When drag works...

Back in the day, the Kids in the Hall did a sketch featuring three men sitting on a front porch discussing...well, gay things. One of them starts talking about a 'queen' he knows and another responds that drag is 'misogyny' and...well, at least, that's how I remember it...

Anyhow, the sketch highlights the ambiguity around drag. Does it reinforce or subvert gender norms? Is it mocking or challenging? If mocking, what does it mock? A lot of this debate goes back to Judith Butler's comments on drag and gender performance in Gender Trouble where she was interpreted as emphasizing the transgressive aspects of drag without acknowledging the potentially reactionary side.

So when is drag subversive? When does drag work to undermine the stability of the 'heterosexual matrix' (Butler's term)? And conversely, when does drag fail?

Exhibit A: when drag doesn't work...

If you didn't know that this was a man in drag, don't worry. How could you? He is absolutely stunning. And that is the problem. Andrej Pejic passes and he passes superbly. It would appear that the perfect woman is a man!!! And with all you know about gender, how it works and what it serves are you really surprised?

I've written about Andrej Pejic before and the massive confusion he causes both heterosexual men and women. But what precisely is the cause of that confusion? Well, this man in drag is a walking idealization of everything a woman is supposed to be. So, yes, he does point out the arbitrary nature of "womanly" signs and symbols and features and curves but does he challenge the categorical qualities of woman as such? Or does he simply reiterate gender norms and contours?

If you really can't tell the difference, then there is no difference. A man in drag is a woman. He is a copy of a copy of a copy...And that's a fail! A gloriously beautiful one but a fail none the less!

Exhibit B: when drag works...




Source: rosalarian.tumblr


Aside from the obvious cartoonishness, what is different about this picture compared to the ones of Andrej Pejic above? No, not the dress. Perhaps the projectingly obvious manliness in musculature and pelvic contours...? Here is a man in drag. The drag is not hidden or subtle or alluring. It is out in the open. The gender issues all hang out.

Exhibit C: when drag works...




Source: rosalarian.tumblr


If the point made in the first picture of the man in drag was too subtle, well look above. Is that too nuanced for ya?

Exhibit D: when drag works...

Source: rosalarian.tumblr

And, as if the point needed to be made again, well here it is anyway. And in quadruplicate!

So why do these images of superheroes in drag work? Well, ask Megan Rosalarian Gedris, the graphic artist who drew them...

She was tired of hearing 'Men are idealized in comics, too' as a response to her complaints about the idealization of cartoon women, so she drew these pictures to show just how ridiculous and off-base that remark was: "Because while the men are impossibly muscular and the women are impossibly skinny/boobular, the men aren’t being sexualized out the wazoo." The idealization of the different genders is clearly not comparable: male strength is exagerrated while female sexiness is taken to absurd extremes.

Gedris' pictures emphasize just how ludicrous the appearance of female characters actually is: "It’s not the characters’ bodies themselves that are the biggest problem, but how they are dressed and posed. Tits out, ass out, lips pouty, legs spread, hips cocked, eyelids at half mast. Outfits that make Wonder Woman’s star spangled panties look fit for a Mormon picnic. Short skirts, cutouts, stilettos, fishnets, thigh-highs." Even while fighting evil, women can't stop being 'woman as sex' whose real purpose is to display her form for the pleasure of the men ogling her.

The idealization of men in comic books has nothing to do with sexiness: ' You don’t see male heroes wearing these costumes or posing like this...their costumes tend to have full coverage, and when they pose, it’s to inspire fear, not boners.' Man is strength and virility. Woman is sexiness. That's the essential truth you need to know.

The representation of women in comic books is beyond absurd and sexist. It is misogynist and oppressive. A woman looks and sees in the cartoon mirror the reflection of the male mutilation of the female body. And men wonder why women don't read comics? As Gedris says,

'Dudes, I want you to imagine a world where most of the portrayals of your gender in comics look like the above. Are you going to think “Well, I really like the stories so I’ll just suck it up and read this anyway”? Or are you going to be alienated from reading most comics? Be honest. Are you willing to stare at that much thrusting crotch just to find out if Spiderman is gonna win?

Lots of people in the comics business look at their demographic breakdown and think women don’t like superheroes. The creator of DC Women Kicking Ass made a very apt point when she said, “Let me put it this way, if you keep keeping putting food on a kid’s plate and they don’t eat do you assume they don’t like to eat or they don’t like the food? Right.”'

Fantasies matter. They are more real than reality because they are the visions that form reality. And they are social acts because we do not create our fantasies from nothing. We develop them in conjunction with other people, our upbringing, the media, etc. Fantasies represent the subterranean economy of social desire: what our society really really wants. Sexual fantasies represent the spectre of the true relations between the sexes: men should be and do such to be real men and women should be and do such to be real women. Sexual fantasies are about what haunts us...

The idealization of men and women in our society and its artifacts are a social stamp that brands and burns and mutilates the bodies of men and women. This idealization tells us what we really want to be. This idealization tells us what we really want...

If Gedris is right and women don't read comics because of the idealization of women found there then maybe this form of gender oppression can be overcome. If women don't want this and men still want women, then maybe men will need to learn to want something different. Something more equal. Something more free. Something more fun. Something more ideal than 'reality.'

Something else, my dark comrades!

Goth home decorating: living with Lovecraft

If you're looking for a way to Goth up ye olde witch's hovel, then what could be better than some call of Cthulhu carpets? Dark Water comes directly from the blackest abyss--otherwise known as Denmark. A new line of carpets inspired by Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos...

You can feel the nameless fear as you sprawl across the crawling chaos...

Source: Kirill Rozhkov

Or sit and read the Necronomicon as the Great Old Ones quietly surround you. And you succumb to Their whispering madness...

Source: Kirill Rozhkov

Just remember you are very very very alone in the dark gulfs of space as you decide whether it is better to face the lurking horror with the lights on or off...



Source: Kirill Rozhkov

 Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!!!

Gorgeous and gory...a good combo?

The new Gorgeous and Gory calendar is out. It's cheesecake. But it's deliciously rotten cheesecake!




Source: The Zed Word/Gorgeous and Gory


As with porn, I'm torn...when I direct my male gaze at the female form. These pics are designed for my consumption. Flesh. Brains. Flesh. Flesh. Flesh. Flesh. Flesh. Yummm. And my body is being deliberately manipulated. Oh, I can feel it. And it bugs me to be used this way.

But...the fix is in. For now at least, I'm a male-identified hetero. I may be strange but I still love female bodies. And not just that. I love conventional heteronormative female bodies...

Gorgeous and Gory isn't the worst offender by far. But it definitely caters--despite its' faux transgressiveness--to the heterosexual imperative. These images are the gender performance reiterated again and again and again on the complicit male and female body.

Just look at it! How do you feel? Does the decomposing nature of the body in question change anything? Or does it merely emphasize the meatiness of the female body?




Source: The Zed Word/Gorgeous and Gory



Source: The Zed Word/Gorgeous and Gory

Let's play a little word association...What do you come up with when you look at the pics above?

Juicy blood. Open wet wounds. Sex and violence. Orifice overload. Body breakdown. Abnormal. Aberrant...ok, stop!

Yes, it's arbitrary but...By my little experiment, I came up with some gender conformist and some gender critical images.

The goriness does reinforce the mainstream gorgeousness of sexy heterosexism. But the goriness does also modify the gorgeousness and challenge the female body as a site of male sexuality. The goriness is  repulsive. Flamboyantly so. And that highlights the contingent quality of "sexy" female signs and images. So it does at least briefly interrupt the male gaze. And provoke some second thoughts. Sobering ones? Perhaps...

Stay tuned for more on the transgressive zombie body...

Eternal Night on the Internet

The internet is turning day into night this Wednesday, January 18th. In protest against SOPA and PIPA, two bills that would almost certainly end the internet as we know it, all of my favourite sites have gone dark. And so, I have nothing to do but work! SOPA and PIPA represent a ramped-up American imperialism that now wants to extend its jursidiction over both the real and the virtual world. I appreciate the irony of blogging on a blacked out day after not blogging for so long but...well, dammit!...go visit Coilhouse to see just how bad things could get, if the American entertainment industry gets to retro-fit the techworld to their dying economic models...

My dinner with zombie: the picture edition

A few weeks ago, I blogged about a zombie-themed dinner I had with some friends of mine. I promised some pictures. And now I've finally got around to uploading them in this post.

An episode of The Big Bang Theory inspired our attempt at a zombie dinner party: Raj and Howard got all Gothed up to go to a dark nightclub where they try to get lucky with some creepy sweetlings. In one scene, they play Gother-than-thou; and Raj goes so far as to claim that they even eat 'Goth food.' The one gothling asks what that is and Raj replies: 'Blackened salmon.'

Hmmmm...if Goth is a lifestyle, then what is Goth food? This is not some original musing on my part alone. There are many options for Goth food, including this cookbook. But I wondered how the zombie theme could be culinarized.

Food is an ephemeral art. Delicious and deadly. If consumption=destruction=a little death. Photography then is a second life. A living death, as it were...

Here are the results:

If zombies had enough will power to set the table:

Intestines anyone?

Mmmmm...clotted blood:

More blood and entrails in a delicious gooey mess:

Zombies go cosmopolitan:

Spaghetti squash with cranberries as...well, use the dark side of your imagination:

Tripe before covering:

Tripe after covering...parmesan helps hide the taste of internal organs:

Fried liver in a brain...well, it kind of looks like a brain. Cheesy is ok in zombieland:

A ravishing massacre...Before we cut it up, it looked like legs struggling from a grave:

What zombies would drink. And what they would mix their drinks in:

The celery stick is just for presentation and practicality. No self-respecting zombie would touch that!

I hope you enjoyed these pics. Dinner should be about creation as much as delectation.

Eat on! Make on! My fellow friends of the walking dead...

More Victorian dadism: Steampunk heroes

Charles Cros

Source: wikipedia

Inventor, damned poet, rogue scientist and xenthropologist. Cros thought of the phonograph before Thomas Edison but didn't make it in time. Just tragic! He also was a passionate believer in alien life before it was cool; and proposed the construction of giant mirrors as a means of communicating with the denizens of Venus and Mars.

August Strindberg

Source: wikipedia

Another damned poet. And playwright. Transformed the naturalist and supernaturalist drama across Europe. Also an anarchist and rogue scientist. He would easily fit into the drinking dens of Salacus Fields and the cross-fertilized magic-science labs of Brock Marsh.

Vladimir Mayakovsky

Source: wikipedia

Not so much of a damned poet as a doomed one. A little late for steampunk, maybe more dieselpunk, but still the arch-dandy and artistic revolutionary. Fought for liberty and equality with both the pen and the sword. Even invented his own poetic-symbolic alphabet for proselytizing the new age and the new humanity. Disillusioned with the Stalinist implosion of the Russian Revolution. Committed suicide. A martyr for freedom. And a martyr for art.

Just steamy. Just punky.

War on evol psych: Steven Pinker and style

Why do I hate Steven Pinker so? Because once I loved him and he broke my heart. Yes, I too fell for the fraud that is evol(utionary) psych(ology) with its elegant reduction of complex human activities like politics, art, morality to reproductive fitness. Everything is about sex. Now that's one hell of an attractive message.

And then I read The Blank Slate: the Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker. I'm no scientist--and sexy science fogs the mind--so at first Pinker's case seemed at least plausible. Ok, the idea that we are an empty skin sac waiting to be filled doesn't really make sense. Ok, studies that emphasize the parental environment in socialization fail to account for the genetic contribution. Ok, ok, ok...

Everything at least made sense, even if it seemed a little oversimplified, until I got to the chapter on 'The Arts.' And then howler followed howler. Here the reductionist thesis became absurd.

Yes, Pinker has some good points even in this silly chapter. Artists and critics always proclaim the death of art and culture. It's what they do. And there is good evidence that lots of people are still being really creative. Contra Pinker, he could have pointed to issues with the funding of the arts in North America, specifically education, community, etc. which are at alarmingly low levels. And yes, human beings are imaginary creatures. We all know that, especially in the imaginary community that is global Goth.

But from reasonable beginnings comes this: 'In The Mating Mind, the psychologist Geoffrey Miller argues that the impulse to create art is a mating tactic: a way to impress prospective sexual and marriage partners with the quality of one's brain and thus, indirectly, one's genes. Artistic virtuousity, he notes, is unevenly distributed, neurally demanding, hard to fake, and widely prized. Artists, in other words, are sexy (Pinker, 407).' Well, yuh. Artists are sexy. Art is sexy. And then Pinker goes from the obvious to the downright silly when he compares the human artistic impulse with the nest-making creativity of the satin bowerbirds of New Guinea and Australia: 'The males construct elaborate nests and fastidiously decorate them with colorful objects such as orchids, snail shells, berries, and bark. Some of them literally paint their bowers with regurgitated fruit residue using leaves or bark as a brush. The females appraise the bowers and mate with the creators of the most symmetrical and well-ornamented ones (Pinker, 407).' And that's just what artists do too, in'it? Ok, maybe Picasso, maybe Augustust John, maybe...

'Aren't you just the cutest little Modigliani?'
Source: blog.nus.edu.sg

Granted, art may have originated as some sort of Australopithecine pick-up line. And yes, Pinker takes a weaker approach to the connection between art and reproductive fitness than his mate Miller. But it's still all about sex. Sex sex sex sex sex sex sex...And you thought I was obsessed with sex. And I thought I could never get sick of hearing about sex.

It's just such a vapid thesis. It explains everything and nothing. So it's about sex. Well, that's just pointless banality. We know that and yet it's only partially true and tells us almost nothing. Does sex really explain why we do art? Why we love art? Why we sacrifice things, including sex, for art? No, of course not. But scientists are clearly sex mad and having none of our prudish abstinence-only aesthetics.

And if Pinker is ridiculous about art, he's downright stupid about style. Here's where the science really hits the fan!

Pinker is a naturalist, so he basically only values naturalistic art. With some exceptions, he has nothing but disdain for modernism and postmodernism. In his view, contemporary aesthetics is where theory eclipses art. And that is just a cover for bad art.

And Pinker loathes the theory: in 'postmodernism...the theory upstaged the subject matter and became a genre of performance art in itself. Postmodernist scholars, taking off from the critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault, distrust the demand for "linguistic transparency" because it hobbles the ability "to think the world more radically" and puts a text in danger of being turned into a mass-market commodity...This attitude has made them regular winners of the annual Bad Writing Contest, which "celebrates the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles (Pinker, 415)."' Har har har! The great scientist has a good laugh at the poor postmodern fools

Gender theorist Judith Butler won the prize in 1998 and Pinker provides the winning quotation on the same page quoted above. Yes, Butler can write some excruciating prose but three points here. Scientists calling social scientists bad stylists is like the boiling pot calling the steaming kettle hot. You folks know bad writing when you see it because you are the experts!

And two, anybody can cherrypick quotations. Here's the first paragraph from the conclusion to Butler's Gender Trouble:

'I began with the speculative question of whether feminist politics could do without a "subject" in the category of women. At stake is not whether it still makes sense, strategically or transitionally, to refer to women in order to make representational claims in their behalf. The feminist "we" is always and only a phantasmatic construction, one that has its purposes, but which denies the internal complexity and indeterminacy of the term and constitutes itself only through the exclusion of some part of the constituency that it simultaneously seeks to represent. The tenuous or phantasmatic status of the "we," however, is not cause for despair or, at least, it is not only cause for despair. The radical instability of the category sets into question the foundational restrictions on feminist political theorizing and opens up other configurations, not only of genders and bodies, but of politics itself (Gender Trouble, 194)."

Was that garbled? Was that hard to understand? Was that bad writing? Phah! See, I can cherry pick too. And for every nightmare passage I can find an equally clear and concise one.

Finally, what about this problem with 'linguistic transparency'? What really is the issue here? Culture theorist Homi K. Bhabha once complained about the double standard of scientists who reserved the right to the most arcane techno-jargon in their archly sophisticated and esoteric fields but then expected everyone else to write simple, banal, straightforward prose about supposedly more mundane things like art, literature, politics, race, etc. As Bhabha asks, why do scientists think that subjects other than science are somehow less complex and difficult? Well, because they're both ignorant and arrogant. They don't know nothing about history or philosophy or art but they knows it when they sees it. And they don't want to be all befuddled and bemused by them big long ambiguous words and phrases in such common disciplines of human knowledge. The kind like Judith Butler writes when she makes a simple word like 'woman' into an issue. Doesn't everybody know what a 'woman' is? What is the problem here?

Scientists (and I most definitely do not mean all scientists here) can be such philistines. And I don't mean this in an elitist sort of way. But in the sense that compartmentalized jerks make authoritative pronouncements well outside of their field of expertise without bothering to learn anything about the subject they're pontificating on. Really, Pinker's whole book is an example of one-sided philistinism. He knows nothing about art or politics or style or women and yet he lectures loud and long on each topic. If only he'd done a little research and troubled himself to actually learn something about Foucault or Butler.

Gender storm

What the ungendered body says about you...

You only need to read a little on the storm of controversy around Storm Witterick to realize how big a deal gender really is. And it is about 'is'. About the state and status of being. The essentials. Being real. Being true. Being unquestionable. Being absolute.

Storm Witterick was born last May to an interesting couple in Toronto. Storm's parents chose to not disclose their baby's gender to anyone outside a small, select circle. Their purpose: to allow their baby to grow up as far and as long as possible in a gender-free, or at least gender neutral, environment. Nothing more.

And then the howl of horror and protest rose up against this unconscionable 'gender experiment.' Please note. Storm's parents were doing nothing to or with their baby. Nothing beyond not disclosing the child's gender to people who had no business knowing. Nothing more.

And yet this little bit of unknowledge was intolerable in the strict binary system of heteronormativity. There are two and two only. Nothing more and nothing less. Definitely nothing less and nothing outside.

This repellent overreaction certainly reveals a lot about us. We just can't handle even the slightest challenge to the twinkle two two world of gender totalitarianism. We depend on it. And we will make the most ridiculous statements and claims and arguments to defend it. We simply can't leave a little baby alone and outside.

The non-gendered body is a creature of horror because it unconceals (yeah, that's the best way to describe it) the naked truth of the abject body. As Judith Butler says (please forgive the long quotation but I think it's necessary):

'This exclusionary matrix [the system of twos] by which subjects are formed thus requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet "subjects," but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject. The abject...designates here precisely those "unlivable" and "uninhabitable" zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of the "unlivable" is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject. This zone of uninhabitability will constitute the defining limit of the subject's domain; it will constitute that site of dreaded identification against which--and by virtue of which--the domain of the subject will circumscribe its own claim to autonomy and to life. In this sense, then, the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subject, an abjected outside, which is, after all, "inside" the subject as its own founding repudiation (Bodies That Matter, p. 3).'

Yup, we are terrified of the naked truth of the abject body. And a little baby becoms an object of horror along the lines of the creature in Alien.

Is that why we're so obsessed with zombies? They are the ultimate abject body...?