MAY 13, 2012

On June 5, 2011, CeCe McDonald, an African American transgender woman, was walking to a grocery store in Minneapolis with several friends, according to her support website. As the group passed a ...]]> BY CHAMONIX ADAMS PORTER

MAY 13, 2012

On June 5, 2011, CeCe McDonald, an African American transgender woman, was walking to a grocery store in Minneapolis with several friends, according to her support website. As the group passed a bar, white men began shouting racist, homophobic, and transphobic slurs at them. One of the men, a Mr. Flaherty, smashed a bottle across McDonald’s face, cutting through her cheek and lacerating her salivary gland. Along with Flaherty, Dean Schmitz, another man from the bar, began fighting with McDonald. Schmitz was an imposing figure with a swastika tattooed on his chest. She turned and ran from them, and Schmitz followed her. She turned and pulled scissors from her purse. Schmitz grabbed McDonald and pulled her towards him, which drove the scissors into his chest. Schmitz died from the injury.

According to her support website, McDonald was sent to prison, where she was denied medical care for the laceration; her cheek swelled to the size of a golf ball. Because she is transgender, she was held in solitary confinement for a month. She was charged with second-degree murder.

On October 6, she was released from jail on bail after extensive fundraising efforts by her supporters. However, on January 5 she was called to court again on alleged violations of the terms of her bail. Her probation officer alleged that she tampered with her electronic monitoring device, although it was argued in court that this could have been the result of a mechanical error. McDonald also tested positive for THC on a mandatory drug test on December 29, although she passed all previous drug tests. Supporters reminded the court that McDonald had a job at a café and asked that her bail be set low so that supporters would again be able to bail her out. Judge Daniel Moreno of Hennepin ruled against McDonald, though, and returned her to jail and set her bail at $500,000.

Hennepin County Attorney Michael Freeman had the power to drop the charges against McDonald. He ignored a petition with over 12,000 signatures calling for him to do so, and the proceedings continued. On May 2, McDonald appeared in court. The judge ruled that the swastika on Schmitz’s chest was not permissible evidence that he was a white supremacist. McDonald accepted a plea deal, and plead guilty to second-degree manslaughter. During the trial, McDonald had to confirm detailed descriptions of the night of her attack. Lawyer and founder of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project Dean Spade described watching McDonald undergoing such interrogation as “so disgusting.” He stated that the judge patronizingly asked McDonald if she understood that when she introduced a weapon into the fight she endangered lives, and she was forced to respond “yes.” The plea deal additionally stripped McDonald of the right to plead self-defense.

As a result of the plea deal, McDonald’s prosecutors recommended a sentence of 41 months. As the time she has already served will be counted, McDonald would likely serve 20 more months, followed by 21 months probation. Spade stated that he expected the judge to agree to these terms at the upcoming June 4 sentencing hearing.

CeCe McDonald is not just the victim of a hate crime: she is, moreover, the victim of a racist and transphobic criminal punishment system. The Hennepin County Attorney’s Website, in a post about McDonald’s sentencing, stated, “Gender, race, sexual orientation and class are not part of the decision-making process.” The post went on to call the plea of second-degree manslaughter “a just resolution.” For the Hennepin County Attorney, who has played such an integral role in incarcerating McDonald, to state that the situation is “just,” is an insult to McDonald’s suffering.

The racism and transphobia that McDonald is experiencing is by no means unique. Trans women are up to 15 times more likely to be incarcerated than the general population. Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey found that 47% of black trans people surveyed had been incarcerated. 38% of black trans people had been harassed or assaulted by the police because of bias. A video (warning: contains graphic discussions of physical and sexual assault and transphobic slurs) from the Transgender and Intersex Project, which interviewed trans women, who have been victims of the prison-industrial complex, included telling statements about the horrors of the system. One woman stated, “prison is the worst thing anyone can go through.” Another said, “I wouldn’t be able to get my hormones and medications that I need.”

McDonald’s case is unique in that it has mobilized relatively well-publicized community support. Since her arrest, activists have mobilized in favor of her release. McDonald’s posse, as it often self-describes, operates extremely effectively. They run a rich support website, and have strong social media presences on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. For the most part, it makes clear the role that racism plays in the case. Too often, the race of trans women targeted by the criminal punishment system is erased by queer and trans activists with white privilege, who sometimes reduce these incarcerations to single-issue cases. Too often, the plight of trans women targeted by the criminal justice system is portrayed by queer and trans activists as simply a matter of gender identity. The racism of the criminal punishment system of a nation in which 1 in 3 black men go to prison cannot be understated. To ignore racism in this system is to misunderstand its foundation and its nature.

The work to free McDonald is also exceptional in that it allows her space to speak for herself. The support website features “CeCe’s Blog,” to which readers can subscribe. McDonald is a gifted writer, and the passages—one handwritten from within prison—are eloquent and long. In one particularly moving passage (especially for Mothers’ Day), she writes:

 I am truly sorry for the loss of a person who also was involved in the incident, but how would my mom and family feel if she heard that I was killed by a group of racist, homophobic/transphobic people only for walking to the store and being at the wrong place at the wrong time […] Would they have taken the same lengths to prosecute him if he had killed me? Or would they have even cared if it were a black on black crime. But once again not to many people care if it doesn’t involve them or is of their concern. But think if it were your child, your sister or brother, a friend or family member. How would you feel?

Prisoners’ rights activism, like the work for many subjected groups, is very often coopted by those with the privileges of the time to lend support and the education to succeed in increasingly privatized and nonprofitized activist circles. The adoption of nonprofit, rather than community-based, coalitional, and nonprofessional, models of activism leaves out many community members. It is therefore quite extraordinary that McDonald has been given extensive space to write about her own experience. The blog does show that McDonald—a fashion student at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, is literate and educated. As McDonald can write so eloquently, her story is more accessible to a wider range of audiences than if she did not have this talent or privilege. Other people targeted by the criminal punishment system may not have forums in which to speak for themselves or the means to do so.

The work to free McDonald is also strong in that while it welcomes the endorsement of high-profile activists, it maintains grassroots autonomy. Veteran queer activist and author of Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg, visited McDonald and will be dedicating a new edition of the canonical work to her. Dean Spade has also commented on the case, but acknowledges that he is not the greatest expert on it. The National Lawyers Guild called on the court to drop the charges. The Bay Area Reporter announced that members of the San Francisco Democratic Party are preparing a resolution in support of McDonald. Such high-profile publications as Ebony and The Advocate have reported on the case. These groups, however, work in support of the “posse,” not in its place. As Feinberg stated, “I don’t speak for CeCe McDonald or her defense committee—I support them.”

The support committee’s activities are also remarkable in that they acknowledge the roles of many kinds of activism beyond legal pressure. The website features some of the beautiful art that has been made about and in support of McDonald. Most feature the color purple, flowers, and honey bees, in reference to McDonald’s nickname, Honee Bea. The diverse art includes zines, videos, and street art. One artist, who made a purple cape emblazoned with “FREE CECE” in large gold letters, described wearing it as “A form of release.  As a form of self care [sic]. as a way to carry the message forward.” Rallies have included noise demonstrations and a Solidarity Dance Party. The noise demonstrations are valuable in that they reach McDonald directly, and help to show her that she is remembered while she is in prison. The dance parties help to demonstrate the volume of support to media sources, while providing a decidedly queer forum for collaboration, emotional expression, and self- and community care.

There are inevitably drawbacks to the movement to free CeCe McDonald. Many sources emphasize the ways in which McDonald is “innocent.” Almost all discuss the fact that she is a student and a community leader. While this is important in representing McDonald’s life accurately, and in making it clear that her imprisonment is deeply wrong, bolstering McDonald’s status as a “good citizen” or an “innocent victim” harms others targeted by the criminal justice system who are not so easy to portray as innocent.

This is especially true in the framing of the case as an issue of self-defense. Many trans women, especially those of color, have experienced bias-motivated attacks like those committed against McDonald. These are often not reported, though. Many come to interact with the Prison-Industrial Complex through participation in criminalized behaviors, particularly sex work. Poverty drives many trans women to sex work and drug use, and trans women of color are subject to disproportionate policing for this. These cases, while more common, are harder to frame as unjust. Deep biases maintain, even in many liberal and progressive circles, that these behaviors are indications of ‘moral failure.’ These logics, of course, ignore the role that structural violence plays in shaping the lives of such marginalized groups.

For this reason, some activists stated that the ruling of a clearly unjust court should not alter support for McDonald. An article in Colorlines stated, “what I hope is that whatever the reasons, and whatever her sentence will be, that LGBTQ activists and allies do not back away from supporting her over the question of innocence. She has the right to be free from violence, she has a right to defend herself, and we should continue to defend her too.”

Much of the activism in favor of McDonald has maintained a relatively strong anti-prison—or at least anti-incarceration—platform. This is essential in building a trans and anti-racist politic that does not bolster the criminal punishment system, as many pushes for hate crime legislation and enforcement have done. By maintaining an abolitionist stance, the calls for McDonald’s release have the potential to be part of a larger queer and trans critique of the space of the prison. Trans scholars and activists have noted that prisons are inherently sites of violence because of their gender segregation, surveillance, and physical policing of bodies. The ultimate goal of this movement is not the freedom of CeCe McDonald, but the dismantlement of the violent criminal punishment system.

This project, as a part of a larger push for justice for trans women of color, is essential. On April 28, Brandy Martell, an African American trans woman, was murdered in Oakland shortly after a man learned of her trans status. This came just days after the April 19 killing of Paige Clay, yet another black trans woman, who was murdered in Chicago. These bias-motivated attacks are endemic in the United States, and are only one of many ways that the lives of trans women of color are shortened by the state. As Dean Spade notes in his book Normal Life, the interrelated welfare, education, child protection, housing, and criminal punishment systems work together to maldistribute life chances, police trans bodies, and end the lives of trans people. An infographic from Fabulous Independent Educated Radicals for Community Empowerment (FIERCE) and the Prison Moratorium Project demonstrates visually that systems, from the start, are structured in ways that make it virtually impossible for trans people of color to thrive or, often, survive.

For feminists and activists, the time to act has arrived. Only by demanding the release of CeCe McDonald—and working to support her as she struggles within prison—will this movement maintain its momentum and create tangible changes for trans women of color targeted by the criminal punishment system.

First, it is important to educate oneself and stay updated on the case. Sources published by supporters rather than often sensationalist, exploitative, racist, and cissexist accounts of McDonald’s case are fairer and frequently provide policy recommendations. These can be found on the support website, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.

After educating oneself, the next step is to educate others. Those with access to feminist networks, blogs, magazines, listservs, and informal networks of support and friendship should write about and discuss the myriad feminist implications of McDonald’s case. In whatever way it is possible, now is the time to reach out. Writing letters and OpEds in mainstream media sources will also help to broaden McDonald’s base of support.

Feminists and activists should also use their skills and talents to raise awareness and show support for McDonald. From street art to zine-making, from singing to dancing, all support is valid. Art galvanizes communities under attack, and can be used to create change for McDonald and other targeted people.

Helping McDonald’s all-volunteer support team with the expenses and challenges the case faces is also essential. Those in the Minneapolis area can volunteer in person or make food for supporters. Attending rallies helps to visually demonstrate support for McDonald. Monetary donations, which are securely accepted, are badly needed.

It is essential that feminists and activists reach out to McDonald during her time in prison. Supporters can send McDonald books and magazines to pass the time and to help her continue her education while she is incarcerated. Writing letters to her is a very important way to remind her that she is supported. Pretty Queer guides activists through the process of writing to a prisoner for the first time. Communication with McDonald as she is caged—quite possibly in solitary confinement—is imperative. A brief and easy letter, which takes less than 20 minutes and costs as much as a stamp, is the least that any of us can do.

The most important step for feminists seeking to create change is to remember that McDonald is not alone in being targeted by the criminal punishment system for her identity. Some justice will be served in the highly unlikely event that McDonald is released, but in the meantime countless other people will be incarcerated or killed. Their stories will not make headlines and their cells will not be flooded with letters of love and support. They are, nonetheless, victims of the same racism and transphobia as McDonald.

Reaching out in support of these people—both directly and by standing in firm opposition to prisons—can catalyze change on a fundamental level. Personal commitment to writing and speaking against prisons, and efforts to publicize violence against trans women of color are key. Projects including the Write to Win Collective, Black and Pink and the Prisoner Correspondence Project allow nonicarcerated people to write to prisoners, and to forge relationships that provide companionship for imprisoned people. By working to end the injustices perpetrated by this system, feminist communities will grow and learn, and most importantly change the experiences of trans women of color.

CeCe McDonald puts it best: “In the memories of those who we have lost, it is our duty to put an effort to make a change. We should not have to sit back in the fear of our own lives and well being, or the lives and well being of those we love and care for due to the hate that exist and threatens our safety. We should not have to mourn for the lives of the people we love and have lost due to hate and careless acts. We have to stand up against those who put us down and try to oppress us. We have to enlighten the neophobics of this world and to help them realize the vast and diverse world we live in. because as long as [we] live in fear, [we] live in ignorance.”

Chamonix Adams Porter is a sophomore in Yale College. She is an Associate Editor for Broad Recognition.

APRIL 11, 2012

You’ve probably seen a new internet meme take its place in the meme-o-sphere recently. Along with Awkward Penguin and Success Kid (and Gender Studies Isopod!) there is now Friendzone Fiona.

The problem? She’s ...]]> By NATHANAEL DERANEY

APRIL 11, 2012

You’ve probably seen a new internet meme take its place in the meme-o-sphere recently. Along with Awkward Penguin and Success Kid (and Gender Studies Isopod!) there is now Friendzone Fiona.

The problem? She’s really Target-of-Entitled-Bitterness Fiona. The meme lays bare so many rancid tropes surrounding (male) entitlement in relationships. While it’s been deliciously deconstructed in counter-meme form, I want to examine entitlement more theoretically here. Though wrong, it’s understandable to feel entitlement for a number of reasons, from the metastasizing of a proper feeling of worthiness and confidence to the malign influence of patriarchy and capital. It’s also worth noting that this entitlement can be directed at love, at sex, at a relationship, or any mix thereof.

First, if we feel, as we should, that we are worthy—as supportive friends, feel-good stories and PBS insist—then it is not so great a step to think we’re entitled. In particular, that feeling of general worthiness can be transmuted into an entitlement felt against a specific person. Why can’t they see how worthy we are! Every against-the-odds novel and movie tells us that yes, we totally can get the guy/girl we want. If they don’t play along, they’re messing up our plotline. This can even be directed at a whole class—“I’m a catch!” becomes “How dare no one catch me!?” Feeling worthy itself isn’t the problem, of course; worthiness means they’re not acting wrongly by loving/lusting after us back. Entitlement means thinking they’re in the wrong for not doing so.

Second, a sense of entitlement can arise when one lives in an environment structured by an attachment between actions and expected rewards. When we live immersed in a capitalist system, it’s natural to see social interaction (along with everything else) as transactional. We do nice things for someone: we’re entitled to something in return. Good deeds get rewarded: all the fairy tales tell us so. And if we’re especially nice, if we think we’re making clear we like them, and if we’re spending lots of money, then the reward is clearly for them to fall at our feet or on our bed.

Third, there’s gender norms. We have centuries of (patriarchal) tradition telling us, particularly men, that if we just act the right way, if we check all the boxes and pull all the levers, pull out chairs, send flowers, don’t openly insult them, then we get the appropriate reward. Though lessened, this kind of relationship recipe exists for women as well: if we’re not too prudish, not too slutty, not too assertive, and if we read the right self-help How To Get A Man book, then the patriarchy will reward us with marriage. Patriarchy’s creation of reward-entitlement is quite analogous to capitalism’s.

Fourth, we get to see all the other people who do find love and/or sexual fulfillment, people who seem no more worthy than we—and sometimes, perhaps, rather less. (The definition of a jerk is someone who’s dating/screwing your crush, as the saying goes. While we, of course, are perfect angels.) This, too, is a trope, that others are poor pickers who pair up with those who aren’t right for them (unlike the oh-so-perfect-for-them us).

While only the third of these causes is explicitly gendered and patriarchy-linked, and the others could in theory arise apart from sexism, in practice they most certainly have not. Patriarchy tells men they are worthy (as men) and entitled (as men) to romantic and sexual access to women. It tells men to barter good deeds and good gifts for women—and that women owe themselves to their benefactors in return. It tells both men and women that women can’t think and decide for themselves and therefore choose bad partners, their little, broken, shallow ladybrains causing them to overlook the “good” men.

How does all this play out? Friendzone Fiona is the latest guise, but all this is at the core of a storied behavior pattern: that of the Nice Guy™, and his less common counterpart the Nice Girl™. (The ™ distinguishes these archetypes from actually nice and kind individuals, and the labels with the ™ have evolved as terms-of-art in the feminist blogosphere). Almost everyone has met a Nice Guy™ at one point or another: the guy who’s complaining that he paid for dinner and all he got was a kiss, that chicks dig jerks, that they don’t give Nice Guys the time of day, that they don’t “repay emotional intimacy with physical intimacy” (as one ostensibly-non-satirical NiceGuy™ rant proclaimed).

Sometimes this is just sheer myopic entitlement (and sexism), the wounded self-righteousness of the man who thought he was playing by the rules and the referees cheated him. But sometimes it’s a conscious play on the causes of entitlement, i.e. manipulation: as embedded as we are in transactional (capitalist and patriarchal) culture, it’s easy for women to feel indebted for precisely these reasons, and the more manipulative cohort of Nice Guys™ know this and take advantage of it.

Nice Guyism is also explicitly anti-feminist: back in the day, goes the thinking, women were happy enough to settle for a nice guy, but now they want supermen or Bad Boys. Feminism isn’t just interfering with a (single) Nice Guy™’s entitlement, but with all guys’ entitlement to women. Friendzoning, then, is what these women do: unjustly “withhold their favors” from men who are entitled to them. Consider a man a friend? How rude!

All these lines of thought are very, very wrong. Entitlement about love, at its core, is about feeling the right to not merely control another’s actions (bad enough) but their very thoughts as well. That’s as deep a denial of agency as can be. Indeed, it’s a denial of the respect we owe others as fellow full persons. It’s to claim that their preferences take second place to our own worthiness, or the effort we put into being nice to them.

Think you’re worthy, absolutely! Be kind, do nice things for people—but because you want to, not for some reward. And instead of stewing over someone else’s taste and judgment in picking not-you, keep looking for someone who wants you as much as you want them.

Nathanael Deraney is a junior in Yale College. He is a staff writer for Broad Recognition.

March 27, 2012

A newspaper has published a misogynistic pin-up spread, and women are angry. Within the pages of the latest issue—and the issue before that, and the issue before that—a reader can find “pictures of scantily clad models, ...]]> By ALEXANDRA BRODSKY

March 27, 2012

A newspaper has published a misogynistic pin-up spread, and women are angry. Within the pages of the latest issue—and the issue before that, and the issue before that—a reader can find “pictures of scantily clad models, beauty contest winners, and ‘bathing beauties’ with captions that exclaimed ‘Most Beautiful Legs in the World,’ and ‘Mrs. New York—and She Can Cook Too.’” The female readership is fed-up, and scathing letters to the editor arrive in the newspaper’s mailbox. Such degrading representations of women, they insist, have no place in mass media. In response, the paper issues an apology and changed its policies.

This could be a scandal out of a contemporary paper. Instead, it is a 1949 campaign detailed in Kate Weigand’s Red Feminism, a well-researched history of feminism in the mid-century Communist Party U.S.A. The paper is the Daily Worker; the writers are Party members. While Weigand discusses the Daily Worker leadership’s recognition of its counter-revolutionary misogyny and resultant policy changes, the story is disturbing. It goes without saying that considerable progress has been made by the American feminist movement in the last 63 years, but Weigand’s research goes to show that, in terms of sexism in the media, we’re still dealing with the same problems as activists in 1949. And most worryingly, we’ve lost the red feminists’ most effective weapon: normative discourse.

To explain, let me start off with a very different campaign: the #notbuyingit Twitter storm that responded to the Super Bowl’s notoriously misogynistic advertisements earlier this year. The campaign organizers were absolutely justified in their disgust. This year, corporate America brought us, amongst other delights, a Kia ad reinforcing tired gender norms (women like unicorns and sunshine; men like naked women and fast cars… and rhinos?) and a Best Buy spot depicting a world in which only men invent cellphone technologies, to be sold only by women. Perhaps most infamously, domain hosting company GoDaddy.com aired yet another bluntly sexist commercial featuring sort of famous women painting another woman’s naked body—with no subtlety to disguise their assumption that only people who love boobs make websites. Disgusted by the misogyny implicit (or explicit) to these ads, feminist took to their Twitters, commenting on the commercials with the hashtag #notbuyingit.

Yet while the #notbuyingit campaigners were entirely right that the ads were deeply offensive, destructive, and necessitated a response, their messaging—we don’t buy this misogyny, so we won’t buy these products—placed too much faith in the market to stamp out the sexism. Practically speaking, as feminism stands today, we are not a big enough population to push the market into a major overhaul of Super Bowl ads (as, for example, Civil Rights lunch-counter protesters were able to create change in the South decades ago). Whatever the Feminist Majority Foundation says about the percentage of advocates in this country, the number of people who would actually stop buying a product or boycott a national championship to make their point is small. GoDaddy.com and a whole slew of beer and car companies don’t care that we’re #notbuyingit. We probably weren’t their target audience, anyway. In order to amass ground support and make sure these sort of gendered mass messages don’t continue, what we need is an argument.

But in market-based campaigns there’s no room for normative discourse. When we seek legitimization and power from a market we get caught in the drab metaphysics of capitalism, stuck on what is rather than what ought to be. That contemporary capitalism stifles normative reason is no new idea, harkening back to Weber, who discussed how cogs in the corporate machine have a tough time taking a moment to consider the value of societal goals, which, by default, roughly boil down to “making as much money as possible.” Yet this dismissal of normative reason presents an obstacle to feminist change that grows direr and direr. Without a proper ethical debate, the market-based counterargument is too easy: companies promote their products through misogyny because consumers are attracted to these representations of women and gender. It’s just supply meeting demand. The fault lies nowhere. Nothing can be done. It is only once we reject the legitimating force of the market and the default goal of financial success that we have the power to declare certain practices damaging and morally reprehensible and fight for our cause because they are wrong, not because of the market’s condemnation. Whether or not it will be profitable, advertisers should not resort to dangerous stereotypes and demeaning representations, plain and simple.

I don’t mean that we should call up the Super Bowl or Kia and have it out one-on-one. I mean that we need a public dialogue, a realization that misogynistic advertising contributes to violence and discrimination, and a shift in societal norms that recognizes such practices aren’t alright. Otherwise, we’re just reinforcing the assumptions that have allowed this advertising to emerge in the first place: profit is the only judgment of a company’s actions. Even if the #notbuyingit campaign was magically successful, would it be a true victory if sexist ads disappear from the Super Bowl just because of market pressure, without any challenge to the underlying assumptions of that misogyny? A pulled ad can easily be dismissed by a wider audience as a “politically correct” response to some offended feminists if there isn’t an explanation for why, exactly, a depiction of the tech world as male-driven is both incorrect and destructive. We can refuse to buy the products, but we need to do more than that.

The Communist feminists Weigand researched had their own strategies, strategies centered on normative discourse. Within the pages of the Daily Worker the red feminists did not just make noise but made arguments. In their letters, readers wrote that the pin-ups were not simply offensive but counter to the goals of the community. Such representations of women, they insisted, were “used to perpetuate male supremacy through the idea that sex is women’s only attribute,” rather than “the mentality and training necessary to institute any change,” and thus deprived the movement of essential support. They also exacerbated the oppression of women, seen as beautiful “cheesecake,” within the Communist ranks and in the family. Working outside the market, these women were able to demand change not as consumers but as moral agents seeking to further the emancipatory efforts already discussed with passion in the paper. Through this line of argument they were able to change the Daily Worker’s policies, inspire the creation of a women’s history column, and spark a debate about misogynistic representations of women in mainstream advertisements. While the term is anachronistic, it can be considered nothing less than counter-hegemonic: these leftists created their own culture; from within they were able to freshly examine their values free from the assumptions of mainstream capitalist American. Apart from the paper, an anti-capitalist arts movement provided fertile ground for the creation of such classics as the women’s history musical Singing of Women and the film Salt of the Earth, which celebrates female leadership in the labor movement. Through these platforms, Communist feminists were able to ethically judge specific practices and seek to persuade perpetrators of misogyny with rational and passionate argument, rather than simply scaring them away with the threat of lowered profits.

Of course, the ability of the Red Feminists to transform culture was also predicated on it being within the limited, Communist Party community they had the power to change. While such a separate culture is obviously a space conducive to debate and ethical transformation, self-contained efforts have their drawbacks. Communist feminists arguably had little effect on the misogynistic American media at large until they entered the louder, more mainstream feminist years of the second wave—though, as Weigand demonstrates, their ideas about gender and labor that were later so central to the feminist movement had certainly developed during their time in the Party. The recent growth of online feminism has shown a rebirth of a distinctly feminist media culture with similar problems. Expressly feminist news sources (like Broad Recognition) offer an appealing option to activists seeking information and discourse unpolluted by gendered assumptions and sexist advertising—and thus able to stand firmly opposed to such tendencies. But we have to worry that, if Slate leaves the “women’s issues” to Double X, feminist concerns are further ghettoized and the movement’s messages, stuck in an echo chamber, never reach mainstream America.

Yet, elsewhere, trends in mainstream feminism are promising. I’ve actually found the feminist response to the recent Rush Limbaugh mess encouraging. Sure, the simple calls for the show’s advertisers to pull their sponsorship may have fallen into patterns similar to the #notbuyingit campaign’s; the writers of the feminist blogosphere dissecting Limbaugh’s remarks may have been preaching to the choir; and the Right may have remained disappointingly loyal to the conservative talk radio host. But we saw a response to misogyny in the media I haven’t observed in a while: a thorough discussion of why Limbaugh was wrong, and why it matters, in the mainstream news sources. Frank Bruni, one of the New York Times’ more conservative columnists, explained why calling Sandra Fluke a slut is simply different than calling Newt Gingrich a pimp (because, you know, patriarchy). TIME, of all ossifying outlets, ran a brilliant satire by Jessica Winter debating whether women are people, based on recent discussion—including Limbaugh’s attacks on Fluke—in the media and the law. Winter’s piece wouldn’t have been out of place on a feminist blog, and shows the wit and incisive commentary that have come to characterize these online communities, but she brings lessons learned in radical niches to the mainstream media. Meanwhile, Fluke refused to accept Limbaugh’s non-apology on The View, which isn’t exactly known for its great feminist commentary, because he hadn’t addressed the underlying sexism of his remarks. Fluke’s point displays an understanding that market forces, both those that pushed advertisers to revoke support and Limbaugh to apologize, don’t challenge the underlying assumptions about female sexuality. Discourse does. And I’m glad to see that American feminists still know how to put up a fight.

Of course, the pulled ads certainly have played a part in the hubbub. Yet they seem to have been driven less by concern that specific petitioners would boycott than by widely voiced, nuanced opinions that Rush Limbaugh just isn’t someone you want to support. The media coverage and loss of corporate sponsorship have fed each other in a productive cycle. This public feminist response, capitalizing on national attention surrounding the Republican “War on Women,” powerfully couples practical strategy and moral rhetoric to illuminate the ways supposedly outlandish views like Rush’s underlie the GOP’s attack on women’s bodies; they are not separate phenomena. In this effort, we see the best of #notbuying it and the red feminists combined, the combination of contemporary Internet sensibilities and old school feminist critical power.

Alexandra Brodsky is a senior in Yale College. She is a former Executive Editor for Broad Recognition.

March 27, 2012

Earlier this month, on March 8th, countries across the world celebrated International Women’s Day. Browsing the IWD website, I was surprised, and interested, to see a short historical timeline of the event, revealing an ...]]> By EMILY VILLANO

March 27, 2012

Earlier this month, on March 8^th, countries across the world celebrated International Women’s Day. Browsing the IWD website, I was surprised, and interested, to see a short historical timeline of the event, revealing an apparently radical background. The Socialist Party of America first celebrated National Women’s Day in the United States in 1909, following a march of working women the year before, demanding shorter hours, better pay, and enfranchisement. The first International Women’s Day was celebrated in 1911, after the unanimous vote of the socialist International Working Women’s Conference. It came to be celebrated on March 8 after working Russian women protested for food and the end of WWI on that day in 1917, instigating four days of unrest that caused the Czar to abdicate and ushering in the Russian Revolution. Even today, of the countries that recognize IWD as a national holiday—the U.S. not among them—more than half are or were socialist. These roots, however, have largely become obscured or forgotten.

It’s interesting to consider the origins of IWD in light of the move to hide the Leftist roots of the U.S. feminist movement. Popularly, the trajectory of U.S. feminism takes a huge leap from 1920, when women achieved suffrage, to the 1960s, when Second-Wave feminism emerged. Yet historical research from the last decade shows that Leftist organizations, largely associated with the U.S. Communist Party, served as an important locus of feminist activism and analysis in the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s—a period of time best known for McCarthy-styled repression and conservative retrenchment. This generation of feminist activists laid the foundations for the Women’s Liberation movement that would erupt later on. Perhaps most emblematic of this struggle is Daniel Horowitz’s recent biography of Betty Friedan, Betty Friedan and the Making of “The Feminine Mystique”: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism. Though the popular embodiment of the disaffected 1950s middle-class suburban housewife, Horowitz argues that in fact, Friedan was integrally shaped by a radical education at Smith College and her early work as a labor journalist for Leftist organizations. Though she later staunchly disavowed associations with the Left, Horowitz claims that Friedan’s feminism was intimately tied up in the progressive politics of her early years. Anti-communist sentiments in the U.S. cast a shadow over the feminist efforts of Leftist organizations during the time period discussed. Like Friedan, many activists involved in these efforts felt compelled to downplay their Communist influences when feminists of the 1960s and 70s unearthed their work. It is unsurprising, then, that the socialist-communist roots of IWD have been relegated to a footnote to the event.

Remembering the Leftist history of the IWD does more than restore a historical fun fact, just as the works of Horowitz and others do more than color in a three decade gap in feminist history. Understanding the consequences of this erasure matter, and can be examined by looking at the current manifestation of IWD. As the IWD site acknowledges, “The tone and nature of IWD has, for the past few years, moved from being a reminder about the negatives to a celebration of the positives.” This, it claims, is because while women face a wage gap, underrepresentation in politics, health and education disparities against men, and violence, “We do have female astronauts and prime ministers, school girls are welcomed into university, women can work and have a family, women have real choices.” The focus of the event, then, is to “inspire women and celebrate achievements.” Abstractly, this goal, and shift in focus, seems laudable. As the Women’s Media Center pointed out in its IWD roundup of women’s victories in 2011, “Rarely are feminist victories recognized by the mainstream media, or even for that matter, by our very own women’s movements.” Feminism too-often defines itself in opposition to existing norms, an exhausting strategy that holds little hope for the future. Perhaps, then, IWD, in “celebrating achievements,” really can inspire and propel the movement forward.

Yet, “achievement” is a subjective term, and IWD provides no metrics for what counts as positive gains. With its shift in “tone,” IWD ignores the importance of radical critique in creating a body of political actors able to make change. Instead, IWD has been reduced, in many countries, to a highly depoliticized event that stands, according the Wikipedia page, somewhere between “Mother’s Day” and “Valentine’s Day”—two events that hardly present a revolutionary view of the value of women. Its stated theme of the year, “Connecting Girls; Inspiring Futures,” is about as vague as the amorphous concept of “International Women.” Admittedly, the IWD website does not represent how the event is celebrated by everyone worldwide. The website is the product of a non-profit founded in 2001, and serves as an umbrella organization to publicize events and allows site users to upload their own initiatives in the struggle for women’s rights. The United Nations, for example, which has celebrated IWD since 1975, drew attention to the plight and potential of rural women with its 2012 theme, “Empower Rural Women—End Hunger and Poverty.” Moreover, women across the globe took it as an opportunity to stage demonstrations, from Filipino women protesting oil power in Manila, to Spanish women in Sevilla covering a wall with thoughts about women’s empowerment.

However, with its broadness and its opaque agenda, IWD still enables a lot of misdirected energy. This year, President Obama, in his March 1^st proclamation opening U.S. Women’s History Month, invited Americans to celebrate IWD but failed to even once mention reproductive health, a political battle raging in state legislatures across the country, in the chambers of the U.S. Congress, and the stump speeches of his Republican would-be opponents. Last year, Diane Van Furstenberg launched a line of IWD-inspired tote bags and T-shirts. In an article promoting the line, the text read, “Even if we’re not political movers or shakers, we can still support the initiative by picking up one of these cute totes online”—quite explicitly diverting potentially political energies into status quo consumerism. An IWD without a vision for the future of women worldwide, without a measure of “achievement” or an understanding of the “negative” forces that impede such “achievement,” has lost a great deal of its meaning, and its power. It becomes an opportunity to gesture toward the idea of women’s rights without furthering the cause.

A recent article written by Bryce Covert at The Nation demonstrates the importance of evaluating, qualitatively, “achievements” of women. A short time ago, the national media was in awe at statistics indicating a possible “mancession.” Data seemed to suggest that women would be the winners in the new economy. Covert’s piece, however, tempers this apparent victory. While women are holding an increasing proportion of jobs, she reports, they are the low-paying, long-hours jobs that hold little opportunity for career advancement and poor benefits. “It’s true that women disproportionately hold retail sales, home health and personal care jobs, all of which are set to see the most growth. But these jobs not only pay poorly and have few benefits; they are also unstable and are poorly protected by labor laws or unionization,” she writes. A lack of paid leave for maternity and a lack of childcare, she continues, hamper women’s success in the workforce. Significantly, IWD was once heavily associated with the strength of unions. Shortly after the 1911 IWD, a devastating fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City killed 146 female garment workers. IWD came to focus its events on the tragedy, galvanizing the labor organization of women.  As Covert shows, women workers today might benefit from the focus on unionization IWD once held. At any rate, a failure to understand actual labor conditions, and focusing instead on their triumph over men in the “mancession,” or bare, increasing numbers of women in the workforce, obscures significant qualitative challenges, and offers no means of solution for the difficulties women still face.

What Leftist activists struggling for women’s rights offered was a full-fledged structural understanding of the forces that oppress women, and a positive vision for how to transform it. As Kate Weigand notes in her book, Red Feminism, among the demands of the CP-affiliated Congress of American Women stood “Adequate childcare facilities with federal and state support for nurseries, recreation centers, and schools with hot lunches.” Rather than “celebrating” the uptick in working mothers, as some of this year’s IWD promotional videos do, they acknowledge the reasons why entrance into the workforce is difficult and seek to combat them. While today individual governments celebrate IWD separately with locally specific practices, in the past IWD was appealing to a specific constituency, working women worldwide. “We must be bold to reach the women—in the shops, and factories, on the farms, in the homes—to make them part of a peoples’ movement for peace, democracy, security, here and the world over,” wrote Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, leading U.S. CP member, for a 1948 celebration of IWD. In 1920, Alexandra Kollontai, a women’s rights activist and leader of the Soviet Union, writes of the IWD celebration improving women’s “political consciousness,” swelling the ranks of “socialist parties” and “trade unions,” and improving the “international solidarity of workers.” In its original form within socialist-communist circles, IWD sought not merely to survey advances achieved by women, but recognize the obstacles to those achievements and organize women for advances further still.

The historians Horowitz, Weigand, and others show that such a Leftist orientation indeed contributes to inciting important change. Betty Friedan is but one example of a woman trained in U.S. Leftist politics of the 30s, 40s, and 50s, who went on to stoke the fires of the Second-Wave. Weigand documents the prevalence of “red-diaper babies” in the social justice movements of the 60s and 70s, that is, individuals whose parents were members or supporters of the U.S. CP. In her work, Personal Politics, oral historian Sara Evans was surprised to find that independent of one another, many of the earliest leaders of the feminist movement had families with radical backgrounds. She writes, “They were not schooled in Marxist analysis…they simply had learned a willingness to question and a deep sense of social justice.” Thus, she contends, they made up “a significant proportion of the early leaders…in developing new feminism.” The idea of feminist “consciousness raising,” a strategy that became key to the movement, Weigand writes, has its origins in Old Left understanding of political movements. Such evidence suggests that the loss of Leftist roots has not just conceptual but material consequences. The conceptual visioning, commitment to and strength in organizing, and oppositional stance of the Left were once driving forces behind both IWD and American feminism.

To finish, it’s worth noting that IWD is not necessarily either a positive source of good or a neutral, harmless holiday. Providing governments, organizations, and individuals the opportunity to pay lip service to the cause of “International Women” without advocating for substantive change is counterproductive. A nod to women, one day a year, without coming to terms with the year-round and centuries-old oppression of women, obscures the problem, rather than working to solve it. A recent Yale Daily News opinion column perhaps most effectively sums up this problematic attitude toward IWD. Elaina Plott, SC ’15, writes of IWD, “On what was supposed to be a celebration of the brilliance, beauty and achievement of the female sex, we were complaining about our entitlement to insurance coverage for contraception.” The base celebration of women as women seems, at best, reductive, and at worst, offensive to those in the gender-queer and trans communities that see themselves on the same side of the fight.  What Leftist organizers understood was that IWD was not about paying homage to an essentialized ideal; it was about agitating for social justice.

This IWD, I most appreciated the coverage given to women and the challenges they face worldwide, which, in raising awareness, hopefully, contributed to increased political consciousness as well. Perhaps a raised awareness of IWD’s Leftist history will, too, contribute to a holiday more committed to women’s social justice struggle.

Emily Villano is a junior at Yale College. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Broad Recognition.

This week was the first International Women’s Day that I celebrate as a woman. As a cis female, I don’t define womanhood in contrast to being a man. Partly, it can be defined ...]]> By A. GRACE STEIG
March 12, 2012

This week was the first International Women’s Day that I celebrate as a woman. As a cis female, I don’t define womanhood in contrast to being a man. Partly, it can be defined by its distinction from girlhood. By several standards of society, I have grown up in the past year: I turned 18, left home, started college. When my May birthday came around, it seemed to me that I was an adult now, and being a woman would follow.

It was only several months later that I felt a shock: I am a woman. I was reading Virginia Woolf for the first time, on a cool summer evening, and phrase after phrase of To the Lighthouse thrilled me with its intimacy. The descriptions seemed recollected, as if Woolf had drawn from my own diary pages about the Ramsay family and Isle of Skye in the 1910s. I became engrossed in Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts, reading what it might be to devote myself to a family: “So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by.” Each time that I had given my protection to a boy, surrounded him and left myself exposed, rose to my mind. As she absorbs herself in comforting her husband then son, so, too, I felt utterly absorbed, spent. Was this what it was to be a woman, then? The devotion to others, the surrender of identity?

Not entirely, I felt later. I had connected to one form of womanhood, a piece to which I have since separated and reconnected various times. Recently, when I run from class to meeting, making plans with busy Yalies to “grab a meal,” the thought of defining myself as the emotional support of a boy is far from my mind. Instead, I face distinct social issues: the negotiation of friendships with women and men; my own intimate choices in a college where sex is often debated about, and where my spoken beliefs and personal choices don’t always coincide. Each choice summons a new question of oneself: Is to be a woman to be devoted? Independent? Respectful? In love?

Is to be a woman to have “a room of one’s own,” as Woolf so famously and brilliantly argued? Maybe my womanhood is the comfort of a literal room. Returning to a dorm room at the end of the night or in the morning, I find the small rituals that prepare me for another day as a Yale woman. A shower, a glance at our Gcal. Sometimes, spindly in its Tabasco bottle in my suite, a still-living flower will catch the window’s light. Maybe it’s from a boy, maybe purely my own. It’s a feminized token, one that does not conform to every person’s notion of “woman.” But for me, its living, twining growth holds meaning, and sometimes that old shock: I am a woman.

I am a woman. The phrase has slowly thrilled in my mind numerous times before and after reading To the Lighthouse. As Mrs. Ramsay seems at times my bosom friend, at others a stranger with backward ideas, we will still be held unified by this phrase. I will remember it, at odd and sudden times, as long as I live in this body and consider this my gender. I will devote myself, if not to a man and family, at least to this identity.

A. Grace Steig is a freshman in Yale College. She is a staff writer for Broad Recognition.

March 1o, 2012

Apart from the uncontroversial observation that his Viagra-fueled penis is all that distinguishes him from a sun-baked heap of horse dung, what can we say about Rush Limbaugh?

Sandra Fluke wasn’t his first victim—though victim is ...]]> By BENJAMIN MILLER

March 1o, 2012

Apart from the uncontroversial observation that his Viagra-fueled penis is all that distinguishes him from a sun-baked heap of horse dung, what can we say about Rush Limbaugh?

Sandra Fluke wasn’t his first victim—though victim is probably not the right word. When all’s said and done, Limbaugh may have done her (and us) a service, despite the ignorant malice of his disgusting attack. That attack turned an anonymous Georgetown 3L into a sympathetic champion of female autonomy. She’s advocated women’s health care on The View. She’s become a Huffington Post sensation. She’s been hypothesized as the left’s Joe the Plumber. If any other recent controversy has generated as much national enthusiasm for sexual rights, I can’t think of it.

Limbaugh doesn’t give a damn. His listeners may fantasize him as an ideological hero, but his interests fit snugly inside his pocketbook. Controversy is his pension plan. Limbaugh is no activist—no Glenn Beck, holding a rally on the National Mall, or even George Will, writing to influence intellectual elites. He doesn’t care how much political harm he does. He’s a savvy rhetorician who won’t let decency get in the way of profit. This is the man who called President Obama “Barack the Magic Negro,” said that General Motors was “trying to kill its customers,” and accused Michael J. Fox of faking the symptoms of Parkinson’s. These are not the kind of thing one says to persuade voters or influence elections. They’re the kind of thing one says to stoke carnal rage—rage that might stop a listener from reaching for that dial.

This time Limbaugh may have gone too far even for him. Dozens of sponsors have pulled ads from his show and some stations have stopped broadcasting it. It’s hard to imagine that whatever listeners he’s gained during this controversy are making up for the sponsorship revenues he’s lost.

We can’t know whether Limbaugh really thought there was logic in his comparison of Fluke’s appeal for birth control insurance coverage to prostitution. We can’t know if he really thought the cost of birth control depends on how much sex the woman has. We can’t know if he really thought it would be clever to demand that Fluke post sex tapes online. And none of that should matter to anyone except his four wives and his biographer (God help her). The only way Limbaugh’s comments matter at all is as an indicator—a kind of noxious wind spinning the weather vanes of social conservatives across the country.

Nothing should surprise us about a known firebrand expressing gross sexism on the radio. In a more perfect society, where sexism runs no deeper than the occasional incendiary remark, perhaps we could spare the energy to lambast every public exhibition of sexist bullshit instead of being locked in an interminable game of whack-a-mole against stubborn chauvinists. We can’t, and if that were all Limbaugh represented, he wouldn’t deserve a second thought. But not only is Limbaugh whack—his mole has a lot of friends.

The biggest problem with Limbaugh’s onslaught against Fluke isn’t that he got a few million fringe sexists to take his drivel seriously; rather, it’s the lackluster response from those we would expect to know better.

To be sure, many conservative public figures have spoken convincingly against Limbaugh’s latest blunder. Carly Fiorina called his language “insulting” (not as accurate as Pelosi’s “vicious” and “uncivilized,” but let’s take what we can get). John McCain said the comments “should be condemned by everyone.” Ron Paul might have come closest to the truth when he spoke on “Face the Nation” about Limbaugh’s apology: “I don’t think he’s very apologetic. He’s doing it because some people were taking their advertisements off his program. It was his bottom line that he was concerned about.” But all John Boehner could manage was “inappropriate,” and Darrell Issa had the guts to respond by demanding an apology from Democratic members of his congressional committee for inciting controversy with their “demeaning and inflammatory rhetoric…on the subject of religious freedom.”

The most insidious comments have been those like Michael Potemra’s at the National Review, who acknowledged the seriousness of Limbaugh’s transgression—then called on readers to “move on” for the sake of civility. Yes, why don’t we just move past this petty squabble?

Limbaugh hasn’t exactly been exiled from the party establishment. The conservative news site Red State predicts that “Limbaugh has hit a snag, but he will remain more influential than ever.” Does anyone doubt that he’ll be invited to the GOP convention in Tampa this summer? Or to the next CPAC?

The party is terrified of him (perhaps for good reason) and has a weak backbone. As David Frum wrote, “Among TV and radio talkers and entertainers, there is none who commands anything like the deference that Limbaugh commands from Republicans: not Rachel Maddow, not Jon Stewart, not Michael Moore, not Keith Olbermann at his zenith.” We’ve learned in the past week that they fear him more than they fear the combined outrage of his targets—Fluke, Georgetown law students, “feminazis,” and all women. It’s remarkable that a party which rallied nationally behind Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann could not muster enough outrage to challenge Limbaugh’s influence.

Where are the women? We stereotype Republicans as old white men, but the GOP ranks swell with conservative women. They may disagree with Fluke’s appeal for a federal mandate that insurance plans cover contraception, but surely they feel the sting of Limbaugh’s slander as sharply as liberals. Why haven’t they spoken out, by the thousands, to defend conservatism against sexism? Why haven’t they ridden the man out of the party on a rail? Do conservative women lack sufficient influence and organization within the establishment—or are they dreadfully afraid of what Limbaugh will say about them?

Benjamin Miller is a 2010 graduate of Yale College. He is a contributing writer for Broad Recognition.

March 9, 2012

According to Caitlin Flanagan, I too lived in Girl Land, once upon a time—and if I hadn’t, it was because my citizenship had been wrested away by the liberal, permissive parents who’d handed me a ...]]> By SOPHIA NGUYEN

March 9, 2012

According to Caitlin Flanagan, I too lived in Girl Land, once upon a time—and if I hadn’t, it was because my citizenship had been wrested away by the liberal, permissive parents who’d handed me a library card (R-rated movies!), and worse, a laptop (the Internet!) sealing my fate forever. Girl Land is a gauzy, creepy dreamworld, utterly exclusive even as it makes sweeping generalizations, and yet Flanagan’s new book, a meditation on female adolescence, exudes enough rose-scented nostalgia to make even the most resolute exile feel like a wistful expat.

It’s easy to demonize Flanagan, who has been called a reactionary, a “schoolyard bully,” and rather problematically, a “mean girl.” Her writing, whether on working mothers or Joan Didion, can be reductive and even cruel in its punditry. Her media appearances never fail to set a feminist’s teeth on edge—take her coquettish spot on The Colbert Report, when she blandly asserted that wives were “crazy” to demand Olive Garden “Date Nights” in exchange for sex. Flanagan is too intelligent not to be aware of her persona, but her on-the-record acquiescence to lobotomies or marital rape is not redeemed by that veneer of irony.

It’s even easier to mock her, especially when Girl Land waxes rhapsodic about how teenage girls are yanked between the poles of “the safety of little girlhood” and “the arms of a lover whom she wants to ravish her, to deliver her to new shores.” While Flanagan’s prose is usually quite good—she was a staff writer for the New Yorker and an editor at the Atlantic—it’s wasted on pages lost in raptures on why teenagers giggle, or reliving the trauma of menstruation. She has even stranger moments, as when she launches into mini-jeremiads on the dangers the Internet, or expresses indignation that The Diary of Anne Frank has been shelved in the Holocaust section of the bookstore.

But if one accepts the conservative, heteronormative parameters of her project, and can swallow the cloying chapter headings of “Diaries” and “Proms,” Flanagan does have interesting things to say. The social history aspects of her book are insightful and incredibly readable, as when she explicates our fascination with Patty Hearst or walks us through the commercial development of Kotex. Moreover, she’s not so mired in her traditionalism that she doesn’t criticize a dating culture which places sexual responsibility entirely on girls, or mock the panic surrounding oral sex. In fact, some of Flanagan’s assertions are very much in-tune with the feminist values she so disdains: she supports the expansion of opportunities for women and roundly condemns victim-blaming. Though I doubt anyone’s asked her, I think that she too would be unwilling to forgive Chris Brown, or any pop culture figure with misogynistic lyrics; she also worries about portrayals of women in the media.

Yet these more perceptive moments are incredibly hard to reconcile with her alarmism (including warnings about the “sexting culture of young middle school”) and even more so with her insistence that she speaks for all women. It’s strange that a writer this intelligent fails to understand the limits of her own perspective. Flanagan writes incredibly well about her own experience—about being a heterosexual, white young woman, or a Californian raised in a liberal, upper-middle class household, or a Judy Blume reader, or a diary-writer. Despite her sillier moments, the memoir segments of her book can also be incredibly compelling.

It’s in its final chapter that Girl Land takes a turn towards the actually bizarre, when Flanagan’s purpose and intended audience finally make themselves clear. At the last minute, the book transfigures itself into a parenting guide, a salve for the alarmed Flanagan fans hounded by her alarmist nightmares of rainbow parties and hookup culture. She offers a list of five suggestions, which range from the reasonable (restricting Internet access) to the bewilderingly unhelpful (Googling “porn” to get an insight into what kids are doing these days).

Bewildering might be right. As the mother of two boys, Flanagan has said in interviews that she did not write her book from “the perspective of being a parent,” which, given that final five, might seem disingenuous. But I could easily imagine those final five tips as a concession to her publisher, who Flanagan has said in the past has wanted her to “soften” her books—for To Hell With All That, it was the subtitle (originally “How Feminism Short-Changed a Generation”), and for Girl Land, it was its elegiac quality. These contradictions may be infuriating, but not all of them are accidental. And, in the end, they are what keep us reading—Caitlin Flanagan wants to be a contrarian, not a role model, and she is anything but a typical reactionary.

Sophia Nguyen is a sophomore in Yale College. She is a staff writer for Broad Recognition.

March 8, 2012

In April 1997, Ellen DeGeneres made television history when she came out as a lesbian on an episode of her sitcom. From her iconic Time Magazine cover to her recent marriage, DeGeneres ...]]> By CHAMONIX ADAMS PORTER

March 8, 2012

In April 1997, Ellen DeGeneres made television history when she came out as a lesbian on an episode of her sitcom. From her iconic Time Magazine cover to her recent marriage, DeGeneres has become one of the most visible openly gay people in the United States. Her phenomenally popular television show hosts everyone from Daniel Radcliffe to Barack Obama, and her sexuality is not secret—DeGeneres has interviewed young gay activists and has produced her own “It Gets Better” video à la Dan Savage.

DeGeneres’s actions are generally relatively uncontroversial. Recently, though, controversy erupted over her involvement with JC Penney. The company, which has been working to change its image and revitalize business, announced that it had chosen Ellen DeGeneres as its new spokesperson. DeGeneres has sponsored products before, appearing in Covergirl and (hilariously) American Express commercials.

The association with JC Penney, however, sparked new controversy. The Christian organization One Million Moms mobilized against DeGeneres’s new position, calling for JC Penney to revoke their support. The group claimed that the appointment of an “open homosexual” was an offense to “traditional families” who shop at the chain. The group stated that “the majority” of JC Penney customers would stop shopping there after the company jumped on “the gay bandwagon.”

Immediately, gay rights groups took action in favor of DeGeneres. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) began a Twitter campaign using the tag #StandUpForEllen and launched a Change.org petition that gathered over 42,000 signatures. Even very conservative media outlets, such as Fox News’s Bill O’Reilley, spoke in favor of DeGeneres. O’Reilley’s stated that, while he disagrees with DeGeneres’s pro-gay politics, he feels that she has a right to be employed without persecution on the basis of her political views. He viewed her appointment as a matter of freedom of speech and private business. In a column, he compared dismissing DeGeneres to McCarthyism. GLAAD, too, framed the issue as one of employment discrimination, pointing out that 29 states do not have laws against employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

JC Penney ultimately decided that they would keep DeGeneres as their spokesperson. In an interview with CBS, Ron Johnson, the CEO of JC Penney stated that the firm would keep DeGeneres as “…Ellen represents the values of [the] company.” Ms. DeGeneres, he said, “captures what America’s about.”

DeGeneres personally responded to the controversy on her television show. She said that though she does not usually discuss “this kind of thing” on television, she felt that it was important to thank JC Penney and other activists for their support. She also listed values for which she stands: “honesty, equality, kindness, compassion, treating people the way you want to be treated, and helping those in need.” She finished with a direct rebuttal to One Million Moms, stating, that her values “…are traditional values.”

Gay rights groups around the country celebrated. The Huffington Post’s “Gay Voices” published an article entitled “How About a Hand for J.C. Penney C.E.O. Ron Johnson?” JC Penney’s refusal to fire DeGeneres has been lauded as a victory against employment discrimination and other forms of homophobic prejudice. This case, however, serves to illustrate many of the problems with today’s gay politics.

DeGeneres and her proponents have made no comments on JC Penney’s blatantly sexist history. A commercial for menswear explicitly made a deal with male viewers: if they watched the “boring” clothing advertisement, they could also watch a clip from the famous swimsuit scene from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. While the commercialization of women’s bodies to sell men’s products is nothing new, most firms do not openly discuss that this is what they are doing. The objectifying ad shamelessly reduced women to sexual objects whose bodies sell goods.

Additionally, this fall JC Penney faced feminist criticism for selling shirts for young girls reading “I’m too pretty to do homework so my brother has to do it for me.” The chain eventually pulled the sweaters, but not before many had been sold to potentially damaging effect.

JC Penney has also received a D+ rating for its treatment of people of color. The website Green America asserts that the firm uses sweatshop labor around the world. DeGeneres failed to address these issues, and only spoke about the value of their support of her as a gay person.

This illustrates one major problem of the single-issue gay politics movement. As activist and advocacy groups ignore the role that sexism—as well as racism, classism, transphobia, and many other forms of subjection—plays in homophobia, they end up supporting certain causes at the risk of abandoning others. By blindly supporting JC Penney, gay activists are implicitly encouraging sexism, racism, and classism—and therefore only increasing the marginalization they purport to oppose.

Gay rights activists are too often buying into a capitalist-centered model of gay progress. With rampant homelessness, sexual violence, poor health, criminalization, and poverty, the right to be a spokesperson for a large corporation seems like a misplaced priority for the queer rights movement. By funneling money into the fight to keep DeGeneres at JC Penney, queer activists took resources from groups in much more immediate danger. The queer rights movement still remains one based in privilege. The right, in this case, of the rich to earn more money was preserved—leaving those without money at all out of the discussion.

Activists should be careful not to conflate the acceptance of Ellen DeGeneres with equality for queer people. As a column The Washington Post’s “She the People” stated, she does not take “a confrontational approach.” DeGeneres has been held up as the model gay American: nonthreatening, white, married, thin, documented, and patriotic. DeGeneres is not radically political. While the acceptance of certain gay people may seem like progress for all queer people, it may be seen as the further marginalization of queer people who do not carry such privileges.

The framing of DeGeneres’s appointment as a victory for gay rights has been a financial masterstroke on the part of JC Penney. On her television show, DeGeneres quoted Facebook posts on the One Million Moms page, including, “Love Ellen and everything she stands for. I’m going to shop there more now!” What has been won, then, is not a right to live without violence and policing but rather to buy things. JC Penney has, like other companies before it, used facades of support for gay people to sell products. While DeGeneres and JC Penney have won a victory, the most marginalized queer people, as well as women, people of color, and the global poor, are left with little change and little progress.

Chamonix Adams Porter is a freshman in Yale College.  She is a staff writer for Broad Recognition

February 3, 2012

Jay Michaelson, like many who are both queer and spiritual, speaks of fear. For years he concealed his homosexuality from others and from himself, convinced that coming out would spell the ...]]>

By A. GRACE STEIG

February 3, 2012

Jay Michaelson, like many who are both queer and spiritual, speaks of fear. For years he concealed his homosexuality from others and from himself, convinced that coming out would spell the end of his Jewish life. Instead, as the writer told an audience seated in Yale’s Slifka Center, “it was the beginning.” A Yale Law School grad and author of four books on religion, Michaelson was here on a book tour for his newest work, God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality. In God vs. Gay, he dispels the myth that the titular conflict exists, arguing within the framework of a literal interpretation of the Torah and New Testament. Michaelson discusses the sexuality of women as well as men, carefully and repeatedly noting that their cases should be addressed independently. A pious lesbian may be surprised, relieved, or disappointed to learn that her sexuality goes almost unmentioned, invisible, in Jewish and Christian religious texts. To his credit, Michaelson opens up the conversation about women’s absence from the texts. His central lesson for us, based on literal and historical textual analysis, is that God loves queers. This message should reach powerfully to a generation of budding lesbian, bisexual, and queer religious girls.

The messages in the Torah and New Testament are very different for a gay woman than for a man. There is a relative silence on lesbianism, as most Old Testament passages taken to preclude homosexuality in fact address only male-specific sexual acts. Take Leviticus 18:22, perpetually cited in Jewish discussions of homosexuality, which Michaelson translates in the following way: “And at a man you shall not lie the lyings of woman: it is a toevah.” The passage neglects to make an inverse command prohibiting women from lying with women. It addresses only male-male anal sex. And even more precisely: the word toevah, meaning a taboo associated with a specific group of people, is linked to cultish practices. Its historical context is indispensable to the reading of the text; as stated in Deuteronomy 23:18 and 1 Kings 14:24, the Canaanites practiced cultic orgies, in which both female and male prostitutes were used in sexual rituals imitating goddesses and gods – the real object of concern for an elective monotheism. In line with the Commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” Leviticus 18:22 forbids only specific cultish sexual acts in order to guard against idol worship. Thus, this passage should not be taken to condemn homosexuality in general. Neither this book nor any in the Old Testament forbid, or even mention, lesbian acts.

Within the texts, unique in directly addressing female queer sexual acts is a passage in the Christian New Testament. In Rmans 1:26-27, speaking of “shameful lusts” that the pagan Romans acted upon, the apostle Paul writes, “Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones.” It next addresses men who “committed shameful acts with other men” and as such is taken to prohibit all – female and male – homosexual acts. This passage, according to Michaelson, is in fact less about same-sex relations than about gender roles. In his interpretation, the problem is not that women have relations with other women, but that, based on the assumption that one partner needs to take a “dominant” role, one woman is acting masculine and thus improper. In a modern context, Paul’s teachings that women must necessarily be meek and defer to the other sex are no longer taken as truth, except on the peripheries of Christianity that still regard women as unfit for leadership positions in the workplace, church, or home. This passage is a condemnation of lesbianism only if we view it as a condemnation of any power for women. As Paul’s words form the sole passage that addresses female-female sexuality, there is no strong case to be made against lesbianism in an age where Christian women gain political power.

Yet if a condemnation of lesbians is absent, so is the mere mention of lesbians. There are beautiful examples of a nonsexual love between women, such as the devotion of Ruth to Naomi in the Torah, evident in her pledge, “Wherever you go, I will go.” Their tender bond should be read as an affirmation of female love, emblematic of a general acceptance of love outside the confines of a heterosexual marriage. Yet lesbian sexuality is invisible in the texts. In biblical times, same-sex sexual acts did not define an identity. Further, women’s erotic acts were not even considered sex, to the Jewish scholars in biblical times whose phallogocentric discourse defined sex as penetration with a penis. Equating gay women with men, and considering same-sex desires indication of inherit gayness, is an anachronistic concept. Queer women may be troubled that their love and sex are not mentioned in the texts. If lesbianism is not an identity recognized in the Torah or Bible, how should women reconcile the blossoming of their spirituality with that of their queer sexuality?

Michaelson’s answer, which he finds in the texts, is that for many people they are two essential ways of expressing love. Passages abound proclaiming God’s compassion and love. As pronounced in 1 John 4:8, “Anyone who fails to love can never have known God, because God is love.” To deprive ourselves of love, we are also depriving ourselves of God’s love. In contrast, the acceptance of one’s identity and feelings is holy. As Michaelson stressed to the assembly in Slifka, “A loving God could not want the tyranny of the closet.” Instead, we should read the texts as affirming our freedom to explore and express our love. Glimpsed through these written messages, God’s wish for us is a loving, spiritual life.

I beheld the blossoming of life and love in one brave girl’s experience. In seventh grade, that clichéd-because-it’s-true time between childhood and adulthood, I attended a friend’s bat mitzvah ceremony, the symbol of a girl’s passage into womanhood. A young Conservative Jew, very small on the bimah, she delivered an eloquent and simple oration on the topic of homosexuality in the texts. She explained that the impetus in Old Testament times for heterosexual relations was a high birth rate to counteract the very low survival rate; an urgency that is no longer applicable to the world with its medical advances. At the time, this girl was in the process of coming out as bisexual, and her conclusion, six years ago, was the same as Michaelson’s: God loves and accepts queer people. Here was a female blossoming into womanhood before the eyes of the seated, amazed congregation. Having dispelled the falsities that too often plague religious queers, including Michaelson well into his adult life, this young woman was filled with a spiritual and personal love that dazzled us. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all girls could mature healthily and free of self-doubt? Her goal, Michaelson’s goal, is an understanding and experience of this spiritual love, available to all.

A. Grace Steig is a freshman in Yale College. She is a contributing writer for Broad Recognition.