21

Now that gay and lesbian marriages have been legalized by the Canadian state (a charter of rights issue, and therefore under federal jurisdiction) Alberta's premier Ralph Klein wants to make it as difficult as he can for gays and lesbians -- and heterosexuals, for that matter -- to act on that right in Alberta. Klein said yesterday that the province might withdraw from sanctioning marriages and just recognize civil unions. This would mean that one could not marry outside of a church in Alberta: ''We simply wouldn't be involved in the solemnization of marriage,'' Klein said.

"There are no legal weapons. There's nothing left in the arsenal," Klein lamented, on hearing the outcome of the parliamentary vote yesterday. And this is precisely the point: now that the religious right's position has been revealed for what it is -- unconstitutional homophobia -- those who espouse this view have no formal recourse to the state apparatus to defend it. So now the right -- where it holds power, as in Alberta -- is trying to change the law so as to render the decision impracticable. Of course, this is something the Liberals, and the queer marriage lobby, should have anticipated (and they probably did) when they wrote the Bill so as to leave religious institutions outside its scope. It is because no religious institution has to abide by the government's comprehensive definition of marriage that this tactic of Klein's could succeed in rendering that charter-based definition merely formal, at least in Alberta. This shows two things: (1) that the Alberta government is, in effect, trying to solidify its theocracy -- through an attempt to undermine the separation of church and state; and (2) that if the purpose of Bill C-38 was to effect social transformation, then its parameters should have included civil society, forcing religious institutions to recognize the legitimacy of queer marriage.


Meanwhile, Stephen Harper is suggesting that the vote was illegitimate because the passing of the bill required the endorsement of the separatist Bloq Quebecois. I most certainly will need another cup of coffee before I can begin to deal with that bit of logic.

Until then, take a look at my friend Victor Serge's astute comments on the passing of Bill C-38 -- link to his blog, And your little dog too, on the sidebar.

And for more crap from Klein, see the CBC's story:

www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2005/06/29/newsamesex050629.html

20

Bill C-38, which extends marriage rights to gays and lesbians passed today by considerable margin in favour (158 to 133 votes). While I tend to agree with radical critiques of gay and lesbian marriage (I agree with radical critiques of heterosexual marriage), this is a victory for gay and lesbian rights in Canada. Queer critics of gay marriage, like Jean Bobby Noble, caution that the struggle for gay and lesbian marriage actually re-entrenches heteronormative conceptions of "love" and "community" that support capitalism, not to mention domesticating transgressive sexuality:

"This inclusion of same-sex spouses could be construed as a way to attempt to stabilize this socially constructed notion of the family, not just as a supposedly emotional centre but also as one of the success stories of capitalism.” (Noble, quoted by Susan Thomson in "The queer argument against marriage" in rabble news, February 13, 2004).

The push to extend state recognition to queer unions hardly seems a fitting conclusion to the gay liberation movement -- which at its best politicized the transmission of AIDS in the gay community as a function of homophobia; resisted heteronormativity and theorized lesbian existence as a space in which to imagine women's lives as productive and independent of men's; and revealed the contingency of gender relations based on the heterosexual contract. What might queer theory after gay and lesbian marriage look like? What might queer politics after gay and lesbian marriage look like?

Well...oddly, liberated. Liberated from the yoke of what has been the "flagship cause" of most mainstream gay organizations: namely, the struggle for gay and lesbian marriage. Now that this right, considered basic by the state, has been duly extended, queer politics might well (and really should) turn its attention to other issues: like resisting the feminization of poverty, which affects lesbians, especially racialized lesbians; like drawing connections between the homophobia that allowed HIV-AIDS to rage through the gay community (and named this so-called "gay plague" an act of god) and the racism and neocolonial interests that allow the AIDS epidemic to ravage Africa; like mobilizing with the trans community for access to sex-reassignment surgeries, and for improved, safer, technologies of self-transformation, for the de-segregation of gendered public spaces, like bathrooms; and like just generally kicking heteronormative ass (conservative party leader, Stephen Harper's ass is most prominently overdue for a good kicking).

I believe in the universal and full recognition of all human beings as human beings: I just don't think the capitalist state can ever achieve this; it is not in its design. As long as the capitalist state exists, so too will an excluded population exist, within or outside its borders; so too will there persist material inequality and class exploitation; so too will informal and formal relations of "race" and gender oppression continue to structure our lives. That doesn't mean I oppose gay marriage (at least no more than I oppose heterosexual marriage, and actually, far less) -- I'm just happy this battle for state recognition has been won (Liberal prime minister Paul Martin's self-congratulatory smirk notwithstanding) so that queer politics can move on, hopefully in more radical directions. I don't want to spoil the celebrations, but I do want to strike a note of caution: queers should not be lulled into complacency or into a false-sense of security by this show of state "tolerance". We need a materialist queer critique of this victory for queer politics -- but that can wait until after the party.

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Yesterday I spent most of the day reading Andrea Dworkin's Letters from a War Zone: Writings 1976-1987. Andrea Dworkin was a Jewish-American radical feminist, who died this past year at the age of 58. For her anti-pornography stance and her uncompromising analysis of the violence of the sex/gender system, Dworkin was perhaps the most maligned feminist thinker of her generation, and - in my view - one of its best rhetoriticians. Letters from a War Zone is a collection of her speeches, articles, interviews, and reflections from that period. It includes "I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape", which is a speech Dworkin gave in 1983 at the Midwest Regional Conference of the National Organization for Changing Men, in Minnesota, to an audience of about 500 men and a few women. This is how the speech ends:

"I want one day of respite, one day off, one day in which no new bodies are piled up, one day in which no new agony is added to the old, and I am asking you to give it to me. And how could I ask you for less -- it is so little. And how could you offer me less: it is so little. Even in wars, there are days of truce. Go and organize a truce. Stop your side for one day. I want a twenty-four-hour truce during which there is no rape...And on that day, that day of truce, that day when not one woman is raped, we will begin the real practice of equality, because we can't begin it before that day. Before that day it means nothing, because it is nothing: it is not real; it is not true. But on that day it becomes real. And then, instead of rape we will for the first time in our lives -- both men and women -- begin to experience freedom...If you have a conception of freedom that includes the existence of rape, you are wrong. For myself, I want to experience just one day of real freedom before I die. I leave you here to do that for me and for the women whom you say you love."

Dworkin's feminism was premised on an analysis of women's oppression according to which the endemic violence against women perpetrated by men (and its cultural representation, i.e., pornography) is constitutive of gender as such. In "Feminism: An Agenda" (also anthologized in Letters from a War Zone), Dworkin writes that "women's fundamental condition is defined literally by the lack of physical integrity of our bodies...our subordinate place in society begins there." Women are made into women by the institutionally-endorsed, multifarious assaults on their bodies, both actual and potential. One in three American or Canadian women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime, most probably between the ages of 16 and 18. The prevalence of violence against women in this society structures most aspects of women's existence: it truncates women's freedom of movement and self-expression; it affects the nature of their sexual and familial relationships, their relations to other women, their relations to strangers, the street, and public space; it deeply informs their psychosomatic experience and their dreams and constructions of what is "possible"...


But what struck me most reading Dworkin this time around was the fact that her feminism is also premised on a real optimism about the possibility of transformation. Her description of the conditions structuring women's lives is dismal, to be sure, and this -- along with her demand that men change their practices -- is likely what accounts for her vilification in anti-feminist and feminist circles. She's been accused of perpetuating a view of women as victims, a "victim feminism" which divests women of agency. But this criticism, I think, is misled. It's like calling Marxism a "victimology" for having an accurate, empirically adequate analysis of class exploitation. In other words, this criticism conflates the naming of the problem (e.g., oppression, class exploitation) with the cause of the problem (misogyny, or private property) Both by anti-feminists and by feminists, Dworkin is most frequently characterized as a "negative", anti-sex, man-hating biological determinist: but Letters from a War Zone controverts that caricature. Not only is her writing polemically optimistic, but -- and I found this surprising, rereading her -- Dworkin's feminism is ultimately about love; her praxis is about the transformation of oppressive social relations which preclude the possibility of love. Nearly all of Dworkin's speeches -- as I discovered reading Letters from a War Zone -- end with the insistence that the feminist struggle is really about love, about realizing a world in which love is truly possible.


Recently the mother of a friend of mine was murdered by her ex-boyfriend, at whose hands she suffered a great deal. The vast majority of women who are battered, sexually assaulted, raped, and tortured, are thus treated by men who are known and close to them, and these assaults most often occur in their homes. The domestic space is a domesticating space for millions of women (both those who are actually violated between its walls, and those for whom this is a looming threat). This violence has a social function: to keep women down. This is why I was infuriated when, at this murdered woman's funeral, no mention was made of how she died or how she struggled. Not a word was said about the millions of women who lead similar lives, who die similar deaths. And this public silence privatizes the social problem of gendered violence: it isolates women in their inhospitable homes. It forecloses the possibility of survival and it murders the possibility of a world in which love is a possibility.


Turning to Dworkin helps me to understand this woman's death -- and the many deaths of the spirit that surround such literal deaths -- as a political problem, and not as the result of the random actions of an individual. Perhaps one of Dworkin's most challenging insights is that ordinary men commit these violations; that, indeed, violating women is normative for ordinary masculinity. Men who murder women aren't psychopaths, on Dworkin's view: they belong on a continuum of normative masculinity, defined by the eroticized impulse to dominate women. Dworkin's feminism illuminates this woman's death as no mere tragic "accident", but as a symptom of fundamental, and wholly contingent, power relations. And this is useful, because it mobilizes the anger I feel at this woman's death, toward taking collective action. WIthout such analysis, such "accidents" as her death, would be, in a sense, inevitable: because accidents "just happen," there is no transformative struggle possible against them. But this woman's death, I want to repeat, is no accident. And action is not only possible, it is needed, it is necessary, for

"it is not enough to cry 'Enough.' We must use our bodies to say 'Enough' -- we must form a barricade with our bodies , but the barricade must move as the ocean moves and be formidable as the ocean is formidable. We must use our collective strength and passion and endurance to take back this
night and every night so that life will be worth living and so that human dignity will be a reality. What we do here tonight is that simple, that difficult, and that important."

-- In memory of B.K. and Andrea Dworkin.

18

Just saw the new film by Todd Solondz, Palindromes. It reminded me of why I dislike Solondz: for the fact that he trades in the mystification of social conditions, and passes it off as a subversion of bourgeois, suburban American values. We are supposed to find the inversion (the teenager, Aviva, actually wants to get pregnant, while her parents want her to abort the fetus) at the core of the film intriguing, and the multiplicity of actors playing the protagonist an innovative narrative technique, but what motivates these two narrative choices?

In the latter case, it's Solondz' insistence that social location makes no difference: we are all equally, fatally, caught up in the human condition. Because the character of Aviva is overdetermined by her desire to have a baby (indeed, to have as many babies as possible, as she declares at one moment, so that she will always have someone to love), which is a normative desire for all women at all stages of their lifetime, she can be played by any woman, of any "race", of any age. This aspect of the film's narrative structure therefore reproduces the belief that women are interchangeable (a belief certainly communicated by anti-choice rhetoric in the so-called abortion "debate") inasmuch as what ultimately defines them is their reproductive function (indeed, all the women depicted in Solondz' film are mothers - actual or potential, adoptive or biological). But social differences do make a difference to the desires (reproductive and otherwise) that women have, and, more to the point, to their ability to access resources (for example, abortion) that enable them to actualize their desires.

The inversion central to the plot of Palindromes functions to mystify the current drama around limiting (and eventually eliminating) access to abortion in the United States (whether this was Solondz' authorial intention or not). In Solondz' America, abortion is available, accessible, and bourgeois white parents advocate it - even pressure their daughters to have it, causing them to run away (into the arms of fundamentalist Christians cum disability rights advocates, pedophiliac anti-choice assassins, and creepy pubescent boys). This film comes at a political moment when women's reproductive rights (not just the choice to have an abortion, but to take emergency contraceptives, or to take any kind of birth control) come increasingly under attack in Bush's America (and, under the global gag rule, around the world). What precisely is Solondz' "even-handed" satire of the abortion "debate" satirizing?

In all his films, in his depictions of social relations, Solondz seems to want to avoid politics -- he wants to avoid using film as a medium for the articulation of a normative position on questions about the social world, prefering to subvert all political possibilities, leaving a normative vacuum and a taste of nihilism in their stead -- but in this very attempt, to evade the political, he makes a political decision. And in the case of Palindromes, "complicating" the abortion question is code for the subtle delivery of a number of covertly reactionary, politically problematic messages about women, reproductive rights, and the politics of "choice" in contemporary America.

The photographs below were taken in Berlin, during my brief visit to that lovely city in early June 2005. I used my ageing and almost too broken Olympus OM-G camera and ISO 200 kodak film. Sadly, I don't remember the apertures/shutterspeeds (I was on holiday!) and I must confess that some have been manipulated in photoshop...

17

la gloria cubana
berlin, june 2005
by a.c.

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there is a crack in everything
(that's how the light gets in)
berlin wall, june 2005
2/2 by a.c.

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wire
berlin wall, june 2005
1/2 by a.c.

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statue
berlin, june 2005
3/3 by a.c.

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statue
berlin, june 2005
2/3 by a.c.

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statue
berlin, june 2005
1/3 by a.c.

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hand of engels
berlin, june 2005
3/3 by a.c.

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hand of marx
berlin, june 2005
2/3 by a.c.

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marx & engels
berlin, june 2005
1/3 by a.c.

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berlin, june 2005

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a banana
berlin, june 2005
by a.c.

below: three from avenue de l' esplanade, montreal, in winter. the little bird is my favourite thing about that street ("please do not live here de bicycle " comes in at a close second).

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little bird
winter on esplanade
3/3 by a.c.

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rotten apple
winter on esplanade
2/3 by a.c.

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please do not live here de bicycle
winter on esplanade
1/3 by a.c.