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thiswaycomessomethingwicked · 3 years

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so i am back on the grima train and i was reading through your posts (absolutely quality, for which i can only thank you !! 💓) and you mentioned in one about his use of magic that you have a Lot of Feelings about grima in relation to gender and plz i need to hear them!! (if you want to share? 👀)

LOTR: Grima & Gender

Oh man, so Grima and gender. My favourite topic. Other than Grima and magic - but they’re linked! So, that’s a bonus for us.

I want to thank you so much for asking this question. I have wanted to rant about this for Forever.

This became incredibly long, but the long and short of it is that Grima undermines social expectations of masculinity in Rohan through his disdain for martial achievements, his occupying a more private/passive role within the king’s household rather than the expected “masculine” public/active, his use of spells and potions being an “unmanly” and “cowardly” approach to problem solving, and his reliance on language and soft-power approaches to politics.

All of this works to position Grima within a more feminine role and character - at least within the context of Rohan’s hypermasculine performativity of manliness.

[It does allow us to read Grima as trans with greater ease in terms of fitting into the canon than the usual favourites, other than Eowyn. So, you know, do with that what you will. Eowyn and Grima both want to be queen. Let them be in charge! I’m going to get my ass bit for this.]

Grima’s gender performance needs to be quickly situated within the broader context of masculinity in Middle-Earth. Gondor’s ideal of masculinity is the gentler masculinity that everyone focuses on when they talk about men in middle earth being good models of what masculinity can look like. It’s a nurturing masculinity, it’s gentle, it’s healing-focused. Aragorn and others try and take the first off-ramp from violence or conflict whenever they can. There is no enjoyment in warfare or soldiering. It’s done because it’s necessary. Dick-swinging is limited to non-existent etc.

Rohan is different.

Faramir touches on this when he speaks to Frodo of how Boromir was more like the men of Rohan and how he thought that wasn’t a good thing as it meant he was seeking glory for glory’s sake, relishing war and soldiering as an occupation rather than an unfortunate necessity.

Of course, Faramir was also making (some very dubious) racial commentary, but race and gender are often bound up together (e.g. hyper-masculinization of black men and the feminization of East Asian men in the North America).

As R.W. Connell says, “masculinities are congurations of practice that are constructed, unfold, and change through time” — and, additionally, masculinity must be defined in opposition to femininity but, also, other masculinities.

For Rohan, there is a strong, militarized hyper-masculinity that threads through their culture. One of the reasons Theoden was seen as a failing king was his physical decline and inability to continue being a physically strong king. His aging emasculated him, more so when compared to Theodred and Eomer. (Something Theoden believed of himself and Grima capitalized on.)

For this, I’m going to speak of masculinity of the upper classes, since that’s what we see for Rohan. Masculinity, and how it’s to be performed, is contingent on social variables such as, but not limited to: age, appearance and size, bodily facility, care, economic class, ethnicity, fatherhood, relations to biological reproduction, leisure, martial and kinship status, occupation, sexuality etc. and as we never see lower class Rohirrim men it’s impossible to say what the “acceptable” and “expected” forms for a farmer or cooper would be.

Upper class men of Rohan are expected to be militarily capable - ready to ride and fight when called by their king or marshal. They are to be men of action over word, and when language is in play, it’s to be forthright and plain. No riddling. Marriage/Husband-ing is an expected part of manhood. Being strong minded, and capable of taking charge and making decisions is important. Fatherhood is also clearly prized, especially fatherhood that results in son(s).

(Theoden only having one child could be read as another “failure” in living up to Rohirrim ideals when compared to the older kings of his family who were far more prolific.)

The appearance of an “ideal” man is tall, fair, and handsome. Physically strong and capable in all ways (martially, sexually, fertile etc.).

Men should be able to demonstrate that they are capable of being in charge, taking control, defending and protecting families and homes. This slots in with more generalized expectations around bravery, honour and glory.

[Eomer: And that, in summation, is how you are to Be A Man.

Grima: Well that sounds utterly exhausting.]

So, with all of that in mind, let’s talk Grima.

First, let’s address the name and character construction as this is the least bound up in how he acts and its tension with Rohirrim ideals of Being a Man. It’s also interesting in that it can give a glimpse into Tolkien and the possible thoughts he had when constructing Grima.

Grima’s Name & Beowulf Stuff

Grima’s name is from old Icelandic Grimr, which is a name Odin takes during the Grimnismal saga.

Here are some lines from Odin in the saga:

I have called myself Grim,

I have called myself Wanderer,

Warrior and Helmet-Wearer,

[...]

Evildoer, Spellcaster,

Masked and Shadowed-Face,

Fool and Wise Man,

[...]

Rope-Rider and Hanged-God.

I have never been known

by just one name

since I first walked among men.

Not only is Grima’s name from Odin, more importantly, it’s the feminine version of that name. No man in the eddas or sagas goes by Grima. Only women. And most often they were seidr-workers or healers/magic practitioners of some kind.

"Other healers include Gríma from Fóstbræðra saga and Laxdæla saga and Heiðr from Biarmiland in Harald’s saga Hárfagra."

- “Hostile Magic in the Icelandic Sagas,” Hilda Ellis-Davidson

And

"There was a man called Kotkel, who had only recently arrived in Iceland. His wife was called Grima. Their sons were Hallbjorn Sleekstone-Eye and Stigandi. These people had come from the Hebrides. They were all extremely skilled in witchcraft and were great sorcerers."

- Laxdæla saga

This is most likely something Tolkien was aware of — I would be flabbergasted if he wasn’t. However, did he fully appreciate the implications in terms of gender and subversion of masculinity? Impossible to say, of course, but he certainly knew he was giving his male character a name that has only been used by women in historical texts.

It would be akin to naming your male character Henrietta instead of Henry. It’s a deliberate, explicit decision. And while I don’t think Tolkien expected most readers to track down the origin of Grima’s name, the --a ending, to most anglophone readers, signifies a feminine name, more often than not. At least, it rarely, if ever, signifies masculine.

So the name alone brings in, at a subconscious level to readers, feminine qualities.

Alongside this, Grima is loosely based on Unferth from Beowulf. The entrance of Gandalf et al into Meduseld directly mirrors Beowulf’s into Hrothgar’s hall (complete with Grima lounging at Theoden’s feet the same as Unferth at Hrothgar’s). Indeed, it was clearly Tolkien’s intention to make a call back to Beowulf with that scene. (He was being all “look how clever I am. Also these are Anglo-Saxons on horses. As a general fyi”).

Unferth is a fascinating character in his own right ,and there is much scholarly debate around his role within Hrothgar’s hall, as well as the text more broadly. While there isn’t enough time/space to get into Unferth, I will quickly note that he is another character who subverts his society’s ideas of manhood and masculinity — particularly with regards to expectations of heroism and bravery. Yet, at the same time, Unferth is noted for being very intelligent, cunning, good at riddling, and overall quick witted (also, a kin-slayer. Dude murdered his brothers for Reasons).

Unferth’s contrary behaviour that flies in the face of Anglo-Saxon norms and ideals of masculine bravery is clearly reflected in Grima. Particularly in Grima’s fear of battle and lack of interest in taking up his sword when called by his king.

This leaves us with a character who was given a woman’s name and who is loosely based on another character who is known for his inability to follow through on his society’s expectations for masculine behaviour.

Grima, from the first moment we meet him, clearly reads more feminine than masculine - this is amplified when he’s contrasted with the likes of Theoden and Eomer. And, not only is his aligned with traditional femininity more than other male characters, he is specifically aligned with the more negative tropes of femininity (i.e. lack of bravery, unreliable, dubious morals etc.).

That is a brief overview of the bones of Grima’s construction: name and inspiration. Now for actions and characterization within the text. This will be subdivided into comments on his use of magic and how that interfaces with Rohirrim masculinity then we’ll get into power and language.

Grima’s key point of power is his ability to weave words in so powerful a way he could convince Theoden of his own infirmity and weakness thereby securing control over the king. Alongside this, we know that he was using certain “potions and poison” to further weaken Theoden. Most likely to amp up the king’s physical weakness so it coincided with Grima’s mental magic games.

Magic for Anglo-Saxon and early medieval Scandinavians was heavily rooted in the power of the spoken word. Runes were probably used but the historical support of this is vague. Which is to say, we know they were used, we’re just not certain how and to what extent.

We do know that rune staves were a thing. They were most often used to send your landwights after opponents or wreck havoc on enemies from afar. To make one, a magic-worker would carve the prescribed runes onto a large stave and position it in the ground facing the direction of their enemy. On top of the stave was added the head of a horse. (Lots of horse sacrifice happened for early medieval Scandinavians, alongside some human sacrifice.)

But, the brunt of magic for Anglo-Saxons and early medieval Scandinavians was spoken word. Which makes sense as their society was, like Rohan’s, predominantly illiterate or, at least, para-literate (though, there has been some recent archeological evidence that is starting to call that into question, for what that’s worth).

In particular, Grima’s spellwork aligns most closely with seidr, a fact I’ve gone about ad nausea. And, again, something we can assume Tolkien was aware of, which means he was also aware of the gendered implications of a man practicing the craft.

The mainstay of seidrcraft is, but not limited to, the following:

making illusions,

causing madness and/or forgetfulness,

brewing of potions and poisons,

prophesying,

channeling the dead,

channeling gods,

removal of elf-shot, and

recovering lost portions of someone’s soul.

The first three bullets are things Grima does to Theoden. That kind of magic — the kind that fucks with your mind and your sense of self, the kind that is subtle and quiet and lurks beneath the surface so you don’t know it’s happening, that’s cunning — that kind of magic is what women do.

It was considered unmanly/effeminate for a man to partake in it as it undermined the hypermasculine militarized culture of the time. Winning a battle or a fight through spells and poison was cowardly.

Therefore, in Rohan where we have this hypermasculine culture that so prizes military glory and grandeur and martial might, Grima pursuing his goals through spellcraft and potions/poisons is Grima pursuing distinctly unmasculine, effeminate modes of action.

Indeed, within Rohan it could call into question the entirety of his masculinity. It would make him ragr (adj. unmanly) because his actions are the epitome of ergi (noun. unmanliness).

"In the Viking Age, homosexual men were treated with extreme disdain and a complex kind of moral horror, especially those who allowed themselves to be penetrated. Such a man was ragr, not only homosexual by inclination and action, but also inhabiting a state of being that extended to ethical and social qualities. This complex of concepts has been extensively studied, and in the words of its leading scholar, "the unmanly man is everything that a man should not be with regard to morals and character. He is effeminate and he is a coward, and consequently devoid of honour". [...] What we would call sexual orientation was, in the viking age, completely bound up with much wider and deeper codes of behaviour and dignity, extending way beyond physical and emotional preference." -Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

Though Price references specifically homosexuality in this passage, a man could be considered ragr for more than just that — and one of the other ways was through practicing seidr.

We see this with Odin, who learns how to do seidrcraft from Freyja, and is then mocked by Loki for how emasculating the practice is for Odin to undertake (as if Loki has any room to talk). Odin’s made himself effeminate, he’s made himself unmanly, he’s allowed himself to learn spells that could enable him to take a cowards way out of a situation, to be dishonourable etc.

Which is a neat tie-back to Grima’s name being one of Odin’s names, particularly when he is in disguise and using seidrcraft and wily ways to escape various unfortunate situations that he ends up in during the Grimnismal saga.

(As Odin says: I have been called Evildoer, Spellcaster, Masked and Shadowed-Face, Fool and Wise Man.)

It also mirrors him to Gandalf - another character who bears an Odinnic name. Gandalf very much represents the masculine, “acceptable” aspects of Odin. Grima embodies the darker, more dubious, and more effeminate, aspects of the god. As I’ve said in other posts, they are two sides of the Odin coin.

Though both are temperamental as fuck.

Alongside the spellcraft and potions, Grima’s performance of power does not align with Rohirrim traditions and ideals. He relies on his wits and his skill with language to navigate the world. Succinctly captured in the epithet bestowed upon him: Wormtongue. This is the modernization of Wyrmtunga, or, Dragon’s Tongue.

Wyrm can translate to worm, sure, and we see Saruman doing this on purpose when he refers to Grima as a worm, a creature that crawls in the dirt. But Wyrm, of course, is actually a form of dragon. And in Middle Earth, wyrm is used interchangeably with dragon (Smaug is called both wyrm and dragon), rather than denoting a specific species/categorization of dragon as it does in our world.

Grima’s approach to power is that of a gentle touch. He speaks softly, but doesn’t carry a large stick. He’s not Eomer or Theodred, who are much more traditionally martial, aggressive and forthright in their responses to a situation. Grima is clearly all about influencing those around him either through persuasion/use of words, or through spellcraft. He manipulates, he uses linguistic trickery.

Additionally, how he undertakes his role as advisor to the king places him more within the private world of Meduseld and the king’s household than the active, public world of marshals and thanes. And, of course, the private world of households was traditionally considered the woman’s domain while men were expected to occupy the public spaces of the world.

Of course, being involved in court politics is a public role as opposed to existing within a wholly private space (such as Eowyn. Who, in the books, takes a mostly private role until she is required to rule in her uncle’s stead while he and Eomer are off at war, and even then it is clearly considered a temporary situation and part of her duty as a woman). But the manner in which Grima occupies that public position is a more “feminine” one.

We can assume that if Eomer or Erkenbrand or Elfhelm occupied the role as advisor to Theoden, they would have a very different approach to the position. A much more aggressive, active and probably military-focused approach. Less carrot, more stick.

A quick note on his appearance in the film, aside from being entirely in black with black hair in a land full of blonds because he needed to be visually distinct as the Bad Guy. He is dressed in longer tunics and robes compared to Eomer and other Rohirrim men (aside from Theoden, but as soon as he is “healed” of his possession(?) he returns to the Proper Masculine shorter tunics than the Weak and Effeminate longer robes and tunics of before). Grima’s hair is longer than Eomer’s and Theoden’s, he wears only a dagger and not a sword, the furs and quilting of his clothes indicate wealth and status, of course, but also decadence and effeminacy.

All in all, Grima’s performance and actions undermine and subvert Rohirrim expectations of masculinity. If not outright transgressing gender norms. He uses spellcraft to achieve his ends which is cowardly and effeminate. When it’s not that, he relies on language and manipulation to ensure his position and rarely, if ever, willingly takes on an active, martial role that would be expected of a man who is in the king’s household and serves as an advisor and a quasi-second-in-command.

Here is a man, occupying a man’s role, but doing it like a woman. Subversive! Scandalous! Underappreciated by fandom!

Grima lives in a liminal, marginalized space that is at once gendered and ungendered but is absolutely Othered.

As for my note on Grima and being trans - absolutely a trans woman. Grima suffers from that thing of “I want to be you and sleep with you” re: Eowyn. That’s my hot take. (Similar to me and Alan Grant from Jurassic Park - I want to be him and sleep with him.)

But no, in all seriousness, a strong argument can absolutely be made for Grima being not-cis, however that might look for Grima. Grima and Eowyn are the two, within the trilogies, that have the strongest arguments to be made for not being cis.

(Grima is a bit of a foil for Eowyn, I think, while also being a foil for Gandalf.)

#grima wormtongue #lotr #Lord of the Rings #writing #lit #gender presentation #gender in LOTR #Rohan #masculinity #queer shit #history #anglo-saxon #viking

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wokestonecraft · 2 years

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I’ve been reading Francesca Bray’s Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China and I have a lot of thoughts about this book, particularly in regards to how history focused on women is handled today. Now, this book was published in 1997, but it and many of the other works it references are still heavily drawn upon today, especially the work of Dorothy Ko and Susan Mann. It has a lot of very solid research in women’s material culture, but the parts I want to draw on are the introductions the various sections that contemplate historiography and the “why's” and “how's” of how historians do history, in regards to each of the subjects. I have a post somewhere about Silvia Federici’s intro to Caliban and the Witch and how she picks apart various approaches to women’s history, and I am glad that I read it this summer before diving deeply in Chinese and women’s history. There’s a lot of context regarding post modernism and post structuralism that colors current historical research that I don’t think the average non-historian is familiar, and that I wasn’t all that familiar with before this year. What sparked this particular post is the section “Medical History and Gender History,” which is Bray’s introduction to reproductive medicine and culture in late imperial China, and she heavily discusses the idea of “bodies” or rather the “body” as both a concept and a tool of analyses. I find this very interesting as there is a very thoughtful discussion of how the body in post structuralism (and Western thought in general) is disconnected from the material relates that shape it, and how this colors research into other societies that may not share these views, and how it can impede our abilities to reconstruct how people in the past viewed themselves and their bodies. While Bray is not nearly as critical as Frederici is, she still points out how important the interaction between material reality and bodies is to thinking about how societies are formed, particularly in regards to gender. One footnote that I think should have been a full-fledged part of the intro continues from this quote: “I find myself at odds with the current trend in feminist theory that dismisses the role of material reality in shaping identity.” In the footnote, Bray continues

“The attitude seems perversely ahistorical. While I agree that ‘discourse’ shapes our understanding and experience of our bodies, I cannot agree that discourse has in effected invented the body, of that it encompasses, because it has created, everything we know and feel through our bodies. Lynne Segal may be right to say “we can only know bodies through discourse” (1994: 228), if we accept the dubious modern Western presumption that all knowledge must be expressible in words. But knowledge is only part of what it means to be human, and to imagine that we can only apprehend our bodies through discourse implies a rarified cerebral and hyperliterate mode of life, lapped by the comforts of modern civilization with its attendants discontents.”

This is particularly relevant as the entire book that this is from is all about material culture, specifically the material culture of women, including the role reproduction played in their lives. Bray coins the interesting and, I think, very useful term “gynotechnics” to referred to the technologies developed and used to manufacture felinity as well as material goods, especially since “gynotechnics” are often dismissed by historians of technology and development as mere “crafts.” How material culture forms ideas of gender and vice versa is an absolutely fascinating part of women’s history, as what work is acceptable for women to do or expected of women is both a reflection and tool of femininity. Within the Chinese context, the ideas of the “outer” vs “inner” sphere has given rise to much debate, especially what it meant for women to be “confined” to the inner quarters. Dorothy Ko has written a very worthwhile book on elite women during the 17th century called Teachers of the Inner Chambers that tackles this discussion, while striving to shed light on the roles women did play and what change they did or did not effect, but the idea of being separate from the body is not as prevalent in Chinese thought as it is the West. Ko has written another article that would lead into her work on the history of foot binding called “The Body as Attire” that focused on the relationship of clothing and the body in Chinese. thought, particularly in regard to signifying civilization versus barbarism, as well. as gender and other social statuses. In essence, the body and the mind are much more linked than in Western thought, which is heavily influenced by the legacy of mind-body dualism, but even the concept of “the body” is different in Chinese thought, encompassing the body itself and clothing. Dorothy Ko writes

“Charlotte Furth, in her studies of gender in Chinese medicine, has reminded us how futile it is to speak of "the body" as a unitary historical subject that is constant across temporal and cultural divides. The classical Chinese medical authorities, for example, conceptualized "the body" in terms of cosmology instead of anatomy:They saw the human body -- the domain of medicine -- not so much as biology as a discourse on embodiment. It took as its subject not the physical body but the patterns of change in human life.”

I feel like that historians who are interested in women’s history as a whole should be aware of the diverse ideas surrounding “the body” and the affect these have had with women across varying cultures, especially in this current time period where academics throw around the idea of “bodies” so casually. In my own personal academic experiences, there is somewhat of a disconnect with the more philisophical domination of certain ideas (I note Judith Butler in particular) and the actual relevance to history. I’m not saying that deconstruction isn’t a useful tool, as asking “why” is one of the key components of history, but at certain point, it can get so abstract to be ultimately irrelevant. Throwing around abstract re-definitions that were created in specific academic context bog down historians, as these ideas filter through the humanities. I think is why I found Bray’s book very compelling, as I think she took a very balanced approached of examining material culture in the context of cultural thought and vice versa.

But these are essentially just my reflections on this book

#Francesca bray #feminism #women's history #radfems #radical feminism #radfems please interact #mine #basically Francesca bray very politely came for their asses lol #I might write more about how post modernism is filtering into all areas of women's history and how it can be useful and detrimental #I really don't like Foucault tho lol'#I find him very condescending

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zaelous · 3 years

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The noble and most ancient House of Black was both a family and a cult. A cult is a social group that is defined by its unusual religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs, or by its common interest in a particular personality, object, or goal. In the case of House of Black, this philosophy and its subsequent goals were a form of magical eugenics focused on the supremacy of so-called “pure blood.” Establishing these basic principles is important at the outset in order to demonstrate how these beliefs and the House of Black’s implementation of them are what make them not just a family of extreme beliefs but a cult whose practices affected Bellatrix’s sense of identity, self esteem, and motivations, effectively forming her personhood.

I. PRINCIPLES BY DEFINITION

Eugenics is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population, historically by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior or promoting those judged to be superior. Positive eugenics is aimed at encouraging reproduction among the genetically advantaged; for example, the reproduction of the intelligent, the healthy, and the successful. Negative eugenics aims to eliminate, through sterilization or segregation, those deemed physically, mentally, or morally undesirable.

Pure-blood supremacists believe that only pure-bloods were real witches and wizards, and were often inclined to consider themselves as the elite of the Magical world; a place in which they believed that Muggle-borns did not belong. More militant subscribers of this philosophy even consider themselves to be akin to royalty. Elitist pure-bloods even believed that it was a sign of weak magic to enjoy non-magical company. Those who are pure-blooded but do not ascribe to supremacist ideologies are considered to be blood traitors and are shunned.

Shunning can be broken down into behaviours and practices that seek to accomplish either or both of two primary goals:

To modify the behaviour of a member. This approach seeks to influence, encourage, or coerce normative behaviours from members, and may seek to dissuade, provide disincentives for, or to compel avoidance of certain behaviours. Shunning may include disassociating from a member by other members of the community who are in good standing. It may include more antagonistic psychological behaviours. This approach may be seen as either corrective or punitive (or both) by the group membership or leadership, and may also be intended as a deterrent.

To remove or limit the influence of a member (or former member) over other members in a community. This approach may seek to isolate, to discredit, or otherwise dis-empower such a member, often in the context of actions or positions advocated by that member. For groups with defined membership criteria, especially based on key behaviours or ideological precepts, this approach may be seen as limiting damage to the community or its leadership.

Concerted efforts at influence and control lie at the core of cultic groups, programs, and relationships. Many members, former members, and supporters of cults are not fully aware of the extent to which members may be manipulated, exploited, or even abused. While there is really no standardized diagnostic tool with which one can definitively say whether an organization qualifies as a cult, some social-structural, social-psychological, and interpersonal behavioral patterns can help to assess a particular group or relationship, in this instance the House of Black.

II. PATTERNS OF CONTROL & DIVISION

The group displays an excessively zealous and unquestioning commitment to its leader, and (whether he is alive or dead) regards his belief system, ideology, and practices as the Truth, as law. This is a trait more difficult to illustrate than others, since there is no one individual leader of House Black; however, it is the root of the House Black philosophy that their ideologies and beliefs are passed down generationally, presumably from medieval times (given their family tapestry). We do see a lengthy history of the family’s current patriarch (whoever it is at any given time) enforcing these ideologies on other family members by excommunicating anyone whom they deem to have fallen out of line with the House of Black doctrine. The fact that excommunication from the family is even a thing that exists and that it furthermore is seen as the ultimate form of punishment emphasizes two things:

Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished. There is no room in the House of Black to politely disagree or hold any sort of discourse on ideals. Even at the tender young age of sixteen, Sirius was summarily blasted off of the family tapestry and considered a traitor by the Black family for expressing his malcontent and running away to the Potters, a blood traitor family. Any member of House Black is obliged to conform to their ideologies or be expelled, which is seen as the worst possible outcome.

The most loyal members (the “true believers”) feel there can be no life outside the context of the group. They believe there is no other way to be, and often fear reprisals to themselves or others if they leave—or even consider leaving—the group. In a normative, healthy family situation, being formally dismissed from the group usually only occurs under dire circumstances and often even then doesn’t fully occur at all. The implementation of characters such as Sirius and Andromeda prove early on that the family’s dogmatic beliefs are non-negotiable and that deviation has consequences.

The leadership induces feelings of shame and/or guilt in order to influence and control members. Often this is done through peer pressure and subtle forms of persuasion. This might be considered to be a more headcanon-y than explanatory point, given I don’t readily have any examples of shame or guilt being utilized directly, but given that these other points exist and are true within the narrative, it would be impossible for those things to have occurred without the use of shame and guilt to manipulate family members, even in occasions when it isn’t intended to deliberately. The peer pressure aspect of control is an especially pointed aspect of the situation, given that they are a family, having one’s entire family ascribe to certain beliefs and practices makes it a given.

The leadership dictates, sometimes in great detail, how members should think, act, and feel (e.g., members must get permission to date, change jobs, or marry—or leaders prescribe what to wear, where to live, whether to have children, how to discipline children, and so forth). This is a point easily illustrated by again referring to the tapestry blasting incident(s), as it was up to the Black patriarch what should be done about betrayals, and he even further punished those who continued to support Sirius in violation of his ruling. However, it’s also common for House Black to arrange marriages between family members to those families whose ideologies align with their own, and if a suitable match cannot be found, to keep the blood pure by arranging marriages within the family itself. These marital practices tie in with other notable behaviors (elitism, polarization, isolation), but most importantly, they illustrate an aspect of positive eugenics, which is the practice of selective breeding.

III. GENDER ROLES

The whole point of this excessively lengthy essay is to explain how and why selective breeding is canon and thereby explain my headcanons for Bellatrix’s relationship to her beliefs and her gender and why the two are inherently linked. The entire concept of supremacy and eugenics relies on the continuation of the genetic precepts that the supremacists view to be superior-- that is, there is an inherent obligation within these beliefs to carry on the pureblooded genes and to provide the future generation of supremacists. The brunt of this endeavor obviously falls upon women, as they bear children, but given the patrilineal and patriarchal nature of the family structure (and that of English culture in the 1950s), the implication is that rather than wanting women who can bear these children, the desire is for male heirs to carry on the family name and the family bloodline, which is their most sacred duty.

Having been born a woman in the House of Black was to have been born with a form of original sin in that Bellatrix had already failed to be a male heir. Her only recompense for this initial transgression is to go on to provide male heirs, especially given that her mother died trying (and failing) to do so. While there is very little personal information available about Cygnus Black, we do know that his wife provided him with three daughters rather than a son, and died giving birth to Narcissa and left him to raise these daughters alone. Without a doubt, Cygnus would have viewed his failure to provide a male heir as a shortcoming, and given that his wife was dead, there was no way for him to vent his resentment on her. This is where we cross over into headcanon territory because I can’t prove anything about who Cygnus Black was as a person from the original text; however, it stands to reason giving the existing evidence and narrative structure (and how his daughters each turned out) that he was not a well man and that subsequently Bellatrix’s childhood was not a healthy or happy one as a result of that.

As the oldest child, Bella had little in the way of protection from her father’s dictatorship, although she did her best to shield her sisters from it once she had sisters. She always took the brunt of her father’s expectations, and his wrath should those expectations fail to be met. This is why, of all the Black sisters, Bellatrix held her supremacist values and mission the closest to her heart, and why I believe she and Narcissa held such a close relationship despite the onset of Bellatrix’s very obvious descent into madness. I also believe this is the key difference between Bellatrix and Sirius: although they both came from House Black, they grew up to be polar opposites. I think it was Rowling’s intention here to illustrate that no matter where you come from, you choose your own beliefs and destiny and you can choose to be good rather than evil or some shit, but I don’t think it’s necessarily as clear as simply choosing a different set of beliefs. I think that Sirius and Bellatrix were raised in very different conditions that instilled the same beliefs differently, and therefore had a different effect. Then one might point out Andromeda, but there’s a difference there, too-- not only did she have Bella to provide a barrier between her and their father that Bellatrix did not have, but she also experienced love outside of the family, which is a whole other set of variables I won’t begin to get into. Suffice to say that falling in love is an external catalyst which can’t be accounted for, and it certainly didn’t happen to Bellatrix.

As an adult, Bellatrix would have had a clear duty to take a pureblooded husband and provide him with male heirs. I do have a whole headcanon (which frankly deserves its own post but I digress) that she was first engaged to her Hogwarts sweetheart, but that he died early in the first war before they could be married, and as a result, her father arranged her marriage to Rodolphus Lestrange instead. This was not just to fulfill the whole get-married-have-babies mandate, but also because Bellatrix went mad with grief after her fiancé's death, and it’s really her first tangible, visible detachment from emotional stability. Her father’s solution to simply replace her fiancé might have been fine, had the couple not experienced infertility issues and been unable to produce children.

Infertility is not so surprising when one takes into account the rampant inbreeding in both the Black and the Lestrange families. Generations of intermarriage in the name of blood purity is guaranteed to give a myriad of health issues, certainly not all of which might be cured through magical means. However, an inability to fulfill her duties as they relate to Bellatrix’s personhood would be, to her, an absolute and unmitigated failure on her part. Fertility issues are already an enormous strain without the added pressures of a bloodline to preserve, but especially given that Andromeda essentially defected from the cause, the responsibility lies solely with Bellatrix and Narcissa, and as the older daughter, the responsibility is once again heavily on Bella. Her inability to conceive disallows her from adhering to her most sacred principles, which Bellatrix views as a failure on her part and results in a definitive rift in her self esteem and identity that she could not repair. She is desperate to be good and pure by the standards in which she was raised, and to fulfill what she views as her destiny, but she is unable to, and this destroys her.

IV. SYNTHESIS & RELEVANCE

Having been raised into these conditions, Bellatrix was conditioned into holding House Black and its doctrine at the forefront of her being. Because she held these beliefs so firmly and from such a young age, being a pure blooded witch is a part of Bellatrix’s identity and her self esteem. This is why any affront to these beliefs upsets her so much; it is a personal betrayal not just of these ideals but also of her wholly as a person. What made her turn on family members who had been burned off of the Black family tapestry was how personally she took their choice to leave. It was a personal betrayal, it was a publicly humiliating snub by someone who ought to have been on her side. Who did she have to rely on but family? The word family carries with it an expectation that they would die for the name Black and subsequently anyone who bore that name. Betraying the family was the same as a personal betrayal to Bellatrix, and was essentially spitting on everything Bella believed to be the most sacred and important obligations they held.

These circumstances create the perfect candidate for an offshoot of the pureblood supremacy cult, the Death Eaters. In the context of the House of Black, Lord Voldemort would have been the obvious escalation and clear apotheosis of pureblood supremacist ideals. Since Bellatrix had already been raised in an environment where the ends justifies the means and violence was an acceptable and omnipresent tool (she had ancestors who literally tried to make muggle hunting a legal sport so it’s not a stretch to think that House Black implemented casual violence elsewhere), she was an ideal fit for an extension of that ideology that placed more emphasis on negative eugenics and moving into the extermination of those deemed unworthy of their society.

V. AZKABAN

Following the conclusion of the First Wizarding War in 1981, Bellatrix was incarcerated at Azkaban at the age of 30, when she still had time to conceive a child. Her fanatical religious devotion for her cause convinced her that she would not be in prison for very long, but as she passed the decade mark, it would have been very clear to Bellatrix that if she were having fertility issues in her twenties, having aged past forty would make it very nearly impossible to get pregnant once the dark lord finally came to rescue them. Perhaps her belief in his infinite power led her to believe that Voldemort could magically fix whatever was the impediment to conception, or perhaps, having long given up on conceiving a child, Bellatrix viewed this failure as a reason to prove herself, a reason that she had to be the most dedicated, the most accomplished of his followers-- because she had failed in all other aspects and this was all she felt she had left to contribute to the pureblooded cause.

Either way, her spent youth would have clearly marked her failure in what she viewed as perhaps the most important endeavor in life, and one might suggest that her regression to a child-like state of mind following her traumatic incarceration in Azkaban could be an unconscious response to her desire to return to her youth in order to fulfill this expectation of her; or a desire to return to a time when she was not a failure but instead could still be of value to the ideologies in which she was raised and through which she viewed her purpose in life.

One could also surmise that Bellatrix’s recklessness in battle and her willingness (and possibly eagerness) to die for the cause of her pureblooded messiah might be due to this failure and the hope that at least if she died before the onset of menopause, it could be said that she was murdered before she could fulfill her duty, rather than being accused of having failed at it altogether. It’s also worth mentioning that her father had died while she was in Azkaban, and with his death, she lost any opportunity to finally earn his love and approval.

#meta ❝𝚆𝚁𝙰𝙿 𝙸𝚃 𝚄𝙿 𝙴𝙻𝚃𝙾𝙽 𝙹𝙾𝙷𝙽❞#this is SO LONG #but it's SO IMPORTANT #this post includes all of my most relevant hcs for bella #and my interpretation of so much of her canon #it took me over 4hrs to write #and I know I promised it like 2wks ago #but here it is finally

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maine-writes · 4 years

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Concerning Kobolds

Most people of the Nine Realms imagine kobolds to be nothing more than diminutive lizards who spend their days scraping a living off of rock and stone, crawling around in dank sewers and caves, and lurking in the impenetrable darkness. After spending some considerable time among city kobolds, I have come to conclusion that such prejudices are only partially truthful.

Kobolds can be categorized into two groups; city kobolds and cave kobolds. The only real difference between them is their attitude towards visitors.

City kobolds are found in the catacombs and sewers of our cities, scavenging from trash and refuse. Few realize that these kobolds maintain their sewage systems and trash heaps. Although the gnomes lay claim to inventing these systems, it can be argued that the true creators are the small draconic beings that live within them.

These kobolds continually work in the sewers, keeping water and refuse flowing into underground chambers to be purified by a host of subterranean fungi and plantlife. Organic material is used as fertilizer or feed for a number of domesticated animals, such as giant beetles or rats. To the surprise of surface dwellers, some especially industrious kobold warrens burn trash they find in great furnaces that heat their homes.

Kobolds live and work in alternating shifts. As one shift works tirelessly for hours, another relaxes. Their mentalities are focused on their shifts, if one works, they care only for their work. If one relaxes, they focus on making the most of their time off. A kobold whose responsibility is to dig may come across an intruder stuck in a pit trap, but ignore them entirely, only going so far as to alert the kobolds who are responsible for clearing out traps. A kobold who is off duty may adamantly decide to spend their shift sleeping, allowing nothing to interfere with their rest.

They do not enjoy visitors, but will tolerate them as long as they do not interfere with their work. Being small and weak, kobolds rely on traps and improvised devices for protection against intruders and dangers that lurk in the Underdark. Their eyes are accustomed to the cold darkness, so they rarely venture out into the light or use weapons that rely on accuracy of sight.

But beyond their industriousness, city kobolds are surprisingly cultured. They enjoy taking in the nocturnal delights of the city above, sneaking into theaters and night markets. Surface dwellers understand that the kobolds are a vital part of their lives, so they tolerate their unexpected appearances.

Some kobolds infiltrate homes and manors in search of materials for their work, only taking what they think will not be missed. However, their judgement is far from perfect. To prevent the theft of such items, some surface dwellers leave gifts to the kobolds in boxes left in the center of a room for their nightly visit.

Another cultural aspect of kobolds is their taste in food, or lack thereof. The allure of foods common to people such as you and I are lost to kobolds. The staple food of these little dragons is a type of subterranean fungus we know as Kobold Bread. It is pale in color, with a wide, smooth hood. Its flesh, which lacks in texture, tastes similarly bland and lifeless. However, when cooked in some form of fat, rat fat being the favorite of city kobolds, it takes on a whole new dimension; akin to smoked meat in flavor and texture.

Strangely enough, kobolds appreciate sweet desserts, such as chocolate and caramel. A rare fungus found in the Underdark, Tiamat's Gold, tastes similarly to these treats and is coveted by the kobolds.

When it comes to drink, kobolds brew a fermented beverage called kurmek, using barley, dried Kobold Bread mushrooms, and flavored with a mixture of bitter herbs. Interestingly, most of the kurmek produced is sold to taverns and vendors aboveground, leaving very little for off duty kobolds to imbibe.

The mating habits of kobolds are simultaneously straightforward and nuanced. What surprises non-kobolds is their concept of sex. Other than the realities of reproduction, kobolds do not assign roles to one sex or another. Responsibility falls upon those whose skills and abilities are best suited. On top of this is their ability to change sexes over a period of several months. Through violence, disease, or natural disaster, a kobold warren may experience a great loss of population. When this occurs, and there is a great disparity in the number of females to males, kobolds change sexes to maximize their reproductive potential. Mating season for any particular kobold warren occurs every three years, signaled by black patches on the throat of males. Although kobolds indulge in sexual activity during their off hours, they do not reproduce until this time. Females lay three to four eggs each season, and on average, three of the hatchlings will be female. Over time, some of these females will become male.

Kobolds are lost on the concept of love. Sex is either used for reproduction or personal enjoyment when off duty, not for forming personal emotional connections. In fact, it can be said that kobolds are incapable of forming emotional attachments. The truth is, kobolds do indeed form connections to others, but not in the same way as we would. They see friends as we would tools and resources. But to be accepted by a kobold is indeed a great feat, as despite our shortcomings and differences in natures, they find something useful.

Kobolds have a maximum lifespan of 150 years, a trait of their draconic heritage. Cave kobolds rarely live beyond the age of 20 due to disease and the harsh nature of theie environment. City kobolds, however, typically live much longer. Two years after hatching, a kobold is considered an adult and given responsibilities. Young kobolds are prone to making mistakes, but these are easily forgiven as long as it doesn't threaten the wellbeing of the warren.

Kobold leadership is rather rudimentary. The oldest kobold manages the others, delegating reponsibilities over certain groups to the most experienced kobolds of that particular field. A unique individual in kobold culture is the Speaker, a shaman and politician amongst kobolds. The Speaker is special as they are born with innate arcane abilities, trained from the moment they hatch to better use their skills. The Speaker is tasked with praying to Tiamat on the behalf of the warren and representing them when speaking to outsiders.

Another notable individual is the Scrapper, a kind of inventor and artificer. Scrappers are among the few kobolds who regularly travel between warrens, bringing with them unique expertise and creations in exchange for food and shelter. Renowned for their ability to create miraculous marvels of engineering from little more than scavenged materials, Scrappers are the kobolds who push the industry of the warrens.

Kobolds, in a nutshell, are a hardy and resourceful folk, despite their rather frail and witless appearance. They can be quite silly, evidenced by their strange creations and odd behavior, but also unpredictable. Like goblins, kobolds are not to be underestimated.

#kobolds #dnd

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arcticdementor · 4 years

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There is, as happens so often these days, a spectre haunting the imagination of the western left. That specter is most commonly dubbed ”strasserism”, though it has other names, such as ”redbrownism”, ”nazbolism”, or more unwieldy names like ”Angela Nagle leftism”. When I came into the left at the beginning of the last decade, these terms did not exist in any meaningful way. As far as me and the people I knew were concerned, ”strasserite” was an incredibly obscure term used exclusively by online neo-nazis is their petty, internicine conflicts. None of us paid them or their silly ideological totems any heed.

At the beginning of the first half of the 2010’s, the left I was a part of was finally starting to feel hopeful again, after the disorientation and loss of direction that came with the fall of actually existing socialism. During the long winter years of the 90’s and early 00’s, people either hopelessly and bitterly clung to a prophecy that everyone else had now fully discarded, or they tried finding new boutique causes to replace the ones that had failed. To take my native Sweden as an example, two of the more significant new causes were opposing the neo-nazis and opposing globalization. There were some victories – or at least, people liked to think so – but the idea of actually achieving political power was dead in everything but name. The left mostly came to accept the role as the social conscience of liberalism, or in the case of antifascism, fancied itself as the Batman protecting end-of-history Gotham City. The streets of triumphant liberal society might have been gritty, the politicians corrupt and undeserving, but antifascist Batman still rose out of bed every night to protect the craven and the low from monsters lurking in the shadows. Or so they liked to think. Most of the time, they just hung out and drank beer.

…

All the details of the intervening decade are beyond the scope of this essay, but it’s fair to say that the left today is more broken and politically defunct than at any point since the fall of the Soviet Union. In fact, a case can be made that the crisis facing the left today is more serious than the crisis of the late 80s and early 90s. ”Left populism” as a political model has failed. Jeremy Corbyn has presided over the worst labour party showing in nearly a century. The ”Sanders moment” is over, and there’s no sequel to any of these failed left projects anywhere in sight. This decline is likely terminal and irreversible, because unlike the decline in the 90s, the left no longer has any significant working class support. In fact, with each new ”left revival” a la Corbyn, the constant bleeding of working class support only seems to accelerate. Comrade Bhaskar at Jacobin magazine touts the (in)famous AOC as the next new great presidential candidate and hope for global socialism, but anyone with an IQ somewhere north of the melting point of water – or at least, anyone who doesn’t have a paper he’s eagerly trying to sell you – knows that this is a truly desperate flight of fancy that will never come to pass, not in a million years.

…

We first begin with the obvious. Strasserism does not actually exist. Nobody reads the Strasser brothers, not even the neo-nazis who threw accusations of strasserism at each other decades before anyone else. Nobody outside of Russia – and for that matter, nobody inside of Russia – cares about the intellectual output of the National Bolshevik party, if such an output were to be shown to exist. The reason the term strasserism has been brought out from the dustbin of history by the contemporary left is because said left is currently in the middle of a social and political panic, and this panic has at least two central functions. Firstly, panics such as these are one way for a group of believers to deal with a situation where prophecy fails. For the left, the only thing it knows today is constant failure. Like any religious cult, the failure of prophecy can only be redeemed by shedding the blood of those members identified as polluting the faith. The price of social cohesion is the turn toward constant purges.

…

Partaking in this ritual of self-depreciation does not mark you as an outsider. It is only if you break the rules of the game, only if you acknowledge the man behind the curtain, only if you point to the basic truth hidden behind this outer layer of ironic self-mockery that you become one of us, one of the so-called strasserites. This truth is a fairly simple marxist truth. Classes have class interests, and so the idea that you could have a political movement – the left – that was well and truly dominated by one class, yet still wholly committed to the class interests of another class, but also just too bumbling and out of touch to ever do a good job of looking out for the class it supposedly ”really” cares about is, to put it extremely mildly, a dubious idea. It is much more likely that a political movement dominated by one class will also be more or less entirely dedicated to pursuing the class interests of that class, while also being unable to take any strong action that goes against the interests of its dominant class.

…

There was a socialism before Marx, and it was utopian and based on human reason and moral progress. There are good reasons for why this brand of socialism fell out of favor, but within its context one can definitely hold the view that a small class of enlightened and educated well-to-do people, acting out of the goodness of their own hearts, will eventually bring about socialism by lifting up the poor, racist and/or stupid proles. You don’t have to agree with it, but it fits together.

A central premise of marxist, materialist or scientific socialism, on the other hand, is that classes simply cannot act this way. Classes pursue their own interests and act politically not out of greed, or generosity, or any other personal bit of sentiment, but due to historical and economical pressures. It is this very simple fact that makes the ”materialism” of someone like Bhaskar Sunkara at Jacobin magazine, and of most leftists of his stripe in general, so incredibly contradictory. For it to work, there has to be an unstated agreement among the faithful to never seriously use the tools of marxist analysis on the left itself. Any and all self-examination must remain on the level of personal discussion (”can person so and so really be a socialist, when her parents are so rich?”). The punishment for transgression against this agreement, for breaking the most sacred code of Omerta the modern left has, is swift and severe: you will get cancelled for this, and you will be added to the ever growing list of ”strasserites” and ”secret nazis” who tried to lure the faithful away from the true path. What happened to Angela Nagle is instructive in this regard; her article, The Left Case Against Open Borders, was an attempt to argue against unrestricted immigration from a class-based, materialist perspective. It’s quite likely – and also quite amusing – that she would probably have recieved less sustained hate online if she had written that immigration shouldn’t be allowed as long as non-white people talk funny and smell bad.

…

I bring my own example up not to relitigate old battles but to underline the point that the sin that earns people the label of ”strasserite” or ”chud” or ”redbrown nazi” has nothing to do with racist animus, or even the issue of immigration more generally. Conjuring up the threat of racism and the ghosts of Nazi Germany is not done because it is true, but because it is necessary. In my case, having a father who came to Sweden to work from central Africa proved to be an embarassing but fairly minor speed bump on the way to declaring me a fighter for aryan blood purity. There is nothing foolish or irrational about any of this; our esteemed comrades are simply doing the only thing they can do, faced with a contradiction they are unable to resolve and a movement that is rapidly falling apart.

…

While I don’t pretend to speak for anyone other than myself, I would claim that the ”strasserite” class-analysis of politics in the west and the role of the left today has a few central features. To start: as the economies in western countries have shifted over the past decades, a new sort of class of people has sprung up and grown in social and political importance. In the united states, the most common name for this class is PMCs; the professional-managerial classes. Their name is less important than their function and political trajectory. To brutally simplify things for the sake of brevity, the notable feature of many PMCs as political actors is a blend of political liberalism and cultural progressivism, merged with a political project aimed at increasingly subsidizing their own reproduction as a class, ideally by means of state transfers. The state should forgive student debt. The state should dabble in reparations. The state should hire ”ideas people” to write up reports and thinkpieces about reparations. The state should create new racial justice commissions, or just generally create more jobs that can employ people who by dint of belonging to this class feel that them taking a job at Walmart means that capitalism has failed and it’s time for a revolution. The most radical, put-upon and economically insecure parts of this class today naturally gravitate toward the left, because the left is – no matter what leftists delude themselves by saying – a fairly focused, competent and credible class project. When Corbyn came out of nowhere and became Labour party leader, it was a real grassroots movement that brought him there; a grassroots movement of students and people who either have ambition to move up the ladder or a legitimate fear of looming proletarianization, of falling down the social and economic ladder and finding themselves joining the proles.

The particular form of ”pro-worker” rhetoric these members of the PMC use mostly boils down to a sort of charity. Vote for us, and we’ll give you higher benefits and free broadband, Labour recently tried to tell the recalcitrant workers of the north. It didn’t work. This mode of ”charity” is hardly selfless – it would be a free ”gift” from these PMC activists given to their precious salt of the earth proletarians, and like all gifts it would be reliant on the goodwill and generosity of the giver. Its main function would also surely be to feather the ever growing number of nests for this class of comfortable, university-educated administrators. And when some leftists start seriously debating why ”racists” should be denied medical care from the NHS, one starts getting a sense of just how much hierarchical domination their future ”worker’s paradise” promises to deliver to the working poor.

The point here is not a moral one. After Labour lost, one exasperated member and activist despaired over how blind the workers were, how easily fooled they were by tory propaganda. ”Don’t they see how evil capitalism is? How brutal and unfair it is?”, this activist wrote: ”I have many friends with good grades who are stuck working at grocery stores, stocking shelves”. Anyone who pretends to be some sort of materialist cannot in good conscience make fun of sentiments like this; it is completely rational for someone in that position to think that ”the evils of capitalism” are somehow laid bare for the world to see when their friends are forced to stock shelves like a common peon in order to pay the rent. That the other workers at the grocery store probably find this way of thinking completely ludicrous and arrogant is obviously besides the point. Politically speaking, the fury and energy that proletarianization engenders should never be underestimated, because it causes political explosions. Jeremy Corbyn successfully challenged the political cartel that had been running Labour on the back of such a political explosion.

We should not make fun of an activist who despairs at the state of the world when good, solid middle class people with solid middle class grades can no longer achieve the middle class lifestyle they were promised. It is however a basic political truth that a worker’s movement consisting of people who are angry at the prospect social and economic ”demotion” – in other words, people who are fighting against the cruel fate of having to become workers – cannot ever succeed. Promising free broadband, or unlimited Space Communism, or some other stupid fantasy world where getting angry at having to work like a normal person is acceptable because nobody has to work won’t really change that.

…

The grand political divide that sundered the house of modern ”socialism” boils down to the question of which class should have its interests taken care of in the first instance. It is all well and good to talk about ”doing both”, or try to soothe workers by saying that once socialism wins, nobody will work, so they’ll all be taken care of then. A century ago Joe Hill mocked the preachers who tried to placate starving workers by promising them there’d be plenty of pie up in the sky after they were all dead. Today, Aaron Bastani does an even more pathetic job within that vaunted political tradition, promising the british working class asteroid mining and fully automated communist holodecks once The Revolution(tm) succeeds. Until that day comes, though, it can’t really be helped that they’ll have to stay under the thumb of – and fight the battles for – the downwardly mobile professionals, huh? After all, who will build all those fancy asteroid miners if little Junior suddenly has to work at Starbucks like a common plebeian?

This is not a question of left incompetence, or Brexit suddenly wrecking everything, or something that Bernie woulda, coulda, shoulda done. The left is bleeding working class support everywhere. The left is picking up support among the more affluent and well-to-do stratas everywhere. The left is merging with greens and liberal ”progressives” everywhere. This is not incompetence, or cowardice. It is not personal, nor can it be fixed by the actions of individual persons; it is a vindication of historical materialism, and it is playing out right before our very eyes.

It is time for the ”socialism” of the professional and managerial classes and the socialism of the working classes to part ways. The former is moribund and a historical dead-end. The latter, I think, still has a case to be made for it. More importantly – and personal experience from outside the left bears this out – it still has an audience that is willing to listen to it.

…

Workers aren’t stupid. They’re not evil. They haven’t been ”tricked by the media”. They need no false shepherds to guide them, no well-paid moral commissars to teach them to not randomly slaughter their neighbors because of muh racism. They have abandoned the left parties because the left parties have abandoned them, not ”culturally” as some proponents of identity politics would like you to think, but materially. They know their own class interests, and they know that the left is inimical to those interests. This is good news, at least for those of us with the courage and political will needed to help them free themselves from their so-called ”betters”. Let the Labour activists of London lament over how ”disappointed” they are that the working class has stopped following orders. We will not be like you. We will not promise new masters and new yokes to live under, new aristocracies and ”vanguards” to subsidize, new cadres of people selling them moral sermons and sensitivity courses. We will promise them a chance at revenge.

#malcom kyeyune #read the whole thing #professional managerial class

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worstfruit · 5 years

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GOBLINS

Ok-- this setting focuses on a small continet, a bit smaller in width than australia, but longer (think the stretched greenland we see on globes). To the north, past a mountain range that crosses the land, lay and endless expanse of pete bogs and moors and thick, thonry shrub forests: here live the greenskins and barbaric humans of lore: free creatures and beasts and even men, who pay no mind to the settled empire that exists just south. Focusing on one of these races, I will be talking about my favourite! The goblins (sometimes called the ‘Moors Goblin’ bc i published this on dnd beyond so i could use it as a homebrew race). I’ve borrowed a lot from Warhammer and 40k but as I work on world building I hope to separate these fuckers from both dnd and warhammer.

What differentiates your Moors Goblin from their more classic fantasy cousins is primarily their culture and disdain for sunlight (ok since writing more...unsure if i want them to be light sensitive!! will have to stew on this). Even Moors Goblins who live outside of cave networks don't see too much direct sunlight due to the cloudy and rainy climate of the northern highlands, and so they're prone to sunburn and blindness during prolonged exposure. Likewise, dryer climates greatly weaken their immune system, and so they rarely travel far enough south to mingle much with other races. The Moors Goblin is unique in that their genetic makeup is closely linked to that of fungus, making them incredibly hard to kill despite some of their more glaring weaknesses. They bleed viscous, green blood, thick with spores that, when the time is right, allow for the birth and growth of new goblins. While they do possess many organs similar to most mammals, like cold blooded reptiles, Moor Goblins can survive seemingly impossible amounts of tissue loss and internal damage, as their green bodies generate oxygen through photosynthesis and their central nervous system operates as a networked inlaid along their vascular lines. For this reason, many tribes take to the belief that it is actually impossible to kill them without the aid of fire or acid, and will chant some iteration of 'no burial mound can hold me' as a warsong. Even if a goblin is crushed beyond recognition, a new goblin may soon crawl from the dirt below the sight of his death due to the spores released upon his body's destruction.

Your typical cave Goblin may not know how to swim very well or see all too well in the sunlight, though some tribes do make a living off fishing the river ways in which they reside or travelling large, flat plain lands during daylight hours. Your average Goblin lives a simple lifestyle with a group of their own, and while some clans may be open to trading and friendly relations with other native races such as orcs or humans, Goblins are known for being isolationists and rather...tricky. They've had many altercations with more southerly dwarves and wood elves(? -- unsure if ill use elves in this manner as ive yet to expand on them). If asking any Dwarf about them, you'll likely hear that they are all cutthroats and petty thieves (largely in part due to land disputes within the mountains), whereas an Empire Elf would likely have little to no experience with them whatsoever.

In general, the world does not know too much about Moors Goblins and the inner workings of their society, as the race enjoys keeping to itself, and for the most part, other, more dominant races tend to likewise keep away from goblin controlled regions.

Older Goblins hold no higher rank in society, though they are allowed more relaxed roles due to their age and resulting feebleness. What does elevate their standing is their outward apperance: namely height and scars. A goblin tends to form welts, pockmarks, bumps, or discolorations after being wounded. Goblins who don’t see much warfare or even friendly sparring tend to be smooth, and as a result, assumed inexperienced, whereas more seasoned goblins tend to be more disfigured or even missing limbs (this implies that they have reached the age and status to breed, though sometimes old goblins may be smooth skinned, and young goblins with a rough early start may appear older than they are). Though more muscular goblins may bully their way through the nest, this doesn’t affect their social rank, though muscle build tends to correlate with height, and height a prized trait within Goblin society. The tallest Goblin is the defacto leader, but this tends to lead more diminutive individuals to ‘augment’ their height through unnatural means (stilts, hats, and even magic). The chieftain of a tribe often wears some sort of elaborate mask made of animal bone that helps to augment his height, and also represent the clan's culture through color, symbol, etc. If a tall goblin is entirely smooth, he must rely on his wits and magic knowhow to gain a reputation worthy of leading. If a very muscular but short and scarred goblin arises, he may fight for the title-- though this is rare. It seems instinctual for these creatures to flock to the tallest.

The Moors Goblin generally has very large ears, useful for detecting sonic frequencies within the earth.

They tend to have more angular facial features, larger noses and chins, hollow cheeks, and large, eyes with yellow sclera and slit pupils. Irises vary in color, from those ranging normal to humans, as well as rarer shades of red, purple, black, or even white. Goblin eyesight is exceptional in the dark, making them adept at living underground and scavenging for food at night, but making them poor day time hunters. Their sense of smell is keen like that of a dog, helping tunnelers to seek out anything from fungal food sources to rare minerals and dangerous sulfur deposits. Claws are large and thick on both hands and feet, and the front teeth are sharp, with pronounced incisors and canines and a set of flat, crushing molars at the back of the jaw.

Cutting open a goblin will reveal a startling lack of any apparent major organs! They possess spider-like booklungs, a network of bladder like muscles that have thousands of little capillary rivulets expending from within and connect the tissue to itselve. Cutting into muscle reveals a sort of crystalline pattern, made of a meat like, gooey substance similar to the consistency of what inside an aloe leaf. These fluids range from a watery, yellowish-green, to more viscous forest greens and even dark browns. Although any surgeons in this world would not be able to discern this easily, the goblin does posses a CNS, it is simply spread through the entire body. Likewise, there is no apparent heart organ, but it seems that electrical impulses force a reflective twitch from this network of innards that compels the goblin body forward. The closest thing to a brain can be found along what resembles a spinal column, where more obvious veins stem from to attach to the eyes, booklungs, and multiple small stomach like sacks. Their skeletal system is composed of a highly resilient and flexible cartilage made of keratin, similar to beetle shells. The goblin’s capacity to heal is astounding and quicker than that of your average mammal, though their springy ‘bones’ and soft flesh do make for easy wounding. Some older, stronger goblins develop a thick callous and scar tissue that makes for excellent, natural armor, and is sought after as a source of leather by some dwarvish tribes.

Eating goblin meat is ill advised, however. It appears to be toxic to pink skins, and no known predator relies on these creatures as a food source.

For this reason, as well as their reproductive nature, goblins are seen as a plague amongst some northerly dwelling empire races. Cut one down, multiple eventually appear. Many have learned to burn goblin bodies rather than cutting up their remains; the more green blood spilled, the more likely they are to return from the earth! Infant goblins can be surprisingly strong and viscous towards perceived threats, and in a great number, they can do a lot of damage.

To an outsider, it may appear that all Moors Goblins are male. In reality, there is only one sex, or rather, in goblin terms, there is no sex or /really/ gender. Moors Goblins have no native terms for 'he' or 'she', though in Common they are typically just referred to as male due to their physical features. Moors Goblins have no need for more telling indicators such as breasts, but do coexist with races that do recognize a binary sex and gender, so they are somewhat familiar with the concept and may navigate it according to their preferences, if they have any. Many are fine with just being labeled an it, a they, or a he/she, though some more involved with humans may chose a set of pronouns.

Moors Goblin society is collectivist at its core; this may be confusing to outsiders however as Goblins are extremely easily distracted by anything they might consider valuable–– be it shiny, aromatic, tasty, dangerous, or just large and heavy. While this kleptomaniacal behavior may seem individualistic on the surface, Goblins operate similar to a termite or ant mound, or even beehives in that they collect food and goods to add to a collective hoard. It’s an animalistic sort of instinctual partnership a Goblin has with their clan, wherein they gather and fight as a collective, for the collective good, in exchange for food and protection. It could be looked at as a primitive form of taxation, but don’t let their demeanor fool you. Many aspects of Goblin society differ so greatly from human culture that it would be easy to mistake the creatures as mere beasts.

Their written language only exists in pictographs and simplistic glyphs, though someone unlearned in their ways may not be able to decode their cave scrawlings. If something must be written for delivery, Goblins utilize clay tablets (much like ancient Sumerians) and rarely take part in record keeping or history. Only the immediate now, and the looming future, really concern the Goblin folk. Oral tradition is common though mostly for religious purposes, and the orator role seems to be taken by older Goblins who have survived wars and skirmishes to tell the tale. In spite of this, Goblins are highly intelligent; though they lack long attention spans and tend towards the hyperactive and impulsive (and greedy) nature, they are adept magic users as well as rogues, druids, rangers, barbarians, and fighters, even bards, and a few exceptional individuals often leave their home to pursue training with other races. Goblin clerics, wizards, monks, and paladins are almost nonexistent, though it is certainly possible for exceptional individuals to arise and take on these roles...just, unheard of. Medicine men are often looked at as Shamans and revered as mystics. If a Moors Goblin has the capacity to learn, or the natural ability to use magic, he will often become a Shaman; as such many 'Shaman' are either sorcerers or clerics, though goblins do not differentiate between the two much, aside from designating some shaman as healers and others as battlemages. Healer shaman are typically alchemists and herbalists.

Religion is not at the center of Goblin culture, though it does play a significant enough role that it merits mentioning. A Goblin may worship any number of deities from a polytheistic pantheon of old, elemental gods; they take their beliefs from oral traditions passed on from generation to generation. Mining and tunneling act as the fulcrum for many folk lore and urban legends, using cautionary tales of careless tunneling practices and unearthing unspeakable evils of the deep. Mentors will often tell these tales to their charges to keep them in line, mostly. As creatures composed of plantlike matter, Moors Goblins tend to feel a kinship with the earth, moss, lichen, and the sort. Shaman, like clerics, draw their powers from the elements and deities who represent them, and on occasion may use their abilities to aid in battles, though primarily reserve them for healing and supplementing their oral tradition.

Goblins will pair bond with one or multiple partners throughout their lifespan, though a coupling for the sake of childbearing is useless in their society. A single goblin may have multiple litters of children in a lifetime, depending on anything from the availability of food to a need for more goblins in a clan. The collective cares for newborns, with a little focus on the biological parent as authoritative figures, though many young goblins may bond with a particular elder and chose to spend more time around them. Many older goblins may mentor or teach younger ones in their trade if they take an interest, though rarely is a goblin forced into a role. It varies among tribes, but is generally a very organic process where any given goblin simply does whatever he is good at. This is how names are given: first names are mostly what matter and are derived from telling characteristics that arise as the goblin child ages. Surnames exist as well, however, and are assigned later once a trade is selected or perhaps a deed done that awards merit. This helps differentiate goblins with more common names, from seperate tribes, or from a proud lineage: fore example, let’s say two Dweezles exist in the same clan for whatever reason. One may become a hunter, the other may become a bard of some sort. The hunter may be named Dweezle Lantz whereas the bard may be called Dweezle the Yox, or in common, Dweezle the Merry. (I am using a very bastardized patois as a basis for a lot of goblin names simply bc i like the idea of Goblle being derived from Orc lowspeak, which I base off a very bastardized French! For no reason other than shits and giggles).

Goblins are often 'born' as twins or triplets, though the mortality rate is somewhat high due to disease and accidents. Goblins share a distant ancestry with that of fungus, and as such their reproduction involves a gestation stage wherein the parent blood lets beneath mushroom caps in a central breeding chamber within the cave networks he may inhabit. From here the spore-filled fluid takes to the dirt and develops into fetuses, which gather further nutrients from the rich soils and the other fungal and plant life found in the cave floor. It continues to grow until a full formed Goblin baby is ready to crawl free from the earth. Infants will possess exemplary motor skills once unearthed and instinctively know to crawl towards older goblins and the scent of food.

Your typical Moors Goblin dwelling is found around the base of a mountain, rolling hills, or within the nooks and crags of a cliff. The tunnels are narrow and warren like but lead to a number of different caverns, both natural and goblin-made, that are much more open. The central chamber has many interconnecting tunnels and can range from large to massive in size. The larger the tribe, the larger the atrium. Often, tribes will seek out pre-existing caverns to make as their atrium, which is similar to a plaza or the town centre of a human village. Here, cave paintings and banners decorate the walls, Shamans will set up shop to offer medical aid or entertainment and education in story telling, the chieftain will make his rounds or sit atop a central throne and hear reports from foot soldiers or settle disputes amongst tribe members, and children will run about and practice battle or play. Beneath the atrium lies the food storage, and below there lies the brood. If a cave network has lava, blacksmiths and cooks may conduct their business around these pockets of magma, but will otherwise carry on outside the tunnels. Individual goblins may seek out and dig their own rooms for sleep, though many will seek others to sleep in piles. Goblins live both within these tunnels and on the surface around the outside of the area. They guard the territory around the mine for miles, sending out patrols of hunters equipped with war horns and using wolves as watchdogs to alert them to intruders.

The Moors Goblin spoken language is quick and sharp on the tongue, spoken in fast fragments meant to quickly convey information. Moors Goblins of old were purported to operate as a literal hivemind, not needing verbal language to communicate with one another, though the modern Moors Goblin has lost this telekinetic ability. The influence of such can be seen in how they work in groups. Pheremone signals and bodily gestures (such as ear twitches or stance) carry nonverbal information throughout the entire brood; attacking one goblin in or near their mound can result in a full fledged, hive-wide retaliation. For this reason it is highly advised to isolate enemy Goblins, or to use crowd control measures when dealing with multiples.

Goblins will align themselves with orcs and humans in times of war, making them an intimidating force to be reckoned with. Even a single tribe can be difficult to battle, though, as they attack in droves and rely on their sheer numbers to viciously bring down any enemy. Shamans and bards will aid a fight using berserker elixirs and spells, AOE heals and buffs/debuffs, and providing chants that both invigorate their soldiers and deter the enemy. Bards typically play animal bladders fixed with a series of tubes, much like the real world bagpipes, war drums, or brass oboe-like instruments that sound off a deep resonance (similar to a didgeridoo). Hunters and rangers will lead a charge on wolves or other tamed beasts, while the chieftain leads the foot soldiers. Tribes at war have a high turnover rate for their leaders.

When teamed with orcs, it is common for goblins to serve as a replacement for pack animals, even during hunts, however it should be noted that goblin slavery is not a common practice among the northern orc tribes and seems to be a willing symbiotic relationship between both races.

The Goblin diet consists of local fauna and flora that is relatively easy to hunt or gather. Goblins don’t participate in much agriculture aside from a few species of mushroom and various moss or lichen, and do not partake in domestication or cattle rearing of any sort, though a variety of rats, bats, small reptiles, amphibians, and insects coexist alongside the Goblin people in a similar manner to humans and domestic dog and cats. Granted, these creatures are also often on the menu. Many rangers will capture wolves and ride them to hunt, as well, though this is less common for goblin groups that live deep within cave systems.

Due to the lack of sunlight, Goblins get their vitamin D through both photosynthesis of available, diffused light and a hearty diet of fatty meats and protein based foods, supplementing it with small rocks and precious gems, nuts, berries, roots, grasses, and leafy greens. Some minerals may actually imbue a Goblin spell caster with certain heightened abilities for a short while, ranging from increased sensory capabilities to hallucinogenic effects. Contrary to popular beliefs, Goblins do eat a number of root vegetables and fruits, gathered and bartered from surrounding forests and towns. Shamans enjoy brewing powerful elixirs and even moonshine that aid in battle or serve as poison to coat their weapons in.

Relationships with other races are mostly dependent on trade, though due to border conflicts, Goblins have an adversarial relationship towards Dwarves. The Goblin’s inclination towards stealing and eating gemstone and ore, as well as collapsed tunnels and collisions have put the two races at odds with each other.

Many tribes align themselves with Barbaric human clans or nomadic tribes of neighboring orcs, and will fight or even live alongside these different races in relative harmony.

i think that’s it for now!!!!

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bluewatsons · 5 years

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Michael Albrecht, Acting Naturally Unnaturally: The Performative Nature of Authenticity in Contemporary Popular Music, 28 Text & Performance Quart 379 (2008)

The notion of authenticity is ubiquitous in discussions of performance and popular culture. This paper examines the ways in which expectations of authenticity are produced through the performance and the cultural and historical context from which that performance emerges. Specifically, the essay works to interrogate issues of self-reflection and self-awareness in musical performance and the ways in which those concepts work to constitute authenticity through performance. Ultimately, the essay demonstrates the ways in which the ostensible distinction between an authentic performance and a self-consciously artificial performance is an effect of specific performance practices.

In a journal article intended for members of the clergy, Reinard Nauta argues that one characteristic of a successful sermon is a successful performance of authenticity. In ‘‘The Performance of Authenticity,’’ Nauta examines the performance of pastors, ostensibly a natural extension of that preacher’s ‘‘authentic’’ relationship with their faith, and points to the constructed nature of the performance and its authenticity. In this schema, even if the pastor has reservations about the authenticity of their convictions, they should have faith in the authenticity of the performance. If the preacher performs their convictions of authenticity convincingly, they can, through the performance, constitute authenticity. Nauta asserts that ‘‘if we accept that pastoral care has a performative character, this also means that its authenticity can only be realized in playing the role of pastor. The dilemma of artificiality and authenticity can possibly be solved by pretending one believes in the performance one gives. In doing so, one brings about a reality that is grounded in faith in one’s performance’’ (428). Nauta’s claim is startling insofar as it shows that even those events that are ostensibly the most natural are deeply performative events in which authenticity is constructed and constituted.

While pastoral performance is not the focus of my inquiry, Nauta’s framework brings to the fore the constructed nature of authenticity and its complicated relationship to performance. In this article, I take up the ways in which authenticity is constituted through performative acts by examining several different musical performances. Through a critical reading of these performances, I trouble existing frameworks that foreground acts of self awareness and self reflection in performance.

In Performing Glam Rock, Philip Auslander (2006), a distinguished scholar of popular music and performance studies, isolates the roots of the high expectations for authenticity in discourses of popular music within the counterculture movement of the 1960s. He notes that performers during this era were expected to maintain a stage persona that was identical to their ‘‘real life,’’ and states that ‘‘the ideology of authenticity mandated that musicians appear on stage as themselves, not as any other persona or character’’ (13). Similarly, he suggests that the authenticity performed by musicians in this counterculture functioned as a natural extension of performer as self. Isolating two well-known performers from the era, Janis Joplin and Joe Cocker, Auslander claims that ‘‘it often seemed that their physical performances resulted more from their own internal experiences of powerful emotion than a desire to communicate with their audiences’’ (17). In Auslander’s schema, since the 1960s the ideal of the performance of an authentic self continues to inform discourses of popular music; however subsequent decades have troubled the notion of authenticity as emanating directly from the self through performance.

Auslander takes up a model outlined by another noted performance studies scholar, Richard Schechner (2001), in Performance Studies. In Schechner’s textbook, he outlines four states that are salient to performance: being, doing, showing doing, and explaining showing doing.’’ He states that ‘‘‘being’ is existence itself. ‘Doing’ is the activity of all that exists . . . ‘Showing doing’ is performing: pointing to, underlining, and displaying doing. ‘Explaining ‘‘‘showing doing’’’ is the work of performance studies’’ (22). Auslander specifically focuses on the distinction that Schechner makes between ‘‘doing’’ and ‘‘showing doing’’ In his assessment of rock music, he distinguishes between those performances by members of the 1960s counterculture like Jimi Hendrix and those of glam rockers like Marc Bolan of T.Rex. In this schema, the former group were merely ‘‘doing’’ a performance, while the latter were ‘‘showing doing’’*actively pointing to the ways in which their act was a performance and potentially different from their ‘‘authentic’’ selves. Auslander explains that ‘‘one could describe Hendrix as simply ‘doing’ the actions he performed: they seemed to flow out of him naturally. Bolan, on the other hand, did not just carry out certain actions but also pointed to and underlined the fact that he was carrying them out’’ (101). Auslander seems to privilege ‘‘showing doing’’ above merely ‘‘doing,’’ and this binary (that I take from Auslander, though he borrowed it from Schechner) is the central theoretical framework through which I engage the relationship between authenticity and performance.

In my analysis, I isolate performances by contemporary popular musicians Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, a cover of their work by Ben Folds, and the performance strategies of the alternative country/southern rock band The Drive-By Truckers, specifically its lead singer Patterson Hood, in an effort to trouble the binary between ‘‘doing’’ and ‘‘showing doing’’ that Auslander sets up in Performing Glam Rock. Through their lyrics, videos, and personae, Dre and Snoop work on constructing an ethos of authenticity as members of the Southern California urban scene. Likewise, Ben Folds performs a certain kind of artifice that situates him within the context of a hipster, and thus separates himself from those interested in maintaining a certain notion of authenticity as a marker of cultural worth. The performance of the hipster inverts traditional notions that privilege the authentic above the artificial by paradoxically positing certain performances of artifice as acts of authenticity. Yet the performance of ‘‘authenticity’’ and the performance of ‘‘artifice’’ are both performances. By simultaneously performing authenticity and artifice, ‘‘doing’’ and ‘‘showing doing,’’ the Truckers destabilize these distinctions and situate those distinctions within the context of the performance. Maintaining the distinction between ‘‘doing’’ and ‘‘showing doing’’ works to create a hierarchal relationship between different performance practices*practices that are ultimately both acts of performance. I ultimately contend that similar to the experience of the pastor in Reinart Nauta’s article, authenticity and artifice are constituted through performance practices.

Though the performances I analyze in this article are deeply informed by issues of race and exist in very different racialized contexts, I do not specifically undertake a specific critical analysis of the different ways in which issues of race intersect with the notion of authenticity. I am not making an argument that specific performance practices are inherently better or that they offer different emancipatory potential. Other scholars have specifically addressed the ways in which different performances of identity are adopted as strategies for challenging dominant discourses about race and performance. Moreover, I am aware that any analysis of authenticity exists within a context of cultural sharing that has historically been marked by problematic relations of power. While I do take up issues of race in my analysis, a more thorough interrogation of the specific relationship between authenticity, performance, and race is beyond the scope of this article. Instead, through my analysis I take up the ostensible division between performances that ‘‘do’’ and those that ‘‘show doing,’’ isolate the hierarchy implicit in that binary, demonstrate the inversion of that hierarchy and ultimately offer a displacement that exceeds the logic of the binary.

One of the motivations for this paper is to take up a call that Auslander makes in Performing Glam Rock to put performance at the fore of cultural studies and popular music studies. He states that ‘‘if cultural and media studies of popular music have neglected performance, performance studies has been remiss in its general neglect of musical performances’’ (2). In this paper, I hope to bridge some of the gap that Auslander sees between cultural studies of popular music and performance studies by focusing on the performative nature of popular music, both in its live and recorded manifestations, and in the complex relationship that those performances maintain in relation to issues of authenticity.

The field of performance studies has tended to privilege live performances over recorded ones. In my analysis, I analyze both live and recorded performances, and contend that while live and recorded performances are indeed different kinds of performances, when thinking about the relationship between authenticity and performance, the distinction is not necessarily useful. In Liveness, Auslander persuasively problematizes the binary between live and what he characterizes as ‘‘mediatized’’ performances. He contends that ‘‘the ubiquity of reproductions of performances of all kinds in our culture has led to the depreciation of live presence’’ (36). For him, the proliferation of reproduction in an increasingly mediatized landscape results in a moot distinction between live and recorded performance. In fact, he contends that ‘‘the very concept of live performance presupposes that of reproduction*that the live can exist only within an economy of reproduction’’ (54). In my analysis of Ben Folds’s cover of Dr. Dre, I focus mainly upon the recorded performances and videos of the artists, while in my investigation of the Drive-By Truckers I engage both live performances as well as recorded performances. Ultimately I contend that the ‘‘liveness’’ of the performance is not salient to my analysis, and that both live and recorded performances can produce the distinctions between authenticity and artifice, and between ‘‘doing’’ and ‘‘showing doing,’’ that comprise the bulk of my analysis.

Ben Folds Covers Dr. Dre

In 2005, Ben Folds, a singer-songwriter who is a mainstay in the contemporary hip music scene, covered Dr. Dre’s gangsta rap classic ‘‘Bitches Ain’t Shit.’’ Folds performs the song in a loungy tongue-in-cheek style that drips with ironic humor. The song, originally a b-side to Folds’s single ‘‘Landed,’’ was released as a single on iTunes with moderate success and has become a centerpiece of Folds’s live shows. His version plays with Dr. Dre’s gangsta rap performance, especially the myriad signifiers that Dre employs to mark the authenticity of the performance.

‘‘Bitches Ain’t Shit’’ was originally released on Dr. Dre’s 1992 album The Chronic. The track features several rappers including the then-aspiring artist Snoop Dogg. The first gangsta rap album to achieve widespread mainstream success, The Chronic commercializes an urban, Southern California lifestyle by advertising specific patterns of consumption: low-ride cars, guns, 40s of malt liquor, and of course ‘‘the chronic’’ (slang for especially potent marijuana). The album also featured three videos (‘‘Fuck Wit Dre Day (And Everybody’s Celebratin’),’’ ‘‘Let Me Ride,’’ and ‘‘Nuthin’ but a ‘‘G’’ Thang’’), each of which shows the rappers sporting the latest west-coast L.A. fashions, myriad scantily clad women, tricked-out cars, a glorification of ‘‘gangsta’’ life, and (usually obscured) guns and references to marijuana. The videos contribute to the image of Dre and Snoop as ‘‘hard’’ gangstas and reinforce their credibility as an ‘‘authentic’’ voice of the west coast urban lifestyle. Part of the success of the album relies upon the ethos of Dre and Snoop as tough, masculine, authentic representatives of the African American communities in Compton and Long Beach. Dre and Snoop go to great lengths to demonstrate that their immersion in the gangsta lifestyle is not a performance, but is in fact an authentic expression of their real-life experiences. For instance in the song and accompanying video for ‘‘Fuck Wit Dre Day,’’ Dre characterizes an estranged former band mate as having become a sellout by forsaking his authentic roots in the gangsta community in favor of an affected performance that solely serves the interests of the record industry. Though it did not produce a video or a single, ‘‘Bitches Ain’t Shit’’ is stylistically and thematically similar to the rest of the tracks on The Chronic including the hit singles and videos. As such, the song does similar work in constructing the rappers’ authenticity through their performance of a certain lifestyle. Beginning with its opening line, ‘‘bitches ain’t shit but hos and tricks,’’ the song features a litany of misogynistic sexually explicit and violent lyrics that were to become a mainstay in gangsta rap.

Ben Folds’s cover humorously and ironically twists the premise of the lyrics by re-situating the context. In his version, ‘‘bitches and hos’’ circulate against middle-class white masculinity. The ironic humor of the song relies upon this contextual juxtaposition, and Folds deploys his ethos as a glib musical virtuoso and a fixture in the college music scene to facilitate this recontextualization. Moreover, he switches the genre of the song from a hardcore gangsta rap to a melodic piano piece with the obligatory sensitive aura and lush harmonies. Folds’s version of the song very explicitly points to its own artifice; in fact, it relies upon a performance of artificiality and irony to accentuate the humor of the song. While he shows a great deal of respect and reverence for the song, Folds is very aware that he is the ‘‘wrong’’ person to be performing it, as the song is seemingly incompatible with Folds’s persona as a performer. In ‘‘Passing, Cultural Performance, and Individual Agency,’’ Bryant Alexander notes that ‘‘cultural membership is...maintained primarily through recognizable performative practices. Membership is contingent on the validation of those cultural performances’’ (380). Ben Folds re-articulates the authenticity of Dre and Snoop’s performance to hyperbolically and ironically reconfigure the perfor- mance practices of the gangsta rappers and subsequently to suggest that Dre and Snoop’s perceived authenticity is an effect of their performance practices.

Ben Folds’s cover brings Dre and performative qualities of Dre and Snoop’s authenticity to the fore through his self awareness of its own artificiality. For example, in his performance of the song, Folds foregrounds his white middle class accent, creating a jarring discrepancy between the two versions. In ‘‘Taking it Seriously,’’ his examination of the eighties synth-pop band the Pet Shop Boys covering U2’s ‘‘Where the Streets Have No Name,’’ popular music scholar Mark Butler contends that this kind of tongue-in-cheek cover contains a critique of authenticity. For Butler, through their synthesized cover of a song steeped in traditional rock authenticity, and through the self-aware artifice that the band performs, the Pet Shop challenged the supposed authority that U2 maintained via their authenticity. He contends that ‘‘given the problematic status of synthesized sound in rock aesthetics, the deliberate artificiality of the Pet Shop Boys recording can be understood as a critique of the authenticity expressed by U2’’ (4). With Butler, I agree that performing a cover of an allegedly authentic song can potentially demonstrate the contingent nature of the authentic performance. However, I am uncomfortable locating the agency to critique the authenticity of a performance solely in someone re-performing an allegedly authentic performance and subsequently reconstructing a hierarchy between those who are supposedly aware of their role as a performer and those who are simply ‘‘doing’’ a performance.

Butler simply reiterates the self-awareness problem identified in Auslander’s distinction between ‘‘doing’’ and ‘‘showing doing;’’ specifically that ‘‘original’’ performers come to exist as having little or no self awareness, and their rendering of authenticity becomes a kind of true expression of their ‘‘authentic’’ selves rather than a performance in its own right. By self-consciously pointing to the artificiality of their covers, the performances by Folds and the Pet Shop Boys engage what Kathy Ferguson dubs ‘‘mobile subjectivities.’’ She argues that ‘‘mobile subjectivities are temporal, moving across and along axes of power . . . without fully residing in them. They are relational, produced through shifting yet enduring encounters and connections, never fully captured by them’’ (154). Ferguson privileges the practices of white men temporarily inhabiting subject positions that are not necessarily their own. In her theoretical framework, by inhabiting an ostensibly foreign subject position, Ben Folds demonstrates that the supposed authenticity of Dr. Dre’s performance are open to reinterpretation and reconfiguration. She claims that through this process ‘‘the solidity of the categories men and white could deteriorate, as the available material and semiotic conditions work to loosen the hold of conventional categories’’ (180). Thus, in her framework, seemingly immovable categories of identity can become mobile through self-reflexive recontextualization of the performance practices that work to constitute those identity categories. In my analysis, I am less concerned with the specific relationship between mobile subjectivities and identity, and instead want to highlight the ways in which the process of recontextualization demonstrates the constructed and constituted nature of authenticity performances.

Performing Mobile Subjectivities

I want to disrupt the binary between the original authentic performance and the self-consciously artificial reproduction of the performance. Both the original and the cover are performances; neither is closer to representing an authentic expression of self, and both the artificial and the authentic are produced by the performance. On my view, all subjectivities are mobile, and those mobile subjectivites become manifest through specific, contextualized performance practices.

This mobility is highly dependent upon the audience of the performance. The expectations of the audience are essential to the production of authenticity, and performers often must convince the audience of their authenticity before their music will be taken seriously. The audience expectations for authenticity are particularly harsh when artists perform the authenticity of cultures of which they are not apparently or obviously members. In ‘‘Will the Real Slim Shady Please Stand Up?,’’ her treatment of Eminem, perhaps the most successful white rapper, Lindsay Calhoun claims that ‘‘it’s whether the consumer can locate the narrative tropes and identifiers of an ‘authentic urban hip hop legacy’ that matters and not whether someone is actually living that experience every day’’ (273). While Calhoun is correct in assuming that audiences are able to accept performances of authenticity by ostensible outsiders, the task for these performers is much more daunting. Eminem must consistently point to those markers of authenticity in his performance much more than Dre and Snoop do. Eminem is never able to simply ‘‘do;’’ he must consistently ‘‘show doing’’ in his performance in a way that black urban rappers need not. Even though both Eminem and Dr. Dre are able to successfully perform authenticity, audiences see Dre’s performance as somehow more natural, and as such he does not necessarily need to ‘‘show doing.’’

However, in Appropriating Blackness, E. Patrick Johnson points to potential problems with characterizing the performance of Dre and Snoop as somehow more authentic, or as one that is simply ‘‘doing’’ what comes naturally rather than ‘‘showing doing.’’ Johnson contends that the notion ‘‘that ghetto life is the site of uncompromised authentic blackness’’ is false (29). Rather than simply existing as authentic embodiments of ghetto life, Dre and Snoop are instead mobilizing the signifiers of that ‘‘authentic’’ ghetto life in order to construct an image of authenticity. Thus, their performance project is in many ways similar to that of Ben Folds who is similarly mobilizing the signifiers of ‘‘authentic’’ ghetto life, albeit in an ironic fashion that points to his artifice, rather than in the ostensibly ‘‘real’’ manner in which the rappers point to their authenticity.

By contending that both the original and the reproduction are both effects of performance, I am in no way arguing a relativist position, but rather seek to situate the cultural, temporal, and spatial logics that undergird the production of authenticity. Assuming that the differences in race, class, audience composition, and other factors are not germane to analyzing the difference in performance between those of Folds and those of Dre would be irresponsible. Eric Lott, for instance, would be quick to note that Folds’s cover evokes an entire history of blackface and the historical and contemporary legacy that surrounds that practice and that has brought historically black culture into mainstream culture. Lott notes that ‘‘Mick Jagger’s performance of blackness, even without painting his face, is part of a long history of blackface performance, and that reflects a tension that continues to circulate in contemporary culture’’ (243). He asserts that ‘‘blackface is a charged signifier with no coincidental relationship to the racial politics of culture in which it is embedded’’ (242). Thus the meanings that are invoked through the respective performances of Dre and Folds, including those meanings that pertain to the notion of authenticity, are complex and potentially contradictory. Yet both are still performances, and neither is more inherently authentic or artificial. Instead, scholars should read these performances for the complicated and often contradictory ways in which they engage issues of race and identity.

The different ways in which authenticity is produced through the performances of Folds and Dre speaks to the notion of passing, a concept that has a complex history in the relationship between race and performance in this country. Traditionally, passing was a practice of biracial individuals or light-skinned African Americans who were able to ‘‘pass’’ as a member of the dominant white culture. These individuals adopted a set of performative practices that enabled them to successfully identify with both sides of a seemingly entrenched racial boundary, destabilizing the division in the process. The process of passing as consequently been extended to include individuals who pass along lines of class, gender, and sexuality. Moreover, passing can refer not only to members of a marginalized culture passing as members of the dominant culture, but also moving in the other direction. In ‘‘Pass ed Performances,’’ an introduction to a special issue of Women and Performance that focuses on passing, John Jackson and Martha Jones contend that on a daily basis individuals engaging in strategies of passing to pass for the group for which they most closely identify. Passing is thus not a practices of tricking others into thinking that one is part of a group in which they do not belong; rather, according to Jackson and Jones ‘‘passing denotes not social artifice but sociological absoluteness: the degree to which all identities are constituted through routinized and repeated actions. One passes for what one purportedly is . . . everyday, in thousands of miniscule and major ways’’ (14). Thus, individuals engage in strategies of passing even as they perform in ways that allow them to pass for those groups of which they are ostensibly authentic members.

Passing is ostensibly antithetical to discourses of authenticity in that it often involves purporting to be something that one is not. As Kerry Rockquemore contends in ‘‘Forced to Pass and other Sins Against Authenticity,’’ ‘‘According to the identity commandments, passing is a sin against authenticity. Thou shalt not pretend to be something that you are not . . . We all fit into some neat conglomeration of social categories and it’s just too confusing if we can’t take people at face value’’ (17). According to this schema, the performance by Dre is reassuring because it conforms to certain expectations about the ways in which blackness is performed through certain performative practices. Similarly, because of the extraordinarily complicated and problematic history of white performers ‘‘passing’’ as African Americans, Folds constantly points to his whiteness and assures the listener that he is not trying to be black. Instead, Folds’s simultaneously transgresses certain assumptions about race while reassuringly performing his whiteness in such a way as to ensure that he ‘‘passes’’ for white and is in fact not violating the so-called identity commandments that Rockquemore outlines.

The Ben Folds performance exists within a long-standing historical context of white performers ironically engaging signifiers of blackness. Folds is in fact enacting what Ferguson would call a mobile subjectivity; however, assuming that Folds is more able to engage a mobile subjectivity than the original performers speaks to a history of hip as it has been understood for the last half century. In The White Negro, Norman Mailer makes a distinction between the hipster, whom he dubs a ‘‘white Negro,’’ and the African Americans who serve as the source of the hip that constitutes a hipster. For Mailer, historically, African Americans lived in the present in a way that whites did not. He asserts:

The Negro . . . could rarely afford the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization, and so he kept for his survival the part of the primitive, he lived in the enormous present, he subsisted for his Saturday night kicks, relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of his existence, to his rage and the infinite variations of joy, lust, languor, growl, cramp, pinch, scream and despair of his orgasm. (4)

For Mailer, the hipster ‘‘absorbed the existentialist synapse of the Negro’’ (4). However, ‘‘having converted his unconscious experience into much conscious knowledge, the hipster has shifted the focus of his desire from immediate gratification toward that wider passion for future power which is the mark of civilized man’’ (6). Thus, the hipster was able to adopt mobile subjectivities in ways that the African American performers of the ‘‘original’’ culture were not.

The discrepancy in Mailer’s characterizations of African Americans and the white hipsters with whom they share certain cultural proclivities is startling. Yet, the distinction that Mailer is making articulates the fundamental difference between those African Americans who simply ‘‘do,’’ against those white hipsters, who, through their self-reflection and awareness, are engaged in the process of ‘‘showing doing.’’ It would seem then, that privileging the act of ‘‘showing doing’’ over that of merely ‘‘doing’’ would speak directly within historical discourses that reflect the kinds of essentialist assumptions that Mailer’s descriptions invoke. Nevertheless, the values of irony, self reflection*the notion of ‘‘showing doing’’*continue to be valued in contemporary society. Hipness ostensibly gives permission to the white performer to ‘‘pass’’ as black or at least to temporarily inhabit the position of the Other because they maintain an ironic distance to the seemingly problematic practices of white performers playing roles traditionally performed by African Americans.

In his recent book Hip: The History, John Leland lauds the practices of the hipster for the ability to critique the mass cultural milieu in which they find themself. In this framework, hip provides a critique of a mass culture which tries to level everything in its path and create an undifferentiated inauthentic society. He argues that ‘‘mass culture, which in the Cold War era built up a titanic mainstream, invited a counteroffensive of hip dissent and satire’’ (336). Thus, the only ones able to exist outside of the juggernaut of mass culture are those ‘‘authentic’’ cultures that have avoided being coopted by the mainstream, and those who are able to draw inspiration from those supposedly authentic cultures and skillfully navigate the terrain of contemporary culture in ways that provide a critique. In this schema, by showing his ability to navigate not only the complicated realm of popular culture, but also able to draw from a supposedly ‘‘authentic’’ culture, Ben Folds is able to play the part of the hipster.

A framework that privileges the hipster, or ‘‘shower-dower’’ and their ability to cull from cultures that are supposedly more ‘‘primitive’’ or ‘‘original’’ than those that exist within the mainstream of contemporary culture complicates the notion of authenticity. The hipster who seeks to transcend the undifferentiated masses of mainstream culture seeks a ‘‘realness’’ that they allegedly cannot find within that culture. As Leland contends, ‘‘within hip’s juggernaut is a quest for the real, a belief that enlightenment involves stripping away sophistication, not adding it’’ (53). This framework constructs two kinds of authenticity. In the first instance, those cultures which are able to flourish outside of the realm of the mainstream maintain a kind of static authenticity. Unable to move beyond merely ‘‘doing,’’ these allegedly primitive cultures avoid the menacing arms of mass culture and become a resource pool for the second kind of authenticity. In this second kind of authenticity, a supposedly much more dynamic authenticity exemplified by the hipster, certain members of contemporary society are able to transcend the artificiality of mainstream culture by tapping into the realness of those ‘‘doing’’ the culture that avoids cooption. By ‘‘showing doing’’ and being able to skillfully navigate ‘‘real’’ and ‘‘artificial’’ cultural practices with an awareness of the complicated relationship between the authentic and the inauthentic, the hipster stakes out a position of authenticity with seemingly more agency than the culture from which they were able to draw their ‘‘realness.’’

This framework validates the hipster and proves to be problematic as it creates a hierarchal relationship between those performances that are ‘‘doing’’ and those that ‘‘show doing,’’ and acts as an inversion to the binary that privileges the authentic above the inauthentic. On the one hand, the hipster framework recognizes the binary that positions the authentic above the inauthentic by pointing to those cultures that are seemingly able to evade the allegedly inauthentic masses of the undifferentiated mainstream. On the other hand, it reinforces and constitutes a binary that privileges a specific kind of inauthentic performance*one that is aware of its own artifice* above that of those ‘‘authentic’’ performances that are uncritically merely ‘‘doing.’’ Seemingly ironically, the hipster performance of artifice ensures its authenticity vis-a`- vis mainstream culture, but also works to construct a hierarchy wherein the performance of artifice exists above the alleged non-performance of authenticity. In this framework, Ben Folds and Dr. Dre are performing two different versions of authenticity; Folds is performing the ‘‘artificial’’ authenticity of the hipster, while Dre is performing his ‘‘true’’ authenticity. However, the former is privileged above the latter, as Folds is able to temporarily inhabit an identity through his performance* enact a mobile subjectivity*while Dre is only able to perform a rigid conception of self as it manifests in the urban African American experience. In the following section, I problematize the matter further by isolating the performance of a band whose members are consistently pointing to their performance (showing doing); yet, through the process of pointing to the performance, they are solidifying and constituting their supposed authentic identities.

The Drive-By Truckers: Authentically Performing Themselves

In live versions of ‘‘18 Wheels of Love,’’ (including the one on the officially released live recording Alabama Ass Whuppin’), Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers introduces the song with a three or four minute spoken story while the band vamps behind him. The narrative, told with a pronounced southern drawl, chronicles the story of his mother who, working as a truck-log auditor, fell in love with a trucker and was subsequently married at Dolly Parton’s theme park, Dollywood. Hood concludes the story by noting that he wrote this song for his mother as a wedding present, and concludes the introduction and begins the song proper by emphatically stating that ‘‘every goddamn word of it is true.’’ This story, retold at many of the Truckers’ live performances, in many ways is a performance of white, southern, working-class authenticity. One might expect that because the members of the Truckers are indeed southern whites who do hail from working class backgrounds that their performance of that authenticity would be seemingly organic*merely ‘‘doing’’ like those performances by Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin that Auslander isolates. Yet the Truckers, especially their front-man Hood, constantly accentuate the markers of white, working-class authenticity in their performances. In this section, I posit the Drive-By Truckers as troubling the binary between ‘‘doing’’ and ‘‘showing doing.’’ Their performance is simultaneously an act of ‘‘doing’’ and ‘‘showing doing’’ and consequently exceeds the logic of that binary. As such, their performance renders the binary moot as well as the hierarchies implicit in that binary.

The Drive-By Truckers are performing at the intersection of two musical traditions*country music and southern rock. As a genre, country music has traditionally enacted the divide between ‘‘doing’’ and ‘‘showing doing’’ with the more mainstream Nashville country consistently pointing to its country-ness (Conway Twitty, Garth Brooks), while less mainstream ‘‘outlaw’’ artists (Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard) simply acted as themselves in their country songs. As Barbara Ching suggests in ‘‘Act Naturally,’’ mainstream country ‘‘often functions as a sly, even campy, announcement of the fact that it is a performance rather than a spontaneous expression of some pure emotion or state of being . . . in such a way as to underline its construction and social purpose rather than its presumed natural essence, innocence, and/or bad taste’’ (109). Because they sonically and spatially distance themselves from mainstream Nashville country, the Truckers claim an allegiance to outlaw country, and so would seem not to necessarily have to point to the constructed nature of their own performance. Yet the Truckers do consistently highlight the fact that their embodiment of white southern-ness is indeed performative. For example, Patterson Hood introduces each band member and specifically mentions the small town from which each member hails. Similarly, the band always plays under the banner of the Alabama state flag and passes a handle of Jack Daniels whiskey among band members at each performance. Thus, the Truckers exceed the requisite level of the performance of country-ness; this excess distinguishes them from most outlaw country outfits and works to undercut any presumption that their performance of authenticity is ‘‘natural.’’

More than identifying as country artists, the Truckers perform in the genre of southern rock, a genre deeply imbricated with discourses of white working class southern-ness. In his treatment of the Drive-By Truckers, Michael Buma contends that the band performs what he characterizes as a ‘‘redneck’’ identity. He claims that he uses the term ‘‘redneck’’ in the ‘‘spirit of subversive reclamation, referring to the...economically underprivileged and largely rural whites of the small-town south’’ (9). While the Truckers do highlight their ‘‘redneck’’ identity, scholarly reviewer S. Renee Dechert contends that by pointing to their identity, ‘‘showing doing,’’ the band is able to specifically address the political issues that exist within the white southern rural working class. She asserts that though the band plays up their ‘‘redneck’’ identity, ‘‘the band isn’t exploiting the stereotype; instead, they’re calling attention to it and to the socioeconomic issues it often obscures’’ (98). By pointing to their performance, the band performs their self awareness, and does so in an effort to separate themselves from the problematic relationship to a racial past that exists both through their identity as rural working-class white southerners and through the historical context of southern rock.

The process wherein the Truckers embrace their ‘‘redneck’’ identity speaks to the notion of disidentification outlined by Jose ́ Mun ̃oz in Disidentifications. He argues that ‘‘the process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recruits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identificiations’’ (31). By accentuating those characteristics of white southern identity that have traditionally been associated with a derogatory stereotype, with the noted omission of the obligatory racism, the Truckers work to rearticulate the figure of the redneck in ways that point to the universalizing work that the stereotype facilitates. In so doing, they simultaneously highlight the problematic historical context from which the figure of the southern redneck and the racism associated with that figure emerge.

The articulation between southern rock and white southern identity is central to understanding the genre, as is the complicated relationship between white southern identity and race. In ‘‘Luther King was a Good Ole Boy,’’ Mike Butler shows the ways in which the southern rock movement of the 1970s worked to constitute a white southern identity in the wake of desegregation. He states that ‘‘the Southern rock movement became emblematic of the South’s struggle for redefinition in the post- civil rights era’’ (43). Despite instances when white southern rock groups reached out to African Americans, like Lynyrd Skynyrd’s reverence towards an African American musician in ‘‘The Ballad of Curtis Lowe,’’ the movement maintained an uneasy relationship to the racial divide that existed in the south. The rebel flag and the confederate anthem ‘‘Dixie’’ were common at many southern rock concerts. Butler explains that ‘‘while Southern rock groups definitely did not follow the infrequent practice of speaking out against blacks and voicing support for white supremacy on musical recordings, several characteristics of the movement suggested that it continued the traditional Southern commitment to white supremacy’’ (46). The Drive-By Truckers are keenly aware that by performing in the southern rock genre, they are speaking within a discourse with a problematic relationship to race, and as such use their performances to negotiate a new southern white identity that acknowledges its racial past while condemning it.

Noticeably, the Truckers never fly the stars and bars, but do proudly display the Alabama state flag, thus enforcing their southern identity without endorsing a flag with a specific past of racial hatred and bigotry. Performing under the banner of the Alabama flag marks the tension that exists as the Truckers perform within a genre with a specific history of racism. On the one hand, the flag speaks to the strong sense of regional identity that is usually associated with the confederate flag and the Albama flag can consequently be read as simply standing in for the confederate flag.

On the other hand, the state flag does not carry the same kinds of racial history that characterizes the confederate flag. Many of the Truckers’ seemingly excessive acts of self-reflection in their performance work to assuage some of the racial tensions that emerge through any performance of white southern identity*especially a performance within a genre with a racially tumultuous past.

The Truckers’ third studio album, Southern Rock Opera, is indeed a performance of white southern identity. Through this concept album, the band tackles the complicated relationship that white southerners have vis-a`-vis race. On the track ‘‘Ronnie and Neil,’’ the Truckers take on the issue of race through the feud between Ronnie Van Zandt and Neil Young that is mentioned in Lynyrd Skynyrd’s southern rock hit ‘‘Sweet Home Alabama.’’ The song begins by referring to the Birmingham church bombings, and asserts that while the bombings were indeed a heinous act, acts like those did not speak for the entire South. The song begins,

Church blew up in Birmingham, four little black girls killed for no goddamn good reason. All this hate and violence can’t come to no good end, a stain on the good name. A whole lot of good people dragged threw the blood and glass, blood stains on their good names and all of us take the blame.

The song continues to wrestle with the complicated relationship that southern rock maintains in relation to racial/racist topographies as well as the specific position of rural white southerners in an always racially divided South. Much of Southern Rock Opera deals with similarly complicated themes and works through a process of disidentification to use the racist stereotypes of white southerners to construct a competing version of that stereotype. In ‘‘The Three Great Alabama Icons,’’ a spoken-word piece from Southern Rock Opera, Patterson Hood states that

When I first ventured out of the South, I was shocked at how strongly Wallace was associated with Alabama and its people . . . racism is a worldwide problem and it’s been since the beginning of recorded history . . . but thanks to George Wallace, it’s always a little more convenient to play it with a Southern accent.

Through his performance, Hood works to distance himself from the racism that Wallace espoused and goes on to note how Wallace publicly morphed from a vicious segregationist to a much more racially sensitive figure in his later years. In these ways, the Truckers are performing their white rural southern-ness as well as their lineage in the tradition of southern rock. Southern Rock Opera contains a surplus of lyrical images and musical tropes that work to enhance the performance of southernness that the Truckers exude in the album. In addition to specifically dealing with the issues of racism through the figure of George Wallace and the disavowal of the Alabama school house bombings, the Truckers refer to specific highways in the south, cultural practices that are indigenous to the south (like the proliferation of sweet tea), and other imagery that produces images of the south that is simultaneously revered and problematized. Moreover, the specific musical practices that the Truckers employ, such as utilizing three guitars to produce a dense sound (a la Lynyrd Skynyrd), crossing generic lines between rock and country, and singing with a pronounced southern drawl highlight the southern identity of the band. The performance practices of the band, which work to position their performance as authentically southern, are counterbalanced by the lyrics that specifically address the problematic relationship that white southernness maintains through its brutal racial past.

In their performance, the Drive-By Truckers are simultaneously acting the part of ‘‘authentic’’ southern rockers (‘‘doing’’) as well as highlighting a specific performance of white southern-ness (‘‘showing doing’’). In their case, the act of ‘‘showing doing’’ while simultaneously ‘‘doing’’ situates the performance differently from a less self- reflexive performance that would ostensibly be simply ‘‘doing.’’ They trouble discourses that privilege a ‘‘pure’’ performance of one’s own authenticity (‘‘doing’’) by consistently pointing to the performative aspects of their identity and authenticity. An ‘‘authentic’’ performance is never completely achieved, as they constantly highlight the constructed nature of that authenticity. In so doing, they bring to the fore the impossibility of any truly authentic performance, because the performance itself works to constitute that authenticity. Similarly, they disturb discourses that celebrate the agency of self-aware performances of artifice by performing a deep reverence towards those very qualities of authenticity that they trouble by accentuating the performative nature of that authenticity.

The Truckers posit the problems with privileging either ‘‘doing’’ or ‘‘showing doing’’ by demonstrating that those distinctions are both deeply involved in performance. In the final section, I further interrogate the act of performance in relation to ‘‘doing’’ and ‘‘showing doing,’’ and offer some potential implications for the disruption of this binary.

Though the Trucker’s performance works to disrupt the ostensible distinction between ‘‘doing’’ and ‘‘showing doing,’’ I want to be careful that as a critic I am not privileging their performances above those of Ben Folds, Dr. Dre or any others. My goal is to challenge those hierarchal distinctions that emerge when certain modes of authentic or inauthentic performances are mobilized and to demonstrate the relationship between those authenticity performances and their relationship to the distinction between ‘‘doing’’ and ‘‘showing doing.’’ I use the Truckers as an example that exceeds the logic that constitutes that distinction and do not want to reify their performance as somehow more complicated or inherently more worthwhile than those other performances. I ultimately contend that when entrenched assumptions about authenticity are challenged, new ways of thinking can emerge that are not bound by the logic of those original assumptions. I use the Truckers only as a tool to demonstrate the ways in which certain performance practices can complicate those assumptions about authenticity not to reify a logic that privileges certain performance practices above others.

Conclusion

By isolating the Drive-By Truckers, whose performance can be read as both ‘‘doing’’ and ‘‘showing doing,’’ I am not using them as a special case that exhibits properties of both performance practices. Many practices can be easily parsed into those categories, and many performances are simultaneously examples of ‘‘doing’’ and ‘‘showing doing.’’ Rather, I use them as an example of the ways in which the distinction itself is in fact spurious and misleading. Both ‘‘doing’’ and ‘‘showing doing,’’ are indeed performances; ‘‘doing’’ does not exist on a different plane from ‘‘showing doing.’’ However, different performances have different audience expectations and can elicit different effects. Likewise, the practices of ‘‘doing’’ and ‘‘showing doing’’ are both effects of the performance itself, and are not mutually incompatible. Through their performance, the Drive-By Truckers are able to simultaneously perform in such a way that could be either ‘‘doing,’’ ‘‘showing doing,’’ or both. Rather than focusing on reaffirming distinctions in performance that reaffirm hierarchal distinctions that are deeply involved in issues of authenticity, scholars should look to thoroughly contextualize performances. In so doing, scholars should ask the question of how performers use existing expectations abut authenticity and self awareness and to what effect.

E. Patrick Johnson nicely articulates the necessity to contextualize analyses of performance. In Appropriating Blackness, he suggests that ‘‘what frames a performance as performance, then, has as much to do with context as it does with the aesthetics of the event itself. In each context the ‘rules,’ conventions, and expectations of the text, setting, performer, and audience vary, and in each context they contribute to our understanding of performance events’’ (11). Beyond just contributing to our understanding of the performance event, contextualizing performances brings to the fore the ways in which certain kinds of performances allow performers to differently negotiate the complicated terrain of contemporary popular culture and the expectations of authenticity therein.

In each of the case studies I have interrogated, the specific kind of performance allows the performers to negotiate certain identity positions that might have been considerably more difficult through different performance practices. The mobile subjectivities that Kathy Ferguson advocates are facilitated through the array of performance practices vis-a`-vis authenticity and self awareness. In performing the authenticity of their faith even in times of doubt, the pastor in Nauta’s article is able to embody the authentic faith necessary for their profession. By performing ‘‘authentic’’ urban blackness and by ostensibly simply ‘‘doing’’ that authenticity instead of pointing to the performative elements of that authenticity, Dr. Dre and Snoop position themselves as authentic voices from the urban streets of California.

By positioning themselves in such a way, they are able to act in violent and misogynist ways by intimating through their performance that they are simply ‘‘telling it like it is’’ and embracing an ‘‘authentic culture.’’ By consistently pointing to the absurd and artificial qualities of his performance--by ‘‘showing doing’’--Ben Folds is able to negotiate the complicated power dynamics manifest in a white performer covering the work of African American artists. Folds’s cover of Dre is seemingly so blatantly artificial and pays such reverence to the original that Folds is able to get away with using the n-word, an act that in nearly all situations would be forbidden for a white performer. Likewise, the Drive-By Truckers are able to forge a vision of white southern identity that simultaneously acknowledges the racialized past of the south while providing a voice for poor rural southerners who are interested in working towards rectifying the intense racial divide that has characterized the south for centuries.

The Truckers facilitate this complicated feat through a performance that is both an act of ‘‘doing’’ and of ‘‘showing doing,’’ and that ultimately demonstrates that both acts are necessarily performances. As such, they represent a displacement to the false binary between ‘‘doing’’ and ‘‘showing doing,’’ and demonstrate that all performances encompass acts that are ‘‘artificial’’ as well as those that are ostensibly ‘‘authentic.’’ As future scholars examine the relationship between performance and authenticity in discourses of popular music, they should avoid both privileging ostensibly ‘‘authentic’’ performances as well as those performances that are seemingly able to negotiate a new kind of authentic performance by pointing to the performative nature of their act or ‘‘showing doing.’’ A careful analysis of performance should begin with the premise that authenticity and artifice are constituted through the performance itself. It should historically and culturally contextualize performances, specifically addressing the expectations of authenticity or artifice from which that performance emerges. Finally, it should look for the ways in which that performance conforms to or diverges from those expectations of authenticity and the ways in which that performance simultaneously produces and troubles distinctions between the artificial and the authentic.

References

Alexander, Bryant Keith. ‘‘Passing, Cultural Performance, and Individual Agency: Performance Reflections on Black Masculine Identity.’’ Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies 4 (2004): 377 404.

Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999. **. Performing Glam Rock: Gender & Theatricality in Popular Music. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2006.

Buma, Michael. ‘‘Stand Tall, Turn Your Three Guitars Up Real Loud, and Do What You Do’: The Redneck Liberation Theology of the Drive-By Truckers.’’ Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 13 (2006): 1 29.

Butler, Mark. ‘‘Taking it Seriously: Intertextuality and authenticity in two covers by the Pet Shop Boys.’’ Popular Music 22.1 (2004): 1 19.

Butler, Mike. ‘‘‘Luther King Was a Good Ole Boy’: The Southern Rock Movement and White Male Identity in the Post-Civil Rights South.’’ Popular Music and Society 23.2 (1999): 41 61.

Calhoun, Lindsay R. ‘‘‘Will the Real Slim Shady Please Stand Up?’: Masking Whiteness, Encoding Hegemonic Masculinity in Eminem’s Marshall Mathers LP.’’ The Howard Journal of Communications 16 (2005): 267 94.

Ching, Barbara. ‘‘Acting Naturally: Cultural Distinction and Critiques of Pure Country.’’ Arizona Quarterly 49.3 (1993): 107 25.

Dechert, S. Renee. Review of Pizza Deliverance, The Drive-By Truckers. Popular Music and Society 26.1 (2003): 97 99.

Dre, Dr. ‘‘Bitches Ain’t Shit.’’ The Chronic. Death Row, 1992.

Drive-By Truckers. ‘‘18 Wheels of Love.’’ Alabama Ass Whuppin. Second Heaven Music, 2002.

---. ‘‘Ronnie and Neil.’’ Southern Rock Opera. New West, 2002.

---. ‘‘The Three Great Alabama Icons.’’ Southern Rock Opera. New West, 2002.

Ferguson, Kathy E. The Man Question: Visions of Subjectivity in Feminist Theory. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.

Folds, Ben. ‘‘Bitches Ain’t Shit.’’ Landed. Epic, 2005.

Jackson, John L. Jr. and Martha S. Jones. ‘‘Pass ed Performances: An Introduction.’’ Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 15.1 (2005): 9 16.

Johnson, E. Patrick. Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003.

Leland, John. Hip: The History. HarperCollins Publishers, 2004.

Lott, Eric. ‘‘Racial Cross-Dressing and the Construction of American Whiteness.’’ The Cultural Studies Reader, 2nd ed. Ed. Simon During. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Mailer, Norman. The White Negro. San Francisco: City Light Books, 1957.

Mun ̃oz, Jose ́ Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999.

Nauta, Reinard. ‘‘The Performance of Authenticity: Ordination and Profession in Pastoral Care.’’ Pastoral Psychology 51 (2003): 425 31.

Rockquemore, Kerry Ann. ‘‘Forced to Pass and other Sins Against Authenticity.’’ Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 15.1 (2005): 17 32.

Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2001.

#performance #authenticity #popular culture #popular music #cultural studies #presentation #race #artifice

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tervacious · 5 years

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I first spoke with Dianic Priestess Ruth Barrett about how to create a Samhain ritual, which you can check out HERE. In part 2, we get into the roots of radical feminism.

AfterEllen: I wanted to talk to you about lesbian feminists embrace of Dianic spirituality. In the 1970s a lot of women turned away from the religions in which they grew up, because they identified them as patriarchal, and they turned instead to a new women-focused spirituality.

Ruth Barrett: I want to name one of our foremothers Mary Daly, feminist theologian, she languaged for many of us the realization that as long as god is male, the male is god. It was one of those took-your-breath-away paradigms that was hiding in plain sight. So for a lot of us in the 1970s-80s the notion of ‘how do we recognize spirituality, religion, politics? and how does patriarchy affect all of these things?’

There was this examination that continues to this day. As your readers know, our lives don’t take place in a vacuum, they are always in a context of history or herstory.

In the 1970s as women were working primarily for equal pay, reproductive rights, equity in the workplace, all of those things, the notion of a feminist spirituality did not enter the consciousness for some time. That had to do with the fact that Marxist politics was influential on the left. Religion was the opium of the people. Spirituality was a distraction from the work people needed to do to be free. It wasn’t until the latter half of the 1970s that women started to think about it differently.

Z Budapest is a Hungarian-born immigrant who came over after the communists had invaded Budapest, and she brought with her her mother’s folk traditions, folk religion. She also became a feminist, so she began to merge these two things.

Around 1976 or ’77 she was arrested for fortune telling in LA, it was against the law. It was the witch trial that occurred in LA in that year. That got the attention of the feminist movement of the time. They had struck out against that woman for tarot reading. The movement took notice and things really went well from there. It was a spiritual revolution. The idea of ‘where do we oppress ourselves from the inside?’

This is what I came up in in my teens and early 20s. Where are we complicit and colluding with the values of patriarchy that we have been indoctrinated into?

AE: You had mentioned the witch trial of Z Budapest

RB: The “Year of the Woman,” let me point out.

AE: Was Z a lesbian?

RB: Yes, and she still is (laughs).

AE: So the movement takes up the cause of women’s spirituality. There was a fair amount of denigration of women’s spirituality within the movement I imagine, in the same way there was the denigration of the “Lavender Menace.”

RB: Many women did not embrace the idea of a feminist spirituality. You have generational trauma over patriarchal religion and rather than seeing it as something that could be healing, there was an outright rejection. There was a lot of Eastern influence and New Age thinking that entered goddess spirituality as well. The Dianic tradition was based in radical feminism, but the larger goddess movement was not necessarily. It really depended on who feminists ran into, in terms of what they could relate to.

I founded a community in Los Angeles; I was ordained in 1980 and that community is still going. It’s the longest running Dianic community. The work that we do is not only personal, it’s political. We do work to counter the dominant power in the best ways we can. We work to heal from the effects. To model the way we want to see the world, through our activism.

It’s because we came out of Second Wave feminist politics. Those who identify in the Dianic tradition still have some form of political activism in terms of their magic and their rituals.

The Dianic tradition — in the beginning most of us were lesbian — but it grew and is now not specifically lesbian. A lot of people assume it’s a lesbian religion, but it’s not. It’s for any female who identifies with those values of radical feminism.

AE: Oftentimes patriarchal loyalists and people who want to denigrate older women make the claim that crusty, old, privileged, white women bought into Dianic traditions or goddess traditions because they buy into gender essentialism. Can you speak to that?

RB: Well there’s a lot of goddess traditions, so there may be a seed of truth regarding some of those traditions. But let’s look specifically at Dianic tradition. Gender essentialism is a misunderstanding coming from the fact that Dianics focus on the sexed body as a metaphor for life. Gender is arbitrary designations of behaviors or characteristics ascribed to the body, whether you are female or male. The women that come to Circle are very diverse in their presentation. It was not just women in flowing robes that were participating, then or now. There were women who were not conforming to gender roles. Essentialism is put on goddess traditions, but Dianics don’t focus on a [gendered] duality. When you don’t focus on a duality, you don’t have the issue of genderism [the gender binary]. In the Dianic tradition, we are whole unto our selves. We model wholeness, so it’s not like females have this one set of characteristics and males have the other. It means we have it all. I can wield the sword and I can cook a meal. Whatever would be gendered behaviors or skill sets — it’s not like, because I have this body I’m more this or more that “naturally.”

That’s what’s happening now because of trans/gender ideology. At the same time people think we’re getting away from the binary, we’re actually reinforcing it. Essentialism means I’m a sexed female, therefore I’m more prone to these attributes and of course these characteristics are gendered. And Dianics just out and out reject that. Who made this up and whose cause does it serve? Where did we get this notion that we have a male side and a female side? What they’re saying with the duality of [masculine or feminine] behaviors or attributes is a crock, we are all whole.

Women can be and behave and aspire to whatever we want and the only thing stopping us is cultural conditioning. That’s the opposite of essentialism.

AE: So Dianism puts forth that there is no single way to be a female.

RB: The maiden/mother/crone metaphor is just a way to talk about our lives. The maiden is youth, mother includes warrior, amazon, creatrix, and crone is the woman who is elderly. Phases of life like the inhale of woman’s breath, you sustain that breath for a moment, then you exhale. It’s a way of talking about cycles. Creation, sustenance and death. So there’s many ways we use language to talk about it and the women-centered symbols is another way to talk about that.

AE: There has been an explosion of women returning to personal practice, a mainstreaming of witchcraft. To the point that there was a witch starter pack that was going to be sold at Sephora.

RB: It may be an entry point for women. You can’t see me rolling my eyes right now, but I also want to think, “what could be positive about this?” The backlash reveals the idea that power in the hands of women is inherently evil. In a sense to normalize it, to do divination or turning inward for guidance, the idea that we could assist one another in our healing — that’s not a new idea, that’s an old idea. Becoming commercialized may trivialize it, but it also means that this idea is no longer terrifying to women to consider their own power or their own authority.

AE: But this might be the first spark for a woman to turn inward for guidance. There is a wide commodification of witchcraft and ethnic and folk traditions going on right now, certainly Sephora is the worst example of trivializing and feminizing since it is part of the multi-billion dollar makeup industry. It is also happening on Etsy and Instagram from boutique sellers. But it’s so interesting that this came from a makeup store since this is one way that women participate in our own feminization and conformity to gendered stereotypes.

RB: It’s also interesting that there’s this thread in magic of “glamoring” and that has to do with influencing others to see you in a certain way. So I hate the stuff, but I’ve put on mascara or something knowing that if I do it with perfect application, I’ll be treated in a certain way.

AE: As a feminine-of-center lesbian, I don’t want to denigrate makeup-wearers, and I definitely wear makeup sometimes, but it’s so true that in liberal feminism the party line is that enacting gender stereotypes can be empowering.

RB: In liberal feminism, anything goes. There is no consistent analysis.

Glamoring, the definition is the quality of fascinating alluring or attracting. Glamoring, in magical terms, can be a charm, enchantment, or witchery. Glamoring is taken from the intentional creation of an illusion.

#surprised to run across this #after ellen has been such a joy

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thisisjustforschooldontlook-blog · 5 years

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ENG 230 Blog

Blog 1-Rear Window

Rear Window is the perfect example of the male gaze. Jeff finds himself privy to the actions of his neighbors around him as he recovers from an accident. Mulvey talked about in her article how at the core of the male gaze, there is a voyeuristic base. The audience can clearly see this as Jeff watches his neighbors from his window. Lisa even tells Jeff to leave his neighbors alone and that some things must be private. The way Jeff and his friend (forgot his name) talks about the dancer is a very male gaze. Her character exists for this sole purpose. She also only interacts with men throughout the film and has no girlfriends come over. I do not think it is totally far fetched to think that a woman living alone has friends and would like them to visit but I digress. Rear Window is a backhanded compliment to women. Backhanded in the sense that even when it seems like the women in the film are being strong and independent, it is for the sake of a man. For example, Lisa although she was super cool in my opinion, only gets her cool moments because she is trying to prove to Jeff throughout the whole film that she is worth marrying. I mean what is the point of having an empowered and feisty female character if the director or writers make the woman revolve around a male love interest? The audience can also see the male gaze in the way that Lisa interacts with Jeff. She always looks visually appealing but the actress truly had the misfortune of having to memorize and repeat some misogynistic lines. Lines that have Lisa wondering why Jeff does not think he can marry her or if she is good enough for him. Another proof is also the way that Lisa has to drag Jeff away from the window in order to get him to look at her through a romantic lens. Jeff only turns his head after Lisa sits in his lap which gives off a fan service-esque vibe. Ultimately all these proofs show why Mulvey would go and write an article about this film and how it relates to the male gaze. Rather than relate, this film is the poster child for the male gaze. Rear Window utilizes the male gaze in order to help the audience take note of what is important versus unimportant information. This is a detective thriller so the audience has to watching and paying attention to every detail. It seems weird but using the male gaze worked for this film.

Blog 2- Where Are My Children

Where Are My Children? is quite an interesting film. I found myself trying to figure out whether the film was pro-choice or pro-life. I am sure my initial response sounded just as confused as I was. However after a quick glance once more at the article provided for the film, I felt as though the dots were starting to connect. The film is not a pro-life or pro-choice film. This is a film that primarily deals with eugenics. Eugenics, Darwin is giggling in his grave somewhere. How is Where Are My Children a film about eugenics as opposed to a cookie cutter pro-life or pro-choice film? The way the film opens up with the story told as the babies return paints the film to be some sort of pro-life propaganda. However, there are multiple cases within the film that the audience finds themselves hearing cases argued for birth control and family planning. However, the case for eugenics comes into play once the audience realizes that birth control is only supported for people who society deems as not good enough to procreate. The young woman who ends up getting a botched abortion is just a servant or low social standing. The characters do not even hesitate to offer this kind of ‘help’ to the poor or ‘loose.’ However for someone as well off and with the social standing Edith has. The film even makes the argument that women should have a choice in case they do not wish to put their career on hold in order to raise a baby. Edith is one such woman. However, it is only egregious that she aborts her children because she is viewed to be worthy of reproduction. Someone like Lillian, however, does not even get an eye batted in her direction as the audience can see with the reaction of her would-be lover. Lillian’s lover throws her away just as easily as Edith makes the decision to terminate her pregnancies. By seeing something like this play out on the big screen, the audience can see how this film is neither pro-life or pro-choice, rather pro-eugenics. The pro-eugenics is seen in the way the court handles the doctor is standing trial for performing abortions and the way the women treat their abortions most specifically Lillian’s. All things considered, this film does a good job of keeping the audience guessing as to what kind of politics this film is.

Blog 3 Cleo

Is the ending of Cleo a happy ending? During this week’s google hangout, Professor Tolliver had me thinking really hard about this question. I truly believed up until he questioned it that Cleo really did have her happy ending. She found out that although she does have cancer, her cancer is treatable and she should be fine. However, there are many loose threads still hanging. Cleo does indeed have cancer so for all intents and purposes, she is dying. So the entire film when she is going around voicing her worries and concerns and allowing herself to entertain thoughts that she otherwise would not, is actually for a good reason. Regardless of whether or not she was sick, it is ok to be scared of one’s own mortality. The documentary cinematography style harkens back to the French New Wave. With this documentary style, one can experience events just as Cleo experiences them. In essence, rather than watching Cleo in a voyeuristic manner, the audience instead gets to be Cleo’s eyes and ears and be privy to her inner thoughts. Going back to my original point, is the ending a happy or sad one? This ending is a true open ending. Cleo does have cancer and given that the film takes place in the early 60s or late 50s, it is safe to say that medicine is not the most updated aspect of life. So while her cancer may be ‘nothing to worry about so long as she gets treatment’ there are still many ways in which cancer could spread and eventually claim Cleo’s life. Also, what if she gets treatment and gets an infection and dies as a result of that. So while things are looking up for Cleo, perhaps the ending is merely an open one instead of sad or happy. However, one thing that can be agreed upon is the fact that Cleo has most definitely changed. She has changed in regards to her perspective on life and what she cares about. This whole event has served as the ultimate introspective experience. Cleo may be happy at the conclusion of the film, and the conclusion itself may leave room for many questions, but Cleo has Antoine. Antoine goes against the average male love interest which is a direct relation to the French New Wave movement. The French New Wave can be seen throughout the film. Perhaps this stylistic choice is the reasoning behind the conclusion we get.

Blog 4 Watermelon Woman

I always find it rather enjoyable when I see multiple types of gay in a film or show. I find that many media outlets add to the stereotype problem for the LGBTQ+ community. In Watermelon Woman, there are many types of lesbians. Cheryl is the type of lesbian you do not find in excess in media. Most lesbians, back lesbians especially, are hypersexual and sexualized by the male gaze. However, this film does its best to avoid catering to the male gaze. Cheryl is the kind of lesbian that just wants to go about her life furthering her career as opposed to chasing her next tryst. The issue that Tamara has with Cheryl is that Cheryl ends up having a fling with a white woman? Is there an underlying issue when it comes to interracial romantic relationships, particularly the queer ones? Yes, there is. When embarking on in a mixed-race relationship, there is always an inherent worry for fetishization. Cheryl experiences this worry through Tamara. There is also the unease of being outside of one’s culture. The idea of someone betraying their culture just because they date outside of it is absolutely silly, however, it is something Cheryl has to combat throughout the film. This problem leads to the other main problem found in this film. Why are queer women of color so underrepresented? Queer women of color are underrepresented because they are not what society deems are good enough to watch on the big screen. Queer women of color more often than not find themselves subjected to stereotypical roles and find themselves fetishized not only for their sexuality but also for their skin color. This film is a case for why queer women of color should be given a chance on screen. The audience gets to experience a hard working queer woman of color, Cheryl and has the privilege of joining her on the adventure of a lifetime.

Final Blog Post

Rear Window tackles the issue of the male gaze throughout the course of the film. Mulvey points out that the film itself is rooted in a voyeuristic manner which allows for the audience to see the actions of Jeff’s neighbors. This, through the looking glass bird’s eye view, allows for the audience’s perspective to feel somewhat invasive. Stella Dallas deals with a mother-daughter relationship, but most specifically Kaplan talks about and focuses on the figure of the absent mother. This idea of there being such a high bar for mother’s to reach in order to be looked upon favorably by society. Kaplan especially focuses on the double standard for mothers and fathers. Stella is held to the high standard which she ultimately feels unable to meet, however, her husband is not held to any such standard. This is absolutely ridiculous seeing as Stella’s husband is a part-time father if anything. Where Are My Children deals with the issues of abortion, family planning, among other things? The film paints itself in a pro-choice versus pro-life debate, however, it ends up falling into the argument for eugenics. While reproductive rights are a very feminist quality and topic to speak on for a film, eugenics is such a far fetched and baseless practice that Where Are My Children most definitely loses the running for a genuine feminist film. Dance Girl Dance definitely shows its feminist tendencies a lot more clearly when compared to the other films we have watched through this course. For example, Bubbles plays the system for lack of better words. She finesses the system in order to suit her needs. What is more feminist than a woman using a man’s privilege against him in order to help her gain ground in life, career, and relationships? Cleo is an interesting film to enter into the battle for the most feminist film we have watched in this course. While I agree that Cleo as a character can seem rather feminist, I would argue that the film does not do enough to be considered the most feminist of all the films we watched. If I had to choose a favorite film throughout this course, it would be The Piano. This film really surprised me. All of the symbolism present throughout the film is enough to make an English major’s mouth water at the chance to dissect. While there are many hidden contexts in this film such as power dynamics in relationships and empowering women, which are very feminist, the main character ultimately seems a tad more romanticized than I would like. Fat Girl makes a compelling entry and in my opinion, comes second to the most feminist film we had the pleasure of viewing. Fat Girl tackles some very taboo topics such as teenage sexuality and rape. I find that there are many times where people like to ignore a sexual violence scene in films just because it makes them uncomfortable. The fact of the matter is, the director included it for a reason. You may not need to watch it, but you must at least try to figure out the purpose of such a traumatic scene. Rape scenes do not just get thrown into a story. Keesey likes to unpack all the hidden context behind Anais’s rape, however, despite the empowering look into rape and rape culture as well as rape fantasies, the voyeuristic feel, although intentional, leaves me feeling weird about making this film number one on my list. Which lastly leave Watermelon Woman. Watermelon Woman is a work of art in my opinion. This film needs to be a requirement for everyone going to school for the humanities. This film is ripe (pun intended) with many interdisciplinary topics. The reasoning behind my choice is simple: Inclusivity. Throughout all these films, there has been very little diversity and Watermelon Woman has just that. Not only does the film showcase a woman of color as the lead, but also a lesbian woman. Queer women of color are the most underrepresented diagraphic. On top of the representation and diversity, this film also covers a number of hot feminist issues. Sexuality, hypersexuality, fetishization, and interracial fraternizing are all issues that are covered in this film. Between Cheryl having to navigate the waters of figuring out what kind of lesbian she is versus having a white romantic partner. Is Diana with Cheryl just for her skin color? Tamara would like to think so. Not to mention that Cheryl’s entire purpose for making the film is in order to bring to light the issue of black women being absent from the film. Watermelon Woman may not be an overly flashy film, but it is a film that does justice to the word feminism. Feminism does not always have to be loud and ostentatious. It can also be inside voices but firm. For all these reasons, Watermelon Woman is the most feminist film we watched throughout this course.

I would also like to say that Fat Girl was really close but I just felt as though it would be socially unacceptable to choose a film like Fat Girl and say that it was the most feminist.

Extra Credit 1 400 Blows

I would first like to start off this post by saying that 400 Blows feels very similar to Cleo. As I am sure this was intended, I will talk about the similarities between these French films. First the cinematography. Cleo and 400 Blows both are some long shot sequences. While 400 Blows may have been the only one of the two films with a freeze frame, there are some shots in Cleo that do appear to stand still. However, shifting back to the longshots, when Cleo is walking around the coffee shop while contemplating her mortality, this long continuous shot is reminiscent of when Antoine is running away from the youth center in order to escape captivity and get to the sea. I would argue that you can see aspects of the French New Age in 400 Blows. For example, most movies rely on a happy ending, but much like Cleo, 400 Blows ends with an open ending as opposed to a happy or sad ending. One may feel sad for Antoine’s situation but in actuality, he seems to be surviving just fine. He even gets to see the sea at the end of the film so there are happier layers to the conclusion of this film. There are other similarities between the two films as well. For one Antoine and Cleo, both have experiences that lead to some much-needed introspection. For Cleo, she looks deep inside herself to figure out what is import in life, at least to her. It seems confronting one’s own mortality can be quite the spiritual awakening. As for Antoine, he learns about who he can and cannot trust. Unfortunately for him, he learns that he cannot trust his mother or his stepdad. Aside from his one trustworthy friend, Antoine has no one. A second similarity and a rather obvious one is the fact that both films are filmed in black and white. Throw in another similarity when you notice that both films are French with French spoken dialogue. 400 Blows is not necessarily a cinematic masterpiece, but it is a film that succeeds in getting the audience to think about life. Maybe not of mortality like Cleo, but certainly this notion of what comes next. Both of these films project an air of what comes next? It leaves the audience wanting to know what happens when everything falls back into place. Truly these films exemplify open endings.

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cunyappliedtheatreblog · 5 years

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Countdown Profile: Week 5 Antonio David Lyons (’13)

Antonio David Lyons (’13) is an actor, musician, and activist. Antonio produces work with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and is founder of We Are Here, an initiative to address masculinity with boys and men from New York to Capetown, through theatre. Interview by Michael Wilson (’11).

What are you up to in the world today, Mr. Antonio Lyons?

At the moment I am getting ready to head to South Africa tomorrow, for a bit of respite, and to check in with my organization, We are Here, and the people on the ground there...and also shoot a music video for a song I recorded the last time I was in South Africa.

And yesterday was quite a whirlwind day: I finished guest starring on an episode of a TV series here, called Seal Team, playing a Congolese general…very interesting storyline dealing with the complications of war.

Then also, I accepted an offer from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for a nine-month contract with them, starting in January, to produce a version of Comedy of Errors...it’s part of a larger envisioning by Lue Douthit, called Play On!, where she commissioned a series of playwrights who were people of color, had different gender identities, sexualities, to reimagine works of William Shakespeare. One: to make the work more accessible, and, two: to move the conversation that Shakespeare started in his work further. It will be a touring show that engages communities in a very meaningful kind of way…[without the] elitist component that often comes with Shakespeare.

Sure, everyone thinks it’s just…it is from the white, European canon. And it has this history of consolidating white culture and white power.

Exactly. Exactly. I think it will elevate the work.

And I know also that you’ve been involved with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for years. Do you remember the year that you started with them?

The first time I went must have been 2013 or 2014…it was like right after we graduated, this opportunity came up, to go as a producing fellow.

How does the experience you had at the MA [in Applied Theatre] inform the work you do at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival?

You know, I’ve been really fortunate, because every time I’ve gone to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, it’s been to do work that absolutely uses artistic practices to engage community in meaningful ways. The first time I went was as a producing fellow, and I really learned a lot about the organization, about how a major institution like that produces theatre. One of the things that attracted me to it was that the artistic director is and was at the time Bill Rauch, who had come from Cornerstone Theatre. I was really interested in getting a handle on how he brought those sensibilities from Cornerstone as a community-based theatre really focused on helping people tell their stories, and helping people use theatre to address issues that were impacting their communities.

I’m interested in this craft and challenge of using old English plays to work in equity—what’s a moment or story of how that’s worked for you?

The process of commissioning. This work of William Shakespeare is always treated very preciously, as if it can’t be touched, it can’t be adapted, it can’t be updated, it can’t be expanded…and what Play On! does, is it challenges these notions of white supremacy inherent in language and culture: that it [Shakespeare's language] can only fit in certain bodies. Play On! Challenges all of that. It challenges marginalized bodies, and allows them to take this work, find themselves in the work, and see what it looks like in their skin, from their world view, which I think is very much about what it means to be an applied theatre practitioner.

Moving on, to help readers understand the multi-interested, multi-talented person you are: describe your music.

Oh my god. It’s my heart. Laughs. My music is my heart. It allows me, in a visceral kind of way, to say things that I don’t often get to say, to express things that I’m thinking, to address issues that are meaningful to me, and to use words and sound to move people…put that together and my music is a…heart movement. My music is a heart movement!

I’m sad this is only a written piece…the way you said “heart movement” was a song right there!

Laughs. Yeah. It uses the fullness of who I am, in terms of my Caribbean-ness, the African-inspired-ness, particularly of South Africa, with me having lived there for so long. It incorporates my poetry…and when I’m performing, it incorporates my dance.

And where can people find it?

Antoniodavidlyons.com and it’s also on Spotify and iTunes and Amazon.

Let’s jump over to We Are Here, because this would not be a complete conversation without talking about your project. Would you describe it?

We Are Here, it started as a one-person show, then it moved into this social activism campaign. Now it’s grown into a non-profit to addresses the core issues of identity, masculinity, and gender-based violence. In 2016, 2017, we were able to expand the work as we expanded the organization, to also include addressing issues of sexual and reproductive health and HIV/AIDS prevention. Part of what we really were aware of is that same sort of negative behaviors that can lead to gender-based violence can lead to exposure to HIV/AIDS and other STIs. The risky behavior is the same.

And over the course of the years, it was amazing to grow from the show, post workshop discussions, some workshops here and there, to having a new five-day curriculum, that went into community and strategically worked with populations of men and boys that ranged from 12 to about 30. We went from it being primarily two people and a part-time volunteer-ish person, to now having three kind of full-time people and five facilitators to do that work.

That’s amazing. I didn’t know that was happening.

Yeah. It was part of the US Government, through PEPFAR and Johnson and Johnson—they launched an initiative called DREAMS. The DREAMS initiative was all over the continent, and it was a search for best practices in addressing HIV and AIDS, with primarily women and girls, and also rolling out a preventative tool called PrEP. We were approached by a female-led organization out of Atlanta, called Sister Love, to be partners with them in applying for the DREAMS initiative grant, to do work in south Africa. We said yes, because part of the grant provided opportunities to do programming for male partners of their primary target population.

And so that happened, and it was a really amazing opportunity. The organization grew, we learned a great deal. We were able to have what I felt was a really great impact with some of the young men and boys we engaged with.

What were the biggest obstacles to healthy relationships that you worked with, with these men and boys?

You know, this idea of masculinity. One moment that comes to mind is this deep-dive conversation we were having, in the relationship module. [The men were] having conversations about how women are not able to be your friend—that they’re sexual objects. A great many of them were absolutely full-on committed to this idea. And what else came out of that moment was the thing that applied theatre does, right? Use theatre-based approaches to have conversations, and, if it’s well scaffolded, to create opportunities where people are easing into thinking and changes, and, before they know it, they’re having these epiphanies. One of the young men, in the midst of the conversation with his other friends, said, "I didn’t know you guys thought that way.” And he was like, “I don’t agree.” And it was a really difficult moment, challenging his friends and his peers on their behaviors. And challenging himself. We did the difficult work of holding space for that conversation.

What was the hardest part about it?

I think the hardest part was where I didn’t know where it was going to go. I was like, “oh my god, oh my god, we done opened up something here.” Because you want to hold space where people can have difficult conversations and not walk away wounded to the point of not being able to find healing. Or to [not be able to] come back to themselves.

Would you say more about how you used theatre in those projects?

In terms of the activities…they did some role playing. We did a lot of physical stuff, because we realized that, for men and boys, moving was really important. We used assessment tools, like human barometer. We used opportunities for collaging and visioning. We used an opportunity for them to do, in role playing, hotseating.

Did you use the piece, the poetry that was the basis for your solo show?

From that, I developed processes where we used the text. They would read from the text, and then there would be an opportunity to create the text embodied, then transform whatever that story was, and make it applicable to their own lives.

How much did you share from your own story: hey, this is me, Antonio, I’m a facilitator, I got into this work because…

I didn’t share that in that way, but, at points within processes, challenging dangerous ideas required a fine line between being a facilitator and being a mentor. Because there’s this…I think, at least for the community that I engaged with, as a facilitator there’s this unrealistic expectation that you would be neutral, in a way. And I think it’s problematic and unnecessary and dangerous, because what you’re asking of participants is to be open, honest, and vulnerable. Then in this neutral, semi-therapeutic role, you’re not [being open, honest, and vulnerable, yourself]. When you open up and reveal a part of yourself and your perspective…you break down that sense of hierarchy, you know.

What’s a point where you stepped in with that mentor side?

That conversation around women as friends. Because while they were able to challenge each other to a particular point, there was a hard disruption that had to happen, in terms of what it does to a community and a society, and to women themselves, when you cannot humanize women. When you cannot humanize other people.

What about men who have sex with men and, you know, I’ve never been to South Africa, but I would not be surprised if that was one of these invisible things—it happens but no one talks about it.

No, that’s real. There are lots of organizations that specifically and openly deal with men and MSM communities. There aren’t a lot of organizations that incorporate that in terms of the bridge between heterosexuals and MSMS, in terms of building relationships and understanding—

—but what about these boys, because masculinity—

Well with us—

How did you deal with that?

—with us what we did not do was ask anybody about their sexual identity. Or how they engage sexually. And it’s always a hard line for me, because I never want any other identified person to feel marginalized or spotlighted. I don’t allow certain languages that may be derogatory to pass by. Because there was one point where that came up. The term that was used for a gay man was a “half man.” [I said] “Okay, let’s deal with that. Let’s get all the way in that right now.” So we did. The people who identified as gay in the room quickly understood, “okay...”

“…he’s got our back.”

All the facilitators in the room got our back. And those who use that language understood, this is going to be challenged, and that’s not okay in this space. And they’re able to engage with these other people who were clear about who they were, and walk away with a different perspective.

Thank you. No surprise, we’re coming up on 40 minutes here, and I feel like we’re just getting started…what would you want someone who is thinking about building a life in theatre and education and social justice to know, what gift would you give them?

Lean into your passion, and that it’s all possible.

We were talking years ago and you’d wanted to have this kind of thing come to fruition, from the growth of We Are Here to landing acting gigs of the profile that you were just shooting recently. So it’s possible indeed.

Yeah, I’m really excited. I’m really excited to see where it goes next. I’m looking at putting together a tour of We Are Here in the US next year, so working with my managers on crafting that, doing a guest star recurring on Bosch, and I’ll be back on that series in the new year. Yeah, you know, now we’re in the hard part of trying to identify funding sources in South Africa. Because that project was for a limited time, in terms of that funding source. It ended up being a very challenging experience, but we learned, and we move forward.

You learn and you move forward.

That’s the skinny my friend.

Thank you so much. Travel safe tomorrow.

Thank you. Ah. I’m so excited. I’m exhausted and excited at the same time.

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