no man’s land

primarily here to save feminist book quotes. secondarily here for tumblr nostalgia.

[homoseggsuality]

“White ‘wiggers’ absorb hip hop; backpackers and vagabonds absorb so-called Third-World culture; male transvestites and drag queens absorb the woman; and ‘femmes’ absorb the prostitute. The transgression of boundaries presupposes the preservation of boundaries. When whites play blacks and academics pretend they are ‘whores’ and ‘junkies’, they deride the humanity of the black person, the junkie and the whore. There’s a slogan printed on T-shirts in Barcelona distributed by a ‘sex worker’ group: ‘Yo també soc puta’ [‘I’m a whore, too’.] This shirt is proudly worn by radical youths and other daring souls who believe that, by wearing this silkscreened T-shirt, they have transgressed the boundary that separates people. ‘We are all whores,’ they think. What they don’t get is that the whore isn’t just a whore. She is a person, just like they are...

This admiration of the whore is no vaccine against contempt— it is exactly the opposite. It goes hand in hand with scorn, overt or covert, for her humanity and a lack of insight into her actual living conditions. A ‘femme’ can repeat all day long that she is a ‘slut’ and a ‘whore’ and simultaneously have a blasé attitude towards prostitution. A transsexual can demand that everyone call him a woman and at the same time have absolutely no understanding of women’s issues. The vagabond wears a Mexican poncho but does not forget to haggle over the price. A man who romanticizes the working class applauds the physical laborer and hopes that he has some of those attributes, but it is stereotypical masculinity he admires, not a living person trying to survive under difficult conditions. The ‘wigger’ feels like he is part of the black community, but is not upset about violence in the ghetto—in his mind, it is part of the draw! What he fails to understand is that by fetishizing someone’s everyday life, he shows how distant he is from it. Living conditions become an identity, and then a fetish.”

- Kajsa Ekis Ekman, Being and Being Bought

[homoseggsuality]

"Thomas Szasz has noted that the conquest of human existence by the mental-health professions started with the identification and classification of so-called mental illnesses, and has culminated in our day with the claim that 'all of life is a 'psychiatric problem' for behavioral science to 'solve.'' Szasz has attempted to show that persons, by seeking relief from the burden of what are actually moral responsibilities, mystify and 'technicize' their 'problems in living.' In turn, this hunger for help and health is fed by a behavioral technology ready and willing to free such persons of their moral burdens. Indeed, Szasz contends that the 'mandate' of the contemporary psychiatrist is precisely 'to obscure,' and moreover 'to deny' the ethical dilemmas of life, and to transform these into medical and technical problems susceptible to their solutions. In this same way, transsexualism has been categorized as a medical and technical problem that is only resolvable by medical and technical specialties.

Mystification is at work throughout the transsexual odyssey. It operates in a variety of areas: in the claim that one is, for example, a man trapped in a woman's body; in the obscuring of the social components of the problem; in the hidden political dimensions of therapy; in the various individualized explanations; and in the very language of transsexualism itself. As demonstrated earlier, it is biologically impossible to change chromosomal sex, and thus the transsexual is not really transsexed. As Dr. Georges Burou, a French physician who specialized in male-to-constructed-female transsexualism phrases it: 'I don't change men into women. I transform male genitals into genitals that have a female aspect. All the rest is in the patient's mind.' Or as Jan Morris inadvertently stated: 'I wear the body of a woman.'

...The process of the de-ethicization of behavior by psychology and psychiatry has particular relevance for discussions of transsexualism and the consequences which follow. By attributing transsexualism to biological or psychological causes, scientists, as stated previously, are conveying that there are only two choices: (1) adjustment to one's body-role; or (2) surgery and counseling to transform one's body and role. In effect, both of these choices are biomedical—choice number one adds up to biology-is-destiny, and choice number two states that, this failing, hormonal and possibly surgical treatment (contingent upon one's 'passing,' of course) are indicated. Either way, the transsexual cannot really make an ethical choice because there are no choices to make. The only 'choices' represented are those that bio-medicine dictates in this culture. The wider range of choices and the discovery of meanings that would be available to one who could live beyond sex roles, but in one's native body, are not made available. Such reductionism and restricted counseling fetishize the transsexual issue."

- Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire

[homoseggsuality]

“Sex class is so deep as to be invisible. Or it may appear as a superficial inequality, one that can be solved by merely a few reforms, or perhaps by the full integration of women into the labour force. But the reaction of the common man, woman, and child – ‘That? Why you can’t change that! You must be out of your mind!’ – is the closest to the truth. We are talking about something every bit as deep as that. This gut reaction – the assumption that, even when they don’t know it, feminists are talking about changing a fundamental biological condition – is an honest one. That so profound a change cannot be easily fitted into traditional categories of thought, e.g., ‘political’, is not because these categories do not apply but because they are not big enough: radical feminism bursts through them. If there were another word more all-embracing than revolution we would use it.

Until a certain level of evolution had been reached and technology had achieved its present sophistication, to question fundamental biological conditions was insanity. Why should a woman give up her precious seat in the cattle car for a bloody struggle she could not hope to win? But, for the first time in some countries, the preconditions for feminist revolution exist – indeed, the situation is beginning to demand such a revolution.”

- Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex

[homoseggsuality]

“What characterizes the neoliberal definition of the victim, however, is that victimhood has become a characteristic. It means that a person is weak, that we can either be passive victims or active subjects. We cannot be both. In this way, the victim is depicted so negatively that the concept must eventually be abolished completely.

Instead of the vulnerable person (who has now disappeared), the illusion of the invulnerable person is created—the person who, by definition, cannot become a victim. No one—not women, drug abusers, people subjected to human trafficking, people living in poverty, illegal immigrants, or even children with no other option but to dig in the trash for food—can be called ‘subjugated’. The ideal of the superman/superwoman becomes the natural condition of the human. For whatever this invulnerable person’s fate—to be screwed by multiple men per day, take drugs and contract HIV/AIDS at ten years of age, have her body covered in bruises, lie passively and let herself be used, or turn other children into slaves—she is, by definition, an active subject who exercises opposition and control. The only possible violence that can be exerted against her is by calling her a victim. It is worse than any other physical or psychological violation to speak of her as subjugated—only then does she become a victim.

A consequence of this belief system is the conviction that if there are no victims, there can be no perpetrators. The unmentionables, the men, are completely exonerated in a highly convenient, imperceptible way... men appear as mere shadows on the wall, movie extras who sneak into the story now and then and in some magical way see all of their desires justified by the happy ending.”

- Kajsa Ekis Ekman, Being and Being Bought

[homoseggsuality]

“The present counseling and treatment of transsexuals, based on the medical model I have described, give the transsexual no real moral options. Failing to analyze our society’s definitions of masculinity and femininity, such therapy offers little encouragement and advice to help the transsexual live beyond both these containers of personhood.

Consider the possibility of counseling that encouraged the transsexual to break both stereotypes. Here, the transsexual would be encouraged to become the agent of her or his own energies and to strive for more varied modes of being and becoming. In a very real sense, at this point, the transsexual would become a social critic. All of us are in some way constricted by sex-role socialization. One way of viewing transsexuals is that they are uniquely constricted by the rigidified definitions of masculinity and femininity. The general cultural constrictions, from which we all suffer, become body-laden with them. However, deprived of an alternative framework in which to view the problem, the transsexual is unable to express the problem clearly. The gender identity clinics have a vested interest in suppressing criticism, and may collude with the transsexual to solve the problem in an ultimately uncritical way. Given a different mode of therapy where ‘consciousness-raising’ is the primary modus operandi, the transsexual might not find it as necessary to resort to sex-conversion surgery.

A society that encourages identity and role conformity based on biological sex will naturally turn to sex-conversion surgery rather than accept what it sees as a threatened obliteration of these roles. Until the problems that psychiatry has claimed for itself are broadened into a general criticism of patriarchal society, transsexualism will not be understood as a medical manipulation of social and individual action and meanings. Meanwhile, the medical model and its empire continue to domesticate the revolutionary potential of transsexuals. The potential stance of the transsexual as outsider to the conventional roles of masculinity and femininity is short-circuited. Health values and goals hide the possibility from transsexuals themselves of being ‘history-bearing individuals’ who, instead of conforming to sex roles, are in a unique position to turn their gender agony into an effective protest against the very social structures and roles that spawned the dilemma to begin with.”

- Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire

[homoseggsuality]

"How did the myth of emancipation operate culturally over a fifty year period to anaesthetize women’s political consciousness? In the twenties, eroticism came in big.

The gradual blurring together of romance with the institution of marriage began, serving to repopularize and reinforce the failing institution, weakened by the late feminist attack. But the convalescence didn’t last long: women were soon reprivatized, their new class solidarity diffused.

The conservative feminists, who at least had viewed their problems as social, had been coopted, while the radical feminists were openly and effectively ridiculed; eventually even the innocuous committee women of other movements came to appear ridiculous. The cultural campaign had begun: emancipation was one’s private responsibility; salvation was personal, not political. Women took off on a long soul-search for ‘fulfilment.’”

- Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex

[homoseggsuality]

“In her 2006 United Nations report on the demand for sexual exploitation, the former UN Special Rapporteur on Trafficking in Persons, Sigma Huda, concluded, ‘Prostitute-users are typically incapable of distinguishing and/or unmotivated to differentiate between prostituted persons who have been subjected to … illicit means … and those who have not.’

Sometimes, the buyers state for the record that they would report such abuse but their behavior proves otherwise. At more honest times, they will tell the truth, as does this man interviewed by Antonia Crane on the Rumpus.

Max: I think the thing I am most ashamed of is that I’ve been to Asian massage parlors. … Many of these women are victims of sex trafficking. … Thing is, they are not glassy-eyed robot slaves sobbing under their oppressor like you see in movies about this kind of thing …

Rumpus: But it’s not consensual. It’s coercion. It’s sex slavery.

Max: And I felt very remorseful when I learned this. And then I did it again.”

- Janice G. Raymond, Not A Choice, Not A Job

[homoseggsuality]

“It is not hard to understand why transsexuals want to become lesbian-feminists. They have indeed discovered where strong female energy exists and want to capture it. It is more difficult to understand why so many feminists are so ready to accept men—in this case, castrated men—into their most intimate circles. Certainly Dionysian confusion about the erasure of all boundaries is one reason that appeals to the liberal mind and masquerades as ‘sympathy for all oppressed groups.’ Women who believe this, however, fail to see that such liberalism is repressive, and that it can only favor and fortify the possession of women by men. These women also fail to recognize that accepting transsexuals into the feminist community is only another rather unique variation on the age-old theme of women nurturing men, providing them with a safe haven, and finally giving them our best energies.

The question arises: are women who accept transsexuals as lesbian-feminists expressing gratitude on some level to those men who are finally willing to join women and pay for their male privilege with their balls? Gratitude is a quality exhibited by all oppressed groups when they think that some in the class of oppressors have finally relinquished their benefits to join them. But, of course, it is doubtful that transsexuals actually give up their male privilege. As one woman put it, ‘A man who decides to call himself a woman is not giving up his privilege. He is simply using it in a more insidious way.’ Furthermore, a man who decides to call himself a lesbian-feminist is getting a lot. The transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist is the man who indeed gets to be ‘the man’ in an exclusive women’s club to which he would have otherwise no access.

Women who think that these men are giving up male privilege seem to be naive about the sophisticated ways in which it is possible for men to co-opt women’s energy, time, space, and sexuality. Transsexually constructed lesbian-feminists may be the first men to realize that ‘if you can’t fight them, join them.’”

- Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire

[homoseggsuality]

“What was taken by outsiders to be slackness, slovenliness or even generosity was in fact a full recognition of the legitimacy of forces other than good ones. They did not believe doctors could heal—for them, none ever had done so. They did not believe death was accidental—life might be, but death was deliberate. They did not believe Nature was ever askew—only inconvenient. Plague and drought were as ‘natural’ as springtime. If milk could curdle, God knows robins could fall. The purpose of evil was to survive it and they determined (without ever knowing they had made up their minds to do it) to survive floods, white people, tuberculosis, famine and ignorance. They knew anger well but not despair, and they didn’t stone sinners for the same reason they didn’t commit suicide—it was beneath them.”

- Toni Morrison, Sula

[homoseggsuality]

“Along with a few other young black men, Jude had gone down to the shack where they were hiring. Three old colored men had already been hired, but not for the road work, just to do the picking up, food bringing and other small errands. These old men were close to feeble, not good for much else, and everybody was pleased they were taken on; still it was a shame to see those white men laughing with the grandfathers but shying away from the young black men who could tear that road up. The men like Jude who could do real work. Jude himself longed more than anybody else to be taken. Not just for the good money, more for the work itself. He wanted to swing the pick or kneel down with the string or shovel the gravel. His arms ached for something heavier than trays, for something dirtier than peelings; his feet wanted the heavy work shoes, not the thin-soled black shoes that the hotel required. More than anything he wanted the camaraderie of the road men: the lunch buckets, the hollering, the body movement that in the end produced something real, something he could point to. ‘I built that road,’ he could say. How much better sundown would be than the end of a day in the restaurant, where a good day’s work was marked by the number of dirty plates and the weight of the garbage bin. ‘I built that road.’ People would walk over his sweat for years. Perhaps a sledge hammer would come crashing down on his foot, and when people asked him how come he limped, he could say, ‘Got that building the New Road.’

It was while he was full of such dreams, his body already feeling the rough work clothes, his hands already curved to the pick handle, that he spoke to Nel about getting married. She seemed receptive but hardly anxious. It was after he stood in lines for six days running and saw the gang boss pick out thin-armed white boys from the Virginia hills and the bull-necked Greeks and Italians and heard over and over, ‘Nothing else today. Come back tomorrow,’ that he got the message. So it was rage, rage and a determination to take on a man’s role anyhow that made him press Nel about settling down. He needed some of his appetites filled, some posture of adulthood recognized, but mostly he wanted someone to care about his hurt, to care very deeply. Deep enough to hold him, deep enough to rock him, deep enough to ask, ‘How you feel? You all right? Want some coffee?’ And if he were to be a man, that someone could no longer be his mother. He chose the girl who had always been kind, who had never seemed hell-bent to marry, who made the whole venture seem like his idea, his conquest.

The more he thought about marriage, the more attractive it became. Whatever his fortune, whatever the cut of his garment, there would always be the hem—the tuck and fold that hid his raveling edges; a someone sweet, industrious and loyal to shore him up. And in return he would shelter her, love her, grow old with her. Without that someone he was a waiter hanging around a kitchen like a woman. With her he was head of a household pinned to an unsatisfactory job out of necessity. The two of them together would make one Jude.”

- Toni Morrison, Sula

[homoseggsuality]

I’ve been glued to my laptop all day looking at the feminist publications on JSTOR’s Independent Voices collection. I originally went on looking for Everywoman and was pleasantly surprised to find all of these papers. My favorite so far is Triple Jeopardy.

[homoseggsuality]

"When the International Labor Organization (ILO) recommended legalization of the sex industry in 1998, their main argument was that governments should be able to garner a share of a lucrative industry. But in order to assert this, it was, of course, necessary for prostitution also to be legitimated as morally acceptable. The narcotics trade and murder-for-hire are other lucrative industries from which governments can also profit, but few international organizations would recommend totally legalizing them. By renaming prostitution 'sex work', explaining that it can be the result of free choice, that society has to 'admit the individual's right to work as a prostitute,' and then fight for better working conditions, the ILO gave governments the moral legitimacy to profit from prostitution (Lim, 1998, p.15)."

- Kajsa Ekis Ekman, Being and Being Bought

[homoseggsuality]

“In trumpeting the agency of women in prostitution, the victim deniers reinforce the view that women choose their own oppression. By reiterating that women are agents and make rational choices to enter prostitution, they ally themselves with a patriarchal culture of blaming women who ‘make their own beds and therefore must lie in them.’ This coincides with the view of conservative moralists, whether religious or secular, who hold women responsible for being pimped, exploited, and abused.

The conservative view of prostitution is to blame women and girls for their alleged choice to be in prostitution; the liberal view is to romanticize women’s ‘choice’ as self-determination and use it to normalize prostitution as ‘sex work.’ Both succumb to the belief that whatever happens to a woman in prostitution is normal because it’s her choice. Both these views have facilitated the expansion of sexual slavery in many parts of the globe and the extensive ways in which women themselves become ‘goods and services’—as prostituted women, as trafficked instruments of exchange, as objects of sex tourism, and as indentured domestic workers who are often sexually exploited as well.

Denying or minimizing women’s victimization in prostitution reverses decades of feminist activism that finally broke through the wall of societal denial that women are victims of male violence. Now that headway has been made in the campaign that domestic battering is violence against women, whether women choose to stay in an abusive relationship or not, it comes back to haunt us in the prostitution debate, not only from those who want to suppress women’s rights but also from those who claim to enhance women’s rights.”

-Janice G. Raymond, Not a Choice, Not a Job

[homoseggsuality]

“The U.S. TVPA [Trafficking Victims Protection Act] has many good points but prosecutors must prove that ‘force, fraud or coercion’ was used in carrying out the trafficking. This requirement—a condition of criminalizing the trafficker—is very challenging to substantiate. Even when the traffickers have used force, fraud, or coercion, the burden of proof rests on the victim. Prosecutors depend on victim testimony, but victims may be reluctant to give evidence because their testimony can retraumatize them and endanger them or their families.

Dorchen Leidholdt, cofounding director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, in her testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives committee considering reauthorization of the TVPA in 2007, described the cases of two Korean trafficking victims assisted by her organization. ‘These traffickers preyed on their victims’ poverty and undocumented status, made them endure 14 to 16 hour days of sexual servitude, deprived them of sleep and food, and demanded that they endure sexual intercourse with as many as ten customers a shift.’ Although these victims were subjected to physical and psychological torture, their traffickers were not prosecuted under the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act because the prosecutors could not meet the proof requirements of force, fraud, or coercion. Instead, the traffickers were prosecuted under another statute—the Mann Act—that metes out much less of a penalty.

...An amended version of the TVPA deleting the force requirement passed almost unanimously in the U.S. House of Representatives but was stonewalled in the Senate by a coalition of groups, including the Justice Department, that convinced legislators it would divert the federal government ‘from its core anti-trafficking mission against crimes involving force, fraud or coercion and child victims.’

The Heritage Foundation, relying on the separation between trafficking and prostitution, argued the amended bill ‘trivialize[s] the seriousness of actual human trafficking by equating it with run-of-the-mill sex crimes—such as pimping, pandering and prostitution—that are neither international nor interstate in nature.’ A coalition between conservative and liberal groups—including members of the Freedom Network and certain governmental authorities, including then senator Joe Biden’s office—appeared not to believe that prostitution is a serious crime, nor pimps serious criminals, nor that most prostitution is in fact domestic trafficking. Unfortunately, Senators Joe Biden and Sam Brownback refused to support the amended anti-trafficking bill that had already passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 405 to 2.”

- Janice G. Raymond, Not a Choice, Not a Job

[homoseggsuality]

“What I remember most clearly are the words of a teenage girl who came up to me after a speech and said: ‘I always had the feeling prostitution was wrong, but I didn’t dare to say it, I thought you had to agree with it.’ 

Her reaction sums up a climate in which proponents of prostitution and surrogacy have effectively managed to revile anyone who stands up against these businesses. Paradoxically, a person may be simultaneously rebuked as being both a Christian and a radical feminist, patriarchal and man-hating, sex negative and moralist, a supporter of biological determinism and unable to understand the biological male sex drive, and so forth. 

Personally, I simply define myself as a feminist. I don’t think there is any reason to be scared by such name-calling. To fight against prostitution and surrogacy is to fight for free sexuality and women’s reproductive autonomy or, to put it differently, the idea that we should be able to have sex and have children when we want to, when we desire it and feel ready for it—not because somebody pays us, forces us, manipulates us, or makes us feel guilty if we don’t. 

The fight against prostitution and surrogacy may seem peripheral or trivial to some. But I believe it is through this fight that we define what it is to be human.”

-Kajsa Ekis Ekman, Being and Being Bought

[homoseggsuality]

“The parallels between prostitution and surrogacy were immediately evident to me. Two industries profit from women’s bodies: one from her sex, the other from her uterus. Two industries commercialize basic human phenomena: sexuality and reproduction... 

This issue, however, is not only about gender. It is about power and how it manifests itself in relation to class, ethnicity, age, social standing, etc. Both industries are based on the concept that the body of a poor person (in prostitution it is not only women) is to be used for the benefit of the rich—without limitations. The powerful people say: ‘I want sex, I want it this way, I want you to do this, say this,’ and pay someone to do it. The powerful people say: ‘We want children, newborn babies, we want them to look like us,” and pay someone to bear the child and give it up, never to see it again. The powerful even go as far as to call their wishes ‘human rights.’”

- Kajsa Ekis Ekman, Being and Being Bought

[homoseggsuality]

“There is a long history of eunuchs who were used by rulers, heads of state, and magistrates as keepers of women. Eunuchs were supervisors of the harem in Islam and wardens of women’s apartments in many royal households. In fact, the word eunuch, from the Greek eunouchos, literally means ‘keeper of the bed.’ Eunuchs were men that other more powerful men used to keep their women in place. By fulfilling this role, eunuchs also succeeded in winning the confidence of the ruler and securing important and influential positions.

Moreover, the word eunuch is also related to the word scheme. (Eunuchs schemed to obtain political power.) In Mesopotamia, many eunuchs became royal officers and managers of palaces, and ‘others emerge on the pages of history as important and often virile figures.’ Some were famous warriors and statesmen, as well as scholars. One finds eunuchs associated with temples dedicated to the goddesses from at least 2000 B.C. until well into the Roman period. In fact, the earliest mention of eunuchs is in connection with the Minoan civilization of Crete, which was a transitional period from an earlier gynocentric society. It thus appears that eunuchs, to some extent, always attached themselves to women’s spaces and, most frequently, were used to supervise women’s freedom of movement and to harness women’s self-centeredness and self-government. ‘It is states that entree into every political circle was possible for eunuchs even if barred to other men.’

Will the acceptance of transsexually constructed lesbian-feminists who have lost only their outward appendages of physical masculinity lead to the containment and control of lesbian feminists? Will every lesbian-feminist space become a harem? Like eunuchs, transsexuals have gained prominent and dominant access to feminist political circles ‘barred to other men.’ Just because transsexually constructed lesbian-feminists are not only castrated men, but also have acquired artifacts of a woman’s body and spirit, does not mean that they are un-men, and that they cannot be used as ‘keepers’ of woman-identified women when the ‘real men,’ the ‘rulers of patriarchy’ decide that the women’s movement (used here as both noun and verb) should be controlled and contained. In this way, they too can rise in the Kingdoms of the Fathers. The political implications of historical eunuchism and its potential for female control should not be lost upon woman-identified women.”

- Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire