Oh yeah you’re a feminist!

Last week, three young women from the Feminist Majority Foundation visited the large Intro to Women’s Studies class that I work as a TA. They did what I take to be a standard invitation:

FMF member: Okay! So who here is a feminist? Raise your hand!

(a smattering of hands go up)

FMF rep: Okay! So who here believes there should be equality between men and women?

(A lot more hands go up, but slowly.)

FMF rep: Okay  then!  That means you’re all feminists!

This is a group of young women and men, taking a Women’s Studies class. A large portion of the students were women of color. And they did not identify as feminist. If I was an FMF representative, I’d be curious to know why. Perhaps we could talk about their ideas about feminism. What was it about feminism, or perhaps just the term “feminist,” that they did not find relatable?

They FMF members smiled a lot, and seemed like nice enough young women. But they were also arrogant, and their blithe dismissal of any concerns the students had — oh yes you too are a feminist! — made me angry.

When I met with my students in discussion class, I asked them about why they didn’t raise their hands. Some said it was just because they were uncomfortable with the term.

A number were upset about FMF’s support for the invasion and continued occupation of Afghanistan. One student used the term “colonialist,” and another said it was attempt to “save brown women from brown men.” These were first- and second-year students, quoting Spivak. I almost cried.

Others took issue with the second question, the facile “equality between men and women.” One Chicana student recalled the racism leveled at her father, her brothers, and her boyfriend faced every single day. Another student brought up Devah Pager’s “The Mark of a Criminal Record,” a matched-pair experiment that showed how white men with criminal records still received higher job callback rates that Black applicants with similar work experience but no criminal record. What men were the FMF reps referring to?

In the end, we did get a good discussion out of the FMF visit. And I did learn a lot about and from my students. The FMF reps might have too, had they bothered to ask questions and listen.

A good life

Last spring, I spent a lot (to me) of money on a mountain bike. I have spent the past few months happily developing my climbing legs and literally soaring to new heights.

I’ve also spent a lot of time feeling guilty. That I, a woman of color grad student from the Third World, could possibly spend that money on a bicycle.

How do I justify that? And why do I feel like I have to?

***

I previously wrote about the dearth of people of color riders on the Los Angeles trails. I have since spoken to other people of color who have been thinking about riding, about spending money on a basic mountain bike, one with decent brakes and some kind of suspension. For many, it’s do-able if (like me) they cut wayyy back on other expenses. But oh the reluctance, since spending the money and actually devoting time to riding is often labeled as unproductive. A waste of time. And maybe, just a bit selfish.

What constitutes a “good life”? For many, the idea of a good life follows a linear progression of childhood, college, marriage, mortgage, kids, retirement. Judith Halberstam observes how this idea of a good life is built around accumulation. Those who live outside this logic of consumption and accumulation are pathologized and vilified.

This dominant idea of a good life already devalues activities like riding and running and  walking and being outside. Because these are pursuits that do not necessarily promote the productivity that “a good life” demands. Instead, they are often a refuge. They are opportunities to breathe, to reflect, and to feel joy outside the consumption-based logic of capitalism.

Perhaps this is a reason why such interruptive and “unproductive” activities are vilified and pathologized in the first place.

***

Erasure

[This is an expanded version of a comment prompted by this insightful post from Prof. Sussuro.]

Caster Semenya won the women’s 800-meter race by 2.45 seconds over her nearest rival. I want to start with that fact, because that win is amazing. She is amazing. And this being lost in all these rumors and speculations about Semenya’s sex, gender tests, and possible disqualification.

By now, a number of Pinoys have noted similarities between Semenya and Nancy Navalta, a Pinay teenager whose gender came under scrutiny when she started setting track records in the Philippines in the early 1990s. For both Semenya and Navalta, it was their appearance—their well-muscled physiques and flat, powerful chests—that was used to question their femaleness. Both women departed radically from the standards of beauty and softness often associated with womanhood.

Outside

Tour de France was a few weeks ago, and Leadville 100 was last weekend. So all I did in between was scour the internet for cycling news, get stoked, then go out and ride. It’s a thrill each time because while I will never be Rebecca Rusch, I just really really love this shit.

Something that really bugs me, though? Is how often these breath-taking feats of physicality are framed in the violent imagery of conquest.

For example, there’s Lance not conquering Mt. Ventoux, and “Lance conquers Leadville”. It’s common imagery in climbing too. This wikilink talks about conquering and assaulting the “seemingly invulnerable and formidable” Mt. Guiting-Guiting. Two years ago, my excitement over the Pinays who summitted Sagarmatha (woot!) was diluted by the headline “Palace lauds three Filipina Everest conquerors.” That women can be conquerors too counts as progress, I guess. Plus the subtitle “shows women are equal and sometimes better than men” was a nice touch.  And just as a bonus, that last article also touts the three Pinoy mountaineers who, the previous year, had “made history by conquering Everest.”

Good lord. Chomolungma and Guiting-Guiting will be here long after we’re gone. They’ll always have the last laugh.

Debris

I’ve been thinking of a comment bfp left here a few weeks ago

…because of borders, I became “mexican” rather than indigenous…

and reflecting on how maps and borders classify people, instead of the other way around.

In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson studied how cultural instruments such as maps, the census, and museums were not only a result of colonization, but in fact served and furthered colonial interests. These regulatory instruments illuminated “the late colonial state’s style of thinking about its domain” (184). The grid of maps allowed for serialization in the colonies. The Netherlands could therefore be reproduced in the Netherlands Indies and New Amsterdam. Mother Spain is reproduced in the Philippines, in the encomienda system and in the surnames people had to take for classification.

People’s lives were molded and organized around these classification tools, these imposed borders. Classification and technology made peoples, groups, and territories visible to the colonial powers, allowing them to reproduce themselves through empire and colonization.

And what of those people who do not fit the set classifications? They’re the ones who get categorized as not statistically significant.  The ones that we turn into Others, into Outliers. It’s okay for them to be the collateral damage of what gets called progress.

Ambahan

In 2002, Elena Garcdoce Francisco, a 102-year-old Tumandok woman, journeyed to Iloilo City from her mountain home in Panay. She sang an ambahan, protesting the destruction wrought by militarization in her ancestral lands. These military incursions date back to at least 1962, under then President Diosdado Macapagal.

This practice of telling stories through poetry and chants remains an intrinsic part of the communal life of many indigenous villages. However, notes writer and poet Gelacio Guillermo, the traditional content of these poetic expressions have been giving way to expressing new ideas, feelings, and aspirations—ones related to militarization, logging, mining, land-grabbing, the destruction of forests. Indigenous women continue the practice of ulallems, agayams, and salidum-ay. These poetic expressions are intended as a collective experience, with no barrier between the performer and her audience.

Gardoce Francisco’s chant could have been a galvanizing moment, bringing a common understanding of how communities are being imperiled and immiserated by a confluence of multinational and local elite interests.

But we—urban and lowland dwellers, schooled in Western-style universities—are painfully unequipped to understand her words. We are unable to see ambahan, agayam, salidum-ay, ullalem, as knowledge production.

Renga

Last semester, members of my grad cohort had dinner with a very cool queer theorist who was guest speaking at the university. We were thrilled to meet her and discuss her work. We were even more thrilled when advisors later told us, “Professor G loved you! She said you were so  [inset gaggle of compliments].” We beamed like kindergartners awarded gold stars.

Then our advisor added, “Professor G was so impressed that you were so uncompetitive with one another.”

Hmm.

That last comment threw me a little, because I’ve never seen myself as non-competitive. Was I losing my edge?

I later learned that Professor G felt the students at her R1 were competitive in a destructive way. They’d ask questions not out of genuine interest in one another’s work, but in an attempt to one-up one another by tearing each other’s work down. That’s competition?

I think back to the members of my cohort. F works on art activism in queer communities of color. C’s work is on trafficking of women. B is looking into transwomen of color in the diaspora. N studies how colonial legal systems have enshrined violence against women. Professor G was right. They’re each doing vital work, and I’ve no desire to try to tear that down.

* * *

(Re)thinking Running

I used to think that I loved running because it made me free.

But lately, the runs have been harder. Not any less satisfying, just harder to get into. Harder to enjoy. It’s not that my runs have changed, but the purpose.

Lately, I’ve been running to get away from people. I’m not quite sure how this happened.

This is not a trail

That sign, “This is not a trail,” drives my dog crazy. Because right behind the sign is. . .a trail.

Apparently, it’s a trail full of coyote scents and potato bugs and other curiosities that his mama won’t let him explore. There was a beautiful trail just waiting to be sniffed, he could see that. No matter what the sign said.

My dog’s reaction brings to mind other official versions of “This is not…”

This is not torture. (At least not when we do it.)

And according to the Philippine government, this is not an abduction.

Any additions to the list?

Kinatay

[Edit: Cross-posted sa Racialicious. Makisali sa diskusyon.]

Let me get this out of the way first. This is not a movie review. It is a review of movie reviews about Brillante Mendoza’s Kinatay. Spoilers follow, though the title pretty much tells you what you’re gonna get.

Last weekend, Filipino director Brillante Mendoza won the best director award at the  Cannes Festival for the movie Kinatay (“Slaughtered“). Mendoza’s win was a surprise, considering how Kinatay is probably, as Prometheus Brown puts it, the most hated film at Cannes.

Exerpts from Maggie Lee’s synopsis and review at The Hollywood Reporter:

Newly married Peping, who attends the police academy, receives an offer via text message to make a fast buck with a shady friend. By nightfall, he is in a van with a group of vicious gangsters who have kidnapped a bar hostess to demand a loan repayment under orders from an elusive general…

The real time pacing, feels like being stuck in a traffic jam, but the dramatic thrust is relentless as one hears through the muffled darkness, the woman being gagged and beaten mercilessly. The horror escalates to rape, murder and dismemberment. None of this is left to the imagination, with the men’s verbal sexism being equally distasteful.

That was a positive review. (See here to view Kinatay excerpts, and here for a round-up of reviews and more background on the film.)

Roger Ebert’s review, charmingly titled “What were they thinking of?”,   is typical of how critics who hated Kinatay approached the movie. There is hardly any discussion of the merits of the movie itself, and instead a whole lot of indignation over the unpleasantness that viewers were subjected to:

It is Mendoza’s conceit that it his Idea will make a statement, or evoke a sensation, or demonstrate something–if only he makes the rest of the film as unpleasant to the eyes, the ears, the mind and the story itself as possible…

No drama is developed. No story purpose is revealed…

Ebert adds that:

the sad thing is, the opening scenes in his film give promise of being absorbing and even entertaining.

How dare a film expose its audience to a woman’s violent murder and dismemberment? A form of violence against women that, by the way, happens not infrequently in the Philippines?

And how dare the film depict this violence in a way that is unpleasant, rather than entertaining?