Debbie says:

Ampersand linked to this delightful (and thoughtful) post about restroom signs.

My thinking about restroom signs dates back to the days when Raphael Carter had an “androgyny RAQ” posted on the Web (sadly long gone). One of the suggestions Carter made was to re-sign restrooms (especially the ones that are single-stall and have no social reason for separation) with other binaries, such as “Left/Right” or “Outside/Inside” just to mess with people’s minds. Then a friend of mine, very jet-lagged in an airport one day, looked at the conventional male silhouette and thought to herself, “head, arms, legs, that’s me” and walked straight into the men’s room.

Now Marissa at This Is Hysteria! has posted an extensive survey and commentary of restroom signs, what they say and what they mean, illustrated by literally dozens of signs from the familiar (at least to U.S. readers) through the stylized to the surreal.

Marissa says: “washroom signs are very telling of the way societies construct gender. They identify the male as the universal and the female as the variation. They express expectations of gender performance. And they conflate gender with sex.” The degree to which a little head hair or a skirt signify female is visible everywhere, but never so clearly as in restroom signs.

She goes on to discuss signs where the sex divisions are metaphorical (flowers, birds, beer pouring as if the beer bottle was the penis and as if it was the vagina), and even signs that reflect cultural beliefs about why restrooms are gendered.

More than anything, what these signs talk about to me, especially all together like this, is how desperately committed we are to gender binaries, and to very very simple iconic representations of these binaries. Of course, as Marissa says, “To many people the separation of the two, and the signs used to distinguish them, may seem innocuous and necessary. Trans people know that this is not the case, and that public battles have been waged over who is allowed to use which washroom.”

So I’ll just close by reminding folks, in case anyone reading this doesn’t know and needs to, about Safe2Pee, the website that helps people outside of the gender binary to find a measure of protection.

Cross posted at Fukshot

Marlene says:

I went to visit a friend. He had a beautiful smile.

I had scheduled this visit weeks in advance as part of a communal effort to provide him with assistance and company as he recovers from surgery. He had surgery about ten days ago and is unable to lift anything substantial, so I was taking my shift helping with things like laundry and changing the linens on his bed. I would have visited sooner after his surgery, but I had long-standing plans to leave town for a week on the day he was scheduled for surgery. I was glad to know that he had plenty of other people to help him out as he recovers.

He had a breast reduction. He is a trans man who has chosen not to take testosterone and decided that a substantial breast reduction would make him happier with his body. I don’t know all of the details of his decision between a reduction and traditional top surgery, but I do know that some of his decision making was influenced by what his insurance would cover. I also know that many surgeons are resistant to doing traditional top surgery for trans men who opt not to take testosterone.

I’ve done this before. I have helped trans men in my life through their recovery from top surgery on numerous occasions. It has been a while since I gave someone this kind of help and this was different from my memories. The difference was because he had healed for a week before I saw him. He wasn’t so sore anymore (but definitely still sore). He had gotten to experience his new body a little and the impact was clear as day; a huge grin.

He was wearing a tee shirt. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him in one before. He has always worn an over-shirt, usually something like a work shirt. His breasts, now small, were bound for comfort and healing purposes. He asked if I wanted to see and I did. He showed me his breasts, something I still can’t quite imagine him doing. I’m used to his body movements constantly circling the center of his torso defensively.

He stood tall in the middle of his living room; shoulders back, still, at ease. We discussed scarring and stitches and seams and surgeon’s technique and then, I helped him re-bind.

He looks different now. His shoulders are lower and his neck looks longer and that smile of his… I have never seen him smile like this in the time I have known him. It’s a smile I know. I’ve felt it on my face, from the inside. Not from surgery, but from my own arrival points, when I knew that I had finally got to somewhere I needed to be.

His smile makes me feel better about the world and about myself and about all of us.

Laurie says:

I  have reread this poem by W, H. Auden over many years.   Some years it feels to me like history, some years it feel like it could have  been written just then.  This year it feels like today.

September 1, 1939
by W. H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,”
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Laurie Says:

Paul Longmore died in August. I didn’t know him personally but we sometimes worked with the same people. I was very much aware of his presence as a strong advocate for disability rights.

He was an activist who helped recast the paradigm of the problem of disability.  His work placed it mainly out in society not in the individual and advocated for change.

Quotes are from an article in the LA Times by Valerie J. Nelson

Early in his career … Unable to use his hands because of a childhood bout with polio, Paul K. Longmore wrote his first book by punching a keyboard with a pen he held in his mouth. It took him 10 years, and when he was done, he burned a copy in front of the Federal Building downtown.

By taking a match to “The Invention of George Washington” in 1988, the scholar brought national attention to a campaign to reform Social Security policies that discourage disabled professionals from working. Some of the most restrictive penalties were soon lifted — including one preventing him from earning royalties on books — in a policy change that became known as the Longmore Amendment.

…”He devoted his life to making this a better and more just world,” Robert A. Corrigan, the [San Francisco State] university’s president, said in a statement. “Legendary, inspirational, pioneering, irreverent … many words are needed to sum up this remarkable man.”

…As a major founder of disability studies, Longmore helped establish it as a field of academic research and teaching….In 1996, he helped start San Francisco State’s Institute for Disability Studies and was its director. Longmore worked to bring the discipline to other college campuses and provided leadership at disability rights rallies across the state and nation.

… last month, Longmore spoke at a San Francisco celebration of the 20th anniversary of the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act and reminded the crowd of a perspective he had long espoused: Disability rights activists had brought about change by redefining what it means to be disabled.

Longmore’s life is a strong example of an individual working in community to effect important social change. His work changed the lives of many, many people for the better.

Laurie Says:

Artist and Curator of the Impossible d’Arci Bruno does work I admire.  This is a video of her exploration of huge graffiti pieces in an enormous decaying warehouse in Alameda that will soon be condemned.

She’s a great tour guide showing exciting work that is about to disappear forever. As she says, It’s not a place for the timid artist and they’re not making safe art.

This is the only way we’ll get to see the work.

She’s also my adopted (as an adult) daughter.

Debbie says:

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the BP oil spill as a source of fashion photography, working from a post by Lisa at Sociological Images. Now, Lisa is back with a very different disturbing take on the greater subject.

These shoes are the Bed Stu “Cleanup Collection,” designed to look as though their wearers have been getting dirty on the shores of the Gulf Coast, presumably washing off waterbirds and turtles.

Bed Stu is a shoe company named to make us think of Bedford Stuyvesant (generally known as “BedStuy”), an extremely poor neighborhood of New York City. From their website (where I couldn’t find these shoes), they seem to make high-quality men’s and women’s shoes, not cheap but not priced in the skyrocket range either. 100% of profits from the “Cleanup Collection” will, they say, go to clean-up efforts in the Gulf.

As Lisa says:

This looks to me like an example of “conspicuous conservation.” The term was originally derived from the phrase “conspicuous consumption,” defined by Wikipedia as “lavish spending on goods and services acquired mainly for the purpose of displaying income or wealth.” Conspicuous conservation, then, is the (often lavish) spending on “green” products designed mainly to advertise one’s environmentally-moral righteousness.

If you wear regular shoes and donate to the gulf spill clean up, your altruism is entirely invisible. But if you buy these hideous things, everyone gets to know what a nice guy you are.

I agree completely with Lisa about the conservation angle, and the conspicuousness, and I think it goes a little deeper. These shoes don’t only say “I gave money to the BP oil spill” (and how much did the wearer really “give” by purchasing a pair of shoes for the price he would pay anyway?). They also say, if not, “I personally worked to help clean up the BP oil spill,” at least, “I am willing to represent myself as having personally worked to clean up the BP oil spill.” They convey an ethic of personal involvement and actual labor. And they convey that ethic by a clothing choice: How do I want to look in the world? I want to look like a person who would go to the Gulf and get dirty.

I didn’t personally work to clean up the BP oil spill, or the devastation left by the Haitian earthquake, or for that matter, the results of any other natural or manmade disaster. Walking off the trail in the park to pick up litter is about my speed. And thus, I would be embarrassed to wear those shoes, because I don’t want to claim experience, or virtue, or even curiosity, that I don’t have. Since all clothing makes statements, when articles of clothing are politicized, wearing or not wearing them becomes a matter of integrity. The shoes feel to me a little bit like a Disneyland ride, not the roller-coaster kind but the ones that have a flavor of simulation in perfect safety: I took a trip on a jungle boat; I voyaged through the inside of the human bloodstream.

As a group, in the U.S. and first world middle class, most of us live very clean and comfortable, and fairly sedentary lives without much adventure and without much hard labor. And we crave the rewards and kudos we would get for adventure and hard labor without the actual heat and bugs, hard beds and dirty shoes. This has been true for many decades. In fact, significant numbers of people pay for expensive adventure vacations, with or without hard work: anything from inexperienced crewing on a sailing ship to being guided up Mount Everest. Clothing choices with the “adventurous” flavor is hardly new: Banana Republic clothing and contemporary cowboy hats are two examples.

But the Cleanup Collection shoes are the first thing I’ve personally seen that add the spice of “ethical person/volunteer/donated time and sweat” to the mix. Buying and wearing these shoes is using your clothing choices to take subtle credit for other people’s hard work and lived experience. At the same time, if the money actually goes to good work in the Gulf (something that always has to be examined), I’m sure the organizations whose volunteers have their feet in the oil are glad to cash the check.

Debbie says:

I’ve apparently come late to the Montana Fishburne party, since I just learned about the story yesterday. For those of you who’ve been living under the rock next to mine, Montana Fishburne is the daughter of acclaimed actor Laurence Fishburne, who is African-American. At the age of 18, Montana decided to perform in porn movies. Her father is furious and not speaking to her.

Montana is extremely articulate and clear about her decision. In an open letter released by Vibe Magazine, she says:

I was the one who reached out to Vivid. [Male performer] Brian Pumper had nothing to do with getting me started. I did my first video with him, but that’s it. I chose Vivid because they are the best in the business and I wanted to go to the top seller. And they have released other movies with celebrity girls like Kendra, Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian. So, I wanted to go somewhere I knew I would be safe. People have it wrong. Doing porn is not about me becoming famous…it’s about becoming successful. Porn just happens to be the industry I was most interested in, so for critics to say I’m going about it the wrong way they are missing the point. I am making a buzz in the porn industry and in the mainstream, too. It’s leading me to more opportunities, so people can’t say that I’m not going to get anywhere.

Her right to do this is not in doubt, and it’s difficult to read that quotation and question that she’s making a conscious choice. No one can say whether or not it will work out for her, but that’s true of all choices we make at any age; sometimes the least controversial-seeming choices turn out to be the most dangerous, sometimes vice versa. So my basic reaction is “You go, girl!”

Andrea (AJ) Plaid adds a layer of complexity to the story at Racialicious. After discussing her own understanding of Montana Fishburne’s choices in the context of her own history, Plaid goes on to give us some racial/ethnic context, and then finishes with a superb analysis of the role of the woman of color in pornography and what kinds of obstacles Montana Fishburne may encounter. (“What’s not getting nuanced in this statement is the deeper notion of what Latoya Peterson describes as the Montana’s and Midori’s “double marginalization”: that “black bodies are devalued, both in mainstream media and in porn…”) Read the whole piece.

In the middle of her post, Plaid analyzes how Montana Fishburne’s racial identity affects public perception of her choices.

… to hear that [Laurence Fishburne]s] Black daughter is not only a sex worker—which is, according to some people, what one turns to only “out of desperation” or is the path of “those (read: poor, uneducated) women,” though some sex workers would state otherwise–is something some people just couldn’t imagine Papa Laurence doing because he’s just too righteous for that. Laurence, like my moms, are what some would refer to as “race people” those Black people who are proud and try their damnedest to do right by The Race™, including rearing children who won’t embarrass the rest of The Race™ by, in the case of Black women, staying sexually “proper”—meaning no “laying up” and certainly not doing it on video for millions to see. And when their child shames them—and by extension, The Race™—sometimes punishment is swift and, in my mom’s and Laurence’s cases, silent.

I completely get this, and at the same time, it is one of the hardest things about being in any marginalized group: Paris Hilton can star in porn flicks and she’s just a rich white girl starring in porn flicks, but if Montana Fishburne does the same thing, she stands in for all African-American women, or at least all middle-class-and-higher African-American women making that choice. Everyone white has the option of generalizing from Montana’s choice to the choices of Montana’s whole group. Everyone of color is strongly pushed to think about how to respond to her as a representative of their choices. Individuality itself is muted by the role of representation. Individual choices and individual public actions become more difficult.

This also makes me sympathetic to the people of color who are opposed to Montana’s choices. If she cannot escape the role of representative, similarly no one who is identified as being in her groups (in this case, people of color and African-Americans, especially conventionally beautiful young women) can escape being lumped in with her to some extent.

Despite the fact that she is chipping away at the bedrock of these issues by being so public, there is nothing immediate or dramatic that Montana Fishburne can do to change her ‘assigned’ role as representative of her identified group. For me, that means that her choice is even more courageous and challenging than it would be if she was white. So, along with Plaid, “I wish her much luck and success in her chosen path.”

Lynne Murray says:

I first heard of feminist artist Brenda Oelbaum’s Venus of Willendorf sculptures made from diet books through the fat activist mailing list. She explains in more detail about the work on her blog.

This is a Venus from 2009.  The present project sculptures are much smaller but this image was irresistible. Lots more images in slide show here.

Essentially Oelbaum and her assistants take apart old diet books and use the pages to create paper-mache models of the Venus of Willendorf. Each Venus will be constructed from the pages of a given diet guru, so there will be the Atkins Venus, the Richard Simmons Venus, the Weight Watchers Venus, etc.

I love that the Scarsdale Diet Venus will include a small toy gun in honor of Scarsdale Diet founder Herman Tarnower murder by his lover Jean Harris

The weight loss myth still flourishes and diet books still rake in the cash, despite the scientifically documented negative effects (and lack of positive effects) of ANY METHOD of dieting. The failure rate has also proved stunningly consistent. To quote the admirable blog Junk Food Science by debunker Sandy Szwarc, BSN, RN, CCP.

The undeniable fact is that in nearly a century, despite billions of dollars behind them, no diet or weight loss measure has been demonstrated to work: to result in sustained weight loss or significant health improvements in people.

What I find intriguing about Oelbaum’s use of diet books as a physical medium for her art is how her process of creating Venus figure mirrors the effect that dieting has had on many of us. By starving our bodies we teach them to more easily gain and retain weight.

Diet books and years of dieting have helped many of us to add extra pounds during the inevitable regain phase that follow all dieting. So in real life, diet books aid in creating flesh and blood Willendorf Venus style figures that might have been somewhat less abundant without that boost from the diet/regain process.

Hagiwara Hiroko has recently written an introduction to Women of Japan.   A dean and professor at Osaka Prefecture University, she is a feminist scholar and activist who who has written extensively on issues of gender, race, art and history in the context of cultural and women’s studies.

As one of the first women I photographed for the Women of Japan project, she was involved from the beginning.  She came on several shoots to translate and to thoughtfully participate in the process.  Our conversations over the years about the concepts involved in the project were invaluable in shaping it.  As part of the project’s Models Words texts she wrote this about being photographed.

She has recently written an introduction to Women of Japan,  Pictures of Diversity? (Both the English and Japanese are on the site).

The quotes below from her essay reflect her thoughts about the project on issues of diversity and multiculturalism.

Women of Japan is a series of forty black and white photographs of women from different backgrounds taken by the American photographer Laurie Toby Edison during her three visits to Japan from 1998 to 2007. The title Women of Japan was chosen as a counter-framework to the phrase ‘Japanese women.’ The photographer intends to resist the idea that women who are of ‘this society’ are ‘real, native and authentic Japanese women endowed with essential characteristics guaranteed by blood and culture, and who have the legal status of the Japanese national.’

…The women in Edison’s photographs are from diverse backgrounds. There are Korean, American, Ainu, Okinawan women and women from ‘Buraku’ area s which are the target of ongoing discrimination. Their cultural backgrounds and their legal status are different. They are of different generations, ranging from their twenties to nineties. They have different occupations such as dancer, teacher, politician, artist, writer, truck driver, scholar, and student. Their concerns and passions are also diverse. They have different standpoints on femininity and being a woman. They are all socially positioned as women but viewers of these works will first of all be impressed with the diversity of women in Women of Japan.

The concept of diversity, however, is not as simple as it looks, and is not easy for any photographer to represent. Edison reached every model through the networks of various women’s communities. Many of the models were introduced or recommended by someone who had posed for Edison. It was a laborious but pleasurable process for the photographer, who speaks little Japanese, to get acquainted with women from various communities in Japan. Nothing was planned for the shoots; one encounter led to another in the process of creating the series.

…Since the 1980s, when people’s mobility across borders accelerated and grew constant on the global level and highly industrialized societies became undeniably multicultural, the word ‘cultural diversity’ has been often used to represent an affirmative attitude towards the situation. Japanese society has not yet acknowledged the constant presence of foreigners in society as components of a joyous diversity. Nevertheless, no one can deny that people from diverse backgrounds work and live in Japan. People know that there are those from Japan’s ex-colonies such as Korea and China, and Japanese-Brazilians, Americans, Filippinos, Iranians, Russians, Nigerians, and Bengalis to name a few. The word ‘multiculturalism’ is normally used in the context in which such multitudes must be favorably welcome and encouraged. I want to question whether Edison’s work Women of Japan can be positioned in that context.If we examine this question carefully, the answer in my view is ‘no.’ Multiculturalism is based on the assumption that each culture comprising the multitude is static and homogeneous and that multicultural society is a mosaic made of such individual components. Women in Edison’s photographs, however, are not representative of their communities. Some models wear their national costume, but they are not here as national representatives. Other models, who share a national origin or community, are in plain dress. Only one woman is in Kimono, which is generally supposed to be the Japanese national costume. Her adornment represents not Japaneseness but herself. Edison’s Women of Japan are not meant to be specimens in an ethnological museum. Cultures are fluid and always mingling to generate something new. While the legal system tries to demarcate the border, to maintain homogeneity within the borderline, and to exclude the extraneous that looks uncontrollable, people meet and cultures mix. People’s cultural identities become hybridized. The words ‘multi’ and ‘multiple’ are based on the idea of countability. Edison’s photographs convey that this is a site of exchange and mingling of people and cultures and that diverse women, whose physical expressions and postures are inscribed with this experience, live in Japan.

Women of Japan photos are here.  The front photo is of Hagiwara Hiroko and her best friend Fukazawa Junko.

Laurie says:

In an article in the NY Times, Natalie Angier talks to scientists in the field and discusses why we perceive some harmless animals as ugly.  Some of the explanations for our reactions are very problematical, but I thought the subject was fascinating. Our culture is obsessive about beauty and rarely considers anything more than biases when (not) thinking about ugliness.  We get nitpickingly specific about beauty and almost never considers ugliness.  It’s one of those things that everybody knows.

…Let’s not pussyfoot. They are, by our standards, ugly animals — maybe cute ugly, more often just ugly ugly. And though the science of ugliness lags behind investigations into the evolution of beauty and the metrics of a supermodel’s face, a few researchers are taking a crack at understanding why we find certain animals unsightly even when they don’t threaten us with venom or compete for our food.

…Among the all-star uglies are the star nosed mole, whose mug in close-up, said Nancy Kanwisher, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “is disturbing because it looks like the animal has no face,” or as if its face has been blown away.

Clearly the second look matters. I don’t know how I’d feel about a star nose mole in life, but on second glance I rather liked it.  The nose seemed more sea anemone-like than repulsive, and the badger-like claws are attractive.

..As scientists see it, a comparative consideration of what we find freakish or unsettling in other species offers a fresh perspective on how we extract large amounts of visual information from a millisecond’s glance, and then spin, atomize and anthropomorphize that assessment into a revealing saga of ourselves.

…We see images of jaguars, impalas and falcons and we praise their regal beauty and name our muscle cars for them. We watch a conga line of permanently tuxedoed penguins, and our hearts melt faster than the ice sheet beneath those adorable waddling feet. Even creatures phylogenetically far removed from ourselves can have an otherworldly appeal: jellyfish octopus, praying mantis, horseshoe crab.

It’s interesting that so many of the creatures that are deadly or dangerous to us, we find beautiful.

…The more readily we can analogize between a particular animal body part and our own, the more likely we are to cry ugly. “We may not find an elephant’s trunk ugly because it’s so remote,” Dr. Dutton said. “But the proboscis on a proboscis monkey is close enough to our own that we apply human standards to it.

…Classical beauty is easy, but a taste for the difficult, the unconventional, the ugly, has often been seen as a mark of sophistication, a passport into the rarefied world of the artistic vanguard. “Beauty can be present by its violation,” Dr. Steiner said, and the pinwheel appendages of the star-nosed mole are the rosy fingers of dawn.

…Don’t forget the gargoyles of our own creation, purebred cats and dogs that are stump-limbed, hairless and wrinkled, with buggy eyes and concave snouts, and ears as big as a jack rabbit’s or curled at the tips like rotini. We love them, we do, our dear little mutants, not in spite of their ugliness, but because of it.

Looking at what different cultures eat, and ‘appetizing’ strongly includes visuals, it seems obvious that standards of ugliness – i.e. I wouldn’t put that in my mouth – vary greatly. Examining all of this I’m still struck by how shallow and circular these explanations are.  It strikes me as the very beginning of a conversation I’d love to see developed.