I'm ending my reading of bell hooks' books this year with her first major publication, Ain't I a woman. Maybe I've come to expect a lot from her and sI'm ending my reading of bell hooks' books this year with her first major publication, Ain't I a woman. Maybe I've come to expect a lot from her and so found this book a little underwhelming. Nevertheless, there is a rawness here that hooks seems to have honed and shaped with her subsequent works.
Hooks was a pioneer, writing about intersectionality at a time when this kind of analysis was marginal. She was also one of the first to talk about how the changes in the American capitalist economy (as opposed to the feminist movement itself) have impacted the status of women. She thus drew links between wealth, capital, profit and liberalism right in her very first book.
It's the rawness of the book that ultimately made it a difficult read for me, perhaps even the most difficult of all of hooks' books I've read so far. Nevertheless, this has been a very important read and as hooks puts in the preface, it's clearly an indicator of her struggles to be fully self-actualised, and to be a free and independent woman....more
As a part of my reading goals this year, I've read a lot of bell hooks so far and no doubt her wisdom and teachings on a wide array of culturally releAs a part of my reading goals this year, I've read a lot of bell hooks so far and no doubt her wisdom and teachings on a wide array of culturally relevant phenomena are invaluable. But perhaps what will stick with me the most is her understanding of pain as a fruitful place of transformation and her assertion that suffering can be redemptive.
When I first started therapy all I wanted was to stop feeling pain. I was suffering so much and I had no apparatus to understand what was happening to me. bell hooks speaks about a similar experience in this book - of realising she needed therapy, of having no frame of reference through which she could understand her pain and ultimately having to reinvent herself as a healer, as her own therapist. I wish I could invent this figure for myself too, but I am not as wise and I still need a professional. But I've come a long way and now practice acceptance and commitment therapy, and understand pain to be an integral part of the human experience. I wouldn't be exaggerating if I said that bell hooks steered me in this direction through her writings.
This book is a collection of essays and interviews, and so is probably amongst the most personal of all her writings. There are several pieces wherein we see her quite unguarded, out of the vantage point of academic settings that she usually writes from. Some of her essays made me giggle and a particular interview even left me a little surprised because of the solidarity she shared with the interviewer. I was going to finish my bell hooks reading with Ain't I a Woman after having finished Teaching to Transgress, but I'm glad I made a stop here and didn't skip the book like I originally intended to....more
Listen, I’m all for occupying the interstices between fiction and reality, that subluminal space is essentially where I live all the time. But I’m botListen, I’m all for occupying the interstices between fiction and reality, that subluminal space is essentially where I live all the time. But I’m both smart and brave enough to admit that I’m delusional and psychotic. Haraway suggests the cyborg as an alternate identity that transcends racial, cultural, gender, and class boundaries. But who are we kidding here?
Haraway identifies irony as a process through which meanings are made, unmade, and remade. She aims to use irony as an instrument of subversion, using which the dominant hegemonical order can be prised open. The very embodiment of the cyborg identity is a celebration of blasphemy, and therefore it is not without its allure. I would have been all for the cyborg identity, especially since it goes against the western metaphysical tradition and blurs the lines between the public and the private. It breaks away from the idea of euro-centric humanness, they don’t call cyberfeminism post-human for nothing.
The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self.
But, the cyborg cannot re-member. Memory as a capacity is rejected by it. Memory is an integral part of what makes us human. Would I like to be a cyborg? Yes, I would love to. But I’m delusional and psychotic and the cyborg identity is pure science fiction, far removed from the reality we face every day. It has no place in personal or collective political action. Given that Haraway has an extensive background in science, her technophilia is understandable. Nevertheless, it’s taken too far here, as if science has ever had an existence independent of the culture it inhabits. Just put in some dialectical materialism, please....more
I've been reading bell hooks quite religiously and rigorously over the past few months. Although driven by the realisation that I haven't given her thI've been reading bell hooks quite religiously and rigorously over the past few months. Although driven by the realisation that I haven't given her the attention she deserves, I still wonder if I fell prey to the sudden cultural trend that turned her into a symbol to be placed on a pedestal post her death. In my defense, I've been actually reading her works meticulously and not just reading All About Love so I can claim to have read her and then just talk about how love will keep us alive. (Yes, that was an unnecessary Eagles reference and I hate the fucking Eagles, man.)
But, I have been asking myself 'what would bell hooks think of this?' a lot and using it as a frame of reference. I think I can claim that I'm sort of familiar with her process of critical thinking now, and I have to admit that it's a very powerful one. I will probably be teaching someday, and you can imagine why this has been one of my most important bell hooks reads so far.
Long before a public ever recognized me as a thinker or writer, I was recognized in the classroom by students—seen by them as a teacher who worked hard to create a dynamic learning experience for all of us. Nowadays, I am recognized more for insurgent intellectual practice. Indeed, the academic public that I encounter at my lectures always shows surprise when I speak intimately and deeply about the classroom.
Every hipster literary npc knows bell hooks - the insurgent intellectual now. Actually no, scratch that. People don't seem to talk enough about her insurgent, incendiary writing even. It's just love and peace, as though she was an internet love guru of some sorts, as though she didn't speak deeply and personally about various political issues.
It was a whole new eye-opening experience to know (even if it's just a little) bell hooks - the teacher. Even outside of her actual classroom experience, she has been a teacher to many of us through her writings. Through this book, I got a glimpse of what her students witnessed in the classroom with her and how she engaged with them (it was not always pretty and nice, as she admits.) Knowing her as a teacher within the classroom seems to have been an intimate affair to many of her students, and I will forever mourn that I did not get to be one of those students. Nevertheless, I will continue to learn....more
Have you ever felt trapped within your body? I don't mean in the way you did as a teenager, being hyper aware of all your flaws and lamenting your verHave you ever felt trapped within your body? I don't mean in the way you did as a teenager, being hyper aware of all your flaws and lamenting your very existence. I mean in the way that you feel your body has been instrumentalized by the gap between knowledges and bodies, such that the object-subject dynamic is obscured.
You know that form of poetry writing wherein you take a random newspaper, cross out most sentences and frame something vaguely poetic of the words left? (Fun fact, this is how I write my reviews. I'm a complete phony) That's how I feel about my body - it's a grotesque assemblage of excess.
Let's swallow the Foucaudian pill, i.e., the daddy pill. Desire, isolated as it has been from other bodily properties since the early twentieth century, was reified into a sexual discourse. An epistemology of body classification was thus shifted to one of body partitioning. Ugh, this pill isn't strong enough.
Let's swallow the Marxian pill, i.e., the super daddy pill. How did bodies normalized as heterosexual and homosexual subjects become inseparable from bodies as consuming subjects? Sexually disciplined, regulated bodies were simultaneously deployed as strategies of capitalist accumulation. Butler pointed out the interdependency of the masculine and the feminine within the heterosexual matrix, but now we embody the interdependency within ourselves, at least I do.
Queer thus emerges as a terminological abstraction as well as a social abstraction, as an an abstract form of subjectivity and a reified form of subjectivity. Bodies are then in turn regulated by a reifying abstraction of sexual desire. Or so the author argues and I find myself nodding along.
Sexuality, accumulation and the nation-state closely mediate each other the author claims, and I'm honestly tired of them all. I'm tired of constantly engaging with the first of them, in a quest to discover what it truly wants. I have no idea even now because it has a very voracious appetite, apparently. Give me a break. And I'm tired of constantly being exploited by the latter two.
Maybe the cyberfeminists are onto something after all. Liberate me from this flesh prison....more
I’m so done with misleading titles, especially since the author seems to have petulantly picked it (Because Foucault and his misleading titles. Go figI’m so done with misleading titles, especially since the author seems to have petulantly picked it (Because Foucault and his misleading titles. Go figure.) While there is variety, there isn’t much history in this book, no chronological order, and no connecting themes except for sexuality and desire. Which would have been fine because it simply reflects how varied and diverse the concepts of sexuality and desire have been in India (hint: at least as varied as its population) except that the title seems clickbait-y and I hate that. It might seem like I’m nitpicking here, but no, it’s important for understanding the structure of the book.
On the surface level, the different chapters of this book have nothing to do with each other. Menon draws from mythology, epics, Indian traditions, rituals, texts, and historical anecdotes to understand what ‘desire’ has meant within India. What’s important to note here is that, as Menon mentions early in the book, geographically and politically, India has not been ‘India’ for much of the history of this land. So, the primary sources that this book draws from are varied and their historico-geographical location is difficult to exactly locate at times, much to the chagrin of the Indian alt-right. The extremely politicized notion of ‘purity’ and ‘Indian values’ that seems to have gripped India now, is just a concoction of British prudery and minority Indian practices that harks back to the British political ploy which tilted the balance from permissiveness towards purity. I cannot appreciate the author enough for having highlighted this. So, talking about India and desire and how the latter evolved within the boundaries of the former is a Herculean task, not least because the boundaries seem to be ever-shifting. In hindsight, it is my whining about the title that was petulant.
I also liked that the author wrote extensively about intersexuality and emphasized on how the western notions of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ have historically failed to apply to India. However, I do think that a more contextual link between the chapters would have helped. I also wish that Menon would have written more on the relationship between bodies and identities in India - since it has been very important in the past and is such a driving force for the divisive politics in place now.
My very first bell hooks book, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, which I read about three years ago left me very unimpressed with her wrMy very first bell hooks book, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, which I read about three years ago left me very unimpressed with her writing. I do not exactly remember why, but I'm mature enough to admit that it was mostly because of my own biases. I expected 'feminist theory' to fit into certain neatly defined boxes that were mostly built by academic upper/middle class white women, it was very naive of me honestly. I was also just getting out of my science-bro phase where I'd look at arguments and go 'where is the evidence for this? Where are the references and citations??' I still consider evidence to be very important, but by expanding my reading of feminist and critical theory texts, I have also come to appreciate anecdotal references. bell hooks doesn't just talk about feminism in a textual context, but she writes about it as a lived reality. And this style of approach, especially from someone who has always been on the margins, is invaluable. Besides, what sort of evidence or references could you possibly cite when you're amongst the first to bring a new, radical perspective to field wherein mainstream narratives have been very one-dimensional?
Even after realising all of this, my journey so far with bell hooks has been difficult. Due to more biases, again. I did not like that some of her writing sounded very preachy and sermony. I did not like that she drew so much of her understanding from what she has learnt through Christianity and the church. What I forgot to consider of course, was how important the church has been as a unifying force for black communities. I am still wary of her Christianity related references, but I am now aware that I am judging it from a completely different historical context. I used to read her texts and go all 'well all of this sounds great, but how could one possibly implement this' and therefore judging her for being too 'ideological' and not speaking in terms of implementable solutions. This has probably been my harshest judgement of her, because I realised that I did not expect policy ideas or solutions from other theorists I read, I just read them to broaden my perspective.
So honestly, bell hooks has broadened my perspective a lot and this is the first book of hers that I thoroughly enjoyed reading, because I was finally aware of all my biases and could keep them aside. I could read bell hooks with the sort of dedication she deserves. It's been a long and arduous journey, and I think I will complete it with another book of hers, but this particular one was epiphany-inducing. I have always admired bell hooks for looking away from the binary of male perpetrator and woman victim while talking about feminism, for stating clearly that 'feminist' is not a prepackaged identity, it is not a lifestyle choice (which a lot of upper class women seem to think it is) but a political commitment, for speaking of the movement through a lens that is composed of the totality of gender, race and class. And now, I greatly appreciate her style too....more
I'm certain that I lack something in terms of intellectually absorbing optimistic writing. As much as I like bell hooks, (and I love watching her talkI'm certain that I lack something in terms of intellectually absorbing optimistic writing. As much as I like bell hooks, (and I love watching her talks and interviews, I just can't get enough of those) I simply get bored of her writing. This book, for instance, seemed downright utopian and preachy. I can't remember the number of times I had to reprimand myself while reading it because I caught myself rolling my eyes. I don't mean to be disrespectful to bell hooks, but you know that stupid Eagles song? Love will keep us alive? That's what this book reminded me of. I spent more than half my childhood listening to that song and I always hated it. It never did and never will make sense.
Not to say this book doesn't. I can see why it would be a very beautiful reading experience to some people. It's just me. I've developed an aversion to anything optimistic and bright. The self-help tone and my-brother-in-Christ sort of religious anecdotes certainly didn't help either.
I did really like hooks' association of alienation and lack of love in the modern world with capitalism and consumer-centred culture, but hooks didn't delve deeper into it. I think this book could have benifited from a more thorough analysis of the material conditions that led us here.
This book has valuable lessons and the sort of insights that only bell hooks can provide. I'm just an insensitive prick who gets easily bored....more
I honestly do not know how to talk about bell hooks. This is only the second book by her that I've read, and my reaction to the first one, Feminism isI honestly do not know how to talk about bell hooks. This is only the second book by her that I've read, and my reaction to the first one, Feminism is for Everybody, wasn't a favourable one. I was naive and approached it with all sorts of wrong expectations and honestly, the book wasn't palatable. But I've watched countless interviews of her over the years, because she has such a soothing voice, it's almost as if she is cooing even when she's taking someone down (like that one interview in which she defended Cornel West's critique of Ta-Nehisi Coates and then criticized Ta-Nehisi coates herself in way I can only call savage, and yet it's so eloquent.) It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that this book changed my perspective on many things.
Despite my several claims over the years of patriarchy being harmful to men and putting them in a box, I immediately shutdown when cis-men actually open up around me and bare their hearts. It's terrifying, it's new each time and I do not know how to react. And I've lost count of the number of times I've secretly wished harm on the men around me, because even though I put up a brave front, I'm perpetually terrified that they'll turn out to be violent. And with a lot of these men, I don't even have justifiable reasons for believing so. It's my own internalised stupid patriarchy-based distrust that stems from trauma. Yes, I'm such a hypocrite. I'm now determined to learn though. To trust and love men. While reading this book, I called some of my cis-male friends and apologized for being cold towards them or shutting them down whenever they tried to receive any emotional support from me. And that in itself was a revelation because they were so forgiving and so delighted. I probably need to make more calls that I feel way too awkward about now, but I'll get there.
I will be reading a lot more of bell hooks this year, and I'm certain it's going to be memorable, life-changing as well as life-affirming....more
I'll be honest, I'm not immune to aesthetization of daily life, I've even been impulse buying things just because they're pleasing to look at. I've spI'll be honest, I'm not immune to aesthetization of daily life, I've even been impulse buying things just because they're pleasing to look at. I've spent too much time on Pinterest going through all those curated boards - a close up shot of an apricot with a quote from Call Me By Your Name on it, a window partially hidden behind blossoms, a cozy reading nook with too many strings of LED lights surrounding it, a postcard with a vintage stamp, corporate style art (you know, the google doodle kind,) lgbtq tshirts. I could go on. But behind this absolute time-wasting activity also lies my usually-ignored knowledge of the ugly truth - I'm just a fetishist, and of the worst kind. Late capitalism has promoted the integration of art into life, but as Hennessy points out in this book, only in ways that are complicit or in accordance with the requirements of commodity exchange. Desires are continuously worked and reworked - yes, look at us, we have seemingly endless options. But these desires have only taken specific forms, have only been allowed to take specific forms.
It's like one of those simulation programs, really. The 'abject' which designates what has been expelled from the social body is always accompanied by a negative charge, because it has literally been rendered the Other. Thus the relationship between value projected onto bodies seems to be inextricable from their value to capital.
Hennessy acknowledges that gendered, racialized and sexual bodies are dense transfer points in the history of capitalist value accumulation. Cultural value is complicit with exploitation. She is a Marxist feminist and tries to understand sexuality through historical materialism. She is critical of both postmodernism and post-structuralism because she sees them as limited and even conservative. I'm not sure how much I agree with her on this.
But, Hennessy also urges feminists to see and understand desire and subjectivity as produced and to adopt the dialectical historical lens in doing so. She asks to resituate sexual politics on the ground of human needs, and this, I very much agree with....more
At the time of this book's writing, non-binary wasn't an available category, it wasn't yet in queer lingo. Mostly because queer culture was still grapAt the time of this book's writing, non-binary wasn't an available category, it wasn't yet in queer lingo. Mostly because queer culture was still grappling with identities, teams, allies and language and all of this on the margins of culture wars. It was a time when queer people had to use slurs used against them as terms of self-identification because they hadn't mobilized on a large scale yet, they couldn't decide if they should claim back the insults and wear it proudly like a second skin or refute it altogether and craft a new community-based yet individual focused identities. And that's why I have so much respect for Kate Bornstein and this book despite its many flaws, because they paved the way for me, for us. Not-man not-woman is a lot more clearly defined now while also being incredibly nuanced.
Although I'm not trans and therefore cannot speak for the trans community, I know that Bornstein is a well-celebrated trans elder. However, I also know that she thinks she still isn't accepted, or they think they still aren't accepted. Because their identity is not just of a trans woman but:
I write from the point of view of an S/M transsexual lesbian, ex-cult member, femme top, and sometimes bottom shaman. And I wondered why no one was writing my story? I’m writing from the point of view of used-to-be-a-man, three husbands, father, first mate on an oceangoing yacht, minister, high-powered IBM sales type, Pierre Cardin three-piece suitor, bar mitzvahed, circumcised yuppie from the East Coast. Not too many women write from that point of view. I write from the point of view of a used-to-be politically correct, wannabe butch, dyke phone sex hostess, smooth talking, telemarketing, love slave, art slut, pagan tarot reader, maybe soon a grandmother, crystal palming, incense burning, not-man, not always a woman, fast becoming a Marxist. And not too many men write from that point of view
I am conflicted about my own gender, I mostly think I'm a woman but not always. I know I'm not a man. And no, it isn't mood swings or phases, I've always felt very distant from the mainstream cultural binary gender classification. I'm lucky, I was born at a time when the idea that gender is not merely an x-y graph but a 3-D, no, a 4-D structure, was becoming fast established. This is not to say that we live in gender-fluid paradise now, but it surely is easier for queer and trans people today than it was for Kate Bornstein. Gender is a spectrum that has evolved over time. But I guess the point of contention is that Bornstein believes the future will be gender free, I suppose that is offensive for trans people who've fought hard to be recognised for their gender, but I also think it isn't too far-fetched.
I had several complaints about the book, but let's give Bornstein a break. They're 73 and all I can give them now is acceptance and respect.
A couple of months ago I read a tumblr post on what it would be like if a bunch of body part fetish porn artists came together and each drew single boA couple of months ago I read a tumblr post on what it would be like if a bunch of body part fetish porn artists came together and each drew single body part of a whole character. It made me think about how I've grown to view the body, especially a woman's body, over the years. Have I also not viewed them as fragments - some beautiful, others hideous - that form a coherent whole? But, to be fair, this whole has never really been coherent to me, and I now know this is because of the male-gaze dominated media and literature I've consumed. I view my own body as though I'm an outsider, my gaze that comes from within is nevertheless directed at my body as though it's merely an exhibit in a museum of grotesquerie.
In this book the author explores how psychoanalysis, poetry and cinema have fragmented the woman's body and created various images of it that travel between reality and dreams only to create a phantasmatic melange. The author specifically examines the works of Baudelaire, Truffaut and Freud in which reality and fiction cohabit to create a third kind of entity - one that has no existence of its own but is born from 'the cut', from the fragmentation and merging of the dreamlike image and the image of reality.
I'm afraid I cannot write about all of the important themes and theories that this book posits, because it's nothing short of an academic work. But to me, it was a very pleasurable yet confounding read. It made me confront and question the sort of media images and archetypes I've been effortlessly incorporating into my own psyche. I have especially tried to think about 'the mother', which as a concept, I have never been able to grasp. And I still have only fleeting ideas and unnameable emotions....more
I am fairly embarrassed and ashamed that I hadn't known of Anuradha Ghandy until I saw this book referenced in an article on sex work recently. But I'I am fairly embarrassed and ashamed that I hadn't known of Anuradha Ghandy until I saw this book referenced in an article on sex work recently. But I'm also not beating myself up over it as I normally would since she was a guerrilla revolutionary and a member of the currently banned CPI-Maoist. Of course there's active suppression of any discourse on her work and mainstream Indian liberal Indian feminism would rather have nothing to do with her.
Ghandy approaches feminism through a historical materialist framework. In this book, she analyses several prominent trends within feminist movement and explains their shortcomings. For instance, she criticizes liberal feminism for being ahistorical in nature, regarding the state as neutral and for focusing on extreme individualism rather than collective action.
Some of her most scathing remarks are on radical feminism. She criticizes radical feminists for treating their notion of the man-woman contradiction as the principle contradiction and for only offering solutions that are reformist. Throughout the book, Ghandy emphasizes that womens' liberation is not possible through a mere reformation of the existing system. She rightly accuses the radical feminists of encouraging lesbian separatism since their criticism of patriarchy was entirely centered around heterosexual relations. She condemns them for providing only abstract arguments in support of pornography and the global sex tourism industry, the latter of which is an imperialist construct that exploits millions of women from oppressed ethnic communities and third world countries.
My mind immediately contrasted this Nivedita Menon's take on sex work that she outlines in Seeing Like a Feminist. Not only does she uphold the crude Marxist statement of 'under capitalism all work is exploitation and sex work is no different' as truism, but she goes so far as to state that forced sex-work is precisely like bonded labour. I read Seeing Like a Feminist last year and thought of it highly, but if I were to re-read it (which I'm not inclined to do) I would definitely be more critical of Menon's arguments which is simply an extrapolation of the radical stance with a Marxist disguise....more
I first came across Katherine Angel when I read Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell earlier this year and I cannot, for the life of mI first came across Katherine Angel when I read Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell earlier this year and I cannot, for the life of me, describe how much I identified with and loved the writing. And of course I immediately looked up if Angel had written more books.
In this book, Angel discusses the tendency within the liberal feminist movement of making sexuality and pleasure stand-ins for emancipation and liberation. The current narrative of consent is limiting, in the sense that it places the responsibility of good sexual interaction on women, it pre-supposes an almost complete knowledge of our desires and wants on our part - but much of sex and the pleasure we derive from it is exploratory, responsive.
Angel writes about the post-feminist movement that posited the image of women as confident sexual selves who know what they want and know exactly how to state it. Outspokenness was then considered necessary factor of feminist subjectivity.
We need a robust critique of consent, not in order to vilify young women supposedly attached to victimhood, but out of solidarity with all women for whom sex can turn into an unhappy bargaining point, a false choice or an economic necessity for survival.
The problem is not that consent appears contractual in nature - this previously agreed upon contract is crucial to ensure the safety of sex-workers and safe practices within bdsm. Rather, Angel writes, that the problem with the current rhetoric of consent is that by centring our thinking about sex on it, we automatically fall prey to the liberal fantasy that equality simply exists. Therefore it ignores the unequal relationships of power that people participate in.
Consent culture reveals the horror of vulnerability and this privatizes our responses to rape culture, shifting the course of action from a collective to the individual - the individual, strong, confident, outspoken woman. It dangerously fixes the narrative to a false dichotomy: that we always either want or don't want sex, it ignores that a lot of us usually hover between the two.
Commentators on the ‘new’ landscape of sex and consent often plaintively ask why it is that men are expected to be able to ‘read a woman’s mind’ when it comes to sex. My question is different: why are women asked to know their own minds, when knowing one’s own mind is such an undependable aim? Self-knowledge is not a reliable feature of female sexuality, nor of sexuality in general; in fact, it is not a reliable feature of being a person. Insisting otherwise is fatal, and it’s an assumption that has been conceded for far too long, to the impediment of conversations about pleasure, joy, autonomy and safety. If we want sex to be good again – or at all – anytime soon, we need to reject this insistence, and start elsewhere.
Desire is not something that is fully-formed within us, that we project outward whenever we want. An ethics of sexuality must consider this, must make place for the uncertainty of desire. The onus of responsibility of a safety from violence, should not be placed on absolute knowledge of ourselves and of our desires.
The onus is not on women to have a sexuality that admits of no abuse; it is on others not to abuse them. The fetishization of certain knowledge does nothing to enable rich, exciting, pleasurable sex, for women or for men. We have to explore the unknown....more
In the preface of this book Angela Davis writes about what she considers to be her non-uniqueness. She admits that by the very act of writing this bioIn the preface of this book Angela Davis writes about what she considers to be her non-uniqueness. She admits that by the very act of writing this biography she is assuming a posture of difference, a stance that might elevate her above her other black comrades.
I felt that such a book might end up obscuring the most essential fact: the forces that have made my life what it is are the very same forces that have shaped and misshaped the lives of millions of my people.
Of the many instances she stunningly writes about in this book, her experience in Cuba was particularly evocative. While participating in a cutting of cane as part of her community work with the Cuban citizens she noticed that her co-worker, a Cuban, was doing it so beautifully that it was like art. When she complimented him however, the Cuban spoke about how the task he was performing must become obsolete.
It was then that I began to realize the true meaning of underdevelopment: it is nothing to be utopianized. Romanticizing the plight of oppressed people is dangerous and misleading.
We must not romanticize the plight of the oppressed people, we must also not romanticize the people who fight against oppression. We must be very careful to not ascribe a higher status to them, while still acknowledging and justly honouring their struggle. So Angela Davis' doubts about the way in which this book would be viewed is understandable - by placing certain figures of the resistance as the symbols of their movements, we undermine the contribution of the millions of others behind this figure, with this figure.
There is of course a universal quality to Davis' fight. The subjects of racism have to constantly fight a categorization by definition - a categorization that the people in power proclaimed as a social necessity and the whole of the oppressed group is unfairly shaped by this. But there's also danger in not acknowledging the particulars, the localities of Davis' experience. While representing the general plight of her people, of black people, of the working class, her experience also speaks uniquely of her own identity. This book is full of that. Her love, her passion, her anger, her rage, her devastation, her revolutionary spirit. And above all, of her constant rebellion.
Here as elsewhere Justice was an image — heavy, slick and wholly deceptive.
And that's a wrap on my 2021 Angela Davis reading....more
01110011 Crying zeros and I'm hearing 111s. Why won't that song leave my head whenever think of this book! Oh no, let me try again.
Perhaps I should fl01110011 Crying zeros and I'm hearing 111s. Why won't that song leave my head whenever think of this book! Oh no, let me try again.
Perhaps I should flush it out of my head by giving it a concrete existence externally. Maybe I'll ask Alexa to play the song while I contemplate constructed femininity. Oh except, I don't use Alexa and I probably (definitely) never will because I've always been unsettled by voice recognition systems. For one, I'm paranoid and I feel like they're always recording whatever I do. No, not Alexa, Siri or Cortana. They're merely devices, they don't have agency in the conventional sense of the word. So who's 'they' you ask? I don't know. But I'm sure someone is. You know, the one percent of the one percent who profit from our personal lives while we drown in consumer culture. What next? Billboards in space??! Oh, they're already working on that. Nevermind.
Let's go back to voice recognition systems being mere devices. Now, that's a potentially dangerous statement to make, but I like to live on the edge. They have female voices by default, but of course, a voice is not a a concrete indicator of femininity and if you explicitly ask them they state that they have no gender. Huh, like that's sufficient to curb our biases. Of course we associate a constructed femininity with them and studies show that assigning female voices to speech recognition systems make them more soothing and acceptable. Oh yes, what more could we ask for in a post-capitalist society than an agency-less female-voiced speech recognition system that we can order around and 'empower' to lull us to numbness by providing us with the false illusion of control?
We know the dangers, okay? We have watched Her. In a few years, digital assistants are expected to outnumber humans. The other day I heard my neighbour's four year old kid asking Alexa to shut up. What are you, Alexa? A zero to our one, a nullity to our wholeness, a void we can scream into? Or a node within a network? A creator in your own right?
Sadie Plant writes about how women have traditionally been off the productive map, or the dialectical loop: no desire, no agency, not even the alienation of the male worker. It's fascinating that we have associated the same traits with modern AI. They are but isolated points in a vast, intricate tapestry that they often design and weave themselves.
Here we are, deploying the ancient and well-established model of the user and the used, creating illusions of autonomy, programming ourselves and calling it freedom. Alexa, play what a wonderful world....more
Loading...
