Talking about Men on Buses

Two days ago, overwhelmed by extreme public transport discomfort and everyday feminist rage, I made the following status update:

'Sitting on a bus completely contorting myself in order not to rub up against a man sitting next to me who is happily sprawling across twice as much seat as he needs. So angry. Gender is literally hurting me.'

And the internet exploded.

While a bunch of fellow Gender Studies students ‘liked’ my status and commented with tips for dealing with this behaviour, some men I love and respect got very, very upset with me. And this is not the first time.

I don’t think it is possible, or even desirable, to get everyone to agree on what it means to have gender and be in the world. If that were the aim Gender Studies would be more dogma than discussion, more application than analysis. It would impoverish our understanding of human diversity and experience and leave big holes in our mapping of the social.

But I think the disagreements in cases like these are of a different order. I think there are some underlying, first-principle misunderstandings that act like railway switches in these discussions, almost imperceptibly sending us off on different tracks. The recurring tensions look like debates, very often, however, we are  in two different conversations, barely talking to each other at all.

This is an attempt to explain two basic starting points for my feminist analysis of Men on Buses that might prevent conflict caused by misunderstanding. Since I think these starting points are common ones, I hope the discussion might prevent misunderstanding in other discussions too. Here goes:

One: ‘Gender’, a provisional definition

The first problem arises from confusion about what exactly ‘gender’ means. This is not surprising. These days I use the word in the context of my training in a complex body of theory that specialises in unpacking ‘gender’s different uses and observing how the languages and ideas associated with those uses are embedded in everyday life. So for me ‘gender’ is a complicated word with a complicated history, history I can no longer separate from my view of the world.

However unlike most academic language you don't have to be an expert to talk about ‘gender’. I hazard a guess that most of us don’t know what the word ‘copolymer’ means, for example, but we know we don’t, and probably think we don’t need to. By contrast, ‘gender’ has a busy extracurricular schedule, one that overlaps rather haphazardly with the work it does in academic debates. 'Gender' is a word with both specialised and everyday meanings- both of which are important. All of this means that we won’t be able to pin down a definition of ‘gender’ that works in all contexts. 

But I can tell you what I meant by it in that status. I used ‘gender’ to point towards a pattern of beliefs, behaviours and practices that differentiate ‘men’ from ‘women’ and ‘femininity’ from ‘masculinity’ (a pattern that has a complicated relationship to ‘male’ and ‘female’).

When you walk onto a bus and sit down next to someone do you notice whether they are a man or a woman? If you do (even if you later remind yourself that you know nothing about their biological status or their chosen identity) you have on some level noticed that there are recurring patterns of behaviour and practices that allow you to relatively reliably predict ‘man’ness and ‘woman’ness. It also means you have a patterned series of beliefs about what ‘men’ and ‘women’ act and look like that inform those predictions.

Two: Patterns Aren’t Rules

If gender is a pattern of beliefs, behaviours and practices that differentiate ‘men’ from ‘women’ and ‘femininity’ from ‘masculinity’, then what is a ‘pattern’?

Wiki says a pattern is ‘a discernible regularity in the world’ and that patterns ‘are often chaotic, never exactly repeating’. This is what I mean when I say gender is a pattern. Our beliefs about men and women, along with the behaviours and practices of men and women, have a discernible, if imperfect, regularity. If they didn’t you would never walk on to a bus and imagine that you know the gender of the person sitting next to you.

‘Pattern’, when used in this way, is not the same as ‘rule’. I really do believe that gender variation exists, and I really do believe that patterns can be changed. Indeed, for me being a feminist means noticing gender as a pattern, knowing it is not a rule, and insisting that pattern should change. This is partly because I believe that pattern tends to disadvantage women and the feminine, but mostly because the pattern creates limits that hurt us all.

In short: gender is a pattern, not a rule. I believe it is worth pointing the pattern out because I believe it can (and should) change.

Men on Buses (Revisited) 

I posted my status update because as I sat on the bus, contorting my body to accommodate the unnecessary sprawling of the man sitting next to me I recognised my experience as part of a gendered pattern. I recognised it because of tumblers like this, blogs like this, and articles like this one here. I also recognised it as part of a broader gendered pattern about how men and women tend to get taught to use their bodies in space, a pattern I have read about many times, but most memorably in the article ‘Throwing Like A Girl’ by Iris Marion Young.

I realised that I (and enough other girls to make it a pattern) have learnt to be very careful about extending my body into the space around me, very cautious about touching strange men on public transport, and very good at making my body seem as small as I possibly can (because small is thought to make girls polite and also beautiful).

I reflected on the fact that while individual men might learn about manners, and may think about taking up too much space on public transport as a manners issue, the man sitting next to me (along with enough other men to make it a pattern) probably wasn’t taught that it is dangerous to touch strange women you're sitting next to or that he will be thought of as unattractive or unmanly if he fails to contain his body politely.

I also reflected on the fact that physical size doesn’t seem to have any discernible correlation with sprawling or perching. I understand and have no problem with the fact that some bodies are bigger than others. The pattern I was observing was not one of different sized bodies, but of the radically different ways similarly sized bodies get used and moved.

So I thought about the fact that my back was developing a serious ache from the unreciprocated effort I was putting in to maintaining personal space and said to myself:
1) It hurts!
2) It is annoying that this individual is so oblivious…
3) but not suprising given the patterns mentioned above, so
4) really gender itself is implicated in this physical pain.

And then on Facebook I said, "Gender is hurting me!"

All of which is completely compatible with the existence of space-considerate men in the world. I know quite a few. It is also completely compatible with the existence of some women who are not. But neither of these qualifiers change the fact that there is a pattern (that is, a discernible, if imperfect, regularity) regarding the gender of those who sprawl and those who accommodatingly perch, and that that regularity corresponds to a set of beliefs we have about gender more broadly. Beliefs I happen to think are rotten to the core.

Let’s Talk 

I don’t for a second imagine that everyone will agree with me, but I hope now we are in a position to work out exactly why. Then we can have a real discussion. I will get you started. Perhaps you agree with me, but if you don’t

• Perhaps you don’t believe in gender as a pattern?
• Perhaps you do believe in gender as a pattern but believe that pattern is caused by a corresponding biological pattern that is unchangeable?
• Perhaps you do believe in gender as a pattern in general, but don’t believe in the particular pattern of gendered space-taking on buses?
• Perhaps you believe gendered patterns are a complicated mixture of biological and social factors and that in the case of Men on Buses biology is clearly implicated in a way that makes the gendered pattern inevitable (and perhaps not worth talking about)?
• Or perhaps you believe that gender is a pattern, and there is a gendered pattern to the distribution of space on buses, but you actually think women deserve less space because they are inferior to men in some way? 

If the last one is the case we have a much bigger problem (and if you plan on pretending you believe this you are a troll, please go away). But I think that most of the time the disagreement belongs to one of the other categories. Or perhaps to possible disagreements that I haven't mapped here?

In any case, let's talk.

Same-sex marriage: Sic et non

 

Our very own Jessica Kean has written up an excellent piece on the ABC Drum website on the question of same-sex marriage and the reaction to former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard's position on this issue.

Whatever position you find yourself in on this issue, Jess' formidable analysis of this biggie is going to give you plenty to mull over.

As a woman and feminist in a long term non-marriage partnership Julia Gillard has taken a strong public stance against the idea that the legitimacy of a union rests on the ability to put a ring on it. It's a politically interesting and sophisticated response, so why does it fall on deaf ears, asks Jessica Kean.

Read it HERE

It's great to see so much engagement on the ABC website's comment section on Jess' piece (close to 400 at the time of writing). I encourage everyone to engage in the conversation there and if it gets inhospitable, feel free also to continue the conversation here.


P.S. Challenge and debate passionately if you want to, but I caution you against trolling Jess here. Don't say you weren't warned.

Can deconstruction make the world a better, funnier place?

It's an all too common complaint one hears flaring up once in a while about cultural studies: That it is so caught up in esoteric theories about what the world is like that it forgets that there is a world.

While I don't have much truck with some types of anti-intellectualism masked as concern for "real problems," I do sometimes feel like cultural theory or that enterprise broadly known as "critique" can be a little bit aloof from the practical concerns of people in everyday life.

So this made me think: why don't we apply some highbrow cultural theory to some of the things that really annoy us?

Let's take tagging for example. Now I'm someone who really appreciates street art and I do think it adds a lot of colour to our cityscapes. But tagging? Most of it is pretty crappy and ugly (speaking as someone who may have once had a go at it and sucked like 99% of juvenile taggers). Personally, I don't think the pleasure of seeing one's own tag scrawled against a hundred newly painted walls outweighs the cost of everyone else having to suffer seeing it or repainting over it.

So what would happen if we throw in a dash of cultural theory at the problem of tagging?

In the past 15-20 years, the most well-known and hotly contested/pilloried approach in cultural theory would have to be deconstruction. To deconstruct, putting it simply, is to call into question a piece of text along the “fault lines” of ambiguity that are built into words and sentences, but that have been suppressed so as to make the meaning of a text appear clear and unambiguous (see here for a more comprehensive explanation). Deconstruction is thus a strategy for reminding us that the meanings of words and statements might not be as straightforward as we think.

For example, by adding scare quotes (" ") around a word when I am communicating with you, I destabilise its meaning whereas normally, you might just listen and take me at my word.



Chris enjoys going to the "movies"

So if I said: Chris went to the "movies", you'll start wondering about all the possible meanings of the word "movie" (Why the hell did he put scare quotes up around that word? Does it actually mean an orgy, or the pub, or helping out at a soup kitchen, or fighting crime in a disguise, or dead, etc?) We all know what a movie is... or do we?



While I don't recommend that you render everything you say suspect through the use of scare quotes - it would get annoying and tiring for those who have to interact with you before long - perhaps we could start to use deconstruction on those annoying tags on walls. In doing so, we begin to toy with the meaning of the word. We can do this simply by additionally spaying a question mark (?) or a little sad face :-(

So take the following tag for example. It confronts you in a sort of gritty and (masculine) in-your-face way:

Add a bit of practical deconstruction...

And voila! A badass tag suddenly looks a little unsure of itself and what it means. It might even be taken for an advertisement for a government mental health awareness program, which is a good thing.

Other fun deconstructive activities may involve adding words like "in bed" or "between my legs" at the end of advertising slogans (e.g. L'oréal- Because You're Worth It... in bed; McDonald's- I'm loving It... between my legs). Suddenly, the meaning of the slogans gets a little mixed up when you add some simple words after them.

Anyone else got good, practical deconstructive tips to make the world a better place, or at least a funnier one?

Is gym culture fascist?

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed the massive surge in gym culture in Sydney over the past 5 years or so?

All this lifting, running, lifting, black spandex and lifting while being yelled at by personal trainers made me think: is gym culture a type of fascism at the micro level?

(For example, check out this video of the latest fitness regime called Crossfit that prides itself on taking things up a few notches... till you vomit)


One of my favourite passages from cultural theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus is the following description of what fascism might look like. I found this passage very insightful on the point that when we think of fascism, we tend to think of nasty bad dudes (and we usually think of dudes) in uniform like Hitler at the Nuremburg Rally. But what about the desire of so many of us ordinary people for fascism in everyday life? As D&G point out:

What makes fascism dangerous is its molecular or micropolitical power, for it is a mass movement: a cancerous body rather than a totalitarian organism.  American film has often depicted these molecular focal points; band, gang, sect, family, town, neighbourhood... fascisms spare no one.  Only microfascism provides an answer to the global question: Why does desire desire its own repression, how can it desire its own repression?  The masses certainly do not passively submit to power; nor do they "want" to be repressed, in a kind of masochistic hysteria; nor are they tricked by an ideological lure.  Desire is never separable from complex assemblages that necessarily tie into molecular levels, from microformations already shaping postures, attitudes, perceptions, expectations, semiotic systems, etc.  Desire is never an undifferentiated instinctual energy, but itself results from a highly developed, engineered setup rich in interactions: a whole supple segementarity that processes molecular energies and potentially gives desire a fascist determination...  It's too easy to be antifascist on the molar [i.e. large scale] level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective.

 So is gym culture a type of "microfascism"?

TV-Infidelity

“How could you? Did our promise mean nothing to you?” 

“I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t know what I was doing. It was just that one time, I won’t do it again!”

You all know this scene. It repeats itself, regularly, in living rooms across the nation. It is a pitiful, cliché filled tableau of guilt, possession, desire and betrayal. You know it well. 

"I still can’t believe you did it. I can’t believe you watched episode 10 without me.”

Infidelity, unwilling to be confined to its animating role in the drama on the small screen, has leapt right out and, increasingly, shapes our relationship to and around TV itself. For those unfamiliar with this new relational landscape let’s take a moment to look at an entry from a dictionary*:

TV-infidelity (noun): the act of breaking an implied or explicit promise to watch a particular tv show only in the company of particular other person/s. e.g. ‘TV-infidelity, a crime most heinous, is often considered grounds for separation’.

Synonym: TV-cheating (noun, verb) e.g. ‘I can’t believe you TV-cheated on me, TV-cheating is the worst, you’re such a TV-cheat!’, and ‘I just walked in on him TV-cheating on me!’

Antonym: TV-monogamous (adjective) e.g. ‘I am sorry, I can’t watch the new Game of Thrones with you… Jenny and I are GoT-monogamous'.  

I would hazard a guess that this phenomenon is only as old as TV on DVD. Before that, if TV studies is to be believed, we were all happy TV sluts**- dropping in and out of viewership not only over the course of the season but over the course of an episode (‘can we pause while I go grab some more icecream?’ was, until recently, just a dream). Our TV companions were not special intimates who stuck with us through the good times (‘Let’s watch another one!’) and the bad (‘Is that the time? SHIT! I have work tomorrow!’). Instead we saw ourselves as part of an big imagined community of fellow TV viewers who we could picture tuning in at exactly the same time as us to watch exactly the same thing. 

Basically, watching TV was like having some kind of serial, anonymous, textual orgy.

For better or worse, those days have passed. The more control and choice we gain over what we watch and when, the more fanatical we become about who we watch what with. As we abandon the tv guide we also abandon the imagined community it represents. And so we make promises (and break them) and try hard to pin back down a sense of a TV experience shared. In the age of box-sets and streaming we have become TV-monogamists.

And that's why, knowing full well that the siren call of an episode fresh from the US can turn even the best boys bad, we gather our courage and ask somebody new, "do you... um, do you wanna go TV-steady with me?”

* This did not come from an actual dictionary. I made it up. You can probably tell.

** I’m using 'slut' here as a deliberately provocative yet morally neutral term for ‘promiscuous person’. Quick guide to correct usage: ‘I hate you, slut!’ = Bad, you sexist prick! ‘I feel like getting slutty!’ = Fine, and go for it, sister!

Do "white dudes" accept the privilege card?

There's a super interesting discussion rumbling over at the famed humanities blog An und für sich on the question of whether the accusation of "privilege" is useful or not.

Basically, the tag of "privilege" is used to describe someone who enjoys all the advantages of societal biases as their norm (e.g. being able-bodied, being middle-class, being straight, being Caucasian, being male, etc).

A few days ago, Adam Kotsko conjectured in a post:

For me, though, the biggest problem is that little word “privilege.” Why should precisely that be the key term?...the term “privilege” plays into the rhetoric of austerity. We’ve all seen the dynamic at work, for instance when people talk about how teachers have summers off and a good retirement plan, etc. The response is always to say, “That’s unfair, that should be taken away” — never “my job should be like that too!” Deprivation is taken as the baseline assumption, and anything above that is an unfair imposition.

This led to an avalanche of comments, which Kotsko noticed were mostly from "white dudes":

I’m alarmed by the fact that the discussion has been so dominated by white dudes who are sick of privilege discourse... My problem is not that it makes white dudes feel defensive — that will happen literally no matter what, because white dude identity is founded on prickly defensiveness....The problem, it seems to me, is that privilege discourse the word “privilege” conflates at least three types of realities...

Check out the latest post and discussion here. If "privilege" is something that yanks your crank, then get into it!

The rise of human spam: On charity muggers

Now before I begin, let's not be silly. I'm not saying that charity organisations are necessarily bad or doing a lousy job in alleviating suffering. However, I wonder if much attention in cultural studies has been given to the rise of "charity muggers" (or "chuggers"), that annoying breed of human spam that gets all up in your grill when you're travelling from point A to B.

We've all been confronted by the feeling of impending doom when these persistent and overly-exuberant folk cross our path, armed with their clipboards and coloured vests or jackets and yelling something about your day and dying baby seals.

 

Channelling Michel de Certeau, one can observe several tactics commonly used by people to counter the marketing strategies of chuggers:

1. Don't make eye contact - to acknowledge their existence is to bring them into being

2. Pretend to play on the phone - whether talking or texting, finding an alibi is key

3. Say "not interested" - whether it's helping starving children, saving the whales or fighting for human rights, people who would usually care a lot suddenly assume the persona of the silent majority

So what do people think about chuggers? What characterises their strategies? Have chuggers been studied as an intensified and visible form of affective labour, exploiting otherwise likable people to use their likability in this way? What are the racial and gender politics of chugging? How do you avoid being mugged for good causes?