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Flowers in a Peaked Cap; Part One

A/N: Heres to attempt two at writing this author’s note… Let’s just say, I haven’t perfected the art of saving drafts. Note to self to actually find out how to make the draft before losing three solid paragraphs of rambling about the story… Sophie Points; Nil. Laptop/Internet Points; One. Welp, honestly internet and laptop have won a hell of a lot more than that. Just don’t remember how many times I’ve lost work because of not quite understanding how to post on here…. Safe to say I’m still a noob. 

Any hoot! Enough rambling about that stuff. 

After posting the first piece to this story; in the very very early hours of this morning. I couldn’t help but feel the massive urge to continue and work on the more of Tillie’s little adventure. It made me want to think about her as a person outside the relatives that we already know. What this girl’s goals are and ambitions. Unlike the rest of her family, I think she has a relatable amount of vulnerability and anxieties that are more from society’s working in the 1920s compared to her brothers; Arthur, Thomas and John that all suffer war-related mental illness and scars.   

Actively she’s a romantic escapist that wants to make her brothers and aunt proud. Making a name for herself in the means of writing and exploring the tales that are brewed from the memories of old days. 

In the progression of this story, I want to be able to explore the growth in Tillie as a young woman. The stepping out of her brothers’ shadows and coming into her own. Growing into a more confident young woman that could be from meeting new people like in this chapter and moving away from her fears. 

I do see romance in this story, something like and full of all the trend first experience one faces at one stage or another. In terms of smut, I’d think it’s lighter and would be something that is worked towards. Tillie to me doesn’t seem rather lust-driven. So, it’ll happen if it does, and if not; its simply because Tillie Shelby isn’t interested in that sort of thing. 

Important note; I’ll be working on organising the Taglist a little more throughout my next few posts. Please notify me if you’re interested in anything specifically and want tags there or if you mind just being on the general tag list and included in every story I post. Thank you!!!  

Requested By; @csigeoblue​

Parts; [ Prologue ] 

Taglist; @zodiyack​, @itsfrancisneptun​, @amys-small-world​, @fandom-fucking-shit​, @hesagod-notyet​, @hinagiku0​, @dylanlover24​, @amirahiddleston​, @a-dorky-book-keeper​, @theamuz​, @csigeoblue​, @smallheathgangsters​, @beautycinders 

Word Count; 1400

Watery Lane wasn’t the play that supported the wild fantasy’s of Tillie Shelby, but the little bookshop that was filled with many hopefuls or lads that were born a little more well off collectively grouped together. Reading the stories they wrote. This gathering was apparently one that caught the attention of the paper since the known publishers and well-off lads from another book club around England had found themselves doing a sort of travel for their source material. 

Since the profile of this club of prolific writers had taken interest in the area of Small Heath and its inhabitants. Inviting upstart writers or aspiring tellers to come and meet them. So, onward the youngest Shelby strolled until she pulled open the door of the quaint little bookshop. The signal of her arrival was the sound of her kitten heels and the ringing of the bell on the door. Doe-like blue eyes that were like the crystal-clarity of the purest of water found themselves settling on a group of well-dressed gentlemen.  Her eyes flicker between some faces she knew of Small Heath, most of them being the arseholes she went to school with and thought themselves privy to a better life. 

It wasn’t that Tillie didn’t believe they weren’t welcome to it. Mostly, it was the way they treated people in order to get there the young woman didn’t quite agree with. She was rather foolish coming to her though since her brother’s had a very vision about how the Shelby family should be seen. Their measures to getting things done with it were also less than admirable. Perhaps, it was the fact that Billy Bronson, James Fitz and Joe Gilbert made hers and Finn’s school life a living hell one way or another. But, it also made it seem extremely unfair to talk to their older brothers about what happened. Since most knew better than to fuck with the kin of the Peaky Blinders. 

Plooms of cigarette smoke clouded in the air, filling the bookstore with a spiced herbal infusion and rippled tailored sticks of tobacco. Moving her gaze from the lads she knew; to the new arrivals. The youngest of the Shelby mob offered a little smile. “Is there room for one more?” Tillie finally spoke up, pulling her book that contained the novel she had poured hours and hours over. Smiling hopefully. Arms hugging the expensive leather made book that her brothers banded together in the hopes for a lovely birthday present in the days before the war. 

Hoping that she’d fill in with various things she enjoyed to draw, but instead, Tillie hadn’t touched it until she was old enough to respect things. Asking Aunt Pol to help her keep in a safe place until then. Scraps of paper were best for sketches in any case. 

Eyes ever hopeful looked at the posher sort, some seemed wary until a certain collared lad smiled and offered a little nod then the place he’d been sitting. Away from the boys that seemed to make life a little more bothersome. “Thank you,” she whispered, settling down in the seat. Resting the book down on her lap before looking to the other lads who straightened their composure.

“We were all about to introduce ourselves since we’ve never travelled outside of London for such a meeting before. Yet, it seemed like a brilliant idea when bought up. Birmingham seemed like the best place, so raw and thrilling. Small Heath alone.” Spoke finally a lad in a handsome waist-coat, the colouring of coal, stiff collar and matching suit made her think of it being something her brother; Tom would wear. Only on the best occasions, or when he was dressing-to-impress. Unlike Thomas, this lad had handsome hazel eyes, the slightest tan to his skin like he enjoyed the frolicking on the beach. His name was Walter, but everyone called him, Walt. 

“Even the presence of criminal activity and organisations like the Peaky Blinders, it does make the area a prize for writing. Wouldn’t you agree, lads,” spoke up for eccentric Norman, who took delight in the thing that only made Tillie smile in a measure of great awkwardness. The name seemed to follow her everywhere she went, and there was a measure of awkwardness for that.  “Sorry, miss, I didn’t quite mean to be so rude, it’s just you don’t seem the sort to know much on that end, too kind and pretty, huh?” Norm covered himself for any form of rudeness that could have been interpreted. 

Only causing a polite little lowering of her head, as her hands wrapped anxiously around her book’s spine. Before relaxing at the conversation drifting off elsewhere. Sobering to the notion that the following cough from Joe Gilbert had goosebumps appearing on her arms. Causing a vast amount of discomfort in the young woman. Tillie traded glances with the nicer of the Londoner’s; Robert. Whom quickly coughed to get things back on track. 

“In any case, back to the introductions. We shouldn’t dwell too long on the story topics if we’ve lacked the proper course of introduction. Shall I start?” Robert spoke up, settled against set up for the purpose of meetings. “My name is Robert Augustine, myself and these other gentlemen,” he said, gesturing to the others in the group of London lads. 

“Are from a collective of young men that wish to write and publish arts. Never before have we had a lady join us, but surely in this modern world we’d be able to welcome the bright minds of femininity amongst us. After all, lady authors are blooming into the publishing world more and more with each generation.” His words seemed to still the anxiousness within her soul at the agreement of his other companions. Looking forward to seeing a hand extended to her, Robert allowed her to stand. The mix of coarseness and softness met between the two palms meet. 

Holding her book, Tillie looked down smiling a little at her feet. Hugging her book to her chest, like it was the most precious thing to her. That was… Because it truly was the thing that held so much value to her heart. Her right hand still gently in the hold of the Londoner, cheeks lightly warming. “I’m Tillie Shelby, and I like to write about my brothers, their stories before the war. When we were kids,” she lit up sweetly talking of her brothers. Her hand and Robert’s naturally finding it parting, before he settled in his spot by the desk. Arms folding at his chest with a little smile. 

“Would you be willing to share any of those stories?” Robert asked in a light voice. Tillie could only think of one response. 

“Would I ever,” she beamed with a presence that seemed to warm the room and the quiet little shop around them. Settling down into her seat once more, she didn’t think about when the others were introducing themselves. Instead, she found herself lost within stories. The more whimsical tales of lads that laughed and partied. Or the ones that filled with a warmth that made her think of the family that suppressed or lost who they were before the war. Among them, none had known those woes and horrors. 

They’d seen things happen on the outside. Felt the absence of a brother, father, uncle or grandfather that either died or lost what kept to their memory that their younger-selves recalled. Tillie was young then. Merely a baby in some regard. But she couldn’t ever forget the days of laughter, wherein night terrors; her heroes would just come up and curl into the undersized cot she called a bed. Soothing their fingers along with the softness of infant or child hairs–that had yet to understand dryness or damage. 

When business didn’t entirely rule the Shelby family but happened in the background. Those were her tales. The tales of rawness and loss from a different scene. Where her brothers; the men who took over the role of an absent father, became; fathers, uncles, older brothers and best friends. And… Pol became the only mother she ever knew and remembered. Her voice spoke of the volumes to family values and how terrible things broke people. Yet, she never uttered their names aloud. 

Only recording them within her mind when she read the tales that meant something to one of her brothers. Art. Tom. John.

I wanted to share some (long) passages from an article I read a while back by Wairimũ Ngaruiya Njambi called "Dualisms and female bodies in representations of African female circumcision: A feminist critique" (Feminist Theory, Vol 5(3), 2004).

Njambi is an author I first encountered through her chapter on woman-woman marriages among Gĩkũyũ women in African Gender Studies: A Reader. After reading that, I looked up what else she had written, and found this article that criticizes "anti-FGM discourse." She talks about how these discourses create dualisms such as "mutilated" bodies versus "normal" bodies. These dualisms depend on the idea some bodies are simply "natural" and free from "culture" while others are not, and can be used to construct African practices as backwards and culture-bound in contrast to a liberated and objective West. The idea of a "natural" body is called into question; instead the author argues that all constructions of the "normal" body are culturally-situated, and sees bodies as "site[s] of enculturation, performance and embodiment."  

Among other things, Njambi points out double standards within Western society and institutions about what bodily modifications are considered to be "harmful" or "medically unnecessary," suggesting (I believe) that "harm" and "medical necessity" can only be evaluated from particular positionalities. (Note: I don't think this means that it's impossible to ever describe actions as "harmful," but I think it calls us to be accountable for the assumptions and standards we use in evaluating this.) This especially caught my attention because I see people invoking similar supposedly-objective notions of "harm" and "mutilation" in debates about BDSM/kink practices and gender affirmation surgeries, respectively. (For some of my thoughts on the former, see here). In both cases, I think people draw on normative ideas about how bodies are "supposed" to be and what we're "supposed" to do with them (e.g. during sex/erotic activity) that deserve to be interrogated.  

Under the cut I include several sections from the article, including the author's discussion of her own circumcision (indicated by the subtitle) and the historical context for it. I found the article really thought-provoking, and hope you all might as well.

Introduction Practices of female circumcision in Africa and other places have emerged in the past two decades or so as a highly visible arena of body politics in a globalized women’s health activism. As such, the recently evolved campaign to eradicate these practices has formed into a powerful discourse intertwining feminist politics and scientific and medical knowledge in pursuit of the common goal of protecting ‘female bodies’ from ‘harm’. Referring to such diverse and heterogeneous practices as ‘female genital mutilation’ (FGM), many of those seeking their eradication condemn them as ‘barbaric’ and as harmful to female bodies and sexuality. They are also viewed as evidence of the universal oppression of women by men and male dominated social structures.

My goal in this paper is to problematize such images using both contemporary feminist theories of bodies and my own personal narrative as a circumcised woman. My approach to this paper is expressed well by Sharon Traweek who states, ‘I am going to write some stories for you, and I will be in some of them; I want you to know how I came to learn about [them] and I want you to understand how the stories some. . . . write might be different from what you expect’ (1992: 432). Throughout the paper I employ the phrase ‘anti-FGM discourse’ to identify various perspectives and strategies, especially in the west, that have played an important role in the shaping and promotion of the eradication of female circumcision as practiced mainly by Africans. My usage of the phrase ‘anti-FGM discourse’ is not meant to imply that all those who are opposed to such practices are alike or that they can easily be collapsed under one homogeneous rubric. Some are located in the west, some in Africa, some are women, some are men, and some are feminists. They embrace various means of stating their views against female circumcision practices, even as they agree that these practices are harmful to female bodies and must be eradicated. One of my interests in this paper is how such conclusions have been arrived at. I am also aware that the phrase ‘female circumcision’, itself a western construct, is troubling because it implies that cultural practices that involve female genital modifications in Africa have no unique histories and meanings of their own, outside of what is already understood in the west to be male circumcision.

Similarly, by using the term ‘west’, or even the term ‘western feminists’ for that matter, I am not trying to imply that the view from this part of the world is monolithic by any means (Mohanty, 1991). Rather, as Mohanty puts it, ‘I am attempting to draw attention to the similar effects of various textual strategies used by writers which codify Others as non-western and hence themselves as (implicitly) Western’ (1991: 52).

I argue that much of the ‘anti-FGM discourse’, as currently formulated, overly homogenizes diverse practices, is locked in a colonial discourse that replicates the ‘civilizing’ presumptions of the past, and presents a universalized image of female bodies that relies upon particularized assumptions of what constitutes ‘naturalness’ and ‘normality’.

After introducing anti-FGM discourse, I will discuss the case of Fauziya Kasinga, who came to symbolize the female circumcision debate in the United States in the mid-1990s. Media representations of Kasinga’s story perpetuated troubling colonialist assumptions in the dichotomy of an enlightened west as refuge from the ‘backward’ and ‘barbaric’ traditions of Africa. Her case also presents a dichotomy between normal versus mutilated female bodies that structures anti-FGM discourse. From this case I critique such dichotomies via contemporary theories of bodies emerging from feminist science studies and cultural studies. In the light of these theories which promote the notion of enculturated bodies, I present a personal story of my own circumcision experience, not as a celebration of female circumcision per se, but as a means of rewriting the narrative of female circumcision in other feminist terms. What I hope my story will convey is that bodies do not exist in a vacuum; they are made and negotiated through everyday rituals and performances that can be simultaneously acceptable and problematic. The decision to avoid as well as to opt for female circumcision is both within the realm of cultural possibility. In my conclusions I suggest to feminists and other activists interested in differences, that seemingly ‘oppressed’ women have more complex stories to offer, no matter how inappropriate and awkward such stories may appear from one’s own cultural vantage point. Taking such complexities seriously could be one way out of the problematic current tendency to represent Others only as passive victims and objects of knowledge.

Introducing anti-FGM discourse To enter anti-FGM discourse in this sense is to immediately be drawn into a battlefield filled with conceptual oppositions already in place: science/superstition; medical knowledge/tradition; healthy bodies/unhealthy bodies; normal sexuality/abnormal sexuality; civilized/barbaric; modernity/backwardness; expert/non-expert; educated/ignorant – and the list goes on. In employing these dichotomies, anti-FGM discourse has emerged powerfully over the past few decades as one that rewards those who embrace its premises and punishes those who question them. For instance, a recent informal internet poll by the BBC showed that 92 percent of respondents believed that female circumcision could not be justified (BBC News, 1999). Comments on the website regarding female circumcision included comparisons of female circumcision with slavery and human sacrifice, with numerous references to the ‘barbarism’ and ‘horrific’ nature of such practices (BBC News, 1999). Dissenting opinions were dismissed and treated as if they were the defenders of Nazis and slaveholders. Needless to say, being a dissenter in this discourse is a risky proposition.

Ubiquitous in the literature on practices of female circumcision is the three-category topology of ‘sunna’, clitoridectomy, and infibulation, organized in order of perceived increasing degree of severity. These three forms are mobilized from one text to another in virtually identical form, representing what is considered to be the ‘reality’ of all practices of female circumcision on the continent of Africa. Specific practices from diverse locations are forced into one or another of these categories. And as the phrase ‘female circumcision’ loses ground on the basis that it fails to capture the horror of the mutilation involved, those who insist on employing the phrase (and not the preferred phrase ‘female genital mutilation’) risk being accused of being too uncritical of such practices.

It is this power to create oppositions between all that is considered ‘normal’, and hence desirable, and what is considered to be ‘pathological’, hence undesirable (Canguilhem, 1991), as well as the power to mobilize allies with similar views (Latour, 1987), that has enabled the anti-FGM discourse to generate its force in activist and policy settings and to be successful in making us forget about its constructedness. In this discursive setting, female circumcision becomes unquestionably harmful, where the only remaining issue to be explored is how, once and for all, to eliminate these practices. However, the centre maintained in anti-FGM discourse is subject to contradictory meanings, images and practices that carry legacies of colonial representations of ‘third world’ societies as ‘savage’ and ‘barbaric’, even while claiming to be pursuing their collective well-being – a civilizing mission if ever there was one.

These images that infuse the west’s understandings of female circumcision are not new. Some date back to early white, male travellers and explorers who reported such practices in their travel monographs and diaries. For example, one 17th-century German explorer in Africa horrified and amused his German readers as he entertained them with the following sensational story:

The girls also have their special circumcision; for when they reached their tenth or eleventh year, they insert a stick, to which they have attached ants, into their genitories, to bite away the flesh. Indeed, in order that all the more be bitten away, they sometimes add fresh ants. (in Gollaher, 2000: 190)

Such stories were rarely questioned and assumed to be true. The main task of such writers was to report on what they thought they already knew – ‘natives’ had been pre-defined as ‘savage’ and ‘barbaric’, dwelling in the ‘refused places’ described by Mudimbe (1994). As such, these explorers and travellers worked to confirm, reinforce, and even enhance the already established western images of ‘primitive’ cultures.

Later such images would become articulated within the language of colonialism as one of the reasons Africa needed to be colonized. As with other cultural practices, female circumcision would be judged as a violation of the colonizers’ notion of good Christian morals and values, and as contrary to progress, civilization, and modernity (Kratz, 1994). Recently, these same issues would reappear yet again, but with a new twist. As Kratz (1994) suggests, the practices of female circumcision now enter a new discourse of not only ‘women’s health and well-being’ (articulated within the rhetoric of western feminism), but also that of the ‘universal oppression of women’ and more specifically ‘universal male domination of women’. Even in these modern times, sensational stories continue to be told about the processes of African female circumcision. The American Medical Association (AMA), for example, claims that ‘the instruments most commonly used to perform FGM are razor blades, kitchen knives, scissors, glass, and in some regions, the teeth of the midwife’ (AMA, 1995: 1714, emphasis added). While not a single group is identified which employs such crude instruments, such statements are presented as a matter of ‘fact’ from one text to another in almost identical language.

In addition, the history of colonialism and neo-colonialism has afforded the more powerful west the right to intervene in the lives of its ‘third world’ Others; a right which is not reciprocal. And through the anti-FGM movement, the west has acquired yet another chance to gaze at African women’s genitals. After all, it has been a while now since the genitalia of a South African woman, Sarah Bartman, were sliced from her and displayed in a museum in Paris, France; part of the continuing eroticization and fascination with African women’s sexuality on the part of neocolonial European societies. Dawit (1994) notes a similar voyeurism in the making of a CNN news programme where a young Egyptian girl’s circumcised genitalia were displayed on video for ten minutes. I suggest that such sexual fascination and voyeurism continues to play an important role in the ways in which the practices of female circumcision are understood in some communities. It is such a tendency to voyeurism that prompted Walley (1997) to write that modern medical discourse may in fact be performing the dual role of using the objective ‘language of science to construct the issue as outside of “culture,’’ while simultaneously offering a sanitized way of continuing the preoccupation with genitalia and sexuality of African women’ (Walley, 1997: 423).

[....]

Seeing female bodies through the lenses of feminist science studies As Kasinga’s case suggests, the presumption of the dichotomies presented above facilitates problematic representations of female bodies in anti-FGM discourse. This discourse represents a meta-narrative on female bodies in which, as with colonial discourse, a particular perspective is universalized to stand for all. In this narrative, a ‘natural’ female body has ‘normal’ genitalia as opposed to the ‘mutilated’ ones that result from female circumcision. Female bodies are seen as corporeal or biological entities only, represented as easily separable from their cultural context. For some feminists, such as Alice Walker, such practices result in ‘a distortion of the original anatomy’ (Walker and Parmar, 1993: 19). Elsewhere, Walker invokes a popular biblical view: ‘We can tell you that the body you are born into is sacred and whole, like the earth that produced it, and there is nothing that needs to be subtracted from it’ (Walker and Parmar, 1993: 19). In an interview on Bravo (Walker, 1994), when asked whom she is representing in her mission to eradicate the practices of female circumcision, Walker responded: ‘I am not speaking for anybody. I am not speaking for Africans. The body of a woman is a universal treasure, precious. It should not be mutilated. Period!’ Fran Hosken similarly states, ‘The female genitalia that are created “perfect” are deliberately crippled and altered according to custom’ (Hosken, 1993: 32). Here the search for a normal body and normal genitalia becomes not only a medical scientific concern but a religious one as well. However, while feminists such as Walker and Hosken have been at the forefront of the FGM eradication movement, other feminists have questioned this dualism between nature and culture (body and mind). Grosz, for instance, has problematized such dualisms showing how they are directly rooted in Cartesian thinking, in which ‘the body is . . . understood in terms of organic and instrumental functioning in the natural sciences’ (Grosz, 1994: 8), and from the western Judeo-Christian’s notion of the ‘human body’, as ‘part of a natural or mundane order’ (1994: 8).

As Franklin notes, ‘debates concerning the body, embodiment, and corporeality have become increasingly central to cultural theory in the past decade’ (Franklin, 1996: 95). These debates have disrupted the view of the body as a natural, biological entity with its own physical reality separated from culture. Instead, these new studies of bodies have urged us to see the body as a site of enculturation, performance and embodiment (see for example, Butler, 1994; Franklin, 1996; Gatens, 1996; Grosz, 1994; Haraway, 1997; Terry and Urla, 1995).

For example, Gatens argues that ‘human bodies are diverse and, even anatomically speaking, the selection of a particular image of the human body will be a selection from a continuum of difference’ (Gatens, 1996: vii–viii). Furthermore, many anatomical depictions that are supposed to represent the ‘human body’, according to Gatens, can be viewed as depictions of particular groups of people or individuals and not others. She urges us to abandon the question, ‘How is the body taken up in culture?’ to a question more relevant to this study, ‘How does culture construct the body so that it is understood as a biological given?’ From these perspectives, I suggest that the assertions of a universalized ‘normal’ body in anti-FGM discourse hide the particularity of bodies as practised and imagined from particular cultural and historical standpoints.

By speaking generally about the ‘harmfulness’ of female circumcision, anti-FGM discourse problematically implies that it knows exactly how an ‘unharmed’ body looks. Gatens’ lesson is that one must learn to see the forms and functions of the body as a product of the ways in which each particular culture organizes, regulates and remakes itself, for better or for worse. According to Haraway, ‘The point is to learn to remember that we might have been otherwise, and might yet be, as a matter of embodied fact’ (1997: 39).

Other constructivist perspectives in science, technology, and medical studies have raised similar concerns regarding the representation of human bodies, pointing out how the nature/culture dualism implicit in some medical conceptions of bodies typically ignores not only how such a dualism is culturally produced and maintained, but also how each acts in the production of the other (Callon and Rabeharisoa, 1998; Latour, 1993; Mol and Law, 1998; Whatmore, 2002). Kwaak, for instance, describes two conversations that took place between herself and a Dutch friend and between herself and a Somali friend. The Dutch friend told her ‘what struck her most about the practice of infibulation was the fact that it was so unnatural’ (Kwaak, 1992: 781). This statement reflects the presumption that a normal body, a ‘natural’ body, is always uncircumcised, like hers. Kwaak also remembers a Somali female friend who said to her that it is western women who seem to behave unnaturally: ‘first, they had hair on their arms and legs; second, they did not cover their hair . . . and thirdly she showed great disbelief concerning the fact that western women still had their ugly genitalia and pubic hair’ (1992: 781). Kwaak’s point is that there is a deep chasm between what these two cultural positions view as normal and natural. However, rather than offering a critical perspective that would have been utilized to problematize the two equally exclusive accounts, Kwaak resorted to what Latour (1993) calls a ‘purification ritual’, of separating nature from culture, with those who are successful at doing so being assigned to the category ‘modern’. Conversely, those who are deemed unable to separate the two – those non-moderns who have yet to adopt the scientific worldview and remain mired in nature/culture mixing and blending – have a clouded view of the ‘natural’ since cultural values allegedly get in the way of objectivity. In the end, Kwaak concurs with her (objective) modern Dutch friend’s view, while she is ultimately baffled by the views of her (non-objective) Somali friend: ‘An educated Christian woman I knew in Somalia, [who] just had her third child . . . When I returned from a short visit to the capital, I was surprised to hear that she had been re-infibulated again’ (Kwaak, 1992: 781).

By the same token, the American Medical Association (AMA, 1995) and the World Health Organization (WHO, 1982, 1997, 1998) explain that practices of female circumcision are ‘medically unnecessary’, and thus should be eradicated. Yet while these two institutions admonish members to refrain from participating in ‘unnecessary’ African female circumcision practices, even under the clinical conditions of a hospital setting, culturally acceptable (even expected) male circumcision and elective cosmetic surgeries are not included in their directive. In many western cultural settings, for instance, a ‘normal’ penis is a circumcised penis, while breast implants have now helped define the ‘ideal’ female body. Open virtually any biology textbook (in the US) that shows human male genitalia and you are likely to see a picture of a circumcised penis. In other words, the default image of a normal penis in western contexts is a circumcised penis (see especially AMA, 2000). In fact, not only is the AMA’s (2000) depiction of the normal penis a circumcised one, but also the colour of the diagram clearly depicts the human male as being ‘white’. Meanwhile, within such contexts, the most common explanations that parents give for opting for male circumcision according to Eisenberg, Murkoff and Hathaway, ‘in addition to just “feeling it should be done,’’ include: . . . The locker room syndrome. Parents who don’t want their sons to feel different from their friends or from their father or brothers often choose circumcision’ (1989: 18). African women who claim the same thing for their daughters, on the other hand, are depicted as ignorant, genital mutilators, and in need of western education.

Recently, cases of intersexuality have presented yet another contradiction within the anti-FGM discourse. As an effort to ‘correct ambiguous genitalia’ or ‘abnormal genitals’, such cases involve ‘Cutting off part or all of a girl’s clitoris if it is considered abnormally large or aesthetically repugnant’ (Gollaher, 2000: 203). In 1997, Rolling Stone magazine published a story entitled, ‘The True Story of John/Joan’, about a male infant whose genitalia were supposedly disfigured during the circumcision procedure. One paediatric urologist from Rhode Island insisted that ‘I don’t think it’s an option for nothing to be done. . . I don’t think parents can be told, this is a normal girl, and then have to be faced with what looks like an enlarged clitoris, or a penis, every time they changed the diaper. We try to normalize the genitals to the gender or reduce psychological and functional problems later in life’ (Urology Times, 1997: 10–12).

By constructing categories of what is ‘medically necessary’ and ‘medically unnecessary’, both the AMA and WHO in the above sources assume that what is medically necessary is a universal reality that is not produced through specific cultural, political, and historical values and interest, as opposed to practices deemed unnecessary. However, we can reassess this dichotomy through feminist science studies theory that suggests that all knowledges are mediated – that there is no such thing as unmediated reality that exists ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered or to be described. The concepts of ‘situated knowledge’ and ‘embodied knowledge’ help to explain this point. According to Haraway (1991, 1997), situated knowledge is never about seeing the world ‘clearly’. It is never about mapping the world from unmarked positions. It is always about accountability, somewhereability, locatability, positioning(s), responsibility, and partiality. In this sense, embodied or situated knowledge is useful because it allows for mobility beyond fixed stations or beyond the sites of the final and only word. Haraway writes:

All that critical reflexivity, diffraction, situated knowledges, modest interventions, or strong objectivity ‘dodge’ is the double-faced, self-identical god of transcendent cultures of no culture, on the one hand, and of subjects and objects exempt from the permanent finitude of engaged interpretation, on the other. No layer of the onion of the practice that is technoscience is outside the reach of technologies of interpretation and critical inquiry about positioning and location; that is the condition of articulation, embodiment, and mortality. The technical and the political are like the abstract and concrete, the foreground and the background, the text and context, the subject and the object. (Haraway, 1997: 37)

In this sense, according to Haraway (1991), the only way to have a view/vision is to be standing from somewhere in particular. Furthermore, as Haraway continues, ‘Vision is always a question of the power to see – and perhaps of the violence implicit in our visualizing practices’ (1991: 192). Butler makes a similar point when she asks: ‘Indeed, how is it a position becomes a position, for clearly not every utterance qualifies as such? It is clearly a matter for certain authorizing power, and that clearly does not emanate from position itself’ (Butler, 1994: 160).

I argue that such feminist science studies perspectives offer useful guidance and metaphors needed to understand what is done away with when anti-FGM discourse constructs meanings of female circumcision through such a dualistic approach. They help to raise the question, what forms of violence and silencing does anti-FGM discourse introduce, replicate, and maintain? If the idea of embodied knowledge was to be applied by anti-FGM discourse, then a possibility of envisioning bodies differently might emerge, that is accountable to local specificities and variations, rather than replicating the western view of a ‘natural body’.

Telling my story of irua ria atumia The feminist idea of embodiment or culturally situated bodies provides an important means of locating and critiquing problems in anti-FGM discourse. One problem with anti-FGM discourse is its refusal to recognize differences – ignoring the diversity of female circumcision’s forms and histories. Perspectives that present bodies as ‘figures of performances’ (Butler, 1990, 1994); as sites of ‘imagination’ (Gatens, 1996); as ‘collectively distributed’ (Callon and Rabeharisoa, 1998); and as ‘a matter of embodied fact’ (Haraway, 1997), can help transform assumptions in the female circumcision debate, pushing participants to rethink the relationship between nature and culture in the representation of bodies. To re-emphasize my point, these perspectives share a common trait in their ability to redirect us away from the conventional assumption which, according to Grosz, refuses to ‘acknowledge the distinctive complexities of organic bodies, the fact that bodies construct and in turn are constructed by an interior, a psychical and a signifying view-point, a consciousness or perspective’ (1994: 8).

Taking such views seriously, I draw upon the recollection of my own personal experience as a Gĩkũyũ woman from Kenya who underwent irua ria atumia, the circumcision ritual that marks the passage to womanhood, to demonstrate how ‘normality’ regarding bodies is culturally produced. My intent in this section is not to provide yet another universal account of how female circumcision should be viewed, or even a comprehensive or ‘authentic’ view of Gĩkũyũ practices, but rather to demonstrate the situatedness of bodies in relation to such practices, all the while recalling Haraway’s point that ‘Location is also partial in the sense of being for some worlds and not others’ (1997: 37, emphasis in original). Additionally, I see myself as a post-colonial product; a hybrid; raised as a Catholic in a rural peasant family in central Kenya, now living and teaching in the US – with all ambivalences about cultural practices that such a mixture can produce. Such a story matters to me first of all because it is rendered invisible and unimportant by anti-FGM discourse.

In Gĩkũyũ, context, culture and bodies are not held separately, and they are historically tied very closely to circumcision, for both women and men. The oral history I encountered while growing up presented irua ria atumia (female circumcision) as a ritual that was appropriated by the Gĩkũyũ women, from a neighbouring ethnic group, as a way of introducing a celebration of ‘womanhood’ to a culture that only celebrated ‘manhood’. Yet this empowering image was reconfigured within Christianity. As Edgerton notes, ‘for reasons that remain obscure, the church did not object to the [Gĩkũyũ] practices of circumcising teen-aged boys, but it regarded the circumcision of adolescent girls as barbaric’ (Edgerton, 1989: 40). To me this reflects a common Judeo-Christian assumption that circumcised male bodies are normal and acceptable, and even that painful passage to manhood is desirable. On the other hand, the same tradition upholds a presumption that female bodies are innately passive and should be protected from such pain. Contrary to missionary concern, for Gĩkũyũ women, as for men, enduring pain bravely is also integral to the passage of womanhood, as Kratz (1994) observed. Additionally, given the dominant view that men transcend nature while women remain nature-associated, it is possible to suggest that irua offers a clear case in which women disrupt such a paternalistic dualism as a way of marking their entry into culture.

While the cultural significance of female circumcision has been waning in the past few decades, due mainly to church pressures, its cultural importance was still strong enough during my youth that I saw it as a necessity. It may seem ironic, given the tales of ‘flight from torture’ told in the media, but my parents refused to allow me to be circumcised, as it was against Catholic teachings. I had to threaten to run away from home and drop out of school before my parents relented and allowed me to be circumcised. The procedure was performed with a medical scalpel in a local clinic run by a woman who was a trained nurse in the western sense, and also a relative of an important Gĩkũyũ female medical healer and powerful leader of the early 20th century, Wairimũ Wa Kĩnene. During the operation, the hood of the clitoris was cut through its apex which caused the hood to split open and the clitoris to become more completely exposed. Such exposure has been associated with sexual enhancement. However, any generalization here might be unwise as it is likely that women’s experience of irua varies, perhaps significantly.

Performed in a time of many social transformations in the 1970s, my circumcision was not the communal experience it would have been in earlier decades, an event that would have tied me forever to other women and men of my ‘age-set’ (riika). However, despite shifting cultural forms, circumcision still continued to be fundamentally important in that those who were circumcised were inscribed with the status and privilege of ‘womanhood’. Usually performed on girls aged 14–16, Gĩkũyũ female circumcision, like many other forms, does not involve holding young women down so that they cannot escape their ‘torture’ from ‘mutilating villains’. Rather, it is a chance for teenage girls to demonstrate their bravery by unflinchingly accepting their moment of pain, as mentioned in some Gĩkũyũ songs.

Prior to my circumcision, my circumcised age-mates still considered me (16, at the time) a child. With their newly acquired ‘womanhood’, they wore a new ‘no nonsense’ attitude that demanded the attention of most adults around. I was not allowed to join the more serious conversations about topics such as menstrual cycles, pregnancy, and sexual fantasies. I could not talk to other adults without having to worry about the words I chose to employ, without having to worry about interrupting someone. I was required, with all the other little kids (!), to cover my ears with my hands whenever grown-ups made sexual jokes with one another that children were not allowed to hear. All the uncircumcised girls (Irĩgũ) and boys (Ihĩĩ), seen as childish and immature, were required to respect and to give up their seats when requested. In fact, the most profoundly humiliating insult that one can level at a Gĩkũyũ adult is to accuse them of acting like an ‘uncircumcised’ boy or girl. Today, however, as the importance of female circumcision declines, this insult has less power over women than it does over men, for whom circumcision remains a must.

By completing my irua, I became a Gĩkũyũ woman. And even though the concept of ‘age-set’ had been disrupted by the time of my circumcision, I entered a category whose pleasures and benefits were previously denied to me. As a 16-year-old girl, I just wanted to become a woman like many other Gĩkũyũ girls, problematically or unproblematically.

Historicizing Gĩkũyũ female and male irua (circumcision) While somewhat dislocated in the post-colonial context, the cultural coding of bodies was even more profound prior to colonialism, when circumcision formed an unambivalent focal point for group identity. Through circumcision, cultural and historical events that happened throughout Gĩkũyũ history would be recorded upon the bodies of women and men, who by virtue of being circumcised together, not only formed a tight bond (an agegrade or age-set known as riika, or mariika in the plural), but a specific name would be allocated to signify both these bonds and the particular historical event that took place during that moment. Kenyatta wrote:

The irua marks the commencement of participation in various governing groups in the tribal administration, because the real age-group begins from the day of the physical operation. The history and legends of the people are explained and remembered according to the names given to various age-groups at the time of the initiation ceremony. For example, if a devastating famine occurred at the time of the initiation, that particular irua group would be known as ‘famine’ (ng’aragu). In the same way, they have been able to record the historical moment when Europeans introduced a number of maladies such as syphilis into the country, for those initiated at the time when this disease first showed itself are called gatego, i.e., syphilis. Historical events are recorded and remembered [in the body] in the same manner. Without this custom a tribe that had no written records would not have been able to keep a record of important events and happenings in the life of the nation. (Kenyatta, 1959: 129–30)

It is not uncommon to this day to hear older Gĩkũyũ generations of women and men identify themselves with the names of their riika (age-grade). For instance, my grandmother’s riika is that of ndege (airplane), signifying the moment when airplanes were first observed in Gĩkũyũ society.

Far from maliciously torturing women, circumcision not only gave Gĩkũyũ women some access to social, political and economic power in an undeniably patriarchical society, but it also allowed them to be keepers of Gĩkũyũ history, a valuable responsibility. Furthermore, apart from their obvious gendered differences in relation to the surgical operation and cultural expectations associated with each, there was little difference in the ceremonial aspects of female and male circumcision. Both women and men were circumcised on the same day, they wore the same ceremonial clothing, they both were secluded in the forest (for educational instructions) for the same time period.

For the Gĩkũyũ, the circumcision initiation did not stand by itself, but was integrated with other social activities, such as ngwĩko, a communal sexual practice for newly circumcised women and men after the healing period. According to my grandmother (Njoki), ngwĩko itself was accompanied by a series of long dances that took place throughout the day after which, as the night approached, groups of women and men were paired and moved together into a kĩrĩrĩ (women’s hut), or a thingira (men’s hut). During this time, both women and men were expected to engage in sexual activity where both would take multiple sexual partners in a one-night session so that they might attain the ultimate sexual excitement through the process of ngwĩko (see Edgerton, 1989; Maloba, 1993; Kenyatta, 1959; Kratz, 1994; Leakey, 1977; Shaw, 1995). As Shaw points out, ngwĩko trained Gĩkũyũ women ‘to respond to a wide range of bodily sensations, and the period of socially sanctioned sexual activity allowed her time to appreciate her own body’s responses’ (1995: 79). Furthermore, sexual activity between members of the riika could take place for the rest of their lives, regardless of marital status. It might be possible here to compare ngwĩko with another practice that is performed by the Baganda people of Uganda that is referred to as okukyalira ensiko, or simply ‘visiting the Forest’. As Kilbride and Kilbride (1990) explain, soon after their menstruation and sometimes even before, young girls would be taken to a secluded place in the forest where their ‘labia minora’ would be physically massaged outward in order to elongate it:

Elongation narrows the vaginal entrance and keeps it ‘warm and tight’, an attribute highly desired by Baganda men. Ssenga [father’s sister] teaches the girl specific utterances and techniques appropriate during intercourse. Traditionally, women are taught to not only desire sex but to also lead an active sex life. A woman is expected to reach orgasm several times before the man and respond throughout intercourse with vigorous body movement. A man is evaluated by women according to the length of time coitus is maintained before his orgasm (about thirty minutes is typical). A too-rapid male ejaculation is likely to evoke female anger and comparison with, for example, a ‘hen’ (enkoko) who, of course, has rapid coitus. A second erection soon after orgasm is also expected of men. (Kilbride and Kilbride, 1990: 92)

For Christian missionaries, practices of okukyalira ensiko and ngwĩko were seen as immoral acts displaying African ‘promiscuousness’ that was an even greater affront to Christian values than female circumcision itself. As one missionary testified:

The most important rite among the Kikuyu was (and still is) that of initiation. The sign of initiation for both sexes is circumcision. . . . The physical operation is the same in all areas although the rites vary quite considerably from place to place. In every case, however, the ceremonies are accompanied by dancing and immorality. After the ceremony the initiates are allowed to wander around the countryside for several months singing and dancing. During this time they are given instruction in matters relating to the tribe, to fighting, and to sex. As we shall see later the church was compelled to denounce the immoral practice [ngwĩko], which accompanied initiation together with female circumcision as injurious to the body and degrading to the soul. On the other hand, until recent years the church has done nothing to replace the sex instruction, which was given at initiation. (Cole, 1959: 130)

To missionaries, ngwĩko epitomized the vices of fornication and promiscuity. Therefore, prohibiting both ngwĩko and female circumcision was seen as necessary in order to conquer such vices. Thus, according to Kenyatta, many women and men ‘have been punished and regarded as sinners by missionaries simply for having been found sleeping together in such a manner’ (1959: 152). In contemporary times, ngwĩko has been suppressed to the point of eradication. By the time of my own circumcision, ngwĩko was already relegated to history. Irua, on the other hand, has only been partially suppressed, despite legal prohibition and years of church activity. However, it is clear that the importance of irua is now less than it was in the past. If I were a girl growing up today, it is not clear to me whether I would have the same desire for circumcision that I had in the 1960s and 1970s.

A reflexive look at irua ria atumia My intention here is not to suggest that irua for the Gĩkũyũ is better or any less problematic than other cultural practices that mark women’s bodies in one way or another. And probably no amount of critical reflexivity will protect me here from those who, when criticized for imperialist and arrogant representations of ‘Others’, are quick to dismiss such criticism as nothing more than a mindless defence of tradition. However, far from blindly celebrating the Gĩkũyũ irua ria atumia and my experience of it, I am perfectly aware that it is never possible for any cultural practice, no matter how small, powerful, acceptable or desirable, to be non-problematic. For values and interests only exist in competition with other values and interests. Consider that, to some extent, the deployment of circumcision rituals is part of an attempt to galvanize an essential ‘Gĩkũyũ identity’ in relation to neighbouring ethnicities and later to colonial intrusions. In 2003 a contemporary Gĩkũyũ social movement called Mũngiki is engaged in what one would call a dangerous form of revivalism, even fundamentalism, of ‘Gĩkũyũ culture’ in the face of social change. Embracing female circumcision as an important component of this revival, some Mũngiki members are reported in the Kenyan media to have resorted to violence against some Gĩkũyũ women who resist this reinscription. As Edward Said makes clear in Culture and Imperialism, one danger here lies in the assumption that there is such a thing as one uncontaminated (Gĩkũyũ) ‘identity’ or ‘culture’ that exists ‘out there’ in the first place – and into which some would automatically (or forcibly) be included while others are excluded.

At the same time, to re-emphasize a question I raised earlier, in the presence of so many religious and other cultural disputes over practices of female circumcision, is it possible to say that the decision to refrain from such practices is not equally a product of specific values and interests? For example, should we say that those in my village who refrained from practices of female circumcision but who chose Christianity instead (like those who assert ‘science’ as on their side) cleverly and safely managed to escape the markings of culture? Are their bodies any less culturally marked than those whose bodies underwent practices of female circumcision? To answer ‘yes’ to these questions allies one with common fixations (feminist or otherwise) on dichotomies of bodily oppression (via circumcision) versus freedom (via eradication). I instead would like to move the dialogue to rethink this idea that bodies exist outside of cultural performativity, and to look at multiple and heterogeneous ways in which not only cultures, bodies, and sexualities emerge in contextualized entanglements, but also the kinds of negotiations and ambiguities that are involved in such processes. For instance, while circumcised women are at times invited to describe its impact on their sexuality or their ability to achieve orgasm, there is no interrogation of the constructions of ‘sexuality’ and ‘orgasm’ upon which the discussion is based.

Also, it is important to point out that all genital operations (like all other physical operations) come with the risk of infections and bleeding, and irua is not an exception to such problems. This is especially the case in places where the healing practices that once accompanied irua have been discontinued and the new healing procedures are expensive, or have not been adopted due to fear of prosecution in places where circumcision is outlawed. My question is how do we situate the potential for infections associated with female circumcision in the context of similar risks with the multitude of other body modifications practised by people worldwide? Besides those of female circumcision, consider similarities with abortion practices, which, when driven underground, routinely result in serious health problems and even death for women and girls. Yet our consistent call is for ‘safe and legal’ abortions, rather than their eradication, on the basis that women should control their own bodies. Also consider the host of legal and fashionable body modifications (in the US especially) such as tattooing, piercing, penis/clitoris slicing, tongue slicing, and cosmetic procedures (including botox injections, liposuction, breast implants, and female genital trimming) that escape the ‘mutilation’ label. How is it determined which of these practices leads to a risk that warrants the emergence of a global eradication movement? How do we discuss these issues without creating an imperialistic impression that only those with some social, political, and economic power and who live in the west have rights to take risks with their bodies?

Conclusion: listening to the Other in ways that seriously matter Hopefully, what my story conveys is that there are ways of looking at the female circumcision issue which go beyond colonialist stories of barbarity and primitivity; stories that surely leave the represented without a sense of agency. Practices of female circumcision involve negotiations, ambiguities, complexities, and contradictions that must be addressed and not dismissed, even as we problematize them. What I hope, at least partly, to accomplish is not to resolve issues once and for all but rather to promote a dialogue which I find seriously lacking or closed-off by current anti-FGM discourse which often presumes a universalized perception of embodied women. Indeed, writings from different margins, and in particular those of post-colonial feminists, such as Chandra Mohanty, Trinh Minh-ha, Gayatri Spivak, Francoise Lionnet, among others, have taught us that beyond our desire to figure out and maintain what ‘women’ have in ‘common’, the question of ‘difference’ is something that we must learn how to address. That is, even as we extend our hands for a ‘common theoretical and ethical ground from which to argue for political solidarity’ (Lionnet, 1995: 3) with other women everywhere, we must learn how to do so ‘without objectifying the “other” woman, or subsuming collective goals under the banner of sameness’ (Lionnet, 1995: 3).

Such a goal may seem difficult to attain given such entrenched images of the Other. Yet Spivak concurs that such an attempt is a must. She states: ‘however unfeasible and inefficient it may sound, I see no way to avoid insisting that there is a simultaneous other focus: not merely who am I? But who is the other woman? How am I naming her? How does she name me?’ (Spivak, 1990: 179).

In other words, women whose everyday life practices are culturally situated at the margins have given us unique insights into how they survive and negotiate structures of power, but also more importantly, how they resist such structures in the best ways they know how. In this sense, they seem to be saying to us – indeed, as my own mother once told me – ‘Please! Before you go naming me and all my troubles, just know that I also have a say in that!’ I interpret my mother’s statement as meaning that, first, she is not a passive victim, and second, if I care enough to listen, I might just learn that she too has something to say regardless of whether I perceive it as ambiguous, contradictory, or inappropriate.

Again, I am not claiming that cultures should not change, or that female circumcision practices are necessarily good or proper and that outsiders should ‘keep their hands to themselves’. Perhaps this paper is not really about female circumcision at all. Perhaps it is about the arrogance and presumptuousness on the part of those (no doubt, well meaning) social change agents who do not see/ignore/do not care about the imperialism residing in their views and actions. What might appear as defensiveness on the part of ‘third world’ voices, which seem to shout protests whenever cultural values are questioned, is better viewed as an acknowledgement of the history which has made this western gaze and interventionist stance a normal part of this ‘globalized’ world. While many of those in dominant positions would prefer to just ‘get on with it’ in terms of forgetting the past and moving on to improve the future – whether it is white views on race relations in North America or Europe or westernized attitudes towards female circumcision, or some similar issues – such words deny the importance of this history of domination, exploitation, and unequal relationships that has not been adequately and seriously addressed to allow such ‘getting on with it’ to take place.

A LOOK AT DEATH STRANDING

A Look at Death Stranding

I accepted that this game would be no Metal Gear. I accepted that Kojima wasn’t going to restrain himself and just wanted room to creatively flex as he left behind his old life and his baby Metal Gear. I bought this game solely based on my familiarity with the Kojima brand, and I gave Death Stranding the old college try.

In the not so distant future, a calamity occurs. The dead begin to flood into our world, referred to as Beached Things or BTs. Death suddenly became tangible, it could be studied. There were no fluffy clouds, no halls of fathers past, but a beach. Though the chaos continued, any recently deceased bodies that weren’t burned soon after the fact caused voidouts, massive explosions that left devastating craters along the service of the Earth. And death only came faster for anyone unfortunate enough to be caught in the rain, the rain became Timefall, downpours of water that will cause drastic aging and bring anything beneath it to ruin in a matter of seconds.

You play as Sam Bridges, a simple courier traveling around and only living for the next delivery to keep him away from people as often as possible, but Sam is quickly dragged and coerced into a journey to fix America. One bunker at a time.

The purpose of Death Stranding is to make connections, delivering cargo between residents of shelters to convince them to join the information and printing network of the United Cities of America. Creating an infrastructure to increase the longevity of what’s left of the human race, to make connections.

And I find this fact ironic, because there is a distinct disconnect between what the narrative finds important and what the gameplay deems as important.

In Death Stranding, you carry boxes. You load Sam up with as many units of cargo as you can before he’s collapsing from the weight and walk him out into the outdoors. I found the gameplay loop rather relaxing actually, you pack your stuff, plan your route on the map, anticipate what problems you’ll be facing and print the equipment you think you’ll need whether you’ll need ladders for traversal, bola guns for bandits or anti-BT devices. I won’t say this was particularly “fun”, but I won’t deny there was a sense of satisfaction when I had the right tool for the right situation and I got the mission done without any particular disasters.

On the other hand, the cutscenes and narrative would say that the bigger obstacles to overcome are the BTs, Terrorists and extinction. By the end of the game, I can’t honestly say that my victories against bosses were properly lead up to by my treks with my many boxes. I probably would have thought differently had there been a visual representation of my progress like more NPCs chatting idly at UCA stations or seeing more of the communities in the underground shelters making structures outside.

There was only one point in the game where the terrorist threat became a challenge to overcome during gameplay. BTs were an obstacle to circumvent, they weren’t an active threat throughout the game and could be easily walked around if you checked for Timefall ahead of departing on your run, and the BT threat completely became a non-issue once I was given the cuffs to cut their umbilical cords. Mules were the most aggressive threat through my experience, but they were simply not important to the expanse of the game.

If this could have been fixed, I would have preferred the enemies the narrative emphasizes be aggressive, be present. Maybe not make the snowy mountains the most annoying part of the game, make it’s geography more diverse than some huge slopes to slog through. Bring back the audio recordings and let me listen to them while I walk around like in MGSV rather than making me read walls of text from NPCs I’m hardly invested in. At a point near the end of the game, there’s a final boss encounter. Above all, the game spent it’s length conditioning the player to prepare for encounters you’ll face, but at this point the story will dictate that you simply aren’t allowed to do so. That decision felt rather “player-dismissive”.

Additionally, optional temporal storms to enter would have been pretty cool.

On the matter of the online features, I won’t deny that there were times that the signs and structures of other players were very helpful. That is, when the features actually worked. My internet connection would die the moment my other family members woke up and started streaming tv shows. I’m actually hoping that Kojima won’t use these mechanics going forward because I just can’t rely on them all the time.

I think Hideo Kojima made a special experience with Death Stranding. I think in some regards, this game truly is a stand out, but at this point in time I’d argue that the lack of coordination between the different elements of the game prevent it from being a fluid, cohesive experience. Kojima has stated recently that if he were to make a follow up to Death Stranding, he would start from scratch and even focus more on making it a horror game. I’m all for that, focus, but I digress. I enjoyed various portions of Death Stranding and the game emphasizes the value of the imaginations of people like Kojima that thwart monotony in the video game industry.

Plato’s Republicans

Two thousand years ago, the Greek philosopher Plato penned The Republic; an argument for totalitarianism that's as terrifying in the clarity and honesty of its arguments as the day it was written. Plato argues that since many (if not most) people are too stupid to be trusted with full control of their own government, society should be controlled by “philosopher kings,” an aristocratic elite class of gifted geniuses. Inculcating obedience to this regime would be a children's tale to make the masses accept a system who's necessity they had not the wits to grasp themselves. Plato suggested a “noble lie” of origins, a creation myth of men born of mother Earth, most with copper-inlaid souls, fewer with silver, and the philosopher-kings themselves with scant and precious gold. Golden souls made the law, silver ones enforced it, and copper ones suffered it. The totalitarian vision of Plato would later be echoed by Rousseau, who advocated the same horrors but without the courage to look them in the face;  resorting to oxymorons such as “forcing people to be free” to justify the jackboots of the 'silver souls' and constant references to a philosopher-king “statesman” who, in his theoretically-infinite wisdom, might be required to tell the people what “their” will really was. The only substantive difference between Platonic tyranny and the founding principles of left-wing collectivism is the nature of their myths, with Plato being the more honest.

Which is precisely why you can open USA TODAY and find a “Republican” repeating the same elitist, anti-democratic arguments without the slightest hint of shame.

The GOP's disdain for democracy has been obvious ever since they backed a man who openly mocked the electorate as easily-manipulated fools as their last, best chance to stop the would-be destroyer of democracy. But even as I marveled at the scale of his disconnect, I still contextualized Cruz's statement alongside Hillary's “Basket of Deplorables” comment, or Romney's “$10,000 bet -” momentary slips from elitists who truly believed they controlled the masses, but still had to mouth a “noble lie” of democratic equality to keep them placated. But this can't be squared with the ongoing public proclamations of never-Trumpers, as exemplified by Tom Nichol's USA Today op-ed, which screams in its headline that he's a “Republican” that nonetheless wants to see the Republican party destroyed to expel the filthy proles and their “inane populist keggers” from power. Nichols isn't an aberration, but an anecdote of the larger group, as evidenced by the histrionic hissy fit Jeff Flake threw on the Senate floor after admitting his own constituents sided with the President, not him. If the Never-Trumpers great concern was for the welfare of America, they'd have heeded Dennis Pranger's plea to back Trump, as he was guaranteed to cleave closer to everything their political ideology says is good for the nation, whereas the alternative was the embodiment of everything they held detrimental to it.

Instead, they seek to defend a system, the structure that has embodied and preserved the power of their elite class, as one can see in their own arguments. Flake whined at length about Trump's temerity in attacking the sanctity of the establishment media, (and by extension the majority of the public) and Nichols has the astonishing gall to defend the likes of the FBI and CIA, despite a mountain of evidence detailing their betrayals of the public trust - and not just recent ones. The Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture's declassified summary describes a rogue CIA not only engaged in barbaric atrocities, but which actively concealed their crimes from Congress, the White House, the Department of Justice and their own Inspector General. If that wasn't enough, the Vault 7 leaks revealed  in great detail that the CIA had invested astonishing sums of money into duplicating the NSA's hacking abilities - a colossal waste of funds only explicable by a desire to avoid the public paper trails necessitated by ordinary inter-agency cooperation. Nor has conservative constituency forgotten the FBI's long history of failures, such as the FBI sniper who blew the head off a mother holding her baby in her arms during the Ruby Ridge “standoff,” or repeatedly being caught in lies about their 2016 campaign misconduct after months of bureaucratic stalling, which makes their current protestations of innocence vis a vis the Nunes Memo hard to credit. And indeed, the preponderance of evidence has had the predictable impact on public opinion.

Yet both Flake and Nichols - despite knowing full well that the electorate's opinion is stacked against them - declined to challenge the evidence and argue to the people (outside of some hot takes on Twitter.) Instead, they reserved their grand speeches and national-circulation op-eds to howl at Trump for attacking those institutions. Considering their open contempt for the electorate, it's not hard to see why - if the voters are stupid sheep, then blame belongs with Trump for using his demagogic power to turn them against the institutions usually relied upon to control them. Indeed, the shockingly open contempt Nichols stuffs into every paragraph of his op-ed documents a complete lack of concern regarding backlash from the peasant class - he refers to us as people throwing “inane populist keggers,” “bellowing drama queens,” drones in a “cult of personality,” “white welfare-statist” whores auctioning off our loyalty, reflexively angry fools who “drift in mindless rage and willful ignorance, the “New Know-Nothings” that must be purged. The astonishingly brazen contempt for the intellect of millions of American voters is proof positive that he thinks no more of it than a farmer discussing slaughterhouses in earshot of a cow. He wouldn't dare unless he truly believed that the people's agency didn't matter; that they could be brought to heel in short order if only the mechanisms to do so aren't demolished by the demagogic power of Trump.

This is the true nature of the “never-Trumpers;” true believers in Plato's vision of aristocratic totalitarianism - Plato's Republicans. Nichols is a particularly illustrative example not just for the sincere openness of his disdain, but because he's written an entire book devoted to the theme - “The Death of Expertise.” Assuming you've no wish to pay nine bucks to be called a knuckle-dragging retard over and over, you can read Nichol's Federalist feature to get the gist. Summarized, he resents the necessity to address arguments to the public as if they're competent human beings, capable of understanding a reasonable argument expressed in plain language. According to him, “the ordinary interlocutor in such debates isn’t really equipped to decide what constitutes “evidence” or to know it when it’s presented.” If the proletariat is this stupid, then arguments can only be judged by the credentials of the personages putting them forth; credentials bestowed by organizations and systems who's own credibility the proles are likewise incapable of judging. It's effectively an argument for oligarchy, with democracy a veneer of polite fiction at best. He offers lip service to this outcome being “terrible,” but says it's inevitable if citizens stay “imprisoned by their fragile egos and caged by their own sense of entitlement.” Clearly they need to sit down, shut up, listen to Daddy, and eat their peas. (To opine that “fragile egos” and “entitlement” is antithetical to democracy is to reveal either a disbelief in democracy, or utter ignorance of the human condition.)

Nichols has naturally anointed Trump the Anti-Expert, surfing to power on a tide of uncritical media institutions and an echo-chamber internet. It echoes Flake's slavish praise of the free press as the “guardian of democracy,” which should always be given the benefit of the doubt in any question of truth. Recall Chris Coumo's statements live on CNN; “it’s illegal to possess these stolen documents. It’s different for the media. So everything you learn about this, you’re learning from us.” You see, the educated journalism experts are “equipped to decide what constitutes evidence” in a way the filthy proletariat - I mean, “ordinary interlocutor” simply isn't. The establishment media's a perfect example of Nichol's argument in particular and the sentiments of Platonic Republicans in general; an institutional pillar of democracy, staffed by golden experts and devoted to lecturing the moronic masses.

It's also bullshit, as evidenced by the American Republic's lack of that pillar from the Founding till at least the Spanish-American war, with the first inklings of it only appearing in the 1830s. When the Bill of Rights was penned, partisan printing was the norm, with those who owned presses free to print anything they damn well pleased - and any jackass or cabal thereof with the cash to buy one, had one, experts be damned. Freedom of the Press was simply freedom to print; with no man able to lie louder or longer than another. The raw partisanship of those early American presses so resemble modern blogs that some academics have drawn the parallels directly. The ongoing disintegration of the “objective” establishment media and the simultaneous rise of partisan “alternative” news is simply a return to form. The openly feral, partisan hatred of today's media is just the final flowering of an insidious bias that the likes of Bernard Goldberg had started documenting a decade prior. (With years of industry experience and 12 Emmy awards, I believe he qualifies as an “expert.”) And yet, somehow, despite its absence for the first century of America's existence, and its worm-eaten weakness in recent decades, we're expected to hail it as an “essential pillar” of our democracy, a “fourth estate,” an undeclared branch of government, an additional check-and-balance.

I know this historiography, because despite being a “new Know-Nothing” Trump voter drifting in “mindless rage and willful ignorance,” I've also earned a bachelor's degree in Journalism and Political Science. From an actual four-year school that gave me a diploma on fancy paper, no less. Something else my formal education introduced me to was “low-information rationality,” the astonishing theory that so-called “low-information voters” don't need to read both candidates hundred-point plans to know  that between the two choices, the Republican will be more conservative than the Democrat. Building on that theory, and surprisingly high opinion-poll pluralities on distrusting media even before CNN started lying about fish feeding and hyperventilating over random white trucks, I offer this hypothesis: the American public can eventually figure out when they're being fed a line of steaming bullshit.

For Plato's Republicans and Never-Trumpers, a more personal formulation: if you believe you can piss on our legs and tell us it's raining, you're badly mistaken. We have swallowed your noble lies and myths for decades, and we've only the ruin of our great cities, the plight of our middle class and the poverty of our rural populations to show for it. With the destruction all around us, you cannot now tell us you still know best and expect us to believe it. And you, Mr. Nichols, most certainly cannot slander us as fools, castigate us for not slavishly obeying our self-proclaimed betters, and then think there is a place for you in this party, where you can stay “for now.” An expert of your intellectual caliber should be able to count, but since this seemingly escapes you I'll remind you that Trump won the elections, ergo, he won the electorate.

We are the party, now.

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24-hour, rolling coverage.

This is a mind-dump, I’ve just caught myself in one of my maladaptive behaviours. I need to process it, so I can ‘put it away’.

Las Vegas. I have ‘news’ notifications on my mobile, because I noticed I was doing that ‘thing’ again, after the Manchester and London incidents. My ‘thing’ is putting the news on the TV, usually BBC news, carefully phrased, and reasonably accountable. Funnily enough, the news-notification didn’t ping today, I picked up that ‘something’ was happening via the ‘trending’ column on Twitter. The ‘Oh, no, who’s dead now?’ column in 2016, and the ‘Oh, f**k WHAT NOW?’ column this year.

I clicked on ‘Las Vegas’, probably a couple of hours ago. The initial posts were confused, some garbled, they were coming from people there, at the scene. Observations, speculation, and an awful lot of people commenting on what they had picked up on the police scanners. That’s bad form. I know that the intent will have been to share that information to keep others safe, but if *I* can see where the police are being deployed to, all the way over here in England, so can any associates of whoever is responsible for this. Now, a couple of hours in, people in positions of authority are asking the public not to share information of that nature, or photographs disclosing identity or location of response teams.

‘We’ are learning, slowly. I was near-incredulous when I saw a news article about UK police advising the public not to post images or footage of active/on-going incidents on social media. These handheld computers that most of us have now have an awful lot to answer for. In September 2001, I had a curvy little grey ‘Sagem’ mobile, no camera, monochrome display, it ‘could’ access the internet via WAP, but it took an eternity, and the available sites weren’t easy to read in that format. Mid-morning on September 11th, 2001, I’d started with a migraine, after going into a shop with a flickering fluorescent tube. I’d taken the bus home, instead of walking with my small son, because I knew I needed codeine before the aura developed into full-blown migraine. No TV on, no radio on, fumbling about half-blind for most of the day, I didn’t know what had happened in America, until the ex came home from work, and put the TV on. It stayed on for days. That’s my embedded behaviour. The TV isn’t on now, because I ‘caught’ myself, but I am still flicking back to Twitter between paragraphs. Small steps, I suppose.  

Ask anyone of my generation where they were when they found out about the September 11th attacks, and they will be able to tell you, often in an alarming level of detail. It’s ‘our’ Kennedy assassination, Vietnam war, or World War, but we don’t remember “We interrupt the scheduled broadcast to bring you news that...”, because we’re 24-hour rolling now.

That saturation crept up on ‘us’ slowly, I’m not quite a dinosaur, but I do frequently ‘catch’ myself endlessly browsing and linking-out during my pre-dawn waking episodes. There’s not an awful lot ‘else’ I can think of to do at 3am. The normalisation of the saturation is why some people were posting unwise content regarding Las Vegas. It’s second nature for a lot of people to share everything, in this always-on, always-connected digital age. I was going to make a sweeping statement that the younger ones seem to think if they don’t post it, it never happened, but my generation over-share, too, social media was novel to us, we’re the idiot generation that started posting “Cucumber, LOL!”, because sharing photos was a step-up from the family group email. 

I can click a few buttons on this device, and find out anything about anything, with varying degrees of authenticity or accountability, those expand-outs are a whole new rabbit hole, and I have to mind myself how deeply I fall in. I was troubled by some of the posts I saw earlier, people posting photographs of the alleged perpetrator, and information they claimed to have picked up from the police scanners. That’s not-OK, because it potentially compromises an active/on-going situation. Then there was the inevitable rush of ‘pray for’, and ‘thoughts with’ posts. I’m cynical, some of those people were genuinely expressing their incredulity at the incident; some were looking for likes and re-tweets. Then, there were waves of ‘My (insert friend/relative here) was in the area, and are not answering their phone.’, my initial thought was unkind, that the UK police advice is not to use your phone until you’re 100% certain it is safe to do so, and that running away from an ‘active shooter’ would have to take priority over answering the phone to your Auntie Beryl. 

The ‘reputable’ news-sources are being deliberately cautious with the information they are releasing, but the other, un-verified information and speculation is still out there, dangerous ground, because we all have it at our fingertips, 24/7. We’re saturated, and there’s a risk that we’re becoming desensitised to all manner of horrors, I, personally don’t think we are, we’re just processing them differently. I can’t do anything ‘about’ Las Vegas, I can’t help in any way, but that ‘Critical Incident Response’ training kicked in anyway, “Is it contained, or continuous? Is there the potential that this isn’t all of it?” I’ve had to pull myself out of crisis-planning for an incident that has nothing at all to do with me, but, if I didn’t pull myself out, I wouldn’t have any head-space for my next unit of Open University Certification. In ‘Risk Management.’

Enjoyment.

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Find Out How It Is Possible To Turn out to be An Expert Zynga Poker Hack

The realm of Zynga Poker Hack has changed in a realistic, completely believable digital enjoying field! You may be the hero from the ninth inning, bases filled fasten online game or save the attractive princess from that wicked warlord! Or, you could potentially learn new things and valuable. No matter what your intention with online games, the following article will educate you on a few things. 

Try out renting game titles before you buy them. It really is challenging to determine you are going to just like a title or otherwise. For that reason, go to a store that rents films and games. In general, you may rent a game title for a few dollars, along with the finances are normally definitely worth it. It is possible to discover when a game is a superb acquire or otherwise not.

Ask your friends and relations to experience a youtube video video game you prefer. You may hang out with them, get caught up on outdated instances and enjoy your favorite game. Who knows, they might want to buy it for their own reasons to help you engage in collectively in the comfort and ease of your personal residences.

Extremely multiplayer online part-playing games (MMORPGs) are greatly popular. If you attempt a couple of out, it's easy to view why! Don't concentrate on seriously presented manufacturer-new titles, however. After several yrs, well-known MMORPGs frequently move into a free of charge-to-perform (F2P) version. This allows you to get pleasure from most or even every one of the game's content material without having to pay a cent!

Usually sit using them once they practice it if you decide to let your preschooler to try out a video activity. Speak with them about what is happening inside the activity. By making the event a sociable celebration, you can create special bonding time involving you and your kid whilst they are doing some thing they like.

Occasionally a game title can come out and then a bunch of downloadable content material adheres to. You really should hang on for quite a while in order to save your valuable dollars. The reason being there could be a version of your Zynga Poker Hack Android which comes out afterwards that includes all of these things for the lower price. Don't get stuck spending money on a variety of bonuses that one could get on one particular disc later on!

Before you permit your young ones play it, look at the activity out. Ensure it is ideal for what their age is by reading reviews and other information regarding this game online. Often the rating isn't ample and it is recommended to have a look at what other people ought to say about the video game and the contents of it.

Use xbox game enjoying time for you to stimulate your children. Does your youngster enjoy playing games? Have you got a tough time stimulating him to a great deal of anything? As the kid completes chores, enable him to try out a certain amount of computer game time. As an example, if you wish your son to complete the dishes, let him perform for half an hour after he concludes this.

Know what microtransactions are. A lot of Zynga Poker Hack Iphone now depend upon these in activity deals for sometimes some as well as their revenue. Usually related to a debit or credit card, you are able to find yourself shelling out a ton of money in a game on internet or top quality articles rather than know simply how much you are actually spending.

Preorder specials offer you a wonderful way to purchase an successful video game purchase. Sometimes, preorders are carried out at special discounts to that particular video game publishers can have even bigger opening time amounts and excitement. More often, premium improvements or more content articles are cast in at no added demand therefore you have more game to enjoy.

Don't allow online games dominate your free time. When you perform video gaming on a regular basis, you might experience wellness effects. Ensure that you participate in other sorts of actions, way too. You should employ video games sparingly as they are rather addicting.

Party game titles make interpersonal parties fun. Although Zynga Poker Generator is normally a solo hobby, it could also be a social action. A party game is an excellent icebreaker, and can assist captivate and relax your guests. Ensure you pick a bash game that will interest all of your current friends.

One of the best points you can do to improve your overall practical experience in the course of online game play would be to shut off the lamps. This is especially enjoyable with horror video games, as it could boost the overall outcome you get. Making an ideal surroundings when enjoying is incredibly good for your and also you friends.

Some parents believe it is helpful to specify an exclusive location just for video games. Online games can be extremely noisy, and also you want some serenity every so often. Designating an exclusive video gaming location will allow your kids to get rowdy, and that you can have some serenity and calm.

Exercise makes best! The better you enjoy a game, the higher you'll be. The more walkthroughs you study, the higher ready you'll be for every level. Observe videos of other individuals playing, or study articles regarding their activities, and you'll locate you rapidly master Zynga Poker Free Coins with tiny effort and frustration.

You can check out bed when you're lifeless! Some individuals think this is actually the greatest slogan to get a game addict. This really is nonsense! You want a total night's relaxation every night therefore you imagination remains razor-sharp.

Possess a separate area for games, whenever you can. Lots of people always keep their game playing devices in the household space or living room, and that is 1 strategy. As a way to allow everyone in the residence to accomplish what they'd like, you could think about developing a individual area for your personal game titles so practically nothing gets in how.

Break up your marathon video gaming trainings with repeated splits to obtain your blood pumping. Resting for extended time periods basically improves your likelihood of blood clots. At least one time an hour, hop approximately perform some moving jacks, operate into position, and even pick up a ingest and have a bathroom crack.

Online video Zynga Poker Free Chips can practically take you out of this community and into a completely different location where by chivalry guidelines the morning! On the other hand, a nuclear dissolve straight down has morphed most of humanity into zombies! Or maybe you would like to online game to the GPA with a few things! With any luck , this article has improved your understanding and advantages your following video game.