The Tradëscan Codex

( Leonardo Boff )

( Immanuel Kant )

( Max Weber )

Also, the "Add them as a friend" in my navbar uses singular they, which makes me happy.

International Blog Against Racism Week is coming to a close. I like to think that every week is International Blog Against Sexism week in my journal, but race doesn't get mentioned all that often. I can't post with any particularly appropriate icons, for all the eight people who appear in my six icons are all white. While I think we are agreed that's deeply problematic, it is not as if going and getting an icon of a character I don't really like would solve anything. The issue is deeper, systemic, and blaming the individual never solves anything. (Not that I should be absolved of responsibility, either.) Changing my icons won't change anything; changing whatever made me not as interested in the non-white characters will, alongside an honest attempt to understand and appreciate the characters I might not "get."

(Honestly, this is how I see affirmative action most of the time. I don't oppose it anymore, because I think the restrictions on it by the Supreme Court are extremely fair, but I don't see it working particularly well, either.)

The closest character to a character of color whom I really loved is Kennedy, and she (and/or Iyari?) passed for white to me for the entire time I watched the show. I even sort of remember the "Really? Hmm" moment when I learned that Iyari Limon was Latina--and of course there are photo shoots of her that I've seen since which really accentuate it.(And there was a really great post about that and how problematic it is on my flist a couple days ago. Let me finish my thought and I'll hunt down the link.) Class issues intersect here--it was clearly established that Kennedy was at least upper-middle class, with a vacation house on Long Island, and there seems to be a weird (or not-so-weird, really, when one thinks about it) way that "upward" mobility requires a much greater enculturation in white culture (i.e., patriarchal hegemony) so that we would expect an upper-class Latina to pass for white better than a lower-class one.

Part of it is to whom I'm attracted; with the exception of the Mesektet/Dark Champions icon, all of my icons contain at least one character to whom I'm attracted. Why do I tend not to be attracted to people who are non-white (and when I do find such a person attractive, it is typically on "white" standards of beauty)? Well, "socialization" is the easy and obvious answer there, but I think the damage has been pretty much done by this point. Any suggestions as to how I can save future generations from this? (Of course, any evaluation of a person based on appearance is problematic from a feminist viewpoint, but it is not a practice from which we can very easily escape.)

Okay, so I wanted to use this time to revisit the question of whether texts can speak with moral voices, because that's part of what is at stake when we look at racism/sexism/classism in texts. There is nothing outside the text, so by definition every act of racism/sexism/classism is carried out via texts. And structural raceism/sexism/classism is built into the very language in which we create the texts, which presents those constructing the text with an interesting dilemma--we must work within the language so as to be communicative, but outside it so as to be liberatory. Twas brilig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe.

Sunnydale is a white, upper-middle-class community. Now there's some worldbuilding issues here, admittedly. We know that Sunnydale has people moving in and out a lot, and the property values are low, and I'm not an economics major so I don't know what it would take to keep up the upper-middle-class lifestyle that the residents of Sunnydale have. And it's been argued that geographically, there's no way a Californian suburb with that level of moving in and out could keep the level of racial homogeneity that it does. I don't know enough about California to speak to that issue. What I do know that here on the East Coast, there are plenty of towns just like Sunnydale.

To say that because Sunnydale is a white community that there is something oppressive with Buffy is ludicrous (and I'm not accusing anyone of making such an argument, just working through a train of thought.) Otherwise, only shows taking place in the Feminist Utopia would be proper, and I'm not sure that such a show would at all be entertaining. Instead, we must look at what function Sunnydale's whiteness performs. Insofar as Buffy is a subversive attack on the complacency of white middle class Americans, Sunnydale's whiteness is a suitably progressive source of satire. We know that the show called attention to the lack of diversity at least once, when Mr. Trick first entered Sunnydale.

If you're not convinced by this reading of Buffy I could go on, drawing on more details and whatnot. But as a result of various meta discussions, I'm not sure whether there is any correct reading. Buffy is a floating signifier, and as a result it says nothing and everything about race. A racist moving picture from the late 19th century might be the most powerful message against racism in the contemporary moment: it self-satirizes.

So what is a radical feminist to do, other than throw their hands up in despair? Nothing is forbidden, everything is permitted? Well, this is where the switch from theory to praxis comes in. (Although the way we conceptualize praxis--which is, of course, another type of text--is ultimately dependent on theory.) In this world, are people of color empowered or disempowered by the Buffy text? This is an empirical question that cannot be answered by watching Buffy alone, and as such, I have no idea what the answer is. And while I think censorship is always an evil, and that people have a responsibility to their Muses, there is no responsibility to go out of our way to disseminate damaging (i.e. damaging in the specific here/now of a sociohistorical location) texts.

An it harm none, do what thou will.

(To recognize "harm" as such, of course, we need a theoretical apparatus already in place--in this case, my radical feminist convictions.)

This is why, as I've said before in this journal, there is no such thing as a feminist text, and the flipside of the argument is that there is no such thing as a racist text: because texts don't speak with a moral voice. They don't speak with any voice at all; they need to be interpreted.

bookishwench asked, I can only assume facetiously, "Just how the heck would one diagram the first sentence in the Star Spangled Banner?"

This is is my best try:



I'm not quite sure what the what is doing. It seems to be taking the place of a that which, but I'm not sure how it is doing that, what that would be called, or how to diagram it. It's not ungrammatical--"I want what I deserve" strikes my ear as perfectly fine--but I don't know what it is.

I either love or hate the fact that I understand my native language so poorly. I'm not sure which.

How is it that I never knew that Jenny Grimaldi was in Serenity?

"You will notice that we now say chora and not, as convention has always required, the chora, or again, as we might have done for the sake of caution, the word, the concept, the significance or the value of 'chora.' This is for several reasons, most of which are no doubt already obvious. The definite article presupposes the existence of a thing, the existent chora to which, via a common name, it would be easy to refer."--Jacques Derrida, "Chora" (trans. Ian McCloud)

The definite article presupposes the existence of a thing: Is there some new rule of French grammar of which I am unaware, or is Derrida just making stuff up? Because I know which option I find more likely. Sheesh. (And is the indefinate article okay? Am I still allowed to speak of "a chora" if I wish?)

Why is it that whenever theorists try to turn to grammar in order to make a point, they always end up saying something stupid? Mary Daly's "God the Verb" metaphor really should be "God the Gerund." Being an action or a process doesn't make something not a noun--as evidenced by the fact that both "action" and "process" are themselves nouns. Of course, Daly is only perpetuating R. Buckminster Fuller's lunacy. And a google search for "not a noun" shows this sort of idocy is alive and well, with claims (amongst genuine mistakes like Jon Stewart's claim that terror isn't a noun and actual cases where the noun-ness is in despute) that love, marriage, cheese, science, divorce, journalism, leadership, knowledge, nature, mind, and information are all not nouns, and I've only gone through a small fraction of the hits. I'm glad I knowlegde that now; I'll have to information it when I'm leadershipping (Bush/Cheny OTP?) and especially when I am marriaging.

A noun is a grammatical category. Taking an article is a grammatical characteristic. Neither signals anything important about the essential qualities of the signified on a metaphysical level, just how it is being used in a sentence.

Source Text: A text used by fans as a repositary for fictional facts about a fictional universe, such as the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series or J.K.R.'s website. In general, fen will decide for themselves which texts they consider authoritative, although they may look to authorial intent for guidance. Also, not all elements consists of content which cannot be transformed into propositional "facts" about the fictional universe, e.g. the soundtrack of an episode or the tone of a book. These are ignored in constructing canon, although they may be considered relevant in interpreting it (see below).

Canon: A. The total set of fictional facts about a fictional universe; B. The condition of being a member of that set of facts.

The problem is, in visual media, there's a very small amount of facts that are actually canon. Basically, we just know what people say, and a little bit about what they do (what's shown on screen). We don't know if they are telling the truth, and we don't know if things are going on as they seem. We haven't seen Xander and Anya actually having sex (and personally I don't want to), although we're led to believe they have sex a lot: we see them in a variety positions from which we are led to infer that they are having sex, or have just had sex, or are going to have sex. My favorite example happens to be the this debate over whether Giles goes to the bathroom. There's not enough canonical evidence to say for sure.

We really need a word for near-canon, those things--like the presence of Giles' reproductive system--that we would never think to question unless we were being perverse (and perversity is perfectly legitimate when writing fanfiction!). Giles could be a robot without the story being an AU, but the writer would still need to explain that choice where s/he wouldn't if s/he made Giles human, and this is despite the fact that both options are equally canon.

You see, when we think about our universes, we assume that the canon--a set of propositional facts--applies to a fictional universe, a "possible world" to use analytic philosophy language. We play "How many children had Lady Macbeth?" And in general, we imagine the closest possible world (in "logical space") to our own in which canon holds true, so we imagine Giles as a human and not a robot. The possible world closest to our own in which canon is true I call the least-hypothesis interpretation of canon, because it involves the minimum injection of weird stuff like Giles being a robot.

Sometimes when we are speaking (or typing) loosely, we treat uncontroversial facts about the least-hypothesis interpretation as if they were canon. ( Read more... )

Okay, in the subject I said I was going to defend ambiguity here, and I am. As wisdomeagle has pointed out before, there really aren't that many people who look at a text as if it were a set of facts about a fictional universe, basically narrowed down to fundamentalist religionists and fanfic writers. (And if Biblical literalists realized that the canonical facts of the Bible could refer to any number of possible worlds, and the closest one isn't necessarily the right--since presumably fundamentalists have a concept of "right" which isn't equivalent to a fan's notion of "best"--one, I wonder what they'd do.) I love Buffy as a playground in which to play, but also as an aesthetic object. Indeed, my aesthetic appreciation of it leads to my fannish love. And part of what I like about it is that it plays with ambiguity.

Ambiguity in a text admits of different interpretations, which enriches it. The fact that the text can sustain a reading in which Giles and Ethan were lovers as well as one where they aren't makes the text multi-faceted, interesting, more complex--for me, more beautiful. If Giles' relationship with Ethan is confirmed, if River is shown actively lusting after Simon, if Faith's last name is revealed (it's not canon until it is on screen, damn it!), then something is lost. Where we once had a hundred possibilities, a Schrödinger's cat, now there is only one. Now something is gained, too, and in many cases it is worth it (different people can argue over whether when something is worth it or not). Also, new ambiguities would be created. But I'm grateful for the ambiguities in canon, and I'm grateful that I don't know Book's past or the populatio of Londinium.

( Read more... )

What is the relation between academia, acedmic concerns or interests, and fandom? I take up the issue at fanthropology.

( Excerpt )

( Just follow the fake lj-cut. )

My flist is chiefly composed of acafen--both teachers and students--so I'd be very much interested in what you think on the issue. You can comment here rather than at fanthropology if you like.