Sexism and Star Trek

We still have a long way to go as a culture when it comes to sexism. Patronizing, objectifying, or otherwise stereotypical portrayals of women, for instance, abound in pop culture. And yet in my recent viewing of just a handful of original Star Trek episodes, I can’t help but think that we’ve made significant progress. A random sampling of those episodes revealed plots that crucially depended on sexist presuppositions — they would be incomprehensible if you didn’t presume that women were ultimately feeble creatures who are easily captivated by a display of male power. It’s not a character flaw of an individual woman, but the condition of woman as such.

In the episode that introduces Khan, for instance, the ship’s historian falls instantly in love with the villain and submits to his abusive behavior with little argument, agreeing to betray her crewmates. While she does rescue Capt. Kirk, she ultimately decides to go into exile with Khan. In another episode, an evil double of Kirk created by a transporter malfunction tries to rape a female crew member, a recurring character who by all accounts appears to be a normal adult woman — and later in the plot, she uses that experience as a jumping-off point for sharing her sexual attraction to him. Now I think that the latter plot would be considered far beyond the pale in contemporary culture, even for something like Family Guy. In the former case, it’s conceivable, but her behavior would have to be thoroughly explained — most likely through some type of explicit mind-control powers.

This is not to say that we’ve done enough or “arrived,” of course — it’s more to point out how deeply, incredibly fucked up things were to begin with.

Social constructs

One often hears people declare something to be “just a social construct” as a way of dismissing its reality or relevance. In reality, the fact that something is a social construct makes it infinitely more powerful and difficult to escape than if it were, for instance, a biological brute fact. We get around biological brute facts all the time. Social forces regulate our eating, drinking, defecation, urination, sexual pairings, etc., etc. Social forces can drive us to suicide — meaning they have overcome the most fundamental biological drive of survival. Biology isn’t infinitely pliable, of course, but it is hardly destiny.

Zizek and “sexual difference”

I’ve long found Zizek’s development of the Lacanian opposition between the logic of the master signifier or constitutive exception and the logic of the non-all (or non-whole, as I wish he would translate the Lacanian pas-tout) to be a compelling and useful schema. At the same time, I’ve never really understood why he is so insistent on referring to this opposition as “sexual difference” or why it is necessary to refer to the master signifier and non-all as masculine and feminine, respectively. He uses many other examples that follow the same logic — in Less Than Nothing, the relationship between bourgeoisie and proletariat is explained in these same terms — and it’s not clear to me why the gendered language should be privileged.

The best explanation I can come up with is his loyalty to the psychoanalytic tradition, where “sexuality” comes to name the fundamental derangement of the human animal (as opposed to any notion of a “natural” procedure of reproduction, etc.). And it’s possible that I’m being an overly squeamish feminist and not following my own rule that generalizations refer fundamentally to social forces rather than to the idea that “they’re all like that.” But still.

Any thoughts?

Domestic Violence and Psychology

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, this year I’m spending my internship at a community mental health clinic in a rural setting. I have the opportunity to work with individuals who have been diagnosed with various disorders such as: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, personality disorders, PTSD, depression, etc. Part of my work has also been conducting psychotherapy with individuals who are in abusive situations. On the weekend I work part-time at a local domestic violence shelter, which has been a real joy. Back in college I had the opportunity to work for two years at a domestic violence crisis center but I did not continue this work during graduate school. I am very excited to get back working in the field of domestic violence because it always been something that I’ve cared about both politically and personally. However, mental health and domestic violence sometimes have an antagonistic relationship. Many activists in domestic violence are skeptical of mental health because they fear that survivors of domestic violence are going to be pathologized and  that the reactionaries will use this to dismiss domestic violence. Some of this anxiety is understandable considering all of the idiots out there who have claimed that battered women (although not all survivors of domestic violence are women) want to be abused. Domestic violence workers counter that everybody is at risk for domestic violence (which is true) and that mental health professionals should recognize that the psychological and emotional issues of battered women are simply a product of the abusive situation.

This leads me to this weekend where I had the chance to read and reflect on David Celani’s text The Illusion of Love: Why the Battered Women Returns to Her Abuser (1994).

Forsaking Futurity and a Call for Feminist Theologies: A Response to Gender & the Studio, Part Three

Abstract: Rather than delve into the potential theo-logic of a Butlerian “constructivist” account of gender, this blog post proposes that we pause, and instead question the discursive operations undergirding the very idea of “the future of systematic theology.” The effort to secure the existence of systematic theology, I suggest, is idolatrous—rather, systematic theology needs to lose its own life in order to potentially save it, and can begin to move in that direction by attending to the concrete, historic, material, discursive realities of people’s lives, especially those on the underside. This “losing” is both practical and apophatic, in that it acknowledges that the task demands constant attention to the material realities of people’s lives and the discursive regimes that produce those realities, and that we cannot seek to grasp or claim or secure a telos or overarching discourse. I end, then, by turning briefly to the potentialities within a constructivist frame, and offering some suggestions for possibilities for Christian feminist theologies.

 

Part Two: Bodies Matter (A Response to Tony Baker’s “Gender and the Studio”)

Part Two: Bodies Matter (as do the ways they are configured in and through power relations)

 Baker argues that theological studies need not be a “masculine form” and that one of the ways it can instead function within/as “the redeemed form of Mary,” is through a focus on “receptivity”—which he identifies, at least in part, as close readings of texts and engagement with Biblical, historical, and literary material—as opposed to “mostly creative construction in the realms of logic and metaphysics.”

While I have a number of theoretical and theological concerns with the association between receptivity and femininity, which I’ll address in the next, and final, post on this topic, on some level, I can get behind, or at least understand, this. Different strands and iterations of feminist theory and politics have named masculine modes and forms of discourse as problematic and have called for the embodiment of alternate, feminine forms—most notably, the “French feminists:” Irigaray, Kristeva, Cixous, Clement… One might also look to some of the U.S. “second-wave” feminists: Carol Gilligan, Catherine Mackinnon, Andrea Dworkin…

What Baker’s analysis lacks in this regard, however, is an attention to the discursive and material realities that engender these dynamics—something that is central to the work of the aforementioned “sexual difference” and “second wave” feminists. Baker calls for a greater focus on “receptivity” without contending with, or even acknowledging, the ways in which bodies and/in power function.

Gender and Theology (and the Theological Academy): A Response to Tony Baker’s ‘Gender and the Studio’- Part One

Part One: The Pink Penis on my Desk (A Lengthy Introduction)

In addition to the random smattering of papers, books, and other odd objects that are strewn across my desk at various points, there are a few items that are consistent adornments—there  are the practical things: the external hard-drive , the file folder, the stapler; and the sentimental things—a stained glass cross I was given upon graduating from div school, a wine cork that reminds me of a particularly happy time in my life, and a bedazzled pink penis.

Often, people don’t comment on the pink penis, probably because they’re embarrassed, or think I’ll be embarrassed. But occasionally, the bold ones will ask,

“Why do you have a pink dildo on your desk?”

I explain to them that, actually, it is not a dildo, but rather, a water gun. When this answer proves unsatisfactory or incomplete, as is often the case, I tell them a version of this story….

A Rereading of Kotsko’s Pop Culture Writings

A couple years ago, I wrote a piece called On Male Culture, wherein I proposed that one of the best things men could do as feminist allies was to become internal critics of male culture. As I have taught feminist texts this semester in my social sciences class, it increasingly strikes me how much awkwardness vs. sociopathy maps onto typical ways of talking about women’s way of relating vs. men’s — relationality vs. hierarchy, connection vs. separation, etc. — as well as onto queer theoretical notions of straight male identity as defined by its very unattainability and its continual vulnerability (hence making the identification with the overwhelmingly male “fantasy sociapath” a perpetual temptation).

From this perspective, the fact that I wrote Awkwardness using all male examples (most controversially, Judd Apatow films) seems to make more sense.

The fantasy of fetal personhood

Most debates about abortion begin from the assumption that the fetus is a more or less isolated entity that can be considered in itself, that it is an individual. We talk about when this entity has “life” in the relevant sense, what its rights are, etc., completely ignoring the distinctive trait of fetal life: that it is radically dependent on, and indeed takes place entirely within, an autonomous human being.

This framing concedes the debate in advance, placing the fetus in the series of other entities with human DNA that were belatedly recognized as being entitled to full human personhood, with the attendant rights.

Monday Movies Is Strong Enough To Be the Woman That Was the Best Part of Our Manhood

I loved Tootsie the first time around, and I want to say “it holds up,” but really it does much better. There was far more for me to enjoy seeing it in 2012 than I ever could have understood at the age of eight, when it first came out, thirty years ago, in the summer of 1982. (Didn’t hurt that I just saw it at the magnificent Orpheum Theatre as part of the LA Conservancy’s Last Remaining Seats series.)

As much as it lodges in the mind as a canonical 80′s comedy, next to Splash and coming up on Ghostbusters and Working Girl, Tootsie retains a lot of the grit and texture of 1970′s film drama. Director Sydney Pollack shoots the New York of hustling hand-to-mouth actors with the same eye he used for Three Days of the Condor (indeed, with the same director of photography, Owen Roizman). He creates a lived-in city of shared, under-furnished apartments and messy streets, and he populates it with working people–men and women who labor at their art and business.

Dustin Hoffman’s Michael Dorsey, a passionate craftsman of acting with a reputation as a prima donna, is the artist as a not-quite-anymore-so-young man. His decision to turn himself into Dorothy Michaels–to shed the identity that dogs him and try out for a female part that his friend, student and ill-advised lover couldn’t get (Teri Garr) allows Hoffman to showboat grandly, but the showboating is grounded in what Pollack has established, believably, about Dorsey’s character–he’s both a workhorse and a talent. In character as hospital administrator Emily Kimberly, Michael-as-Dorothy improvises fierce, feminist lashings to reroute the soapy scripts she’s been given. But before Dorothy shows up to work, we get to see Michael’s laborious self-creation: the makeup, the padding, the curlers, the outfits.

Tootsie‘s feminism is problematic, but sly as well. There’s an element of “mansplaining” in the film — Dorothy is hailed as a hero to women, and there’s a clear analogue to the white savior in the suggestion that all that feminism needed was someone who deep down wasn’t a woman to get the ball rolling. Dabney Coleman’s philandering soap director, and the near-rapist elderly star played by George Gaynes, are easy targets as broad phallocrats. But as Michael recognizes his own character in their actions, the story deepens. “I was a better man with you, as a woman… than I ever was with a woman, as a man,” says Michael to his co-star Julie, delivering the line with tongue-tied inelegance to hide the simple poetry.

More interesting than the film’s attempted feminism is its attempted patriotism. Dorothy does a magazine cover in front of an American flag; her rise to fame is accompanied by a red-white-and-blue Amtrak train hurtling into the pastoral hinterlands, where Julie’s father Les owns a sun-kissed farm decorated with extremely wholesome-looking wood furniture. There’s an insistence that Dorothy’s feminism, pushy and individualistic, is the right fit for America, whose women and men alike have been left adrift by sexual revolt. She’s not just popular; she’s a populist symbol.

A personal coda: in my experience with drag, it is powerful magic. My drag persona, adopted for a community pageant in 2002,  chose me more than I chose her, and she frightened my first wife.There’s something that feels very honest and familiar about the distance Dorothy takes Michael out to sea.

What did you see, and where did it take you?