I have been trying to decide if these are the most disgusting people on earth, because this really is the stuff of nightmares. We all talk about racism, and hate, and the persistence of our violent national past, but this is nonetheless an exemplary crime. Not unimaginable in its occurrence, but, still, the worse of the worse: a group of people who kidnapped a black woman, with no intention but to harm, degrade, and destroy. Leonard Codispoti, the local Magistrate in this jurisdiction,

“It was the worst case of human abuse I have seen since I have been a magistrate.

“Something like this is so horrifying it makes you want to puke. They got this girl out of Charleston and took her to Big Creek, threw her in a shack, raped and stabbed her, put a rope around her neck, made her eat animal feces and did other horrifying things to her” (Charleston Daily Mail, hat tip to Rikyrah).

And, I must say, I am a little bit surprised at how slowly the national has been on the story, despite pretty heavy coverage in the southeast. The AP only put out a video today (below), and Reuters hasn’t gone near it. CNN was shying away, though the story did eventually appear on CNN international. (In case you didn’t get the memo, outside the U.S., all the “news” is different. Even on CNN!) And indeed, why talk about a real sexual assault when we can instead obsess over Vanessa Hudgens in the nude? Why talk about a hate crime when we can instead debate Michael Vick’s racial victimhood?

My guess– and yes I am being snarky but I also really believe it– my guess is that as the defendants become more recognizable and categorizable as monsters, as exceptions, the story will spread. Until then, a slow burn, because the story is too ugly, too painful, and too real.

I struggled with putting their pictures on my site. Even though I think of my site as a space I share with you, a public space, even looking makes me feel dirty. So how to talk? More later.

I can’t wait to get my hands on “Hey…Shorty.”

For now, here’s a trailer from War Zone. You can check more videos from Northampton’s Media Education Foundation, including Byron Hurt’s fabulous, Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, by clicking here.

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Christina Olivares

I find this one difficult to work out: If you have never boxed, or done some sort of martial art, it might be hard to understand how such activities aren’t quite about violence. But in this post that boundary around violence is difficult to identify, since part of what I’m thinking about is a kind of self-defense (which thus assumes violence). I’m not saying, for instance, that I believe that all women should box, or that knowing how to fight would necessarily alleviate women’s vulnerability to domestic abuse. But there is something to be said for the psychological effects of imagining one’s self as able to hold one’s own. It’s an effect on the mind developed through the disciplination of the body.

“Disciplination,” by the way, is just fancy for “what we put our bodies through” in order to achieve some kind of effect. Disciplination makes comportment– or what my grandparents refer to as “how you carry yourself.” So learning a new sport or a new style of dance involves disciplination. We simply use the fancier word when describing such activities as also having psychological effects. The philosopher Iris M. Young has this beautiful essay called “Throwing Like Girl,” and in it she talks about a moment when she realizes that there are all these things she never learned to do with her body because she was a woman, and that “being a woman” was explicitly tied up in having a limited physical relationship to her body. It’s not that girls can’t throw; it’s that girls never learn to throw. We don’t teach girls to throw because girls can’t throw; girls never learn to throw. There is no such thing, really, as throwing like a girl. Oh, unless “girl” just means “badly.” Language is a bitch, huh?

It’s really quite amazing to think about. If I throw a ball at you, will you duck or catch? How much is that reflex guided by your training? How much is your training justified or strengthened by what do you think you should do? Or what you have always done? Who are you anyway?

Comportment is fascinating, especially coming off of a semester of teaching classes like “Girlpower” and “Racial Passing.” Passing is all about understanding comportment, and knowing how to adjust one’s bearing in such a way that people take you to be a certain kind of person. Two of the best examples of passing through comportment I can think of are Will Smith’s character in Six Degrees of Separation, and Kevin Spacey’s character in The Usual Suspects. (Although I guess these might also be examples of how vexed relationships between the real and the imaginary can be: remember when Denzel told Smith to use a body double for kissing a man, b/c it would ruin his career?)

But anyway, race and gender passing are usually about conscious decisions, while comportment is mainly unconscious, much in the way being “who we are” is an unconscious performance (for instance your regional accent or your gentle manner). But sometimes things happen that make you suddenly aware of “who you are.” Someone tells you that you don’t sound black, or look Jewish, or sit like a man. That moment of being told who “you” are is called an interpellation, and it speaks to how identity requires both our own actions and other people’s explicit recognition thereof. (If you’re interested in thinking about what this means for gender performance, you should check out the Chloé A. Hilliard article I mention in “all lesbians are sneaky.”)

So back to boxing and blows, to subjects and objects, and to the complications of our relations therein. Three powerful readings: In her post on CnS, Olivares has all these important things to say regarding boxing in relation to her own femininity through boxing. Then I saw a post over at a cat and twenty, picked up via Objectify This. Both women riff on how often women apologize, “I’m sorry this,” “I’m sorry that.” Apologies for imposing. Apologies for taking up space. Apologies for making people deal with themselves, and then watching their struggle.

1. So here’s Olivares. I don’t want to reproduce too much here, because I’d really like you to read the women above for yourself:

on the train to the gym this morning i realized that it was fear that kept me rooted & accepting of my teammate’s blows. not about being quick. i’ve just been trained to sustain blows. when i was little – the one time i evaded my father’s heavy hand, perhaps at 7 or 8 years old, i felt, for the first time in my life, not fear, but contempt for him as i spun to the other side of the kitchen – and he, shame? either way, when he caught me by the arm a second later, it became the worst beating of my life. for future (inevitable, i was a back-talker) punishments i never resisted, partly to not bring worse punishment, but partly, it must’ve been, so that i would never have to feel contempt for my father. fear was preferable to loathing. fear made it my fault; loathing, his fault. and so i’ve trained myself to not duck blows.

2. From a cat and twenty:

… she was sorry. she knew enough, even drunk to the point of unconsciousness and physically incapable of movement, that she was sorry about something. because we always are. we are always supposed to be.

you know what i wish? well, i wish a lot of things, really, chief among them being that men would stop hating women so goddamn much. because it’s not our fault. whatever it is that actually drives that misogyny, whatever fear is actually coiled up at the bottom of that vast heart of darkness, it is most definitely not our fault.

but barring these impossible dreams, you know what i wish? i wish that we would stop apologizing. it’s not easy – we’ve learned to say “i’m sorry” to try to preempt the whipping, or to lessen the lashes, or just to quiet our own minds while it’s happening. we’ve learned that “sorry” helps us survive. but i wish we could start fighting back, just a little, in little ways.

3. And finally, two scenes from Karyn Kusama’s Girlfight. The first is when Michelle Rodriguez’s Diana gets into a fight with her abusive father, and beats him. The second, which you can catch a glimpse of in the clip below, is when she hits her sparring partner. Hard. Then she apologizes. Her trainer admonishes her “don’t be sorry. Don’t ever be sorry.”

I could problematize this by emphasizing that the “don’t be sorry” implores women to be like oppressors. But here, I really don’t think it’s about apologizing, about proper conduct in the interest of ethical relations. This is about a state of being: Don’t ever be sorry.Though there are dangers. On top of her father, subjecting him to her blows, there’s this moment when Diana seems to see her abusive father in herself. By virtue of her position over him, she suddenly sees him as her abused mother, which makes her… Multiple subject positions, multiple significations: It’s hard not be sorry– in every sense of the phrase. Hard not to apologize for living while female, and then hard not to be a sorry ass punk… So much work.

To end, a Madonna video, “What It Feels Like for a Girl.” I have some feelings to smash out. The ending doesn’t bode well (nor does her English accent!), but afterwards I always feel strangely fine, being left to the work of recuperation.

But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading
cause you think that being a girl is degrading
But secretly you’d love to know what its like
Wouldn’t you?
What it feels like for a girl?

The second thing I was thinking about is why I am obsessed with chicness as feral. To be ‘feral,’ as you probably already know, is be wild. But not quite wild like “girls gone wild,” (although…) but more like raised in the wild, like raised by wolves.

According to feralchildren.com, feral children “are children who’ve grown up with minimal human contact, or even none at all. They may have been raised by animals (often wolves) or somehow survived on their own. In some cases, children are confined and denied normal social interaction with other people.”

Hmm. Today’s celebrities: survivors? — check (Kate Moss has been in the news for almost 20 years!) Denied normal interaction? — check. Raised by animals? — well at least there’s a good metaphor there.

Anyway. Maybe we like our girls feral because we like them at best beyond human–and all equivalent notions of sustenance. Or at worst, we simply like them desperate.

At the heart of this chic thing, the gamine thing, the hungry, I’m-gonna-eat-you-look thing, there is something interesting about femininity as sexual yet not reproductive. The unnaturally childlike body reinforces this, its hungering look promising consumption and consummation without reproduction.

I am not hard on this idea of consummation and consumption because I believe that it is wrong to distinguish between female sex and female reproduction. Frankly, I’m in favor of such distinctions– because I am in favor of female sexual pleasure independent from makin’ babies.

But I have to be suspicious about our growing cultural desire to have all things both ways, and how, if we aren’t careful, the negative energy generated between desire and its material limits will always take someone victim, often a woman. Women should work, but there has been little integration between childcare and labor structures. We want to reduce teen pregnancy, but don’t want sex education. We want peace without the hard work of making justice. We want sexual pleasure without reproduction. In each of these examples, there is some kind of financial “out,” but they are loopholes, not solutions.

To use an over-simplified example: I always want new clothes. If the producers of clothes all made living wages, I could not always have new clothes, unless I were wealthy. I want the people who make clothes to earn living wages, because I want workers in general to earn living wage. Business owners know, however, that even though I want others to earn such wages, I will not stop going to the store. They know that I, perhaps innocently, want to have it both ways. I will never ask the question: what I am willing to give up? To make the example less trivial, substitute “food” for “clothes.”

Earlier in this post, I wondered if we like feral girls because we like our girls without suggestion of sustenance. Not only might their bodies not suggest reproduction, they don’t even need to be fed! They are outside of social relation. There is no marrying them (they’re celebrities), no feeding them (they don’t eat), no making a living with or for them (they’re rich). Apparently, we only need to wait for them to become legal.

They are perfect embodiments of desire. They’re girls gone wild!

And I am pretty sure that there is something I am supposed to like about this. I am not being sarcastic: I like wild. So why this feeling of dis-ease? For what will this mean for regular girls? Everyday girls? Girls who must navigate the wilderness we grow in their images?

One reason offered for the major increase of the likelihood of college-educated Black women being abused sexually, among others, is the backlash theory. It states that as women become more successful outside of the home, men become abusive due to resentment of their move outside of the traditional roles of women.

The article is quite interesting, and also talks a bit more about how the statistics were collected, as well as also discussing how part of the problem is linked to ways in which abuse is not discussable in many black households. Check it out!

. . . .

by Supriya Pillai

I’ve been in the basement of the UN for all of last week and I’ll be there until the end of this week. The Commission on the Status of Women meets every year to discuss government’s various commitments to a particular theme having to do with women. General, I know and, annoyingly, pretty non-binding, but the theatre I have been witness to has really been something. Watching world politics unfold in one room as people comb through language and text, the silent fights become more vocal. Diplomacy is just a nice way of fighting. Like, when most delegates take the mic, they respectively thank their other delegates, the chair and then they proceed with their “fuck yous”– but ever so gently.

This year, the theme is the Girl Child. Interesting to note, there are no international treaties, documents, etc that indicate that girls can express their human rights. Rather, there are places where girls are protected (i.e. by their families), but in and of themselves, they are not entitled to inalienable human rights.

Here’s the thing, the US is one of the very few countries that hasn’t even ratified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), let alone the Convention of the Rights of the Child or the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)… and they are proposing new language. It’s really arrogant. The US won’t ratify the UDHR because they claim we cannot have universal human rights when we believe in state sovereignty. To be honest, the US just wants to be exempt… exempt from owning up to torture at Abu Ghraib, owning up to starting a war when war wasn’t necessary, owning up to the systematic imprisonment of black folks and latinos in this country… I mean the list is long and basically they want to be exempt from fulfilling human rights and exempt from being held accountable for violating them.

So, what gives them the right to introduce any new language, to boss around other countries, and then to denounce the whole UN system at once? And for those of you who think that the UN is a waste of time, that’s our government’s propoganda and I can’t figure out, if that’s what they think, why they’re present and why they’re fighting so hard.

This year the US is [presenting] 2 resolutions. One got nixed today and the other will most likely get trashed too. They’ve put their hands into the pot of female infanticide, which we can all agree we are against, but then they had to throw in sex selective abortion. Our administration is so against abortion that they will fight battles outside of the country (since they can’t win them inside the country) to try to gain allies to deny women the right to control their own bodies and choose an abortion.

Another government’s delegation said to me and some other colleagues today, “I don’t understand why the US has to meddle in abortion, opposing it so much, when it’s legal in their own country.”

The other resolution is against forced and early marriage… I won’t go into it but it’s really the US’s back up… they have thrown in language on sex selective abortion into this resolution today with no negotiation from others… so really very diplomatic, to say the least. It’s all confusing and doesn’t make sense, but they are letting the world know that they are going to fight abortion wherever and however they can.

China has been funny… they blame all of the problems that the girl child faces today on globalization. They aren’t far off the mark, but they don’t see themselves as accountable in any of it.

Our friends from South America lobby in a block called Mercosur and they are doing a phenomenal job. Brazil, in particular, is very progressive.

Every year the Palestinians [present] a resolution (through another country since Palestine is not considered a member state) on women and girls living under foreign occupation. And, every year it gets shot down (by guess who? The US and Israel). But, this year we hope will be the year that it gets recognized.

Bonus: It’s also about ANTM and NOW in The NY Daily News! Interestingly, there are no references to the episode on any ANTM site. I put some of the images after the jump, in case you don’t want to see it. Dorothy Snarker at After Ellen has more pix, and some commentary thereon.

Also, WPIX, The CW’s NY affiliate has this poll (if you vote you can see the results).

Finally, because once one is in the CW it’s hard to get out, I can’t resist this gallery of pix from the top model’s “political issues” shoot.