Race, Ethnicity And Culture

Disfigurement: Isolating ‘Imperfect’ Bodies

December 6, 2011 By Sharon 2 Comments

Shirin Juwaley of Palash Foundation, an organisation dedicated to the rehabilitation of people with disfigurement, explains how disfigurement affects the lives of women.

Originally published at Women’s Web. Cross-posted with permission.

By Shirin Juwaley

Having a facial disfigurement, according to me, is an advantage! It has sieved out the people in my life as only the significant remain. In the 13 years of surviving an acid attack by my ex-husband, I have come across all sorts of attitudes and behaviours towards a deviant face.

Justifying and accepting discrimination

I often wonder why most people cringe, repel, flinch, stare, avert their gaze and feel awkward in their interactions with people with disfigurement. To cite a few examples, Deepa.S*, 25, decided to burn up as she was fed up of living a life not meeting her expectations. This wife and mother of a one year old survived and suffers extreme contractures. Her chin and neck are fused with scarring all over her body. Let’s face it; her physical symmetry has gone askew. This mother prefers to isolate herself in a dingy house with no electricity and water, as fetching food would mean the neighbours cringing and fearfully closing their doors. This means Deepa is willing to go thirsty and hungry rather than step out in a community that is obviously uncomfortable with her physical appearances.

In a country [India] where leprosy is still considered a curse from God, where social discrimination is based on colour, where girls of marriageable age are encouraged to go through great lengths to be visually acceptable, fearing the visually deviant holds no surprise. What is interesting though, is that Deepa herself conforms to these ideas of beauty and finds the reaction of her neighbours justifiable. Many women in the lower socio-economic class resort to burning as an answer to their troubles not realising that this will only add to their woes if they survive. Since fire is considered to be engulfing and easily accessible to women, 80% of burn cases are women and children.

Shanti.K*, 30, was burnt by her in-laws as she was childless three years into her marriage. She survived with her skin on her face and body badly twisted and stretched leaving her looking deviant. She wears a scarf around her facial disfigurement and hides her scars with clothes covering her fully so that ‘others’ are comfortable around her. She runs into a fit of anger if a man passes the comment “Who will be with someone like you? (Teray jaisee kay saath kaun rahega?)” as it affirms that she is not beautiful and hence not acceptable. She has few friends and does not like to socialize, which is much against the carefree person she was before getting burnt. Marriage or even relationships according to her are both impossible and not even a distant dream.

The perfect, unattainable body

Both Deepa and Shanti are accepting of their discrimination as they don’t know otherwise. The social indoctrination around physical appearances, especially for a woman, starts as soon as she is born. The messages floating around are so strong, be it in the stories we are told, the movies we watch, the clothes we wear, religious significance, customs to be adhered, compliments/comments we receive, comparisons made with siblings and cousins – the list is probably endless, shape our thinking. The visual impact of media has pushed 98% of the ‘normal’ population to ape the 2% population of ‘perfect’ bodies displayed in glossy magazines and hoardings.

For Anamika.M*, who was born congenitally disfigured, growing up with no legs was traumatic. Children around her played and ran while she stood in one place, helpless. She was considered as a ‘kaccha limbu’/invalid and rejected for not being ‘normal’. The trauma of growing up was magnified, as fitting in became the only goal. Anamika made concentrated efforts to look pretty to compensate for her feet.

There are thousands of people with disfigurement living in Mumbai alone but the probability of meeting these thousands is reduced to one in a month. I wonder, why is the ratio so abnormally imbalanced? The answers over the years have evolved into more questions.

The paramount importance given to ideals of physical appearances, mostly for women, has secluded a certain section of society that does not fit into the mould of beauty or ‘normalcy’.

Deviant looking bodies (disfigurement) have been enshrouded with myth, religious beliefs and fear causing disruption in attitudes and behaviour. Disfigurement is defined as an altered physical appearance which can be congenital, due to accidents, burn injuries, surgical intervention, skin deformities, illnesses or any other reason. Hence disfigurement, though not a physical liability, creates a disabling impact due to social prejudices and apathy by society, particularly for a woman, as she is overburdened with expectations of being a perfect (socially acceptable) daughter, a wife and mother.

We at Palash Foundation deal with these core issues of accepting differences. Our core programme addresses social reintegration and livelihoods for people with disfigurement. We currently work along with the social work department of LTMG (Sion) and Kasturba Hospital in Mumbai with burn survivors and their caretakers and simultaneously conduct sensitisation and awareness talks to different groups of people on disfigurement. To know more visit www.palashfoundation.org

*Names changed on request to protect privacy.

About The Author: Shirin Juwaley, 37, is an acid attack survivor. She is the Founder, Director of Palash Foundation, an organisation that strives to create an inclusive world where the rights of people with disfigurement are respected and protected. She has worked extensively on different projects in the social sector for the last 9 years.

Filed Under: Disability, Race, Ethnicity and Culture, Representation and Identity, Women Tagged With: acid attack, acid attack survivors, burn survivor, discrimination, disfigurement, India, Mumbai, Palash Foundation, Shirin Juwaley, violence against women

All-American Muslim: A New Show Unveils Muslim Life in the Midwest

November 18, 2011 By Ophira 2 Comments

By Ophira Edut

Hey, non-Arab America, guess what? There are Muslims living in the U.S.A. and some of ‘em are just like us. At least, that’s what TLC’s new reality show All-American Muslim is attempting to portray.

It’s groundbreaking…and it isn’t.

As a Detroit native who grew up a few miles outside of the show’s Dearborn, Michigan setting—a city with the largest Arab population in the United States—I was especially excited to see my hometown make it into reality-land. Simplified or not, it’s high time the media showed a three-dimensional portrait of Arab-Americans, and I’ve set my DVR.

The cameras follow five Muslim families as they navigate between custom and assimilation, and deal with everyday issues like love, family, work and generation gaps. There’s a single Lebanese mom who calls herself a “hillbilly at heart,” marrying an Irish Catholic man who’s converting to Islam. A young mother-to-be, already married at 24, is proud that her husband will break from tradition to be a hands-on dad. There are cops, football coaches, and a sassy blond businesswoman who dresses in short, tight dresses and heels. Some women are veiled (or partly veiled), others are glammed up with blond highlights and heavy makeup. Most of them speak in a flat Midwestern dialect, others with a trace of the Arabic cadence. Hookahs are puffed, prayer rugs unrolled, and daily Muslim life goes on amidst Americana.

While the show has (of course) been criticized by Muslims and non-Muslims alike, I believe it’s a good start. (See one Muslim-American man’s food for thought here.) Obviously, it portrays only a small swath of Muslim life in America: the cast is Midwestern and most, if not all, are Lebanese. The mix of old-school and modern values helps humanize a group that’s been scapegoated more than ever in the last decade since 9/11.

Is it a representation of Muslims worldwide? Well, no. Arabs are only 20% of the total Muslim population. Some of the most concentrated Muslim areas are in Asia and southeast Asia (Bangladesh, Pakistan and Indonesia) and Africa (Senegal, Somalia, Djibouti)—not in the Arab countries. Certainly, a TLC reality program can’t represent the entire spectrum of a religion that boasts over a billion members.

This small cast is not “typical Muslim” any more than Snooki and The Situation are ambassadors for Italian Americans. (What TLC left out is that many of Detroit’s Arab residents are also Christian, notably the Chaldeans from Baghdad and some Lebanese folk.) The show will have stereotypes, conversations that make people uncomfortable, all the pathologies of humanity on display. And if you want to get radical for a sec, a subtext does seems to be a message to whitey that the Muslim next door is just like you. But if it’s gotten people (and the media) talking about Arab-Americans without using the terms “terrorist” and “9/11,” it counts as progress in my book.

I grew up in Detroit during the 1970s and ‘80s, and I witnessed the area’s Arab-American assimilation process as a child. It was a similar path to the one taken by Jews (including my own grandparents, who escaped the Holocaust), and other immigrant groups that have fled to the United States.

In grade school during the late 1970s and early 1980s, Arab kids joined my classes mid-year, some not speaking a word of English. Their multi-generational families piled into homes and their families set up businesses, most visibly “party stores,” print shops, banquet halls, restaurants, and groceries. A slow creep of signs written in both English and Arabic peppered the neighborhood, and the kids started to assimilate, joining Girl Scout troops and sports teams and other extracurricular activities. Still, the process was slow, as many of their families still maintained customs from back home.

Over the years, like many other immigrants, some of our Arab neighbors became part of the nouveau-riche out in the sprawling suburbs, adopting Western beauty ideals and consumerism. Others took the educational track, studying business, medicine, law. Now, a whole first-generation group has grown up in America. Only their parents and grandparents remember the struggles of the old country, though they have faced a different kind of discrimination here. As a group of boys on a Dearborn football team explain on All-American Muslim, their high school is 95% Muslim. When they play rival teams, they’re jeered with Arab slurs. But, they insist, it only makes them work harder.

My father is an Israeli immigrant whose family hails from Jaffa, a city south of Tel Aviv with a mixed Jewish and Arab population. When he moved to Detroit three months before I was born, there were very few Israelis, and that’s remained the case. So, the closest thing to home in some ways has been Detroit’s thriving Arab culture. For 30 years, he’s bought his pita, olives, and Turkish coffee at the Arab-owned stores. Access to my own Middle Eastern heritage came from the comfort of pronouncing hummous with a throaty “ch,” and feeling a geographic and cultural kinship of sorts with my Arab classmates. In a school with few other Jewish kids, my ethnic features were often called out, notably my nose, and when people couldn’t figure out where my name or non-WASPy looks came from, they sometimes assumed I was Arab.

Because I grew up with my own version of cultural dissonance, and witnessed how invisible many cultures were in the media, my activism has centered around representation. In 1992, I co-founded a multicultural women’s magazine called HUES (Hear Us Emerging Sisters). The mission was much like that of All-American Muslim: to be a space where underrepresented groups could tell their own stories and be known.

One of HUES’ most popular articles was called “Veiled,” written by one of the hippest chicks you’ll ever meet—Muslim or not—Maysan Haydar. Maysan is from Michigan, too, and she sports both a tongue piercing and a veil. Back in high school, she would mix a full-body hijab (covering) with silver rollerblades and cheerfully skate through the halls. She’s now married to a Christian man, and, much like the TLC cast, has blazed her own trail while practicing “Islam a la carte.” How very American indeed.

But speaking of veiled, Arab and Muslim culture HAS been shrouded in stereotypes and secrecy here, partly because it hasn’t been revealed in pop culture until now. As troublesome and trashy as reality shows can be, they’re still telling the narratives of our times, giving us a voyeuristic glimpse into lives we wouldn’t otherwise see.

The All-American Muslim series is well-done, in my opinion, and also reveals the multitude of decisions that a bicultural American must make. We get a glimpse of women making choices that aren’t traditionally Western (much like in TLC’s controversial show “Sister Wives”); yet, these choices are shot through with American influence. Some women opt to cover their heads with scarves, but express their style with fashionable and colorful fabrics. Others mix full-length hijab coverings with sexy, strappy heels. The Lebanese-meets-Irish-Catholic wedding features a river dance AND a belly dance, veiled vows followed by a white dress reception, a flashy banquet hall that doesn’t serve alcohol. It’s fascinating to see how people walk the line, which elements of their customs they choose to keep.

These very choices, I believe, are what makes the show “all-American.” The notion of personal freedom is what America, in theory, is all about. And this freedom has left an indelible mark on even the most traditional cast members of All-American Muslim. In one poignant scene, the Irish Catholic mom, a little rattled by her son’s upcoming conversion to Islam, is matter-of-fact. She says she knows that society has to evolve—and that as much as we long for things to stay the same, they don’t.

It’s a truth that All-American Muslim challenges us to embrace. Hopefully, this will just be the beginning of fun, down-to-earth and realistic portrayals of a population that’s long overdue for a serious media makeover. Some of them have only been here for a while. But some have been here all along, as American as the rest of us.

If you’re Muslim, Muslim-American, or watching the show, tell us what you think! Keep the dialogue going, because that’s what it’s all about.

Filed Under: Race, Ethnicity and Culture Tagged With: All-American Muslim, Arab-American, Dearborn, hijab, HUES, Masyan Haydar, Michigan, muslim, TLC

Unintentionally Eating the Other (The Fashion of Racial Drag)

September 30, 2011 By pia Leave a Comment

by minh-ha t. pham

[The other week], Crystal Renn, the [former plus-size] model who recently appeared in a Vogue Japan spread with her eyes taped in ways that were suggestive of an old theater makeup trick meant to make white actors look “Asian,” offered an explanation and defense of the cosmetic practice. Tape, it should be noted, is only one of many tools in the arsenal of this particular form of racial drag, also known as yellowfacing – a practice that is literally older than America. Contrary to popular headlines suggesting that “yellowface is the new blackface,” there is nothing new or novel about yellowfacing. One of the earliest incidences of yellowfacing in the U.S. occurred in 1767 when Arthur Murphy presented his play The Orphan of China in Philadelphia.

What interests me about this moment of racial drag or “transformation,” as Renn’s called it, are the reactions to it and her own explanation of the decision to tape her eyes. In last week’s published conversation with Jezebel editor Jenna Sauers, Renn insists that she “wasn’t trying To ‘look Asian’ in that eye tape shoot”. And I wanted to believe her. I have great respect for Sauers. Her writing has always displayed a great deal of thoughtfulness and acuity and she’s been a generous supporter of Threadbared for a long time. For all these reasons, I approached Sauers’ conversation with Renn as a generous reader, willing to be convinced. After all, Sauers initially assumed Renn was yellowfacing too. If she could be surprised with Renn’s explanation, I thought I might be too.

Here’s how Renn explains the eye-taping:

In a way you become something else.
No, it tends to be when there’s more makeup and drama. And the point is transformation.
To transform is the greatest part of my work. It’s the thing that makes me the happiest. And to be able to try to do as many looks as I can and to show as many faces as I can, it’s exciting to me . . . I’ve had moles painted on my face. I’ve had freckles painted on.
I become something else.
We didn’t even think about [race] on the shoot. I’m the one who suggested it, and it didn’t even cross my mind. It’s something that I regularly ask makeup artists, you know, if it will bring something more to the character. Offer a different face.
As the model, as somebody who thrives on the transformation, I am beyond thrilled to do stories where they change my gender, where they take me and make me something completely different.

What is so striking about Renn’s explanation is its ambiguity. She never says what look she was going for – just that she intended to become “something else.” This intangible “something” that has more “drama”, more “character” , and is so “exciting” is, for Renn, not racially specific. It is instead a generalized exotica, an experience of vague sensuousness. But do racist acts require intentionality? And what are the implications of Renn’s deracialization of a practice that was so clearly racist to so many people?

“Eating the Other”

Renn’s understanding of this “transformation” is reflective of a broader cultural logic in the mainstream fashion industry that has historically viewed and engaged with racial difference as a depoliticized and dehistoricized aesthetic. Racial difference, evacuated of its history and politics, becomes a set of design elements and sartorial flourishes (a kente pattern here, a frog closure there, a Native headdress on the weekend – why not?) that are absent of meaning and context. Fashion’s depoliticization of ethnicity and race rely on and reproduce what Nirmal Puwar calls “the amnesia of celebration.”

The problem is that the violent racist abuse meted out to Asian women who have worn these items has no place in the recent donning of these items. . . “Do you remember when you thought we were ugly and disgusting when we wore these items?”

The amnesia of celebration forgets (willfully or not) the historical and ongoing violence that women of color bear wearing the very same garments on their bodies while looking like they do – rather than like Renn does (or Madonna, Gwen Stefani, and the list goes on). The eye shape Renn creates using tape is one that has given rise to schoolyard taunts, sexual harassment, mockery in real as well as fake Asian languages, nearly a century of immigration exclusion, employment discrimination, fetishization, and much more for Asian women who were born with these eyes. Not what you’d call an “exciting” experience. That Renn is able to feel “transformed” through and by this cosmetic trick of racial drag – one she equates with other tricks like fake moles and freckles – underscores the capacity of white bodies to play with race without bearing its burdens, without having to even acknowledge the existence of these burdens. Thus, the transformation Renn experiences and achieves is conditioned by her whiteness and the privileges that accrue to her racially unmarked body. At the same time, her transformation is possible only because of her proximation and consumption of otherness. The function of Otherness – even one that is unacknowledged by her – is reduced to the servicing of white women’s transformation.

This desire for transformation through the Other is not unique to fashion; it is connected to a much longer history of what Black feminist scholar bell hooks (always in lower case) calls “imperialist nostalgia”: the longing of whites to inhabit, if only for a time, the world of the Other. Bodily transcendence through sartorial and cosmetic play is enacted by the consumption of otherness – a “courageous consumption,” in hooks’ words – because it is about “conquering the fear [of racial difference] and acknowledging power. It is by eating the Other,” hooks explains, “that one asserts power and privilege.”

But Renn wasn’t “even think[ing] about [race] on the shoot . . . it didn’t even cross [her] mind.”

Here, I want to return to my earlier question: do racist acts require intentionality? The obvious answer is no. A well-intentioned compliment about how well I speak English or a clumsy flirtation that begins with a deep bow like I’m the Dalai Lama (both have happened to me) are meant to be friendly gestures that close the gap of racial difference. (“Don’t worry – I’m culturally sensitive.”) Yet, these examples are clearly born of racist ideologies about what “real” Americans look like and what are “real” Asian cultural practices. Racism is so deeply entrenched and pervasive in many societies (the U.S. context is not exempt but neither is it exceptional) that everyday racism, the kind of racism that is experienced in civic life (through social relationships, media, interpersonal workplace dynamics, etc.) is often unintentional. On the other hand, what is always intentional is anti-racism. The struggle against racism resists the pervasive ideologies and practices that explicitly and invisibly structure our daily lives (albeit in very different ways that are stratified by race, gender, class, and sexuality). Anti-racism requires intentionality because it’s an act of conscience.

But I think Renn’s (mis)understanding about eye-taping and intentionality is suggestive of something more than unconscious racism. I think that Renn’s explanation exemplifies how race is understood in this “post-racial” historical moment. What does racial discourse sound like in the age of post-racism? Well, I think it sounds like Renn’s explanation. This isn’t to single out Renn for indictment; instead, my point is to suggest that Renn’s explanation is an example of a post-racial narrative in which race is simultaneously articulated through and disavowed by discourses of class, culture, patriotism, national security, talent, and, in the case of fashion, creative license. Renn’s transformation is conditioned by its proximation to racial otherness and yet the language of creative license (Renn says: “To transform is the greatest part of my work.”) denies race as a driving and organizing factor in this transformation, it denies both her racial privilege as well as the eye-taping technique as a common cultural practice of racism. This kind of post-racial consumption of race in which the historical violence of racial difference makes no difference at all denies the ongoing reality of racism in the age of postracism. It is conditioned by the many privileges of whiteness (first and foremost among these privileges, a racially unmarked body). Recall Puwar’s incisive observation – which I’ve quoted numerous times on Threadbared – “It is precisely because white female bodies occupy the universal empty point which remains racially unmarked that they can play with the assigned particularity of ethnicized female bodies.”

Crystal Renn's other forays into racial drag, also published in Vogue Japan (June 2011)

We see the discourse of postracism also in Renn’s assertion that she is “not 100% morally okay with [blackface shoots] — I would feel that I’m taking a job from one of them. I would feel that I’m taking a job from a black girl who deserved it.” Renn’s sensitivity towards the need for more diversity in the modeling industry is not surprising. She has been a vocal proponent of size diversity among models (for a time, she was one of the most successful plus-size models) and has spoken openly about her own struggles with eating disorders and the pressures that come with the constant scrutiny of young women’s bodies in the media.

Her statement that she would never engage in a blackface shoot does two things: First, it elides the issue at hand (yellowfacing) for what seems to be for Renn a more real and authentic act of racism, blackfacing. In so doing, her statement suggests that anti-black racism is the only authentic form of racism worth talking or caring about. Second, it suggests that practices of yellowfacing and blackfacing (like, redfacing and brownfacing) take modeling jobs away from nonwhite models. This logic assumes that these acts of racial drag are meant to represent an actual racial body. Let me be clear: yellowfacing is not a practice of racial substitution, of a white model in place of an Asian model. Photographers, magazines, and designers know Asian models exist and know how to hire them. But they don’t hire them for these jobs because yellowfacing does not intend for audiences to believe that the body in view is actually Asian.

I’ve become really impatient with responses to racist practices of racial drag that involve comments like: “Why didn’t they just hire a Black/Asian/Latina/Native model?” (Yes, I believe there are anti-racist kinds of racial drag.) This question glosses over the actual operations of yellowfacing, blackfacing, etc. which is not about Asianness or Blackness but about Whiteness. It is about consuming Otherness, it’s about making racial difference commodifiable and palatable through whiteness, it’s about reproducing and securing white privilege. To quote hooks again, “eating the other” – hooks’ term for the consumption of difference – offers:

A new delight, more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of doing and feeling. Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream while culture.

__________________________________

NB: It’s unclear to me who is actually to blame for Renn’s eye-taping. She’s insisted that it was solely her idea but editor-in-chief of Vogue Japan Anna Dello Russo has also taken credit for the idea. I asked Ashley Mears, a former model and now sociology professor at Boston University whose book about the political economies of the modeling industry called Pricing Beauty is due out this month from the University of California Press if Renn might be falling on her sword for Dello Russo. According to Mears, it’s plausible that Renn had some creative input. As she explained, “models tend to have very little input in the terms of their work or in how their images are crafted or manipulated. However, at the higher levels of the industry where Renn is working, in which stylists and models work with each other repeatedly on high-end productions, there is a greater degree of collaboration with models, especially if she takes initiative to be involved.”

Cross-posted with permission; Originally posted at Threadbared

Filed Under: Race, Ethnicity and Culture Tagged With: Asian, beauty standards, bell hooks, blackfacing, Crystal Renn, racial drag, Vogue, yellowfacing

This Is Why I Worry About “The Help”

August 16, 2011 By Sharon 5 Comments

By Tami Winfrey Harris

A lot of folks have been giving the whole idea of a book, written by a Southern white woman, about black domestics in 1960s Mississippi, the side eye. I understand. When my book club decided to read Kathryn Stockett’s The Help last year, I was ambivalent. The book was a popular best-seller with rave reviews. Yet, I have learned to brace myself against the biased and stereotypical way black women are rendered in media. I have become weary of Mammy-fied caricatures that bear little resemblance to the many Southern black women in my family. I am sick of narratives that read like a sort of pre-Civil Rights porn for people who get off on “the good ole days.” And I have become tired of narratives where black folks are “saved” by the awesomeness of good white folks. So, yeah, I came to The Help begrudgingly. But I liked it.

The Help was a good book. I had a hard time putting it down. The black characters did not feel “off” as they often do when written by a non-black person. And Stockett wove her story with far more nuance than I expected. The author illuminated the pains, dangers and hypocrisies of 60s-era racism and segregation. She even departed from discussion of race to explore class, an issue often overlooked in tales like this. Not every white person was wealthy or considered “the right sort.” Not every white woman felt comfortable in the role of mistress of the house.

Oh, there are racial fails in The Help. Nearly all of the black characters speak in dialect, while none of the white characters do. And I don’t want to spoil one of the book’s big reveals, but surely Stockett realizes that there have been mixed-race people in black families since we arrived in the country, perhaps most especially in the South due to slavery, Reconstruction and the exploitation of black women. It is not shocking for a black family to have a member or members who could easily “pass” as white. There are other problems, but I will say this, The Help had no more racial fails that most other fiction I’ve encountered. Or at least, in my eyes, the book rose above it.

My concern is not with The Help. My concern is how American society processes race and how people will receive the movie, based on the book, which debuts this weekend.* Here’s an excerpt from Rolling Stone’s three-and-a-half-star review of the film:

The film’s catalyst is Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan (Emma Stone) a recent graduate of Ole Miss looking to spark a career in journalism by getting Aibileen and Minny to confide their feelings about working for white families in a changing South. Skeeter is a tricky part–white girl liberates enslaved black womanhood–but Stone, an exceptional talent, is so subtly effective at showing Skeeter’s naivete. It’s Skeeter’s job to first liberate herself from the bigoted codes passed on through generations, including her mother (Allison Janney) and Skeeter’s own card-dealing, role-playing girlfriends. [Emphasis mine.]

See this. This is the problem. Skeeter begins capturing the stories of her town’s domestics for her own benefit. She wants a writing job in New York City. She has outgrown Jackson, MS, and its cages for both women and people of color. It is true that she begins to recognize and rebel against the rigid societal rules of the time, including the ones related to race. Skeeter is also, naive, young and privileged. In fact, some of her behavior puts the black women she is working with and herself in danger. Skeeter is not Moses. She liberates no one, but herself.

The black women who tell their stories to Skeeter do so for their own reasons. Because they are tired of being silent. Because they have put up with years more oppression, as black people and as women than Skeeter has. And their race, gender and class give them very few of her freedoms. These black women liberate themselves. The book and film take place in the 1960s–a time when black people were fighting hard for equality. In 1955, years before The Help takes place, Rosa Parks, who once worked as a domestic, refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., bus and sparked a boycott that changed history. Many domestic workers would take part in that boycott, walking miles to their jobs in white people’s homes in a bid for their civil rights. How offensive to imply that what a group of grown black women needs is for a young white woman to come alert them they are “enslaved” and them lead them to freedom.

To me, The Help was less about race than it was about gender–about women of different races, ages and classes chafing against the ways society marginalizes them and restricts them and tries to own them. But that narrative, perhaps, does not lend itself to big box office receipts and product tie ins. (Yeah. Product tie ins.) So instead, we’ll get Nice White Lady Saves Po’ Black Folks – Jim Crow Edition. (If you haven’t seen Mad TV’s parody of this kind of film. You have to click through that link.)

Here’s what Booklist has to say about The Help:

Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1960s is a city of tradition. Silver is used at bridge-club luncheons, pieces polished to perfection by black maids who “yes, ma’am,” and “no, ma’am,” to the young white ladies who order the days. This is the world Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan enters when she graduates from Ole Miss and returns to the family plantation, but it is a world that, to her, seems ripe for change. As she observes her friend Elizabeth rudely interact with Aibileen, the gentle black woman who is practically raising Elizabeth’s two-year-old daughter, Mae Mobley, Skeeter latches ontothe idea of writing the story of such fraught domestic relations from the help’s point of view. With the reluctant assistance of Aibileen’s feisty friend, Minny, Skeeter manages to interview a dozen of the city’s maids, and the book, when it is finally published, rocks Jackson’s world in unimaginable ways. With pitch-perfect tone and an unerring facility for character and setting, Stockett’s richly accomplished debut novel inventively explores the unspoken ways in which the nascent civil rights and feminist movements threatened the southern status quo. Look for the forthcoming movie to generate keen interest in Stockett’s luminous portrait of friendship, loyalty, courage, and redemption. –Carol Haggas

This is my worry: That even if The Help film gets it right, viewers will see just another movie about a spunky, young, white girl, setting the world on fire, while the lives, stories and agency of black women remain invisible.

*Originally published at What Tami Said on August 9, 2011. Cross-posted with permission.

Filed Under: Race, Ethnicity and Culture, Representation and Identity Tagged With: Black, Book, Ethnicity and Culture, gender, media representation, movie, Race, Ethnicity and Culture, Stereotypes, The Help, Women

Of Shame and Pride: Confronting My Culture and Identity

August 1, 2011 By pia 2 Comments

By Olivia Hoang

Often times, love and criticism go together. To fully embrace our heritage, we must be willing to rectify the bad, as well as nurture the good.

It was July 2002 when I stepped out of Tan Son Nhat International Airport, and into the streets of Saigon, revisiting my homeland and my past. The heavy humid air bore on me and my skin began forming beads of sweat. Here it was, the Vietnam that I had so missed when I first came to America in 1992 — the noisy crowded streets, the musty air, and the people who spoke my native tongue. As a child, I dreamt about coming back. And here I was, 10 years later, a teenager who had grown up in America.

Back at the hotel that night and sitting next to the windowsill, I peered out my window as the faint voice of a food peddler announced last rounds before she retreated for the night. I observed the scene with the fond heart of a native and the detached mind of a foreigner. The next morning, I awoke to the hustle and bustle of Saigon traffic and looked out my window to see what daylight revealed that the darkness of night could not.

I scanned the horizon and glanced past the streets congested with people on their mopeds and bikes to see a pinkish building jump out at me, apparently a relic of Vietnam’s French colonial past. Girls’ uniform ao dai’s flowed wistfully in the wind as they made their way to school, reminding me of the paintings that people sometimes brought back from Vietnamese tourist traps. Along the edge of the road right beneath my vision, a young man in his dress shirt and slacks rode his bicycle.

As I gazed out at them, it made me wonder what their lives were like. Where were they heading off to? Was she a good student? Was he going to study abroad? What will become of them? These were things that usually escaped my mind when observing people in a place where I lived daily.

People’s faces in the streets were a stark contrast to the metallic shields of cars and reflections from windshields that I saw everyday in America. Being able to see people as living bodies out in the streets instead of just getting glimpses of anonymous beings in their metallic pods lent a faint feeling of familiarity to them. It brought back memories and reminded me of the things I loved most about Vietnam.

I loved the circumambient air, the aesthetic beauty of girls in ao dai, the live faces I got to see on the streets, the fresh innocence of unworldly children, and mangosteens, rambutans, sapodillas, waterapples, and jackfruits. But despite my headiness at re-experiencing my exotic homeland, I couldn’t help being bothered as I recalled the way airport authorities tried to extract money from us as we checked out of the airport upon arrival.

I remembered the officer yelling at me and questioning me repeatedly on my intentions of visiting Vietnam—all because he had not seen any dollar bills slipped into my passport when he opened it. Really? Yes, a petite teenage girl such as myself really held a threat to national security and needed to be questioned over and over again as to why I was visiting. (Dude, that usually happens when you come to a rich country from a poor one, not the other way around!) We finally made our way out, but that incident still stuck with me.

How could anyone be loyal to a place like this? How can I be proud to come from a place where coercive government and domestic abuse still run rampant? Those were the defining questions that guided my identity formation in my teenage and college years.

The truth was, I was never quite sure that I should be proud of my heritage. Although I was fortunate enough to retain my fluency in Vietnamese and enjoyed Paris by Night and Vietnamese food, I wasn’t wholly sure that my heritage was something worth being proud of.

How could I be when I’ve seen what my motherland allowed? The beating and oppression of women bothered me the most since I am a woman. And having grown up in a traditional household where I was expected to do chores while my brothers were not, this kind of subject really spoke to me. How can a woman be proud of coming from a place that treated women as being lesser than men?

As I grew older, my philosophy gained more coherency from its previously fragmented state. Just as I was still an American despite hamburgers, widespread violence in the media, imperialistic foreign policy, and school bullying, I was still Vietnamese whether I liked it or not. My heritage has influenced who I am as a person and how people chose to treat me.

No matter how American my philosophies are, the outside world will always see me as an Asian girl at first glance, and treat me as they have been conditioned to treat an Asian woman. So to me, the importance of knowing where I came from was intertwined with the necessity of learning to navigate the stereotypes that people bestowed upon me. Understanding the source of that stereotype opened up my empathy for Vietnamese women, and for myself. Then I understood that my Vietnameseness ran deeper than the color of my skin or my black hair.

My heritage was to me like a baby is to its mother, and a mother is to her baby. You cannot choose certain things; you are stuck with its idiosyncrasies. But to nurture that which is close to you, you need to see what’s ugly about it to help you rectify the problem or at the very least, not make it an even bigger one. Denying that there’s a problem will not help, yet denying that which is a part of you is to lose the totality of who you are. And so I chose to cultivate my Vietnamese-American identity the same way a great mother cultivates her baby: to accept wholeheartedly what is hers, to nurture that which is beautiful and good, and to call out for rectification the bad behavior.

[This piece started out as a piece on why a lot of Vietnamese-American kids don’t like to speak Vietnamese because they think it is ugly, but my writing took on a different path as I recalled my own shame of Vietnamese culture. There are a lot of factors involved in this shame: peers making fun of Asians, not seeing enough positive representations of Asians in the public eye, not seeing good role models around, not having positive experiences with Vietnamese culture as a child, etc.

But the sources of this shame have been discussed before, and it still hasn’t done enough to encourage Vietnamese American kids to embrace their roots. What is needed now isn’t more dissection of the problem, but more good examples of Vietnamese Americans successfully navigating the two worlds while embracing and leveraging their Vietnamese heritage to live a meaningful life and ways in which we can encourage our youth to do the same.]

. . .

Cross-posted with permission: Originally posted on Vietnam Talking Points

Hollywood Chinese

When White Goes Wrong…

Filed Under: Race, Ethnicity and Culture Tagged With: domestic abuse, french colonial, heritage, identity, pride, reconciliation, shame, vietnamese-american

Dolls: It Matters if You’re Black or White

July 10, 2011 By pia 9 Comments

By Whitney, Contributor

(Originally published August 2009)

As a college student, I had spent most of my college career wrestling with the concept of how I have white privilege. Through my studies, I tried to learn about and deconstruct our society’s power structure and my place in it.

Recently, in a Northern California Target of all places, it all came into glaring perspective for me. As I stood in the doll aisle, I saw what Peggy McIntosh had been talking about in her groundbreaking article, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack “. I scanned the aisle and noticed that the majority of the dolls were white. The portion of the aisle that the “non-white” dolls inhabited seemed like an afterthought, like, “Oh yeah, we have to put out some black and brown dolls, huh? Almost forgot!”.

Bratz Dolls

I stood in the aisle almost paralyzed as I slowly turned around and looked, really looked, at what was on the shelves. The white dolls were overwhelming the majority of products. The colors they were dressed in were all pastels and they were all some kind of princess, professional, or fashionista. As I slowly turned and faced the “brown” doll section, I noticed that this population wore bright and bold colors like red, black, purple, hot pink, and even electric blue. These dolls were more like caricatures with their over plumped red lips, caked on make-up and super short skirts. Instead of being adults, like their white counterparts, these dolls were students in middle or high school. The Latina and Black dolls were very sexily, if not scantily, dressed–the opposite of the white dolls. I’m not sure what school these dolls were supposed go to, but whatever school it was, it allowed super short and tight clothing. Sure fairy princess Barbie may be in a leotard, but for some reason the dolls of color looked like a watered down version of the classic sexual fantasy: the naughty catholic school girl.

The Los Rebeldes Dolls (Rebel Dolls)

The thought popped into my mind that if a little girl of color wants a doll that’s a princess from Target, she’ll have to choose from the white ones. Sure she could buy a doll with her skin color and make her into a princess, but it wouldn’t be the same as seeing one on the shelf already made for her. I know that we could bring in the argument about whether or not a princess is the right thing for any girl to want to be, but just go with me for a second while I try and explain what I saw.

There was an absolute lack of choice in the doll department. I believe that this lack of choice extends into every area of life and is detrimental to the spirit of young girls everywhere, whatever their race.

At a very young age, girls (and boys) begin to ask the question of “why?” Why aren’t there any dolls that are like me, that like to swim and ride bikes? Why aren’t

Plunging Neckline Sexier Black Barbie (from the Barbie Basics Collection)

there more dolls that look like me, with brown hair and skin? Why? Why? Why?…

There are many other, nicer sounding answers, I’m sure. But at this point in my life (I don’t have kids) I want to say very bluntly:

“Sorry kid, it’s called white privilege. And just about everything, everywhere, everyday, is colored by it. That’s why.”

Editor’s Note: The Barbie Basics Collection was released in 2010, after this piece was originally published. One of the Black dolls caused controversy as the plunging neckline on her dress seemed at bit more sexualized than her counterparts in the collection.

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A Picture Worth a Thousand Words

Joan Holloway Barbie Proves Plastic is Less Fantastic

Filed Under: Race, Ethnicity and Culture Tagged With: Barbie, Barbiology, bratz, Commercialism, dolls, los rebeldes, Target, white privilege

Culture: Latina Beauties

May 18, 2011 By Sharon 5 Comments

Zoe Saldana has Dominican & Puerto Rican roots; Alexis Bledel is Mexican-Argentine-American.

By Helen Rodriguez of Latinitas

For years, Latinas have worked hard to break beauty barriers in the U.S. Now that we have managed to forge our own identity in American society, a part of me is thrilled with what Latinas have achieved and the role models that are now available for many young girls. On the other hand, I can’t help to think that this progress is not enough.

Through women like Jennifer Lopez and Salma Hayek, Latinas have won Hollywood over with their sexy curves and most importantly their undeniable talents. They have redefined Latina image all over the world. At the same time, their images have formed a stereotype of Latinas as all having dark hair, golden skin and sensual curves. However, this image does not necessarily represent every Latina.

Alyssa, age 22, does not fit this stereotype. Her blond hair and light eyes make her stand out in her Hispanic community of El Paso, TX. Even though her entire family is Mexican, people often mistake her for Caucasian. “I am an image of being different. You don’t have to look a certain way. You don’t have to fit a certain stereotype,” she said.

Despite the fact that Alyssa does not fit the “typical” Latina image, people still try to place her within the Latina stereotype. At times, people have attributed her curves to the fact that she’s Latina. When she was younger, some of her friends would call her names because she looked “white.” “It was frustrating because they defined me based on my skin color,” she remembers.

Because of this, she embraced her Hispanic culture and was inspired to educate people about it. She wanted people to get to know her, so that they might be able to make “more precise judgments.”

“Every individual defines who they are. It doesn’t matter what type of skin, body. It matters what’s inside,” Alyssa said. “I could choose to be Hispanic and not tell anyone else, but I choose to embrace it.”

There are many Latinas in the media who are not associated with Latin American culture because their complexions do not fit the classic Latina stereotype. Like Rosario Dawson, a black Latina who is part Puerto Rican and Cuban, does not fit this stereotype. Actress Zoe Saldana, who recently appeared in the blockbuster hit Star Trek, is also a black Latina of Dominican and Puerto Rican descent. Despite the fact that she is proud of her Hispanic heritage and that she is a Spanish speaker, she is mostly cast in African-American roles.

Another example is Alexis Bledel who is Mexican-Argentinean-American. Bledel starred in the show Gilmore Girls as a Caucasian teen. Hardly anyone is aware that she is a Spanish speaking Latina, and she has not been cast in any Latina roles.

These young actresses are successful Latinas in Hollywood, but their ethnicity goes unnoticed in the media. Consequently, these examples of diverse Hispanic women go unnoticed by the public as well, limiting the role models available to them.

In her book Hijas Americanas, Rosie Molinary dedicates an entire chapter to Latina beauty, titled “Maria de la Barbie.” Molinary recognizes the need for diversity in the way the Hispanic culture is shown in the media. “Latinas need to see that we do not all need to look like Hollywood’s Latina trendsetters to be compelling and influential,” she writes emphasizing that the best way to show Latinas that “there is no perfect prototype is to show women the range of possibilities among us.”

We should keep in mind Latinas come in all shapes, colors and sizes. We cannot be defined by a generalizations or ideas of what we should or should not look like. If we learn to love ourselves, flaws and all, we can teach other women to do the same through our example.

Molinary writes something everyone should keep in mind about Latino culture:

“An important point to make is that there is no typical anything. Just like there is not one typical white, Asian, or black girl, there is no typical Latino — and no typical Puerto Rican, Colombian, or Mexican either. Having just one image of Latinos — when there are twenty-plus countries and immeasurable amounts of culture mixing — is impossible.”

What is special about Latinos is our different cultures from different countries with different histories. Despite the efforts to limit our image, but we come in all shapes, colors and sizes. We are diverse and cannot be defined. As Molinary recommends, we cannot assign generalizations to any ethnicity. The beauty of being human is that we are all unique and that there is only one of you.

* * *

This post originally appeared at Latinitas, the First Magazine By and For Latina Teens. Cross-posted with permission.

More on the topic: The Curious Case of the Ambiguously Mexican Red Head

Afro-Latinas And Why Blatina Is Beautiful

The “Mi Pobre Hijo” Syndrome

What Is The Colour Of Beauty?

Filed Under: Race, Ethnicity and Culture, Representation and Identity Tagged With: ALexis Bledel, Beauty, Celebrities, Ethnicity and Culture, identity politics, Jennifer Lopez, latinas, Latinitas, media representation, Race, Ethnicity and Culture, Rosario Dawson, Salma Hayek, Stereotypes, Zoe Saldana

Using Cosmetic Surgery Stop Bullying?

May 13, 2011 By Ophira 9 Comments

A few weeks ago, ABCNews.com reported an article “When Is Cosmetic Surgery the Answer to Bullyling?” (Um, never?) We particularly liked this smart response by blogger Shark-Fu of Angry Black Bitch, who allowed us to reprint this with her permission.

When I was a wee bitch I was bullied mercilessly for all things related to my blackness. When they made fun of my hair, I cut it off in an attempt to make it look more like the bob that was the trend at the time. When they made fun of my ashy knees, I meticulously rubbed lotion into my skin before school. When they made fun of my lips I tried to fold them inward…that didn’t last long.

Ultimately my bullies focused on my blackness as a whole – I was different and I could not change, so I thought that the best I could hope for was to conform as much as possible and get rewarded for not being as black as some of the other students who came to school through the desegregation program.

Country black trumped city black, but black was still worthy of bullying.

By the time I hit Junior High I realized that I had accepted the unacceptable – that these assholes set the agenda and had the rest of us scrambling to meet their standards so we could make the constant taunts, physical abuse, and harassment stop. I decided that was bullshit and stopped trying, but I lost a lot to those years of bullying.

Here’s the thing – the same young people who are having surgery to make their ears stick out less will likely be the same young people who will find out that their hair isn’t just so, their clothes aren’t up to par, or their [insert anything here] offends the same horrible little shit who used to make fun of their ears.

Here’s another thing – bullying hurts more than just the person being bullied. Bullying distracts from class work…it creates a climate of fear and intimidation…and, if left unchecked, it creates grown ass people who bully because they were young people who bullied.

I understand the attraction of cosmetic surgery as a solution to your child getting teased about their ears. It’s gotta be hard to see your child miserable because of something like how their ears are positioned on their head.

But cosmetic surgery isn’t the solution to bullying.

Cosmetic surgery is a solution for some people who have ears that stick out and want to change that.

We need to shift our thinking on this shit. We need to focus on the bully and ask ourselves why they aren’t being asked to change. And we need to deal with the fact that bullies will bully until bullies are taught not to bully.

Eventually the bully will move on to something that isn’t changeable…to something that isn’t fixable through an expensive surgery and painful recovery.

Because bullies bully until bullies are taught not to bully.

When we start down the road of changing ourselves to appease bullies we being a journey that will never end and that puts the responsibility for being harassed on the survivor rather than on the person who desperately needs some home training and likely needs therapy.

This is the “solution” that has people blaming the gay kid for acting too gay…the black kid for not acting too black…the fat kid for not losing weight…the woman for dressing in a provocative manner…the deaf kid for not dedicating her life to making hearing people more comfortable…and so forth and so on until finally the bullies of the world are satisfied.

But the bullies of the world will never be satisfied.

Bullies bully until whatever the fuck kind of insecurity and/or self-hate they are avoiding dealing with is dealt with.

Pause…sip coffee…continue.

Surgery will be a solution for bullying when doctors discover the Bully Tumor and create a surgery to remove that rancid shit.

Until then…well, now that those ears have been “fixed” I’ve noticed how large the nose is and you could lose some weight and your hair is too short and you “act gay” and why are your feet so big and…

And…

And.

Blink.

Reprinted with permission from Angry Black Bitch

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Filed Under: Body Image, Race, Ethnicity and Culture Tagged With: black hair, blackness, bullying, ears, standards

If You’re Fat, Your Paycheck Might Not Be

April 20, 2011 By Sharon 4 Comments

By Ashley-Michelle Papon

When it comes to cultural and social inequalities between men and women, the wage gap is one of the most widely accepted yet paradoxically ignored aspects of the gendered disparity. For over 30 years, equal pay has been the law of the land, though numerous independent studies have established that working women who clock 40 hours still make, on average, 77 cents to their male counterpart’s dollar. Furthermore, earlier this year, The Washington Post reported on some surprising findings that a person’s body size has more to do with the size of their paycheck than previously believed.

“The study found that thin women are paid significantly more than their average-size counterparts, while heavier women make less,” Amelia Rayno writes on Jan. 29. “Skinnier-than-average men, on the other hand, cash smaller paychecks than their average-weight peers.” Rayno goes on to quote Teresa Rothausen-Vange, a management professor at the University of St. Thomas, who explains that skinny men are considered “less-than-manly” while thin women make for a more attractive corporate image.

However, uncovering that the workforce is enabling and perpetuating unrealistic physical standards of attractiveness is old hat. What makes The Post’s report so shocking is contained several paragraphs down where Rayno reveals staggering results: Men on the smaller side earn $8,000 less than their more beefy male peers, a paltry amount in comparison to the women’s results. According to the study, thinner women earned more than $16,000 a year than their heavier co-workers.

Attempting to deconstruct all of the social mores that fuel the pay schism would require a blog post the length of Atlas Shrugged, but let’s examine a few of the more thought-provoking issues here. To begin with, it’s worth noting that the pay disparity between the two different male body types is still considerably less than the wage gap between men and women, particularly for women of color. This suggests that although the corporate world is hostile to people of size, men, particularly white men, have a leg up on the female competition.

That certainly seems to be supported by a study completed by Michigan State University researchers in April of 2009, which examined a control group of 1,000 bosses from companies in the United States. The study, published in the British Journal Equal Opportunity International, went on to conclude that being “overweight” didn’t appear to hurt men’s chances for professional advancement unless they were considered “obese,” while women were hindered by being considered “overweight” and “obese.”

Although the study validates what factivists have been saying regarding discrimination in the work place, it also exposes a flaw in the methodology of such information-gathering. The Michigan State University researchers carried out their study by asking medical professionals to rate the executives as overweight or obese based on the Body Mass Index, commonly referred to as the BMI, a formula that has been debunked in recent years for being grossly inaccurate. The results are made even more suspect due to the fact that the medical professionals only had photographs of the executives to go on, challenging the veracity of how objective the study actually was.

This isn’t to dispute that there is an obvious phobia towards persons of size because the instances of fat discrimination appear to be on the rise, but rather to illustrate how wily the problem is. Much like the Supreme Court’s standard on pornography, nobody can define what being healthy looks like as a universal precedent, but plenty of people think they have been granted the magical power to recognize it on sight. There is no standardized rubric with which to visually judge whether someone is “overweight,” but that doesn’t seem to deter some people from trying.

Although these findings affirm that employers are likely to rely on their own prejudices of weight to determine an employee’s worth, they also signal a strong need for political change to challenge the dominant, aesthetic narrative. Until such reform happens, it is not unreasonable to conclude that the pay gap may snowball into a pay canyon.

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Lagerfeld Sets Aside Fat Phobia for Renn

Carrie Fisher Joins the Ongoing Star War Against Fat

Why Being Fat Is–and Isn’t–All That

Size and Sardine Packed Southwest Airlines

Weight Stigma: Breaking it Down with Advocate and Activist Marilyn Wann

Filed Under: Media Bias, Race, Ethnicity and Culture Tagged With: Ethnicity and Culture, fat, Fat Prejudice, gendered disparity, men, prejudice, Race, Ethnicity and Culture, Size & Weight, size discrimination, sizeism, wage disparity, wage gap, Women

A Place for Me: Art, Porn, Feminism, and Race

April 18, 2011 By pia 3 Comments

By Favianna Rodriguez

Originally posted on Favianna.com; cross-posted with permission.

I’m always excited when my art world merges with my personal world. As a visual artist, that personal world is one where I’m constantly imagining the sort of artwork I want to create. What kinds of images do I want to draw? What questions do I want to pose? Do I care what people will think of me?

Today I spent an evening with my Latina sistah/gurlfriend and we were discussing the need for more popular and positive education formats to talk about sex. I was talking about the various podcasts I find online that talk about non-monogamy and non-conventional relationships (such as PolyWeekly.com), but complained that so many of these podcasts did not speak to me as a woman of color. What if, I thought, I could create a podcast that openly talked about non-monogamous relationships and how they are accepted (or rejected) in communities of color? How do our sexual hang-ups, or sexual liberations, intersect with our experiences around race? After all, talking about women of color’s health means also talking out our history with sexual abuse and sexual violence, particularly as it has played out in colonial, slavery, and imperialist contexts.

Image by Favianna Rodriguezrelationships (such as PolyWeekly.com), but complained that so many of these podcasts did not speak to me as a woman of color. What if, I thought, I could create a podcast that openly talked about non-monogamous relationships and how they are accepted (or rejected) in communities of color? How do our sexual hang-ups, or sexual liberations, intersect with our experiences around race? After all, talking about women of color's health means also talking out our history with sexual abuse and sexual violence, particularly as it has played out in colonial, slavery, and imperialist contexts.

We ended our night with a stroll into Oakland’s newest sex-positive store and gallery, FEELMORE, owned by a woman of color with years of experience in the pleasure industry. I was inspired by three things when I walked into the store: 1) the artistic and erotic images of people of color decorating the walls, 2) the conversation I had with the owner, who briefly talked about her vision for the store as a place where folks could come for sex education, and 3) a queer girl film I picked up, which I just learned was nominated for an award for Feminist Porn. The film “Tight Places” breaks new ground in the queer porn scene by being the first to feature an all people of color cast. I can’t wait to see it and review it!

I felt inspired overall, because for many years I have wanted to create art about sexual liberation, non-monogamy, sex-positivity, porn, erotica, kink, and stuff that I rarely talk about in public. Yes, I’m an anti-capitalist, and an environmentalist, and a lover of the planet, a lover of people and their rights, and a fighter of justice. But sadly, the definition around being “radical” or “progressive” so often leaves out a revolution around sex and the constructs around it. In fact, when I have raised the issue of heterosexism and monogamism (meaning the dominance and enforcement of “monogamy”), I get ostracized or isolated. When will the day come when I can hold my “Stop Deportations” banner alongside my “Fight the Climate Crisis” banner, alongside my “Release your Inner Slut” banner?

Really, when will we as a progressive sector begin to embrace a full liberation of not just out outer selves, but our inner-selves? That includes challenging the things we have learned about sex, about relationships, and about pleasure.

As an artist it is one of the topics that most interests me but I have not been able to fully explore at times because of my own fears of being rejected by my community. But spaces like FEELMORE, remind me the importance of women of color being voices for a new political analysis on sex, gender, queerness, porn, sex work, monogamy, etc. We have to be OUT and unapologetic. That is how we can address the fear. So keep your eyes open for my upcoming art about Slutdom.

On that note, I have some work in an exhibit in Minnesota, “Everybody! Visual Resistance in Feminist Health Movements, 1969-2009. “ Everybody! presents work by artists and activists engaged with the women’s health movement, inaugurated by feminists in the later 1960s and 70s and continuing up to the present day. Featuring advocacy posters and self-education publications, polemical paintings, descriptive drawings, poetic artists’ books and a provocative performance sculpture, this exhibition provides visual evidence of the struggle to define health care as a human right, and the quest to view every body as beautiful.

On display through May 8, 2011, admission to Everybody! and the Carleton College Art Gallery is free and open to the public.

Following the evolution of the movement, Everybody! presents recent creative responses to issues extending beyond women’s bodies to the health needs of women, men, and transgendered people. These include “Constructa/vulva,” a large soft sculpture conceived in homage to the 1970s feminist women’s health movement, a wall drawing imagining girls endowed with non-human reproductive organs, wallpaper featuring historical birth control devices, and videos and websites exploring gender transformation and other themes.

The image above is one of the author’s prints and can be purchased by visiting Favianna’s online store.

Sex, My Body and Giving it Up

The Naked Clam and Other Preposterous Pubic Hair Problems

Filed Under: Race, Ethnicity and Culture, Sexuality, Women Tagged With: Favianna Rodriguez, feminist porn, sex-positive, sexuality, stutdom, women's health