Class Blog #2

I found Monday night’s class discussion so helpful and useful-especially in terms of discussing DeBord’s use of the term “spectacle” to theorize about a global media economy. I found it very interesting to talk about what can enable access to the spectacle and whether or not everyone has the same access or can avoid or resist the spectacle altogether. I felt much of this conversation we were trying to determine whether or not we consciously participate in the spectacle and in what degree are we conscious or participatory? Part of me really wants to take that route and do a very theoretical discussion parsing out my ideas on these matters. However, for the sake of “fun” and “play” I am going to wrestle with these ideas via DeBords notion of “celebrity.” My previous reading of Debord was really in the context of visual representation and I find his notions of spectacle to be applied not only to the banal and mundane but also to those who take up a spectacular lifestyle through celebrity. I find this especially poignant and amusing in cases of reality television.

Although my translation is different, I found that DeBord identifies the spectacle in thesis 10, as, “Affirmation of appearance and affirmation of all human life, namely social life, as mere appearance.” If the spectacle is appearance, is image, is representation and the affirmation of these images, we can see this being performed so plainly in so many places. In the context of celebrity, we can see how images are affirmed, especially through their repetitive use and for the desire of others in the spectacle to mimic celebrities. As a professor at my undergraduate institution once said, “Celebrities are celebrities because they are celebrities, they are famous for fame’s sake.” Celebrities are not only a part of the spectacle, they are spectacle themselves—performing a spectacular image of what it means to be a celebrity whether it be the multiple attempts in rehab, excessive spending, or adopting children from foreign nations. As DeBord notes in thesis 60, “The celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living being, embodies this banality by embodying the image of a possible role…Celebrities exist to act out various styles of living and viewing society —unfettered, free to express themselves globally (emphasis original). What I notice from this is exactly what my professor noted, celebrities are not celebrities because of their acting, singing, or dancing ability but because they give us, the little people, models of the ways we should desire to live.

As a society we are presented with a character like Paris Hilton, who has no direct connection to being a celebrity, no specific talent (although some will argue that modeling was her talent and that she was a celebrity for that,) yet becomes famous for her spectacular lifestyle — mainly the fact that she is an heiress to a fortune. The recognition of Paris as a celebrity makes it possible for her to later launch an acting and singing career and even more ironically her “reality” show, The Simple Life. In this “reality” show, Paris and one of her friends are transplanted into different situations far removed from their Hollywood lifestyle, usually into small towns with common people, and everyone voyeuristically watches to see if she will in fact stick her hand into the cow’s rectum on the dairy farm while wearing her Prada dress. The fact that the show is even called The Simple Life alludes to the fact that these girls are actually the opposite of simple, but high maintenance, big spenders, causing a scene with the town’s local boys no matter where they are. The connection between the spectacle, celebrity, and capitalism becomes quite clear that they are all in fact contingent upon one another for success of propagating “the spectacle.” But it is also important to return to the question of our participation in the spectacle and whether or not we are conscious in our participation. I provide a clip of Ellen, in which, she becomes Paris Hilton's new BFF (also based off of a reality television show) and in turn partly because she is a comedian, but also because she is at least somewhat of a social critic, makes fun of the Paris Hilton enterprise.
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While Ellen may be poking fun at Paris Hilton's spectacle celebrity lifestyle, commenting on all of her pictures, driving her around in the Smart Car, and dancing in "the club" on the stripper pole, in a sense Ellen simply creates a different celebrity lifestyle of which to potentially mimic. We also begin to see the ways that Paris's lifestyle is taken up in shows like MTV’s Made, Cribs, Sweet 16 and others, which, generally turn ordinary people into celebrities by giving them a make-over, buying them a new car, or showing them living in an extravagant house. While we may think that a Smart Car may be resistive to the spectacle as opposed to driving a "pimped out" SUV it actually creates a new spectacle based on a different celebrity with a different lifestyle. In turn as we discussed in class I do not think DeBord would be more fond of Ellen's commentary on Paris's life since she makes money from her show and resisting the spectacle can not necessarily be done in terms of using capitalistic means, but I did feel that it could illustrate nicely two different examples of celebrity spectacles, different, yet the same. However, I wonder as we also talked about in class is it possible to as Audre Lorde writes, "Dismantle the master's house with the master's tools?" Is it possible to use the spectacle, as a mediated form of communication as a "celebrity" in order to change the existing spectacle?

I do not think that there are many examples of this out there but one that immediately came to mind from reading José Esteban Muñoz’s Disidentifications, was Pedro Zamora, a man/character on MTV’s the Real World: San Francisco. A gay Latino man living with HIV/AIDS, Muñoz claims that Zamora used the medium of the Real World and television to enrich the world with gay Latino visibility as well as AIDS activism. Through his work as a “televisual activist”(143), Zamora was able to use the spectacle of reality television to engage social justice work and reach a large group of people as evidenced through the thousands of letters a week that he received. Zamora was very conscious of his participation in the spectacle from the time he submitted his audition tape but knew that in order to reach a large range of people he would have to use the spectacle to sort of set his own agenda. He accomplished this, by becoming a focal point of the show giving a human face to homosexuals of color living with AIDS. He died soon after the show finished taping and thus, never experienced he kind of celebrity that “reality” television stars are often afforded now. And although there are historical, political, social, racial, gendered, sexualized differences between Hilton and Zamora, we can see how the spectacle may be used for purposes of social justice and not solely spectacle or celebrity.
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Not to conclude too sharply but I do believe we are all caught up in the spectacle at different levels, with different amounts of consciousness. There are certain parts of the spectacle (certain celebrities) we identify with and others we resist. Our choices are limited but the spectacle is not all bad as Gladys pointed out in class Monday night. The spectacle does allow us the medium to transmit messages and access information otherwise denied to us. I leave with another clip of Zamora, maybe a certain type of spectacle or celebrity himself, but one who was conscious enough to know how to use the spectacle to engage the work of resistance and social justice.

class blog posts #1

Disciplining Sex

Foucault is one of the foundationalists in discussing sex and sexuality and queer theory. His poststructuralist notions of sexuality combined with his theories of power underscore the idea that there are no essentialialisms, no fixed ideas about bodies, and in theory, no fixed identities. This is taken up often in the form of queer studies by theorists such as Judith Butler who assert that there is no congruency between sex/gender/and sexual desire. His theories have had profound impact on my own work as a feminist and queer scholar. As Foucault writes:

“We, on the other hand, are in a society of ‘sex’ or rather, a society ‘with a sexuality’: the mechanisms of power are addressed to the body, to life, to what causes it to proliferate, to what reinforces the species, its stamina, its ability to dominate, or its capacity for being used…I am looking for the reasons for which sexuality, far from being repressed in the society of that period, on the contrary was constantly aroused”(269).

In context this quotation comes from a chapter of Foucault’s history of sexuality a provocative essay, which, asserts that, in a sense a genealogy of ideas or which have disciplined bodies into asexualized and yet overtly sexual beings. Beginning with the idea of “Biopower” Foucault theorizes about the shifts in ways to control and discipline bodies, through the “right to take life or let live” (259), continuing to ideas about sexuality and the concern with sexuality as a “micropower concerned with the body.”(267). Sexuality organizes society through disciplinary tactics, which, occur through the stigma of homosex, of reproductive rights, and eugenics. The right to sexuality is the right to take life or let live. The right to determine sexual norms are created and reinforced by those in power and the repetition of disciplinary practices instituted by such people.

Situated within Foucault’s earlier notions of power and discipline of bodies where Foucault asserts, “The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated self (adopting the illusion of substantial unity), and a volume in disintegration”(83). What we can begin to see as a product of Foucault’s earlier arguments integrated with his more updated ones in The History of Sexuality that bodies are constructed and organized-not based around essences but around language, experience, and modes of power, which discipline bodies into conformity. Bodies are disciplined through practices of sexuality and sexuality is a destabilized discipline and not necessarily built around biological or essentialized phenomenons. As the first quotation illustrates, sexuality is a echanism of power of control of determining what sexual practices are normalized and which ones stigmatized, or even outlawed. If sexuality is a mechanism of power, and not fixed or biological, then this power has the potential to be subverted by reinventing new notions of sex and sexuality. This has proved invaluable for work being done which, centers around bodies and sexuality—mainly through the denaturalization of sex/gender/and sexuality.

In this sense we do begin to see the roots of queer theory and with that critiques of that very theory. While queer theory allows us to see the ways that bodies are disciplined, especially in terms of heterosexual and gender normativity, it also allows for the possibility of agency for those very bodies. If we have the potential to be a culture that is built around the disintegration of the body and at the same time be most concerned with sexuality than we may be able to rewrite the body to free it from constraining notions of heteronormativity.

With this however, comes the very real and very valid critique of post-structuralist and queer theories. Scholars have posed the question that if bodies are only constituted by disciplinary practices such as language and discourse than how do we account for marginalization of those bodies based on their materiality? Bodies face real material consequences through practices of racializing, gendering, classing, and sexualization. And thus, I see the problematic issues surrounding the ideas of Foucault and other thinkers following in his same vein. Bodies may be a product of history, language, and experience, but bodies are still based on their materiality or the way that they look. Whie these judgements may be based on social/political/historical/and cultural constructs they do prove to have real consequences for bodies which, are othered and often devalued.

While I believe there is no conclusion to this conundrum, as I do believe that Foucault’s knife is actually quite blunt so as to not cut off the possibilities for multiple endings, I do think that it may suffice to say that bodies are a hybridization of materiality and disciplinary practice and that it is possible to view bodies as material without essentializing them. And I do not necessarily see Foucault as disagreeing with this, I think instead he challenges us to be open to the possibility that bodies like identities are not fixed, and are instead contingent on historical/cultural/political/and social factors. In this way they have the possibility to be rewritten into new volumes once the previous ones have disintegrated.

DU Women's Conference Presentation

I have presented this, so if you are interested in "borrowing" my ideas then u need to site me. Kathryn Hobson, 2009 Women's Conference, University of Denver.


Femme Drag Performance

How do you read my body?
My tall, slender, white body.
My hips, my stomach, my breasts...
How do you read the eyeliner, the lipstick, the earrings?
the skirt?
Don't lift it up you might be scared by my hairy legs
(no I don't shave them)
Is this the queer part of me?
Is the eyeliner?
Or is it queer because they both exist on the same body

When you see me
do you see those who came before me
walk with me
live in my house and
teach me

When you read me do you see
my great grandmother's hands
do you see that she lives in my heart?
that I can do nothing without thinking about her
that I am nothing without her
that I hear her bellow in the night
-Kathy-
even though she is long gone

When you read me do you see
that I live in a constant state of pain
that my ovaries and uterus will be removed
is this too much information for you?
is this where the queerness lies?
in the fact that “biologically” I will
no longer be female?

but no matter what happens to my parts
I will always be
Femme
a femme
in drag
a femme
in everyday drag
a femme dressed in everyday drag
looking like a girl
and yet desiring other girls
Is this where the queerness lies?

When you see my body
My tall, white, slender, queer, female body
my hips, eyeliner, and breasts
juxtaposed with another female body
a female body that looks like a male body
sometimes brown and sometimes white
sometimes with a tie, long shorts, and mohawk
sometimes but not always
Is that where the queerness lies?
In the juxtaposition?

When you see my body
When you read my body
do you see my skepticism about
myself
do you see my whiteness
I'm sure you do
even if you do not assess it the meanings of privilege
it deserves
but doesn't receive
do you see my contradiction?
Is this where the queerness lies?
in the contradiction?

When you read my body
do you see the fragments
the parts that don't know anything?
The parts
that question everything
from the eyeliner, the white hips and breasts
the mohawk, the masculine femininity,
the privilege
the juxtaposition
the contradiction
the queerness
the beginnings
the endings
that go on
that never begin and never end
--

“Hey Jill, How do I look — I have a presentation tomorrow?”

“You look good, you look like Bette Porter. If I could just relate all of your outfits to L Word characters I think we would do much better when you ask me this question.”

“Ok well Bette Porter’s good, but what about the shoes are the shoes good?”

“The shoes are fine baby.”

“And my hair, how does my hair look-is it too red?”

“No, you look good Kathryn.”

“But does my body speak? Does it tell a story? I want to tell a story with my body? I want to tell a story with no beginning and no ending a story that goes on even when we’ve left? I want to tell a story without constraints without limits – a story that speaks to people. I want my body to speak. Does it speak baby?”

“Oh yeah it speaks. A little too much maybe.”

“Haha very funny. And I can’t do it-I can’t do it all-I can’t write and say everything, some things will be left out and lost-how can I write a story when I can’t tell it all?”

“You’ll know what to write and you’ll know what to say. You just have to tell it, that’s all you can do.”

“One more question though-this is the important one… Do I look gay? Do I look gay enough? Do you think they’ll know I’m gay?”
--
I wake up in the morning and I put on my gender and sexuality identity. Everything I do in the morning while habitual is done with intent. The eyeliner I put on my top lid, lining it with careful precision, the grey ankle boots I place on my feet-they are intentional choices. How am I going to put on my white, femme, lesbian self today? You see I need my eyeliner and boots in this crazy world we live in because for a femme lesbian they are both my resistance and my protection. They are my defense against the world. They are my resistance and my empowerment. I live in a world where I need my eyeliner and my boots because they are my survival. You see they are my resistance, my armor against being called a dyke and queer (and not in that good way.) I wear them to encounter all the many places where I feel resistance — resistance to my queer positionality, my queer body. I have had to put them on, from all the times I have had to wear them. I wear them to work, sometimes at home, when I go out, and when I enter the classroom.

Although the classroom as a microcosm of the academy, is supposed to be a safe space it isn’t always, in fact sometimes it is downright painful. Sometimes I need them in the academy more than I need them in a straight bar, my small homophobic town, or anyplace I go holding hands with a member of my same sex.
“I do not see the connection between gender, sexuality, and power,” a colleague once says during a heated debate around queer theory. Ouch, I think, in that moment my life, my history, my narrative has been erased, made insignificant. I do not have my boots on today and I am made vulnerable, again singled out, the only out student in the classroom.
I walk through my life with the benefit of “looking” straight as if straightness were something possible to decipher. My body is read as a straight body because it is a supposed gender normative straight body. Some people call this “cis gendered” my biology matches up with my gender identity. But I find this a much too limited term because I am more than feminine, which matches my “biological parts” soon to be removed (and then what I ask?) But I camp up my femininity, I consciously put it on-it doesn’t just match, it’s my choice to put on this feminine appearance everyday. I call it femme drag because it’s important to note how our bodily performances create our identities and present ourselves to others. And this doesn’t involve false eyelashes or corisettes (all the time), but femme drag is the way I negotiate my gender and sexuality everyday. It is my way of subverting a dominant normative, white, hetero patriarchal paradigm.

And this is a privileged negotiation, not only born out of privilege but creating privilege as well. I have white skin, which, normalizes my entire performance of white femininity-femme lesbian or not. And I am able to perform this white femininity because of a certain level of class privilege that I have. I can buy the stuff to make me look and perform femininity quite well. I have to make conscious choices to do my hair myself and not shave my legs in order to subvert some of the normative patriarchal assumptions of femininity-however, these are things most people won’t ever know unless I tell them. My race and class produce my lesbian femme body in a certain way so that without the consciousness I bring to my gender/sexuality performance I walk around with straight, white, middle-class, heterosexual privilege.

But I’m a lesbian. A dyke, a muff muncher, a lezzy, a queer.

And isn’t that just a little bit radical? Maybe I am laughing at my own joke here but isn’t it a little bit queer to perform femininity and do it for the purpose, no not the purpose the desire of other women-preferably those already lesbian (but that’s always negotiable.) And what about performing it for women who don’t look like women at all? Basically I say eff the patriarchy the system that tells me my eyeliner and my boots can’t be my resistance that these things normalize instead of queer me.

Usually I am QBA: queer by association.

I will be with my girlfriend Jill and we’ll be out at a restaurant and the waiter will come and say “What would you like Ma’am” and I’ll say my order and the waiter turns, “And for you sir?” She laughs a bit and begins to order-her voice is a dead give-away that no matter how she looks, she is not a sir. “Oh my gosh I am so sorry,” the waiter says obviously embarrassed. He has obviously made the connection, this masculine person is a woman (most likely a lesbian) so I am guessing this feminine person is also a lesbian, and oh my gosh they are on a date. “It’s fine it happens all the time.” And it does happen all the time and we pretty much laugh it off-laugh away some of the hurt it has caused for both of us the hurt she feels existing as an outwardly non-gender normative person and the pain I feel for her in that situation. But there is also pain in knowing that I wasn’t read as a lesbian until my partner was. Personal pain, selfish pain, possibly even narcissistic pain.

But my queerness…I want it to stand on it’s own.

My femme drag performance is enough to cast me in the role of lesbian, of queer, of gender norm defying queer.

Because everything I do is with intention.
This outfit
This eyeliner
These shoes
This hair
This femme identity
Is my subversive performance
Because I can wear this, I can do this
I can perform this identity

And yet I can desire women.

And isn’t that just a little bit queer?

There is No Paradise

Trouble in Paradise
"There is no Paradise, Kathryn,"she replied
but there's still trouble

So much trouble
I cry for everyone's trouble
so much more than my own
my own life seems small and insignificant
in comparison

One friend's abortion
is another friend's choice to keep her unplanned pregnancy
Trouble in Paradise

One colleagues abuse
is another woman's divorce
Trouble in Paradise

pain
women
sexuality
all different all similar
Trouble in Paradise

The loss of a father
grandfathers
an uncle
my own great-grandmother
Trouble in paradise

pain
women
sexuality
loss
loss
loss
Trouble in Paradise

Sacrificing one thing for another
cat for dog
heart for work
sanity for money
Trouble in Paradise

I weep for those
who are different
from me
going through
different things
as I cry for myself
when I am overextended
by choice
but not by choice
I cry for our shared pain
and for pain I may
never
ever
know

pain
women
sexuality
loss
choice

Trouble in Paradise
"There is no Paradise, Kathryn," she replied

Forgiveness-how possible probable is it?

Precursor: This may seem like it is only in relationship to romantic love but I write it as a way to demonstrate my queer relationships with say my father, my mother, my friends, my high school experience, those who have sexually assaulted me-there are several to whom this post refers. But it also has to do with romantic love-are things easier because they are easy?
--
I have been thinking about forgiveness and I heard this song by edie carey called bonfire or something and in it she sings that snow and weather can put out any fire - like there is always reconcilliation after pain and fighting.

I do not believe in the sort of forgiveness propogated by the church that you need to forgive in order to absolve oneself and to give oneself peace. Sometimes I think that there are some things that cannot be forgiven some traumas that one cannot absolve themselves even as a victim or survivor as some people say.

But I am wondering how easy is it to forgive? How can we let go of things that hurt us so badly and what about the people that hurt us. Especially without closure when bandaids have been ripped off without the proper precautions of making sure the wound was properly healed. I'm sure this has larger implications in the world but I don't want to think about them now. I just think sometimes we hurt others and others hurt us and how do we forgive when there is so much pain and hurt. Layers upon layers of hurting constant hurting that may be abuse but may be even deeper than abuse what if that is the way we are as a human the way we have learned to be?

And can we ever go back to the way things were? Obviously not but what if we could? Before we realized how much hurt we were enduring and creating? Would my dad never have talked to reporters, would my mother have never taken money that wasn't hers? How do we really lean to trust after someone has broken that-killed it to an extent.


I believe in letting go and living in the moment but isn't that moment always shaped by our past our history our social positioning our culture and our physiology. And what do we have to give up to move on, our expectations, our friends, family even? What do we give up in ourselves in order to forgive especially when we can never forget?
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So I edited out the other lyrics to that song because they were the wrong ones-if anyone knows where to find the right ones or if it is a different song let me know. The song I am talking about actually refers to a bonfire being able to melt the cold of winter. I take this as a metaphor for winter being hearts made cold through pain and bonfires easing the pain with forgiveness. By pouring flames onto the snow the ice can be melted.

strange happenings

a buzzing
a fluttering
a tingling
none of the above
turn it to the left
dials to the right
nothing works
to make this pain go away

stand up
sit down
lie face down
drool on a pillow
pain on the back
stimulate the toe
perfect
perfect test


roll over
we'll explain
tingling
burning
pain in the uterus
vaginal area
your rectrum
this will help all of that

will it
will a machine make me better
will a machine change my life
will it
what will it do

it is hard to tell
from a simple
test

I just don't see how sexuality and power are connected

I am sitting there
just sitting
no not just sitting
because I am never
just sitting

I am sitting and thinking
thinking about articles we read
and womdering if confrontational rhetoric is really something
to slam

I mean I read Malcolm X and
the fucker changed my whole fucking life
so there

So I am sitting and thinking
thinking about the articles we read
"I just don't see how power and sexuality are connected"
I want to smack the person who has said this

But I know it is not the queer feminist
peace loving
thing
to
do...

But I really want to do it anyway
I want to scream
everything
Everything
EVERYTHING
is a manifestation of power

"I just don't see how a gay man and a heterosexual man would have a difference in their power?
The only power I see is the power divide based on gender, male and female."

So I speak
I shouldn't have
but it hits a little fucking close to home
I don't talk about my personal life, I don't put up pictures of people I love and have loved before that have taken the female form,
I could be fired from my job..."

Ahem ahem, "Actually, actually anyone can be fired at any time, we're an at will state...I think of discrimination in the form of performance."
Oh ok, because I speak of one law and have heard it differently stated, I am not only wrong but all of those other performances I talked about previously are discredited?"
really?
Really?
REALLY?

And I just want to cry
want to run away
want to be angry
at people who have made me angry
at people who are privileged
and don't have to see

and I don't have to see racial privilege
but I do
because I know it is there
not because of full blown bouts
of racism
I don't have to see a hate crime
to know that racism exists
(Thanks bobby dylan)

but really I just keep thinking
about bell hooks and her ideas of anger
and how sometimes is productive
and most importantly
it is necessary
and it is healing
and it helps me be me...

"and even in friendly conversation
I get the bell hooks-ian urge
to kill mother-fuckers who say stupid shit to me
all day"
(thanks Staceyann Chin)
because I just want to scream
and cry
because I am a grad student
with other grad students
around and have they never heard of
HETERONORMATIVITY?

"See, sometimes anger’s subtle, stocked in metaphor
full of finesse and dressed in allure
yes, sometimes anger’s subtle, less rage than sad
leaking slow through spigots you didn’t know you had.
and sometimes it’s just
fuck you.
fuck you.
you see, and to me,
That’s poetry too."
(Thanks Alix Olson)

So fuck you,
fuck you
and get angry
get angry that you feel targeted in a system
as having privilege
let it piss you off
so that you change it...

change it
fuck you
change it
fuck you
change it...