links for 2009-10-25
October 25, 2009-
Barnes complained on his personal website that Griffin "should have stood up to these whining, middle-class hypocrites that use the race card for self-enrichment – and thrown the truth right back into their fat, sanctimonious, hypocritical, self-serving faces". He accused his party's leader of "failing to press the attack" on the "ethnic middle class" for "taking up the best jobs while still playing the bogus race card for every opportunity". And in a move that is likely to reinforce concerns that Griffin's appearance will spark violence, Barnes used his personal website to suggest that "perhaps there needs to be a few 'white riots' around the country a la the Brixton riots of the 1980s before the idiot white liberal middle class and their ethnic middle-class fellow travellers wake up".
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Frank Whipple is 101. He saw action in the 1926 General Strike, he fought the fascists in Cable Street in the 1930s, and for more than 30 years he has cared single-handedly for his beloved daughter Peggy, who has special needs
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Mainstream North American culture likes to define itself as cultureless, but Halloween is a very cultural practice. Not only is it a little weird (Just look at it from the point of view of an outsider. Send your kids out to strangers’ houses and tell them to ask for candy? Decorate your house like a graveyard? Dress up like a sexy version of a public health worker?) it is also based on difference – the point of Halloween is to dress up as “something different.” So how do people who are often made to feel visually different – you know, like people of colour – experience Halloween? The average Halloween costume tells us a lot about what we culturally consider to be abnormal.
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Whatever image Madonna adopts, "this is a fake" is always an assumed part of the message. No matter who she is this week, you're never seeing Madonna, you're seeing "Madonna," and in a sense that's why she seems so powerful: you can't pin her down into any one identity. She reserves the right to slip into and out of them as she chooses.
But one thing that IS kind of an unavoidably true and permanent part of Madonna's identity is that she is a privileged, American, white person. In a sense, that whole "ultimate sex object" thing that she's been playing on from the first moment she dressed up like Marilyn Monroe, is very much a function of her whiteness, and her ability to uphold the mainstream white beauty standard. And it's when Madonna starts assuming that she has the right to pick and choose images from other cultures, including cultures that are not privileged and not predominately white, that she moves from being subversive to just flat-out asserting her privilege.
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To personalise the whole thing – I laughed when my footballing adversary yelled, "He's only got one leg, for Christ's sake!" because I knew there was no malice attached. If, however, he'd had a previous gripe with a totally unrelated aspect of my personality and had chosen to take it out on me by way of a 'leg joke', I would have been vehemently offended. In other words – if you have a problem with me, say it to my face, not to my leg.
The same goes for Heather Mills. If you feel the need to make a joke about her leg – or lack of one – then do it because there is something innately off-beat and jarring about a missing limb, and not because a friend of a friend told you she may be "a bit of a bitch".
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"What we had a hunch about, and was proven when J Street was launched, is that there is this very large constituency of Jewish Americans who do care about Israel and who are cool identifying themselves as pro-Israel. But their pro-Israelness is about the need for Israel to be at peace with its neighbours to gain security, not by being an ongoing expansionist presence. In fact, that endangers Israel."
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Our article focuses on the situation in Britain, where ‘Muslim’ and ‘homo-phobic’ are increasingly treated as interchangeable signifiers. The central fig-ure in this process is Peter Tatchell who has successfully claimed the role ofthe liberator of and expert about Muslim gays and lesbians. This highlightsthe problems of a single-issue politics of representation, which equates ‘gay’with white and ‘ethnic minority’ with heterosexual.
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In their article "Gay Imperialism: Gender and Sexuality Discourse in the 'War on Terror'" (2008), Jin Haritaworn, Tamsila Tauqir and Esra Erdem critique white gay discourses in Germany and Britain that trade in Islamophobic constructions of a gay-friendly, sexually liberated 'West' and a homophobic, sexually oppressive 'Islam' as the West's Other. They argue that these constructions are validated in the politics of the 'war on terror' and the erosion of migrant citizenship, and that racism is "the vehicle that transports white gays and feminists into the mainstream" (p. 72). Their work extends a tradition of antiracist feminisms that analyse the complicities of feminist and sexual politics in colonialism, war, and other forms of state violence. Writing collaboratively as trans of color, queer Muslim, and migrant feminist scholars and organizers, Haritaworn, Tauqir and Erdem call for a different kind of sexual politics.
