Tiger Lily

"In the end they changed into paper tigers, dead tigers, and beancurd tigers. These are historical facts. Have people not seen or heard about these facts?" - Mao Ze Dong, speaking to the Politburo of the CCP 中央局 (Dec 1, 1958)

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There is no real identity—individual or group-based—that is separable from its conditions of possibility, and any political appeal to identity formations must engage with the paradox of acting from the very subject-positions it must also oppose.  The dangers of identity politics, then, are that it casts as authentic to the self or group an identity that in fact is defined by its opposition to an Other. Reclaiming such an identity as one's own merely reinforces its dependence on this dominant Other, and further internalizes and reinforces an oppressive hierarchy.

The Stanford Encyclopedia entry on identity politics, borrowing from Wendy Brown

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Characteristics of male power include: the power of men 1. to deny women [our own] sexuality [by means of clitoridectomy and infibulation; chastity belts; punishment, including death, for female adultery; punishment, including death, for lesbian sexuality; psychoanalytic denial of the clitoris; strictures against mastur- bation; denial of maternal and postmenopausal sensuality; unnecessary hysterectomy; pseudolesbian images in media and literature; closing of archives and destruction of documents relating to lesbian existence]; 2. or to force it [male sexuality] upon them [by means of rape (including marital rape) and wife beating; father-daughter, brother-sister incest; the socialization of women to feel that male sexual “drive” amounts to a right; idealization of heterosexual romance in art, literature, media, advertising, etc., child marriage; arranged marriage; prostitution; the harem; psychoanalytic doctrines of frigidity and vaginal orgasm; pornographic depictions of women responding pleasurably to sexual violence and humiliation (a subliminal message being that sadistic heterosexuality is more “normal” than sensuality between women)]; 3. to command or exploit their labor to control their produce [by means of the institutions of marriage and motherhood as unpaid production; the horizontal segregation of women in paid employment; the decoy of the upwardly mobile token woman; male control of abortion, contraception, and childbirth; enforced sterilization; pimping; female infanticide, which robs mothers of daughters and contributes to generalized devaluation of women]; 4. to control or rob them of their children [by means of father-right and “legal kidnapping”; enforced sterilization; systematized infanticide; seizure of children from lesbian mothers by the courts; the mal-practice of male obstetrics; use of the mother as “token torturer” in genital mutilation or in binding the daughter’s feet (or mind) to fit her for marriage]; 5. to confine them physically and prevent their movement [by means of rape as terrorism, keeping women off the streets; purdah; footbinding; atrophying of women’s athletic capabilities; haute couture, “feminine” dress codes; the veil, sexual harassment on the streets; horizontal segregation of women in employment; prescriptions for “full-time” mothering; enforced economic dependence of wives]; 6. to use them as objects in male transactions [use of women as “gifts”; bride-price; pimping; arranged marriage; use of women as entertainers to facilitate male deals, e.g., wife-hostess, cocktail waitress required to dress for male sexual titillation, call girls, “bunnies, ” geisha, kisaeng prostitutes, secretaries]; 7. to cramp their creativeness [witch persecutions against midwives and female healers and as pogrom against independent, “unassimilated” women; definition of male pursuits as more valuable than female within any culture, so that cultural values become embodiment of male subjectivity; restriction of female self-fulfillment to marriage and motherhood; sexual exploitation of women by male artists and teachers; the social and economic disruption of women’s creative aspirations; erasure of female tradition]; and 8. to withhold from them large areas of the society’s knowledge and cultural attainments [by means of noneducation of females (60% of the world’s illiterates are women); the “Great Silence” regarding women and particularly lesbian existence in history and culture; sex-role stereotyping which deflects women from science, technology, and other “masculine” pursuits; male social/professional bonding which excludes women; discrimination against women in the professions].

A poem by Gertrude Stein.

And how does this poem make you feel? -- asks Janet Halley in Split Decisions...

If this convergent list of equivalences energizes you, indignifies you, and even fortifies you - if this way of compiling everything together into a kind of structuralist manifesto appeals to your reasoning...you might be a purist, and a feminist.

Or if you question the grand narrative here, and seek to articulate the differences between contexts, indivdual experiences, individual ways of navigating or exploiting these constraints on feminine agency/subjectification...you might be kind of queer, and also a feminist. Thus, paralysis.

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"Animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.¹"

- An old Chinese ontology, purportedly as discovered by Borges, and quoted with amusement by Foucault

[literaryheroine]

[featherandarrow]

yes

[bettinajudd]

Yes

precioso

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Let me say, loud and clear, that governance feminism has been, in manifold ways, a good thing….But surely even a beneficiary of governance feminism can question the good faith of feminists who persistently represent feminism as unequivocally a political underdog, as lacking governance ambitions and effects, and as pushed into the grave by every up-start prodigal theory. Perhaps we can instead acknowledge that feminism has a will to power, and thrill to the ferocity with which it sometimes wields the power it has won. Of course acknowledging feminism to be a governance project has a dark side, and it is important to face it. That dark side includes its vanquished, its prisoners of war, the interests that pay the taxes it has levied and owe the rents it has imposed. Feminism with blood on its hands. Any force as powerful as feminism must find itself occasionally looking down at its own bloody hands. And any force as powerful as feminism will occasionally impose itself on its own constitute elements….But when governance feminism / feminist theory pretends it is always the underdog, and when feminists insist that prodigals must be converged back into feminism or feminism will die, it wages power without owning it. Feminism…avoids acknowledging the full range of its effects….It is a very dangerous moment. …This refusal to see, sustained while feminism imposes costs on interests and projects outside its purview, gives us a textbook case of bad faith….As long as it closes its eyes to the effects of its power on neighboring but different theoretical/political projects and constituencies, on its prodigal sons and daughters, they will - and I think they should - prolong their sojourn away.

Janet Halley, Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism

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Some moving ideas from Janet Halley's text, Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism:

1. The map is not the territory. Treating ideological frameworks as theories, mere models of the world, without insisting that they be the normative prescriptions by which the world ought to operate. Focusing on the problem, rather than on the orthodoxy of theory. Allowing for multiple points of ideology to coexist in describing a single problem. 

"Instead of working to defend, protect, and maximize theory as an account of the world and program for the world, I am trying to see it as theory fragments lying about that we can use quite instrumentally, pragmatically, and disloyally to deal with problems we perceive and want to do something about….My desire is a posture, an attitude, a practice, of being in the problem, not being in the theory.

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2. A History of Prodigal Feminisms - Convergence and Divergence: Janet Halley provides a very well-written genealogy of splits from mainstream feminism, what she calls "the prodigals." In later chapters, she writes about each of these prodigals, where and why they differ from mainstream feminism, and the attitude of outraged betrayal they inspired in Mother Feminism - what she calls "convergence feminism," an attitude among governance feminists that feels it must reincorporate the prodigals back under its umbrella somehow, in order to remain whole as a theoretical framework. This is in contrast with what Janet Halley calls "divergence feminism" - owning up to the fact that mainstream feminism doesn't describe all people's experiences, and isn't the only form of justice that can be. Allowing for differing strands of theory to coexist without insisting that a single one has to be right.

"It is widely (but by no means universally) thought that left/progressive, theoretical, political, and erotic work in sexuality today, in the United States, will always, at root or ultimately, be feminist. I argue here, to the contrary, that feminism is not a universal advocacy project for all sexual interests that left/progressive/liberal intellectuals and advocates have constructed, inhabited, defended, and advanced: … gay-identity thought and politics, sex-positive feminism, anti-racist, postcolonial, and socialist feminisms that are willing to diverge from feminist priorities, postmodernizing feminisms, queer theory with and without feminism - have been competing with various feminisms…for intellectual authority and political fealty."

--- "A person framing a conceptual, descriptive, normative and/or political project that involves a discontinuity between two theories of power, two descriptions of the world, two normative aims, two invoked constituencies, and so on…can choose between converging and diverging them….What I’ll call convergentist feminism insists that feminism mediate whatever comes into conflict, harmonizing it into a feminism frame. In its divertentist forms, feminism is prepared to see political splits and split decisions, within its feminism….Decides that feminism need not be the normative or political measure of goodness of the results"

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3. Feminism's Bad Faith: as an ideology, governance feminism refuses to admit to its will to power, insisting that it is always the victim, and refuses to see how it also victimizes people in conflicting crossroads.

Critique of feminist NGO imperialism: “Global governance and local governance are often done through informal, opaque, ideologically committed ‘nongovernmental organizations’ that strategize hard - sometimes successfully - to become indispensible when major new fluidities in formal power emerge.”

——- BEST QUOTE:

"Let me say, loud and clear, that governance feminism has been, in manifold ways, a good thing….But surely even a beneficiary of governance feminism can question the good faith of feminists who persistently represent feminism as unequivocally a political underdog, as lacking governance ambitions and effects, and as pushed into the grave by every up-start prodigal theory. Perhaps we can instead acknowledge that feminism has a will to power, and thrill to the ferocity with which it sometimes wields the power it has won.

Of course acknowledging feminism to be a governance project has a dark side, and it is important to face it. That dark side includes its vanquished, its prisoners of war, the interests that pay the taxes it has levied and owe the rents it has imposed. Feminism with blood on its hands.

Any force as powerful as feminism must find itself occasionally looking down at its own bloody hands. And any force as powerful as feminism will occasionally impose itself on its own constitute elements….But when governance feminism / feminist theory pretends it is always the underdog, and when feminists insist that prodigals must be converged back into feminism or feminism will die, it wages power without owning it. Feminism…avoids acknowledging the full range of its effects….It is a very dangerous moment.

…This refusal to see, sustained while feminism imposes costs on interests and projects outside its purview, gives us a textbook case of bad faith….As long as it closes its eyes to the effects of its power on neighboring but different theoretical/political projects and constituencies, on its prodigal sons and daughters, they will - and I think they should - prolong their sojourn away.” ===== BRIEF BIO:

Janet Halley is among the canon of critical legal theory scholars, who teaches at Harvard Law School. I discovered her work in the context of her critiques of human trafficking, as the co-director of Trafficking Roundtable. My first encounter with Halley's thinking was through this anthology, Left Legalism/Left Critique, which she co-edited with Wendy Brown (the critical legal theorist, partner of Judith Butler, who included in this anthology a thought-provoking paper about suffering the paradoxes of rights in identity-based politics, which I will write about in another post). My first encounter with Janet Halley was at her talk at NYU Gallatin, organized by my advisor, Vaskuki Nesiah.

Here is an interview Halley did with the Guardian, where she talked about many of her core ideas.

Here is a select list of Halley's publications, which represent her body of thought, which spans queer sexuality to family law.

Here is a video of Halley speaking at Duke Law School on: "A Map of Feminist and Queer Theories of Sexuality and Sexual Regulation"

Here is Halley's [curtailed] professional bio, as listed on the Harvard Law School website:

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"Janet Halley is the Royall Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature from UCLA and a J.D. from Yale Law School. She has taught at Tel Aviv Buckmann School of Law and in the Law Department of the American University in Cairo....She is co-director of the Trafficking Roundtable and of the Up Against Family Law Exceptionalism Conference, an international collaboration dedicated to studying the role of the family and family law in colonization, decolonization and contemporary globalization....She teaches Family Law, Gender and the Family in Transnational Legal Orders, Gender in Postcolonial Legal Orders, Trafficking and Labor Migration, and courses on the intersections of legal theory with social theory."

  Areas of Interest

Family Law

Family Law: Comparative Family Law

Gender and the Law: Gender in Transnational Law

Gender and the Law: Queer Theory in Legal Studies

Legal Theory: Critical Legal Studies

Sexuality and the Law

Anthologies Edited 

With Wendy Brown, Halley coedited Left Legalism/Left Critique (Duke 2002)

With Andrew Parker, Halley coedited After Sex? New Writing Since Queer Theory (Duke 2011).

Halley is the editor of a collection of essays entitled Critical Directions in Comparative Family Law

Her current book projects are The Family/Market Distinction: A Genealogy and Critique and Rape in Armed Conflict: Assessing the Feminist Vision and its Law. 

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Sell/Buy/Date - a Review "In-Progress for Public Workshopping"

“Welcome to me!” giggles Bella the sex-positive blond, a Feminist Sex Work Studies major “with a minor in Social Media and a concentration in YouTube memes.”

Such was the characterization of sex worker activists on the internet by Tony-award winning playwright, Sarah Jones. She has been publicly “workshopping” her newest one woman show, entitled “Sell/Buy/Date” at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe from September 18th to October 18th, allegedly to seek feedback and social media publicity/hype from early viewers. I had the fortune of being one such viewer last night, on its closing night, and I have some feedback.

“This is really rough, everyone,” Jones said at the opening of the show. “Some of this stuff, I literally wrote in the last hour.”

It certainly felt like that.

The impressionistic sketches of the former Nuyorican slam poetry champion, Sarah Jones, has the level of accuracy of a Mean Girls’ collection of favorite insults. The play is really one insult after another, crafted for comical value.

From jabs at head-bobbing Indian women, to a rotund and slow-witted Native American sex worker, to using the N-word during an impression of an African-American male, it seems that Sarah Jones had something offensive for everybody.

“Skinny people…you can tie a few together and make a Dreamcatcher!” exclaims one 300-pound Native American sex worker, on stage at a Las Vegas venue called the Exploitation All-Inclusive.

Everybody was a “prostituted woman” except for a Russian male pimp who self-described as a sex worker. And the sex worker rights activists are caricatured as dimwitted and undereducated supporters of Sarah Palin. In line with other anti-prostitution movement mythologies, Sarah Jones seems to be under the impression that the sex worker movement is funded by big corporate interests, which has bought out human rights organizations like Amnesty International. (Of course, bribery is the only reason why any human rights organization would want to support sex worker rights.)

Set in a futuristic classroom, where a professor looks back on a history of the previous century with disbelief at its errors – the short-lived legalization of prostitution being the greatest error –  Jones’ monologues paints a world where sexism is pathologized and automatically treated with therapy. In this progressive world, prostitution could not possibly exist.

The future is a techno-utopia of ever improving gender equality, and the main narrator is a college professor who is teaching to a classroom full of students through summoning characters from the past, using a buzzy form of neurotechnology. These “characters” which Jones imitates with her famed ability to act out funny impressions, are voices from our present day mid-2010’s, as well as imagined voices from the years 2020-2060. Their brains and memories encoded and preserved in some cloud of internet-based immortality, and reincarnated onto the stage by Sarah Jones’ multi-faced talents.

Assuming that history progresses teleologically towards social justice, and is not some kind of arbitrary power struggle between various actors under resource constraints, the future India will be a place where an emergency medical treatment will be necessary to cure male porn addicts of their epidemic – Sarah Jones is a modern day Cassandra for the Male Health Crisis of adolescent dopamine depletion due to pornography and video games. However, magically, there will be a “re-sensititization” of men by forcing them to watch Thelma and Louise, which will suddenly lead to a change of neurochemistry across all the members of the sex, and will make men much more supportive of educated women rather than porn stars. (Because the two types of women are mutually exclusive. And because men are, of course, the only consumers of porn.)

Fortunately, with the brave new world technology of Thelma and Louise, men will also “suddenly lose the capacity for domination.” (Because that’s what BDSM is really about.)

The Head of the Union of Sex Workers International speaks to a membership of seven, and claims in her ditzy and self-centered way, that this union is the “most vocal” union, with some members so educated as to even have an Associate’s degree! Clearly, Jones has never heard of the 650,000 strong DMSC, a sex worker collective in India, only one of several sex worker unions in that country. She has also never met the majority of fetish workers in New York City, 39% of whom have Ph.D.’s from institutions like Columbia University, which is a higher level of Ph.D. attainment than almost any other profession in the city. Jones certainly displays a lot of educational superiority for a college dropout from Bryn Mawr who decided to leave school to become a slam poet. (But I’m being Mean now…)

“I started out in the Lingerie Football League,” the sex worker union leader tells the audience, explaining how she was basically getting pounded in the head and other parts for a living, “what we need are better helmets and labor rights.” (The notion of a high-paid porn industry star becoming a sex worker activist is kind of awesome and fantastical, since the vast majority of sex worker activists are middle-to-lower-level tattooed radical/anarcho-socialist types like myself, but bear with her here…) Sarah Jones tries to point out how the very notion of labor rights in prostitution is silly, because…football.

Yes, professional athletes also do a physically harmful job, and take on great risks for pay, and are way too often broke and homeless years after their best performing years, much like veterans. This is, in fact, a labor rights problem, which needs to be addressed through better retirement and job re-training, savings and investment programs during high-earning years, lifelong healthcare and reparations – all things that sex workers have been talking about for decades, and would really benefit from if there was actually such a thing as sex worker labor rights.

Without addressing any of the push factors of prostitution from socioeconomic inequality to mass incarceration to the dire need for additional housing for runaway youth, or suggesting any better solutions for gaining reparations/rights/protections from violence for sex workers besides more criminalization of clients (as if that has been so effective in dissuading all those guys in these last few centuries…) – the bleak future that Sarah Jones paints is dystopic only insofar as revenge porn continues to exist through futuristic “mental dommes” who are clients that target sex workers by taking snapshots of the inside of their brains.

“Sure, hack me, as long as you pay me, whatever” chants the nonchalant and docile Asian Australian sex worker in the play, probably a sketch of Julie Kim of Scarlet Alliance, whom Sarah Jones claims to be impressed by, though she “agrees to disagree” with Kim’s politics.

An Irish sex worker is also caricatured – sounding an awful lot like Laura Lee or Gaye Dalton – and mis-portrayed as some pathetic woman who has been abused by one man after another, whose sad life is testament more to womankind’s weakness than an Irish sex worker’s strength.

There is also a “sex-negative” immigrant domestic-worker-become-sex-worker, supporting her children while playing towards racial stereotypes of Jamaican women, or Indian women pretending to be Jamaican women. She is included in order to demonstrate a diversity of views, and her words sound a bit like Lori Adorable’s, but she is portrayed in a very backhanded sort of way. Jones downplays this kind of economic instrumentalism as an egg head academic’s idea of “agency” but not empowerment, because empowerment is for the whole of womankind, against which the economic decisions of individual sex workers are opposed.

It seems like Sarah Jones has been paying pretty close attention to Sex Worker Twitter, so much that many of her characters seem to be caricatures of real sex worker activists. But with predictably mistaken statistics on the age of entry into sex work, because she either willfully ignores what she reads by sex workers and academics, or because she has decided that it will be more commercially viable, or artistically successful, to cater to the much more dominant prostitution abolition movement.

Actually, Sarah Jones’ work has been directly commissioned by the anti-prostitution organization Equality Now. Speaking of corporate sponsorship, it seems the human trafficking movement has never been short of it. But it really disappoints me that queer feminist people of color spaces like the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, where I hung out as a teenager through participating in Urban Word, a writing program for youth of color with a strong social justice focus – is increasingly supportive of this kind of paid rhetoric on prostitution.

Jones would do well to read a much better writer’s compilation of prostitution facts and fictions, such as Maggie McNeill’s blogpost here. But who has time for distinguishing between such distinctions? Fiction is clearly more fun and more rewarding, and can just as easily be masqueraded as fact.

I think the worst insult of all that Jones throws around is her musical portrayal of the Sad Survivor stereotype: an ignorant Latina girl with low self-esteem, who has been abused by men, and she deserves so much better, because all she really wants is love. (This whole bit is Jones’ singing finale – yes, she is one of those slam poets who sings in her poems to show off her singing voice, which is admittedly quite a lovely one.)

There is no strength in the melodic voice of the Survivor stereotype that Jones portrays. Crooning somberly to the metaphor of an airplane, the Survivor stereotype sings: “I was grounded…and I didn’t think I deserved anything better, but now I know that I deserve more…I deserve to fly. I just needed love.”

Could anything be more insulting?

Yes, it could. Sarah Jones not-so-subtly suggests in closing that she herself might just be a survivor of the sex trade, who was “prostituted” at age 17. But she backtracks: even if she were a survivor, Jones says through her narrator, that she would not want to let the public know this fact, because the Survivor is too stigmatized a figure in the public imagination. “The audience might put you on a pedestal as a survivor,” she said, “they might tell you it’s courageous, but really, they raise you up to take better aim at you with pity.” Of course, Jones would never want to court public pity.

Nor would she want to contribute to the stigma of being a survivor of prostitution, a “veteran” of being prostituted, or an example of how being a prostituted woman completely ruins your life and self-esteem – unless, of course, you write a Tony award-winning play, or get invited to speak at the White House with Michelle Obama. Of course, survivors never have experiences like that…

“I want to dictate the terms of my objectification,” says the sex worker activist-bimbo-dumbditz in Sarah Jones’ play, “I go to a bi-weekly feminist pole dancing party called Don’t Get All Pole-mical.”

If only.

“You are not a Toyota; you are a human being,” preaches Jones through one of her many personalities.

She pretends to be a retired vice cop in the AA for prostitution addiction, who pines for sentimental romance: “You can’t get enough of that feeling. You keep chasing. It hurts your ego deep down,” because what the l vice-cop-ex-client really wants is love:

“I got access to this special part of them, and all they got back is money…Prostitution steals the one true thing you could have in the world: love.”

Oh, Po-lice! “I’ve heard orgasms faked in 100 languages,” the vice cop goes on to pontificate, barfingly, “The sound of orgasms should be beautiful, like the forest, or the ocean…but instead, it’s like I am hearing an ambient noise machine.”

It just so turns out that ambient noise machines aren’t criminalized or subjected to systematic violence by the police! And here and again, I also can identify a hollow ring, from anyone who claims to have worked on the street: we know that police are not your friends.

I was pretty excited to see this show, and I really really wanted to like this piece. I would like to assume the best about Jones, and hope that through the workshopping process, she will produce a better-researched (and less Mean Girls crossed with NGO fundraising commercial) sort of final product. But somehow, I’m not too hopeful of that.

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By Whyyy from China. More at http://globalstreetart.com/whyyy

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A video I took on the subway in between Canal Street and Fulton Street on the C train in downtown Manhattan.

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