Tuesday, July 7, 2020

To Wade in or Not To Wade in on Rowling, That Is the Question.

Long and Short: I disagree with Rowling on Dumbledore being gay; I agree with her on menstruation being constitutive of female gender.

I disagreed with Rowling on "Dumbledore" being gay. I put him in quotes because the question is what constitutes him. I say it is only what is on the page and how demonstrably it can tie out with real things. Taking a look at a clearer example for comparison: She put names of members of the the real-world Fabian Society into the Order of the Phoenix; that society is known (see their table at the fair at the opening of the college year at the beginning of Chariots of Fire) and its members on record; that society was about gradual change on social justice and politics; the Order is headed by DD, and while he fights the Death Eaters and Voldy immediately, as far as changing the behavior of Ministry rule, he believes in gradual advancement (he will give Dobby a job and pay but realizes other elves aren't anymore ready than are a lot of wizards, but they can get there eventually); all of that tracks strongly enough that you can say the theme of the real-world Fabian Society plays as an ingredient in the recipe of the fictional Order of the Phoenix.

But when it comes to DD being homosexual, I argue his orientation is never really on the page, homo or hetero. And there is even a gay-rights activist who agreed in an op-ed piece in Time the week after she came out with the statement at Radio City Music Hall in 2007: John Cloud wrote that, while he thanks her because they can use all the help they can get, it would have been better if she had actually written the character gay on the page ... which means he thinks she didn't. If anybody would be looking to say a character is actually gay on the page, it would be a gay-rights activist, but Cloud closes by saying, "one wonders whether she might not as well have left the old girl in the closet" (paraphrase). Further, I think reading a clear attraction to Grindlewald as the source of blindness robs force from other themes that she does have in there more clearly (and I think Cloud's own further reading shows an example of this: he asks, would it have been so bad to have some openly gay characters, like say to have the obviously gay-styled Blaze Zabini ask the aptly named Justin Finch-fletchley to the Yule Ball; but this misses a characterization JKR sets in the first book that, while Slytherins hate Gryffindors as an enemy, they are at least more of an equal enemy, whereas Hufflepuff are despicable as underachievers with no ambition. as witnessed in Draco's comment in Madam Malkam's in book 1 before they know who each other are, when he says, "can you imagine being put in Hufflepuff? I think I would leave"; the gay reading robs the bigotry reading when it disregards those tensions by suggesting that it might fit in the WW for a Slytherin Blaze to ask a Hufflepuff Justin on a date).

Now, on to the current controversy (one that might make it impossible for them to complete the Fantastic Beasts franchise, but the third film was having troubles even before this and covid19 ... and then covid19 hit): I agree with her on menstruation in relation to female gender. I am sure that there are a lot of plain vanilla, "cisgender" women out there who support the transgender univocal equation of their own gender identification as female with the gender identification of transgender persons, but then Ben Carson and Herman Cain like Trump and that doesn't make Trump right on race or not a bigot, and the say so of a number of traditionally cisgender women who may have been predisposed to agree with anything coming from one side is not definitive on the matter (even less does the opinion of the actors in the Yates films matter for anything: I hear Dan Radcliff declaim and I want to tell him to go wipe after he finally got to take a dump after five films of obviously needing to take one in every scene). [Note: I don't mean to liken LGBTQ interpretations to Donald Trump's racism, but simply to say that the reaction of some in an impacted group is not necessarily decisive  on an issue].

While I think that gender dysphoria must me taken seriously (and not met with the "tough love" bullshit that drives conversion-therapy damage for people with a physiologically verifiable psychologically objective condition of homosexual orientation), I do not think that this changes that "gender" identity (1) is constructed (this does not cut gender off from correlation to a larger normative realm) and (2) is built out of psychological experience, or else (3) has no stable meaning. I think the conservative side shot itself in the foot with all the talk of gender being ontological rather than constructed, because here we have people saying that, yes, there is core ontological identity that goes beyond experience-construction, BECAUSE it goes beyond the  physiological formation of the body in which those experiences are encountered and used for constrtuction, and (as I have read in pieces) that a person has "known" accurately their whole life that they are the other gender, basically in terms very much like saying that gender ontologically transcends physical accidents. I think that such persons may very well interpret the dysphoria they experience as identifying them with the gender pole opposite that associated with their birth sex in a gender-binary understanding they have received of the world, that they may find an affinity with their opposite-sex parent, and that they might understand that affinity as one of gender identity, but I don't think that that conception on their part makes it necessarily so.

I simply don't think that dysphoria from one gender is enough to identify one solidly with the other in a binary system, as if to say that dysphoria from one creates euphoria with the other, because that requires that there be stable gender concepts. If one is to say that one has really been a woman all of one's life, one has to be able to say what one means by being a "woman" beyond simply that it is dysphoric from male gender identity, because "male" gender identity will simply then be that which is dysphoric from female (euphoric at interacting with the female if heterosexual, but dysphoric as being female, whether one is born with male sex or female sex). I think there are core experiences that are the building blocks of "male" and "female" in the construction of stable gender identity: a woman will never know what it is like to worry about getting kicked in the balls the way a man does (a woman worries about other pains from violence, but not that particular pain in the family jewels that are exterior to the rest of the body), and I as a man will never know what it was like to have my body change in the core way a female body changes in the development of breasts or know what it is like for blood to be something that regularly flows from my body rather than only as the result of injury, or the knowledge of the possibility of having another human beings whole body grow inside me, or post-partum depression ... I will never really be able to understand the way she does when one guy's wife joked that she had looked forward to getting her body back, but then, nope, there's the demand for the boobs (her words, not mine, and as I say, she was joking around about it, not grousing about her child's needs). I think that, without those psychological, experiential factors defining gender, it winds up being amorphous and not a thing that can be spoken of constructively. All that is needed to say that one is definitely a woman is to say that one feels like a "woman," and that begs the question, with such a highly subjective criterion and no stable common ground to unite one person's conception of "woman" with another person's, of whether we can solidly call anybody a woman or man.

There are people whose physio-psychic development has come to a place of dysphoria from the gender identified with their birth sex, and as as a result of no personal failing on their part or their parents (hell, look at the story of increases in cancer from Dupont selling teflon and birth defects in the areas where they were dumping chemicals from its production [see the film Dark Waters with Mark Ruffalo] and tell me it's not possible for serious problems to occur in prenatal male/female brain development because of what some capitalist asshole dumped in the water). And my heart breaks for them because I don't know what the answer is (and I try to avoid using pronouns with family of those people to avoid using the birth-sex gender pronoun, as I know some whose kids have suffered from the dysphoria to the point of hospitalization and medication for suicidal thoughts). But I don't think that simply assigning them to being "actually" the other pole is a solution.

In a lot of ways, the transgender question in relation to feminism is like the gay question in relation to the other themes more demonstrable in Harry Potter. The two things wind up in competition, just as there was a debate on the Democratic side in 2008 as to whether it was more important to have an African American (a win on the race front) or a woman (a win on the sexism front). On the objective side of the questions going on with Rowling presently, I find the concerns of the feminist question to have more of a stable basis in its assessment of a core material world and a prejudice and injustice within it (these gender differences exist on a biological level and one set of people at one clear end of a spectrum, one ole of a binary, have used them to oppress those at the other end ... at least as far back as the Babylonian Enuma Elish telling a story of the gods to justify the idea of using the procreation role of mothering to subjugate women in a patriarchal society), whereas I think that the transgender univocal flattening of euphoric female-sexed and dysphoric male-sexed into one "gender" called "woman"  does not have a solid base in the material reality of what we know of psychology as it works with physical experience, even though the dysphoria to which that move tries to respond is real and quite possibly physiologically based in developmental years. A transgender "woman" who does not menstruate is not a woman who needs to worry about pregnancy from rape (many other things from the violence of rape, but not pregnancy), and therefore not about having the role of mothering forced on her under those circumstances. A woman may say that this can't be used as evidence because she can love her child and being a mother, and therefore love what was forced on her, in spite of that origin, but that acceptance and love of the child in spite of how she got pregnant is still something unique to women that men can't do because they can't undergo that violence in order to be accepting of it. And if the concern of pregnancy by rape is not particularly a woman's issue ... but the only people for whom it is an existential reality are women ... where does that leave it? It doesn't seem like it can be part of the issue of justice between the sexes.

And this isn't the only place you will find this tension particularly between LGBTQ and feminist concerns and thinking. Somewhere along the way, The Babadook got categorized as LGBTQ and activists pushed that identification from there, but that identification seriously cuts against the woman-film reading stated by the film-maker (tension between being a lover and being a mother). The woman-movie reading can be shown from the details of the film (e.g., the kid interrupts even her method of coping with the loss of the husband, in the scene of thwarted masturbation), while the LGBTQ reading defies logic: if the woman is the protagonist and she is the one keeping the Babadook in the basement as part of the resolution of the film, does this mean the answer is to keep the queer in the closet? If not, then the only logic is that either (1) the woman is actually the antagonist or (2) we call it LGBTQ on the basis of "contains any element anybody thinks weird" and eventually it is not distinctly LGBTQ because all are potentially LGBTQ, just waiting on somebody to assert it for it to become "objectively" so.

I'm aware that Rowling might find as much issue with my take on and defense of her comments on menstruation and female gender (and maybe even simply of a male presuming to declare anything about it ... and on that score she would be at least partially right), but there is my two cents for what it is worth ... or really even for whatever I can actually figure out that it is.

[Post Note: I'm also aware that, when speaking of bodies and bodily experience as normative and constitutive,  there are those who fault even Judith Butler (whom many on the traditionalist side of assuming binary- and hetero-norativity consider to be about as far out there as you can get in deconstructing gender, especially in her book Gender Trouble) for not going far enough because, when she speaks of the ground that actually can be there as simply "bodies" rather than gendered bodies, she still means human bodies, whereas the "posthumanist" movement is trying to find meaning and order in the nonhuman that can be the basis of the human without the human being normative, but all I can do here is note that it's a real question and that, in part, my answer would revolve around part of it being, for me, what some call a "retroductive warrant," or at least as best as I can understand that term, as a bedrock element that one realizes as one that they simply accept. First among these for me is that human bodies are the only bodies of which we know that can communicate a concept like "body" in any way to another body [or embodied mind, if you like, but the minds communicate through the body, so the receptor of the communication is first the body]. The second would be that, so far, the binary gendered system is the only one that we know of that has the capability of expressing ideas of gender: there are mixes and hermaphroditic bodies, but our understanding of them always seems to me to happens in terms of admixtures of the two poles of the binary or falling somewhere between the two on a spectrum. Granted, I think that there must not be hegemonic attempts to force those whose bodily experience does not conform as easily to strictly one or the other, such as hermaphroditic bodies or, even given a heteronormativity in sexual compatability (i.e., I am saying the next part even if one accepts that acting on homosexual erotic inclinations is out of bounds in and of itself, not just contextually, in a way acting on heterosexual inclination is not out of bounds), attempts must not be made by things such as "conversion therapy" to violently force heterosexual psychological shape onto a mind that has developed homosexual orientation, but I can't avoid binary gender language as at least the basic outline of the majority of cases (heteronormativity in sexual orientation is trickier ... I am pretty conservative on it, but it is a more intricate issue and one that should be approached with utmost care and respect, because there has been a great deal of injustice done at times against people who have a physiologically verifiable homosexual orientation that has developed organically and cannot be changed by force methods like conversion therapy). All of this takes place in language developed by people in gendered bodies whose understanding and language is informed through categories of bodily experience that can be expressed only in human language employed by human bodies and minds that develop gender identities that, even when neither euphorically male nor euphorically female, are constructed within the binary framework of understanding set by bodily experience of the development and activity of specific body parts, or at least can be recognized and discussed only by them (the question is sometimes as whether machines will develop a completely machine language, one not readable by humans, and my question is ... how would we know if there was, since to be truly unreadable to humans it would be unrecognizable to humans as language at all; and there is some pushback in the contemporary realm of literature studies against the "posthumanist turn")].

Sunday, July 5, 2020

Viewing Malcom X

This is Facebook post on recently watching the 1992 Spike Lee film Malcolm X (interestingly on July 4, 2020).

Finally got around to watching Malcom X. Very powerful. I want to address the comments on the JFK assassination, particularly that it was “justice,” because while he changed his approach a lot after that statement, I don’t think it should be missed that there is a sense in which it is true, and it is the sense in which I think he meant it ... and it is an important sense that is still true. I put “justice” in quotes because I think that, sadly, a great deal of the sense in what he said about the assassination being “justice” will be missed by most modern people who hear that statement, particularly from the right, because they have no clue how to take it properly and are, frankly, in too much of an unintelligent stupor to process it. Justice is really balance, hence the image of the lady with the scales. And in cause and effect, there is balance: for every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction. The definition of justice that makes sense of Malcom X’s statement is one that I believe is *absolutely* fitting in this situation, but one that I think most on the right are completely unable to process. Those from that camp generally, in my experience, suffer from two maladies: (1) an inability to think in terms other than a reading of virtue that is heavily influenced by individualism and (2) an inability to conceive of two different things being the case at the same time, two dimensions, such that, in their mind, if there is an understanding of an event like this that it other than simple individual, occasional (meaning a single occasion, rather than systemic pattern) viscous action, that understanding cannot be true at the same time as an occasional understanding of it. If you want to believe that the assassination was an individual case in which JFK suffered an injustice perpetrated by whoever, singular or plural, singular or plural, pulled whatever trigger or triggers in whatever building or on whatever grassy knoll, driven by whatever insanity or directed by whatever sinister government agent, that is fine and I agree with you. BUT there is another level, which is the systemic level, on which what happened is simply a balancing of forces, of cause and effect. A system is simply sequential and consequential events of serial cause and effect, and “justice” in that system is simply the material balance. If JFK was a victim, he was a victim of not only Oswald or whomever on the individual occasional level; he was ALSO a victim of the system of racism perpetuated in this country. Individually, in the realm of the occasional justice, he was a victim of injustice, but on the systemic level, the fact that a white American died at the hands of white Americans is simply the justice of balance of cause and effects. When whiteness in America has been so defined by violence, it is inevitable that it will kill its own. In a sense, the intensity of the real violence of racial injustice is greater than the actual number of black bodies available to suffer it, and that excess has to go somewhere. There is not only the violence done to the black bodies like the actual beatings and murders; there is also the violence terror and other psychological violence, including that done to the minds of young whites. Whatever happened to JFK, it was done by whites who moved in a direct line of cause and effect flowing from the broad range of impact of racial violence, and the balance and equality of force in that chain of reaction is a form of justice, a material justice. Malcolm X was also a victim of it, but through the path of (if the film is accurate) Elijah Muhammad being seduced by the very same lust for power and “greatness” the characterizes the “advancement” of white America (the claims may be true that the FBI had people in the Nation of Islam materially pushing the assassination, but whatever the truth of that is or isn't, it IS the case that white American contributed to X's killing in the form of Muhammad being addicted to the same kind of control of power).

Whatever the story of the assassination of JFK is on the level of individual persons committing crimes, on the collective level, like the assassination of Lincoln, it is the story of how America sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind (Hosea 8:7).

Follow Up:
On the film Malcolm X on the narrative level, especially in light of push back prior to the film against Lee doing the film and and the idea that he might focus too much on the early life. I thought there was an intentional parallelism between the relationship with Archie and the relationship with Elijah Muhammad. Two things are significant in this. The first is that doing a piece on the years of involvement with/against the Nation if Islam leading up to the assassination does not mean not including earlier material, and that it indeed must do so. Nothing happens in isolation from what led up to it, and the naivete and betrayal by somebody very much viewed as a mentor and danger to life from Archie is a first instance in a pattern of needing such mentors (it even begins the film, with shorty showing him how to wear the suit) that defines one of the things that it meant for X to really break free after his Hajj; and breaking free was a big part of his message, and one that underwent development in the shift out of the Nation of Islam, and so looking at a pattern that defined a thing from which to break free for him is part of the fuller picture of what that meant, especially since, while the phenomenon has a distinct white shape to it in America, such psychological manipulation is a universal problem, and the shift in X's thought (as best as I can understand it) was to move from thinking about the race issue in America solely in its own context to thinking about it in the context of a humanity shared among all ethnicities. The second is that historical accuracy and narrative accentuation of certain aspects are not mutually exclusive. The idea that they are diametrically opposed, that the more historically accurate an account is, the less it can have any trace of narrative crafting, is a myth (in the pejorative sense of the term, used here ironically) put forth by the erroneous belief that science can be completely objective.


Thursday, July 2, 2020

Thoughts on Recent Events (statues and essential "work" in the pandemic) from Noah Trevor Interview with John Stewart

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OC4CIfZ_1A
Recent (late June or early July 2020) interview of Jon Stewart by Noah Trevor, The following is my Facebook post accompanying posting it.

I find Stewart's comments on the destruction of the statures as a “spasm” and on the statues a statement of keeping fear in the lives of African Americans to be spot on. We define terrorism as the wielding of fear in the extreme form of terror, but when it’s white America, we call the wielding of fear “heritage.”

But the statement I really find insightful is his comment on the decrease in valuing of work. What I
find interesting in the discussion surrounding corporate tax breaks and trickle-down economics is that the argument in favor of that rests on the assumption of the very things for which that camp criticizes Marx and others. Stewart’s line about devaluing work is very insightful because of what the response from the right will be, which is that the management of economic force done by corporate managers IS work: figuring out ways to systemically manage the systemic forces. But emphasis on the systemic nature of those forces is precisely one of the things for which they will criticize Marx, on some idea that admitting it will somehow heretically deny the human free agency that is the basis of morality, BUT it is precisely the management of those forces for which they will praise and pay a corporate management class.

The comment on “work” is particularly insightful because what we think of as “work” is directly, materially relevant in the subject of Marx. Marx formulated his theories of capital at a particular moment in history ... not just out of nowhere, but because certain recent phenomena primed the situation for somebody to make these types of observations. He developed theories of such system forces particularly after the Industrial Revolution not just because abuses of masses of workers were visible, *but because of what was INvisible*: the hand of the worker. Until this point, our usual experience was that the visible work of that hand is what visibly produces material product, but after that point, we saw that you could set physical forces in motion that operated unseen, behind the scenes, in machines that perpetuate their force and management of it on their own invisibly as long as you feed them fuel, AND actually produce greater quantity. Marx took the next step in asking whether there were psychological and group-psyche forces that operate for the production and conservation of the real, invisible material called “capital” (he doesn’t us the concept of psychology that I know of, but that is basically what is in play ... what is the stock market other than the impact of a global-level psychology on economics? ... and there is very big component of this that, in the gnosticism I speak of next, operates on denying the realities of psychology in favor of a radical “spirituality,” a gnostice spirituality). I think that, when we rely on those forces but then condemn those who call attention to them, we prime the pump for the spasm of Marxism having an appeal.
This next statement may be a bit contentious, but I think the same thing happens in the realm of the psychological: there are people who are VERY good at managing the psychological experience of others and are often praised as being good managers while, at the very same time, those who note and study those forces and their impact on persons and people (if you want to know the difference, there is a great line in Men in Black) are decried by those who are praising their manipulation. And this is the contentious part: I think it happens a great deal in the realm of religion in America. I’ll just leave that at that. I’ll not get heated about it, but I do think that psychological manipulation happens a lot in that realm. And I don’t think it’s only a corporate thing in mega-churches; I think it’s also a cottage industry that goes on in legion one-on-one interactions (to keep with the set of terms I am using here, in pointing out the systemic, I am not denying the occasional: in this realm, psychological manipulation happens on the systemic level in mega-churches and on the occasional level in the legion occurrences of “spiritual mentoring”).

And for the record, I disagree with Marx’s materialism, but back to Stewart’s idea of a spasm and to reiterate by repetition, I think that what makes his materialism so appealing to some (his ability to perceive the invisible forces in the systems of human interaction that operate with a quasi-material force, such that individual virtue and particular acts of choice by individuals are not the only elements in play) is a long history of *neo-gnosticism* in “christianity” in the West (I put it in quotes merely to clarify that what is particularly in view is the element of the religious identity that specifically uses quotes, that obsesses about what it means to apply the term to oneself or one’s group over against others, and in editing academic material, terms are done with quotes [or italics for non-English, which is basically a quote mechanism]), the gnosticism of seeing virtue and individual acts as the only factors (“occasionalism,” versus observations of systemicity) and then praising those who manage lucratively the forces we deny exist, praising them under some vague notion of being “a good manager.” And I think that a history of that materialism *in the name of “virtue”* (Marx isn’t the only materialist in the room, just maybe the only one admitting it) and using gnostic concepts of virtue to beat others down and keep them from having anything materially so that some can have more creates a spasm in which people say, “yeah, Marx was right.” And I will also say that I think that denying the psychological component of these systems is anti-Incarnational; John 1 says the Word became flesh (sarx), not body (soma), and flesh is more a term of the squishiness, really the psychic element of embodied existence; in effect, this neo-gnosticism is neo-Appolinarian in an implicit denial of the soul, a Cartesian dualism in which the “spirit” that makes the acts of will that define morality and “virtue” is all there is, a ghost in the machine of the flesh (and yes, I use “machine” as significant: the treatment of the human person as material machine for production, as a “human resource,” goes hand in hand with this Cartesian dualism that so characterizes much of modern “christian” identity marketing and politics). Unfortunately, all too many in the religious camp will let a doctor convince them of an invisible system in the body that can be impacted by things that are beyond the realm of their choices but will vehemently deny the existence of such systems in the psychological interaction between persons and peoples (although we have seen in the recent “protests” against safety measures that the acceptance of the existence of such invisible-but-real systems is not secure even on the physical level ... and I think really that the gnosticism on the justice level paved the way for the gnosticism on the level of physical health: If I just believe enough, I won’t get the virus).