Scribblings with Green Chalk

 
 
… I would be able to finish this sentence in French. As things are, I can still read certain things and ask about the restroom. If I were her, I would be quite shameless in decorating my apartment with Elliott Erwitt’s portraits of myself. I wonder if de Beauvoir had a secret room where she retired to absorb them in narcissistic abandon.

As an existentialist, she might have discarded the temptation that I would probably act upon: to haunt him sometimes as a punishment for publishing all those photo albums about dogs after my demise.

My presentation on America Day by Day already done and delivered, I will reread The Second Sex and leave Mr. Erwitt in peace. Note to self: keep growing the hair, get an interesting necklace and shawl, and practice elegantly nonchalant occupation of uncomfortable chairs.

So apparently Karl Lagerfeld is amazed by Chan Marshall and wants to make her the next fashion icon. I not only despise Karl *** Pretentious Lagerfeld but hate all those attempts at Madonna’ing every possible female musician. I remember seeing pictures of Tori Amos playing background piano at a Viktor and Rolf show, thinking, oh my god, not only did they dress her in an old lampshade but they put her in piano bar hell and made her smile at it! And while American Doll Posse was not a bad album, the rawness of the first records died in silk and fumes of Chanel No.5. So now they’re after poor Cat Power. Death by fashion. This is how the world ends.

(Image found here)

Those self-righteous uppity bitches just don’t know when to stop. They throw at you that twisted nonsense divorced from reality, cos they’re closed off in their own world. They’re loud and ridiculous. Vicious and competitive. Turn off the volume and you get an amusing pantomime. Caricatures of women. They’re like half-women, trying so hard to be like men. If they knew the meaning of the word “moderation,” they’d just shut up.

Sorry. Did I forget the quotation marks? I was so focused on translating. I’ve always been quite gifted with languages, supposedly because I have ovaries. Or because I inherited the talent from my father. Either it’s irresistible biology, my small, comely feminine brain, or my masculine side, making me an exceptional token woman, almost as neat as a guy. Theories of intelligence are exciting, really. And they’re oh so objective and oh so neutral.

There is an interesting post on Shakesville about this article. Sadly, the comments shifted quickly from theories and perception of intelligence to whether men are “maybe, just maybe, actually smarter.” Good luck arriving at conclusions beyond the shadow of a doubt. But just how do you plan to “see” and evaluate intelligence? I might have old information, but for all I know no one has procured the philosopher’s stone and we’re stuck in a world of perceptions, misperceptions, and inferences.

The first paragraph is, as I hinted, a translation of a message I’ve heard many times. In its most polite formulation meant as “good advice,” it sounded like this:

“Modesty is the greatest virtue. A truly modest person will be content with possessing knowledge and keeping it to herself. She will answer only when asked directly. She will help others, give them the answer, because she knows she has a moral duty toward the group to work toward achieving harmony, to cooperate.”

Quotation marks duly inserted. Emphasis mine. The only thing this vision lacks is a deathbed scene wherein a grateful crowd gathers over the heroine’s body (after her last breath) to say how wonderful she was. Hearing the accolades would be to immodest, of course she has to be dead. Why do I make “person” feminine? Because I got this wonderful lesson of “true womanhood” from someone who was very concerned about my modesty. It’s a picture of what I should have become but never could.

Looking back, I can say I am greatly indebted to my native culture and system of education for the following: for not knowing what “intelligence” should mean, having heard smart and accomplished women described as bitter bitches (worse if they happened to be childless and/or unmarried), for not having a sense of reality that would allow me not to feel like the world’s biggest hoax, an award and national contest winning idiot, for recognizing my curiosity as inappropriateness, stupidity, a desire to be “one of the boys,” for translating my ambition as “trying too hard,” ” an anti-social impulse.”

Abiding by the rules of “modesty” does not let a woman excel. But that is not a problem, given that an “immodest” woman is evil. And, as so many will let her know, she is not a woman at all, because she supposedly wants to be a man, as shown by her sins against femininity.

The performance of intelligence is gendered, and intelligence itself, the “essence” is beyond reach. You never experience someone’s naked intelligence. There’s always gender trouble and intellectual cross-dressing involved.

When you hear a man disclaiming his contribution with “This may be stupid or irrelevant…” or “I’m sorry…”, let me know. I never have. If that happens somewhere in the world maybe we can talk about those IQ tests.

Time’s dust is slowly accumulating between me and my essay on Elizabeth Bishop’s conception of poetry as a glass eye gifted with sight. I decided to close the process of revision and consider the essay done, though I still can’t read it without thinking that it could be improved in many ways. Today, I would also add other questions to my original inquiry. But that could be a separate essay, couldn’t it? The question of creative and created sight remains open.

Because the most interesting points about sight were made by Bishop, not by me, I hesitate to paste here any excerpts from my paper. One possible point of departure for more questioning would be this paragraph, which brings together many of the ideas that interested me then: Probing the limitations of perception is one of Bishop’s idées fixes. Regardless of whether we are dealing with objectivized narration or an emotionally-colored description, the problem of the sense and aim of observation inevitably returns. The knowledge gained through watching the world closely is always questionable, being a combination of what one sees and what one only desires to see. By recreating visual experience through linguistic means, the poem becomes, out of necessity, also a tale of the act of perception. References to other senses not only emphasize certain characteristics of the object but, above all, expose the limitations of sight, its dependence on memory and imagination. Naturalness and artificiality are therefore present in observation from the very beginning.

I’m glad I used “objectivized” and not “objective,” which settles the Krapp argument tentatively in favor of me being the same person now and then. Sight as Bishop constructed it in her poetry was never “pure,” innocent, or unquestionable. Not all-embracing, not all-knowing. Tricky.

About sight in poetry, she wrote:

Off and on I have written out a poem called “Grandmother’s Glass Eye” which should be about the problem of writing poetry. The situation of my grandmother strikes me as rather like the situation of a poet: the difficulty of combining the real with the decidedly un-real; the natural with the unnatural; the curious effect a poem produces of being as normal as sight and yet as synthetic, as artificial, as a glass eye.

(Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box 212).

Although this applies to representation of sight, I think it could be extended first to extraliterary representation and then to conceptualizing sight as such. Not that this hasn’t been done, because it has — if it hadn’t, I wouldn’t even be asking about this, because the notion of disembodied objectivity still has rather strong appeal.

I’m thinking of Bishop’s modesty as pitted against the Objectivity of scientific representation. Remember what she did in Georgaphy III? The series of questions that opens that volume creates a skeptical lens through which to view space, distances, places, and phenomena from the poems. Sight according to Bishop is a modest sense. So modest that in “Poem” Bishop cuts it off from visionary pretences–

Our visions coincided—“visions” is
too serious a word—our looks, two looks

Is modest sight too dubious for science? Is vision the locus of objectivity? How can objectivity be questioned?

I could probably turn now towards modest sight as a david to scientific vision’s goliath in Bishop’s poetry, but in this sketchy post I’ll go in the other direction.

Whether scientists like it or not (and I know a few who don’t, because they will insist that linguistic is not a “real” science), language plays with them and their findings. The “objectivity” that is touted as the ultimate truth of inquiry and representation is language pulling their strings (and having its strings pulled to some extent). The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis after a bath in champagne. The legacy of sentimental novels, newspaper articles, and political propaganda entering “serious” research (not like the wishy-washy humanities) all the time, quietly, unnoticed. Sic!

Apologies for enjoying the irony so much (with probably more than a hint of a humanities “complex”). Being in language is inescapable as is being in culture, politics, society. An objectivity which claims that this is possible has ulterior motives. It’s an enticing objectivity, with pretentions of godhood, one floating above the mundane in an impossible trick of its vision.

Whatever I could say has already been said in a more cogent and convincing way by Donna Haraway, so I will let the quotes from “Situated Knowledges” do my work for me.

I would like to insist on the embodied nature of all vision, and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere. This is the gaze that mythically inscribed all the marked bodies, that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation. [...]

The visualizing technologies are without apparent limit [...]. [...]Vision in this technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony; all perspective gives way to infinitely mobile vision, which no longer seems just mythically about the god-trick, this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters. [...]

A tribute to this technology of direct, devouring, generative, and unrestricted vision, whose technological mediations are simultaneously celebrated and presented as utterly transparent, the volume celebrating the 100th anniversary of the National Geographic society closes its survey of the magazine’s quest literature, effected through its amazing photography, with two juxtaposed chapters. The first is on “Space,” introduced by the epigraph, “The choice is the universe–or nothing” (Bryan, 1987, p. 352). Indeed. This chapter recounts the exploits the exploits of the race and displays the colour-enhanced “snapshots” of the outer planets reassembled from digitalized signals transmitted across vast space to let the viewer “experience” the moment of discovery in immediate vision of the “object.” These fabulous objects come to us simulataneously as indubitable recordings of what is simply there and as heroic feats of techno-scientific production. The next chapter is the twin of outer space: “Inner Space,” introduced by the epigraph, “The stuff of stars has come alive” (Bryan, 1987, p. 454). Here, the reader is brought to the realm of the infinitesimal, objectified by means of radiation outside the wavelengths that “normally” are perceived by hominid primates, i.e., the beams of lasers and scanning electron microscopes, whose signals are processed into the wonderful full-colour snapshots of defending T cells and invading viruses.

But of course that view of infinite vision is an illusion, a god-trick. I would like to suggest how our insisting metaphorically on the particularity and embodiment of all vision (though not necessarily organic embodiment and including technological mediation), and not giving in to the tempting myths of vision as a route to disembodiment and second-birthing, allows us to construct a usable, but not an innocent objectivity.

(Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of the Partial Perspective.”The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004. 86-87)

(The title is absolutely borrowed. I am intrigued by how powerfully this combination of beauty and emotion with dismemberment works. If you’re curious about the source, read Linda Gregg’s poem, completely unrelated to this discussion. If not, pass on to my rambling below.)

The conceptual marriage of beauty and suffering comes across as a Gordian knot. I say “comes across,” not “is,” because I don’t believe this link is necessary for our thinking about either concept. Yet together they come to produce a new quality, a kind of beauty martyrdom.

Many concepts are inverted along the path to salvation through beauty. (Something called “beauty” being conceived of as, paradoxically, both essential and produced, its production and attainment of a “natural-looking” ideal desired without questioning.) Most importantly, pain becomes anaesthetized in the beauty discourse. It becomes something purely imagined and exaggerated. In beauty martyrdom, pain doesn’t exist. It’s swallowed before the mind could let it come into being.

The mind. Smoothly inserted into the body, which is — what? An object? Property? Easily remodeled clay? Whatever it is, it is clearly divisible from whatever the mind is in this narrative. If beauty is married to suffering, then the mind is forever divorced from the body. In my rushed and perhaps somewhat inconclusive comment to Wildly Parenthetical’s post “The appropriation and normalisation of the body,” (which is a response to [What in the hell...] do things do things look like if we start with the body?, so I recommend reading both) I wrote: The discourse of beauty production further removes the body from the mind, depersonalizing it even further, it seems to me. The body ready for a “cosmetic surgeon’s” scalpel, with lines drawn on it is already dismembered, ready for another level of butchering. The justification for the practice erases identity from the body. The woman (it is usually the woman) is made to believe that the “imperfect” body is abstracted from her self and that the mind (as a fully separated entity) should have all possible creativity in determining the shape of its flesh encasement.

For a far more cogent and comprehensive argument, I suggest looking up Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth.

What I would like to focus on is the question of dismemberment.

It strikes me that this kind of dismemberment seems to have a completely different cognitive impact than the dismemberment of animals as described by Paul Shepard:

Breaking up the world in thought, attending to its diversity and discontinuity, discriminating differences in order to think–all this clearly threatens its continuity and wholeness. Learning the morphology of bodies has been likened to a kind of dissection. The butchering analogy extends as well to the naming of the internal part of the body. Oddly enough, it is the insides of animals that work against the tendency of the world to fragment. (The Others 47)

We need to cut up the world in order to make sense of it and animals are our primary models, argues Shepard. But “butchering” has two different meanings for him depending on the context. When the process of dismemberment is removed from our eyes and made the business of institutions that deliver to us ready products:

Butchery makes new categories by abstracting “meat” from the whole animal, creating a perceptual gap between the food and the thing eaten. (The Others 34)

I wouldn’t want to insist on direct parallels between the animal world with human participation and the human society which sees itself as abstracted from the broader natural context. But I’m tempted to ask if there is any human-to-human equivalent to creative cognitive butchery when the beauty industry so neatly fits the second description?

To what extent can we relate dismemberment to control or creation? Where is the point when these ideas become perverted? When and how did the marriage of beauty to suffering take place?

the responses to the hate-mail received by Feministing editors (here and here). Thinking women rock. The wit of those replies is a Christmas gift for us all.

There are several other interesting posts in the anti-feminism category — just browse through the Feministing archives.

Here’s one of my favorite comments:

pffft, my vagina does my taxes, and my bookkeeping. and it brings me soup, 7-up, and crackers when im sick. annnnnnnnnnd, it does a mean dance routine to “my humps” by fergie. my vagina is totally not boring, nor am i, this guy can go die. (Posted by: jessilikewhoa)

Why such a post sounding like I thought I knew more than I know I do? Because, hey, why not? (OK, that’s not the reason. Read on.)

Honestly, I don’t see myself as capable of “enlightening” destitute minds. I don’t think you can “teach” anyone anything, you can only tell them about the different possible paths. This reading guide contains a couple well-written texts about issues that anger me but to which I often fail to respond, because I’m too preoccupied with guilt-tripping myself about the things I haven’t yet read and I don’t yet know. (In other cases, when I do try to answer, I feel that no one gets my point.)

Caveat lector: a narcissistic paragraph about my personal philosophy follows. Humor me, because I’m on a serious caffeine overdose, taking a break between writing two papers, and badly in need of some pseudo-intellectual showing off.

The foundation of my personal philosophy is a deep belief that if you challenge people and let them know that you believe in their capability to think and learn, you help them grow. Treating them as children and spoonfeeding “knowledge” leads to blind conformism and, when brought to the extreme, totalitarianism and utter stupidity. I’m against stupor, because it means the death of thought and there is nothing I desire and admire more than free thought.

Free thought, mind you, in my subjective free-thinking out loud, must be informed. It’s born of curiosity but not naïvety. It seeks self-discipline and connection to other interesting thoughts, it negotiates its place, but, nevertheless, respects its own arrogance. There is little more arrogant or, to some, offensive than free thought practiced by women. I find this witch-hunt both repulsive and fascinating, ergo I let my thoughts play with other thoughts on the playground we often call feminism.

Forgive me, dear reader, the lie. I gave you two narcissistic paragraphs instead of one.

I came up with the idea of a reading guide when engaging in evil, brain-damaging multi-tasking whilst I should have been concentrating on writing my first paper in queue. This is to give your (and my) free thoughts something too nibble at: delicious rhetoric and lucid argumentation. The posts I link to below answer the repeated accusations against feminism:

…watch this space, I might add more later. In the meantime, back to paper #2…

What’s wrong with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland?

When I first read it, which was a while ago, I didn’t give it a second thought. It seemed to be revolving smoothly, a well-oiled utopian music box. The structure appeared sound. As sound as a recipe: throw in the elements, concoct solutions, and pretend that it’s clear-cut mathematics. And then get an idiot to look at your equation. It took some shaking to realize that a few screws were loose in the story. I was the idiot looking at the equation.

There’s a mechanics of writing utopias and a mechanics of reading them. If you forget about the other one, you are the story’s dupe. This is no true forgetfulness but a combination of fear and laziness at the sight of a mathematical problem. You stare at the lines of numbers on a sheet and find yourself nodding, as they painlessly fly through your brain.

I have two crude pictures in my mind when I say “mechanics”: the author with measuring instruments, slowly putting the parts together and the reader, screwdriver in hand, bending over the work to dismantle it. Reading utopian fiction without a screwdriver is, to me, exactly like staring at an equation. It’s pointless. In the latter case you can merely say you like the shapes of the digits, in the former, that you’re intrigued by the author’s use of adjectives.

Utopias are planted in the author’s here and now. Unlike autobiographies and memoirs, though, they do not repeat that with every “I.” The sage leading you through non-place is that very same author that in a memoir is spanked by his or her mother, however. They’re showing you their own world with a twist: as if someone had cleaned all the streets, repaired all the clocks, made all the people kind and wise. Made all the people… Made all the people…–

Here is where Gilman’s music box gets stuck.–

Made all the people… white. Hear those screws rattle? I didn’t when I first read the novel. I put it away without a second thought. It was only when a teacher addressed the question of Herland’s whiteness in class that it sank in. Why did I miss it?

While it could be true that I have a gaping hole in my head through which intelligence, vitamins, and all the other wonderful undefined things escape, I would prefer to believe that there is still hope for me. My mistake was not to bring my screwdriver to the text. Or: I stared at the equation and didn’t try to solve it myself. You have to break into the utopia, because no utopia is a dream. Wrapped in neologisms, inventions, exotic moral concepts is the writer’s here and now, and as a reader you should feel its breath on your neck.

Read in isolation, every utopia is a pretty mechanism. It announces itself as a neutral solution tailored to humanity’s needs. You can read “neutral” and “humanity” from where you stand, you can take your all-inclusive formulation, but the writers were never where you are, they didn’t use your dictionaries. You find the utopia in their back yard. In their trash can, if they couldn’t afford a garden. In the streets they crossed during their daily walks, in the people they saw as the scum of the earth, in their prayer books, in their laundry baskets.

As entertaining as it might be, utopian fiction is never written solely for one’s friends and about one’s friends. It’s always a vision encompassing the world. My failure as a reader lay in my laziness to verbalize and follow up on these points: (a) Gilman’s world was never the same as mine, never had the same norms, (b) Gilman must have realized that not all people in the world were the same as her closest friends, because — if that were indeed the case — there would be no need for her to write a utopia.

I didn’t ask myself about the exact shape of Gilman’s world and the “others” of that world. Yet there is more to utopia than the explicitly named. Men are just one kind of others. The rest was wiped out from the text, but you see them, if you go deeper into the world where Gilman wrote Herland. It was a world before anyone even mentioned “colorblindness.” Skin color organized life, space, and labor. However distraught at times, Gilman must have seen those hierarchies and divisions. And it’s not against them that she put down her prescription. Was it ignorance on her behalf or intended erasure?

I have no idea whether she read any literature by people of color, and if she did, where she put it within her intellectual space. Did she hate, did she turn a blind eye to whatever didn’t directly concern her? Whatever her true attitude, the fact is that the parthogenesis in Herland eliminates not only sex and all the boys but also black women, the black girls Gilman saw — not an imagined people from a distant country — the black women around her.

This is no simple elision and surely not an oversight. By comparison, Mickiewicz didn’t leave out Jews from his imagined pastoral homeland. The plot of Pan Tadeusz would collapse without Jankiel, but Herland stands proudly on its one leg. Until you rattle the music box, that is.

In the novella Péplum, Amélie Nothomb mocks utopian simplifications. She has a messenger from a glorious future elaborate on how it turned out so glorious for “mankind.” Evasive at first, the messenger confesses to the narrator/Nothomb how wealth and equality was won through blowing up the poor south. That is where the story gets going. There is no such moment of insight in Herland and though this could be put down to the different era (Nothomb wrote her book at the end of the twentieth century, Gilman in its first half), Gilman is stuck with the messenger in the simplicity of her solutions. The virgin wombs of her amazons swallow black girls.

Without ironic disclaimers, without footnotes, blackness is written out of existence. Gilman’s is not a whiteness that arrives with a thump, like in the ending of Poe’s Pym, but one that sits quietly. But only until it’s opened up. Then it becomes obvious why and how a “forgetful” utopian vision has come to create one of the many splits between feminisms. Is Herland a case of ladylike backstabbing?

Regardless of intentions and the culprit’s lucidity, there is a body in the room. Herland rattles on.

At first glance this question might seem slightly awkward. But I find it crucial to ask about perpective and forms of engagement before going on to explore particular issues connected with the black feminist experience.

From its inception, black feminism was by Black women for Black women and the benefit of the Black community as a whole. The communal aspect cannot be undermined, since black feminism has been primarily concerned with praxis: no theorizing without activism.

This much is clear. Yet since its orientation is not solely towards the female individual but the community — of women and women within a larger community — what if we asked about its possible benefits for the society at large?

The black feminist standpoint is exceptional in that it grasps multiple levels of oppression: it’s articulated at the intersection of race and gender, and as such it reveals the ways in which systems of oppression and exclusion conflate. Although in everyday existence this position signifies deprivation and invisibility within dominant discourse, in the light of standpoint theory, it makes for deep insight. Coming from the very bottom of the power hierarchy, the black feminist standpoint is cognizant of the mechanisms and ideologies that more privileged standpoints would either not notice or consider neutral.

It’s knowledge.

The pursuit of knowledge is one of the great human desires.

And — I’m thinking out loud here — this kind of knowledge appears exceptional in that it provides a chance to sever the cords between knowledge and power. It’s not about inventing the wheel or, more accurately, inventing systems of control, but about understanding. Understanding has been increasingly undervalued, since it does not have momentum, does not lead to expansion. Or has understanding never really been valued?… And yet, as I stated above, people desire knowledge, if only for the sake of satisfying desire.

Since standpoints are not inherent qualities, it makes sense to believe that one can access them without being part of the original group, with additional effort, perhaps. Yet how to do that without making it seem like an attempt to steal, and change ideas?

First of all, how to listen and hear? There is no “neutral starting point” for a dialog with a position we do not know enough about. All such attempts fail and, what is worse, lead to more misunderstandings. I found two posts at Beautiful, Also, Are the Souls of My Black Sisters that clearly illustrate this. In “What Can the White Woman Say to the Black Woman?,” the writer, Ann, warns about disregarding history. Irrational fears of “reverse racism” often preclude necessary openness, without which participating in the project of black feminism is not possible. This leads to isolation and separatism. And while separatism has its advantages, it rarely leads to sharing knowledge and spreading tolerance.

As Patricia Hill Collins warns (critiquing Hazel V. Carby):

Exclusionary definitions of Black feminism which confine ‘black feminist criticism to black women critics of black women artists depicting black women’ (Carby 1987, 9) are inadequate because they are inherently separatist. Instead, the connections here aim for autonomy. (Black Feminist Thought 32-33)

Arguing for autonomy instead of isolation, Collins opens up the possibility for outsiders to be part of the discussion. The question remains: How?

Another one of Ann’s posts, “Shut the Fuck Up,” mentions attempts at placating Black women without asking about the reasons of their anger and discontent. Treating women like children is, of course, nothing new but always a suicidal shot if what one wants is insight and knowledge. The answer is, as Ann points out, to shut up. Not to step in with “but’s” and “however’s” before you’ve heard the argument and thought it over. My next question is where to go from there.

If your objective is to learn and use the knowledge in your experience and, furthermore, to engage with the perspective (which is what I personally want), how do you find your place within the larger project? Which, in the end, boils down to the question: who can become a black feminist?

Those who follow my scribblings on a more or less regular basis (thank you for that), probably noticed that I put up a new page. I want to add to the random ramblings a thread about the idea which, I hope, becomes in the end a good thesis.

From now on some of the posts will be concerned with questions about black feminism, the black feminist standpoint, and the different forms of activism (with emphasis on blogging and internet initiatives).

Please feel free to contribute to the discussion, irrespective of your sex, skin color, nationality, if you are interested in and supportive of black feminism. Misanthropic comments are not welcome.

Thinking is dirty. Let’s outlaw it. There is nothing more violently protested against than thinking. It verges on the obscene, it’s everything our traditions despise. Let’s write manuals against thinking; teach your brain to be moderate — know when one ought to defecate, when to say thank you, and halt right there. Let’s make it new modesty: “don’t you dare show off those gray cells, don’t you dare overexercise them!”

Should someone still be tempted to engage in the outrageous activity, we will make them feel sordid and guilty. Let’s give them a lesson on how to behave, let’s unwind their brains and eat them out with teaspoons. Till all we have is the regular ticking of clockwork people.

That’s just me, reading about yet another brilliant strategy to convert women to embrace “modest behavior” (here). If you had the impression it was about sex, do some dirty thinking, because that’s what it is about. Congratulations on the sophisticated strategy, dear guardians of morals; how noble of you to use guilt and shame as arguments against free thought and choice. How dirty it is to think one is allowed to think.

Remember Jane Eyre and the woman locked up in the little red room? The diagnosis was that sex blew her mind. The treatment: keep the poor dear away from decent people and treat her like an idiot child. The story comes from the times when, as Queen Victoria said, women didn’t have legs, so they couldn’t even mention anything that was underneath the layers of petticoats. What are our times?

The sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick believed that the Roman Empire never ended only we were living an illusion in which time feigned movement, but the world really stood still in 70 A.D. Dick had schizophrenia, but his theory doesn’t sound so crazy to me when I read about people such as Parker, Grossman, and Stepp and their brilliant [sic!] plans to “enlighten the weaker sex.”

Please read the discussion at Feministing.org along with the linked articles, comments, and responses to get a fuller picture of these grand initiatives aimed at reducing women to helpless idiots that need to be protected from themselves. And most importantly, from their sexuality which, as the Good Books out there say, is the source of unimaginable evil.

Are we stuck in the nineteenth century for good? The pseudo-theories in biology and evolutionary psychology’s explanations of every social aberration as result of human development could well have been penned by Charlotte Brontë, they bring nothing to our understanding of the world. They do, however, give us insight into the minds of their makers and the politics to which they subscribe. Is it boredom with historical materialism or some almost religious desire for positive essence in human cruelties throughout the ages that makes them come up with these ideas? Or again, is it the work of the specter of a glorious tradition that never really existed but is romanticized and fetishized into a set of rules imposing “order,” that is, oppression…?

What I find especially heinous is when women do it to women — when they assume the role of mother figures only to patronise and tell other women to “behave.” Where’s the breaking point? When will there be enough of spoonfeding shame and when will our brilliant scientists and reformers find that women have brains and are able to see through spurious claims intended to keep them in “their” place?

Naturally, I cannot say that Ms. Magazine has been present in my daily life. I grew up in interesting times and in an interesting place: politically, geographically, and in terms of social changes. I wish we had our own Ms. (though I value Zadra for its mission, I don’t feel I can relate to its stand on many issues and I do not hear my voice among its voices). I believe it would have helped to carve out a better, more affirmative space for women in Polish culture, without all the nasty ‘traditionalist’ attacks and attempts at ‘re-domestication.’ But I digress.

While a universal orientation can deprive a magazine of a distinctive character and boldness (and Ms. has been criticized for that), Ms. has been reaching towards thinking women from various places and walks of life for 35 years now. Here’s how it works. Thanks for the good writing and simply for being there.

You do know that feeling when you see a homeless person, a sense of shame tinged with indifference. Not that it’s most convenient to look away, or that like Ben Franklin we have absolute control over what happens to us… But how far does ranting and raving go and just how much love for the world and benevolence is there in our personal reservoir?

I remember a friend of mine who, seeing a beggar by the entrance to the Viennese Hauptuni, got into a long tirade over what this country and our demonic capitalism do to people.

I have my fears about waking sleepwalkers, so I let him dream his marxist dream. Maybe I have a heart of stone, but I didn’t see things as he saw them there and then.

It’s becoming my favorite answer that we are all to a greater or lesser extent bound within our perspective. What you are and what you have directs your perception, structures it, and writes between the lines. Embodiment is tough to oppose. You cannot, try as you might, just float out of your body and stand apart with a sense of complete insight and oneness with the world. Yet our pet theories often give us the feeling that through them we are achieving precisely that. This is my pet theory.

And this is how I make sense of that situation from several months ago. My friend, who was an American exchange student, comfortably well off, and a big fan of Marx, saw in the beggar the proof of great social injustice caused by capitalism and the US impact on world economy. While he struggled with outrage and what seemed to me like a bit of self-disgust (for being American), I was somewhere else on the whole issue. An exchange student like him, but with incomparably smaller funds, and, moreover, from a former people’s republic, I did not conceive of the old man’s desperate condition in terms of capitalist oppression. First of all, because capitalism in Austria is not an exact recreation of American models (so “this country” is not “this country” with the intonation and criticism that automatically came to his mind). And, perhaps more importantly, because the old man was not an Austrian ousted to the margins by the state economy’s cruel machine, but an emigrant, most likely from a former communist state. His mumbling didn’t sound even remotely like German. If it were possible to ask him why he came to Vienna, I imagine we’d have heard a story about how he wanted to embrace the cruel capitalist machine. Where it got him objectively and how evil the world actually is remains beyond anyone’s perspective.

If it’s the homeless who really know what homelessness is about, then there are slight chances that the others will be able to go beyond romanticizing homelessness. It’s an ironic footnote to the standpoint theory. Be it linguistic barriers, madness, or aimlessness of storytelling, whatever the reason, it’s not very likely that we’ll get a comprehensive outcast’s view of the world.

There is a beggar on Heidelberg’s Hauptstrasse that everyone recognizes. The guy usually has a peaceful albeit somewhat blank look on his face and he’s always sitting with his dog. He’s got a piece of cardboard covered in unsteady handwriting (I never read it) and he wraps his dog up in a blanket. Like many people, when I pass them I can’t help to want to stroke the dog. Thank God I never tried to.

This is what I heard today from my classmate Ricardo. As he was walking down Hauptstrasse a while ago, he saw an elderly man approach the guy and try to lift the blanket to look at the dog. The homeless guy quickly leapt to his feet and punched the elderly man, who staggered and fell down cracking his skull on the pavement. A crowd gathered around them, people yelled at the beggar. And Ricardo said that the beggar yelled back something like: “He shouldn’t have tried to touch my dog.”

Whoever knows what that meant. I’m not up to theorizing about poverty nor madness, nor up to stroking anyone’s dog after this story.

This wasn’t inspired by any madeleine moment. Nor by yesterday’s grammatical misunderstanding. No eurekas of the past, no linguistic crimes. This is just a moment in my ongoing thinking process. Although if I had to name a particular turning point, it would probably be reading Toril Moi’s “‘I Am Not a Feminist, But . . .’: How Feminism Became the F-Word” (PMLA Vol. 121, No. 5 — for the more curious among you). Before that article I imagined that the backlash I noticed in Poland was merely a local phenomenon. Yet another wave of Catholic resurgence, yet another dirty trick orchestrated by the far right. It’s been a little over a year now since I left the country and am trying to trace why I thought so. I blame it all on idealism. Trying to believe in positive change, I tend to overestimate my findings. But there is always another rude awakening.

Or let me put it differently. Though certain ideas may seem old and used up, they still persist. In spite of all the confusing talk about ‘post-feminism’ and equality won and established, the reality fell behind in the chase with newspapers. The world is not as fast as thought. We are not blasé post-modern in everything. This never happened. What did happen was that theory (in humanities, I cannot speak for other fields) turned so theoretical that it wasn’t about anything much but itself. Reading it is similar to reading old science fiction — to those visions of the year 2000 when we no longer need dentists. Remember that? I don’t and neither does my dentist.

But was the theory madness the reason why so many people today consider feminism obsolete? Or am I getting it all wrong and running into a conspiracy view? But I see things that really scare me. The invention of the young conservative woman, for instance. Who pulls her strings and whose voice is it when she opens her mouth to announce that feminism is evil and that renewal will come through ‘traditional values’? It’s a wild interpretation of Pascal’s claim that most of the mess in this world comes from our inability to sit quietly in our rooms. If women sat quietly in their rooms appreciating traditional gender roles, so the argument goes, there would be less mess in the world. So feminism’s obsolete, no?

Perhaps in a parallel world, where all the edges are smoother and everyone’s benevolent, this is merely a question of perspective: there is no problem when so many people don’t see it. Here and now, I conceive of this as a blind spot blotting out the view. The struggle for gender equality began to seem so familiar that it ceased to be treated seriously. Instead, it became common to approach it as a fad. Moreover, as a fad that is long passé. It’s in that smirk followed by “so you’re a feminist,” in all the nonsensical debates about ‘militant feminism.’ (How frustrating and vacuous all this talking is is best explained here and here.)

If I did realize these things before, only needed to recognize their gravity, what is then the change? What’s with the initial disclaimer? Maybe I’ve known too many women who believed that they were stupid and said it aloud, and too many who never dared to speak in class. Or, on the most personal level, I’m annoyed with myself for not being able to cope with my own extroverted nature all these years, with always trying to guess what is ‘appropriate’ and advisable. Not that I follow those rules, but still I know where the bit is even if I refuse to hold it between my teeth. Sitting quietly in your room, M. Pascal, you can become your own worst enemy, even if only out of boredom. This moment in my thinking is when I feel thinking alone is not enough. Browsing on-line, I mostly found organizations asking for donations and that is not the kind of activism I mean (who will pay my rent?). Any ideas on what I could do?

How much has been done for simplicity’s sake: dealing cards on the table of history only to your best buddies, keeping women in the kitchen, peasants in the field. For simplicity’s sake masses of people were deprived of rights. For simplicity’s sake all they were given instead were lame explanations why that is the case. It was both cruelty and fear of effort that did so much for the idea of simplicity. So when the intelligent young man who had a talk on Thoreau today told me he used in his paper the words ‘man’ and ‘he’ as synonyms of ‘the individual’ precisely “for simplicity’s sake,” I tried to explain that he was shooting himself in the foot.

For how does simplicity benefit from excluding roughly half of your readers? With ‘man’ scurrying to and fro in the text, searching for transcendence, how could the woman reader seriously believe that she too is implied in all the masculine glory of that ‘individual’? My brain shuts off after a few paragraphs of such writing. The ‘he’ is huffing and puffing, but my indifference towards the idea only grows.

I don’t care if ‘he/she,’ ’s/he,’ or ‘he or she’ seems cumbersome to you. You can always pluralize. Otherwise, don’t count on my understaning and appreciation. “For simplicity’s sake” I will ignore your text.

She should not have refused to kiss her lover the next morning using the silly excuse that “kisses are intimate.” Immediately we saw the face of Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman sliding over hers like a mask in a bank robbery, borrowed where it wasn’t needed. She probably shouldn’t have played with the yellow bandana either, because the rag failed to be her story’s falcon. But the doses of naivety were necessary. After all, it wasn’t Shakespeare retold by simply adding non-European cast. The allusions to Faulkner didn’t make the girl Quentin Compson’s Caddy as she lightly leaped off the pedestal (got out of the car and started walking towards the city).

If we take Asian Americans to be a ‘model minority’ – well-educated, staying out of trouble, quiet – then we should think of this movie as something made with a magnifying glass. The quotes and mis-quotes would then help us see what would otherwise be doubly invisible, because it is a story about Asian American women.

There are few things that are as translucent as girls trained in meekness. Their fingers pick through heaps of trash and no one comes to their aid. Joy Dietrich’s movie doesn’t scream about this, it simply says this is the case. We see a girl picking through garbage when everyone else is asleep, a college student in both pre-law and pre-med whose perfect body is no comfort but yet another duty, and finally the protagonist who refuses to be her brother’s incestuous fantasy and turns back. The keepers of their stories, the white landlady and the demanding parents who say volumes with meaningful pauses, cannot be slain like dragons. Years of silencing cannot be likened to a dragon and therefore a brave knight is absolutely out of place. When the protagonist’s brother appears at her door trying to play that role, his quest slowly dissipates into a drive around New Jersey. It’s up to Jenny to end it and head back to what she left behind. There are no songs of triumph in this picture, just a mix CD playing in the car during Jenny’s unfinished escape. Listening to it, she is not daydreaming about romantic fulfillment but figuring out a way to speak in and to the world. By that time she knows she will have to learn to speak for herself rather than let Joe guard their story and carry it off into the fields surrounding the road. She’s a photographer, not a model.

Beatrice is the model. She is also the meek girl eventually found dead in the bathtub, because she does not manage to break out of the canvas on which others projected their fantasies of her. Quite literally, in the beginning of the story, Dietrich has her posing as one living element in a painting of fields stretching towards a lonely farm. She plays a crawling invalid, thus prefiguring that she will be trapped in that momentary pose for the rest of the movie. Her demanding parents and abusive boyfriend make her crawl from one form of perfection to another. In the end, her stunning beauty, undeniable intelligence, and dedication are meaningless. She is ridiculous standing on the parapet in a silk nightgown as if she were slipping into yet another familiar role even when considering suicide. When Jenny pulls her corpse out of the bathtub, the pretty dress and lightly smudged make-up cake the person who suffocated underneath. A person who didn’t know herself and in her textbooks, which she read out loud, didn’t find a way to speak her self. Beatrice’s death is not meant as a mere warning. We are aware that there was a person underneath the make-up. Her suicide is the dotted i of her presence; it’s the only outlet for the otherwise incessantly curbed will. The banality of her death and the borrowing involved in the story are necessary. In her white nightgown moment on the parapet, Beatrice refers us to the cliché image of Emily Dickinson.* If you can recall a line or two, you can hang on to them as hints at the story which Beatrice – an unfulfilled creative writer – cannot tell. The poem she does leave as her suicide note is neither good nor enlightening and, to my mind, could have been left out just like the clumsy allusion to Pretty Woman.

The girls in Tie a Yellow Ribbon do not speak magic spells or start revolutions with declarations full of fire. The act of speaking is here practical and concrete. Towards the end of the movie Beatrice and Jenny’s neighbor finally plucks up courage to talk back to the landlady who made her sort the garbage. Jenny calls her foster mother whom she hadn’t talked to in years. After much consideration, they put together sentences through which they can become actors and not recipients of their own story. Does this sound like a description of a cheap assertiveness course? It should not. Dietrich’s juggling with banality brings us to a place where banality matters. The patterns of everyday become no less real because of their familiarity or similarity to random novels or movies. Just because so much has been written about identity search, feminism, depression, doesn’t mean that all is resolved. On the contrary, the seemingly resolved slips back into invisibility. Although this is not the age of sentimental heroines, meek girls drown in bathtubs, as quietly beautiful as when they were still alive.

I do not quite understand why the title is Tie a Yellow Ribbon, maybe because for me the motif of the bandana misfired. The German title, Die Koreanerin, makes even less sense to me, because although the main character is Korean American, the two other girls are of Japanese (I think) and Chinese descent, and the bonding of these three women lies at the heart of the tale. It is where the connecting and disconnecting that Jenny repeatedly mentions takes on a different form.

It would be misguided to liken it to male bonding as presented in, for instance, Moby Dick. It’s not a myth but one of those unseen, untold everyday affairs. My friend Junyoung (who happens to be a Korean New Yorker like Dietrich’s Jenny) made me realize this when she told me about a movie called Take Care of My Cat. “There are no movies about single women in their twenties,” she said. “They begin to exist in popular imagination when they turn thirty. Before that, they are always presented in relation to men in their environment.” I have been coming back to her point ever since. With Tie a Yellow Ribbon I found my tentative response.

Not only are the three girls dogged by the stereotype of the meek Asian woman but, because of their age, they lack the privilege of experience. Speaking therefore means in their case breaking not just the cultural taboo but entering a gray area between experience and innocence. Which is to say, disappearing. However, through their bond they escape invisibility as they see one another. While I am not denying that it is a movie about identity and about problems facing Asian Americans, problems I may not be fully grasping, not being touched by them, I think that this aspect is equally significant. I am impressed by Dietrich’s ability to give those twenty-year-olds voices and bodies. Throughout the story she lets the audience know that she could easily make her characters slip into ready-made roles. But even with one girl drowned, she didn’t make them a threesome of amateur Ophelias. There is a story within, between, and beyond the borrowing.

*I would like to thank Asia for hissing “Emily Dickinson” into my ear during that scene.