Gender & Sexuality @cult814f15 - Tumblr Blog

Or is it?

Slacktivism as a means; slacktivism as myth

-Xtina

Narrative & Summary

- Andrew

My lit review looks at the concept of passing, the voice is one element of how gay men may try and pass as straight.

Ian

So, this is Citizen Capitalism, a fresh, new way to think about your day, your life, your future. Citizen Capitalism will help you create a better world by making choices with conscious intent - at work, at play, at home. It will encourage you to realize your personal power to affect global good.

lit review will center on subject formation and embodiment in and of (neoliberal) capitalism

- kayla

Brideshead Revisited Episode 1 - "Et in Arcadia Ego" - PART 5

Media for Lit Review on British interwar homosexuality among the upper class.

Two very brief clips at 0:30 and 2:40.

-Zach

I define neoliberalism as the investment and integration of social movements into state-sponsored institutions, such as electoral power, market power, marriage, citizenship, and the military. In my current project, I am examining how black lesbians and transgender women negotiate their gender/sexual identities and their home communities, and how this affects their mental and physical health. […]

Life imitating art

Above article as inspiration for larger project. Will discuss the capacity of fantasy films to challenge and disrupt heteronormative ideals and to imagine ways of being outside of the constitutive constraints of socialized gender and sexual identity.

-Annie

Fangirls and leveraging ‘purchasing power’ to gain respect

-Erin

Daesh and the American Girls

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/world/americas/isis-online-recruiting-american.html?_r=0 http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/teenage-jihad-inside-the-world-of-american-kids-seduced-by-isis-20150325

--Kristin

The veil or "hijab" a symbol of oppression or a threat? -Sita

The trial of former officer Daniel Holtzclaw, accused of sexually assaulting more than a dozen poor, black women, has not been making headlines. One local group wants to fill the void.

Women and Juries

#ashley

Yellow Dirt: A Poisoned Land and the Betrayal of the Navajos [Judy Pasternak] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Now in paperback, the critically acclaimed Yellow Dirt, “will break your heart. An enormous achievement—literally

If you are interested in issues affecting Indigenous populations, “Yellow Dirt” is also fantastic. Here is the Amazon summary: “From the 1930s to the 1960s, the United States knowingly used and discarded an entire tribe of people as the Navajos worked, unprotected, in the uranium mines that fueled the Manhattan Project and the Cold War. Long after these mines were abandoned, Navajos in all four corners of the Reservation (which borders Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona) continued grazing their animals on sagebrush flats riddled with uranium that had been blasted from the ground. They built their houses out of chunks of uranium ore, inhaled radioactive dust borne aloft from the waste piles the mining companies had left behind, and their children played in the unsealed mines themselves. Ten years after the mines closed, the cancer rate on the reservation shot up and some babies began to be born with crooked fingers that fused together into claws as they grew. Government scientists filed complaints about the situation with the government, but were told it was a mess too expensive to clean up. Judy Pasternak exposed this story in a prizewinning Los Angeles Times series. Her work galvanized both a congressman and a famous prosecutor to clean the sites and get reparations for the tribe. Yellow Dirt is her powerful chronicle of both the scandal of neglect and the Navajos’ fight for justice.” - Andrew

The Roundhouse by Louise Erdrich - Response

Most people do not have a salient image of a Native American reservation or its people, let alone their struggles. Erdrich (2012) provides her readers with that missing picture by telling a story detailing the tenuous relationship between the US Federal Government and Native American tribes when a crime is committed. The Roundhouse’s central storyline revolves around the rape of a Native American woman, Geraldine, who is the mother of the protagonist, Joe, and the effect it has on their family and community.

Early on, Joe and his father, Bazil, identify the attacker: Linden Lark. Despite knowing the rapist, and having what seemed like a good amount of evidence, they were unable to charge Lark with a crime because Geraldine (his mother and rape survivor) couldn’t identify exactly where the rape occurred. Who takes on the case varies widely depending on where crimes are committed. As Dear (2004) notes, non-Indian offenders can almost always escape punishment on reservations because tribal leaders lack authority to assign punishment. Early on in The Roundhouse (p. 2) Joe says, “ . . . our treaties with the government were like treaties with foreign nations.” This sentiment sets the foundation that Erdrich builds upon to tell the story about power between these two vastly different groups. When Bazil says Geraldine is going to be questioned by the police, Joe says “Which police?” and his dad says, “Exactly.” This yet again establishes early on that even with evidence, justice may never come.

Deer (2004) outlines the myriad cases of abuse and victimization that Indigenous People face every day. Women and children are more likely than any other population to experience sexual abuse and violence. Erdrich uses a 13-year-old boy as the storyteller which frames the story in an interesting way. At one point, Joe gets frustrated by the lack of progress on his mother’s case made by authorities. So much so that he is able to garner criminating evidence before the detectives could. Eventually, Linden is able to avoid charges. But with the help of his friends, Joe remains undeterred. To bring peace to his family, Joe started to plot the murder of Lark. With the help of his friends, he waits for him on the golf course and shoots him. He covers his tracks well but in the end his parents are fully aware of what happened, even without Joe explicitly admitting it. The novel ends tangentially after a car crash that left Joe unscathed with his friends.

Overall, I thought The Roundhouse was amazing. As many of the reviews claim, Erdrich’s writing is eloquent in a way that brings real stories to life. Upon completion of the book, there are several important things to consider.

First, Erdrich does an excellent job of not exploiting the story of a rape survivor (albeit this is a hybrid of fiction and nonfiction). We frequently see TV shows and movies use rape as a primary way of entertaining their audience and simultaneously revictimizing women. Edrich doesn’t do that. When the details of the event are finally told, they are not graphic and they are told from the perspective of the survivor.

Second, Erdrich beautifully articulates how a crime like this involves an entire community. Every family knows each other; while Geraldine is in the hospital and/or recovering at home, many people inquire about her condition, stop by the house to bring food, and let Joe stay with them for safety. The Roundhouse accurately depicts how many children are forced to grow up very fast when atrocities happen in their families and communities.

Erdrich also subtly shows both the cyclical nature of poverty and the mistreatment of women in these communities and perhaps society more broadly. Sonja, who Joe stays with for a time, is stigmatized by the community for how she dresses and who she’s slept with. Yet, we learn her background later on when she references her mother:

“She got beat up a lot. She took drugs, too. And guess what? I never met my dad. I never saw him . . . I quit school, had my baby. I did not learn nothing. Anything. My mom said if you got nothing, you can strip. Just dance around, right? . . . I got stuck in that life . . . Cry all you want, Joe. Lots of men cry after they do something nasty to a woman” (p.222).

Finally, it’s important to consider how power is manifested in any given situation. Erdrich does a nice job of telling a story of when those in power fail and the people are left wanting answers. POC in the US are struggling for justice. In a story like this, a boy can shoot his mother’s rapist and find peace of mind. But for POC across our country who are murdered at the hands of the state, this is not how their stories end. But an anecdote like The Roundhouse might allow some to see a pervasive problem on an individual level where “peaceful protest” isn’t enough.

Does this story oversimplify the complex history between Indigenous people and the US government? Further, it’s important to consider context. How would the community have reacted if Geraldine was white? Black? What if the rapist was black?

While Erdrich does a sufficient job of realistically telling the story in a compelling way, how does a lack of commentary about race affect our understanding of the incident and the culture more broadly? While we can certainly see the racist underpinnings of an act like this, there is no discussion among the characters about how prevalent prejudice is between the communities. At the beginning of the story, when Geraldine is admitted to the hospital, a pregnant, presumably white, woman says, “Don’t you Indians have your own hospital over there?” Yet this is one of the few lines with racial undertones throughout the book. Is it Erdrich’s job to paint a more realistic picture or is this just simply a story where the reader gathers what they may on their own accord?

There is a clear persuasive message in the afterword where Erdrich offers some statistics on sexual assault of native women. She then highlights organizations who are actively working to help solve the problem. Erdrich offers insight into a world very few of us think about. The families in this book have a lot in common with other communities of color today. Beginning to understand their daily life may be the first step toward understanding the system at work. Deer (2004) explains many politicians have apologized for the abuses of the past while simultaneously doing nothing to prevent them for happening. Simply put, the Federal Government's involvement in Tribal Affairs puts women and children at risk. Reforms are desperately needed so that tribal community leaders can effectively deal with problems plaguing their communities. - Andrew

'Thanksgiving,' a Poem by Jonathan Garfield

Jonathan Garfield

11/28/13

November 19, 2013 at 5:56pm

Thank you for relocating relations, relocating their hearts, some forgetting or ashamed of their Indigenous roots.

Thank you for alcohol that now courses like blood through reservation veins.

Thank you for teaching our young, impressionable, heavily reserved minds your history and overlooking ours in reservation schools.

Thank you for Catholic boarding school surgeons painfully removing our Native tongue without anesthetic until our mouths bled English.

Thank you for that old white man in the white owned store on my rez that showed my 8 year old eyes the color of my skin as he stalked me like prey aisle-to-aisle, always a thief in his adult eyes.

Thank you for the bruises that covered my sister like war paint, painted by fists, baseball bat and a love created and mixed by your reservations, in wars she never won, dying every time.

Thank you for the U.S.D.A. approved diabetes that has stolen uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, fathers, my mother.

Thank you for BIA and its IHS replacing our ceremonial medicine with prescribed addictions that have now stolen so many visions on the rez that it’s hard to see what comes next.

Thank you for compulsory sterilization creating and rewriting so many stories forever left broken and unfinished.

Thank you for the children starving reservations wide, left alone and staying up late, hoping their parent or parents didn’t drink or shoot up all the check.

Thank you for the alcohol related car wrecks that have turned epic poems into tragic short stories.

Thank for the tiny white crosses plunged deep like hot knives into our land and the reservation roadsides that always claim another victim from families dying a little inside every time they drive past them.

Thank you for the F.A.S. and F.A.E. babies turned high school dropouts because the Caucasian teacher from a different world was never taught enough before coming to the rez to teach.

Thank you for the reservation suicides that have killed the spirits of those left behind.

Thank you for using us as mascots, making our young ones feel uncertain in their skin and redefining honor for them by turning us into a cold, unfeeling, symbol for a sports team where drunken fans honor us by mocking us.

Thank you for leading us on to reservations with no guidebooks on how to live in your world on our land, where we are still stumbling and learning, trial by heartbreaking error, to this day.

Thank you for your stereotypical portrayal of us in film and the movies where the white men are the heroes saving the Indians despite the Native-like titles like Dances With Wolves, Thunderheart.

Thank you for stealing our land, raping it like some woman you never knew the name of, leaving her crying, traumatized, bleeding.

* * *

Thank you for razing our homeland, cutting it up into states, poorly piecing it together and shrouding us in it like a quilt infested with smallpox.

I am thankful for all of this for making me feel too fucking much.

I am thankful for all of this turning me into a clenched fist in times when words don’t hit hard enough.

I am thankful for all of this, for stirring the spirits of warriors dormant in us for centuries.

I am thankful for all of this because without it, I could never write this.

Thank you for the artillery, arrows for my bow.

Born a few centuries too late and raised on U.S.D.A. approved commodity everything, Jonathan Garfield is an enrolled Assiniboine tribal member of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux reservation in Montana. His stories document the tragedy forced on “his people” (which he loves saying ‘cause it sounds cool) that is the rez. Jonathan has been published in various Art & Literature magazines and quarterlies. His short story, “Reservation Warparties”, became a short film, adapted to a screenplay and directed by Angelique Midthunnder. The short film was featured on the program, Independent Lens, on PBS. Jonathan Garfield continues to write poetry and short stories. He is also a practicing trickster.

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