Gilded Turd a Go-Go

The Other Libertarian Paradox. . .

2012-01-23T15:04:00.001-08:00

This is just funny. No matter how you feel about the Pauls, the absurdity here is just amazing. Especially on the heels of Roe v. Wade's anniversary. Call it pandering to social conservatives who would otherwise feel alienated. Call it being genuinely that obtuse. Regardless, this quote from a Reuters article earlier today just outlines the phenomenal ridiculousness in these ideological discontinuities: "Paul and his father, who is a U.S. Representative from Texas, have helped lead the charge against what critics call excessive federal intrusion, from healthcare to body searches. . . Paul's personal showdown with airport security unfolded as he headed to Washington to address an anti-abortion rally." Come onnnnnnnnn. . .

Serving up Gender in the 2012 Republican Primaries

2011-11-20T07:11:00.000-08:00

If there were any lingering questions about how Michele Bachmann views women's rights and roles, last night's Thanksgiving Family Leader Forum provided a clear indication of where she stands. As the event began, Bachmann proceeded to woman up and pour water for each of the other male candidates and moderators. As women continue to struggle as candidates and leaders against the stalwart masculinity of the U.S. political system, it is problematic that a presidential candidate felt it appropriate or necessary to pour water for her fellow dude candidates. Why?

1. Let's start with the most obvious - performing acts like this reifies traditional ideas of acceptable and expected femininity in troubling ways. Call me crazy, but I feel that it would kind of suck if this was the image put forth by the first female president (not that I think for a minute there's anything remotely viable about Bachmann).

2. One of the biggest reasons women are noted as having problems getting ahead in their careers is the persistent expectations that they provide extra care to those around them - to their peers and subordinates.

3. Though it's sort of like having an official national mom, I don't think the public at large would be inclined to take any female candidate seriously who self-subordinates in the presence of her male peers. Women in politics have reported many instances of misogyny on the campaign trail and in office that often impede how freely and effectively they can focus on the issues of their constituents.

4. As much as I hate Michele Bachmann, I hate the fact that she felt compelled to do this even more. Put down the water pitcher, Michele. Put it down.

Women Hating Women Loving Babies

2011-10-17T09:13:00.000-07:00

I usually, for reasons of personal and psychological health, choose not to participate in broad public forums like Facebook regarding controversial political issues. Give me a closed group or a great blog, I'm your girl. Facebook status threads, notsomuch. However, a friend of mine from college posted something about her concern regarding the troubling implications of the recently passed bill HR 358, or "Let Women Die Act" as it's been termed in the media. I am always so pleased to see old friends post unexpected things regarding women's rights and issues of similar ilks that I couldn't help but get involved. It IS troubling. The implications of a bill that allow doctors to choose willy nilly who they value more, woman or wombdweller, extend way beyond the usual pro-life/ abortion rights debate. This speaks to what Lauren Berlant writes of in her book The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citzenship regarding the American obsession with futurity and the primacy of the fetus in questions of political viability of it v. the woman who carries it. Women's rights as citizens are decreasing on the regs. All around us. Yet it is interesting to me that it seems like no one really cares very much anymore. . . chiefly women. Their arguments for their rights are startlingly absent. Operating in a rather insulated political world where I take for granted the progressivism I'm around, I had forgotten until this morning just how misogynistic women can be. How self-loathing we have become. Couch it in religious ideology, political slants, whatever you want -- when a woman's life is less valuable to most women than the fetus residing within her, we've got us a big problem. And my friend on Facebook asked, "Where's the media coverage?" WHERE IS THE MEDIA COVERAGE? Turn on the TV, log onto Facebook, pull up the CNN homepage. The Occupy Wall Street news is everywhere. People are outraged. People are active. Where is their outrage regarding the state of women's healthcare? Where is the bustle over how disenfranchised women are becoming and how widely accepted this seems to be? In this 21st Century when anyone can do anything anywhere and we are all working so tirelessly for LGBTQ rights and issues of class, where are all the feminists? It really kinda freaks me out.

Slavoj Zizek at Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-10T08:08:00.000-07:00

Check out parts 1 and 2 of philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek at Occupy Wall Street:

You can also read the transcript from his speech at VersoBooks.

Sundays, Silhouettes, and Sleeplessness

2011-10-09T14:45:00.001-07:00

So in an effort to jumpstart our conference preparation, my dear friend J and I had an all-night theory extravaganza that began with meticulous organization of our compiled resources to put off digging our heels in and ended with an early-morning screening of Lars von Trier's, Melancholia (deserving of a month of posts and certainly deserving of a mental acuity that just isn't feasible today on this total and utter lack of sleep). However, as I began to flesh out my latest paper ideas on race, Black male incarceration in the Southeast, and its correlation to a narratological structure of imprisonment and deprivation, I kept coming back to images by one of my favorite artists, Kara Walker. Her simple, though extraordinarily poignant, cut-paper silhouettes are some of the most haunting images I have seen to date (save for Ana Mendieta and her headless chicken piece. . . but that's neither here nor there).

http://learn.walkerart.org/karawalker

Puar's "Paranoid Temporality" and the Occupy Movement

2011-10-06T19:44:00.000-07:00

I had the choice to continue devouring Jasbir Puar's Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times or to watch the coverage of Occupy Wall Street and (gasp!) maybe even check into some regional meetups this weekend. For once, television seemed like the more productive option. It feels useful, though, even important, to personally situate her work in this present. Puar describes:

Paranoid temporality is. . . imbedded in a risk economy that attempts to ensure against future catastrophe. This is a temporality of negative exuberance -- for we are never safe enough, never healthy enough, never prepared enough -- driven by imitation (repetition of the same or in the service of maintaining the same) rather than innovation (openness to disruption of the same, calling out to the new).

A paranoid temporality therefore produces a suppression of critical creative politics; in contrast, the anticipatory temporalities that I advocate more accurately reflect a Spivakian notion of 'politics of the open end,' of positively enticing unknowable political futures into our wake, taking risks rather than guarding against them. (xx)

My entire recollection of an American political landscape has been characterized by this paranoid temporality that Puar introduces here. Fear-based everythings. Fear-based politics, fear-based consumerism, fear-based loving, eating, education, walking, traveling. Fear-based everythings that characterize actions of inactivity and paralysis. And I can't help but feel a sense that this could be the rare, expansive breach of that? I have to admit that I initially approached the Occupy movement with a dose of skepticism, an embarrassingly bourgie level of skepticism. Surely this wouldn't go anywhere. Surely this would be a bunch of hipsters and hippies that would give up after a weekend, and it would gradually dissipate until it was a funny little joke that only Democracy Now! covered.

Alas, this appears not to be the case. It's galvanized. It's spreading. It's laced with uncertainty and growing excitement. I don't have the energy tonight to address the relationship between Puar's work and the description of these protests as an "American Autumn," but there is much to be said and explored there, for sure.

More tomorrow. Now, bed.

Day 340: What I've Learned So Far

2011-01-25T18:04:00.000-08:00

Intent only goes so far.

Tonight I filled out a questionnaire for a feminist scholar working on a project about feminist bloggers. I thought that giving myself a catchy and rhyme-y point of departure would be enough to provide the wind beneath my wings. Not so much. What discourse am I contributing to? Who am I writing to? What am I saying that others aren't? I figured it out. In all my explorations of the feminist blogosphere, the one thing that I've always felt myself responding to is a large population of 30-something, highly educated, middle-class mainstream voices. To mommy or not to mommy? To work or not to work? I feel like this is the extent of the critical online discourse I see delving into the practice of heterosexuality. That's not exactly applicable to me.

So here is a profile of D and I as a couple: We are poor. We are progressive and political. Neither of us have been to graduate school and only I have completed undergrad. We watch TV more than we read. We work more than we fuck. We share domestic responsibilities. He is divorced (more specifically, in the process of getting a divorce). I am a serial monogamist. We are critical yet lacking a lot of direction. I used to consider myself radical and I'm terrified as I see that falling away. And now we're living together.

The things that bother me on a regular basis are things like whether my burgeoning addiction for Bravo is being fostered by my domestic partnership. Should it piss me off that I clean the bathroom more frequently? The truth is that I'm no longer writing marxist feminist media responses. I'm not all "subversive" anymore (and would question whether I've ever been). I'm just trying to navigate how to balance making enough money to stay afloat with my waning desire to devote my free time to research and article-writing. It's fucking hard. I'm not doing as well as it as I'd like to be.

That's what I've learned in Month 1.

Day 363: A Feminist Exploration of Cohabitation

2011-01-03T18:36:00.000-08:00

5,000 birds in Arkansas fell out of the sky on the morning of January 01, 2011. And I, Andrea Miller, found myself writing a check for my half of this month's mortgage payment. That's what happened this week.

Welcome to 2011.

So here goes -- my feminist exploration of cohabitation. 365 days of it. Give or take (discipline has not been my forte as of late). With a dude. A progressive, socially leftist, uberbrilliantatheistmusician dude who appreciates all my crazy queer marxist feminist attributes (even the ones I have insisted function as decorations on his [our] coffee table). But a dude. I've already found myself getting lost in thoughts of gender identity and conformity and subversion, so I figured what better a way to explore it than to blog about it.

5,000 dead New Year's birds.

Just Remembering

2009-08-26T08:28:00.000-07:00

The more our feelings diverge, the more deeply felt they are, the greater is our obligation to grant the sincerity and essential decency of our fellow citizens on the other side. . . .

In short, I hope for an America where neither "fundamentalist" nor "humanist" will be a dirty word, but a fair description of the different ways in which people of good will look at life and into their own souls.

I hope for an America where no president, no public official, no individual will ever be deemed a greater or lesser American because of religious doubt -- or religious belief.

I hope for an America where the power of faith will always burn brightly, but where no modern inquisition of any kind will ever light the fires of fear, coercion, or angry division.

I hope for an America where we can all contend freely and vigorously, but where we will treasure and guard those standards of civility which alone make this nation safe for both democracy and diversity.

-- Senator Ted Kennedy, Speech on "Truth and Tolerance in America," Oct. 3, 1983, Lynchburg, Va.

(reposted from LA Times' "Ted Kennedy Quotes" from August 26, 2009)

Middle-Class Mommy Talk

2009-08-24T09:02:00.000-07:00

I don't usually concern myself with mommy squabbles. Partially because I'm not a mother and partially because I'm always severely annoyed by the massive amounts of classism and racism I find circulating in the arguments. Today in The Huffington Post, Wendy Sachs declared a temporary ceasefire in "The Mommy Wars." Citing the economic recession as the cause, Sachs asserts:

Maybe there's one piece of good news to come out of the recession - it's killed The Mommy Wars. With the unemployment rate hovering at nine and a half percent, having a job feels like a privilege not a choice. . . Modern mommyhood comes loaded with criticism and judgment. Whether you're a breast feeder or a bottle feeder, grow an organic garden or feed your kid Big Macs, use biodegradable diapers or landfill clogging Pampers, circumcise, vaccinate, nanny or daycare, home school or
private school, wear a sling or push a Bugaboo, the smorgasbord of personal choices and decisions seem to invite contempt. But one thing is off the changing table - at least for now - whether a "good mom" chooses to work.

Though I find myself chuckling at her acknowledgment of the absurd debates that characterize mothering discussions in the U.S., this passage highlights the blind spots that also characterize those discussions. That the relationship of employment to quality of parenting is removed from the foreground is not a bad thing by any means, discourses surrounding it still exhibit a general lack of sensitivity regarding motherhood and child-rearing. The "opting out" argument and the others alluded to by Sachs are not the issues that characterize parenting decisions for many Americans. "The luxury of choosing not to work" that Sachs describes as a casualty of the recession was never on the map for millions of single moms and the working poor. This daunting reality hovers around these discussions yet is rarely acknowledged. It just really seems that it's about time for analyses of mommy-hood to begin more regularly discussing the realities of mommy-hood beyond those applying to the white middle class. Seeeeeriously.

While I Was Out. . .

2009-08-23T13:11:00.001-07:00

Lazy Sunday mornings are by far one of my all-time favorite things. I realized on this particular Sunday morning, however, that I too have been a bit lazy. All wrapped up in the health care debate this week, I totally blanked out on the story of Caster Semenya of South Africa, who's thrust the issue of the gender binary smack-dab onto my lazy Sunday morning MSNBC. I skimmed past it in the New York Times and totally missed it in Feministing on Thursday, as my head was firmly planted up Rachel Maddow's behind. And though that is a place I'm quite, quite fond of being, I also like to try and remember that other things are happening all over. This week, I sort of fail.

Semenya's sex-determination testing is problematic on a number of levels. First of all, it presupposes that to demonstrate such athletic talent a woman must not a woman be. That's pretty obvious. Of course Semenya must really be a man. It also, however, has placed the gender and sexual binaries at the forefront of the discussion. The categories of "man" and "woman" simply do not in any way account for the ranges of sexual identities that exist. And though I was pleased to hear a sports writer discussing that the rigidity of the gender binary is reductive and inadequate, a topic I rarely get to geek out to outside of my queer theory and feminist circles, my delight that the subject matter was being mainstreamed in no way canceled out the sheer horror of the implications for Semenya. I most often discuss issues of gender and sex with others for whom its a matter of politics, either out of choice or necessity. But it's easy to forget that for many people it has nothing to do with a choice to politicize the issue. It's easy to abstract sex and gender, to theorize them to fetishistic deaths. And yes, it is validating to hear the words "gender binary" on Sunday morning MSNBC. But this should not eclipse what will inevitably be the long and likely traumatic experience of sex-determination testing for Semenya, casting a pall over what should be her time to just savor kicking major ass at what she does.

And the media has scarcely touched the issue of race as it plays into the story. It only begins to scratch at what is still a very real colonial legacy of racism wherein Western configurations of sex and gender dominate and marginalize on the basis of race and difference. Sandra L. Gilman creates a genealogy of the relationship between race, sex, sexuality, and Western Imperialism to medical science in "Black Bodies, White Bodies" that could prove very helpful to anyone interested in a concise exploration of the subject.

This aside, I wax all hopeful-like that the dialogue surrounding Semenya's story will expand mainstream cultural conceptions of sex and gender. Who knows? Maybe I'll catch Anne Fausto-Sterling chatting it up with ol' David Gregory on Meet the Press next week.

Parts 1-7 of DeMint Town Hall Meeting: 8/20/09

2009-08-22T20:18:00.000-07:00

And I spoke too soon. The entire meeting can be viewed in seven sections:

http://www.youtube.com/user/incensedinsc#play/uploads/1/QSR-ZlGK_t4

Have at it!

Senator Jim DeMint at Greenville's Country Ham House: YouTubed Baucus-Style by Dan McCord

2009-08-20T12:50:00.001-07:00

The other night, I dreamt that the streets of Greenville were lined with people. Most of the signs were so blurry I couldn't read them, but the point was that there were signs. There was so much anger. It just spilled over the police barricades and off of the sidewalks. It was a spectacle. And as the police directed our car toward the town hall meeting, I remember being happy. I also had a dream about Disney World.

I woke up feeling both encouraged and disheartened. Encouraged to get a glimpse of what a scene like that would feel like. Disheartened because there is no part of me that imagines it could ever happen. Short of the second coming, I can't foresee people in Greenville that excited about anything.

End tangent.

On a semi-/un-/very-related note, here's a video shot by Daniel McCord of Jim DeMint's town hall meeting at 8 AM at the Country Ham House in Greenville. I believe (?) that there is going to be a second one on its way that includes the questions posed to DeMint afterwards. Word on the street is it gets purrrrdy interesting. The title of the video says a great deal -- not just in terms of race but also in terms of the extreme measures of exclusion that occur when meetings are held at 8 in the morning on a Thursday. That tends to really limit the people that can make an appearance. Preaching to the choir is sort of an understatement at this meeting. Regardless, I'll keep the commentary to a minimum. I truly just thought it to be a useful thing to post. Hopefully I'll be able to stick up a second half to this mamma jamma shortly.

James W. DeMented

2009-08-19T08:22:00.000-07:00

Ever since giving up my dearest Upstarts after finishing the ol' undergrad., I have felt the blogging itch. Though blabbing to open-eared Facebook friends and the random passers by was something I was reluctant to start, I now find myself compelled. I've become "that" person. And now, with the health care reform debate raging, I feel that it is time. Enter Senator Jim DeMint. Good ol' boy extraordinaire. Adamantly opposed to the public option that would so greatly help millions of Americans, he spouts his libertarian ethos: health care reform is "a government takeover" and we should stop it in favor of "real reform." What would real reform look like to Senator DeMint?

As MSNBC's Rachel Maddow put it oh-so-well in her "Parable of the Pizza Order" last night, in the game of ordering the pizza (read health care reform), conservatives really don't want pizza (read health care reform) at all. Jim DeMint wants no pizza. He does not want Tito's. He does not want Pizza City. He doesn't even want Papa John's. And this comes as no surprise when you take a close look at DeMint's campaign contributors. According to The Center for Responsive Politics, of his top 20 main contributors, 10 are either directly part of the health care professions or insurance sector, contributing a substantial $429,514 to his campaign. Among those contributors are Blue Cross/ Blue Shield, UnitedHealth Group, and coming in at numero uno: Club for Growth, who has launched a $1.2 million tv ad campaign of misinformation in response to the health care debate.

Regardless of your personal opinions surrounding the public option and the face of this bill, it is all too apparent that the politicians who so vehemently oppose it speak not based on the needs and wants of their constituents, but on those of the people with the moolah. With one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation, South Carolinians are in dire need of this legislation. Senator DeMint will be making two appearances in the Upstate Thursday, August 20; he will be at Tommy's Ham House in Greenville at 8 AM and at The Beacon in Spartanburg at noon. So I urge you, whatever your stance, to go and make yourself heard. To have a public discourse on the matter there needs to be an actual discourse. Hope to see you there!