Interview for New York Times by Jessica Bennett, contributing editor in Opinion, where she writes about gender, politics and personalities.

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The first thing I did when reading Judith Butler’s new book, “Who’s Afraid of Gender?”, was to look up the word “phantasm,” which appears 41 times in the introduction alone. (It means illusion; the “phantasm of gender,” a threat rooted in fear and fantasy.)

The second thing I did was have a good chuckle about the title, because the answer to the question of who is afraid of gender was … well, I am? Even for someone who’s written on gender and feminism for more than a decade and who once carried the title of this newspaper’s “gender editor,” to talk about gender today can feel so fraught, so politicized, so caught in a war of words that debate, or even conversation, seems impossible.

I am perhaps the intended reader of Butler’s book, in which the notoriously esoteric philosopher turned pop celebrity dismantles how gender has been constructed as a threat throughout the modern world — to national security in Russia; to civilization, according to the Vatican; to the American traditional family; to protecting children from pedophilia and grooming, according to some conservatives. In a single word, “gender” holds the power to seemingly drive people mad with fear.

Butler’s latest comes more than three decades after their first and most famous book, “Gender Trouble,” brought the idea of “gender as performance” into the mainstream. As it turns out, Butler — who has written 15 books since — never intended to return to the subject, even as a culture war raged. But then the political became personal: Butler was physically attacked in 2017 while speaking in Brazil, and burned in effigy by protesters who shouted, “Take your ideology to hell.”

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity

Did you ever think you’d see a world in which your ideas would be so widespread — and so fraught?

When I wrote “Gender Trouble,” I was a lecturer. I was teaching five classes, trying to work on this book I thought no one would read. Still, I knew I wasn’t just speaking for myself; there were other people who were strong feminists but also lesbian or gay or trying to figure out gender in ways that weren’t always welcome. But today, the people who are afraid of my ideas are the people who don’t read me. In other words, I don’t think it’s my ideas that they’re afraid of. They’ve come up with something else — a kind of fantasy of what I believe or who I am.

And of course it’s not just my views that are being caricatured, but gender more broadly — gender studies, policies that focus on gender, gender discrimination, gender and health care, anything with “gender” in it is a kind of terrifying prospect, at least for some.

So … who is afraid of gender?

It’s funny, I have a friend, a queer theorist. I told him the book’s name and he said, “Everyone! Everyone’s afraid of gender!”

What’s clear to me is that there is a set of strange fantasies about what gender is — how destructive it is, and how frightening it is — that a number of forces have been circulating: Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin, Giorgia Meloni, Rishi Sunak, Jair Bolsonaro, Javier Milei, and of course Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump and lots of parents and communities in states like Oklahoma and Texas and Wyoming, who are seeking to pass legislation that bans the teaching of gender or reference to gender in books.

Obviously, those folks are very frightened of gender. They imbue it with power that I actually don’t think it has. But so are feminists who call themselves “gender critical,” or who are trans-exclusionary, or who have taken explicit positions against trans politics.

Can you describe what prompted you to return to this subject?

I was going to Brazil for a conference on the future of democracy. And I was told in advance that there were petitions against me speaking, and that they decided to focus on me because I’m the “papisa,” the female pope, of gender. I’m not quite sure how I got to have that distinction, but apparently I did. I got to the venue early, and I could hear the crowds outside. They’d built a kind of monstrous picture of me with horns, which I took to be overtly antisemitic — with red eyes and kind of a demonic look — with a bikini on. Like, why the bikini?

But in any case, I was burned in effigy. And that freaked me out. And then, when my partner and I were leaving, at the airport, we were attacked: Some woman came at me with a big trolley and she was screaming about pedophilia. I could not understand why.

You thank the young man who threw his body between you and the attacker, taking blows. Was this the first time you’d heard that “pedophilia” association?

I had given a talk on Jewish philosophy, and somebody in the back said, “Hands off our children!” I thought, What? I figured out later that the way that the anti-gender ideology movement works is to say: If you break down the taboo against homosexuality, if you allow gay and lesbian marriage, if you allow sex reassignment, then you’ve departed from all the laws of nature that keep the laws of morality in tact — which means it’s a Pandora’s box; the whole panoply of perversions will emerge.

As I was preparing to interview you, I received a news alert about the “Don’t Say Gay” settlement in Florida, which says that schools cannot teach about L.G.B.T.Q. topics from kindergarten through the 8th grade, but clarifies that discussing them is allowed. You write that words have become “tacitly figured as recruiters and molesters,” which is behind the effort to remove this type of language from the classroom.

Teaching gender, or critical race theory, or even ethnic studies, is regularly characterized as forms of “indoctrination.” So for instance, that woman who was accusing me of supporting pedophilia, suggests that my work or my teaching would be an effort at “seduction” or “grooming.”

In my experience of teaching, people are arguing with each other all the time. There’s so much conflict. It’s chaotic. There are many things going on — but indoctrination is not one of them.

What about the warping of language on the left?

My version of feminist, queer, trans-affirmative politics is not about policing. I don’t think we should become the police. I’m afraid of the police. But I think a lot of people feel that the world is out of control, and one place where they can exercise some control is language. And it seems like moral discourse comes in then: Call me this. Use this term. We agree to use this language. What I like most about what young people are doing — and it’s not just the young, but everybody’s young now, according to me — is the experimentation. I love the experimentation. Like, let’s come up with new language. Let’s play. Let’s see what language makes us feel better about our lives. But I think we need to have a little more compassion for the adjustment process.

I want to talk for a moment about categories. You have occupied many — butch, queer, woman, nonbinary — yet you’ve also said you’re suspicious of them.

At the time that I wrote “Gender Trouble,” I called for a world in which we might think about genders being proliferated beyond the usual binary of man and woman. What would that look like? What would it be? So when people started talking about being “nonbinary,” I thought, well, I am that. I was trying to occupy that space of being between existing categories.

Do you still believe that gender is “performance?”

After “Gender Trouble” was published, there were some from the trans community who had problems with it. And I saw that my approach, what came to be called a “queer approach”— which was somewhat ironic toward categories — for some people, that’s not OK. They need their categories, they need them to be right, and for them gender is not constructed or performed.

Not everybody wants mobility. And I think I’ve taken that into account now.

But at the same time, for me, performativity is enacting who we are, both our social formation and what we’ve done with that social formation. I mean, my gestures: I didn’t make them up out of thin air — there’s a history of Jewish people who do this. I am inside of something, socially, culturally constructed. At the same time, I find my own way in it. And it’s always been my contention that we’re both formed and we form ourselves, and that’s a living paradox.

How do you define gender today?

Oh, goodness. I have, I suppose, revised my theory of gender — but that’s not the point of this book. I do make the point that “gender identity” is not all of what we mean by gender: It’s one thing that belongs to a cluster of things. Gender is also a framework — a very important framework — in law, in politics, for thinking about how inequality gets instituted in the world.

This is your first book with a nonacademic press. Was that a conscious decision?

Oh, yeah. I wanted to reach people.

It’s funny because many of your ideas do reach people, albeit in internet-era sound bites. I’m thinking about, for instance, of “gender is a drag” T-shirts or “Judith Butler explained with cats.” It strikes me that a lot of people who claim to have read you have actually just read the Instagram caption of you.

Well, I don’t blame them for not reading that book. It was tough. And some of those sentences are truly unforgivable. Hopefully I didn’t do that in “Who’s Afraid of Gender?”

I feel like I’m more in touch with people who are mobilizing on the ground at the global level than I have been before. And that pleases me.

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Jessica Bennett is a contributing editor in the Opinion section of The Times. She teaches journalism at New York University and is the author of “Feminist Fight Club” and “This Is 18.” More about Jessica Bennett

The post Judith Butler Thinks You’re Overreacting – Interview appeared first on Void Network.

In accepting the ideology of victimization in any form, we choose to live in fear. The person who painted the “Men Rape” graffiti was most likely a feminist, a woman who saw her act as a radical defiance of patriarchal oppression. But such proclamations, in fact, merely add to a climate of fear that already exists. Instead of giving women, as individuals a feeling of strength, it reinforces the idea that women are essentially victims, and women who read this graffiti, even if they consciously reject the dogma behind it, probably walk the streets more fearfully. The ideology of victimization that permeates so much feminist discourse can also be found in some form in gay liberation, racial/national liberation, class war and damn near every other ‘radical’ ideology. Fear of an actual, immediate, readily identified threat to an individual can motivate intelligent action to eradicate the threat, but the fear created by the ideology of victimization is a fear of forces both too large and too abstract for the individual to deal with. It ends up becoming a climate of fear, suspicion and paranoia which makes the mediations which are the network of social control seem necessary and even good.
 
It is this seemingly overwhelming climate of fear that creates the sense of weakness, the sense of essential victimhood, in individuals. While it is true that various ideological “liberationists” often bluster with militant rage, it rarely gets beyond to that point of really threatening anything. Instead, they ‘demand’ (read “militantly beg”) that those they define as their oppressors grant them their ‘liberation’. An example of this occurred at the 1989 “Without Borders” anarchist gathering in San Francisco. There is no question that at most workshops I went to, men tended to talk more than women. But no one was stopping women from speaking, and I didn’t notice any lack of respect being show for women who did speak. Yet, at the public microphone in the courtyard of the building where the gathering was held, a speech was made in which it proclaimed that ‘men’ were dominating the discussions and keeping ‘women’ from speaking. The orator ‘demanded’ (again, read “militantly begged”) that men make sure that they gave women space to speak. In other words, to grant the ‘rights’ of the oppressed–an attitude which, by implication, accepts the role of man as oppressor and woman as victim. There were workshops where certain individuals did dominate the discussions, but a person who is acting from the strength of their individuality will deal with such a situation by immediately confronting it as it occurs and will deal with the people involved as individuals. The need to put such situations into an ideological context and to rent the individuals involved as social roles, turning the real, immediate experience into abstract categories is a sign that one has chosen to be weak, to be a victim. And embracing weakness puts one in the absurd position of having to beg one’s oppressor to grant one’s liberation–guaranteeing that one will never be free to be anything but a victim.
 
Like all ideologies, the varieties of the ideology of victimization are forms of fake consciousness. Accepting the social role of victim–in whatever one of its many forms–is choosing to not even create one’s life for oneself or to explore one’s real relationships to the social structures. All of the partial liberation movements–feminism, gay liberation, racial liberation, workers movements and so on–define individuals in terms of their social roles. Because of this, these movements not only do not include a reversal of perspectives which breaks down social roles and allows individuals to create a praxis built on their own passions and desires; they actually work against such a reversal of perspective. The ‘liberation’ of a social role to which the individual remains subject. But the essence of these social roles within the framework of these ‘liberation’ ideologies is victimhood. So the litanies of wrongs suffered must be sung over and over to guarantee the ‘victims’ never forget that is what they are. These ‘radical’ liberation movements help to guarantee that the climate of fear never disappears, and that individuals continue to see themselves weak and to see their strength as lying in the social roles which are, in fact, the source of their victimization. In this way, these movements and ideologies act to prevent the possibility of a potent revolt against all authority and all social roles.
 
True revolt is never safe. Those who choose to define themselves in terms of their role as a victim do not dare to try total revolt, because it would threaten the safety of their roles. But, as Nietzsche said: “The secret of the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is to live dangerously!” Only a conscious rejection of the ideology of victimization, a refusal to live in fear and weakness, and an acceptance of the strength of our own passions and desires, of ourselves as individuals who are greater than, and so capable of living beyond, all social roles, can provide a basis for total rebellion against society. Such a rebellion is certainly fueled, in part, by rage, but not the strident, resentful, frustrated rage of the victim which motivates feminists, racial liberationists, gay liberationists and the like to ‘demand’ their ‘rights’ from the authorities. Rather it is the rage of our desires unchained, the return of the repressed in full force and undisguised. But more essentially, total revolt is fueled by a spirit of free play and of joy in adventure–by a desire to explore every possibility for intense life which society tries to deny us. For all of us who want to live fully and without constraint, the time is past when we can tolerate living like shy mice inside the walls. Every form of the ideology of victimization moves us to live as shy mice. Instead, let’s be crazed & laughing monsters, joyfully tearing down the walls of society and creating lives of wonder and amazement for ourselves.

From “Anarchy: A Journal Of Desire Armed” issue #32, Spring 1992

source: https://finimondo.org/node/381?fbclid=IwAR2j1U0QAeSxjRnmFoUf1Ss3dofOJREXIC3OPVe5_W_fpf2XtwU0StCdj3M

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Σε αντίθεση με το υφιστάμενο νομοθετικό πλαίσιο που αναγνωρίζει την εργασία στο σεξ ως νόμιμη παρά τους υπέρμετρους περιορισμούς που θέτει για την άσκησή της, η Γ.Γ.Ι.Φ. προτείνει με το πόρισμα τη μερική ποινικοποίηση του επαγγέλματος.

Θεωρεί εκ προοιμίου την εργασία στο σεξ ως εκμετάλλευση και συνεπώς την εξισώνει με τη σωματεμπορία, αγνοώντας το θεμελιώδες δικαίωμα του ατόμου στην αυτοδιάθεση, όταν δεν συντρέχουν συνθήκες βίας. Ακολούθως, δε λαμβάνει υπ’όψιν την επιχειρηματολογία και την τεκμηρίωση διεθνών οργανισμών όπως ο Παγκόσμιος Οργανισμός Υγείας, που υποδεικνύουν την πλήρη νομιμοποίηση της εργασίας στο σεξ, ως εργαλείο κοινωνικής ενσωμάτωσης. Η συγκεκριμένη στρατηγική υπηρετεί παράλληλα τη διαφύλαξη της δημόσιας υγείας. Η Γ.Γ.Ι.Φ. διακηρύσσει τέλος, πως «η πορνεία συνιστά μια πολύ προφανή και παντελώς απεχθή παραβίαση της ανθρώπινης αξιοπρέπειας» αναπαράγοντας στερεοτυπικούς χαρακτηρισμούς που πλήττουν τα πρόσωπα που εργάζονται στο σεξ.

Το πόρισμα της Γενικής Γραμματείας Ισότητας εκπονήθηκε κατά πλειοψηφία από μία επιτροπή στην οποία αποκλείστηκαν εκπρόσωποι σωματείων εργαζομένων στο σεξ και οργανώσεων που ασχολούνται με την προάσπιση των δικαιωμάτων τους και την ενδυνάμωσή τους. Επιπλέον, η συγκεκριμένη επιτροπή ήταν από τη σύστασή της προκατειλημμένη υπέρ της ποινικοποίησης της εργασίας στο σεξ, όπως προδήλως αποτυπώνεται στον τίτλο της «Ομάδα Διοίκησης Έργου για την Αντιμετώπιση της Πορνείας». Πέραν τούτων, εξ αρχής η αντιμετώπιση της εργασίας στο σεξ στην χώρα ως ζήτημα που αφορά αποκλειστικά cis γυναίκες και η ίδια η ανάθεση των εργασιών στη Γ.Γ.Ι.Φ. αφενός παραβλέπει την πραγματικότητα, αφετέρου αφήνει ουσιαστικά περιθώριο σε ελλιπή αντιμετώπιση του προβλήματος, αλλά και άνιση -και δη από πλευράς της Πολιτείας- μεταχείριση των cis ανδρών και των διεμφυλικών ατόμων, εργαζόμενων στο σεξ.

Η ανάγκη αναθεώρησης του αναχρονιστικού νομοθετικού πλαισίου για την εργασία στο σεξ στην Ελλάδα καθίσταται επιτακτική, προκειμένου να υπηρετήσει παραμέτρους όπως η εξάλειψη του στίγματος, η καταπολέμηση της βίας και η κοινωνική ενσωμάτωση της συγκεκριμένης ομάδας, καθώς και η διαφύλαξη της δημόσιας υγείας. Ο νομοθέτης από τη μία πλευρά αναγνωρίζει τη νομιμότητα στην εργασία στο σεξ και από την άλλη θέτει υπέρμετρους περιορισμούς που καθιστούν τη νόμιμη εργασία σχεδόν αδύνατη και ουσιαστικά ωθούν τα εργαζόμενα πρόσωπα να ζουν και να εργάζονται σε καθεστώς παρανομίας. Τούτο αναπόφευκτα οδηγεί τα άτομα σε άκρως επισφαλείς εργασιακές συνθήκες που τα εκθέτουν σε άμεσο και διαρκή κίνδυνο άσκησης βίας σε βάρος τους και ασφαλώς τα καθιστά εξαιρετικά ευάλωτα στον ιό HIV, αλλά και στα λοιπά σεξουαλικώς μεταδιδόμενα νοσήματα. Η απάντηση σε αυτή την πραγματικότητα δε μπορεί να είναι η νομοθέτηση της ποινικοποίησης της εργασίας στο σεξ.

Στο παραπάνω πλαίσιο, ο δημόσιος διάλογος για το νομοθετικό πλαίσιο που ρυθμίζει το συγκεκριμένο θέμα θα πρέπει να γίνει χωρίς προειλημμένες αποφάσεις, ιδεολογικά στεγανά και διάθεση άκριτης υιοθέτησης μέτρων που αγνοούν την ελληνική πραγματικότητα. Καλούμε συνεπώς, το Υπουργείο Εσωτερικών που είναι ο αρμόδιος φορέας, να οργανώσει ένα θεσμοθετημένο και ανοιχτό διάλογο, με τη συμμετοχή όλων των εμπλεκόμενων μερών όπως τα ίδια τα άτομα που εργάζονται στο σεξ, τα συναρμόδια υπουργεία, η ακαδημαϊκή κοινότητα και οι οργανώσεις της κοινωνίας των πολιτών.

Οι συνυπογράφουσες οργανώσεις:

Διεθνής Αμνηστία
Ελληνικό Παρατηρητήριο των Συμφωνιών του Ελσίνκι
Κέντρο Ζωής
Ομάδα ΛΟΑΤΚΙ+ Εργασιακής Υποστήριξης – LGBTQI+ Employment Support Group
Ομοφυλοφιλική και Λεσβιακή Κοινότητα Ελλάδας (Ο.Λ.Κ.Ε.)
Σύλλογος Οροθετικών Ελλάδας «Θετική Φωνή»
Σωματείο Υποστήριξης Διεμφυλικών (Σ.Υ.Δ.)
Athens Pride – Φεστιβάλ Υπερηφάνειας Αθήνας.
Colour Youth
Proud Seniors Greece – Ομάδα υποστήριξης ΛΟΑΤΚΙ ατόμων ηλικίας 50+
Thessaloniki Pride – Φεστιβάλ Υπερηφάνειας Θεσσαλονίκης
Οικογένειες Ουράνιο Τόξο

The post ΓΙΑ ΤΗΝ ΕΡΓΑΣΙΑ ΣΤΟ ΣΕΞ ΣΤΗΝ ΕΛΛΑΔΑ- Απάντηση οργανώσεων στο πόρισμα της Γενικής Γραμματείας Ισότητας των Φύλων appeared first on Void Network.

by Pankaj Mishra

On the evening of 30 January 1948, five months after the independence and partition of India, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was walking to a prayer meeting at his temporary home in New Delhi when he was shot three times, at point-blank range. He collapsed and died instantly. His assassin, originally feared to be Muslim, turned out to be Nathuram Godse, a Hindu Brahmin from western India. Godse, who made no attempt to escape, said in court that he felt compelled to kill Gandhi since the leader with his womanly politics was emasculating the Hindu nation – in particular, with his generosity to Muslims. Godse is a hero today in an India utterly transformed by Hindu chauvinists – an India in which Mein Kampf is a bestseller, a political movement inspired by European fascists dominates politics and culture, and Narendra Modi, a Hindu supremacist accused of mass murder, is prime minister. For all his talk of Hindu genius, Godse flagrantly plagiarised the fictions of European ethnic-racial chauvinists and imperialists. For the first years of his life he was raised as a girl, with a nose ring, and later tried to gain a hard-edged masculine identity through Hindu supremacism. Yet for many struggling young Indians today Godse represents, along with Adolf Hitler, a triumphantly realised individual and national manhood.

The moral prestige of Gandhi’s murderer is only one sign among many of what seems to be a global crisis of masculinity. Luridly retro ideas of what it means to be a strong man have gone mainstream even in so-called advanced nations. In January Jordan B Peterson, a Canadian self-help writer who laments that “the west has lost faith in masculinity” and denounces the “murderous equity doctrine” espoused by women, was hailed in the New York Times as “the most influential public intellectual in the western world right now”.

This is, hopefully, an exaggeration. It is arguable, however, that a frenetic pursuit of masculinity has characterised public life in the west since 9/11; and it presaged the serial-groping president who boasts of his big penis and nuclear button. “From the ashes of September 11,” the Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan exulted a few weeks after the attack, “arise the manly virtues.” Noonan, who today admires Peterson’s “tough” talk, hailed the re-emergence of “masculine men, men who push things and pull things”, such as George W Bush, who she half expected to “tear open his shirt and reveal the big ‘S’ on his chest”. Such gush, commonplace at the time, helped Bush, who had initially gone missing in action on 11 September, reinvent himself as a dashing commander-in-chief (and grow cocky enough to dress up as a fighter pilot and compliment Tony Blair’s “cojones”).

Amid this rush of testosterone in the Anglo-American establishment, many deskbound journalists fancied themselves as unflinching warriors. “We will,” David Brooks, another of Peterson’s fans, vowed, “destroy innocent villages by accident, shrug our shoulders and continue fighting.”

As manly virtues arose, attacks on women, and feminists in particular, in the west became nearly as fierce as the wars waged abroad to rescue Muslim damsels in distress. In Manliness (2006) Harvey Mansfield, a political philosopher at Harvard, denounced working women for undermining the protective role of men. The historian Niall Ferguson, a self-declared neo-imperialist, bemoaned that “girls no longer play with dolls” and that feminists have forced Europe into demographic decline. More revealingly, the few women publicly critical of the bellicosity, such as Katha Pollitt, Susan Sontag and Arundhati Roy, were “mounted on poles for public whipping” and flogged, Barbara Kingsolver wrote, with “words like bitch and airhead and moron and silly”. At the same time, Vanity Fair’s photo essay on the Bush administration at war commended the president for his masculine sangfroid and hailed his deputy, Dick Cheney, as “The Rock”.

“Psychotic masculinity can be seen everywhere from ISIS to mass-murderer Anders Breivik, who claimed Viking ancestry. Some of this post-9/11 cocksmanship was no doubt provoked by Osama bin Laden’s slurs about American manhood: that the free and the brave had gone “soft” and “weak”. Humiliation in Vietnam similarly brought forth such cartoon visions of masculinity as Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. It is also true that historically privileged men tend to be profoundly disturbed by perceived competition from women, gay people and diverse ethnic and religious groups. In Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle (1990) Elaine Showalter described the great terror induced among many men by the very modest gains of feminists in the late 19th century: “fears of regression and degeneration, the longing for strict border controls around the definition of gender, as well as race, class and nationality”.

In the 1950s, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr was already warning of the “expanding, aggressive force” of women, “seizing new domains like a conquering army”. Exasperated by the “castrated” American male and his “feminine fascination for the downtrodden”, Schlesinger, the original exponent of muscular liberalism, longed for the “frontiersmen” of American history who “were men, and it did not occur to them to think twice about it”.

These majestically male makers of the modern west are being forced to think twice about a lot today. Gay men and women are freer than before to love whom they love, and to marry them. Women expect greater self-fulfilment in the workplace, at home and in bed. Trump may have the biggest nuclear button, but China leads in artificial intelligence as well as old-style mass manufacturing. And technology and automation threaten to render obsolete the men who push and pull things – most damagingly in the west.

Many straight white men feel besieged by “uppity” Chinese and Indian people, by Muslims and feminists, not to mention gay bodybuilders, butch women and trans people. Not surprisingly they are susceptible to Peterson’s notion that the ostensible destruction of “the traditional household division of labour” has led to “chaos”. This fear and insecurity of a male minority has spiralled into a politics of hysteria in the two dominant imperial powers of the modern era. In Britain, the aloof and stiff upper-lipped English gentleman, that epitome of controlled imperial power, has given way to such verbally incontinent Brexiters as Boris Johnson. The rightwing journalist Douglas Murray, among many elegists of English manhood, deplores “emasculated Italians, Europeans and westerners in general” and esteems Trump for “reminding the west of what is great about ourselves”. And, indeed, whether threatening North Korea with nuclear incineration, belittling people with disabilities or groping women, the American president confirms that some winners of modern history will do anything to shore up their sense of entitlement.

But gaudy displays of brute manliness in the west, and frenzied loathing of what the alt-rightists call “cucks” and “cultural Marxists”, are not merely a reaction to insolent former weaklings. Such manic assertions of hyper-masculinity have recurred in modern history. They have also profoundly shaped politics and culture in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Osama bin Laden believed that Muslims “have been deprived of their manhood” and could recover it by obliterating the phallic symbols of American power. Beheading and raping innocent captives in the name of the caliphate, the black-hooded young volunteers of Islamic State were as obviously a case of psychotic masculinity as the Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik, who claimed Viking warriors as his ancestors. Last month, the Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte told female rebels in his country that “We will not kill you. We will just shoot you in the vagina.” Tormenting hapless minorities, India’s Hindu supremacist chieftains seem obsessed with proving, as one asserted after India’s nuclear tests in 1998, “we are not eunuchs any more”.

Morbid visions of castration and emasculation, civilisational decline and decay, connect Godse and Schlesinger to Bin Laden and Trump, and many other exponents of a rear-guard machismo today. They are susceptible to cliched metaphors of “soft” and “passive” femininity, “hard” and “active” masculinity; they are nostalgic for a time when men did not have to think twice about being men. And whether Hindu chauvinist, radical Islamist or white nationalist, their self-image depends on despising and excluding women. It is as though the fantasy of male strength measures itself most gratifyingly against the fantasy of female weakness. Equating women with impotence and seized by panic about becoming cucks, these rancorously angry men are symptoms of an endemic and seemingly unresolvable crisis of masculinity.

When did this crisis begin? And why does it seem so inescapably global? Writing Age of Anger: A History of the Present, I began to think that a perpetual crisis stalks the modern world. It began in the 19th century, with the most radical shift in human history: the replacement of agrarian and rural societies by a volatile socio-economic order, which, defined by industrial capitalism, came to be rigidly organised through new sexual and racial divisions of labour. And the crisis seems universal today because a web of restrictive gender norms, spun in modernising western Europe and America, has come to cover the remotest corners of the earth as they undergo their own socio-economic revolutions.

There were always many ways of being a man or a woman. Anthropologists and historians of the world’s astonishingly diverse pre-industrial societies have consistently revealed that there is no clear link between biological makeup and behaviour, no connection between masculinity and vigorous men, or femininity and passive women. Indians, British colonialists were disgusted to find, revered belligerent and sexually voracious goddesses, such as Kali; their heroes were flute-playing idlers such as Krishna. A vast Indian literature attests to mutably gendered men and women, elite as well as folk traditions of androgyny and same-sex eroticism.

These unselfconscious traditions began to come under unprecedented assault in the 19th century, when societies constituted by exploitation and exclusion, and stratified along gender and racial lines, emerged as the world’s most powerful; and when such profound shocks of modernity as nation-building, rural-urban migration, imperial expansion and industrialisation drastically changed all modes of human perception. A hierarchy of manly and unmanly human beings had long existed in many societies without being central in them. During the 19th century, it came to be universally imposed, with men and women straitjacketed into specific roles.

The modern west appears, in the western supremacist version of history, as the guarantor of equality and liberty to all. In actuality, a notion of gender (and racial) inequality, grounded in biological difference, was, as Joan Wallach Scott demonstrates in her recent book Sex and Secularism, nothing less than “the social foundation of modern western nation-states”. Immanuel Kant dismissed women as incapable of practical reason, individual autonomy, objectivity, courage and strength. Napoleon, the child of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, believed women ought to stay at home and procreate; his Napoleonic Code, which inspired state laws across the world, notoriously subordinated women to their fathers and husbands. Thomas Jefferson, America’s founding father, commended women, “who have the good sense to value domestic happiness above all other” and who are “too wise to wrinkle their foreheads with politics”. Such prejudices helped replace traditional patriarchy with the exclusionary ideals of masculinity as the modern world came into being.

On such grounds, women were denied political participation and forced into subordinate roles in the family and the labour market. Pop psychologists periodically insist that men are from Mars and women from Venus, lamenting the loss of what Peterson calls “traditional” divisions of labour, without acknowledging that capitalist, industrial and expansionist societies required a fresh division of labour, or that the straight white men who supervised them deemed women unfit, due to their physical or intellectual inferiority, to undertake territorial aggrandisement, nation-building, industrial production, international trade, and scientific innovation. Women’s bodies were meant to reproduce and safeguard the future of the family, race and nation; men’s were supposed to labour and fight. To be a “mature” man was to adjust oneself to society and fulfil one’s responsibility as breadwinner, father and soldier. “When men fear work or fear righteous war,” as Theodore Roosevelt put it, “when women fear motherhood, they tremble on the brink of doom.” As the 19th century progressed, many such cultural assumptions about male and female identity morphed into timeless truths. They are, as Peterson’s rowdy fan club reveals, more vigorously upheld today than the “truths” of racial inequality, which were also simultaneously grounded in “nature”, or pseudo-biology.

Scott points out that the modes of sexual difference defined in the modernising west actually helped secure, “the racial superiority of western nations to their ‘others’ – in Africa, Asia, and Latin America”. “White skin was associated with ‘normal’ gender systems, dark skin with immaturity and perversity.” Thus, the British judged their Kali-worshipping Indian subjects to be an unmanly and childish people who ought not to wrinkle their foreheads with ideas of self-rule. The Chinese were widely seen, including in western Chinatowns, as pigtailed cowards. Even Muslims, Christendom’s formidable old rivals, came to be derided as pitiably “feminine” during the high noon of imperialism.

Gandhi explicitly subverted these gendered prejudices of European imperialists (and their Hindu imitators): that femininity was the absence of masculinity. Rejecting the western identification of rulers with male supremacy and subjecthood with feminine submissiveness, he offered an activist politics based on rigorous self-examination and maternal tenderness. This rejection eventually cost him his life. But he could see how much the male will to power was fed by a fantasy of the female other as a regressive being – someone to be subdued and dominated – and how much this pathology had infected modern politics and culture.

As Hindu nationalisation got into gear, formerly chubby Bollywood stars began to flaunt bulging biceps.  Its most insidious expression was the conquest and exploitation of people deemed feminine, and, therefore, less than human – a violence that became normalised in the 19th century. For many Europeans and Americans, to be a true man was to be an ardent imperialist and nationalist. Even so clear-sighted a figure as Alexis de Tocqueville longed for his French male compatriots to realise their “warlike” and “virile” nature in crushing Arabs in north Africa, leaving women to deal with the petty concerns of domestic life.

As the century progressed, the quest for virility distilled a widespread response among men psychically battered by such uncontrollable and emasculating phenomena as industrialisation, urbanisation and mechanisation. The ideal of a strong, fearless manhood came to be embodied in muscular selves, nations, empires and races. Living up to this daunting ideal required eradicating all traces of feminine timidity and childishness. Failure incited self-loathing – and a craving for regenerative violence. Mocked with such unmanly epithets as “weakling” and “Oscar Wilde”, Roosevelt tried to overcome, Gore Vidal once pointed out, “his physical fragility through ‘manly’ activities of which the most exciting and ennobling was war”. It is no coincidence that the loathing of homosexuals, and the hunt for sacrificial victims such as Wilde, was never more vicious and organized than during this most intense phase of European imperialism.

One image came to be central to all attempts to recuperate the lost manhood of self and nation: the invincible body, represented in our own age of extremes by steroid-juiced, knobbly musculature. Actually, size matters today much less than it ever did; not many muscles are required for increasingly sedentary work habits and lifestyles. Nevertheless, an obsession with raw brawn and sheer mass still shapes political cultures. Trump’s boasts about the size of his body parts were preceded by Vladimir Putin’s displays of his pectorals – advertisements for a Russia re-masculinised after its emasculation by Boris Yeltsin, a flabby drunk. But shirtless hunks are also a striking recent phenomenon in Godse’s “rising” India. In the 90s, just as India’s Hindu nationalisation got into gear, formerly scrawny or chubby Bollywood stars began to flaunt glisteningly hard abs and bulging biceps; Rama, the lean-limbed hero of the Ramayana, started to resemble Rambo in calendar art and political posters. These buffed-up bodies of popular culture foreshadowed Modi, who rose to power boasting of his 56-inch chest, and promising true national potency to young unemployed stragglers.

This vengeful masculinist nationalism was the original creation of Germans in the early 19th century, who first outlined a vision of creating a superbly fit people or master race and fervently embraced such typically modern forms of physical exercise as gymnastics, callisthenics and yoga and fads like nudism. But pumped-up anatomy emerged as a “natural” embodiment of the evidently exclusive male virtue of strength only as the century ended. As societies across the west became more industrial, urban and bureaucratic, property-owning farmers and self-employed artisans rapidly turned into faceless office workers and professionals. With “rational calculation” installed as the new deity, “each man”, Max Weber warned in 1909, “becomes a little cog in the machine”, pathetically obsessed with becoming “a bigger cog”. Increasingly deprived of their old skills and autonomy in the iron cage of modernity, working class men tried to secure their dignity by embodying it in bulky brawn.

Historians have emphasised how male workers, humiliated by such repressive industrial practices as automation and time management, also began to assert their manhood by swearing, drinking and sexually harassing the few women in the workforce – the beginning of an aggressive hardhat culture that has reached deep into blue-collar workplaces during the decades-long reign of neoliberalism. Towards the end of the 19th century large numbers of men embraced sports and physical fitness, and launched fan clubs of pugnacious footballers and boxers.

It wasn’t just working men. Upper-class parents in America and Britain had begun to send their sons to boarding schools in the hope that their bodies and moral characters would be suitably toughened up in the absence of corrupting feminine influences. Competitive sports, which were first organised in the second half of the 19th century, became a much-favoured means of pre-empting sissiness – and of mass-producing virile imperialists. It was widely believed that putative empire-builders would be too exhausted by their exertions on the playing fields of Eton and Harrow to masturbate.

But masculinity, a dream of power, tends to get more elusive the more intensely it is pursued; and the dread of emasculation by opaque economic, political and social forces continued to deepen. It drove many fin de siècle writers as well as politicians in Europe and the US into hyper-masculine trances of racial nationalism – and, eventually, the calamity of the first world war. Nations and races as well as individuals were conceptualised as biological entities, which could be honed into unassailable organisms. Fear of “race suicide”, cults of physical education and daydreams of a “New Man” went global, along with strictures against masturbation, as the inflexible modern ideology of gender difference reached non-western societies.

European colonialists went on to impose laws that enshrined their virulent homophobia and promoted heterosexual conjugality and patrilineal orders. Their prejudices were also entrenched outside the west by the victims of what the Indian critic Ashis Nandy calls “internal colonialism”: those subjects of European empires who pleaded guilty to the accusation that they were effeminate, and who decided to man up in order to catch up with their white overlords.

This accounts for a startling and still little explored phenomenon: how men within all major religious communities – Buddhist, Hindu and Jewish as well as Christian and Islamic – started in the late 19th century to simultaneously bemoan their lost virility and urge the creation of hard, inviolable bodies, whether of individual men, the nation or the umma. These included early Zionists (Max Nordau, who dreamed of Muskeljudentum, “Jewry of Muscle”), Asian anti-imperialists (Swami Vivekananda, Modi’s hero, who exhorted Hindus to build “biceps”, and Anagarika Dharmapala, who helped develop the muscular Buddhism being horribly flexed by Myanmar’s ethnic-cleansers these days) as well as fanatical imperialists such as Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scout movement.

The most lethal consequences of this mimic machismo unfolded in the first decades of the 20th century. “Never before and never afterwards”, as historian George Mosse, the pioneering historian of masculinity, wrote, “has masculinity been elevated to such heights as during fascism”. Mussolini, like Roosevelt, transformed himself from a sissy into a fire-breathing imperialist. “The weak must be hammered away,” declared Hitler, another physically ill-favoured fascist. Such wannabe members of the Aryan master race accordingly defined themselves against the cowardly Jew and discovered themselves as men of steel in acts of mass murder.

This hunt for manliness continues to contaminate politics and culture across the world in the 21st century. Rapid economic, social and technological change in our own time has plunged an exponentially larger number of uprooted and bewildered men into a doomed quest for masculine certainties. The scope for old-style imperialist aggrandisement and forging a master race may have diminished. But there are, in the age of neoliberal individualism, infinitely more unrealised claims to masculine identity in grotesquely unequal societies around the world. Myths of the self-made man have forced men everywhere into a relentless and often futile hunt for individual power and wealth, in which they imagine women and members of minorities as competitors. Many more men try to degrade and exclude women in their attempt to show some mastery that is supposed to inhere in their biological nature.

The post The crisis in modern masculinity- by Pankaj Mishra appeared first on Void Network.

[text English / Ελληνικά] One hundred and twenty naked women participated in a flash mob Tuesday to protest gender-based violence in Argentina’s capital of Buenos Aires.

Displaying a banner reading “Femicide is Genocide,” the mass of women gathered in front of parliament, the presidential palace Casa Rosada, and Argentina’s highest court, reported The New Yorker.

They then proceeded to strip to a soundtrack playing behind them. Clustering around the banner they were holding, the women collapsed to form a pile of bodies meant to represent victims of violence.

A woman on a loudspeaker outlined the problems of gender-based violence plaguing women. The women then rose and advanced towards their audience, finishing the performance with a long, angry scream.

The flash mob was the latest protest organized by a collective known as Fuerza Artística de Choque Comunicativo (F.A.C.C), meaning “artistic force of communicative shock” in Spanish, a team of activist artists formed last year.

Dozens of topless women demonstrated in Buenos Aires in February to demand the right to sunbathe semi-nude after police asked topless women to leave the beach. Police cited a national criminal code article prohibiting “obscene displays” to justify asking the women to leave the beach, The Guardian reported.

The city of Buenos Aires also passed a bill in December 2016 outlawing public sexual harassment in an effort to prevent males from catcalling women.

source: http://dailycaller.com/2017/05/31/activist-mob-thought-the-best-way-to-solve-gender-discrimination-was-to-get-completely-naked-in-public/

ΜΠΟΥΕΝΟΣ ΑΪΡΕΣ: ΔΙΑΜΑΡΤΥΡΙΑ ΜΕ ΣΥΝΘΗΜΑ “ΤΟ ΜΙΣΟΣ ΣΤΗΝ ΓΥΝΑΙΚΑ ΕΙΝΑΙ ΓΕΝΟΚΤΟΝΙΑ”

Η ομάδα γυναικών “Ni una menos” (Ούτε μία λιγότερη), στην Αργεντινή, πραγματοποίησε, στις 30 Μαίου 2017, διαμαρτυρία μπροστά από τέσσερα δημόσια κτίρια του Μπουένος Αϊρες, ανάμεσά τους και στο Κοινοβούλιο, για να αφυπνίσουν την κοινωνία σε σχέση με την δολοφονία ήδη 133 γυναικών την χρονιά που τρέχει, από άντρες.

Η διαμαρτυρία είχε μελωδία από βιολιά, ενώ σιωπηλά μια ομάδα γυναικών, αφού πέταξε τα ρούχα της, ούρλιαξε για να “ξυπνήσει” και τον τελευταίο ανυποψίαστο.

Σε ανακοίνωσή τους τόνισαν ότι:

Eίμαστε όλες εδώ, δολοφονημένες, εξαφανισμένες, χτυπημένες, περιθωριοποιημένες, διωγμένες, ζωντανές και νεκρές, είμαστε εδώ και θα υπάρχουμε για πάντα!

 

πηγή: http://lesbian.gr/10833/mpouenos-aires-diamartyria-synthima-misos-stin-gynaika-einai-genoktonia/

The post Feminist Activists Against Gender-Based Violence in Argentina- Διαμαρτυρία με σύνθημα “ΤΟ ΜΙΣΟΣ ΣΤΗΝ ΓΥΝΑΙΚΑ ΕΙΝΑΙ ΓΕΝΟΚΤΟΝΙΑ” appeared first on Void Network.

Ένας χλωμός ήλιος ξεπροβάλλει πίσω από τη λέξη ντεκαυλέ, η οποία ριμάρει με το ντεφορμέ και το ντεπασέ και όλους τους επιθετικούς προσδιορισμούς αρνητικής χροιάς. Το ερωτικό ξενέρωμα είναι εδώ και είναι παντού. Απλώνεται σαν τον μύκητα στο κεφίρ. Σαν το μέλι στην κερήθρα. Επιπλέει στον αφρό των ημερών σαν αβαρές πλαστικό καπάκι από μπουκάλι αναψυκτικού.

Δεν είναι η οικονομική κρίση που αναστέλλει την επιθυμία. Δε φταίει ο επιμερισμός της προσοχής μας στην αδιάλειπτη εναλλαγή εικόνων από το κινητό μας στο τάμπλετ και στον υπολογιστή και πάλι πίσω. Δεν κακίζουμε καν τα γνωστά-άγνωστα σόσιαλ μίντια, ούτε φυσικά την αποσπασματική μας μνήμη, η οποία έχει αναφορές πλέον μόνο από ποσταρίσματα και αναρτήσεις. Ενοχοποιούνται σαφώς όλα τα παραπάνω, συν κάτι ακόμα, πιο σοβαρό: Η λίμνη του νεοπουριτανισμού, μέσα στην οποία όλοι κολυμπάμε. Άλλος με σωσίβιο, άλλος με μπρατσάκια και άλλος με μακροβούτια και απλωτές. Κάποιοι πάλι έχουν μείνει στην όχθη και κοιτούν. Μαζί με εκείνους που πολεμούν την πρωτοπορία απ’ όπου κι αν προέρχεται και τους παραδίπλα που μάχονται τη βιοποικιλότητα της όποιας διαφορετικότητας.

Κι ενώ η τεχνολογία χορεύει γύρω μας διονυσιακούς χορούς, εμείς κλεινόμαστε ακόμα πιο βαθιά στο υπόγειο της ανηδονίας.

Η ντεκαυλέ εποχή έχει έρθει να ντύσει τα ντεκολτέ, να σιδερώσει τους τρόπους, να στεγνώσει την έκφραση, να καλύψει τα ρωμαϊκά γυμνά αγάλματα, να ακονίσει την απορριπτική διάθεση, να καταγγείλει τις προκλητικές φωτό των φεισμπουκικών προφίλ, να παύσει τα τσίτσιδα του Playboy, να στρώσει τα κρεβάτια αντί να τα χαλάσει, να μείνει στο σκοτάδι κοιτώντας μέσα από την κλειδαρότρυπα, να φέρει στο φως τον sapiosexual, τον νοοσεξουαλικό, αυτόν που το πνεύμα τον ερεθίζει περισσότερο από τη σάρκα.

Και για να μην παρεξηγηθώ, ως προς το τελευταίο, φυσικά το οξυμένο πνεύμα λειτουργεί διεγερτικά ενώ ο μπρουτάλ, στερεοτυπικός αντρικός σεξισμός απωθητικά. Μόνο που ο διαχωρισμός σάρκας και πνεύματος είναι σαν το διαχωρισμό εκκλησίας και κράτους: απόλυτα ουτοπικός. Στην προσπάθεια να περιχαρακώσουμε τη γυναικεία ελευθερία μας και το κοίταγμα στα ίσια με τον άντρα, γίναμε αυτό που γιουχάραμε. Σοβινίστριες γκάουλαϊτερ για το ίδιο μας το φύλο. Πως αλλιώς εξηγείται το μένος των γυναικείων σχολίων για την πρόσφατη αποκαλυπτική εμφάνιση της ηθοποιού Σούζαν Σάραντον στο κόκκινο χαλί; Πως αλλιώς μεταφράζεται, παρά ως χάσιμο στη μετάφραση, η δυσπιστία για το υψηλό IQ όποιας τηρεί ισορροπημένες σωματικές αναλογίες και κάλλος; Και πως αλλιώς ερμηνεύεται η ηθελημένη στάση «ατσαλάκωτη Barbie» από όποια τηρεί ισορροπημένες σωματικές αναλογίες και κάλλος;

Κι ενώ η τεχνολογία χορεύει γύρω μας διονυσιακούς χορούς, εμείς κλεινόμαστε ακόμα πιο βαθιά στο υπόγειο της ανηδονίας. Από τη μία εκθέτουμε με προθυμία τη ζωή μας και τα απόκρυφα του σπιτιού μας στο Instagram, από την άλλη συνεχίζουμε να κοιτάμε σκανδαλοθηρικά τις ζωές και τα απόκρυφα των σπιτιών των άλλων. Από τη μία διατυμπανίζουμε τη δημοκρατία της διαδικτυακής επικοινωνίας και από τη άλλη αυτοφιμωνόμαστε εις ένδειξη πολιτικής ορθότητας.

Η ντεκαυλέ εποχή πανηγυρίζει με απόλυτη σοβαροφάνεια για το παντοτινό, που όμως -φευ- είναι εφήμερο. Σε πλήρη αντίθεση με την προηγούμενη φάση, την καπάτσα εξαδέλφη της, η οποία γιόρταζε το εφήμερο που έμοιαζε παντοτινό.

Επιμύθιο: Οι underground, οι μποέμ, οι περιπλανώμενοι αναζητητές της ζωής νοσούν. Και οι followers τους δεν αισθάνονται, κι αυτοί, καθόλου καλά.

Πηγή: http://www.womantoc.gr/psychology/article/i-epoxi-einai-dekavle-kai-den-milame-gia-to-seks

The post “Η εποχή είναι ντεκαυλέ. Και δεν μιλάμε για το σεξ” – Έφη Αλεβίζου appeared first on Void Network.

Αντιφασιστικό Φεστιβάλ Παραστατικών Τεχνών 2015

 Ένα χρόνο πριν, τον Μάρτιο του 2014, το 1ο Αντιφασιστικό Φεστιβάλ Παραστατικών Τεχνών έγινε πράξη στο ελεύθερο, αυτοδιαχειριζόμενο θέατρο ΕΜΠΡΟΣ. 200 καλλιτέχνες παρουσίασαν το έργο τους, 40 πολιτισμικοί ακτιβιστές ανέλαβαν τη διεξαγωγή και 10.000 κόσμου συμμετείχαν σε αυτό το αυτοοργανωμένο, καλλιτεχνικό, κοινωνικό και πολιτικό γεγονός. Το 3ο Αντιφασιστικό Φεστιβάλ Παραστατικών Τεχνών θα γίνει στο ΕΜΠΡΟΣ από 19-29 Μαρτίου και καλεί καθεμία και κάθεναν, που έχει επιθυμία για κοινωνική δράση μέσα από τις παραστατικές τέχνες, να συμμετάσχει ενεργά στη συνδιοργάνωσή του. Ας διευρύνουμε αυτήν την πλατφόρμα συντονισμού και δράσης ανθρώπων των παραστατικών τεχνών. Στόχος μια συλλογική αντιφασιστική συζήτηση στον χώρο της τέχνης και η εμψύχωση όσων αγωνίζονται για ισότητα, δικαιοσύνη, αξιοπρέπεια, ενάντια στην κουλτούρα της εμπορευματοποίησης, του αποκλεισμού και του ρατσισμού. Το φεστιβάλ θα περιλαμβάνει θεατρικές παραστάσεις και εργαστήρια για παιδιά κι ενήλικες, χορό, συναυλίες, performances, κινηματογραφικές προβολές, δρώμενα και οργανωμένες συζητήσεις. Ελάτε να υπερασπιστούμε τον πλούτο της πολυπολιτισμικής κοινωνίας, να αναδείξουμε την ανθρώπινη ποικιλομορφία. Να κάνουμε τις γειτονιές μας, τους χώρους πολιτισμού και τις πόλεις μας γέφυρες φιλίας, αλληλεγγύης και αντίστασης μακριά από τις λογικές του διχασμού. Ενάντια στο σκοτάδι του φασισμού ανάβουμε τα φώτα της σκηνής. Ας ενώσουμε τις φωνές μας ενάντια στο μίσος και τη βαρβαρότητα.

************************************************************************************ ΑΝΟΙΧΤΟ ΚΑΛΕΣΜΑ στη συνέλευση του 3ου Αντιφασιστικού Φεστιβάλ Παραστατικών Τεχνών Σάββατο 7 Φεβρουαρίου, στις 3μμ, στο ΕΜΠΡΟΣ *************************************************************************************

Το κάλεσµα απευθύνεται σε: σε όλους τους ελεύθερα σκεπτόμενους άνθρωπους της τέχνης, ανεξάρτητους καλλιτέχνες, θεατρικές ομάδες, καλλιτεχνικές συλλογικότητες, ανοιχτούς κοινωνικούς χώρους, αυτοοργανωμένα εγχειρήματα, εκπολιτιστικούς συλλόγους, αντιφασιστικές και αντιρατσιστικές κινήσεις, οργανώσεις και πρωτοβουλίες, ευάλωτες κοινωνικές ομάδες – κοινότητες μεταναστών και προσφύγων με τα σχολεία και τις δημιουργικές τους ομάδες, ΛΟΑΤ, Ρομά και Ρομνί, ανάπηρους-ες κ.ά – και εν γένει σε κάθε άνθρωπο ή ομάδες που βιώνουν τον ρατσισμό και θα ήθελαν είτε να συμμετάσχουν στο δημιουργικό μέρος, είτε να μοιραστούν τους προβληματισμούς και την εμπειρία τους.

The post Αντιφασιστικό Φεστιβάλ Παραστατικών Τεχνών 2015 / Ανοιχτό Κάλεσμα Συμμετοχής / Open Call Out for Participation at the Athens ANTIFASCIST FESTIVAL of PERFORMING ARTS 2015 appeared first on Void Network.

ΚΕΝΟ ΔΙΚΤΥΟ[ΘΕΩΡΙΑ, ΟΥΤΟΠΙΑ, ΣΥΝΑΙΣΘΗΣΗ, ΕΦΗΜΕΡΕΣ ΤΕΧΝΕΣ]
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“The Limitations of Anti-Sexism” 

by Sissy Doutsiou ( a poet, actress and 

long run cultural / social activist from

Void Network) is a part of the book

“We Are an Image From The Future

The Greek Revolt of December 2008″.

It is an essay investigating the

limits of anti-sexist’s theories and pratices. 

The text is infuenced from the feelings 

and understandings of December 2008 

riots in Greece, the social uprising 

that followed the assassination 

of 15 years old boy

Alexis Grigoropoulos by Greek Police. 

 

A review

made for this essay in digital mag.

The Anvil Review mentioned :

Doutsiou fairly represents the pleasure angle. She positions herself in expansiveness—culturally/internationally, socially, and philosophically. Her discussion about sexism and anti-sexism is in the context of anarchist activity in Greece in December 2008—a time of expanding anarchist action, relevance, and awareness—as well as her experience in various European anarchist circles. To make her points she draws on Judith Butler, Françoise Denevert, Guy Debord, Simone de Beauvoir, etc. And her argument is for sexiness, for sensuality, for contrast, and for people celebrating their own particularities.

We choose to free ourselves from normality to become the most extreme of beings. We want to break through identities established by society, by tradition, and even by anarchist spaces. .

She names anti-sexism as a specific kind of reaction to sexism, one that ends up reifying sexism itself, much in the way that Alfonso argues “Why APOC is a White-Supremacist Organization“, or how sociologist Joshua Gamson (who she quotes) posits that queer identity is necessary for queer liberation /and/ perpetuates the binary that predicates queer oppression. And her primary critiques of anti-sexism have to do with the limitations that they rely on:

Language shapes us, composes us, and forms us. Language is based not on words per se but on the use of this word and the meaning of it at a specific time and place. However, the anti-sexist hysteria [ouch!] with language, with both creating new words and not using certain words, only makes those feel guilty who express themselves using words in a colloquial manner. […] The meaning of a sentence cannot be captured solely by the definitions of the words that constitute the sentence. Those purporting to be anti-sexist only end up as jailors of semantics and detectives of the prohibited colloquial expressions.

As in the quotation above, this article acknowledges the raw components that anti-sexists work from (language, cultural events, etc) but challenges what anti-sexists make from those ingredients.

Doutsiou contrasts the simple support of the spectacle (those people who are content to take on the gender characteristics that are most simple and proscribed — sex kitten for women, macho man for men), with the anti-sexist specatacle that is the knee-jerk reaction to sexism (“women who express their aggression towards men in order to show tha they are not subjugated… men who avoid an honest aggressive dialogue with women because they must behave gently… even anarchist men and women who locate erroneous behaviors and explain them as sexist…”).

 

 

“The Limitations of  

The post “The Limitation of Anti-Sexism” by Sissy Doutsiou from Void Network appeared first on Void Network.