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Bimbo Feminism: Why I’m Excited About the Barbie Movie

Posted on April 6, 2023 by binarythis

If you (somehow??) haven’t heard, there’s a live action Barbie film coming out in July this year, and it looks incredible.

The film has Greta Gerwig at the helm, who brought us previous meditations on femininity including Frances Ha, Lady Bird, and Little Women (seriously someone come do a PhD with me on her oeuvre). Plus it’s co-written with her partner Noah Baumbach who brought us exceedingly depressing reflections on the precarity of the nuclear family with The Squid and the Whale and Marriage Story. With this indie pair in charge you know Barbie is going to be magic.

But the reason I’m most excited isn’t just because it involves two of my favourite filmmakers, and an all-star cast. It’s because I genuinely hope that this film ushers in a new era of critical feminist analysis that takes femininity seriously as a point of theorisation, not so easily written off as “postfeminism”. Maybe we’ll call it “bimbo feminism”. I’ll explain.

Barbie is one of those fraught icons of hyperfemininity. I’m sure I’m not the only one whose caregivers were reluctant about Barbies. I get it. I’ve written recently about how kids clothes are gendered in absurd ways and “for girls” often becomes code for “impractical”. As an icon of girl culture Barbie can get caught up in this. My grandmother gave me a Barbie card for my seventh birthday, and inside there was a message along the lines of “I didn’t get you one because Barbies are sexist” (I’m not joking).

Eventually someone got me a Barbie (“Lights and Lace” Barbie), and I also procured some from an op-shop. I cut Lights and Lace Barbie’s hair short and she lived with her girlfriend in a suitcase apartment with their Barbie cat, and a Ken doll (who was also gay). Do straight Barbies even exist?

On the one hand, Barbie has been abundantly critiqued as an emblem of unrealistic and patriarchal beauty standards. On the other, people have pointed out that she’s done every occupation, and is the ultimate girlboss (eww). On the third, and much more interesting hand, the way people have actually played with Barbies, remixing their hair, outfits, personas and sexualities, reveals Barbie as the GOAT bimbo icon: a blank slate, a fantasy of femininity. She is spectacular plastic with nothing, and thereby everything, to say.

Since the 1990s, feminist critique in the academy has become dominated by dubbing things “postfeminist”. It’s a debated term, but essentially refers to media depictions (or what Ros Gill calls a “sensibility”) that depict feminism as done-and-dusted, within a broader cultural context of backlash against feminism. A LOT of early discussions of postfeminism focused on sex-interested or hyper-feminine female characters as evidencing post-feminism (e.g. via films like Bridget Jones’ Diary or Legally Blonde). Because of the rise of popular feminism in the 2010s, postfeminism is now used a little more expansively to describe an ideology that circulates in popular culture that undermines feminist gains, or is regressive in some way. Problem is, what is dubbed postfeminist/regressive can’t shake the hang up on sexiness and femininity.

Since the 2010s there has also been a parallel development in academia called Critical Femininities (CF). The idea of this field is to give serious attention to studying femininities (in much the same way that masculinity studies has become a proper field), critically but not dismissing femininity as merely, easily, or only patriarchal. CF has been championed largely by queer femme scholars, by people who know what it feels like to be perceived as straight-conforming or not “queer enough” simply because of their feminine gender expression. I have been so excited to see recent CF analyses revisiting “postfeminist” texts like Legally Blonde and the Spice Girls, and arguing for the radical elements of the spectacular femininity therein. For example (and I could quote the whole paper here), Maya Padan’s (2023) close reading of the Spice Girls as pseudo drag queens argues:

The band underscores the performativity of femme embodiments, while using the spices to enable a self-aware inquiry of femininity as a choice, rather than patriarchal coercion. In doing so, the Spice Girls stress how meaningful playfulness is to the construction of gender and how gender can be an arena of exploration (2023, p.13).

Similarly, as Sarah Kornfield and Chloe Long (2023) suggest in their analysis of The Bold Type TV show, “patriarchal and capitalist pressures work to devalue and regulate femininity and to commodify and objectify fem(me)inine people”. In response, they offer “femme analysis [that] resists patriarchy and its interlocking oppressions without positioning women, femmes, or spectacular femininity as patriarchy’s dupes” (2023, p.13).

I love these analyses because they don’t dismiss the rubric of postfeminism as useful, but also offer other ways to engage with spectacular femininity, namely from queer perspectives. One limitation of these account is that they sometimes fly a little too close to “choice feminism” for me, through emphasising “femininity as choice”. The problem with choice feminism is that in responding to the “dupes” argument, it can bend the stick too far in the other direction (I am often guilty of this).

This is where I think bimbo feminism could come in.

Since 2020, interest in bimbo-ism has gained traction via TikTok. There are endless explainers you can look up, but essentially the bimbo movement has been about: embracing styles otherwise derided as hyperfeminine, hypersexual, and/or girly, and emphasising vapidity, that is, feeling over thinking. In other words, celebrating oneself as “hot and dumb”, and encouraging pleasure and leisure over uneven heterosexual relationships and the girlboss grind. Despite their professed anti-thinking attitude, the bimbos of TikTok offer explicit critiques of capitalism, right-wing politics, heteronormativity, white feminism and trans-exclusionary feminism. This is bimbo feminism.

Of course until recently “bimbo” has almost always been used as a pejorative, that’s really the whole point of the reclamation. Some aren’t convinced by the politics of the new bimbo-ism. This morning Jessica DeFino – ex-beauty influencer turned anti-beauty blogger – wrote in her newsletter “From what I’ve seen, the reclamation of ‘bimbo’ by cisgender women essentially means using your words to promote the values of the political left while using your aesthetics to promote the excess of capitalism”. I can (and will) write a whole book about the limits of DeFino’s straight-gaze anti-beauty critique, but her take down of bimbos really misses the (radical) forest for the (pink) trees. For DeFino, hyperfeminine aesthetics “taint” the possibility of real politics. Since when is “using your words to promote the values of the political left” a bad thing just because you’ve got a full face of makeup? And why is spectacular femininity the ultimate signifier of “the excess of capitalism”?

CFS scholar Rhea Ashley Hoskin has written extensively about how intensely femininity is policed, so that it is not “too much”. Femininity is systematically devalued, it is seen as synonymous with “subordination”. Femininity is always seen as being done “for men”. This is, Hoksin argues, “femmephobia”.

As she suggests: “femininity is not taken seriously, it is trivialized, it is considered not very credible, false, untrustworthy, with ulterior motives, anti-feminist and not very intelligent”.

The negative use of the term “bimbo” is after all wielded in such a way to take down people who are perceived as too feminine, too sexual, too vapid, too excessive in their gender presentation.

I’m sure that scholars in the 2000s would look at bimbo feminism and call it “postfeminism” but for me the term has reached saturation. I’m post-postfeminism, I want what’s next.

I feel like the Barbie movie is going to deliver the goods. It’s going to take femininity seriously. Based on the trailers I’m fully expecting a queer critique of capitalism and heteronormativity while dressed in pink glitter.

That’s bimbo feminism.

For the love of dresses

Posted on February 1, 2023 by binarythis

When I was small I distinctly remember having fights with my mother about wearing dresses. While some other queer friends have recounted similar fights, my desire was not to reject dresses that were foisted on me, but rather, I deeply desired dresses while my mother wanted me to wear the more practical and much warmer option of track pants. After lots of fighting (screaming? Tantrums? It’s a kindergarten memory blur) we compromised: dresses over pants. Sartorially questionable, but enough for me to feel like I was wearing the “right” clothing. I think the obsession might have dovetailed with a girl from school asking if I was a boy, and me running home chanting to myself “I’m a girl I’m a girl I’m a girl”.

Despite my awareness, now, of the clear cultural pressures informing my desire, I still love dresses.

I once even created a blog detailing all of the 47 dresses in my closet, the stories behind all of them, and a record of wearing them all in a single month to raise money for charity (which culminated in me wearing a giant gold 1980s prom dress on a teaching day).

Recently, I bought a dress online because it reminded me of one that I wore to my uncle’s wedding when I was around seven or eight. Of course what I loved then – blaring floral design in primary colours and a 1990s design – doesn’t really translate into my style now. I refer to it as my “Pavlova Mum” dress, the kind of dress you wear when you’ve just baked a pav for the BBQ. Dresses have become symbolically central to my psychic grappling with identity and femininity and I suppose that the “Pavlova Mum” dress-naming hints at my anxieties about becoming a parent who lives in the suburbs. Though, my partner pointed out that it is also reminiscent of the final gown in Midsommar, which makes me like it a little more.

I’ve spent over a decade of my academic career unpacking and untangling my relationship to femininity, thinking through how femininity can be queer, and the confusing and messy space between cultural expectations of femininity and the desire for feminine embodiment. I thought I had come to some kind of resting place with this tension, which might be summed up something like: yes to the capacitating joys of feminine expression, no to the incapacitating expectations of femininity. But I’ve been plagued by these questions (ESPECIALLY thoughts about dresses) since I spent the last year raising a now one-year-old.

I am watching the world “girl” her in real time. Babies are, unsurprisingly, quite genderqueer little creatures. Often balding post-birth, they are little potatoes that are becoming human. They are learning to use their bodies (to know that they even have bodies), which are growing at an astonishing rate. Babies are all about transformation, becoming, and capacity. The gender designations of “boy” and “girl” seem wildly arbitrary in these early times. Yet. Walk into most children’s clothing stores and you will see the segregation of clothes by the gender binary. Shop attendants will ask you the gender of your child. Parents are sold headbands to cover their bare baby girls’ heads. Since watching the latest season of The White Lotus I have been HAUNTED by the line that Jennifer Coolidge’s character Tanya utters as a kind of self-explanation for her passivity and unhappiness:

“You know, when I was a little girl, my mother used to dress me up like a little doll. And I was always a little doll, waiting for someone to play with me“

In an attempt to align with my theoretical values around femininity, when it comes to clothes – questions of gender presentation and how the world “reads” you – my intent as a parental dresser has not been gender “neutrality” but rather gender experimentation and options. But try as I might to go shopping for baby clothes with the mindset that “anything goes” I have struggled, deeply struggled, to shop from the “girls” sections of shops. Unless you’re second hand shopping or looking at a designer children’s boutique (often online, very high price points), this is what those sections look like in real terms at chain stores in Australia:

	“FOR BOYS”	“FOR GIRLS”
Fit	Loose, long	Tight, short
Pockets	Frequently	Rarely
Colours	Dark or neutral – e.g. black, green, blue, grey	Pastel or bright – e.g. pink, white, yellow, purple
Volume	Straight cut	Puffy/billowy/flowy
Sunsmart	Frequently	Rarely (e.g. short sleeves)
Frills	No	Frequently
Buttons	Rarely	Frequently
Fabrics	Hardy	Often delicate (e.g. loose weave knit)
Prints	Dogs, elephants, giraffes, dinosaurs, lions, crocodiles, trucks	Unicorns, cats, flowers, rainbows, ladybirds, rabbits, fruit

The above table is based on my own observations but I’m not imagining it: a study recently conducted in Germany studied 20,000 items of children’s clothing and found that shorts “for girls” are shorter and slogans “for boys” were about being active while “for girls” were about emotions and dreaming. Sometimes these differences are benign and are simply signifying colours, but at other times they are extremely ideological (as the jumpers from the “boys” and “girls” sections of a popular chain below demonstrate).

The thing that I tend to get stuck on the most however is how impractical clothing “for girls” is. Watching my child learning to walk, it is obvious that dresses in particular can be quite incapacitating. “Girls” shorts are shorter, pants tighter, sleeves more clumsy or not covering enough in the sun (as another example below illustrates).

Many a shopping trip has ended with me in a rage, and only purchasing dull clothes from the “boys” section. Of course you can just shop for whatever clothes you like but the point is the very madness of the division in the first place.

That there are these gendered differences in children’s clothing is not new news. It’s a point so obvious to anyone that cares about gender that it feels banal to be bringing it up (again). Yet, I am compelled to bang the proverbial drum of my keyboard to shout look! Are you seeing this! Why is it still like this!

When I’ve shared these thoughts online however, many people are also fixated on the colours and patterns. The pink! The prints! They say. I’ve also found myself internally screaming at frills.

I have to step back and remind myself of my own writing, and theorising on femininity. Because it’s rarely the pink or decoration that is the problem. It is the question of what these clothes capacitate. In an ideal world the segregation of clothes by gender would be abolished, and everyone would have access to pink and frills (though not baby headbands they are simply choking hazards please throw them in the bin) and no one would have to trip over baggy laced sacks while burning their shoulders in the sun.

Then I have to step back, again, and remind myself of my love of dresses.

I brought up this conundrum with a friend and she told me not to overthink it, that my child would assert her own desires with clothes at some point. I’m just acutely aware that none of this is in a vacuum, and I am woefully brought back to the same position my mother was in when I fought with her so hard, a concern for practicality.

I’ll make sure there are dresses on offer. They might just require pants underneath.

Woman Culture and the Gendering of Pregnancy

Posted on October 24, 2021 by binarythis

Got to be honest not 100% sure what’s going on in those wrappers

Lecturing in gender studies I have spent a lot of time talking about how children are exposed to processes of gendering, how these operations are intensely social, and that learning about gender does not happen in a parent-centred vacuum. This happens immediately from birth (with the declaration “it’s a boy!” etc), and as Judith Butler (1990) usefully points out, the distinction often made between sex (the biological: including genitalia, chromosomes and other sex markers) and gender (assumed as the cultural interpretation of those markers) is blurry:

“…perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all”

This gendering can even start pre-birth, at the ultrasound, or with blood tests to determine chromosomes. Once sex is designated, an intense process is kicked into gear that involves expectations of how a child will act, what they will wear, and what their future holds (primary assumptions being, for example, that a baby designated female will be feminine, grow up to be a woman, and will one day partner with a man). As I have also discovered being pregnant, there are a whole set of gendered assumptions made between the physical experience of childbearing and the child itself – for example the idea that craving sweets means you are having a girl [*eye roll forever*]!

While I have often thought about gendering in childhood, I have attended less to how pregnancy itself is enrolled in a process of gendering adulthood. What I have experienced as a pregnant person this year has given me some insight into how intensely pregnancy is tied to the category “woman”, and in turn bound up with extremely fixed notions about biology, gender and destiny.

From vitamins to pregnancy tests, the pink and blue coding is inescapable

While I am a bisexual/queer person I am also for all intents and purposes cisgender: I am feminine presenting, use she/her pronouns, and that matches up with the expectation of being assigned female at birth (or, as I am told the pronouncement at my birth was “it’s a feminist!”…something to unpack another time). And yet, I have found the “woman culture” – or what might be more accurately termed “female culture”, emphasising biology – of pregnancy profoundly disorienting.

My first real confrontation with this (aside from the pink and blue aesthetics and white smiling women and babies of pregnancy tests and pregnancy vitamins) was at an early ultrasound. The clinic, like basically everything around pregnancy, emphasised that it was for “women” not only in its name but in every clinical detail. This included the fact I could only find a women’s bathroom there and was made to put on a smock pre-exam that was less neutral gown than actual v-neck lined puffy-sleeved purple dress. The main reception room featured a photograph of a huge pair of high heels with a caption (I’m paraphrasing here): “When the shoes didn’t fit her daughter, the mother simply reminded her she wouldn’t need toes when she was a princess”.

There is a huge emphasis on nature and the natural in pregnancy (never mind how many people used to die in pregnancy and childbirth pre-modern medicine…)

My partner, a man (*constantly* referred to in my pregnancy books and apps as my “husband” despite the fact we are unmarried…), was not allowed to come to the clinic with me and has not been allowed to any of my appointments so far, even with me crying and pleading on the phone about it after some complications, or when I had to go in for an emergency scan. While this has ostensibly been due to COVID-19 restrictions, it has not only intensely reinforced the sense that the responsibility of childbearing is mine alone, but that I am doing this as a (cis) WOMAN whose “body was made to do this” (a saying repeated over and over again to me). It has been distressing for both me and my partner to be separated in this process, and I can only imagine the homophobic layer that partners of the same gender would feel with one parent being constantly cast out.

I am not so disoriented by the physical transition of pregnancy when it comes to gender, despite the discomfort and pain – for me personally it is fun and interesting to have a growing belly, larger breasts, a body full of more blood, and I often think about how not everyone that wants to have this experience gets to. I feel very privileged. I just cannot stand the grate of being told this experience is about divine femininity that connects all (cis) women, that a (cis) woman’s identity is forged through the fires of childbirth, and that pregnancy and labour is some kind of secret business that only (cis) women can discuss with one another.

Fighting stigma and shame around periods does not have to be achieved through emphasising “womanhood”

It reminds me of when I first got my period at 14 and I was happy to have reached the puberty milestone, but also did not think much of it. My mum got really angry at me for not taking it more seriously as the transition to “womanhood” that it represented. She wanted me to celebrate. Her approach was informed by a feminism aiming to reclaim bodily processes which had been shamed and repudiated by patriarchy for centuries. But I did not feel shame, I just wanted to get on with it, and did not want to hold a party for my “entry into womanhood”. There’s a lot of feminist emphasis these days on things like periods and pregnancy because of the stigma that has otherwise surrounded them. That is totally understandable. What is harder to compute is why this has to be enrolled into a “female culture” that emphasises one’s status as woman at every turn.

It would be so easy to use gender neutral language around pregnancy, like referring to “pregnant people” rather than “pregnant women”. It would not harm anyone, it would not “erase women”, it would simply make these spaces more inclusive, and unravel the hard knot of essentialism that pervades reproductive culture. I suspect that many cisgender women enjoy having womanhood emphasised in these spaces though precisely because the misogyny of patriarchal culture means women are rarely celebrated, and pregnancy is one of the few times where one becomes a kind of special icon (where people congratulate you, make room for you on the bus, etc). However the way to resolve this issue is not to double-down on the mother-woman-biology matrix, especially given that ever more queer, trans and non-binary people are bearing children. Given the “female culture” of pregnancy it really is no surprise that it is mother-forum sites like “mumsnet” in the UK that have become the epicentre of anti-trans discourse.

Last night my partner and I re-watched Jeanie Finlay’s (2019) documentary “Seahorse” about one trans man’s experience of pregnancy. I wanted to watch it as I been reading about labour and could not think of any other cultural representations of active labour (aka how it actually happens, not the Hollywood kind where a person gives birth lying on their back). Watching Freddie’s journey through pregnancy as a now pregnant person was so soothing to me, untethered as it was from the “female culture” that has soaked every other pregnancy text I have encountered so far. Importantly in the film Freddie emphasises that his experience is *not* the same as cisgender women, precisely because of the gender dysphoria and difficult social expectations he has to navigate as a pregnant man. There is a scene where Freddie goes through all of the documents from his midwife that emphasise “mother” and “woman” and “female”, and replaces them with words that match up to his experience. Today Freddie is still fighting in court to be recognised on his child’s birth certificate as “father” or “parent”, rather than “mother”. “Seahorse” is a reminder of the small things that we could change culturally that would make a huge difference to the myriad of people experiencing pregnancy, and to thinking about gender broadly.

For now I will keep trying to find a way to navigate this fraught terrain and trying to connect with my body while holding the intense gendering at bay. I suspect this will only become more difficult, in becoming “mother”, and all of the expectations carried with that. Thinking about how we can better support people going through the gamut of reproduction without insisting on rigid gender boxes is a must on the way to loosening the grip of gender expectations in adulthood.

Trans legitimacy, existence and resistance in academia – a small selection of peer-reviewed scholarship in trans studies

Posted on February 17, 2021 by binarythis

The confected “debate” about the legitimacy of trans lives does not seem to be going away, and indeed is becoming a key feature of the culture wars in Australia and abroad. In recent years a small group of activists have rebranded themselves “Gender Critical (GC) Feminists” (distancing themselves from the term “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist (TERF)”, which they claim is a slur). Despite being marginal in their views around trans rights, GC activists continue to receive a huge amount of media attention and platforming, often in the conservative press (but sometimes also, sadly, in outlets such as The Guardian and The Conversation). Many GC activists also continue to hold senior positions in the academy, which adds legitimacy to their public commentary, despite the fact that very few of them have any expertise in gender studies and many have no peer reviewed publications on trans issues.

When we delve into the arguments of GC activists many outright deny the legitimate existence of trans people altogether, claiming, for example, that “our problem is with male people claiming to be women, regardless of how they present”. GC activists then must be understood not simply as “trans-exclusionary”, but as trans deniers.

It is absolutely crucial that media outlets and universities begin to recognise that like climate denial, trans denial is based on unscientific views that are wildly out of step with peer-reviewed scholarship. When GC activists suggest that trans rights ought to be “debated” on the basis of “free speech”, they set the terms of a highly uneven debate between their ideological perspectives vs. actual scholarship. If we focus on the actual scholarship, we see that there are many debates to be had in trans studies around identity, embodiment, race, decolonisation, the relation to non-binary identity, research methods, and more, but those discussions are completely annihilated by GC feminists suggesting that the debate should be about the very legitimacy of trans people in the first place.

In response to this outrageous and fabricated debate, I present (below) a very short introductory list of peer-reviewed scholarship in the field of trans studies that might be used to rebut the entirely unsupported claims of GC feminists, to illuminate the vast depths of the field of trans studies, and to illustrate to the media and universities alike that the “debates” are to be found elsewhere from where GC feminists claim. This is by no means an exhaustive list – there are literally thousands of articles on trans studies, and more are published each day. (There is, of course, much amazing writing published by trans people outside of the academy, my point here though being that trans studies is a huge field of academic scholarship, a point mostly overlooked in public “debates”).

If you would like to view/download a copy of this list please click here. If you think something should be added to this short list of peer-reviewed scholarship (or removed) please contact me.

Journals/special issues and key texts/readers (rebuttal to claims of “trans orthodoxy” – trans studies is not mere political polemics, it is an established and legitimate field of study)

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq

International Journal of Transgender Health https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/wijt21/current

Women’s Studies Quarterly (2008) 36(3/4) Special Issue on ‘Trans-’ edited by P. Currah, L. J. Moore & S. Stryker https://www.jstor.org/stable/i27649777

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (1998) 4(2) Special Issue on ‘The Transgender Issue’ edited by S. Stryker https://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/issue/4/2

Hypatia (2009) 24(3) Special Issue on ‘Transgender Studies and Feminism: Theory, Politics, and Gendered Realities’ edited by T.M. Bettcher & A. Garry https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/15272001/2009/24/3

Gender, Place & Culture (2010) 17(5) Special theme on ‘Trans Geographies’ edited by K. Browne, C. J. Nash & S. Hines https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2010.503104

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (2014) 1(3) Special Issue on ‘Decolonizing the Transgender Imaginary’ edited by A. Aizura, M. Ochoa, S. Vidal-Ortiz, T. Cotton, C. Balzer/C. LaGata https://www.dukeupress.edu/decolonizing-the-transgender-imaginary-1

S. Stryker & S. Whittle (eds) (2006) The Transgender Studies Reader. London: Routledge https://www.routledge.com/The-Transgender-Studies-Reader/Stryker-Whittle/p/book/9780415947091

S. Stryker & A.Z. Aizura (2013) The Transgender Studies Reader 2. New York: Routledge https://www.routledge.com/The-Transgender-Studies-Reader-2/Stryker-Aizura/p/book/9780415517737

A. Haefele-Thomas (2019) Introduction to Transgender Studies. Columbia University Press http://cup.columbia.edu/book/introduction-to-transgender-studies/9781939594273

S. Hines & T. Sanger (eds) (2010) Transgender identities: Towards a social analysis of gender diversity. New York: Routledge https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/37306

D. Spade (2015) Normal life: Administrative violence, critical trans politics, & the limits of law. Durham, NC: Duke University Press http://www.deanspade.net/books/normal-life/

G. Salamon (2010) Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality. Columbia University Press http://cup.columbia.edu/book/assuming-a-body/9780231149587

J. Halberstam (2018) Trans: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability. University of California Press https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520292697/trans

J. Serano (2007) Whipping Girl: Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. Emeryville, CA: Seal Press https://www.sealpress.com/titles/julia-serano/whipping-girl/9781580056229/

K. Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman (eds) (2010) Gender outlaws: the next generation. Berkeley: Seal Press https://www.sealpress.com/titles/kate-bornstein/gender-outlaws/9781580053778/

C. Richards, W.P. Bouman & M-J. Barker (eds) (2017) Genderqueer and Non-Binary Genders. London: Palgrave Macmillan https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781137510525

Trans theory and history (rebuttal to the claim that trans is an entirely ‘new’ concept – while some terms have changed over time, trans theory continues to grow and change)

S. Stryker (2017). Transgender History, Second Edition: The Roots of Today’s Revolution. Berkeley: Seal Press https://www.sealpress.com/titles/susan-stryker/transgender-history-second-edition/9781580056908/

S. Stone ([1987] 2006) ‘The empire strikes back: A posttranssexual manifesto’. In The transgender studies reader, Susan Stryker & Stephen Whittle (eds). New York: Routledge https://uberty.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/trans-manifesto.pdf

J. Prosser (1998) Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. New York: Columbia University Press http://cup.columbia.edu/book/second-skins/9780231109345

T. Ellison, K. M. Green, M. Richardson, C. Riley Snorton (2017) ‘We Got Issues: Toward a Black Trans*/Studies’, TSQ, 4(2): 162–169 https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-3814949

S. Stryker (2004) ‘Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin’, GLQ, 10(2): 212–215 https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-10-2-212

J. Halberstam (2005) In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press https://nyupress.org/9780814735855/in-a-queer-time-and-place/

L. Feinberg (1998) Trans liberation: beyond pink or blue. Boston: Beacon Press https://www.worldcat.org/title/trans-liberation-beyond-pink-or-blue/oclc/607065169

S. Stryker (2008) ‘Transgender History, Homonormativity, and Disciplinarity’, Radical History Review, (100): 145–157 https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2007-026

P. Califia (1997) Sex changes: the politics of transgenderism. San Francisco: Cleis Press https://www.worldcat.org/title/sex-changes-the-politics-of-transgenderism/oclc/36824894

V. K. Namaste (2000) Invisible lives: The erasures of transsexual and transgendered people. Chicago: University of Chicago Press https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo3683192

C. M. Keegan (2020) ‘Getting Disciplined: What’s Trans* About Queer Studies Now?’, Journal of Homosexuality, 67(3): 384-397 https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2018.1530885

C. Adair, C. Awkward-Rich & A. Marvin (2020) ‘Before Trans Studies’, TSQ, 7(3): 306-320 https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-8552922

M. Day (2020) ‘Indigenist Origins: Institutionalizing Indigenous Queer and Trans Studies in Australia’, TSQ, 7(3): 367–373 https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-8553006

Transfeminist approaches (rebuttal to the claim that feminism and trans studies are incompatible – these texts look at the tensions between feminist and trans studies from transfeminist perspectives)

A. F. Enke (Ed.) (2012) Transfeminist perspectives: In and beyond transgender and gender studies, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt14bt8sf

E. Koyama ([2000] 2020) ‘Whose feminism is it anyway? The unspoken racism of the trans inclusion debate’, The Sociological Review, 68(4): 735-744, https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026120934685

V. Varun Chaudhry (2020) ‘On Trans Dissemblance: Or, Why Trans Studies Needs Black Feminism’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 45(3): 529-535 https://doi.org/10.1086/706466

M. Nanney & D.L. Brunsma (2017) ‘Moving Beyond Cis-terhood: Determining Gender through Transgender Admittance Policies at U.S. Women’s Colleges’, Gender & Society, 31(2): 145-170 https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243217690100

S. Stryker (2007) ‘Transgender Feminism’. In S. Gillis, G. Howie & R. Munford (eds) Third Wave Feminism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593664_5

V. Namaste (2009) ‘Undoing theory: The “transgender question” and the epistemic violence of Anglo-American feminist theory’, Hypatia, 24(3): 11–32 https://www.jstor.org/stable/20618162

C. Heyes (2003) ‘Feminist solidarity after queer theory: The case of transgender’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28 (4): 1093–120 https://doi.org/10.1086/343132

C. Awkward-Rich (2017) ‘Trans, Feminism: Or, Reading like a Depressed Transsexual’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 42(4): 819-841 https://doi.org/10.1086/690914

A. Tudor (2019) ‘Im/possibilities of refusing and choosing gender’, Feminist Theory, 20(4): 361-380 https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700119870640

S. Hines (2019) ‘The feminist frontier: on trans and feminism’, Journal of Gender Studies, 28(2): 145-157 https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2017.1411791

Trans harassment, discrimination, erasure, surveillance (rebuttal to the claim that trans people are villains/perpetrators rather than a highly surveilled and persecuted minority – these texts provide empirical evidence and analysis of the issues faced by trans people and communities)

T. Beauchamp (2019) Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance Practices. Durham: Duke University Press https://www.dukeupress.edu/going-stealth

B. Colliver & A. Coyle (2020) ‘“Risk of sexual violence against women and girls” in the construction of “gender-neutral toilets”: a discourse analysis of comments on YouTube videos’, Journal of Gender-Based Violence, 4(3): 359-376(18), https://doi.org/10.1332/239868020X15894511554617

K. Bender-Baird (2016) ‘Peeing under surveillance: bathrooms, gender policing, and hate violence’, Gender, Place & Culture, 23(7): 983-988 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2015.1073699

J. James (2021) ‘Refusing abjection: transphobia and trans youth survivance’, Feminist Theory, 22(1): 109-128 https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700120974896

C.L. Quinan (2017) ‘Gender (In)Securities: Surveillance and Transgender Bodies in a Post-9/11 Era of Neoliberalism’. In M. Leese & S. Wittendorp (eds), Security/Mobility Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 153-169 https://www.manchesteropenhive.com/view/9781526108364/9781526108364.xml

A. Lubitow, JD. Carathers, M. Kelly & M. Abelson (2017) ‘Transmobilities: mobility, harassment, and violence experienced by transgender and gender nonconforming public transit riders in Portland, Oregon’, Gender, Place & Culture, 24(10): 1398-1418, https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2017.1382451

K. Kraschel (2012) ‘Trans-cending space in women’s only spaces: Title IX cannot be the basis for exclusion’, Harvard Journal of Law and Gender, 35: 463-85 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2138896

T. Spence‐Mitchell (2021) ‘Restroom restrictions: How race and sexuality have affected bathroom legislation’, Gender Work Organisation https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12545

M. A. Case (2019) ‘Trans Formations in the Vatican’s War on “Gender Ideology”’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 44:3, 639-664 https://doi.org/10.1086/701498

R. Rosenberg & N. Oswin (2015) ‘Trans embodiment in carceral space: hypermasculinity and the US prison industrial complex’, Gender, Place & Culture, 22(9): 1269-1286 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2014.969685

P. L. Doan (2010) ‘The tyranny of gendered spaces – reflections from beyond the gender dichotomy’, Gender, Place & Culture, 17(5): 635-654 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2010.503121

C.L. Quinan, D. Cooper, V. Molitor, A. Kondakov, A. van der Vleuten & T. Zimenkova (2020) ‘“State Regimes of Gender: Legal Aspects of Gender Identity Registration, Trans-Relevant Policies and Quality of LGBTIQ Lives”: A Roundtable Discussion’, International Journal of Gender, Sexuality and Law, 1 (1): 377-402 https://doi.org/10.19164/ijgsl.v1i1.985

D. Irving (2015) ‘Performance Anxieties: Trans Women’s Un(der)-employment Experiences in Post-Fordist Society’, Australian Feminist Studies, 30(83): 50-64 https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2014.99845

Negotiating trans identity/lived experience (rebuttal to the claim that trans identity is not legitimate – despite attempts at erasure, trans people continue to exist and resist)

A. Rooke (2010) T’rans youth, science and art: creating (trans) gendered space’, Gender, Place & Culture, 17(5): 655-672 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2010.503124

T.J. Jourian, S.L. Simmons, K.C. Devaney (2015) ‘“We Are Not Expected”: Trans* Educators (Re)Claiming Space and Voice in Higher Education and Student Affairs’, TSQ, 2(3): 431–446 https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-2926410

S. Hines (2010) ‘Queerly situated? Exploring negotiations of trans queer subjectivities at work and within community spaces in the UK’, Gender, Place & Culture, 17(5): 597-613 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2010.503116

I. Linander, I. Goicolea, E. Alm, A. Hammarström & L. Harryson (2019) ‘(Un)safe spaces, affective labour and perceived health among people with trans experiences living in Sweden’, Culture, Health & Sexuality, 21(8): 914-928, https://doi.org/10.1080/13691058.2018.1527038

A. Gorman-Murray, S. McKinnon, D. Dominey-Howes, C. J. Nash & R.Bolton (2018) ‘Listening and learning: giving voice to trans experiences of disasters’, Gender, Place & Culture, 25(2): 166-187 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2017.1334632

S. Hines (2007) ‘(Trans)Forming Gender: Social Change and Transgender Citizenship’, Sociological Research Online, 12(1):181-194 https://doi.org/10.5153/sro.1469

C. T. Sullivan (2018) ‘Majesty in the city: experiences of an Aboriginal transgender sex worker in Sydney, Australia’, Gender, Place & Culture, 25(12): 1681-1702 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2018.1553853

M. J. Andrucki & D. J. Kaplan (2018) ‘Trans objects: materializing queer time in US transmasculine homes’, Gender, Place & Culture, 25(6): 781-798 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2018.1457014

O. Jenzen (2017) ‘Trans youth and social media: moving between counterpublics and the wider web’, Gender, Place & Culture, 24(11): 1626-1641 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2017.1396204

O. L. Haimson, A. Dame-Griff, E. Capello & Z. Richter (2019) ‘Tumblr was a trans technology: the meaning, importance, history, and future of trans technologies’, Feminist Media Studies, https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2019.1678505

T. Raun (2016) Out Online: Trans Self-Representation and Community Building on YouTube. London: Routledge https://www.routledge.com/Out-Online-Trans-Self-Representation-and-Community-Building-on-YouTube/Raun/p/book/9780367596620

Son Vivienne (2017) ‘“I Will Not Hate Myself because You Cannot Accept Me”: Problematizing Empowerment and Gender-Diverse Selfies’, Popular Communication, 15(2): 126–140 https://doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2016.1269906

M.Y. Chen (2010) ‘Everywhere Archives: Transgendering, Trans Asians, and the Internet’, Australian Feminist Studies, 25(64): 199-208 https://doi.org/10.1080/08164641003762503

J.N. Chen (2019) Trans Exploits: Trans of Color Cultures and Technologies in Movement. Durham: Duke University Press https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/2636/Trans-ExploitsTrans-of-Color-Cultures-and

R. A. Pearce (2020) ‘A Methodology for the Marginalised: Surviving Oppression and Traumatic Fieldwork in the Neoliberal Academy’, Sociology, 54(4): 806-824 https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038520904918

Engagement with the “wrong body” model/trans medicalisation (rebuttal to the claim that trans theory necessarily reinforces a strict or medical model of gender)

T. M. Bettcher (2014) ‘Trapped in the wrong theory: Rethinking trans oppression and resistance’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 39(2): 383–406 https://doi.org/10.1086/673088

N. Sullivan (2008) ‘The Role of Medicine in the (Trans)Formation of “Wrong” Bodies’, Body & Society, 14(1): 105-116 https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X07087533

J.R. Latham (2019) ‘Axiomatic: Constituting “transsexuality” and trans sexualities in medicine’, Sexualities, 22 (1-2), 13-30 https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460717740258

J.R. Latham (2017) ‘Making and Treating Trans Problems: The Ontological Politics of Clinical Practices’, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 18(1): 40-6 https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2016.1238682

S. Vogler (2019) ‘Determining Transgender: Adjudicating Gender Identity in U.S. Asylum Law’, Gender & Society, 33(3): 439-462 https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243219834043

A.P. Hilário (2020) ‘Rethinking trans identities within the medical and psychological community: a path towards the depathologization and self-definition of gender identification in Portugal?’, Journal of Gender Studies, 29(3): 245-256, https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2018.1544066

Non-binary and genderqueer subjectivities specifically (rebuttal to the erasure of non-binary identities – there is a growing field of empirical and theoretical work that looks at the complexities of non-binary and genderqueer identities and experiences)

H. Darwin (2020) ‘Challenging the Cisgender/Transgender Binary: Nonbinary People and the Transgender Label’, Gender & Society, 34(3):357-380. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243220912256

H. Barbee & D. Schrock (2019) ‘Un/gendering Social Selves: How Nonbinary People Navigate and Experience a Binarily Gendered World’, Sociological Forum, 34(3): 572-593 https://doi.org/10.1111/socf.12517

S. Monro (2019) ‘Non-binary and genderqueer: An overview of the field’, International Journal of Transgenderism, 20(2-3): 126-131 https://doi.org/10.1080/15532739.2018.1538841

C. Richards, W. P. Bouman, L. Seal, M-J. Barker, T.O. Nieder, G. T’Sjoen (2016) ‘Non-binary or genderqueer genders’, International Review of Psychology, 28(1): 95-102 https://doi.org/10.3109/09540261.2015.1106446

S.Bower-Brown, S. Zadeh & V.Jadva (2021) ‘Binary-trans, non-binary and gender-questioning adolescents’ experiences in UK schools’, Journal of LGBT Youth, 1-19 https://doi.org/10.1080/19361653.2021.1873215

D. Cosgrove (2021) ‘“I am allowed to be myself”: A photovoice exploration of non-binary identity development and meaning-making’, Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services, 33(1): 78-102 https://doi.org/10.1080/10538720.2020.1850385

A. Vijlbrief, S. Saharso & H. Ghorashi (2020) ‘Transcending the gender binary: Gender non-binary young adults in Amsterdam’, Journal of LGBT Youth, 17(1): 89-106 https://doi.org/10.1080/19361653.2019.1660295

L. Nicholas (2019) ‘Queer ethics and fostering positive mindsets toward non-binary gender, genderqueer, and gender ambiguity’, International Journal of Transgenderism, 20(2-3): 169-180 https://doi.org/10.1080/15532739.2018.1505576

Emily in Paris: Sexless in the City

Posted on October 25, 2020 by binarythis

This post contains minor spoilers for the Netflix series Emily in Paris – tune out now if you haven’t already inhaled the show in one sitting and don’t want to know how long it takes Emily to get to Paris etc.

Emily in Paris doesn’t beat around the bush when it comes to getting its protagonist to said city. Much like a porno film of old, it begins with an extremely brief and tenuous set up including some interactions with a generic boyfriend character (who is quickly cut). Literally only four minutes of exposition later, Emily is rolling down the Champs-Élysées.

It must be said, straight up, that I would best describe this show as utter garbage. After I swiftly watched the whole series, my partner (who deftly avoided it despite being in the same locked-down house) asked me about the narrative arc of the season. The best I could muster was, “Emily succeeded in her job and slept with the guy she has a crush on”. Emily wears some truly terrible outfits, most people hate her, but a lot of men are attracted to her. She never stops working. Paris is beautiful. Not a lot happens.

Some of my favourite cringeworthy lines from the show include:

[commenting on a perfume] “It smells like poetry”
[after meeting a brand CEO] “I actually have a Masters in Marketing”
[after meeting a semiotics professor] “Semiotics? The study of symbols. I have a Master of Communication” [*shrugs*]
[on the idea of mistresses] “I’m not somebody that can share a crepe. I want the whole crepe”
[on eating an actual crepe] “It’s funny how every culture has its pancake”

Emily is nominally in Paris to work at a marketing firm and provide “the American point of view”. That is indeed what we get from Emily. She is represented as the hard-working, relentlessly optimistic, severely earnest, unapologetically garish American. But most fascinating (to me), is that Emily is depicted as a strait-laced millennial feminist clashing with her lewd, openly sexual and decidedly “not feminist” French counterparts.

Distancing herself from her sexually liberal postfeminist mom, Sex and the City (SATC), Emily in Paris‘ rebellion entails: a) being au fait with feminism; and b) keeping a lid on sex (or at least keeping the covers pulled up). The creator of Emily in Paris Darren Star was also behind SATC, so there is much we can learn about the mediation of changing mainstream feminist ideas in comparing the two shows.

Emily in between her two much more interesting friends Mindy and Camille

During the 2000s SATC became the key text for feminist critique of “postfeminism” – a term used to refer to the representation of women as capitalising on feminist gains of the past while simultaneously disavowing feminism. For example, as feminist scholar Angela McRobbie remarked of shows like SATC in 2008: “These new young women are confident enough to declare their anxieties about possible failure in regard to finding a husband, they avoid any aggressive or overtly traditional men, and they brazenly enjoy their sexuality, without fear of the sexual double standard”

But while SATC was all about fucking and not mentioning the shadow of feminism, Emily in Paris is all about being a career woman who seems concerned about feminism but is extremely prudish about sex. Emily is a millennial who has come of age in a world where every white woman completed a Masters in Communication and Marketing after watching Mad Men and then became a feminist after Trump beat Hillary.

There is, however, little substance to raising the spectre of feminism rather than disavowing it. As we see in Episode 3 “Sexy or Sexist” Emily’s views on the objectification of women are only relevant insofar as they have an impact on the brand she’s working for. In this episode we see Emily watching a perfume ad being filmed. It features a naked woman strolling across a bridge being admired/ogled by men, wearing “only perfume”. Emily appears shocked after watching the ad. When asked by the brand CEO what she thinks, she suggests that the ad might be sexist, depicting the naked woman as at the mercy of the male gaze. Importantly her French boss Sylvie (set up as a wickedly unfriendly character) not only tells Emily to lighten up, she says that even though she is a woman she herself is not a feminist. Here Sylvie acts as the outdated postfeminist Other to Emily’s American feminist inclinations. When the CEO asks why the male gaze is a problem, Emily responds:

“I’m worried it won’t translate in the States. In today’s climate it could come off as politically incorrect… we just need to be sensitive to the way women are thinking now. I wanna protect your brand!”

Emily’s career mode and life mode are indistinguishable

Emily suggests sharing the ad on social media and asking women to answer the question “sexy or sexist?” to “get a conversation going and…make it part of your campaign”. In other words, taking a political position is redundant. People might think the ad is sexy or sexist, but all that matters is that they end up buying the product. The show is pulling the same move. What do feminists think about sex now? *Shrugs*

Emily represents what I have termed elsewhere “entrepreneurial feminist femininity“. This is a specifically gendered mode that means identifying with feminism, adhering to and reinforcing a rigid gender binary, and most importantly focusing on achieving individual success within the given system of gender relations rather than challenging the system. This is similar to what others have termed “lean-in feminism” or “neoliberal feminism“.

Emily’s relentless optimism always pays off

Emily is distinctly entrepreneurial in spirit. All failures are opportunities for Emily. Nothing can get her down. As Silvio Lorusso argues in his excellent book “Entreprecariat“, precarious employment mixed with entrepreneurial ideology is now the dominant mode of contemporary work, where there is no work-life balance because life is work (and we love it!). Emily in Paris embodies this on every level, with endless references to her American mode of overwork, where no boundaries exist between Emily’s personal life, her influencer life on social media, or her career as a marketing expert. Emily’s feminism is only relevant insofar as it can help her more effectively sell things.

While the show is all about Emily The Career Woman, the sexually explicit aspects of SATC era take a back seat. Despite men seemingly throwing themselves at Emily, the most risqué the show gets is Emily accidentally sleeping with a seventeen year old who gives her a hickey. It’s not even close to the explicitness of Samantha’s endless sex-marathons, Charlotte’s husband-wanking issues, Carrie’s golden-shower dilemma, or Miranda’s boyfriend fingering dramas of SATC days past. And unlike her “heteroflexible” foremothers, don’t even mention the possibility of girl-on-girl action to Emily. Emily insists – over and over – that is something that would never even cross her mind (she “likes to please men”).

My guess is that with future seasons of Emily in Paris (and yes I suspect there will be many many more) part of the grand-er arc will be that Emily becomes more enculturated into the “French ways” meaning slightly less gaudy style and in turn more (under the covers) sex. We’ll get to see just how American feminism today at once distances itself from its “postfeminist” predecessors while making similar – yet decidedly less adventurous – moves.

Of course, I’ll keep watching.

The Sound of The Machine Breaking

Posted on September 16, 2020 by binarythis

“What is the sound of a machine breaking down? What noise does this machine make as it refuses to stop? Today, when I woke, I was already exhausted” (Snack Syndicate, “Groundwork — Protocols For Listening in (and after) Social Isolation“)

I’ve been thinking a lot about consumption during lockdown. What we consume. Why we consume. Who usually makes our consumables. One of the things on repeat in the media at the moment is that because the economy is tanking we need to spend, consume, more. Even though people are losing their jobs left and right, we are being encouraged not to save. In Australia even our retirement funds have been opened up for us to spend. Graphs on the nightly news track consumer confidence. We’re spending more in supermarkets and on homewares but less on retail and restaurants. Across the board those still with jobs are saving too much, and those without have nothing spare to spend. The rich lament that there’s “just nothing to spend money on“. In the UK young people have been told to go out and spend for the country, but are now being blamed for the spike in COVID-19 cases. Being a “good consumer” at the moment is fraught, to say the least.

This week The Guardian started a discussion about “lockdown shopping“, for readers to contribute stories of purchases in isolation. Many of the comments noted a sense of “doing one’s bit” to help the economy, by buying things. But well before COVID-19 much of our sense of agency had been whittled down to our consumer power. I’ve noticed the impulse comes out when things go wrong. When a friend is going through a tough time my first instinct is often “what can I buy them?” (flowers, plants, chocolate, etc) instead of “how can I be there for them?”. Of course a gift signals care and concern but it is interesting to think how this impulse might also reveal how I defer first to consumption, rather than say, creation or care.

Trying to prop the economy up with spending keeps us in an impossible bind. Many of us are not spending enough but we’re also not saving enough for our future livelihoods. Right now being encouraged to spend money to keep the broken wheels of capitalism spinning feels a bit like being asked to contribute to a giant Go Fund Me so that everyone can still have a job.

Under capitalism the donations are never going to go into the right pockets. Even in countries like Australia where governments have provided funding supports (though these are quickly being slashed) the ruling class have been skimming them for profit. In real terms wages have gone down over the COVID-19 period while profits have gone up, with shareholders scooping up subsidy gains. Capital stays winning while labour loses. It’s enough to make your blood boil. If you’re like me I’d wager it may also be enough to make you reach for the dopamine hit provided by online shopping. It’s understandable to pursue small pleasures in the big disaster of it all.

One of my own recent rage/despair purchases was the September edition of British Vogue. I’ve been buying British Vogue on and off since Edward Enninful took the reins, who promised to take the fashion magazine in more radical directions (the fact that Teen Vogue has gone rogue since going online is also fascinating, but another story). The September 2020 front cover features Marcus Rashford and Adwoa Aboah in Black-Pantheresque attire, with the banner “ACTIVISM NOW: THE FACES OF HOPE”. The four-page fold out features over a dozen activists and commentators, largely connected to the Black Lives Matter movement. But flip the cover pages over and there’s an enormous spread from fashion house Ralph Lauren, featuring a diverse cast of mostly Black and Brown models all decked out in POLO. The ad states “We believe in a quality of life that is authentic and optimistic – one that embraces a spirit of togetherness, and honors the individual beauty in each of us”. What this juxtaposition of the brand with the cover amounts to is that the radical focus on activists is immediately recuperated. Activism is sold back to us the moment it is featured.

Donatella Versace with the Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in 2016

The overall theme of the issue is “hope”, and many of the advertisements proclaim radically generic ideas like “Hope is not a trend” or “We are one”. Much of the content is also dedicated to leading figures in the fashion industry talking about what needs to change in light of COVID-19 – namely that the furious churn of fashion needs to slow down. But as dynastic designers like Donatella Versace state their new drive to make “everything sustainable”, the contradiction is palpable given their exceptional wealth and intimate ties to the very richest of the ruling class. There can be no sustainability, no justice, no peace, within a system fundamentally geared toward profit, of which the fashion industry plays no small part. This is precisely an industry where creativity has been distorted into hyper-consumption, and where the artistry of couture is reserved for those at the top. Just like every other industry, there is no real way to be ethical under this deeply extractive system.

I am not making these judgements of the fashion industry from afar. I love fashion, and I love fashion magazines. I too recently bought some pleated pants, under the auspice of “doing my bit” for the economy (and trying to achieve the “dark academia” trend). It made me feel good to purchase something and receive a parcel in the mail. But COVID-19 has exposed an unbridgeable rift in capitalism that was always in its fabric. No amount of pant buying is going to keep me or my friends employed. And there is no way to make for-profit driven business “sustainable”. We knew it already, but now it’s confirmed: this is a profoundly unsustainable system.

I recently attended an online reading group where we discussed the piece “Groundwork — Protocols For Listening in (and after) Social Isolation” by Sydney-based poetry team Snack Syndicate. The piece offers a meditation on labour practices under lockdown, and in it they ask “What is the sound of a machine breaking down?” I read this question to (maybe) mean, what might the death throes of the oppressive structure actually sound like, if we listen? In the reading group I had no answers, only vague gestures toward the utopian possibilities of imagining different worlds. But reading British Vogue this week I felt like I could, maybe, hear the machine slightly breaking.

Not everything can be easily recuperated. Despite the best efforts of advertisers, an ad declaring “hope for the future” is always going to jar with actual demands of activists who want an end to white supremacy, real action on climate catastrophe, and a new order – not the old normal. The sound of the machine breaking is the contradictions getting so wide and deep that you can hear the cracks. Even if brands do try and sell mass uprisings back to us sometimes, these always stay incredibly surface-level. They have to, because actually smashing up the current (racist, sexist, homophobic) system and eating the rich isn’t really something a CEO is going to want to promote.

You can’t buy change. The less that we can think of our power in terms of consumption the better. So many actions championed pre-COVID – use less plastic, go vegan, install solar panels – have been well-intentioned but have primed us to think of our political power in terms of consumption.

Going vegan and going off-grid is actually easy for many of the readers of British Vogue to achieve. The very wealthy can employ someone else to do their shopping for them, set up their houses, install the right things. British Vogue shows that the 1% are doing great at adapting to (and selling) “clean beauty” and “ethical fashion”. Consumption as power washes the hands of those that can afford to consume “right”, and does nothing to address the underlying system of exploitation (that they are running!) that means we have mass produced plastic, factory farming, and fossil fuel dependance, etc, in the first place.

All of this is to say that I don’t think you should feel bad about your current consumption or lack thereof. No amount of purchasing power is going to save us right now. Sure, keep buying local, buy the plants and the pants. Or don’t. Either way make sure you listen out for the cracks, and dive right in.

Time in the Heart of Corona

Posted on March 23, 2020 by binarythis

Many of us are reading so much about COVID-19 at the moment, that it seems nothing else exists, or can exist. With everything cancelled and our social worlds rapidly shrinking, there is, quite literally, not much else to report on. In Australia we’re just at the crest of the wave, a few weeks (if that) behind some European nations in terms of cases. But our public health messaging has been wildly mixed, and as a result ordinary people and businesses are all over the shop when it comes to changing their daily lives and routines in response. While one friend is worried she won’t see her parents for months because of state border lockdowns, another is hosting a dinner party. While public libraries were some of the first spaces to shut down (even though they are the only place some people can access the Internet), the boutique pet store on my street remains open. Some cafes have been serving only through windows while others (until the shut down – though this is still unclear) seemed wildly unaffected. We could analyse this as a total failure of public health messaging, but how to analyse the feelings associated with this unevenness as we navigate our lives right now?

What this lopsided shut down of daily life adds up to is that we, as a populace, inhabit different affective landscapes. That is: we’re feeling different things, living in different worlds, even as the same crisis is affecting absolutely all of us. For those who have had to radically alter their working life (working from home, perhaps with added caring responsibilities) or have lost their jobs this past fortnight, the reality of things is probably much closer, though tempered by the immediate demands of life logistics, care, and survival. For those who have had to stay working as per usual things might feel strangely normal, or, simply that we are living in the shadow of something serious to come but not yet here. Some of us check live news feeds all day, while others don’t have the space or inclination (and in any case, the news and guidelines change by the hour, minute). The point is that we’re all arriving at conclusions at different times. Some people are already totally socially distanced and staying at home, while others continue to maintain many face-to-face networks. We are living in different (emotional) worlds, and the effect of that is, frankly, jarring.

This is not to mention that at this juncture, with ordinary routines gone and a fluctuating and uncertain future, our sense of time is out of kilter. Something that happened yesterday might feel like weeks ago, while imagining tomorrow can seem like a big question mark. All normal sense of time lost. Even if we’re at home, trying to settle into the new “local”, it’s a pretty lumpy and warped everyday to traverse.

I am reminded of a feeling that I had over summer, during the Australian bushfires. I was staying in Canberra, which was relentlessly thick with unbreathable smoky air, while I also had friends and family facing the fire front on the coast. I was in a state of panic and distress for weeks, imagining the absolute worst (aka that none of the towns I grew up in/near would exist any more). In the end the level of catastrophe in my mind didn’t eventuate, yet, a slower less spectacular one continues to unfold. I learnt that panic doesn’t help, but being real about how bad things are is vital to building different futures.

When I came back to Melbourne, people were just going about their daily lives as normal. Talking to friends I tried to make them feel my panic, my newly-found prepper attitude (make sure you have a full tank of petrol!), because I was living in one affective place and they another. I wanted to be in the same place, so we could weather the storm together. But I learnt that even if you really want people to be on the same page as you – full of either the same amount of despair or hope that you hold – you will probably be disappointed. People deal with things in their own way and time.

Obviously the problem with this in the context of a pandemic is that we are (vaguely) being told to stay home and socially distance ourselves, and someone who doesn’t “get” this is actually a public health risk. If you’re busy not seeing anyone and turning your life upside down, it can also be profoundly confusing, angering, irritating, upsetting, and invalidating to see others not taking the same steps. This is exactly why clear and swift leadership – from the Government – is so important. To help get everyone on the same page. To try and get us into the same world as each other, so we can not only act collectively, but feel collectively. Sadly, our “leaders” have been some of the most affectively-lagging of anyone, as they prioritise and cling to illusions of maintaining the economy as normal, above anything else.

But it also makes me wonder, what am I clinging to? What parts of the (already broken) system am I trying to grasp onto, as everything changes? People maintain feelings of normalcy as an act of survival.

Of the many things that this virus is revealing to us, it is the cracks in the system, the total unsustainability of global capitalism, and the way that capital is so often pitted against health and human life until it is too late. It is also showing up the gaping crevasses in our political system, not least of which is the failure of leadership to get us all on the same page. Official messaging or not, we must recognise we have the same world to win. If we can do that, we might find ourselves in the same space and time when the pandemic ends.

Capitalism is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Queer Utopian Dreaming with Taylor Swift

Posted on June 24, 2019 by binarythis

“A certain affective reanimation needs to transpire if a disabling political pessimism is to be displaced” – José Esteban Muñoz

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Weighing up her original country fan base versus the gay market?

If you’ve ever been to a Taylor Swift concert, you’ll know that she is not only one of the greatest singer songwriters of our time, she is an industrial complex. The changing merchandise. The cross-promotion. The advertisements. Worth $360M, Swift is number 60 on Forbes‘ dubiously named “self-made women” list (though notably well behind Madonna at 39, Celine Dion at 46, and Beyonce at 51). As one Swiftie tweeted this week – after Taylor announced not one but four versions of her album companion booklet – “You can’t spell capitalism without Taylor Swift”.

Taylor being subtle

So perhaps that’s why when Taylor released the new single from her upcoming album, “You Need To Calm Down” (YNTCD) with its super gay content there was understandable outcry that Taylor is simply trying to cash in on a lucrative gay market (the so-called “pink dollar”). This is a reasonable claim. I doubt that Taylor and her team have ever made any decisions without considering the bottom line.

The whole thing raises the sticky questions of: how can we celebrate queer culture when capitalism is intent on devouring everything good, and selling it back to us? If there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, how should we orient toward a distinctly queered Taylor Swift?

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We get it

Some of the answers lie in looking to Taylor’s fandom, specifically those who believe that Taylor is a (closeted) gay icon: the Gaylors. While “capitalist Taylor Swift” is an important reading, it is limited. It misses the impact that Taylor being more overtly queer, rather than just covertly queer (which she has been doing for years, as I have written about previously) has on these queer-reading fans. The online Gaylor community (which is mostly made up of Kaylors – those who believe Taylor and model Karlie Kloss have been in a relationship for years) has spent over a decade dissecting the queer elements of Taylor’s oeuvre.

For these fans (which let’s be real, I am one), Taylor’s new queer-ified era represents a turn from subtext to text, and importantly a big alienating middle finger to Taylor’s conservative fanbase.

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Some of the drag queens from YNTCD

For the Gaylors, Taylor wearing rainbows, promoting the Equality Act, and making a video full of queer people hasn’t been seen as a grab at their cash (which they already give her!) but rather, validation.

This isn’t to suggest that we should defend industrial-complex Taylor simply because she means something to fans, but rather, that this example (like everything under capitalism) exemplifies the contradictions of the system. The pursuit of profit doesn’t bludgeon out all the good things in life, it repackages them. But despite these conditions, human creativity and human relationality relentlessly persists, and breaks through in unexpected ways that show us a glimmer of a different possible world, the one that we might hope for if this wasn’t all enrolled in the machinations of big business.

The scene: described by some as a “gay-lor park”

As José Esteban Muñoz argues in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, we can gain access to a sense of queer utopia in the everyday, even in the face of mass production and consumption. This utopia, as queerness, is a potentiality, always flickering as a promise on the horizon – if we can just learn to see it.

Arguably, Taylor’s YNTCD offers precisely such a glimpse, a queer potentiality that is never fully realised. Of course many commentators might call this “queerbaiting” – because queerness is never solidified into stated identity (Taylor has never identified her sexuality).

She burns it all down

However the call in YNTCD is not to identity but rather a queer utopia, a land (in this iteration, a trailer park) solely dedicated to queer living. Taylor starts by burning down her caravan of normative femininity (read: closet), enters the queer village, dons the colours of the bisexual flag in her hair, and adopts an aesthetic that can only be described as “queer Tumblr circa 2015”.

While this world is populated by celebrity queers, it is no ordinary palatable pride parade. In fact, it’s not a pride parade at all, it’s just queers swanning about and drinking piping hot tea. While some read the anti-gay protestors in the videoclip as specifically classed (“the great unwashed”) we might instead see that the trailer park setting casts the entire scene as the realm of the working class. This makes the sharp political point that not all views are created equal and that reactionary working class ideas should be marginalised (the ideas, not the people – that some of the protestors leave to join the fun at the end is significant).

Kiyoko, also known as Lesbian Jesus

Furthermore, while some commentators called the video “sexless“, this shows a distinct lack of understanding about queer women’s fantasies: Hayley Kiyoko as Legolas; Ellen getting a tattoo while biting her nails short; a food fight a la Fried Green Tomatoes. Plus, there is no corporate sponsorship in this world, and perhaps that is precisely why people read Taylor here as the stand-in for corporate pride. We’re so used to seeing social media companies and big banks as the mode of our queer representation, that YNTCD seemed jarring to people’s queer sensibilities. There must be something wrong! Is it even a stretch to suggest that Taylor makes a nod to the demand for cops out of pride with her line “cop out”? I think not.

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This image screams femme and yes this Gaylor thing is the hill I will die on

Importantly this is a vision of a queer utopia that is not actualised: it doesn’t exist in reality, and is indeed its possibility is threatened under present conditions. But, it offers a hint. When we’re so busy fighting for queer rights (like the Equality Act that Taylor has been plugging) sometimes we forget to stop and imagine exactly what we’d like the world to look like. YNTCD suggests a quotidian garden of gay delights, where even Taylor Swift, everyone’s “classic” het girl, is no longer simply the hen’s night crashing the gay bar, she’s as gay as the gay bar.

So, think on this: queer utopian dreaming with Taylor Swift might open us up to a world of gay visions and fantasies, a different version of the present. It might inspire collective action, be that the resilient queer readings of the Gaylors, or overt advocacy of equality legislation. Much of this might get eaten up and spit back out for consumption. But at the end of the day it’s not that you hate Taylor Swift, it’s that you hate capitalism. Make that your mantra for Monday morning and the queer horizon awaits.

Bisexuality in the Present Tense

Posted on April 21, 2019 by binarythis

“…a particular temporal framing of sexuality has cast bisexuality in the past or future but never in the present tense” – Steven Angelides, A History of Bisexuality

TwentyBiTeen
2019 has been dubbed – by the collective consciousness of the Internet – “TwentyBiTeen“. It follows from “TwentyGayTeen” last year (and we’re all looking forward to what 2020 will yield).

I’ve struggled to write about bisexuality, a hint perhaps at the deep ways that biphobia lodges within oneself. Now in a long term gay relationship, I’ve found that my previous loud and proud bisexual identification (which I frequently deployed to demand inclusion in queer spaces), has faded, and my silence leaves me feeling like a traitor to my bisexual kin. Like Willow from Buffy, I’ve felt little need to bring up my past as relevant to my current to my identity, and I tend to use the terms “queer”, “gay”, or even “dyke”, to fudge the question. My sense is that there are a lot of bisexuals in “gay” relationships, we just don’t talk about it. But now, this year of TwentyBiTeen, with multiple bisexual texts appearing to haunt me on a daily basis(!), it’s time to confront the question.

Bisexual characters on TV are on the rise

As a recent GLAAD report suggests, bisexual representation in popular culture is on the rise – at least on television – but figures are still disproportionately low given findings that suggest at least half of the LGBTQ population (in the USA) identifies as bisexual.

This marginal but increasing representation raises the crucial question of how bisexual identity is being conveyed. This is particularly important to consider given the insidious and harmful tropes that underpin biphobia, including: 1) that bisexuals have “straight privilege”; 2) that it is merely a temporary fluctuation between the fixed poles of gay or straight; 3) that bisexuals are confused, greedy, and/or risky when it comes to love and sex. Are contemporary representations resisting these tropes, or repeating them?

Angelides’ History of Bisexuality was published in 2001

Bisexuality in the Past/Future
As Steven Angelides describes in A History of Bisexuality, even in its most utopian iterations bisexuality has been understood as a starting point or end point of human sexuality, rather than something that is possible as a stable position in the present.

He describes how Sigmund Freud imagines sexuality as multi-directional and dispersed across the body (“polymorphous perversity”), that then develops into “healthy” heterosexual desire. In this way Freud offers a rather radical understanding of sexuality as innately bisexual, but fixes bisexuality distinctly in the past. On the flip side, Angelides describes how Gay Liberation in the 1970s held bisexuality up as an ideal form of liberated human sexuality, though one that would not be possible without the revolution/destruction of compulsory heterosexuality. In this way, bisexuality was located as always in the future.

Gay Pride Celebrated At Annual Los Angeles Parade

The bi flag was designed in 1998(!) by Michael Page

Angelides suggests that seeing bisexuality as impossible in the present is used to maintain the binary distinctions upon which both Freud’s theories and Gay Liberation were based – male/female, man/woman, gay/straight. To accept bisexuality in the present would be to trouble this organisation. Bisexuality is a threat. As Marjorie Garber writes, “The more borders to patrol, the more border crossings”.

Bisexuals (and especially bisexual men) have often been seen to “contaminate” straight life. This was most explicitly seen in the midst of the AIDS crisis, during which bisexuals were represented as adulterous hyper-sexual types who risked spreading the disease to the “normal” population. Similarly, gay communities have rejected bisexuals as “risky”, as seen in the 1990s following a rise in homophobic street attacks when the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras effectively limited the ability of non-LGT individuals becoming members. In many ways this kind of thinking was a hangover of 1970s lesbian feminism, which presumed sex with men was akin to “sleeping with the enemy”. This history illustrates how the terms of sexual violence and compulsory heterosexuality create fault-lines in our community.

In this era of TwentyBiTeen, with bi rep on the rise, we might wonder how and if bisexuality is being rendered possible in the “present tense”. To explore these questions I offer an examination of three key bisexual texts I’ve come across lately that philosophise bisexuality and complicate the tropes that underpin biphobia: Desiree Akhavan’s drama TV series The Bisexual, Sally Rooney’s novel Conversations with Friends, and Channel 10 Australia’s reality show Bachelor in Paradise.

Different Worlds in The Bisexual (Desiree Akhavan)
This six part television series debuted in October 2018, and follows the sexual and romantic pursuits of Leila (Desiree Akhavan) after her break up with long-term girlfriend Sadie (Maxine Peake). In pursuing sex and relationships with men, Leila finds herself not only having to confront her own biases about bisexuality (“it makes you seem disingenuous, like your genitals have no allegiance”), but finds herself on the outer from her previously comfortable queer world. As Akhavan who co-created and directed the series, described to The New York Times:

“I heard myself described as ‘the bisexual’ at every other introduction: ‘the bisexual filmmaker,’ ‘the bisexual Iranian-American,’ ‘the bisexual Lena Dunham’…For some reason, hearing that word made my stomach flip, in a non-fun way. And I wanted to explore that”.

This show grapples with and complicates the trope of bisexual “straight privilege”, that is, the idea that bisexuals can simply “choose” to partner straight and therefore not experience homophobia. The Bisexual negates this assumption, showing the pressure and pain of occupying bisexual identity in a world organised into distinctly gay and straight worlds. While Leila’s desire is multi-directional, the reality of adapting to heterosexual gender expectations is jarring. In this way The Bisexual explores an idea otherwise papered over by claims that “love is love”, but that is abundantly apparent to bisexuals, as Leila states: “you’re gay or you’re straight and one comes with an entirely different lifestyle”.

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Leila finds herself at odds with gay and straight cultures

The experience of gay coupling versus straight coupling as a bisexual person can seem qualitatively different not because of something intrinsic to gender, but because of these different worlds. For one, if you are in a “gay” relationship, a fear of homophobia can inform and structure daily life (holding hands in public, booking a holiday, family Christmas).

But more than that, the system of gender relations permeates everyday life in a way that partner dynamics in “straight” relationships as a bisexual person can also box you into narrow roles that you have to actively resist. This also plays out in “gay” relationships, but when the world’s not asking you “when are you getting married?”, “when are you having babies?”, etc, you’re operating in a different arena of expectations (for better or worse). As a bisexual person this experience of different, somewhat incommensurable, worlds is very discombobulating. It is also painful to realise these different social worlds exist, precisely because one cannot simply dictate one’s desires.

Parallel Loves in Conversations with Friends (Sally Rooney)

Conversations with Friends was published in 2017

I never read the back of books, so I was surprised when the main character in everyone’s favourite Sally Rooney novel turned out to identify as bisexual. The story follows Frances, and her romances and encounters with her best friend and ex-lover Bobbi, and with a married couple Nick and Melissa.

“Don’t say ‘just bisexual’ she said. Frances is bisexual, you know.
I didn’t know that, Melissa said.
I chose to drag on my cigarette for a long time before saying anything. I knew that everyone was waiting for me to speak.
Well, I said. Yeah, I’m kind of an omnivore.
Melissa laughed at that. Nick looked at me and gave an amused smile, which I looked away from quickly and pretended to take an interest in my glass.
Me too, Melissa said”.

Unlike The Bisexual, in Conversations with Friends there is no major schism between gay and straight worlds, even as we see different intimate and sexual dynamics play out along gendered lines. The trope that this work upends is the idea that bisexuality is a temporary fluctuation between gay and straight. Instead, for Frances bisexuality means having simultaneous desires and parallel loves that are also braided together, working to resist common understandings of romantic love as monoamorous.

To be clear, the work does not make Frances’ sexual identity the major plot drama – nothing hangs on her having to “choose” an orientation. Neither can we really claim that all of Frances’ actions are functional, and she is deeply flawed. But the representation here is an experiment with characters on a stage where the rules of heteronormativity have limited bearing, or at least, where the characters are trying their hardest to come up with “alternative models of loving”. These are characters simply negotiating the stickiness of love and desire, where gay and straight are not opposing poles, but rather, there are no poles. They barely factor into the equation.

Dangerous Desires in Bachelor in Paradise (Channel 10)

Alex Nation and Brooke Blurton share a kiss on their date

For those unacquainted, Bachelor in Paradise is that particular circle of reality TV hell that involves ex-contestants from The Bachelor and The Bachelorette trapped on a Fijian island. All still “looking for love”, they are given copious amounts of alcohol and made to pair up via “rose ceremonies” where men and women take turns to choose partners. This season featured Brooke Blurton and Alex Nation, two women who openly identify as being attracted to both men and women. This show engages with the trope of bisexuals as greedy/confused/risky, (shamefully) not by rejecting these tropes, but rather by laying them out for all to see.

When Brooke and Alex first appear in the series, they repeat every negative idea of bisexuality in the book: “I’m just greedy!” “I just can’t make up my mind!” “I’m confused!” and on. Similarly other contestants repeat stereotypes, describing the women as “very sexual beings”, and men hinting they would “like to be a fly on the wall” for them getting together. Interestingly, at first their bisexuality is accepted without drama (at least that’s the edit). The hyper-sexualisation of bisexual women, and widespread assumption that bisexual women will always end up with men, means that women’s bisexuality in the context of other straight people is not always perceived as a “threat”.

The men’s faces when Alex chooses Brooke for a date

However later in the show we see exactly how “threatening” bisexuality can be to the laws of heterosexuality, when Alex chooses Brooke to go on a date. Both women already have men who they are interested in on the island, which for Brooke includes a man also called Alex. The men start “freaking out” as it means that the women might give each other their “roses” and send un-partnered men home. In (what I read as) a poetic sign of bisexuality’s ability to smash gender hegemony, the men start saying things like “It’s over for us boys”, “Paradise is under threat”, and “Paradise is over”. Here we learn that all along “Paradise” was merely a synonym for the boozey swamp of heteropatriarchy.

A few episodes later, when Alex tells Brooke she’s more keen to “explore her feelings” for another (man) contestant, Brooke is heartbroken. In spite of all the biphobic guff we’ve had to endure as viewers, what’s beautiful about this event is that Brooke calls off her simmering relationship with the other (man) Alex and decides to leave the island, which acts as a kind of metaphor for the viewer – bisexuality is impossible in Paradise, so no Alex can be loved.

Bisexuality is a present

I think this image speaks for itself

All of this is to say, the representation of bisexuality today is uneven, but where bisexual voices are at the creative centre (as in The Bisexual) tropes can be reworked and resisted in complicated ways. Unlike The Bisexual or Conversations with Friends, Bachelor in Paradise is neither high production television nor well regarded literary fiction. Perhaps then, as a mass entertainment example, it is the most important sign that despite headway bisexuality is often represented with deferral to old tropes.

What all of these texts do reveal however, is that, for those lucky enough to find themselves in the bisexual position, bisexuality can be a gift. It means often occupying a liminal space that gives you a distinct view of gender and sexual expectations.

I’ll end on this note from Jonathan Alexander who explores his bisexuality in his essay with Karen Yescavagae “Bisexuality, Queerness and Identity Politics”. After describing growing up in a highly religious homophobic family/community he reflects:

“Still, despite this abuse, I had a crush on a boy, a young Latino named Domingo. I plotted and planned how to become friends with him, and though we never ‘did’ anything, I suspected that my interest in him (and his khaki-clad bottom, his hot pink undershirt, his luxuriant Navy pea coat) was bringing me perilously close to the forbidden realm of faggotry. My internal confusion, my soul-searching cognitive dissonance was intense: could something I want so much really be so evil? Imagine my confusion when I left the all-boy environment of high school to attend university and finding myself interested in some of the young women in my classes. (I might be safe after all!) I developed a crush on a classmate, Laura, and I eventually married another fellow student, Tara, some years later. Still, my interest in men continued, and I felt buffeted back and forth – a buffeting that ended my marriage.

I eventually ‘came out’ as bisexual, thinking that’s the term that best describes my ‘condition’. I developed a primary relationship with another man (with whom I still live), but my interest in women – as intimate friends and even subjects of desire – continues. Many of my gay friends scoff at this, wondering how I could ‘stand’ vaginal sex. But I like it. And I’ve come to see this plurality of desires as something that enriches me, that speaks to the complexity of connections I want to create with people. And I like it”.

Jordan Peterson’s Insidious Alt-Right Rhetoric

Posted on February 24, 2019 by binarythis

Jordan Peterson: Just wants to be your father figure and restore some chaos to this overly feminine world

There’s a lot not to like about Jordan Peterson. His critiques of gender quotas. His rise to infamy because of his stand against gender neutral pronouns. His suggestion that men are biologically programmed to assault women and that this can only be reigned in through marriage.

The problem is, he is a master of persuasion.

Even though Peterson has admitted “I choose my words very, very carefully”, there has not been enough attention on why this means he can get away with saying some pretty shocking things without widespread condemnation. Studying Peterson’s linguistic tactics reveals exactly how he seems to come across as reasonable, even when he is suggesting something heinous (e.g. that the gender pay gap is biologically determined). Peterson simply uses the oldest trick in the persuasion book: Aristotle’s ethos, pathos, and logos. Identifying these aspects of Peterson’s jargon is useful for revealing him for what he is: an “alt” right-wing crusader trying to convince the world his ideas are rational.

First, ethos. In Aristotle’s terms ethos refers to establishing one’s credibility, that is, expertise, authority, and character. That is why you will always see Peterson start off with a reference to his credentials. This opening of one of his blog posts (a rebuke to a mother’s letter about how she is glad to see Jordan Peterson fail because he is unduly influencing her teenage sons) illustrates how he does this:

Gosh with SO many important things to do you’d think Peterson would hardly have time to complain about women

In subtle ways, Peterson establishes his authority as a lecturer, author, and spokesperson you should trust. When this is questioned he makes sure his followers know about it:

Drawing on ethos (but also perhaps just indicates a fragile ego)

Secondly, pathos. Pathos is all about appealing to emotional sensibilities of the audience. We see it in the blog post above when he draws the reader in with reference to “thoughtful and heartfelt and positive” feedback that he gets. This sits in contrast to the end of that same blog post, where he draws on “despair”, “sadness”, “cynicism”, and “malaise” to eventually implicitly suggest that women who worry about their teenage sons becoming men’s rights activists threaten “our entire culture”.

wow wait how did we get here

His inducement of pathos was most starkly on show during Peterson’s last visit to Australia when he notoriously “reduced himself to tears” talking about the state of the world:

TRUE. WISDOM. TEARS.

The whole performance elicits the feeling that Peterson is just a regular guy who really cares, y’know (but also don’t forget, he is a Professor so he definitely knows better than you).

This finally brings us to logos, the crux of Peterson’s art of persuasion, and something that he has written a lot about. In general terms logos means using reason and logic. Historically, logos refers to the idea of a “principle of order“. Peterson’s particular logic involves appealing to pseudo-biological-science and vaguely Christian tenets about love, truth, and so on. Peterson’s dialogue both constructs and appeals to this “common sense” logic that underpins Western thinking. This is exemplified by his whole schtick, of defending “free speech” (not hate speech, “logic”) and his new book “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos” (i.e. rules and logic, not chaos). Here are these so-called rules:

How could anyone who likes to pet cats in the street be accused of misogyny my goodness

None of these rules seem as heinous as say, suggesting that incels killing women is a reasonable response to women denying men sex. He presents a front of reasonable rationality, to obscure his radical conservative agenda.

Peterson has even been sneaky enough to cover his persuasion technique tracks by suggesting that the real problem is women/feminists/nagging mothers/hysterical hags (they’re all the same thing right?) just don’t believe in logic or dialogue:

They believe that logic is part of the process by which the patriarchal institutions of the West continue to dominate and to justify their dominance. They don’t believe in dialogue. The root word of dialogue is Logos. Again they don’t believe that people of good will can come to consensus through the exchange of ideas.

Peterson laments – if only we could all come to the table and break bread together we’d see that his logic is the true logic of the universe!

Imagine, it must be exhausting making money off being patronising to women

All of this – pointing out Peterson’s use of ethos, pathos, and logos – is just a fancy way of saying what Harrison Fluss has more eloquently said in Jacobin: “he’s full of shit”. But, this is also a dangerous, and frankly exhausting, rhetoric that those of us on the (amorphous) left are constantly having to battle with. This is the kind of rhetoric that means when right wing protestors killed a young woman in Charlottesville, the response is that there is violence “on both sides”.

Peterson represents nothing more than the “alt” right-wing agenda promoting traditional gender roles, men’s dominance over women, white supremacy, and the rejection of gender diversity that is unfolding across the world. Deconstructing Peterson’s persuasion tactics we can see what is really going on: smooth-talking and bad politics.

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