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Cultural appropriation

I feel that the left’s reaction against cultural appropriation is good but some are missing that the flipside is cultural imperialism and we might need to walk the tightrope between the two of them (sometimes erring on one side, sometimes the other) instead of diving headfirst into compulsive white normativity.

Clarification needed before I mention the word “radfem” just to make it explicit that it’s inherently queer inclusive, and you’ll see why as I get into the essay proper. The deluded TERF cult is a snake’s nest of inconsistencies, illogic, propaganda and alliances with the far right.

They prop up what they claim to fight: oppressive, suffocating gender normative limitations. They claim to be “gender critical” while being 24/7 complicit in the performance of gender. They punish transgressors for being too masculine and for being too feminine. They deny the existence of wall while being the wall. They have forgotten the fight for pants.

They shame and disparage femininity and womanhood while confining AFAB dudes and gatekeeping them out of male-coded society. Some of them march with lesbophobes, anti-choice terrorists, and racists.

Wilhoit defined conservatism like this:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

That definition shows what an extraordinary trainwreck the TERF cult is, since in their (unfortunately increasingly successful) efforts to bind the out-group they tie themselves into twisted contortions. Self-owning the in-group into a stunted, hollow half-life of kinder küche kirche.

I know I’m often not the best ally to trans people, and I hesitate to get into wedge issues, but the “GC” crowd is a core driver of 2020s fascism. Not to say that gays and muslims are in the clear (the struggle continues) but “GC” is, as of this writing, a focal point uniting the right. The fascist propaganda machine (in order to pivot the struggle away from “workers vs owners”) is always seeking to create an enemy which they can mock as defeatable and weak, while simultaneously blowing it out of proportion as an urgent, terrifying threat.

They believe that targeting queerness is a jackpot for them since they can unite self-hating women with those who hate women under one grotesque banner. It’s an incredibly short-sighted “jackpot” since unlike other groups they have tried to annihilate, there will always be new generations of queer folks, as there has always been queer folks in the past, but that doesn’t matter to them. They operate one election cycle at a time since our political system incentivizes getting votes over being stewards of our irreplacable garden.

I can’t believe they’re wasting our time on this while the Earth is burning and the workers are starving and the wealth gaps are widening but here we are. Good night, and good luck.

Trans Legislation Tracker

A brief history of women’s fight to wear pants

Aside over. Now to the essay.

I know words like “normativity” and “feminism” is a trigger for a lot of people to immediately close their ears but stick with me for three seconds on this. I’ll retread some basics and then I’m going somewhere new with this.

Coming from an old-school radfem perspective, and “rad” means “root”, as in going to the root of things, the analysis was that it’s weird and bad that pretty much all “neutral” symbols, like the dude on the street crossing sign or the idea of a “neutral ‘he’” in text books, is male coded. Like in the Smurfs, every smurf has a schtick—one smurf likes pranks, one likes mirrors, one likes hammers, one likes glasses, one likes alchemy, one likes being lazy, and one is a woman. Being a man is the default setting in culture. We’re in the 21st century so this has been noticed and struggled against and backlashed against and reinforced and the pendulum has swung forth and then back again harder than ever, so it can be hard to fathom what an absolute mindblow this realization was.

Even for us women. The chains had been so invisible and the “male defaultness” norm had been so successfully programmed. Yes, life for men sucks too—coal mines and suicides and prison rape and bar brawls. We haven’t missed that. Solving that is important too. Don’t get hung up. I’m building up to make a point about something else.

It’s like the old saying of fishes taking water for granted.

Just as the male perspective was enshrined as the cultural “default”, the unflavored milk ice cream, the schtickless schtick, the --no-init-file, the plain glass of water… there’s also a similar cultural bias to the “defaults” of language, clothing, hairstyles, food, games, music.

As minorities are protecting their own cultures, there’s a tendency among the groups to push each other towards this vanilla “cultural default”, seemingly forgetting the historical hierarchical biases of that cultural default. Enshrining and elevating “white America” to a mandatory norm.

I can’t pass judgment on specific cases or decide how any one group wants to do this—and the groups aren’t homogenous, they “pull in all kinds of directions” as Pratchett put it—so I want to make sure I don’t overstate an example like how some Chinese-American actors have been rebuked when they use some phrases originating in African-American Vernacular English, or come across as telling any member of either of those groups how to react.

It’s legit that some in the black community are protective given how eager white audiences are to throw money at anyone who isn’t black, from Elvis to Eminem, while cops are shooting them and while black speakers of AAVE are punished in schools and in the workplace.

Imposter (Snow) - Jim Carrey - YouTube

But it’s easy to get the impression that the message is “act straight, act white, and to the extent that bring your own culture’s thing it’s only to the backdrop of Norman Rockwell conformative hellscape”.

It should go without saying, but just to be clear and sharp as a glass shard, I am not endorsing the white complaints of a “lack of identity” and similar white supremacist trolling campaigns.

Wikipedia on the troll campaign “It’s okay to be white”

I’m saying the opposite: white cultural norms are everywhere, like the fish/water story I mentioned above.

So instead, what I’m talking about here is how minorities can take place fully in the public forum and how they can bring their cultures to each other, not just as strawberry ripples filtered through the great blandness of the bossman’s boots.

None of this is to reduce the kyriarchy to “if only the minority groups would…” It’s not the fault of fish that the water is wet. I’m not absolving the establishment of any responsibility to help set things right.

I’m also not saying “full steam ahead! 2–4–6–8, come on, let’s appropriate!”

It’s a tightrope between the twin pitfalls of appropriation and imperialism. There are things that are, correctly, increasingly being recognized as wrong, like treating someone’s sacred ceremonies as a Halloween costume or a music video. It’s great that today’s intersectional left has a growing awareness of these pitfalls of cultural appropriation; it makes me hopeful that while we’re just getting started on a long road ahead of us, we’re gonna get better in that regard. That we’re realizing that minorities shouldn’t get trampled in an “everything belongs to everyone” mess. That we understand that when two forces come together like colliding amœbas, the force in power has more responsibility. However, let’s not neglect the opposite danger of enshrining white tropes, of cementing their universality.

It’s like when you’re sailing between a rock and a whirlpool. Swerving straight into one of them isn’t a victory no matter how far that took you from the other.

And, this isn’t an accusatory screed, it’s more a cautionary, pre-emptive one. The kids are alright, and are mostly getting this balance right. Balance might be a misleading word here. “Centrism” sucks and isn’t what I’m going for. It’s more like there are two things that we wanna avoid that are sometimes related and sometimes not.

We’re gonna make mistakes and there are gonna be some no-win binds, but as we evaluate what to do in a given situation, please let’s keep both of these in mind. Most likely, our (the intersectional left’s) priorities are going to have to keep shifting back and forth the way they already have, and what’s the right call in one situation might be the wrong call in a similar-seeming one. You don’t want to toss water on a flooded building but you might on a burning one.

I aim to stick to my promise that I wouldn’t make this kind of social justice topics my bread & butter on here. If you love these topics I hope you are getting your fill elsewhere, because I have other things to talk about. It’s been over a year since my last post about this kind of stuff:

Reactionaries

Two days short of a year if you count a sort of rambly and not entirely thought-through gem-only post I made a week later:

The Scarlet WWW