. I know, puke in my mouth. But that’s what they are in this framing). So I am not trying to throw out wholesale the idea of doing pop-ethnomusicology because it’s cool. I do, however, think that there are better and worse ways to do it. Diplo’s little doc seems rather uninformed, as if he’s the only person who has ever seen this form and he’s TELLING you about what it is. He doesn’t say people’s names or give them much credit in the film, and he doesn’t seem to spend much time in New Orleans. It feels pandery to me, like some sort of insufficient and superficial lip service that is essentially chapped (and chapping my ass). He also cites this white, hipstery friend as the expert on sissy bounce, when there are clearly copious black people in NOLA who know more about it AND can dance to it. I’d like to see that skinny white kid ‘shake [his] ass/shake it fast.’ More on that later too.

-who are/were sissy bounce’s original fans?
I don’t know who the genre’s fans were before it was discovered, but from XLR8R’s interview (which is actually very good, an in-depth and respectful treatment that contextualized the genre) as well as some footage during Diplo’s visit to the club and the youtube videos, they seem to be black people, straight queer and gay, with a variety of body shapes (ranging from the Panamanian-skinny to giant mountains of flesh with tiny features submerged in them) and of many socioeconomic groups. Black people, and blacks in New Orleans specifically, are often portrayed in the media as globally poor, but I am just going to refute that one a priori, because I can assure you that there is a huge black middle class in NOLA, as in other cities in the south (Atlanta being the mecca, or so I hear), and professional classes and upper classes and republicans and everything else. Nevertheless, the XLR8R folks discuss gunbattles at night and the essential poverty of these artists of sissy bounce, who are products of the ghetto innovating their way out and making their queerness the centerpiece of this.

One would think that when a societally disparaged figure – the gay black male or transwoman, for example – is entertaining an enormous crowd of oppositional folks, that his/her identity might be denigrated (apposite word choice there, hm) as part of the act, in the inverted way that, say, an obese woman can make a lot of money by consistently being “Fat Woman #2” in a movie. Or the classic example: black blackface (often called “ethiopian”) minstrelsy. This is always the paradox of parody: the person – or persona, rather -  being mocked and scoffed might in fact be having the last laugh, both because of the effect of the “minstrel mask,” by which the actor distinguishes him/herself from the persona who is the object of audience scorn, and materially, which becomes visible when one does the infrastructural analysis, i.e., examines the money changing hands and connections made, asking questions about who the impresario/producer is (because if the artist IS the producer or manager, what you have is essentially self-representation, and there’s a lot more room for lucrative profiting – as with henry “box” brown – even if the act itself is demeaning).

But IS sissy bounce demeaning? I would say profoundly no. I say this admittedly not knowing its former context in the mostly-black (? Not even sure if they are) clubs in New Orleans, but I would assume that it was not terribly derogatory even then. For one thing, the XLR8R people note that the dance form brings in women, including sexy women who are really adept at shaking their asses, which in turn brings in het or het-identified men. With these sorts of sexual networks forming, and with the respect and affection that the women seem to have for the queer performers, there are plentiful reasons for the het men to enjoy the show without enjoying the queerness, per se. Because the queerness is so obvious, there’s no need to call it out with mockery: like the classic purloined letter, it’s transparently available and therefore somehow hidden, or screened. This might change if the performers also shake their queer or trans asses onstage, as did Big Freedia during my show. I get the sense that they do. I don’t have the ethnographic data to understand whether 1) there are segregated queer and straight shows; or 2) whether gay men and trans people shake their asses alongside the hetero show of female ass-shaking. I don’t know how the spectacle of queerness incorporates itself, or doesn’t, into the shows. Again, there really needs to be a study ! and I smell funnnnding…and fun.

Autoethnography:
Okay, so this next part is going to describe a little bit of my experience at the show in Chicago and ask some questions. At first when I saw that Big Freedia was touring with a variety of non-sissy bounce acts, I was like, “hm, cool, whatev.” But then, closer to the show, I wondered if it would be weird, like if the show could possibly transcend irony and identity politics and avoid landing us in a kind of minstrelsy trap. This actually became a palpable fear for me when I saw the crowd, the opening acts (one of which was terrible, like TERRIBLE – a totally uninspired and unrelated act that had nothing going on. The other one, with its amazing Second Life projections and tutus with burlesque whiteface, was awesome, though). So then I started to feel nervous about abjection, the other, crowds, etc. But then Freedia herself came on, with her amazing hair (one side shaved in a design, the other hanging long with white-streaked bangs) and her very Panamanian-looking clothes – namely, a silver belt and jeans that were somewhere between baggy and skinny, Panama style. With her were a backup dj, a big-bodied water dude, and a white (or white-appearing) female assistant dancer wearing a sort of aquamarine satin unitard with fishnets. The thing that I could not get over was the female dancer’s makeup and expression, which was VERY sassy and definitely could have had something satirical/parodic going on. Simply put, she exhibited the exaggerated features of a blackface minstrel female figure. I am not bullshitting; she did. Or perhaps a white trash/po’ white minstrel figure? And when she flashed us the finger, twice, the impression was even more striking. Weird. I wondered what the relationship between Freedia and her was – whether she was the dancer for the entire tour, or just to places serving a mostly-white clientele, or what was going on there. Would it have been strange if Freedia had brought a black dancer to shake her ass for us? Was that too exoticizing? It’s not that this dancer couldn’t booty-dance as well as a black person – not at all, she was amazing. But her whiteness, or appearance of such, combined with the makeup, was very strange to me. I am still processing it and would honestly like to hear the interpretations of people of color in the audience.

Unlike the sassy backup dancer, Freedia projected a persona that was, I feel, very “pure” in a way – dignified, earnest, and honest. For example, at the end, she explained to us that she was very ill and therefore was sort of cutting it short but that she tried to hold out because she loved Chicago. This was all very touching and cool. Also, she was a class-A ass shaker but wasn’t arrogant about it. The whole vibe of her sissy bounce persona was, I felt, very put together and with the right amount and KIND of presence. The feeling that I had after the set was essentially that Freedia is a consummate performer, pardon the cliché, who really knows how to work with a variety of audiences. Not that this one was tough or turgid at all, however. The mood of the crowd was also very open to communing with the whole situation.

And I think that that provides one reason that the show transcended irony. As presented within the production/promotion of Decibelle, the event was queer-friendly, and gay rights were clearly on people’s minds there. I feel like gay rights and expression trumped race and class in this context, or rather created a venue for them, that people could relate to and that quashed hostility, to some extent. There was a sense of empathy, and I don’t say that lightly. Very few people were observing, arms crossed, from the sidelines. It was less hipster and more freak. Which I liked.

In addition to being very gay, and therefore very awesome, the show was very interactive, with participants of all shades and stripes getting up onstage and shaking their asses in various configurations. This presented a sweaty, drunk, and lusty subsection of the queer fe/male audience dancing together, on boxes, gyrating on the floor, humping and grinding against each other and the stage, eyes half-closed, in what turned out to be a very charming shambles.

But meanwhile Freedia would go through the crowd and physically point to the best ass-dancer, drawing the audience’s attention away from the poor imitators and to the one who really understood what to do with his/her body. What this did was several things: 1) established an embodied hierarchy, so that if anyone was to be mocked, it was the people trying to dance and doing so badly; 2) it prevented even those hacks from being mocked because of the eye-turning power of Freedia, the ass-connoisseur. She showed us that she was totally in control of this hierarchy, that this was TOTALLY a skill that required intensive practice and, often, athleticism, and that there were other types of power available to people. I saw quite a few people getting flustered or embarrassed when they realized the distinctions between those who really could shake their asses and those who were thinking that this was going to be something fun and casual. It’s actually a very serious thing, this dance. It involves keeping most of the body completely immobile while revolving your ass-cheeks like a washing machine. Even more tricky are forms in which the participant bends over, lies on the floor, or gets up on a structure and whirls her ass. It’s totally mesmerizing and extremely easy to pick out immediately who’s doing it well and who badly. In any case, this rearranged hierarchy defeated any attempts to mock the performance, as we saw what sexual power was also contained in this incredibly erotic dance (and it is!), which probably also explains its appeal at straight black clubs in NOLA.

To summarize, I had a great time and emerged feeling okay about it too. I’m not sure what other stops are on this tour, and I hope that there aren’t any to, like, frat boy bars in rural texas. That might produce an entirely different reception, and one that would bring out some of the worst and most racist and homophobic undertones of U.S. society and culture right now. I can say in our case that I was satisfied with the reception that we audience members gave Freedia. Despite the the mixed race but mostly queer-identified, white, middle-class audience members, the performance managed to transcend irony (while not ditching the realm of camp – using camp somewhat to its benefit, although this could have been more played up) due to its the inclusive nature, as well as the coalescence around issues of queer identity that went on, AND a hierarchy of movement that emerged and would definitely smack down any sense of irony cultivated by the lip-curling sneerers hanging on the periphery (not that there were any. In fact, the concert was remarkably upbeat and sincerely, wholesomely enthusiastic, which is a rare feeling to have from a show, especially one in Chicago, espECially one in wicker park.) I only had the sense that the organizers of the show might have wanted Freedia to directly invoke an aspect of queer politics and/or rights, but she didn’t. I’m not sure how much of a spokesperson she has been, is, or is becoming, but being linked to Decibelle, contrary to what you might think, does not seem to imply that she is incorporating their message in her work. But that is not to say that she should be: I think that Freedia knows who she is: that is to say, she is walking politics, there’s no need  to say it out loud. That’s the sense I get. I’m sure that she has views on gay marriage and DADT, but sometimes body politics are more powerful and transformative than npr’s talk-radio approach. and sometimes performance studies can be really validating, i think.

not so gaga

I don’t get gaga.

Her name is Lady Gaga. She’s a big baby.

And more to my horror, an article in harper’s (faludi’s piece on feminism’s ritual matricide, an excellent read) quoted  Judith/Jack Halberstam, the gender studies professor at USC, on the future of feminism being the “brave new world of Gaga girliness.” gulp.

For real? Is this really the direction we’re going in? She seems to me to be but a revival of Madonna-style subversiveness, yet so much less shocking, all about design and appropriation. I appreciate her eccentricity, but I also feel like dancing around in a thong, shooting her glamor vibes throughout prison is a problematic image.

What does it mean for us for Gaga to be the representative of the next wave? Any of you Gaga fans out there, please enlighten.

c

cross-bloggery

hi all,

i invite you to read this essay that i wrote on my own homegirl blog: http://funlandfunfunfurryfun.blogspot.com/

it’s about my grandmother’s death and life. i hope that you learn & enjoy. xo, katie