The body bag gaffe and racism

The Canadian of Health is preparing for an H1N1 epidemic: training their staff on how to handle an epidemic, testing vaccines, and so on. Which seems sensible enough. You wouldn't think that racism could possibly creep its way into the preparations. But if you thought such a process was above racism, you'd be wrong.

What my government-funded workplace did for me, my co-workers, and my students:
-They installed hand sanitizer in every hallway that I use to get to classroom that I teach in. Pretty thoughtful, really, since I have to open so many doors. Not wholly necessary, though.

What (until very recently) government-funded Aboriginal reserves received:
-Well, not hand sanitizers. Because, some bureaucrats suggested, they contain alcohol and the people might drink them instead.

What I, the white urbanite father, personally got by way of preparation:
-An somewhat informative pamphlet in the mail, telling me how to reduce my risk of infection, like by washing my hands frequently. A colorful and affable reminder to do more or less common-sense stuff.

What Aboriginal reserves in Alberta got by way of preparation:
-Body bags, reminding them implicitly to isolate the bodies of the people killed by the flu so as to prevent them from infecting others. Because we can't trust these people to separate the living from the dead, it would seem.

Mind you, they finally got those hand sanitizers in the same shipment. Something like 3 or 4 months (or more - I don't know when they were first requested, just when it was reported) after they asked for them, but they got them. Some victory.

The cover to Batman and Robin 3

This blog entry has nothing to do with the comic itself and everything to do with how good Frank Quitely is.

Take a look at the cover to Batman and Robin #3:


Pretty nifty, eh? All these trippy colors, a bunch of scary hands in the foreground and a bunch of Dollotrons for Batman and Robin to POW! PAFF! and BOP! (The SCT and BANG made of blood in the hospital scene? A perfect demonstration of Quitely's ability to adapt the TV show's aesthetic to the new title.) I did, however, wonder why two of the baddies seemed to be looking backward - looking at us, maybe? Looking at Professor Pyg? But that wouldn't make sense because he didn't wear those gloves. Weird.

But I put it down on my desk and when I came back the cover was upside down. Not only did I notice some now conspicuous design choices, but those two backward glancing characters made sense - because the cover is actually face:


The faces are eyeballs, the logo is a maniacal grin, and the white gloves a face, with Batman, Robin, and the throng in the background being a nose, of sorts. And those conspicuous details that now make sense? Well, green and purple can't possibly be random choices. And there's also a curious green glow on the thumbs of a Dollotron in the foreground - cast on them from the background, I guess, though it doesn't make physical sense. More likely it's a purely aesthetic choice, and when we reverse the cover it suggests green eyebrows for this face.

And the owner of that face: can it possibly belong to anyone other than the Joker? Very cool.

Stuart Hall on Marxism

From a longer piece by Michael Bérubé that nicely sums up why I don't call myself Marxist:

Indeed, if there was one thing that [Stuart] Hall inveighed against above all others in his debates with his fellow leftists, it was economism, the favorite monocausal explanation of the left intellectual. "I think of Marxism not as a framework for scientific analysis only but also as a way of helping you sleep well at night; it offers the guarantee that, although things don't look simple at the moment, they really are simple in the end," Hall wrote in 1983. "You can't see how the economy determines, but just have faith, it does determine in the last instance! The first clause wakes you up and the second puts you to sleep."

Caster Semenya and 'gender-testing'

I'll resist the urge to rant about how patently absurd it is to 'gender-test', given the impossibility of finding an exact scientific standard that expresses a common biological truth among all men or women, or a single (or even short list of) biological difference that clearly delineates one group from the other. In fact, I'll leave it at that.

A bunch of things are annoying me about all the attention that runner Caster Semenya's ostensible 'failure' of the gender-test - that is, it was revealed that she's intersex, that she has testes where her ovaries were expected to be - has produced. Foremost is the disturbing regularity with which news outlets are reporting the test results as if Semenya is some entirely undiscovered breed of humanity.

She isn't - Anne Fausto-Sterling lists some three-dozen different medically-defined sex variations that are collectively called intersex, and estimates that some 2% of the world's population fits one of those categories. (I've seen more conservative definitions and estimates, but even these would put the number of intersexed people across the globe in the millions.) She isn't even the first intersex person to be identified after medalling in a track and field event. More recently, a total of 23 women at the '92 and '96 Olympics were DQed for failing a DNA test. But, I suppose, the difference there is that they were tested prior to racing. Which is why no one noticed or cared.

Strangely, the wholly problematic tradition of sex and gender-testing in international sport - a 70 year long tradition - hasn't been contextualized or addressed at all. One would think that responsible journalism would note that it was commonplace in the 60s for female athletes to participate in a "nude parade", that the earliest genetic tests focused exclusively, and rather arbitrarily, on the presence of a "clump" of chromatin, and that failing the test doesn't necessarily indicate a chemical or biological advantage for the athlete. (In the majority of failed tests, in fact, the athletes displayed no other evidence - physically or hormonally - that they weren't normatively female.) Also, I obviously lied about saying that I wouldn't rant about gender-testing.

To their credit, I've haven't found a news outlet that has gone so far as to state that Semenya is 'actually' a man. There's a certain distress in their response to her ambiguity - and a lot of effort is taken to avoid using gendered-pronouns - but at least they're willing to entertain the possibility of ambiguity. Now if only they could actually use the opportunity to spread some understanding, rather than make it seem like something of a freak show.

(Note: Tavia Nyong'o has written a particularly good synopsis and analysis of the issues here.)

I hate the vocorder. Mostly.

The vocorder is to the late 00s what melisma was to the late 90s. Which is to say that it's ruined pop music all over again.

I don't absolutely hate either one, per se, but I definitely hate how widely and inappropriately they've been (mis)applied. The effect works perfectly with, say, Kanye's "Heartless" because it provides an incredibly apt musical texture for the lyric - just when it feels as if Kanye should be at his most impassioned, he sounds his most robotic. And there's an indeterminacy to the effect, too - has Kanye himself become cold and heartless, or has the artificiality of the vocorder overstated his case and, thus, undercut it?

I think the surest sign that the vocorder's reach has become too pervasive is when Mariah Carey - who arguably popularized the pop-melisma in the early 90s - also, and bafflingly, began to use the vocorder on her newest album. (I say 'bafflingly' because the vocorder was first used to subtly hide the vocal shortcomings of people who couldn't sing - ie. Britney Spears - and not to obscure the ability of people who can sing. Conversely, over-indulging in melisma seemed, at first, to be used as a way to flaunt one's voice and only later did it become clear that young singers were being taught to move between notes because they couldn't hold a single note - ie. Jessica Simpson.)

I can't embed Mariah Carey videos, so I'll post some links...
Vision of Love (1990) - The emblematic melismattic song.
Obsessed (2009) - The vocorder song.

And just to include something that, to my mind, uses the vocorder effectively...
Heartless (2008)

Notes on reactions to MJ's death

I started compiling some notes on the reactions to Michael Jackson's death four weeks ago, and then never came back to it. (I had an exam to prepare for, a move coming up, and, you know, life. And so I forgot about it.) Here are those notes, since they'll otherwise just sit, unread.

1. If discussions on Facebook and at softball (with other graduate students, mind you) are any indication, the response to Michael Jackson's death has been incredibly polarizing: among those who care too much and those who care not at all; those who find it newsworthy and those who wonder why we've suddenly stopped paying attention to Iran. (There is, of course, a minority of people who don't seem to think we need to fit one model or the other.)
2. The people who decry all the attention seem to characterize the response to MJ's death in terms that seem like Bourdieu's notion of the 'carnivalesque' - a debased space of excessive affect and grotesque expression, the lowest of low cultures. (And, I would add, a hysterical space.) It's at once a liberating space of enunciation, on the periphery of culture, and a mode of containment by hegemonic culture - ejected from the center but nonetheless under its regulatory power. Importantly, the gesture of placing something within the carnivalesque marks it as illicit, and so both an object of repulsion and desire. It's also, as Gael Sweeney notes, a particularly apt model for theorizing the relation of ghettoized cultures to the middle-class mainstream - white-trash and black pop-culture in relation to the white norm.
3. Charges of the grotesque and excess have, of course, been levelled against MJ himself for at least the past two decades. In his infamous interview with Martin Bashir, Jackson associates with 'taste' ('good taste', implicitly) those objects and artworks which Bashir deems gaudy and tacky. (And so MJ is also guilty of the sins of those who are 'new money'.) Jackson's obsession with plastic surgery and whitening, of course, are both grotesque and excessive, though they're also expressive of another element of the carnivalesque - its normative function in race politics. Just as those who think themselves universal must believe that the occupants of the carnivalesque would reject it if only they knew better, MJ's bodily transformation seems to express how non-whites aspire to whiteness - and how, because the non-white is carnivalesque in its essence, that transformation can never convincingly happen. (Though this is perhaps too obviously and problematically essentializing a gesture for anyone but the most racist of white people to admit of black people. Of white trash, though...)
   
4. There's a gendered element to the response, too. As Victoria reminds me, the public performance of women's grief, seemingly irrespective of race, is made to seem less carnivalesque. I'm guessing that the ostensible naturalness of women's affective responses has something to do with this. And while the carnivalesque nature of non-white people is also naturalized, it's strikes me as a more pejorative description - the emotions of women are thought to serve a role in maintaining society that the carnivalsque simply can't and won't.
5. Of course, white people (men, implicitly, since white women are a great deal more ambivalent when you need to consider their whiteness and womanness as positions that exist in some ambivalence) engaged in the carnivalesque are a far more problematic thing, given that they are the ostensible bearers of a rationalist tradition. (Appropriately, stereotypical funeral conventions, and gendered roles that people are expected to play, illustrate this rational/carnivalesque difference rather aptly.) And a hysterical response marks a rational subject as suspect - someone who should be marginalized, which is especially troubling if that person looks as if they belong at the center, and so makes visible the contingency of a racialized and gendered hegemony.
   
6. And so this takes me back to 'guilty displeasure', which I wrote about - and others helped me develop - a long while back. For many of those (mostly white people) who are tired of hearing about Michael Jackson, complaining about his overexposure (or about the celebrity culture that he exemplifies, etc.) has become something of a worthwhile performance itself. And it's not about reveling in the displeasure that one feels toward MJ as it is about the displeasure one feels for the people who have reacted hysterically to his death - especially those people who mark themselves as either traitors to one's race (white women) or one's gender (white men).
7. I'm overstating my point, I realize. I don't think that, for the most part, this is a conscious logic or even an unconscious one. But I'm trying to trace a tradition that I think these responses mirror in an eerie way.
   

Al Jolson and Michael Jackson: Blackface/whiteface

George Elliott Clarke on Michael Jackson:

[I]t may make sense to view Jackson as a reverse Al Jolson, the white entertainer who made it big in blackface in 1920s Hollywood.

To which I can only reply: no, it doesn't.


Granted, Jolson's contemporaries considered his blackface performances to be of an anti-racist sort (especially since Jolson was Jewish and so only a marginally white person himself) and he's credited with popularizing jazz and blues within white America. But let's not forget that blackface rarely encouraged anything more than a superficial relationship with its material - that it was a hyperbolic performance that plays up the cool, the illicit, and the sexual aspects of an imagined black community for the amusement of a white audience. And that Jolson's blackface - by virtue of being so clearly theatrical - also served to establish his claim to whiteness by way of contrast: the falsity of his blackface made real and authentic his 'whiteface'. (And while it might have opened doors for black musicians to cross over into white spaces, it also prescribed the stereotype that they were expected to fit.)

It would be difficult, or impossible, to suggest that MJ's whiteface had that sort of reciprocal effect (especially since most people think it delegitimized his blackness) or that he performed whiteness for a black audience so as to make it something they could control and consume. It's difficult to suggest that he had any explicit politics at all, much less to suggest that he thought he was doing whiteface.

A friend told me that it's pointless to keep talking about the "real" Michael Jackson and to impute what his body or his behavior "means", as if it isn't already overdetermined. (To paraphrase Foucault, he resembled his crime before he committed it. If he commited it at all.) All that we really have, she said, is his music. That might be a tad oversimplified, but it's preferable to his unproblematized reimagining as queer revolutionary and anti-racist icon.

Comicboards and the internet forum as liberal state: briefly

I started posting at Comicboards, a website with a huge range of superhero message boards, way back in 1997, when I was still pretty new to the internet. I started moderating a message board about a year and a half later, and I did that pretty consistently for about a decade. (Though, really, my heart was hardly into it for the last few years.) And since I quit eight or so months ago, I can probably count the number of days I've gone back to visit on one hand.

The problem with Comicboards - and it's been a problem since nearly the very beginning - is one that reminds me of one of the problems noted in Wendy Brown's critique of the liberal state: namely, that the liberal state privileges the juridical protection of the individual over that of the community. And that, in fact, it completely elides the recognition of a group identity that isn't specifically embodied in particular persons. (ie. A marginalized group of people is protected only insofar as the individuals that lay claim to that identity can't be discriminated against for comprising it. The group itself is considered to be nothing more than the sum of its parts.)

An example: The time before the most recent stop I made there, I got into an argument with an admittedly embittered poster who asked a question that amounted to 'which is kind of woman is worse - a lying slut or a cheating whore?' Now Comicboards has a system of rules that protect against "blatantly insulting" behaviour. The problem is, this community is 95% male and his obviously misogynistic question was a 'hypothetical' one and not addressed to anyone in particular - a key requirement of the "insult" rule being that there needs to be an individual who is the injured party. On the other hand, my response - in which I called him a misogynist and insisted that he was "crazy-wrong" - was personal and direct. And so the original post was left intact and my responses were branded a personal attack - evidently no one was familiar with my cutting-edge usage of the word "crazy", since it was deemed insulting to his mental state - and deleted.

And what was worse than the utterly twisted logic of determining injury, I think, was that the deletion of the only critical response to the post also, unfortunately, served as a tacit endorsement of misogyny. After all, if insults are against the rules and one post in the thread is deleted for containing insults while another is left untouched, then it follows that the untouched post is not insulting, right?

Another example: More recently, a poster admitted to confusion over the vague intimation of racial solidarity expressed by the Redskins' Jason Campbell over the death of Steve McNair, both of whom are/were two of only a small handful of black NFL quarterbacks. He wondered why the verbalization of black solidarity was socially permissable when he was certain that white solidarity would be met with charges of racism. My response was to point out that the two were historically overdetermined in very different ways - like feminism, black American solidarity is usually an expression of equality, while white solidarity, like masculinism, has tended to be an expression of superiority - and that there was no reason to assume, much less any evidence that would prove, that Campbell's grief was expressive of racial superiority. (Among other points as to the incomparability of white and black racial solidarity and the NFL that, you'll have to forgive me, are too numerous and long to list here. And probably too boring.)

And that response prompted one of Comicboards' managers to sincerely liken Campbell's words of mourning to those shouted by a gang of ostensibly black supremacist teens that attacked a white family, an analogy that was admittedly "outrageous" but which he asserted was "no joke". That such an ostentatiously racist comparison can be made by one of the site's administrators speaks powerfully, I think, to the pervasiveness of the technology of liberal individuation described above. Given that both Campbell and the teens are asserting some affinity for a community and belonging beyond that of liberal individuals relating to other liberal individuals, they're equally suspicious and problematized by the system's logic, one that's premised on an idea of equality that's ahistorical and can't register the historical overdetermination of race.

Just as a sexist attack on women is not an actual attack for lack of an individual woman who is its victim, "racism" is measurable only within a singularity - the decontextualized events and individuals who have been stripped of the historical and social specifics that actually make racism a meaningful concept in the first place. (And we were told that the internet was going to change everything.)

The queerness(?) of Michael Jackson

This article about Michael Jackson and his status as queer icon was recently posted to my departmental listserv. I tend to agree with what it suggests about MJ's victimization by a system of compulsory heterosexuality that he tried to fit but couldn't. (I'm less certain about whether he actually had vitiligo, but his eventually cartoonish efforts to whiten himself through bleaching and surgery go well beyond dealing with a medical condition.)

Among the exchanges in response to the article over the list, one friend suggests that Jackson didn't actually aspire to normativity. I can see why he'd be tempted to say that - through the late 80s and early 90s, a surprising amount of academic writing was devoted to discussions of MJ's ironic embodiments and performance of identity, masculinity, sexuality, and whiteness. It seems fair to wonder why anyone who wanted to seem 'normal' would choose to have his face altered in such a way that it looked inhuman.

But I'm of the opinion that MJ was entirely too conscious of normative white America's ideal images. The problem, and it's the same problem that appears to have informed many of his life's decisions, is that he tried to normalize himself in the way that a little boy would - by exaggerating to the point of parodic and grotesque excess. That is, it would be parodic if it weren't so sincere; and it would be endearing (rather than disturbing) if, like a child, we thought that he was expressing some inner-essence - a masculinity that he would eventually grow into.

And as for 'the queerness of Michael Jackson'? Another friend adds that "Queer also isn't synonymous with deviant, although often, what is regarded as deviant can be included in what it is to be Queer". So failing to be heteronormative does not make one queer - especially in MJ's case where it seems so clear that he wanted to be heteronormative and just didn't know how to go about doing it. No one ever perfectly matches the demands of compulsory hetersexuality, but it's rare that someone who wanted so badly to match it ended up missing the mark so spectacularly.

King of Rock, King of Pop...

Two oddly similar "facts" that I stumbled upon in the last 6 hours from completely unrelated sources:

1. The Michael Jackson Fan Club reports that, as of today, 12 people have committed suicide in response to the death of The Gloved One.
2. As of 1991, about 100 times as many miraculous healings had been attributed to Elvis as had been attributed to the average Catholic saint.

Liars and monsters: part 2

While not nearly as bombastic as the Letterman-Palin mess, Canada had a far less banal crisis of misinterpretation involving politicians this past week. Aside from how the ideological positions are reversed in this example - rather than the liberal Letterman being taken to task for something he didn't say by the conservative Palin, it's a Conservative being burned at the stake by Liberals - there are eerie similarities.

The controversy surrounds newish MP Lisa Raitt, the Natural Resources minister, who is recorded - on a private tape that was left in a washroom - saying that she would love to have the Health minister's job. The problem, it seems, is that she's heard to say that the Health portfolio's issue-of-the-moment, a shortage of nuclear-istopes used in cancer treatments, is "sexy".

Like the Letterman joke, I'd like to believe that only someone who is incredibly dense would think that Raitt was literally calling cancer "sexy". And yet that's exactly how NGOs, cancer survivors, and Raitt's political opponents are choosing to interpret it. As someone who generally despises the Conservative government, I'd love to see Raitt resign and the party go down in shame. As someone who would like to pretend that representative democracies can work, I'd rather they admit that it's just not that big a deal.

The thing is, cancer is a sexy topic - in the same, desexualized way that terrorism is sexy - by virtue of its ubiquity and importance within Canadians' popular consciousness, and the same politicians castigating Raitt know this better than most. (I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't occur to many of them that a political gaffe of this sort presents a particularly sexy opening for some opportunistic attacks.) If Raitt made a mistake, it was not unlike Letterman's - her choice of words could be too easily misappropriated. (Which is not to say that the phantasmic meaning of sexy=sexual isn't implicit or subtextual, even when the word is being used in a particularly desexualized way as it is here. But, again, that's a different blog entry right there...)

Sarah Palin is either a liar or a monster (or both? why not?)

So David Letterman made a joke a few days ago about the Palin family attending a Yankees game and Alex Rodriguez impregnating one of Sarah's daughters. Sarah Palin immediately fired back, pointing out that the only daughter at the game was the 14-year old, Willow, and so Letterman was joking about "the statutory rape of my daughter".

And if he were joking about statutory rape, I'd actually share her indignance. But he wasn't - to all but the least discerning of people, it should be clear that he was making a joke about the older daughter, Bristol, who is already a teenager mother. (And given that Bristol's out-of-wedlock baby problematizes Sarah Palin's 'family values' schtick, also taking an indirect shot at Sarah.)

What amazes me about the entire exchange, though, are these three things:

1. The number of people (dozens, hundreds) who have the basic intelligence necessary to blog but are nonetheless convinced that a) Letterman actually knew which daughter(s) were present at the game, and b) that he would knowingly make a sex joke about a 14-year old. Sarah Palin herself called Matt Lauer "naive" for suggesting that Letterman was making a joke about Bristol (because Bristol has never been the butt of a joke, right?). When Lauer asked whether, in a press release, she was sincerely suggesting that Letterman couldn't be trusted around a teenaged girl (it's implied - and I'm willing to give Palin's people some credit and call it a joke, but a bad one - that he's a pedophile) she stumbled through her response and couldn't actually bring herself to tease out what was being implied. Because, at best, she's being completely disingenuous. At worst, she's being totally malicious.

2. Ironically, in refusing to admit the possibility that Letterman was making a joke at Bristol's expense, Palin actually endorses Dave's intended joke and its implied meaning - that, to put it plainly, Bristol is a slut. Palin has made it clear that she will rain down on Dave with hellfire for insulting her family and women in general, so one has to wonder why she uses no fraction of her outrage in support of Bristol. It's as if mom thinks that only one of her daughters is actually deserving of a defense - hence the title of this blog, because only a monster could behave that way.

3. No one seems to care that at least half of Letterman's joke was directed at A-Rod. In fact, if Palin is right, then the entire joke was at A-Rod's expense. That said, we should point out that the reason a joke about A-Rod impregnating anyone is at all funny is because he's infamous for being something of a (purported? confirmed? i don't follow him closely enough) serial adulterer. That level works if the joke is about Bristol but not if it's about Willow. If it's about Willow, then suddenly the joke is about A-Rod being a pedophile, an accusation that's never been raised against him. It seems to escape Palin entirely that her favored interpretation of the joke casts A-Rod as a pedophile, and that this is equally problematic. That she hasn't addressed this element of the joke whatsoever is probably worth thinking about - and I'd suggest that it's also an implicit endorsement of it. (One has to wonder whether A-Rod's ambivalent relationship to his American-ness and his race have some role to play in the ostensible obviousness of the joke's appropriateness, but that would be an entire post in and of itself.)

Batman and Robin #1

(Please forgive the awfulness of the image quality - my Photoshop has been glitchy, so I resorted to a hack job in *ugh* MSPaint. Forgive me, Burt Ward and Frank Quitely.)

I wasn't the only person who found Robin's pose on the cover of Batman and Robin #1 really familiar, right? I've been told that Morrison and Quitely are going for a 60s TV show feel, and I have to say that I'm pretty impressed with how they've managed to the incorporate elements from it without either a) importing the cheese-factor, or b) appearing to mock it.

I doubt I'm adding anything new, but I wanted to reiterate how awesome it is that Quitely pays homage to the visualized sound-effects of the show by actually working them into his drawings (what's the opposite of onomatopeoia, anyway?), how the text and images of the preview recall its cliffhangers, or how Pyg is a sort of grotesque twist on the sorts of lame, circus-like villains of the show. Pyg's henchmen, though, also manage to bridge a gap between the show and Morrison's own ouvre - not only are they a hideous take on the uniform henchman gangs on the TV series, but they also call to mind the Stepford Cuckoo's from Morrison's New X-Men. (Though exactly how far that link runs remains to be seen.)

Feminist fatherhood (and motherhood)

[I haven't written much on here about how I became a dad a little over four months ago. That's not to say that I haven't been writing - I've been keeping a diary for more than ten months, addressed to the baby herself - but that I haven't known how to write about it for more than an audience of two or three. But maybe I should try?]

Victoria, who's reviewing some books on motherhood, tells me that there's an assumption among those who write about (and attempt to enact) feminist motherhood that the mother should put herself first and not sacrifice everything for the baby. So I can only suppose that there's an assumption of a feminist partner (either another mother or a father) who is able to take on a co-primary caregiver role. (Though, as I understand it, the other partner's role often isn't emphasized at all.) The ironic thing is that many of the same people who write about feminist mothering admit that they don't know how to actually do that.

As for feminist fatherhood, it seems implicit that my goal should be the reverse – that dads need to learn how to put themselves second if not third, to the baby if not the mother. But I'm generalizing to a great degree when I say this - the practice of "feminist fathering" is far more amorphous and phantasmatic than feminist mothering. Amazon lists some 900+ books on the latter topic and about 125 on the former, but even this comparison is misleading - the "feminist fathering" search results includes many of the books that are more properly about feminist mothering, and the only result from among the first half dozen pages that is actually about feminist fathering addresses it in such a way that it calls the very existence of a practice into question: "Do Men Mother?" (What does it mean to "mother" anyway? And what sorts of limits does that place on fathering?)

But if I'm right to draw out this distinction, then it's also true that things rarely work out this way - and that, in fact, it's still often the opposite. Feminist moms can't fully extricate themselves from the mostly conservative models of motherhood they've inherited and the same seems true of feminist dads and fatherhood. (This might be why the book title above asks if dad can "mother", presuming that they need to cross-identify in order to find something worth imitating.) And while there are people in our lives that assert the need for Victoria to find me-time or for me to act more like a full-time dad, these are still largely exceptional moments. For the most part, our casual friends, colleagues, and co-workers will (uncritically and unconsciously, I'm sure) question Victoria whenever she goes anywhere without the baby and, conversely, assume that I should be free and flexible to drop things at a moment's notice. (Less often, there's an assumption that I can/should want to work more and make more money; Victoria is often challenged for not taking a leave from school and work.)

It’s hard enough to negotiate these ideals of feminist mothering and fathering when it seems as if no one knows how to negotiate them. But it's even harder when those people who should, you would think, be most supportive of these goals don’t realize that they’re constantly undermining them.

Airbrushing Uhura

Weeks after everyone else, I decided to get some Star Trek glasses from Burger King. And because I was weeks after everyone else, they only had Uhura and Nero left - so I got both.

Why this is worth mentioning, though, is because I barely recognized Zoe Saldana as Uhura. Bizarrely, she's been so excessively Photoshopped that her black hair looks golden-blonde. And her skin? Well, I'll put an image from the Star Trek site of Eric Bana's Nero glass beside the Uhura glass - can you tell that one actor is white and other's black? (And if you knew nothing more than this distinction, would you misapply those labels?)

edit: And there's probably a common sensical (and so incredibly problematic) reason that their skin colors seem to have been swapped - Nero is 'evil' (his glass is darker and the ship must absorb ambient light, it's such a deep green-black) and Uhura is 'good' (and much like her skin and hair, the ship and its background glow unnaturally). Because good is bright and evil is dark, of course.

The ongoing battle for Canadian identity: Ignatieff and the Tory commercials

With a federal election certain to be called in the next few months, the Conservatives have taken to launching pre-emptive attack ads at Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, a public intellectual probably best known in North America for his work in Security Studies - work that he did, the Tories point out, almost exclusively outside Canada, in the UK and USA.

The Liberals contend that attacks, based on a 34-year absence from the country, are simultaneously an attack on all expat Canadians (Liberal strategist Warren Kinsella lists Wayne Gretzky, Neil Young, and Celine Dion as figures who must then be equally problematic) and naturalized immigrants, who may have also spent the majority of their lives outside the country. Tory strategist Tim Powers counters that it's not that he left, or necessarily the length of time, but rather "it's what he said when he was outside the country" - referring to his explicitly identifying as an American and a Brit while residing in those countries.

Kinsella's analogies are hardly perfect; neither is Powers' response convincing. Kinsella's examples include people who represent Canada in an official capacity at international events (Gretzky) and keep a Canadian residence (Dion), and all three actively and repeatedly assert their Canadianness - none of which could be said of Ignatieff during those three and a half decades. As for Powers' argument, it doesn't escape the latter charge made by the Liberals, as a huge number of Canadian immigrants (and, as has been my experience, even many 2nd and 3rd generation Canadians) likewise don't identify themselves primarily "Canadian".

That Ignatieff (and Gretzky, Young, Dion, I'm sure, if they were challenged in a similar fashion) can convincingly, if not unproblematically, liken himself to both the celebrity expats and the marginalized (and presumably non-white) immigrant is no small feat and has everything to do with which of those two groups he more closely resembles. Those same immigrants couldn't look to Gretzky and Dion in order to legitimate their own tenuous hold on Canadian identity - they were, after all, born Canadian ("natural" Canadians vs. "naturalized" Canadians) and, tellingly, are all white. Ignatieff can invoke an analogy of oppression but the reverse, an analogy of privilege that should theoretically be open to non-white immigrants, seems somehow a harder sell.

Consider, too, that Ignatieff is able to reinforce his own claim to Canadianness (though not without a certain element of danger, as I'll explain) by way of an appeal to people who are considered provisionally Canadian without reciprocal increase in their Canadianness. But were a non-white Canadian lobby group to attempt to increase their access to Canadianness by way of appeal to white Canadian figures like Ignatieff, I suspect that a) the simile wouldn't be as convincing, b) they would do little to advance their own cause, and c) that they would actually damage Ignatieff's own status as Canadian. Rather than improve their own standing relative to hegemonic ideas of Canadian identity, they would problematize his.

There's an analogy to be made here to American racial politics - the "one drop" rule of racial blood - which Canada has regrettably absorbed: Ignatieff's whiteness can't whiten the immigrants' non-whiteness, but the reverse - the loss of Ignatieff's Canadianness (which is bound to his whiteness) - remains an ever-present risk. And it's precisely that danger that the Conservatives are invoking - and that Ignatieff, in drawing out what the Tories themselves could not say explicitly, is inadvertantly reinforcing.

Because there can't be a blockbuster newstory without an appropriately explosive ending...

In the latest iteration of the Missing White Girl media phenomenon*, Southern Ontario's media has been equal parts hysterical and manic for the past month and a half while reporting on the kidnapping of an 8 year old. So, of course, when two arrests were made just yesterday the TV personality who reported it on Canada AM made some appropriately asinine comments, noting that the arresting officers were comparing the case to that of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka - but that we "shouldn't make any assumptions."

Oh, right. That makes sense - because we don't know why she was kidnapped or what happened, even if we assume that these people kidnapped her. Because you know what will keep people from making crazy assumptions? Comparing the arrested to Canada's most infamous rapist/murderers. Certainly, I would never jump to any conclusions upon learning that the police are reminded of the serial killers that kidnapped and raped as many 30 teenage girls between the two of them.

That is some fine and responsible journalism, right there.

*Just to be clear: I don't use the expression or link to the Onion in order to disparage the victim; I do it only to mock the absurdity of the media's tunnel-vision and their obsession with wringing these stories for all the pathos they're worth.

The LOST season finale, and Season 5 in general...

Over on Geoff's blog, he writes that the show will pull through in Season 6 because it always puts the characters first and the mythology second. But I think that this season is among LOST's weakest precisely because that wasn't true.

The Jack-Kate relationship would serve as Exhibit A, I think. Jack became thoroughly unlikable and his skepticism transformed into a cynicism that bordered on nihilism; Kate was present but virtually inaccessible with respect to her feelings and motivation. The two interacted so little on the island that it wasn't until the finale that I realized they still had feelings for each other and we were supposed to be rooting for them.

Conversely, Sawyer and Juliet was pulled off in a surprisingly convincing manner. Still, given that their relationship arrived fully-formed, a flashback covering the previous three years on the island and giving us a reason to feel invested in them as a couple would've been nice. We're supposed to sympathize with Juliet, I think, when she's made to feel anxious by Kate's arrival, but instead I felt a sense of inevitability - that Juliet would be become jealous and do something dumb, that Sawyer would give her a reason, that the Jack-Kate-Sawyer triangle would reassert itself.

For all the character work that didn't happen, then, it's also surprising that so little of the mythology seems to have been developed or resolved. The trip into the past added surprisingly little to our understanding of the Island and its inhabitants, while the much more interesting stuff happening in the present was barely given any time to breathe. When you toss in the introduction of some timeless battle between Jacob and his adversary (now known to the internet as Esau) and a whole new group of survivors, it's enough to make one suspect that there will be little more effort put on the characters next year.

This is not to say that I think the show went all wrong. Some individual episodes around the middle of the season were fantastic - Locke's, in particular - and the season really picked up when it seemed they realized that it should have started with Jack waking up on the island and not spun its wheels for several episodes trying to explain how he would get there. And the inversion of Ben and Locke's roles - the evil schemer and naive follower - was damn clever and fiendishly executed. (These two are probably my favorite characters, and no less so now that Ben is emotionally crushed and Locke is no longer Locke.) And while Sawyer's turn as leader and thinker was far too short lived (again, this development would have benefited from a flashback), I liked what they did with him, even if they pissed it away with a predictable reversion in the last couple episodes.

Finally, I like that I have absolutely no idea where this next season will start. (I guessed that Season Four would start where, it turns out, Season Five began, and that Five would open with them back on the Island.) Having them landing in LA in 2004 would be a ballsy move, but I'm not sure where they would go from there; picking up in 2007 with the characters having landed in LA three years earlier would at least fit the timeline that the show has established, but would seem to make equally little sense. Really, though, nothing to this point suggests that Daniel was right in thinking that the past could be changed, and so I wouldn't be surprised to see the Losties from 1977 end up in 2007, as little sense as that might make. (The white flash did, after all, share a certain resemblance with the white flashes that sent them flying through time earlier in the season. In which case we have no reason to think that Juliet's necessarily dead.)

But that would just be a really cheap way to get them back, wouldn't it? And make it seem as if they were in the 70s for no good reason, except maybe to explain... no, they didn't even really explain or show us anything that we didn't already know or suspect we knew. (Radzinsky was more intriguing as a stain, and DHARMA more interesting when everything we knew about them was gleaned from old film and a pile of corpses in the jungle. And we discovered absolutely nothing new about The Others, except that Ellie and Charles have some sort of 'complicated' relationship, both romantically and with respect to the leadership of the group. Though we don't know what that complication is. Still.)

Problems in applying the Prime Directive

From an article on Star Trek's Prime Directive, from the Toronto Star:

[Queen's University's Kim Richard] Nossal warns, however, against adhering too closely to anything like the Prime Directive. Taken to its extreme, he says, it can be a justification for both isolationism and ignoring the needs of other countries under the guise of respecting their territorial integrity.

That kind of thinking, he says, is what allowed the genocide in Rwanda to go unheeded, an outcome now roundly seen as a failure by the international community to act when needed.

I'm sure that Nossal is a fine and rigorous academic, but it's this sort of sloppy work on pop culture that reflects poorly on all of the rest.

The first problem, and one that Nossal seems keenly aware of, is that the Prime Directive is an ideal that isn't at all applicable to any inter-cultural meetings or exchanges in the 21st century - colonialism and globalization have seen to it that there no society can exist without some awareness of and relationship with the West/Global North. (But maybe he was pressed to try anyway...)

The second, and more egregious problem, is that his example of Rwanda is a hideously inappropriate one. We could maybe cite examples retrospectively, and maybe even try applying the directive to contexts where the exposure to Euro-American influence has not already been disastrous. The problem with the Rwandan Genocide example, though, is that the situation was itself created by colonialism and overdetermined by it. The Tutsi and Hutu populations which constituted the opposing sides in the civil war, for example, were only 100 years ago class-distinctions that became hard-and-fast ethnic classifications when Germany and then Belgium took control. (The Belgians and Roman Catholic church went so far as to invent socio-scientific definitions and give out cards.) While the UN's non-interference in 1993/94 was a problem, it's useless, and dangerous, to discuss it - much less use it in a discussion of Star Trek's Prime Directive - without acknowledging that it couldn't have happened in the first place without European interference.

Really, though, I'm quite confident Nossal knows all of this. So what is it about pop culture applications of theory and politics that seems to cause writers to lose their critical edge?

8 quick thoughts on Scott Pilgrim

1. The latest volume, "...vs. The Universe", was an improvement over the previous one. (Which I kinda disliked.) Scott was less grating, perhaps because this issue was less emo in its pretentions and so I was less critical of the preposterousness of his relationship with Ramona. But also because...
2. This issue made it clear that, whether intentionally or because O'Malley - like me - is more interested in her, Ramona has become the central character in (what is ostensibly) Scott's story. At this point, there is little that is novel, provocative, or mysterious about Scott - and, luckily, Ramona supplies those things to an excess. Tellingly, she's also been featured on more covers than the title character himself. When she disappears, I want to know why and what will happen next. To her. Not to Scott, so much. Which is unfortunate, because the book closes in following the wrong character.
3. The film adaptation by Edgar Wright has been shooting here in Toronto for a short while, now, and Wright just posted a vlog of the first day of shooting. Some personal connections: One of the stand-ins visible in the first 15 seconds or so is a guy I took a grad class with a couple years ago. Which is not as weird as it seems, given that I know some of the real people that various characters in the series have been modeled on. (I also e-interviewed O'Malley, who once played in my friend's band, when the first book in the series came out. I don't typically advertise the results, though. It was a much... stranger exchange than I expected.)
4. Clever casting, one: The series' mastermind and villain, Gideon, was first seen in shadow, then given a fuzzy cameo in the penultimate issue, and won't actually be revealed in full until the last one. Appropriately, then, the identity of the actor playing Gideon is officially secret. (But unofficially, we know that it's Jason Schwartzman. Which is a pretty cool choice.)
5. Clever casting, two: Chris Evans and Brandon Routh are playing two of the evil exes that Scott must defeat. Given the series nominal status as a superhero series, of sorts, it's incredibly cool that they've cast guys who are most famous for playing superheroes. Only this time they're playing bad guys.
6. Clever casting, three: And Ramona's female ex? She's being played by Mae Whitman - Ann from Arrested Development. So Michael Cera, as Scott, will be fighting George Michael Bluth's ex-girlfriend.
7. Clever casting, four: I said it's 'nominally' a superhero series because it's actually something of a hybrid - it mixes and matches bits of superhero convention with copious video game references, teen drama more befitting an indy title (or hour-long TV serial), and a manga inspired visual style. It's bizarrely appropriate, then, that the very first evil ex is played by Satya Bhabha - son of Homi Bhabha, the post-colonial theorist who writes of, among other things, the political potential of hybridity.
8. Clever casting, five?: I can't actually find anything on the two remaining exes, the twins. But I hope that they don't disappoint, either.