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 frame 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.

May 6, 2012

The “Purchase Bubble,” as students and faculty affectionately call their New York state college, rests peacefully in the Westchester County shade. Purchase is a reserve of liberal and fine arts, with a flair for the ...]]> By James Cersonsky

May 6, 2012

The “Purchase Bubble,” as students and faculty affectionately call their New York state college, rests peacefully in the Westchester County shade. Purchase is a reserve of liberal and fine arts, with a flair for the bohemian and a history of left-wing activism. “When we step outside, we realize that we’re pretty progressive,” says Christina Vitolo, a senior studying journalism and gender studies. “We have things like gender-neutral housing and gender-neutral bathrooms. We have professors who are openly gay or have trans partners.”

Vitolo is a co-director of what was, until February, Purchase’s proudest pocket of fresh air: the alternative clinic for women and female-bodied people.

The alt clinic provided gynecological services and counseling for some 150 to 200 students. For two days a week, from 6 to 9 p.m., students could come in for pelvic exams, pregnancy tests, STD tests, dental dams, condoms, peer counseling, and the comfort of tea and conversation with fellow students. Female-bodied people could opt for gynecological care at Purchase Student Health Services, but many found the alt clinic more conscious and accepting of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities, and hence a safer environment.

A nurse practitioner administered medical services. Otherwise, the clinic was, as Vitolo says, “completely student run.” Two co-directors were charged with selecting the nurse practitioner, overseeing the clinic’s budget and operations, and leading a team of student interns who received class credit for clerical work, educational outreach, and training around issues of sexuality, gender identity, relationships, and intimate-partner abuse. All funding came from the Purchase Student Government Association and student activity fees.

The women’s liberation movement spawned the alt clinic in 1978. By then the fight for abortion rights, riding older waves of struggle for legalized contraception and federally funded family planning, had galvanized women around a panoply of issues centering on the right to one’s own body: the safety of reproductive and maternity-related drugs; the overuse of invasive surgeries; gender balance among doctors; and communicative, preventive, positive care. Alternative clinics provided autonomous spaces for such “women-centered” health care.

Faced with increased competition for service provision, the medical establishment didn’t exactly cheer on the movement. But mainstream hospitals craftily channeled its energies, internalizing reproductive health care, childbirth education, and patient support groups.

REPRESENTATIVES FROM Purchase Student Health Services met with the student directors, nurse practitioner, and faculty adviser Karen Baird throughout the fall to review the clinic’s practices. The process seemed routine—maybe the student interns would have to get more specific training, or paperwork would have to be re-formalized. Meanwhile, the co-directors were on the lookout for a new nurse practitioner for the coming year.

Come February, they were told they didn’t need one. The clinic’s services were to be shut down. Purchase’s legal counsel decided that student involvement in service provision, from filling out paperwork to answering patient calls, was too great a financial burden given students’ lack of liability and malpractice insurance. Shutting down clinical services wasn’t a recommendation, but a mandate.

A week and a half after the decision, forty students assembled to speak out and chart a course of action. An unofficial taskforce was formed. In March, the clinic’s leaders and school administrators held a panel discussion, followed by an open question and answer session with Ernie Palmieri, Interim Vice President for Student Affairs. Maybe, the administration said, Purchase Health Services could stay open longer to accommodate the clinic’s services. On the basis of Title IX, the extra hours would have to be equally, if nominally, open to men.

“At first I was really upset, and I got even more upset when I thought about how important a service this was,” Vitolo says.

For many, the clinic’s closing resonated with the more visible attack on Planned Parenthood and Title IX funding going on across the country. As Baird put it, “That struggle that happened in the sixties and seventies of non-MD people providing services for women—that’s still the struggle.”

But Rush Limbaugh was nowhere to be seen at Purchase. The decision there was less ideological and much simpler. Though Baird hadn’t been told this until I informed her in our phone conversation, the alternative clinic was investigated because Purchase Student Health Services was seeking accreditation with the Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care (AAAHC). According to Palmieri, Purchase’s pursuit of accreditation is a “general maneuver…to have top quality care for our students” following several years of rehabbing health service facilities. Though Palmieri couldn’t cite any direct benefits of accreditation when we spoke, his word on the clinic was clear. If students were sued—for the first time in the clinic’s thirty-three years—“SUNY would not protect the College, and the College would have to pay. A lawsuit would kind of put us out of business.”

Many students weren’t convinced—if they were even aware of what was going on. Vitolo and fellow co-director Erica Basco were the first to inform the student body of the clinic’s closing. “It wasn’t until all of us on campus bombarded the president and other administrators with emails that they started talking to us,” says Melanie Mac Caskie, a student activist and taskforce member. “We never got any statement of support from anyone publicly.”

This lack of communication dovetails with concerns over Purchase’s status, and identity, as a safe space for female-bodied people. “When people talk about the progressiveness of our campus, that’s not exactly true,” says Gabriella Ibacache, a sophomore studying sociology and gender studies and co-president of Feminists Organizing Real Transformation Here (FORTH). “When I think about the group of activists there are and feminists there are, I think the environment is great, but it’s not, because sexual assault is still a huge problem.” Before FORTH was founded last year, the alt clinic was Purchase’s “closest thing to a specifically feminist space.”

In a confusing twist, the Purchase administration doesn’t necessarily support the clinic any less than students do. “The alternative clinic really has come to represent the unique nature of the Purchase College student body,” says Jason Alt, the amiable director of the Office of Student Life and Community Partnerships. “When the liability issues came up, I can assure you that the administration wasn’t just saying, let’s get rid of it.” Instead, Alt claims, shutting down the clinic’s services, and re-envisioning its institutional mission, is a realistic and proactive choice.

When I spoke with Suzanne Kessler, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Vice Provost, gender studies scholar, and women’s lib vet, she pulled out a flyer for a “Forum on Health Care Needs” from 1982, convened by the alt clinic and women’s health advocates in the region and attended by state senators and medical professionals. Admission: $5. Lunch: $3. By now, says Kessler, “women’s safety, women’s rights—it’s all pretty much a no-brainer.” Kessler feels bad about what’s happening to the alt clinic—“for sentimental reasons”—but remains confident that “the students involved keep the advocacy piece of it around women’s health.”

HOW COULD the grassroots and grasstops alike be so easily bulldozed?

The alt clinic’s shutdown is the offspring of a broader movement to make universities run more like corporations—patriarchy dressed in genderless neoliberal garb. Christopher Newfield, an English professor at UC Santa Barbara and author of the popular “Remaking the University” blog, wrote in an email that under neoliberal restructuring, “financial factors come to drive every service decision, and can dominate health outcome objectives as easily as they have been dominating educational goals. In the latter case, budget control can keep educational goals from being articulated in the first place.” There lies the structural violence behind the war on women’s health.

At Purchase, the battle is over which standards to prioritize in austere times. Purchase College’s “Strategic Plan, 2010-2015” advocates “allocat[ing] resources to priority areas as effectively as possible in an uncertain financial landscape” and “streamlining and clarifying administrative policies.” The AAAHC judges institutions according to uncontroversial standards like the rights of patients, quality of care, and facilities, all in the name of ensuring “the highest achievable level of care for recipients in the most efficient and economically sound manner.”

The problem is that proponents of “streamlining” and “economic soundness” tend to reject, by default, a positive commitment to bodily autonomy for female-bodied people. This commitment can be, and has been, articulated as its own set of standards. A 1993 conference run by the Jacobs Institute of Women’s Health, for example, declared these core principles: (1) mutual respect between women and health professionals, (2) comprehensive care with a focus on prevention and wellness, (3) a multidisciplinary team approach crossing the boundaries of body systems and medical specialties, (4) education as an integral part of women’s health, and (5) quality control based on clinical outcomes and professional standards.

This war between standards is carried out on a decidedly slanted playing field. Movement forces don’t have the capital leverage of hospital systems and health maintenance organizations—for-profit or not. The issue isn’t that Rupert Murdoch or Charlie Koch owns all these mega-providers, but that they run on a neoliberal logic that deprioritizes feminist and queer standards of care. This puts women’s clinics, especially those that are not part of a larger hospital system, into a difficult position.

Autonomy makes a difference. In Women’s Health Care: Activist Institutions and Institutional Change, Carol Weisman reports that women’s clinics not sponsored by hospitals are more likely than hospital-sponsored centers to be committed to gender balance among doctors on staff (56 versus 37 percent) as well as to feminist ideology (43 versus 14 percent). But competition with large providers makes the benefits of autonomy hard to sustain. Since the explosion of “managed care” under the aegis of HMOs in the early 1990s, women’s health centers have confronted a range of challenges in procuring contracts, in some cases because of operational issues (like having to rewrite medical protocols), in others because managed care standards put centers’ missions at risk (reducing visit times and patient communication, establishing credentialing roadblocks for non-MD staff like nurse practitioners). Among women’s health centers, the for-profit ones are more likely to get these contracts, but less likely to serve underprivileged women, provide educational services for their clients, or involve surrounding communities in center governance.

THE AFFORDABLE Care Act represents hard-fought gains for women’s health. Health plans must now cover certain preventive services and screenings, and obstetrical and gynecological care no longer require prior approval. But the fight against sexism in service delivery, perverse financial incentives among doctors, and the Act’s wanton discrimination against immigrants continues.

Similarly, the movement undergirding the alt clinic’s existence lives on, even without an autonomous space for service provision. The clinic’s services will likely be transferred to Purchase’s newly rehabbed student health facilities sometime after this year, at which point the clinic’s leaders will help select a new nurse practitioner. Meanwhile, the clinic’s interns will ramp up campus outreach, giving presentations on different women’s health issues, hosting political candidates for panels on reproductive rights, running “STI jeopardy,” and more.

The post-shutdown taskforce spreads its tentacles as far as Albany—when the SUNY central administration picks up the phone—and among potential allies in the gender studies faculty and student body. It works in collaboration with alt clinic leadership so that the push to restore what there is to be restored from the clinic doesn’t fall solely on the co-directors. “A lot of it is not letting it go,” Mac Caskie says, “not getting to the end of the school year and leaving it to the administration and student leadership.”

Though the uniqueness of the clinic within the SUNY system has been a bargaining handicap for its advocates, it doubles as a charge to organize at dozens of other campuses across the state. “We’ve gotten a lot more interest now that we’ve been shut down,” Vitolo says. “Now we have an opportunity to reach out to other students on campus and at other schools. Sometimes an artist doesn’t get famous until they die.”

James Cersonsky, YC ’11, is a contributing writer for Broad Recognition. He is a writer and activist based in Philadelphia. His writing has appeared at the Nation, AlterNet, Dissent, and elsewhere. Contact him at cersonsky@aya.yale.edu or follow him on Twitter @cersonsky.

The text of this article first appeared in Dissent Magazine (May 4, 2012) and is reprinted with permission.

May 6, 2012

In May, the LAPD will open a separate module of its downtown jail for women designated to cage transgender arrestees. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Captain Dave Lindsay heralded ...]]> By Alexandra Brodsky

May 6, 2012

In May, the LAPD will open a separate module of its downtown jail for women designated to cage transgender arrestees. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Captain Dave Lindsay heralded the upcoming opening as a progressive milestone, shaping the new jail as “an environment that’s safe and secure, as there’s been a history of violence against transgender people.” It’s hard to see, though, why Lindsay thinks segregating a population that has long suffered the worst of American prison violence is a solution to this problem.

Without a doubt, imprisoned trans people—both transgender and transsexual, though the LAPD does not differentiate between the two—face unconscionable abuse, particularly when placed in a population contrary to their gender identification. Yet the National Transgender Discrimination Survey Report indicates that trans people in jail are more likely to be harassed by a guard than a fellow inmate. The LAPD itself acknowledges that correctional personnel have mistreated trans people, but has decided that moving the arrestees—as though they were in part to blame—and providing prison guards with basic sensitivity training will rid jails of this problem. The idea that a workshop that “instructs officers to treat transgender individuals with respect and courtesy” will somehow combat the guards’ well-documented violence, however, is suspect. Some trans-rights groups have applauded the reforms, but the formal changes seem insufficient to create true, lived change.

Further, this isolation serves not to open up ideas of gender in the prison space but to reify the categories of “masculine” “feminine,” and “other.” Those who do not fit the strict binary must be clumped together, allowing for no nuance of experience or self-identification; whatever Lindsay’s claim to sensitivity, grouping all trans people together entirely ignores their own claims to specific or fluid gender identities. By segregating trans people from individuals of the same identification, the LA correctional system obviously rejects the right to self-determination of gender and establishes who is a “natural” or “normal” man or woman—and who is not. Such strict definitions of gender categories pose harm to trans people but also to those who will remain in the “standard” jails but may deviate in some way from their expected category, including queer people, butch women, effeminate men, etc.

Perhaps this should be unsurprising: The prison-industrial complex has long used the enforcement of gender as an oppressive, “correctional” method. In her essay “Public Imprisonment and Private Violence,” Angela Davis writes of “the feminization of public punishment… explicitly designed to reform white women.” She recounts the structure of the first American prison designed for women, opened in Indiana in 1853, which sought to reprogram its prisoners as docile, feminine women by training them in traditional “womanly” tasks like cooking and sewing. This tactic reemerged explicitly in the development of plans for “gender-responsive” prisons, most controversially in California, where prison conditions were recently found “cruel and unusual” by the US Supreme Court. These “gender-responsive” prisons seek to create environments tailored for women, but in doing so enforce a specific idea of womanhood (scoop neck shirts, sewing classes); in their tremendous report for the U.S. Department of Justice, “gender-responsive” prison advocates Drs. Barbara Bloom, Barbara Owen, and Stephanie Convington devote an entire section to “Acknowledging Gender: Differences Between Women and Men.” Certainly, women do experience obstacles specific to their sex or gender: the challenges of menstruating and giving birth in prison are not universal. But there is no need to codify binaries while responding to specific needs, and we can recognize the role sex and gender play in lived experience in prison without essentializing this divide as indicative of the absolute “differences between women and men.” California’s experimentation with gender-responsiveness and creation of separate jails for trans people indicate the same drive to enforce rigid gender categories.

Ultimately, the fact that officials feel that people who deviate from traditional conceptions of gender and sex cannot be safe in the general jailed population is an indication not that trans people need to be relocated to other detention facilities to be “safe and secure,” but that imprisonment itself is a violent, unsafe, unsecure response to crime in America. Trans people face discrimination outside of prison as well, but incarceration serves to conceal the abuse behind the prison walls and let such violence proceed unchecked. On the same note, without minimizing the targeting of trans people in prison by abusers (particularly guards), we can also recognize that all imprisoned people suffer physical and emotional violence, particularly sexualized violence. But this violence, as well, is hidden from the public, just as mass incarceration is itself hidden from most of the American people. LA’s plan to segregate trans people only serves to obscure the fundamentally violent nature of the prison-industrial complex.

In dong so, such a plan also encourages the growth of America’s already massive prison system. The LAPD only plans to open up an addition 24 hold cells, but if this trend catches on, proposals for new prisons would likely be styled as progressive developments, as were plans for new gender-responsive prisons in California. Such plans, despite their claims to compassion, lead to the imprisonment of more people. As Rose Braz, in her position as the director of national prison abolitionist non-profit Critical Resistance, wrote in an article for Women, Girls and Criminal Justice in 2006: “History teaches us better than anything else: If we build them, we will fill them.”

A truly “gender-responsive” approach to crime—and by “gender-responsive” I don’t mean responsive to specific ideas of masculinity and femininity, but to individuals’ lived experiences through their gender identities—could not be built upon coercion and abuse. The acknowledgment that the gender identities of the imprisoned matter is an acknowledgment that the United States attempts to address crime by locking up people, people who have their own preferences, self-conceptions, and desires. Davis’ abolitionist perspective is driven in part by Foucault’s observation that prison reform serves to normalize incarceration and restrict our ability to imagine other responses to crime. There are options beyond slight alterations to methods of imprisonment. Braz stresses the importance of looking outside the prison system for community-based approaches to crime, such as New Way of Life in Los Angeles. We as prison abolitionists have a long way to go in developing scalable transformative justice mechanisms, but existing community programs, like New Way of Life or accountability organization Support NY, show the power of inclusive discussion, treatment of addiction over criminalization, family cohesion, and working to build from conflict, rather than furthering harm. Only by developing and embracing rehabilitative, transformative programs can the American justice system aspire to be anything more than, as Braz puts it, “kinder, gentler… cages.”

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

April 29, 2012

It seems like the ghost of Fiona Apple has been haunting the music world for some time now. Since her sudden disappearance from the pop scene seven years ago, her name has resurfaced across album ...]]> BY ISABEL ORTIZ

April 29, 2012

It seems like the ghost of Fiona Apple has been haunting the music world for some time now. Since her sudden disappearance from the pop scene seven years ago, her name has resurfaced across album reviews and YouTube comments alike, popping up as a descriptor for Lana del Rey’s raspy voice, Regina Spektor’s jazzy piano ballads, and even Claire Boucher’s sullen waifishness. In a decade that brought about a slew of angst-ridden, husky-voiced female musicians, it speaks to her unique magnetism that Apple has emerged as the prototypical ’90s woman. Maybe it was her age (she was only seventeen when her demo tape caught the ear of Sony Music exec Andy Slater), or maybe it was her persuasive rendering of those cheap Lurex crop tops and knit skirts in the aesthetically prescient “Criminal” video (American Apparel, Terry Richardson and the rest of fashion’s current school of lo-fi ’90s sexy should cut her a check), but for some reason Apple has remained in our collective consciousness as music’s most convincing embodiment of the plight of disparate youth.

It’s important to note that, viewed on its own, Apple’s music has done little to impact the pop trends that followed. Today, her brand of jazzy piano pop has been relegated to Starbucks music at best, and her vision pales in comparison to that of her ’80s counterparts Kate Bush and the Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser, whose embrace of synth and electronica has been much more influential in the blossoming electro-pop renaissance of the 2000s. And yet, her vague imprint on so many contemporary acts that bear no musical resemblance to her (e.g. Lana del Rey and Claire Boucher) shows that Fiona Apple is bigger than her sound.

Her performance last month at SXSW after a seven-year absence was the perfect example of the way in which the power of the Fiona Apple mystique subsumes and surmounts the music itself. The explosive impact of her comeback was unmarred by the fact that her drummer was kind of shitty and that she sang while banging on a twisted metal pipe whose feeble clinks and clanks must have sounded hilariously primitive alongside the dark synchronicity of Sharon von Etten and the ecstatic electronica of Dan Deacon, who both played just before her in the SXSW line-up. But as detached as she seemed from today’s musical currents, videos of her nonetheless powerful performance made it clear that Apple was harnessing a completely different type of electricity.

“Ghostly”, “nymph-like”, and “sylphic” are all adjectives that have followed Apple around for far too long now, but these alone don’t do justice to how her performances pulse, vibrate and throb in a way that’s as much holographic as it is ferocious. While the suddenness of her reappearance and the oddity of her inclusion in SXSW’s alt-pop line-up made her seem like an apparition bound to disappear at any moment, her voice wrapped itself around every syllable with the same intensity with which she curled her vise-like fingers around the mike, consistently re-asserting her existence, her relevance, her impact on a shifting public.

But then again, the mere existence of Fiona Apple has always seemed like a glitch, a strange mix-up in the code. Her 1997 MTV Video Music Awards acceptance speech remains a downright weird moment. Watching her walk up to the stage in a daze, grimace at the hunk of bronze in her hands, quote Maya Angelou and proclaim, “This world is bullshit,” it’s easy to understand why a generation of sullen teenage girls responded to this jolt, hanging on her every word even when we couldn’t understand exactly what she was trying to say. As the garbled spokeswoman for confused and angry teenagers everywhere, Fiona Apple seemed to get “it” even when we couldn’t all agree on what “it” was—whenever her sentences trailed off with “you know?” we nodded “yes, of course we do”; when her message was vague, we filled in the blanks; when her album titles were long and nonsensical, we chalked it up to brilliance and threw withering Fiona Apple-worthy stares at anyone who dared call them pretentious.

It’s this fundamental weirdness of the Fiona Apple persona that pervades the continuous disconnect between her eternally muddled message and her increasingly ferocious delivery. Despite the appeal of her potent voice and her tough exterior, it is her confusion, her messiness, the fact that she is just as vulnerable and fragile as we are that continually draws us to her. We have never known (and will never know) a Fiona Apple who has it all figured out; for all of her power, it’s important that at the core of her image she remain fundamentally lost, strung out, seventeen. The problem, then, is that the stronger and more persuasive she becomes as a musician, the more I wonder of what she is trying to persuade us. How might the adolescent listlessness on which she built her career remain relevant to her now grown-up fanbase, and where can she go from here?

Apple’s delicate balance between strength and intimate vulnerability was what originally set her apart from the more grown-up, self-confident counterparts of her time. In 1997, Apple entered a community of successful female musicians who had spent the decade experimenting with different expressions of strength through music. The ensuing array of emerging musical feminisms ranged from the Indigo Girls’ gently political lesbian folk, to Tracy Chapman’s musings on the challenges of adult life, to Suzanne Vega’s thoughtful homage to New York cool. Apple’s selling point, and the legacy she left behind, was her ability to celebrate and explore angst and insecurity amidst a sea of female musicians that were perhaps alienating in their cool confidence. In the late ’90s, this vulnerability was revolutionary. With Apple at the helm, the image of the female musician as attractive mess became en vogue, and the allure of her unraveling became prototypical of the empowered female musician.  For Apple, confidence no longer had to be defined by being comfortable in one’s own skin, and empowerment no longer implied self-direction; the acknowledgement of fundamental discomfort, the embrace of a loss of direction could now be deemed “confident” and “empowering” too. While the Indigo Girls’ “Power of Two” and Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” both feature women driving their boyfriends to set destinations, Fiona Apple’s “Fast as You Can” uses the analogy of a car crash to describe a tumultuous relationship reaching its breaking point.

Watching her return to the stage last month, however, I was struck by how the incandescence of her revolutionary ’90s identity appeared strangely dulled in today’s musical climate. Since she was last on the scene, Apple’s legacy of empowered disorder has become so ubiquitous that it is nearly impossible for a successful female musician to project empowerment without a corresponding dose of vulnerability. The curse of Fiona Apple’s legacy is evident in her offspring; watching Lana del Rey do Lolita impressions, Grimes wander through a high school with her headphones in the video for “Oblivion,” or Regina Spektor skip around toting a yellow boom box in “Dance Anthem of the 80’s,” it seems that female musicians crowned by critics as Apple’s inheritors have internalized the idea of exuding vulnerability at the expense of strength and, even more dangerously, of achieving this vulnerability through a state of prolonged adolescence. This wouldn’t be a problem per se if there were female counterweights in the pop world who had taken off where Tracy Chapman or Suzanne Vega left off, singing as adults about life’s harsher challenges. Unfortunately, today’s stars are continually egged on by patriarchal society to embrace their nostalgia for the perpetual angst of teenage girldom. While women are encouraged to relive their teenage years over and over again through pop role models that reinforce this arrested development, male musicians are pushed to grow up fast in order to be “taken seriously.” While Beyoncé’s “Countdown” video features her dancing around a high school gym at age thirty with her pregnancy obscured by clever costuming to help her pass as a teenage girl, Justin Bieber is currently undergoing an image makeover at age eighteen to reflect his deepening voice and budding maturity.

Despite her stunning voice and commanding presence, the Fiona Apple that reappeared before us last month bore all too strong a resemblance to the sullen teenager that spouted garbled diatribes at the MTV Video Music Awards in 1997. Throughout her set at SXSW, she paced back and forth nervously, fidgeted during songs, and often finished by collapsing onto the piano, continually emphasizing her fragility and her weakness onstage. In between songs, she echoed her MTV moment by shouting out into the crowd, “You’re imaginary, you’re all in my head” and, “You’re not real” while shielding her face from the public. Though I recognize that these kinds of stunts are a vital part of the “rawness” of her mystique, I couldn’t help wondering what would have happened if Apple had learned to grow up in the way that so many of her musical disciples have not yet been allowed to. As a role model for a generation of female musicians and fans alike, Apple’s influence on pop’s gender imaginaries and their cultural impact is indisputable. Whether or not she chooses to harness this power to emerge as a matured ingénue remains to be seen; however, in retooling her image to counter female pop’s Peter Pan syndrome, Apple now faces the challenge of correcting her complicated legacy.

If the fantastic single “Every Single Night” that she released last week is any indication, it seems Apple herself is attuned to and has already begun to tackle this challenge. With her voice wavering back and forth between the controlled vibrato of a ’40s cabaret singer and throaty, percussion-backed chanting, her lyrics document conflicting desires for “a double-king-sized bed” and “the little wings of white-flamed butterflies in her brain” that cause every night to be “a fight with [her] brain.” With music and lyrics that dialogue with her previous identity while introducing a new kind of voice, it seems Apple may be going through some growing pains. Though her path to maturation has been (and continues to be) a long and arduous one, I’m fostering a hope that the next couple months will reveal a Fiona Apple who has begun to sift through her internal tumult to create a new world for herself; a world in which “angst” doesn’t necessarily have to be “teenage.”

Isabel Ortiz is a sophomore at Yale College. She is an Associate Editor for Broad Recognition.

Dear Readers:

Beginning today, April 23nd, Broad Recognition will enter its summer publishing schedule. Rather than publishing pieces daily, we will publish one longer, analytic piece the Sunday of each week, and shorter pieces intermittently in between. Regular publishing ...]]> April 23, 2012

Dear Readers:

Beginning today, April 23nd, Broad Recognition will enter its summer publishing schedule. Rather than publishing pieces daily, we will publish one longer, analytic piece the Sunday of each week, and shorter pieces intermittently in between. Regular publishing will resume the week of September 1st. Thank you for your understanding and continued support.

Sincerely,

Emily Villano, Editor-in-Chief

April 22, 2012

Names are powerful and political. The act of naming is consistently informed by larger structures of power and hierarchy. On April 5th, Yale Pride held the event “Reclamation! Taking Back, Giving ...]]> By Andrew Wagner

April 22, 2012

Names are powerful and political. The act of naming is consistently informed by larger structures of power and hierarchy. On April 5^th, Yale Pride held the event “Reclamation! Taking Back, Giving Away, and the Future of (Queer) Language,” to discuss the difficulties of reclaiming queer language: can a word steeped in a history of oppression be transformed into something positive? Led by Professor Liz Montegary and Linguistics major Amalia Skilton ‘13, the event took on the feel of a round table discussion, with students lending personal anecdotes and describing their own experiences with queer language.

Of course, one can’t begin to discuss queer language without first talking etymology. The word “faggot,” though having a long history tracing back into the Middle Ages, was first used to refer to gay men in 1914. It tended to connote an effeminate man (similar to the word “sissy”), and its gendered sense undoubtedly remains. The etymology of the word “dyke” is far messier; even the OED simply notes that it has an “obscure origin.” In some cases it was used to mean masculine woman, in other cases lesbian woman, and in still others, woman in drag. Some think it could have been clipped from bulldyke (a form of bulldagger woman), but even this is uncertain.

The contemporary connotations of both these words remain linked to their historical origins: faggot still connotes an “effeminate” man, while dyke still connotes a “masculine” woman. Many at the discussion noted that attempts to reclaim the term “dyke” have been more successful, perhaps due to each of the word’s gendered senses. Gender policing is often more common for men who behave “femininely” than it is for women who behave “masculinely,” making the movement to reclaim “dyke” easier than one to reclaim “faggot.” Perhaps “faggot” is more of an insult than “dyke” precisely because we live in a society that still values acting “masculinely,” regardless of one’s gender, over acting “femininely.”

Can these words ever be completely “reclaimed” though? Even if we continuously use a word positively, its negative connotations still remain to some. For instance, despite the campaign to use “dyke” positively, its potential as an insult still undoubtedly exists. However, the changing connotations of the term “queer” suggest that reclamation is possible. Though “queer” was often used in the ‘50s as an insult to both homosexuals and individuals who broke gender boundaries, beginning in the ‘90s, it underwent a massive reclamation movement and garnered positive connotations. Its reclamation began with the activist organization, Queer Nation, in 1990, and it also became associated with the burgeoning discipline of queer theory. Its reclamation was tied to political and radical ideas—people tended to use queer as a rejection of heteronormativity and strict gender and sexuality boundaries.

While the exact meanings of queer are still under debate today—some using it simply as an umbrella term for LGBT individuals, some more specifically only using it with its more political sense—the word’s negative connotations seem to have diminished. None of the participants in the discussion could recall ever hearing “queer” in a negative light, and, indeed, the idea of “queer” as an insult, though it undoubtedly is occasionally used that way, seems archaic to most. However, while the word “queer” had lost its negative connotations to the participants in the group (and to me), it is important to acknowledge that our experience is not universal. Though activist and academic communities have embraced the term, the word “queer” has yet to be reclaimed in other spheres. In addition, language is unstable and constantly in flux, and the reclamation of the word “queer” can hardly be viewed as permanent. In future decades, the word could slip back into negative usage just as easily as it was positively reclaimed. The act of reclamation, then, is never complete.

The struggle to reclaim gets messier when one tries to use reclaimed words around friends who aren’t queer. Take for example the word “faggot,” which is currently undergoing the beginning stages of reclamation among select queer communities. A gay man experimenting with reclaiming the word “faggot” might use the term around his straight friends, giving them the impression that they can also refer to other gay men as “faggots.” However, can a straight man or woman use “faggot” in a positive way that doesn’t reinforce oppressive power structures? If not, is the gay community to become the “language police”? Using “faggot” outside of gay communities is both necessary for the act of reclamation and dangerous in its potential to encourage its use among those who may not be aware of its duality. This complicates the role of the reclaiming agent. As the reclaiming agent, do you tell outsiders to stop using it? Do you give them “permission”?  Does giving them “permission” truly rid the term of its oppressive character? Furthermore, can a single individual truly grant “permission” and decide who can and cannot use the word? There are no easy answers, and these remain some of the difficulties of trying to reclaim a word like “faggot.”

Some might argue that the oppressor can never use reclaimed language, and that straight people will never be able to use the word “faggot” without the sting of its prior meanings. However, given the success of the reclamation of the word “queer,” this conclusion feels too permanent. Language is always evolving, and I think that one could imagine a world in which the word “faggot” could join the term “queer” as a word that gay and straight people alike could use without its oppressive implications. It’s also important to note that a gay man using the word “faggot” doesn’t necessarily make him a reclaiming agent, and that it is still possible for members of the gay community to use “faggot” in a way that reinforces oppressive structures. This further complicates reclamation—how can one necessarily tell whether or not a queer individual is using a word in a way that reinforces oppressive structures, and who, ultimately, is to decide?

Despite the complexities of these movements, the reclamation of oppressive language is a necessary act. All these words (fag, dyke, queer, etc.) have been used in the past to put LGBT individuals “in their place,” to try and keep them from breaking the boundaries of gender and sexuality. To use these words positively is to throw one’s oppression in the face of the oppressor. It announces that we are proud as LGBT individuals, proud to challenge societal conventions of sexuality and gender. To reclaim is ultimately a political act, and to not allow these words to be insults, to not allow them to make us feel shame, is a powerful move.

April 21, 2012

On April 27th, 2010, the Ying Yang Twins were paid to perform at Spring Fling. At the time, I was on the Board of Directors of the Yale Women’s Center. I spent the great majority ...]]> By Kathleen Powers

April 21, 2012

On April 27th, 2010, the Ying Yang Twins were paid to perform at Spring Fling. At the time, I was on the Board of Directors of the Yale Women’s Center. I spent the great majority of that week bristling at the Spring Fling Committee’s decision to invite them, engaging in desperate, impassioned stabs at activism, writing an incendiary opinion piece, and slowly, bitterly arriving at the realization that the Ying Yang Twins, those beloved identical spouts of rapist rallying tunes would perform at my school.

It was infuriating to realize that when music with lyrics like “You screamin’ you cant take it no more. Beat the pussy so bad we done fell on the flo” would resound across our campus, it would be authorized to do so; that to some extent lyrics like “Fuck you til’ you cry” were desired. The Spring Fling Committee purchased their presence. Or more accurately, we did (classes of 2012 and 2011). Fueled by the dues we all pay to the Yale College Student Activities Fund, with Yalies blithely carousing before them, the Ying Yang Twins unloaded their hateful speech on Yale’s Old Campus as Spring Fling headliners.

In the days before the Twins’ arrival, I became powerfully aware of my own impotence: there was very little that I could do to prevent the Twins and their euphoric, carnivalesque brand of patriarchy from coming to Yale, short of physically barring them entry, which would have been a comedic occasion for all parties involved. (Hint: I would have lost that game). Thus, effluvia poured forth from within the gates of our home turf, from the places in which we profess to learn.

After a brief reconnoiter mission in Google, one can excavate the Spring Fling 2010 website from the annals of the internet. The text reads:

“Hailing from the dirty dirty, the Ying Yang Twins have been tearing it up in ATL for the last ten years, and are now burning through New Haven to leave their mark on Old Campus…”

To leave their mark on Old Campus—such a line disturbs in the uncanny portent it holds.  But 6 months after the Ying Yang Twins came and left our school a second misogynistic act materialized between High Street and Phelps.

On October 13th, 2010, the brothers of Delta Kappa Epsilon paraded around Old Campus. They used that well-traveled space as a receptacle for their fervent sexist discourse. By this ripe hour, we all know what these men—our classmates and friends—expressed there: “No means yes, yes means anal.” With conviction, with bravado, they recited the chant over and over again.

Now, a year and half later, T-Pain is coming to Yale’s Spring Fling. Get ready to be dazzled. Known for crooning “couple more shots you open up like a book” in that smash-hit ditty “Blame it on the Alcohol,” which the Washington City Paper included in a list of the top 5 Rape Anthems, T-Pain will sing his songs. In effect, we will pay him to marginalize members of our community. The tunes of T-Pain neutralize sexual assault.

“Blame it on the Alcohol’s” narrative is simple: from the first booming “Blame it on the goose” to the last “al al al al al alcohol” Jamie Foxx and T-Pain spin a story in which a woman, who characteristically does not consume alcohol—“Ay she say she usually don’t”—is poured drink after drink by our narrator(s): “Girl what you drinking?”  The narrator pays for the free-flowing libations for one reason, and we are made aware of it in the very first verse of the song, as in: “But you know we probably gonna do / What you been feelin deep inside.” He wants to have sex with her, a goal only achieved if she is made so inebriated that she is unable to resist. He jeers in sinister autotune, “Just one more round and you’re down I know it.” Because of the goose, citron, Patron, vodka, blue top or henny, she has begun to “feel dizzy.” He has now “got her in the zone.” He gets his reward when he gets her so drunk that in the morning, when she wakes up she’ll “think it was all a dream.” He has sex with her, and then she wakes up in the morning and doesn’t know what has happened to her.

Rape is not hard to define: it is non-consensual sexual intercourse. The scenario spewed by T-Pain and Jamie Foxx is one in which one person gets another person so intoxicated that the impaired person does not have the agency to say yes. This is rape.

Yet one more sinister aspect of the anthem “Blame it on the Alcohol” is that the narrator arbitrarily resolves that the woman must want him: “But I know that she front/ Cause shawty know what she want/ But she don’t wanna seem like she easy.” How cute! He thinks she’s just acting coy, because he knows that no matter what a woman does, no matter what a woman says, they will secretly want something else: “Don’t lie now.”

Other songs of T-Pain’s allude to a similar, inherent male entitlement to women’s bodies. According to T-Pain, women have been placed on this earth for one glorious purpose: to provide pleasure to the male population. To T-Pain every woman is defined by her relationship to men. Women have greater utility when they provide more male enjoyment. (“Take your motherfucking shirt off, hey!”). Furthermore, his lyrics relegate the female sex to an infantile status (“Back breaker, put you over my knee woo/ Put you on punishment woman and I’ll spank you”).

Good, T-Pain. Good, that’s what all Yale women want anyway. Oh, and why don’t I take my shirt off while I’m at it.

If you find that I speak derisively, then you have aptly evaluated my tone; I’m tired of writing dour, anti-Spring Fling op-eds. But lest my choleric voice cause you to dispense with what is written here, know that I write in the attempt to save something that you and I both love: Yale University.

Events like the Ying Yang Twin’s performance, DKE’s parade, and T-Pain’s impending arrival do not transpire in isolation. It is only diction that differentiates lyrics like “I’m going to fuck you til you cry” from the equally violent, equally terrorizing refrains of “No means yes, yes means anal.” These events are as protuberances—they make visible the toxic, subterranean aspects of a culture that is on the surface beneficent and smiling. These events tear us apart.

In recent months our campus has undergone a revitalizing exfoliation. Gender is oft-discussed in the YDN opinion page, Yale has created a University-Wide Committee to manage sexual assault claims, and Yale has created a position to manage Title IX complaints and policy integration; there is a trained Community and Consent Educator in each residential college, as sponsored by the Dean’s Office.

It comes as no surprise that we hear, see, use the words “sexual culture” on a daily basis. Sexual culture is the target of all this activity. It is the end of institutional action and one of the most gripping conversational topics. Everyone has an opinion about how we should (or should not) change the culture surrounding gender and sexual activity at Yale.

CULTURE—that elusive, invisible container of social action, the producer of our ethical mores, and the arbiter of what is normative behavior. The best social theorists are absconding (I see you back there, Foucault) when it comes to theorizing on that monolithic thing?concept?structure? called “culture.” The American Anthropologist Clifford Geertz parries like the others, but offers some guidance in the essay “Thick Description, Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.” Crumbs from his table:

“Though ideational, it does not exist in someone’s head, though unphysical it is not an occult entity…once human behavior is seen as symbolic action—action which, like phonation in speech, pigment in painting, line in writing or sonance in music, signifies—the question as to whether culture is patterned conduct or frame of mind, or even the two mixed together, loses sense. The thing to ask about…(a social act) is not what its ontological status is. It is the same as that of rocks on the one hand and dreams on the other—they are things of this world. The thing to ask is what their import is: what it is, ridicule or challenge, irony or anger, snobbery or pride, that in their occurrence, and through their agency is getting said.”

The last line is the most resonant: what…through their agency is getting said. According to Geertz, social events render our world legible—they make the social world into a text to be read. They are imbued with the special ability to tell us what we are.

The social event analyzed is the decision to invite T-Pain to Spring Fling.

T-Pain’s unresisted, authorized arrival is not an exception but an exemplar of the times. It reeks of futility. The decision to welcome T-Pain’s rhetoric to our campus evinces a culture in which his rhetoric is deemed acceptable. The Spring Fling Committee is importing a discourse that degrades and threatens members of our community. Yale women will to go to Spring Fling, and they will have to listen to someone disparage them.

We are just now moving again; this is a post Title IX complaint Yale. The discussion presently occurring within the administration is not mere institutional cant. Even if it progresses rheumatically, Yale is not failing us. Administrative action is the best chance we have. We’ve made strides in my years here, but if a culture of misogyny is to be dispelled from this campus, negligent decision making—exhibited by the Spring Fling Committee—must be stopped. Such decisions disregard any progress we’ve made.

Our space is not T-Pain’s to desecrate. The adjustments we’ve made are fragile, needing to be fortified. T-Pain is not going to protect what we’ve built. Will you?

Kathleen Powers is a senior at Yale College. She is a contributing writer for  Broad Recognition.

The text of this article is an extended version of an opinion column that originally appeared in The Yale Daily News (Apr. 20, 2012) and is reprinted with permission.

April 20, 2012

At least since the DKE chanting fiasco last year, if not before, the Yale Daily News and the undergraduate feminist community have had an uneasy relationship. While some of the paper’s actions—for example, the publication ...]]> By Katherine Orazem

April 20, 2012

At least since the DKE chanting fiasco last year, if not before, the Yale Daily News and the undergraduate feminist community have had an uneasy relationship. While some of the paper’s actions—for example, the publication of two anonymous testimonies of women who were raped by fellow students—have done much to further the discussion of Yale’s sexual climate, other pieces—most notably the editorial that ran immediately after the DKE incident—have been heavily censured by feminists on campus.

Most of the conflicts between the paper and Yale’s feminists have played out in the opinion section. Last term, under the editorship of Alex Klein and Andrew Squire, there were a number of fiery back-and-forth debates about Sex Week at Yale and sexual culture on campus. An op-ed panel on those issues was filmed and posted online. Klein estimated that, during his tenure, the opinion section published more on the Title IX complaint and sex at Yale than on any other set of issues.

This term, opinion editor Julia Fisher seems to have moved away from that focus on feminist issues. The few pro-woman pieces that have been published have tended to be relatively moderate in tone and in argument. More worryingly, a number of blatantly sexist pieces, including Elaina Plott’s claim that the war on women isn’t real and Elise Ransom’s indictment of the Women’s Center for eschewing her brand of (oxymoronic) “pro-life feminism”, were published without an opposing viewpoint.

Feminist writers who have tried to rectify these deficits have had difficulty getting their voices heard. Several women have been told that their columns are unlikely to be published if they are framed as direct responses to other writers. In one such case, Ellie Monahan sought to respond to Ransom’s article but was told that her piece could not run as an explicit refutation of Ransom’s argument. Deputy opinion editor Jack Newsham also suggested to Monahan that perhaps she would prefer to forgo publication of her piece to ensure that “no one can leave nasty comments on it.” He followed this comment with a smiley-face emoticon. Monahan, who says she felt the YDN was not “a safe space” for her piece, eventually chose to run it on Broad Recognition instead.

A similar scenario played out when Julia Calagiovanni sought to run a response to Plott’s op-ed. Fisher wrote in an e-mail that, while Calagiovanni could address Plott’s points implicitly, she wanted to avoid “a petty back and forth” between the two and encouraged Calagiovanni to make the piece more of a standalone argument. In the end, the article did not run, and Plott’s piece passed without rebuttal in the opinion pages.

The YDN has also suggested to some feminist writers that their views are too familiar to be worthy of publication. For example, when two of the directors of Sex Week sought to contribute a piece to the SWAY controversy, they were told that their arguments added little that was new to the discussion and were encouraged to make their article more confrontational. Calagiovanni was also given a similar rationale for Fisher’s objections to her piece; in an e-mail, Fisher wrote that an argument supporting the notion that congressional Republicans are indeed targeting women “rehashes the same points we’ve seen time and again.”

Taken collectively, these cases show the YDN moving away representing the views of campus feminists—a particularly worrisome development considering the YDN’s influence on how Yale is perceived both within our community and among the general public. As Connie Cho, one of the authors of the SWAY column, says, “The YDN has an enormous ethical responsibility as gatekeepers of information and how it is reproduced within the student body.” The News is undoubtedly the most widely read campus publication, and one of the only ones likely to be seen by those outside the university. If a segment of the student population cannot make itself heard in the News, those outside Yale—including prospective students—are unlikely to know that it exists. As such, the paper’s opinion section should take seriously its responsibility to accurately represent the diversity of student viewpoints on a given issue.

For her part, Fisher agrees that the YDN has a duty to offer “a daily portrait of public opinion at Yale.” She says the decision not to run columns in direct response to other pieces is a broader shift in editorial policy, and has never been intended to silence any particular interest group on campus. Direct responses, Fisher says, are unpopular with readers—they “cut people out of the conversation” if they’ve missed original article. Rather than running such responses as columns in their own right, Fisher prefers to publish them as letters to the editor. In fact, there have in fact been a few such letters articulating feminist objections some opinion pieces, such as Sam Huber’s response to Julia Pucci’s column “Why women don’t write” and Bassel Habbab’s critique of Plott’s piece. Fisher also defends her choice to focus on opinions that are more unfamiliar to readers rather than those arguments many may already haven seen elsewhere. Some submissions, she says, merely repeat “the same thing that has been said again and again” and so add little to the campus conversation.

But while Fisher’s editorial changes are intended to satisfy more readers and advance substantive debate, they seem to have resulted in fewer opportunities for feminists to respond in kind to columns with which they disagree. These changes represent a significant shift in the organization of the YDN opinion section. Last year, the publication of pieces that responded directly to previous columns was common; Klein, one of last year’s editors, says his goal was to “provide a sounding board for the most controversial, divisive issues on campus” and to “get the right mix of voices.” Without publishing direct responses, achieving that mix seems to be more difficult—the fact is, people are more likely to take the time to write a piece that rebuts an argument they abhor than one that advances their own views without provocation from an opponent. To refuse to publish retorts to controversial opinions like Plott’s and Ransom’s, either because they constitute a “petty back and forth” or because feminist views have gotten a decent amount of campus coverage in the past year, seems misguided. As Habbab (who wrote a letter to the editor in response to Plott) says, “I don’t think feminists should be faulted because their arguments aren’t entertaining or novel enough to satisfy the YDN op-ed gods.”

Still, if we as feminists are unhappy with the YDN’s coverage of our platform, it seems only fair to lay at least a healthy portion of the blame at our own doorstep. Fisher says that, as the Title IX has faded from the spotlight, she has received far fewer pitches for pieces on feminist issues, a deficit she has struggled to rectify. Perhaps feminists have eschewed writing for the YDN because of some of its past sins; perhaps we’ve simply stopped writing as much about our issues altogether. Whatever the results of the News’ editorial policies, it seems we have fallen silent more than we are being silenced. Going forward, we would do well to remember that representation in the pages of the YDN is crucial to our visibility outside of Yale. We need to work harder to articulate positive expressions of our positions, instead of merely reacting to others whose views we oppose. While maintaining a public presence on a campus often hostile to feminist stances may be a challenge, it is one we cannot take lightly if we want women considering Yale to know that they do, in fact, have a home here.

Katherine Orazem is a senior in Yale College. She is a contributing writer for Broad Recognition.

April 17, 2012

On March 16, Dahrun Ravi, an ex-student of Rutgers University, was found guilty on charges of invasion of privacy, evidence tampering, and bias intimidation in relation to the death of his roommate, Tyler Clementi. ...]]> By Chamonix Adams Porter

April 17, 2012

On March 16, Dahrun Ravi, an ex-student of Rutgers University, was found guilty on charges of invasion of privacy, evidence tampering, and bias intimidation in relation to the death of his roommate, Tyler Clementi. Last year, Clementi, who was gay, threw himself off of the George Washington Bridge after Ravi used a webcam to view him having an “intimate encounter” with another man.

Tyler Clementi was in many ways the face of the rash of gay teen suicides that broke out last year. His death spurred the It Gets Better Project, and helped to shape the passage of the “Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights” in New Jersey. Clementi’s name again made headlines when, in 2011, gay teenager Jamey Rodemeyer committed suicide just days before the first anniversary of Clementi’s death.

According to an investigative New Yorker piece, much of this attention has been spurred by worrying misinformation. It noted, “It became widely understood that a closeted student at Rutgers had committed suicide after video of him having sex with a man was secretly shot and posted online. In fact, there was no posting, no observed sex, and no closet.”

The case, it transpires, is much more complicated. According to the New Yorker article, before he met Clementi, extensive online searching revealed to Ravi that Clementi was gay. Ravi wrote to a friend online, saying ““FUCK MY LIFE / He’s gay.” He also tweeted (to 150 followers, although anyone could have read the tweets) a link to a gay forum on which Clementi had posted along with the comment “Found out my roommate is gay.”

The article goes on to state, though, that Ravi seemed relatively unperturbed by or unfocused on Clementi’s sexuality. He soon moved on from the topic and wrote online to his friends about Clementi’s class and social status. The two met a few weeks later, and barely spoke although they shared a miniscule bedroom.  It came as a surprise to Ravi, then, when Clementi asked him to let him use the bedroom for a meeting with an older man who was not a student at Rutgers.

Ravi agreed, but expressed concern to a female friend who lived across the hall. He allegedly stated “It’s a really old-looking guy, like, What the heck, what’s going on?”. Ravi used iChat from a friend’s computer to connect with his laptop—which remained in his bedroom—and use its built-in videocamera. From across the hallway, he and the friend watched as Clementi and his guest kissed. About three minutes later, Ravi tweeted “Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly’s room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.”While he was with the man, Clementi noticed a green light on Ravi’s webcam, which prompted him to check Ravi’s Twitter the next day. It was there that he saw Ravi’s tweet. He talked about it at length to a friend from home, but said that he was not too worried, noting “its not like he left the cam on or recorded or anything / he just like took a five sec peep lol.”

His friend encouraged him to look up Rutgers’s policy on spying, although she expressed confusion as Clementi eagerly read about it as he had told her just minutes before that he had not felt violated. Later that night, Clementi asked for advice on a gay men’s forum, as well as Yahoo Answers. In both spaces, he expressed concern that the best that could happen would be that he would be given a new roommate, and he was worried that he might get a worse one.

Two days later, Clementi again invited the older man to his room. He asked Ravi if he could use the room until midnight. Ravi again agreed, and tweeted “Anyone with iChat, I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes, it’s happening again.” Ravi later texted a friend saying, “people are having a viewing party.” Clementi read the tweet before the man arrived, and went to see a resident adviser, to whom he explained his situation. The RA took him seriously and asked for him to email him about the event. After staying in his room with the man until 11:48, Clementi formally emailed the RA, explaining the situation and stating “I feel that my privacy has been violated and I am extremely uncomfortable sharing a room with someone who would act in this wildly inappropriate manner.”

The next day, Clementi, behaving normally, went to violin rehearsal and talked on the phone to his mother. The RA visited Ravi, who seemed upset at the allegations. Clementi returned to the room briefly, but soon left and travelled towards the George Washington Bridge.

While Clementi was en route, Ravi sent him a text message stating that the filming had been an accidental coincidence. Ten minutes later, he sent another, reading “I’ve known you were gay and I have no problem with it. In fact one of my closest friends is gay and he and I have a very open relationship. I just suspected you were shy about it, which is why I never broached the topic. I don’t want your freshman year to be ruined because of a petty misunderstanding, it’s adding to my guilt. You have a right to move if you wish but I don’t want you to feel pressured to without fully understanding the situation.”

It is unknown if Clementi ever read that final text. He jumped off the George Washington Bridge. Soon after, police contacted his parents after finding his phone and wallet. As police arrived at the room, Ravi deleted the original tweet about watching Clementi and edited the others so that they implied he was not videoing Clementi.

The police questioned Ravi and his female friend. She revealed everything, but he maintained that the call had been an accident. The two—and the police—quickly realized the discrepancy in the stories. As court proceedings began, the friend bargained with the court, plead guilty, and got off with 300 hours of community service, testimony against Ravi, and no time in prison. Ravi turned down similar offers, which would have absolved him of jail time because, his lawyer stated, “Simple answer, simple principle of law, simple principle of life: he’s innocent.”

The court, though, did not agree, and convicted Ravi of the crimes with which he was charged. He is now subject to up to ten years in prison. ABC News reports that it is “very likely” that he will be deported to India after he leaves prison.  Responses to this have deeply troubled queer imaginings of hate crimes (the “bias intimidation” in Ravi’s charges).

An Op-Ed in the New York Times holds that it can be dangerous to apply hate crimes laws—intended for violent crimes against individuals motivated by racism, homophobia, and other prejudices—with bullying, which, although certainly a problem, is also an issue of children that should not be connected with the criminal justice system to such a great extent.

An article in The Moral Liberal points out that poorly written laws that classify harassment in higher education as hate crimes can have the potential to be misapplied and could be used to prosecute students for petty actions.

An NPR article failed to reach any consensus on the true definition of a hate crime, and even fewer on the Ravi verdict. Callers expressed concern about everything from freedom of speech to the political value of public admiration.

Edge Boston, an online gay publication, noted that queer people have provided “surprising” criticism of the ways in which the case has been handled. The article notes the problems of speedy jury processes with shoddy testimonies. That queer people are involved in critiques of the criminal punishment system, though, is neither new nor surprising. Queer people, along with other subjected groups such as people of color and trans people, are disproportionately policed and involved in criminalized activities outside of prison, and experience particularly inhumane treatment while incarcerated. This has led to a strengthening queer prison abolition movement. Queer criticism is not surprising because, as trans scholar-activist Dean Spade wrote in his book Normal Life, “Criminal punishment cannot be the method we use to stop transphobia when the criminal punishment system is the most significant perpetrator of violence against trans people.”

In addition to the problems that pursing hate crimes poses to the case itself and as a strategy for queer movements at large, commentators have noted that hate crime legislation is an easy way for a homophobic state and society to absolve itself of blame for tragic losses. An article on Slate explains, “the impulse to paint Ravi as some kind of unprecedented, hate-driven monster is a cop-out, considering that his brand of homophobic posturing is pervasive in our culture. Exiling him to prison won’t absolve us of our complicity in that fact, and it won’t heal the lack of empathy that Parker mentions.”

Only with much larger structural changes will cultures of hostility and hatred, particularly surrounding queer people, end. These situations are never simple, though, and to charge Ravi with hate crimes and walk away is to fail to take into account the complicated nature of Clementi’s death. Ravi behaved horribly—but many sources indicate that he did not necessarily act based on homophobia. Hate crimes laws pose a broad range of issues to victims and perpetrators alike, especially when conflated with incidents of bullying.

A Huffington Post article points out that homophobia is not an issue that affects individuals but instead a systemic, societal problem. Charging Ravi with such an extensive hate crime will not change the homophobia that queer people experience every day. As the Slate article states, “Unfortunately, we can’t lock the bully up, because the bully is in all of us.”

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