A Dating (Multi)Culture

Leah Libresco is kvetching about dating woes at her blog Unequally Yoked, in some conversation with other bloggers. One of these other bloggers, Thomas Umstattd, critiqued the courtship culture he had spent some portion of his life promoting and offered as a substitute a 1950s-style model of casual dating. In this model, people do not go out on a date with the same person twice in a row. If a guy takes you out for ice cream on Monday and you want to take him up on his invitation to the Saturday night dance, you need to get a date with someone else during the week. This way, accepting a date or asking someone out on a date doesn’t imply anything much, and you get to know a number of people in a romance-possible context without feeling like you’re leading them on. After all, if I know my date is seeing another guy two days from now, I can hardly feel entitled to her attentions or affections. What we call “dating” was called “going steady” or “exclusive” back then, and it meant that you’d then only go on dates with that one person. By the time anyone proposed marriage, you had gone on dates with rather a lot of people and had a sense of what you were looking for in a partner.*

Leah quite liked this model and was trying to think of ways to bring it back. Noting that dates with people you met online already had the 1950s implication but had many many other pitfalls, while dates with people you already knew tended to be over-invested with meaning even when it dodges online dating's pitfalls, she thought Umstattd’s grandma’s 1950s approach might well be the best one.

One of the commenters was leery, however. Cam was concerned that trying to construct a culture with such strict expectations might only work for some members of society:

What's so wrong with clear, open communication? It's the best and I think it can be nicely grounded in respect, feminism and all kinds of love. 

[…] 

If at any point a misunderstanding occurs, this isn't the end of the world, right? Clear it up, laugh it off, move on with life. I don't think trying to orchestrate a 'dating culture' is the best way to manage expectations among individuals. A 'dating culture' can still feature confusion too. 

Everyone is unique and there are a wide range of identities, approaches to life, sexualities and relationships that are conducive to love and happiness (please keep trying to learn/accept this). A wider culture is needed where all sorts of people can navigate all kinds of relationships safely and happily. That's why wishing for some sort of 'dating culture' isn't a good idea, the best way to manage expectations is through communication and respect. [emphasis mine]

Even though I had been interested in what Leah and Umstattd were suggesting, I wound up agreeing pretty strongly with Cam that such a culture was not going to be helpful for everyone. Of course, part of Leah’s and Umstattd’s concern with the way dating happens now is that it often doesn't; people hook up or make out instead, and see what happens from there. Now, no one I know started their current relationship that way, to my knowledge, but prevailing wisdom seems to be that that’s how most relationships start these days, and I don’t have the data to contradict that. Anyway, good-Catholic Leah isn’t interested in hook ups either for herself or as a cultural script, so she’s suggesting something else.

But I agreed with Cam, with some caveats:

I would mostly agree with you, but I'd need to add this caveat: there almost certainly are people who think they work best with one sort of relationship but actually don't work well with that sort of relationship, and there are almost certainly kinds of relationship that don't work well for anyone (even when they are all consenting), like the extreme courtship model Umstattd critiques. But allowing people to make those mistakes is a necessary evil (or really just inconvenience, I wager) that comes as a consequence of the far more necessary practice of allowing people to find and pursue the sort of relationship model that does work well for them.

Of course I was inclined to agree with Cam, because zer complaint was much like the sort of complaint I myself have made in other arguments. Like I was in those other arguments, Cam was accused of rank relativism, which I pointed out was silly because saying that there are multiple good answers doesn’t mean that all answers are good; good answers may even be in the minority, but still there can be more than one equally good answer. However, I feel like Cam’s suggestion ignores some of the original problem and it ignores that a dating culture of some sort will inevitably exist and the question is merely how explicit it is.

Let’s do those in reverse order. Cam wrote, “That's why wishing for some sort of 'dating culture' isn't a good idea, the best way to manage expectations is through communication and respect.” But, of course, managing expectations through communication and respect is a dating culture, or part of one. Communication and respect are things that work better if everyone does them, and they are things I certainly would have no problem pushing on other people, within the bounds that they themselves set, of course. By arguing that we should communicate and be respectful and otherwise expect as few particulars as possible from potential dating partners, Cam is in effect “wishing for some sort of ‘dating culture’,” just not the same one as Leah as wishing for.

And I think this is precisely the sort of dating culture we should be pushing for: one which is open about the kind of relationships people might engage in, but which insists that communication and mutual respect manage our expectations about those relationships. However, we have to add one more element in order for it to work: we need participants to know and accept that there are lots of different possible models and that what works for some people won't work well for everyone. In a sense, it’s like a culture which has multiculturalism baked into it, which has means of handling different scripts or etiquette as part of its scripts and etiquette. What I’ve described is a minimal sort of dating culture, but it’s probably the only acceptable one, where “acceptable” is defined as “not terrible for lots of people.”

However, this proposed dating culture has problems, and some of those problems are the very ones that Leah’s been complaining about. For example, it might be difficult to communicate to people what your expectations are, even if open communication is a norm. Leah can’t possibly be expected to recite her series of posts when she asks a guy out ice-skating or responds to an invitation to the local maple syrup festival. A person’s needs and expectations might be complicated, and it might not seem reasonable or possible to explain them all before going on a date. What would really help is a way of signalling what sort of relationship you’re interested in without having to conduct a screening interview with every applicant.

One of the other commenters—Randy Gritter—and I came to the same conclusion independently: a person could open a coffee shop that deliberately promoted itself as being a location for a particular kind of date (in this case, the kind Leah was proposing). The coffee shop would require an aggressive and canny marketing campaign so that everyone in the target customer base would understand its social role, but if it were to achieve that then everyone in the area would know what an invitation for coffee/tea at that particular coffee shop meant. There’s already a place for this if you’re looking for a hook-up (singles’ bars), but it would be nice to have such venues for many different romantic models. Today Leah proposed a dating service that one might tweak to these ends, and I might also suggest trying to develop and popularize a lexicon. All of these suggestions are intended to manage the same goal: creating options which are easy to communicate, and allowing people to develop, advertise, and communicate new options as needed.

Of course, all of this is already happening, but in a disjointed and often unacknowledged way. Again, there are yenta and dating sites and singles’ bars, and there are multiple models of dating which people struggle to communicate, and there are already campaigns pushing for communication and respect. What is needed is a framework—a dating culture—in which people acknowledge that there are multiple models and which allows people to communicate, or signal, their preferred relationship models (or relationship models they are willing to try, even if they aren’t the preferred option) to others as conveniently as possible. Two people who are romantically interested in one another might still disagree about the sort of relationship they should have because they have different needs and desires, but that’s still currently happening and would happen in the 1950s model or any other possible dating culture, unless there are literally only two options: strangers or married. All I’m asking for is that we salvage the existing mess by making it an explicit system.

And note that I'm being a bit ironic when I say "all I'm asking"; there's a tiny problem trying to orchestrate a dating culture, or any sort of culture at all, especially when you have no social clout whatsoever.

----

*Think Archie Comics, if you've ever read those. Actually, I think a lot of the ways in which the Betty and Veronica trope plays out today is a strange artifact in which a franchise carries one generation's cultural expectations through several other generations, and those subsequent generations don't quite understand what they're seeing but don't misunderstand it enough to realize they're misunderstanding it. I mentioned at Leah's that Umstattd's description of 1950s dating is what made those comics finally click into place for me; otherwise, it's too easy to interpret the Betty-Archie-Veronica thing as a terribly dysfunctional/unstable poly triad.

A Conlang for Your Heart

Glossary
Conlang: A constructed language, or conlang, is a language whose features have been consciously constructed rather than developed naturally, as in most languages.
Asexuality: Asexuality is a sexual orientation (or something analogous to a sexual orientation) in which a person does not experience sexual attraction to anyone. Although many asexual people are aromantic--meaning that they do not experience romantic attraction to anyone either--not all are. People who are only minimally sexual, but not entirely asexual, are often called "grey."

One of the things that excites me about the asexuality movement is the attempt to create a new vocabulary for attraction. Many, if not most, of the ways we have learned to describe our relationships with other people are based on romantic and familial models, though we've generated a few others to describe sexual non-romantic relationships in the last few decades (friends with benefits, f*ckbuddies). And there are some institutional or quasi-institutional terms, too: mentors, sponsors, confessors. But there are few words or phrases for peer-to-peer relationships, and there are even fewer words or phrases for the kinds of bonds people have, irrespective of the particular activities that people do with one another. Asexual people, and especially aromantic asexual people, therefore have hardly a vocabulary at all to describe the different kinds of bonds they have with people. Making a new vocabulary is more urgent for aces, but it is useful for anyone who has informal non-romantic relationships . . . which probably includes pretty much everybody.

I encountered a "web of attraction" at the blog asexy beast. It consists of a spider's web with different points around the edge labelled with different kinds of attraction: sexual, romantic, aesthetic, platonic, physical, fantasy. The different components go unexplained, so we're required to use the author's commentary to try and make sense of the diagram. But I'm not wedded to the particular labels What was revelatory for me when I first saw the web was that all of these different kinds of attraction could be de-coupled. Until then I had been assuming that if I experienced a certain kind of attraction toward someone I really must be experiencing all of the others, since I had conflated them all. This became very confusing when my actual experiences did not line up: how can I be attracted to someone I don't find attractive? How can I be attracted to someone when I don't want to date them? etc. So long as I was grouping all types of attraction into one category and treating them as simply facets of a single experience, I was confusing myself. Seeing the web of attraction--especially in the context of asexuality--broke that conflation up for me. I have been able to make much better sense of my own experiences now that I am not reflecting on them with a limited vocabulary.

For instance, I am no longer especially confused or worried if I find a person attractive to the point of distraction but I do not have the slightest inclination to date that person: "thinks is cool" and "finds physically attractive" might be prerequisites to "wants to date" for me, but they are not sufficient, because "wants to date" is its own discrete and indivisible experience. But I'm simplifying a little--"finds physically attractive" isn't a single indivisible experience, either.

But of course different people will be experiencing different combinations of these forms of attraction, in response to different aspects of other people, so it will make sense for people to be developing their own vocabulary for their own use. The trick in making your own vocabulary is the danger that you'll try to project that vocabulary onto others (of which the problem asexual people encountered trying to explain themselves in sexual language is one example). I'm recommending that people make these vocabularies largely so they can explain themselves to themselves, and therefore it can be an entirely private language; however, teaching other people to speak your language could be helpful if you wanted to explain yourself to them and if you wanted to help them revise and improve the conlangs for their own hearts.

If you want to learn more about asexuality, I recommend checking out AVEN, the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network, and the YouTube channel Hot Pieces of Ace.

Although I have finished and posted this in response to a comment conversation at Unequally Yoked, I have been sitting on drafts of this for awhile.

"Her Naked Glory": Objectification and Female Nudity in Television and Film

I've been reading* a bit of commentary about "Blurred Lines" and Game of Thrones, particularly regarding female nudity and objectification. In the comment sections more than the articles themselves I've noticed a few people (mainly women, incidentally) asking if female nudity couldn't be empowering (or be read as empowering) in certain cases. While the individual comments I saw were not really well worked out with regard to "Blurred Lines," which we probably cannot read as empowering if we're being honest about the video, I still think that this is a question worth asking. I don't really have an answer, but I do want to break this broader question into a few more specific ones.

1. Are representations of female nudity always erotic?
I ask this because male nudity isn't always erotic. In the first season of Game of Thrones (the only season I've seen), there is a lot of female nudity but there is also some male nudity. In the first instance of male nudity that I recall, there is really no sense that that nudity is erotic. It's humiliating and objectifying, yes, but not erotic. (A man is forced to march naked and tied to a horse as a punishment for attempting to murder another character.) So my suspicion is that, if male nudity is not always erotic, then female nudity wouldn't be, either.

2. Are representations of female nudity always objectifying?
I have little to say about this, except that if the answer to this question is no and the answer to the previous question is no, we have to ask the next question.

3. Are representations of female nudity, when erotic, always objectifying?
Again, for reasons like those above, I am assuming that it isn't. The example that's usually cited here is lesbian pornography (as in real lesbian pornography, made by women about women for women, not pornography made about lesbian women by straight men for straight men), but the example that comes to mind for me might be Irene Adler in the BBC's Sherlock. She appears naked as a way of exercising power, and I think her agency is deliberately emphasized in that scene, but I'm not always sure that this sort of agency is maintained as the representation crosses the fourth wall. In other words, can a female character still be objectified for the sake of male viewers while maintaining agency within the fiction?

(Note that you can set this up as a chart, with two columns and two rows; the columns would be erotic/non-erotic and the rows would be objectifying/non-objectifying. I've covered three of the four cells now, but the fourth, non-erotic objectification, is pretty obvious, I think, in that if non-erotic nudity is possible, then non-erotic objectifying nudity must be, since objectification does not rely on eroticization to function. That statement is a pretty important piece of evidence, though.)

4. If the answer is no to questions 1 through 3, then under what conditions do representations of female nudity a) become erotic and b) become objectifying?
This is the question that really interests me, and that I am most ignorant about so far. I suspect that I know the answers to #1-#3 as far as I am asking those questions abstractly: so, representations of female nudity almost certainly aren't always inherently erotic. But maybe, in the cultural and representational settings I inhabit, the conditions making nudity both erotic and objectifying are always present; maybe, under patriarchy, where the assumed viewpoint of any text is both male and heterosexual, and where male heterosexuality assumes subject status at the expense of female subjectivity, representations of female nudity always become erotic and objectifying, regardless of the text's own features. I'm not saying that any of this is true, just that I could believe that it is true without much convincing. But I would need some convincing.

The point where I resist this story that I've posited is where, under patriarchy, male heterosexuality's assumption of subject status always entails objectifying women. I think it's easy to do, and that we (as in "heterosexual men" and not "you and I") are encouraged (by whom?) to assert subjectity at the expense of female subjectivity, but I don't think it's inevitable. That's one place where I'd need convincing. And I'd also need convincing that the assumed reader/viewer is always male and heterosexual. (In other words, just because patriarchy is big and strong doesn't mean it's omnipotent and omnipresent.)

In other words, we are confronted with the problem--the same problem, really, that all textual or cultural interpretation confronts in some way or another--of where meaning resides: intention? reception? context? form? Does a film objectify women, or does the director objectify them, or do the veiwers? Do well-intentioned viewers, watching a well-intentioned and well-executed film, nonetheless objectify nude women when watching in a patriarchal context? Can the act of watching, in anyway and by anyone, recover agency for women represented erotically when nude? Or is it some formal (or intertextual) feature of the film itself that objectifies or does not objectify nude women, and that feature trumps anything you or I might bring to the text? The answers to these questions certainly aren't obvious in the general case of textual interpretation or the specific case of representations of female nudity.

We can ask a version of question #4 of women even when clothed, obviously: Under what conditions do representations of women a) become erotic and b) become objectifying? However, because we criticize films for gratuitous nudity and not for a gratuitous presence of women (the problem is the exact opposite), I think there is something special about nudity that lends it to objectification. (Notice, too, that when people criticize a film for gratuitous nudity, they almost always mean female nudity, not nudity in general.) And gratuitous female nudity does seem for most people to mean "erotic objectification of women" in and of itself, which makes me think that these questions are particularly apt, since if female nudity is not always objectifying, then we ("you and I" this time, not "heterosexual men") should probably be criticizing films a bit more pointedly and accurately than just saying "gratuitous nudity" without explaining how it is objectifying in this case.

(I'm assuming feminist reasons and not prudish ones for criticizing a film for gratuitous nudity. While rather prudish myself, I don't consider prudishness grounds for criticizing a film; it might mean you don't like the film, but it has no bearing on the film's quality.)

5. Are representations of female nudity ever empowering for women, and under what conditions?
Which is the question I started out with. It isn't a question I feel I can answer, though, this time not because of ignorance (as in #4), but because I'm a dude. I feel that this particular question is probably one that men can't answer.
______________
(The title quote comes from Paradise Lost and refers to a pre-lapsarian Eve. There's some obvious baggage with that quotation--for example, Milton's spectacular sexism--which is why I chose it. Because, you know, so-called empowering nudity might come with misogynist baggage.)
*OK, skimming.

Unnatural Acts and Unnatural Ingredients

or, What Kind of Pure?
A Moral Foundations Theory post

[EDIT 25 July 2012: I feel like this needs a caveat. I do not really believe that the distinction between natural and unnatural acts is a valid one. At best the distinction relies on an ontology that I consider to be erroneous; at worst it is incoherent. So when I talk about people calling acts unnatural, I am trying to mention those claims in the way of anthropology (that is, they are the subject of my consideration) rather than citation (that is, they are not claims I'm using to support my own). I'm not sure if anyone has been reading this differently, but I want to make it clear. But I should also note that I am a pescetarian/selective vegetarian now and I was one when I wrote this post.]

From the outset, I will cite my primary resource for these speculations: Richard Beck's book Unclean, which looks at the psychology of disgust and how it relates to Christian culture, theology, etc. I don't have the book to hand, so I can't block-quote a relevant section, but it deals with the underlying psychological mechanisms of disgust, and how we use disgust metaphors when talking/thinking about morality. One of Beck's claims (one that I think bears up under scrutiny) is that about the only domain in which the purity metaphor controls our conversation about morality is sexuality. Chastity is controlled by a logic of purity (and therefore disgust), but lying or consumerism are not.

Indeed, I noticed that a number of the questions which I suspect contribute to the purity and sanctity measure on the Moral Foundations test dovetailed with Beck's observations (as they would; Beck drew on the theory in his research). There was a question about chastity, there was a question about whether an act's "unnaturalness" was sufficient to make it immoral, and there was a question about whether feeling disgust about an act was an indication of its morality. There was another question about whether pleasing God is relevant to an act's moral status, but I'm going to deal with this concern elsewhere. According to Moral Foundations Theory, purity tends to be the most political conservative of all of the scores; it is here that there is the greatest discrepency between liberal and conservative participants (much to both groups' horror, I'm sure.) I wonder about this, though, because I see purity/disgust governing another ethical realm, one I generally consider more left-leaning, which I touched on in my post on authenticity: environmentalism.

Like last time, I have no systematic evidence for this but instead have a cluttered list of examples. If you've seen the movie Fern Gully, however, you might have some kind of idea: the environment is possessed of a certain purity which pollution (maliciously) defiles. While clear-cutting and poaching are foci of environmental activism, the ones I tend to think of are all concerned with introducing foreign substances into the environment (which is the basis of disgust, cf Unclean): oil spills, CO2 emissions, ground water contamination, garbage in the oceans. Landfills, floating garbage islands, smokestacks, filthy water pouring into rivers: these elicit disgust. For this reason, I think a lot of environmentalist activism, if not theory, operates with an implicit purity logic or rhetoric.

The word "unnatural," so often used these days to describe homosexual activity, comes to mind also in terms of the food we eat. People fear unnatural ingredients (despite the fact that this term has no clearly definable meaning) and unnatural foods (as in genetically modified foods); as far as I can tell, this fear has a viceral more than logical force. Many vegetarians express revulsion at the thought of eating meat, and lots of vegan activism relies on extremely disgusting images of slaughterhouses (which, you know, can hardly be photographed in a non-disgusting way). It makes sense that we would be particularly vulnerable to purity-thinking with regard to our food, because disgust's primary function is to prevent us from ingesting harmful substances.

I don't think either environmentalism, vegetarianism, or the organic food movement (only carbon-based foods!) are especially right-wing these days (though I'm skeptical that political orientations like right-wing or left-wing are historically consistent, and certainly there have been avowed reactionaries, like C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkein, who have been environmentalists). So there seem to be, at least in contemporary Western moral reasoning, two kinds of purity: sexual and biological. One of these is conservative and the other liberal.

I would really like to see empirical studies of this, because if I'm right, then purity/sanctity may not be a strictly conservative measure. Instead, the test's questions pick out a single kind of purity at the expense of another, skewing the results. Of course, we might want to say that sexual purity and biological purity are different moral foundations altogether, but 1) then biological purity should be represented in Moral Foundations Theory and 2) I am skeptical that they are very different, but are instead one moral foundation (purity/disgust) mobilized in different realms (sexual, ritual, environmental, dietary) like authenticty can be mobilized in different realms (truth-telling, existentialism, spontaneity, emotional self-expression).

If one moral foundation can be mobilized in different realms, though, this might call into question certain assumptions that Moral Foundations Theory makes, or at any rate certain assumptions that I made about Moral Foundations Theory and how we can use it, particularly to talk about politics.
I should also note that the description given of purity/sanctity does not really seem to reflect the concept, or at least not as elucidated by Beck. The quiz I took describes this measure as being about abstract religious or philosophical views about morality, which doesn't seem right at all. At the very least, things like utilitarianism and deontology, about as abstractly philosophical as you could get, are not well captured by the questions the quiz uses to detect purity/sanctity. Either that or I'm badly misunderstanding this measure, which I think is possible.

Moral Foundations Series Index

This Exploitation Might Not Be the Kind You're Thinking of

National Identity and a Pageantry of Stereotypes

When discussing his motivation for making the movie Desperado (2010), director Robert Rodriguez said he was interested in giving people a similar experience to one he had watching John Woo's The Killer:

Rodriguez says that when he got to Hollywood to make Desperado he wasn't trying to make a Latin film but a film that was entertaining just like when he saw John Woo's, The Killer and he thought, "Damn I want to be Chinese." With Desperado he liked the idea of people watching it, who would say, "Wow I want to be Mexican." [sic] (source)

Recently I've been thinking about the relationship between identity/community and the sort of quilt of stereotypes that define exploitation flicks like Rodriguez's later Mexploitation flick Machete (2010), as Rodriguez's quote exemplifies.

(I'm drawing my knowledge of exploitation flicks from these sources: Wikipedia's page on the genre; TVTropes's page on the genre; my own viewings of Coffy (1973), Undercover Brother (2002) (which is really am affectionate parody of Blaxploitation rather than an example of it, despite the fact that Blaxploitation was self-parodying from the outset), Kill Bill I & II (2003, 2004), the Grindhouse movies Planet Terror and Deathproof (2007), and Machete; and conversations with friends on these and other exploitation flicks. Take my interpretations with the grain of salt designed for opinions based on insufficient evidence.)

Exploitation flicks are often described as containing some kind of exploitation (a gimmick to draw in audiences) rather than high-quality plot, acting, or cinematography, but since things like action sequences, romance, horror, and comedy count as exploitation, this definition reduces the term to something as vague and unhelpful as "genre movie." Sometimes definitions insist that two particular exploitations--graphic violence and nudity--must be present, which does narrow the definition considerably but still includes everything shown on HBO (Game of Thrones, I'm looking at you). To narrow the definition so that it actually approaches common use, I would say that an exploitation flick must 1. use at least one of graphic violence and nudity/explicit sex to draw audiences; 2. promise some other material that will play on specific conventions and/or stereotypes and violates a contemporary taboo, such as religion/sacrilege, racism/racial identity, Nazism, or cannibalism; and 3. be notably or seemingly low-budget (though not necessarily poor quality). Often the element in the second qualification places the film in a particular subgenre: among the subgenres, Blaxploitation (which draws heavily on stereotypes of and societal problems for black Americans), nunsploitation (which often shows nuns exhibiting sexual behaviour we don't expect of nuns), and kung-fu movies are perhaps the most well known.

Exploitation flicks tend to incorporate as many stereotypes and associations connected with their chosen theme as they possibly can. For instance, Machete, which I will use as my example throughout, is mainly about illegally-immigrated Mexican Americans ("We didn't cross the border; the border crossed us!") and it has redneck border patrols, cockroaches, taco stands, semi-mythical revolutionaries, high Catholicism, street fighting rings, chop-shops and pimped-out cars, corrupt Federales, bandannas, and people brandishing rickshaws, hoes, and shovels. Plot devices include Mexican immigrants using publicly subsidized health care, Mexican characters getting construction work, Mexican characters infiltrating houses by doing yard work ("You ever notice how you let a Mexican into your house just because he's got gardening tools?"), and American-raised Mexican-Americans struggling to balance American and Mexican identities. It is almost as though the script writers made a list of all possible stereotypes that Americans have of Mexicans, strung them into some kind of order, and wrote a plot around that. Most of these stereotypes are presented as blatantly as possible. Subtlety is not highly valued.

Given the genre's focus, exploitation flicks usually privilege a pageantry of associations over the linear logic of tight plot. There is something carnivalesque and anti-systematic about them (though, of course, it is not necessarily the case that they don't have some kind of deep order). Part of this might come from the fact that the exploitation flick's very name implies an emphasis on immediate experience--pleasure, outrage, shock, tittilation, excitement--over a more considered or analytic engagement. It assumes that an exuberant display of taboo topics will be pleasurable to its intended audience, perhaps in part because of the imagined or documented outrage of a putatively unintended audience of social censors (but of course this unintended audience is really intended if their outrage is a real source of pleasure). However, there's something more to this than just the pageantry and the pleasure of taboo. These films use the play of stereotype and the overabundance of flavour to explore, if not always articulate, a certain kind of collective identity. In my flagship example, Machete, this is especially obvious; Rodriguez has said that he wanted to make his national/ethnic identity attractive, so Machete must display something that is recognizably Mexican, even if Mexican-ness is not clearly articulated in the film. (Of course it couldn't be; it, like any national identity, is imaginary.)

This leaves me with five directions for further questioning.

1. There must be a considerable difference between an emic (insider's perspective) and an etic (outsider's perspective) exploitation flick. Were Machete an etic film rather than an emic film, we would be quite right to consider it an act of appropriation at best, derogatory patronizing at worst. As much as I'm tempted to subscribe to the death of the author, it is clear that an author-figure (or author function) of some kind is still hugely important to an interpretation of a text. If an exploitation flick plays with the identity of a community, how much changes depending on whose community it is?

2. Exploitation flicks play on a confusion of identity or affiliation as well as an exuberant expression of one. I am not Mexican; it is unclear what affiliation I am supposed to have with this film (or it would be if Rodriguez hadn't helpfully told us that we're supposed to want to be Mexican). In etic exploitation films, we're often encouraged not to affiliate with the thematic group; from what I can tell, hixploitation films do not want you to want to be a hick. But more often than not it's unclear: what does Coffy think of race in America? The associative rather than linear focus makes it hard to pin down.

3. Identity must be somehow related to association. I might want to say that my identity as an academic, for instance, is based on a set of values or a set of practices, but if you were to make a gradsploitation flick the salient features would be much less logically coherent ones: all-nighters, useless erudition, endless arguments, grading papers, probably some seductive co-eds (which have nothing to do with my life as a grad student but would be conventional in such a film), etc. Is this a good way of imagining identity, "good" meaning either "accurate" or "admirable"? What does this tell us about how to strengthen our communities? Or does it say something very bad about the communities in question? Is it just a clumsy genre? Of course we should remember that in the case of things like Blaxploitation and Mexploitation, which focus on minority communities, there's a jocular reclaiming element to the stereotyping. The pleasure may come from claiming certain identifiers that were thrust upon them. These films might be excellent examples of the post-modern sense of irony, in that they balance self-conscious parody with sincerity.

4. If an exploitation film is the vehicle for making Mexican identity desirable, this might suggest that violence and nudity make identities desirable, which I find disconcerting. There's a lot in our culture to suggest this is true, but it's worth thinking about why. There are some obvious answers: violence implies that the protagonists are strong and capable while sexuality implies that the protagonists are desired by those who are desirable and desire those who are desirable (and thus have ideal normative sexualities). I'm sure this has something to do with masculinity et al., which makes me suspicious. But I'm also suspicious of those who would ban exploitation flicks as a prudish reaction to violence and nudity/sex; I suspect that filmmakers can use both exploitations to make intelligent and valuable commentaries, even if they have not ordinarily done so.

5. This is probably a coincidence, but to what extent does the term exploitation, which as an industry term does not refer to oppressive practices, relate to exploitation in the sense of oppressive practices? Exploitation in the latter sense has played a role in the history of black Americans, Mexican Americans, etc.; it might be argued that the nudity in these films is an exploitation of women; the violence in these films might reflect the violence needed to enforce the exploitation of oppressed populations. It is probably a coincidence, but it does seem a terrible irony that the method by which filmmakers "exploit" an audience entails or reflects the presumed audience's own exploitative practices. (It also gives a certain linguistic legitimacy to the Marxploitation flick, a genre I made up.)

As for Me and My House

On Disclosing Religion, Sexuality, Psychology

A few weeks ago I was speaking with a friend who mentioned that she and her fellow Catholics sometimes spoke of "coming out as Christian," confirming that I'm not the only one who has noticed a similarity between the kinds of stories people tell as Christians (which in Protestant circles, at any rate, are called "testimonies") and the kinds of stories people tell as LGTBQ folk. But I'm forced to wonder, first, why the comparison seems apt and, second, if it really is all that apt after all.

One of the things I didn't like about Judith Butler's Giving an Account of Oneself is that it lacked examples which might make her subject clearer (and with Butler, clarity is often in peril). Giving an Account of Oneself is about the vexations one encounters when narrating one's own account. For instance, I cannot narrate my exposure in part because my narration would expose me in new ways, and were I to narrate that exposure, I would yet again be exposed in a new way. I remain partially opaque to myself and cannot narrate those parts I cannot see. Any account I give is shaped by my audience and by certain norms that my context determines without my consent. I think it's clear that Giving an Account takes coming-out narratives as a typical species, as it were, but Butler never explicitly states what kinds of accounts she is describing.

In trying to find examples of account-giving, I discovered that Butler's discussion seemed to apply equally well to the fumbling accounts I've had to give to non-Christians of my own Christianity (and, for that matter, of the fumbling accounts I've had to give to Christians of my uncertainties, unorthodoxies, or heresies). The vexations are appallingly similar: the sort of self-description you're giving doesn't fit in with your context's expectations of a self-account, and the kinds of questions that your audience has asked you don't set up very good answers, and giving the account changes the very situation you're trying to describe, and anyway you don't perfectly know why you feel what you feel or believe what you believe. In this way, it makes some sense to say that you can "come out as Christian."

There are other reasons that the comparison seems to hold: religion and sexuality* are often invisible and therefore secret until you choose to self-disclose; religion and sexuality can shape your decisions in important ways; in many cases people can be both apprehensive and celebratory when describing their religion or their sexuality.

But I worry that Christians (or straight ones, anyway) maybe ought to avoid using the language of "coming out" to describe their own religious self-expression. It seems to me like a form of appropriation, and a darkly ironic one at that: certain Christian reactions to homosexuality have been and still are one of the reasons that coming out as queer can be so dangerous. To take a phrase from queer culture that is inscribed with Christian oppression of homosexuality and then use it to describe a certain Christian identity could be very disrespectful, even if you are a Christian that supports LGTBQ identities whole-heartedly. And then there's the fact that Christians are not exposed like LGTBQ people are exposed; whatever the squawking you hear, there is no systemic persecution of Christians on par with that of LGTBQ people (or, for that matter, atheists).

Of course, it isn't hard to find accounts which put the two together: if the accounts I've read are any indication, queer Christians are asked to account for themselves as Christian and as queer simultaneously or near-simultaneously.

The reason I'm interested in comparing the testimony and coming-out genres is that another comparison is suddenly relevant to me: I have frequently been called on to give an account of my depression. It is beset with the same vexations that Butler has described. While the average person's acceptance of mental illness is improving, there is still the threat of stigma or potentially damaging incomprehension. (That said, I'm sure that in academia disclosing my psychology would be somewhat more successful than disclosing my religion.) A major difference is that I do not have much cause to celebrate my depression, nor do I have  much desire to make depression a part of my identity (though I think there are good reasons for saying that it is part of my identity nonetheless).

Last time I posted I spoke of genera and species, and I think that sort of taxonomy might be helpful here: "coming out story" is a species of the genus "account." I guess I wish there was a better, more specific, and more popular synonym for "account."

------
*Also, asexualty and irreligion.

"Those to Whom it Matters Most"

One more article before I get to work.

In "Gay rights and religion are not opposed to one another," Petra Davis begins by talking about the false binary that much of the same-sex marriage debate has formed:

Lesbian, gay, bi and trans people are as diverse, culturally, as any other group, with many from faith communities among the throng. Gay columnists are quick to deploy generalisations about religious abuse, with little regard for those with complex cultural, sexual and gender identities. If the debate were led by those to whom it matters most - LGBT people of faith - it might well look significantly different.

She moves quickly from this topic to the other issues around which LGBT people might want to organize: say, mental illness or homelessness in the LGBT community. These seem to be more pressing issues that equal marriage rights. Why are they not being addressed? By the end of the article she becomes a bit alarmist--I'm not sure I would want to use the phrase "a new queer fascism"--but barring the final paragraph, it's a good read.

A few disconnected thoughts: the LGBT people of faith may not be leading the conversation because, by now, their voices are thoroughly overwhelmed. I do not imagine that they can speak easily in their religious communities (though that's changing); I don't know enough about LGBT circles, but I imagine there might be silencing there, as well. So asking why the conversation is not being led by them strikes me as a little naive: they have good reason of fearing being outed (as queer or as religious) to either community. But we should also try to avoid the "silent victims" trope, which can re-enforce their victimhood and cast us (whoever we are) as necessary saviours for them. (Avatar, Dances with Wolves, The Blind Side, The Help, etc. etc.)

And perhaps the focus is on marriage rights because those are easier to fix than homelessness, mentall illness, and so forth. It has clear victory conditions. Focusing on the Marriage Front allows one to identify enemies (those who oppose legislation) and easily select tools (lobbying, legal-drafting, etc.) to win that campaign. The other arenas are more serious, but finding out who is blocking you and selecting the best means to acheive your goals are a lot harder when you're combatting increased incidents of mental illness in LGBT people. That daunting (and less clearly adversarial) campaign makes it difficult to draw media attention, financial backers, and public support. It also involves other categories of oppression (ie. mental illness, neurotypicality), which makes delineating your "sides" a lot harder.

Gamers who are Gay

I recently found this blog: http://vorpalbunnyranch.com/. It concerns the intersection of gender and sexuality studies on the one hand and gaming on the other. To my knowledge, this is far from the only blog to do so. If you don't see me for a few days, I got lost in the Internet again.