CONTEXT: Postmodernism's Material Benefit to Society

When I tell people I'm a doctoral student in theology, with a particular interest in poststructuralism and queer theory, they have an inevitable follow-up question.

"What are you going to do with that?"

Sometimes it's asked with a detectable sneer, an undisguised contempt for the waste of a good brain in such an arcane discipline. Sometimes it's asked quizzically, with genuine puzzlement on the part of my interlocutor. Never is it something I want to be asked.

I mean, there are only three possible answers, right?

1. Ordination (and that one is clearly out, if you've known me for five minutes).
2. Academia.
3. "No idea. HAHA oh god you're right, I'm wasting my life, let me switch to STEM despite not having studied any science since the age of 15."

It's the people who seem to be hoping for answer 3 who really bug me. There's a broad cultural trend here in the US toward the devaluing of humanities and especially of anything with a postmodern bent. I think it's part of a depressing economism undergirding US society (even more so than UK society, in my experience): if something doesn't have an immediately apparent material benefit, people genuinely can't comprehend why you would do it.

But the fact is, postmodernism does have a material benefit, if we would only apply it. The primary lesson of postmodernism is still what it was in 1967: il n'y a pas de hors-texte. Detractors use Derrida's words to dismiss deconstruction, poststructuralism, and the whole project of postmodernism as sophistry, caricaturing our work as immaterial language games; but the point is not "there is nothing outside the text," but "there is nothing outside context."

(Yes, there's a not inconsiderable irony in the fact that a statement about the supreme importance of context is so often taken out of context.)

The lesson of postmodernism is: Everything we do, say, and think is historically and contextually contingent -- profoundly, radically so. Is that the same thing modernism was trying to say? Kind of yes; but we're trying to say it in ever new ways, because clearly the lesson hasn't stuck.

For example, I woke up yesterday to this infuriating story: "Men and women's brains are 'wired differently.'" The BBC, of all things, recites a new iteration of the same tired neurosexist hogwash that was so comprehensively debunked in Cordelia Fine's wonderful book Delusions of Gender. It's terrible science and terrible reporting on science. It's cissexist, it's reductionist, and it's just utter BS.

My criticisms are ideological, of course. That's a term lobbed at postmodernists by detractors who like to think of themselves as unbiased viewing subjects who coolly take in all the scientific evidence before forming a judgment based on the facts. What these small-o objectivists don't realize is that this is an ideology too. It's more insidious, because it's an ideology that disguises itself as an objective view-from-nowhere. Feminists have long been aware that there is no view-from-nowhere, and to claim otherwise is an at best disingenuous, at worst nakedly malicious perpetuation of oppression.

The gift of postmodernism is epistemological self-awareness. Everything we think we know as an objective, timeless truth is radically contextual, and postmodernism is the practice of constant vigilance, of consistent suspicion of truth-claims.

"Men and women's brains are 'wired differently.'" There are so many profoundly contextual assumptions packed into that short headline: that "men" and "women" are clearly definable, discrete categories; that there is meaningful difference between men and women, rather than wide variation among all people; that the wiring of the brain tells us anything useful about human personalities; that brain wiring is predetermined and perhaps immutable; that there's a "right" way to be a man or a woman; etc. etc.

And there are so many real-world injustices that are perpetuated by the uncritical parroting of this ideology. The murder of trans women, the wage gap, the war on reproductive freedom -- none of this takes place in a void. It's all a part of the context within which it's seen as acceptable to report cognitive bias as scientific fact.

Postmodernism is not a disconnected, immaterial, ivory-tower discipline that's all about proving how clever you are. It's a tool for justice, and it matters.

There's No Crying At Disneyland

“Disneyland [is] an imaginary effect concealing that reality no more exists outside than inside the bounds of the artificial perimeter.”

– Baudrillard, Simulacra & Simulations

“There's no crying at Disneyland!”

– Parent/guardian to grizzling toddler in a Disneyland restroom, last Wednesday

I went to Disneyland this week, and I spent the whole time thinking about Baudrillard and marveling at the astonishing racism on display – thoughts that coalesced into a slight obsession with the question: Why do we go to Disneyland?

Baudrillard fingers Disneyland as the quintessential iteration of the simulacrum and the hyperreal: the artificial representation of reality that becomes more real than the real, to the point that reality as such no longer exists. (I had my most dizzyingly simulacrumtastic moment on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, when it occurred to me that I was on a ride based on a movie BASED ON THIS SAME RIDE.) We all know going in that Disneyland is thoroughly artificial, and from this knowledge we (falsely) extrapolate the converse: that what is not Disneyland is not artificial; that reality exists. Is that why we go to Disneyland? For reassurance, however false it may be, that reality is real? But if we know that this reassurance is false, why do we still go there?

Maybe I read too many dystopian novels as a child, but I find something profoundly creepy in the enforced cheerfulness of Disneyland. Enforced cheerfulness is sinister enough when it's enforced in pursuit of explicitly spiritual aims, but when it's undertaken on a massive scale for the sake of commodification, commercialization, and unchecked consumerism, it's flat-out sickening. It's sickening because it tells us to suppress our awareness of the exploitation and oppression that undergirds the Disney-industrial complex. “Don't think about sweatshops and pollution and racism,” it says; “you're in the most magical place on earth!”

How one could fail to think about the racism, at least, is beyond me. The Jungle Cruise is one of the most astonishingly racist things I have ever experienced (and I grew up in a more or less neo-colonialist environment in East Africa). The official website proudly describes it thus:

“Depart civilization from a forgotten Victorian loading dock. Crossing continents and oceans, you'll explore exciting rivers around the world — including the Amazon of South America, the Nile of Africa, the Irrawaddy of Southeast Asia and the Ganges of India.”

Cringing yet? There's the conflation of, like, all of Asia and all of Africa in some textbook-Orientalist mashup of ~the exotic~; there's the framing of the West as “civilization”, in implied opposition to the primitive/barbarian/uncultured/wild; there are some truly horrible (neo-colonialist) stereotypical representations of ~the natives~ (including some Unfortunate Implications so breathtaking, I'm flabbergasted no one involved in the design and creation of the ride noticed them). I mean, it's not as though I was unaware of Disney's slight racism problem; but, because most of the really blatant racism has been whitewashed out of Disneyland (which in itself is not unproblematic), the massive unconcealed racefail of the Jungle Cruise was particularly appalling to me.

And yet it's Small World that really encapsulates the Disney ethos, in all its (utterly clueless) obscenity. Once I'd gotten past the giggle fit induced by noting certain similarities, I realized that, at its core, the message of Disney is really: “Diversity lies in the external trappings, beneath which we are all as one [in our relentless desire to purchase Disney products].” That, I think, is the great philosophico-cultural lie of our time – that diversity is skin-deep, and underneath we're all the same. It's not that we don't all share a certain fundamental humanness – to deny that is just as bad – but to insist on (and commodify) the sameness is to reduce the differences, to fail to respect alterity, and ultimately to perpetuate the power differentials of the status quo. It's nothing more than a salve for the oppressor's conscience, a way of empathizing with others just enough so that we can kid ourselves the world isn't in need of radical change.

I'm not convinced that the simulacrum always and necessarily has to function this way, to make perpetuating oppression palatable to the oppressor's conscience. Even if it does, I believe that it is possible to deconstruct it and be aware of what's going on; but that involves always being on your guard, always fighting it. And is your resistance meaningful if it's only ideological? I gave Disney my money. I showed up. Does it matter that I spent the whole day thinking critically about the many awful things going on, if financially and physically I supported them?

This continued failure to put my money where my mouth is – is this just the kind of acceptable compromise with the kyriarchy that we all have to make all the time because we live here, or is it straight-up hypocrisy? Consuming stuff critically is better than consuming it uncritically, but either way I'm consuming, consuming, consuming. And perhaps I go to Disneyland to seek what I know to be a false reassurance that this is okay, because otherwise I couldn't live with myself.

On Offense (Or: How I Learned To Be An Asshole)

Recently, I offended someone.

This is, shockingly enough, not a new experience for me, but it got me thinking: what do we mean when we talk about giving (or taking) offense? In thrashing it out with Joel (who, incidentally, is one of the best conversationalists I know, and if you aren't fortunate enough to know them in meat-life you should at least be reading their blog), I realized that there are really two rather different things conflated in the term “offended”.

On the one hand, I am easily offended – by the perpetuation, deliberate or unthinking, of the assorted kyriarchal -isms that comprise the dominant culture where I live.

On the other hand, I am almost impossible to offend – by personal insults, viciously sarcastic banter, slurs on my taste in entertainment, and the like.

See the difference? In the first case, my being offended is not actually the point. The point is that systemic injustice is being perpetuated; my taking offense is merely a manifestation of outrage at injustice, which is the real Bad Thing. The second case, however, turns on personal sensitivity: the Bad Thing here is my hurt feelings.

Collapsing all distinction between these two modes of being offended is problematic. It's what I did as an asshole young teen awash in unexamined privilege, dismissing all instances of people being offended as the hurt fee-fees of oversensitive whiners.

But completely separating the two modes of offense isn't too great either, and I think that's what I've been doing more recently. In my zeal to fight the power, I've been separating offendedness into wheat and tares: being offended at -isms is legitimate and righteous, but personal sensitivity constitutes an illegitimate form of offendedness. Of course, on a very basic level this separation makes no sense at all, because -isms hurt people. The two forms of offendedness are not identical, but they are intertwined.

At a formative age, I learned the hard way to not have hurt feelings. If you let your hurt feelings show, you gave the people trying to hurt you the satisfaction of a job well done, and encouraged them to keep at it. Better to repress those feelings. Better to hide in the library, fade into the background, turn invisible. Better to try not to have feelings at all, and if you must have them, have them in the novels you read, the diaries and poems and stories you write, the secret world in your head to which you retreat in every idle moment.

I was a child with a tenuous grasp on theory of mind as it was, so “hurt feelings are a weakness and a failing” was not the most helpful lesson for my preteen self to learn. As much as I've tried since then to unlearn everything I absorbed from the kids who made my life so hellish for that couple of years, those things are an insidious part of who I am. (I am worthless. Nobody could ever like me. Showing hurt feelings means they've won.) My brain knows that hurt feelings are a perfectly legitimate reaction to insults and sarcasm, but my gut still dismisses them as weakness, oversensitivity, invalid.

I am, my many past and present failures in this field notwithstanding, getting pretty practiced at battling the kyriarchy. Even though I don't always combat them when and how I should, I have at least gotten quite sensitive to the pervasive presence of -isms all around me.

But I am still not at all sensitive to individuals' hurt feelings. Many times, my personal insensitivity has caused offense, and sometimes I haven't even understood how. What I've realized from this latest incident is that I am drawing an artificial dualism that cannot be maintained. Systemic injustice can cause hurt feelings. Personal insensitivity can cause hurt feelings. Most of the time, it's kind of both.

I will never, I think, be a very sensitive person. I'm too callused by my childhood experiences to be hurt by a bit of mockery or rudeness; but I will fight my tendency to assume that everyone else is too. I will bear in mind that what looks to me like personal sensitivity might well be influenced by a systemic injustice that my privilege has blocked from my view. I will remind myself that, even though a certain joke or comment wouldn't be hurtful me, it might well hurt somebody else, and that doesn't mean that person is oversensitive or somehow in the wrong for feeling that way.

I will learn. I will get better at this.

I'm Not Here For Your Entertainment

The other night I was at a party, where I saw somebody I haven't seen since high school. Let's call him Flobberwobberbobberbobberbobber (+10 if you get the reference, +100 if you can say it out loud without cracking a smile). At some point, the inevitable happened: I made a passing reference to an ex-girlfriend, and Flobberwobberbobberbobberbobber said, “So are you gay now?”

That kind of phrasing sets off all manner of alarm bells, but the simplest answer is “yes”. Of course, this led to a barrage of inane questions, which I really didn't feel like answering. (Mad props to my homies in the house who jumped straight to my defense with the usual inversions: “How long have you been straight?”) Later on, I'm pretty sure he was trash-talking me to a good friend, who also defended me like the absolute brick he is.

It would be nice to say that this is the worst I've ever gotten from a straight dude, that I've never been treated like a performing seal or been called unpleasant names or come close to getting the snot beaten out of me on account of my sexuality. It would be nice, but if I said that I would be a lying liar who lies.

All of this harassment, without exception, has come from men.

Some of these men were bullies; some of them were merely ignorant but well-intentioned; they are all products of a culture that tells men they can belittle women's sexuality with impunity. That tells men all valid sex revolves around men's sexuality. That tells men gay women are putting it on to titillate men. That teaches men to question a gay woman's very existence, because it doesn't make any sense that women can have desires and attractions that don't involve men in some way, so any woman claiming to do so is at best a divertissement for men's amusement and at worst a pervert (yes, I've been called that – for holding hands with my girlfriend in public).

What does it feel like to be told, implicitly or explicitly, that your existence is invalid?

It feels like shit.

The only time a woman has made me feel this bad was when a conservative Christian friend lent me a charming book called Blame it on the Brain, which purports to offer solutions to problems like depression, alcoholism, and homosexuality through a cobbled-together mess of dubious neuroscience and Scripture. How much it hurts when people use my faith, the God whom I love and trust with everything I am, to invalidate me is a whole other story. In the secular world, though, women don't doubt other women's sexuality, because we know from our lived experience that, contrary to the teachings of the kyriarchy, women are sexual beings just as much as men are. Some women, of course, are asexual, as are some men; but among those of us who are sexual, some of us are gay. Yes, really.

We're not doing it to get your attention. We're not doing it to play hard to get. We're not doing it because we feel a feminist's obligation to reject men even though we secretly want them. We're doing it because it's who we are.

When you are part of a marginalized group, your oppressors put you in a neat little damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't snare. When a member of the oppressing majority asks a question that displays eir astonishing, breath-taking ignorance, like “how long have you been gay?”, ey's putting the onus on you to educate em. You can refuse, knowing that ey will probably not bother with the five minutes of googling needed to self-educate, and so you are leaving em in ignorance; or you can oblige, and feel as though you are there purely for the convenience of the oppressor: you're the Magical Minority!

What I want from my oppressors is simple. I don't want to have to justify myself to you. I don't want to hear you say you've “turned” lesbians, or to put up with your sexual advances after I've made it clear that I am not interested. I don't want to feel like I have to educate you, and I don't want to have to be defended by my straight friends. I definitely don't want to have to run away so I can keep my face the way it is. When you do this stuff to me, you make me feel as if I am less of a person than you.