To the Readers of the World

Dear treasured and anonymous readers,

Although nobody follows this blog, I thought it would be fair after a month without posting to let those of you still ending up at this page that I will be taking a break from this blog for the duration of the summer.

If, for some reason, you like what I write, there is an outside chance that you will like my less serious stuff at Short Cartoons, Comic Stories

If you don't like that blog, fear not! My literary rants with a vaguely feminist perspective will continue in the Fall.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes, Turn and Face the Strange

For my final project in my fem lit class I was told to construct a theory loosely based on the theory of somebody we read in class. I was about to say "a woman" instead of "somebody" but I double checked and there was one male co-author who worked with Cixous on the Laugh of the Medusa article. While I find it interesting that a class on gender only looked at works written by women, I feel that discussion is for another time and another place. Here is the space in which I invite you, the reader, to join me as I retrace the steps in finding my own little theory on gender.


My first instinct was to follow the path of destruction. Tear it all down! For tears make tears that fertilize the seeds of change. My theory was going to analyze the emotion of anger present in Zine publications. I figured the angry feminist is already an image that comes to people's mind, why not define what it means to be an angry feminist, and what it accomplishes?  I couldn't think of a good way to go about it so I took a study break and did some online psychology experiments for another class. Whilst doing one particular experiment I had a Archimedes moment...!


The experiment was surveying something they called benevolent sexism. I thought to myself, I could write on benevolent sexism. The concept is simple, men behaving a certain way toward women with good intentions but really they are promoting stereotypes of weakness in women that is considered sexist. As I sat down to create my benevolent sexist theory, here is what I came up with.


It has been a long standing belief of mine that humans have a desire to identify aspects and elements of the world in which we inhabit, from abstract emotions to a grain of sand. The usefulness of this identification process is not in question. Certainly the very concept of language revolves around the labels created for identification purposes. But incredible usefulness does not make the process of identification impervious to criticism, especially when identifying people. In fact the word “label” has had negative connotations for a long time. Soren Kierkegaard is best known for his quote “once you label me, you negate me.” But what, exactly, is negated? Kierkegaard says “me” in a holistic fashion, not distinguishing between body and mind. Yet because of the labels of mind and body, they are discussed separately in the world of gender theory. My goal in this piece is to critically evaluate Virginia Woolf’s concept of the androgynous mind alongside Judith Butler’s commentary on body and gender in an attempt to find an appropriate means of talking about people


So as you can see I changed my topic yet again. But I like where I can go with this last idea of looking at society’s acceptance minds and disapproval of bodies. So yeah.

Madness? THIS IS BERTHA!!!

A Girl Interrupted my reading of H.P. Lovecraft to tell me about the Wide Sargasso Sea that really made her mad. Naturally I asked her why a raven is like a writing desk? She didn't answer but she did asked me which would be worse, to live as a monster or to die as a good man? As I was giving my response to her, my roommate with a Beautiful Mind walked in and asked me why I was talking to myself.

Madness, lunacy, insanity, Linsanity, Mickey Rooney... if you think about it too long you become it, like philosophy and philosophers. Ok, so maybe you won't become Mickey Rooney, but if enough people say you're crazy it pretty much will come true. This was the case for Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea. I don't believe she was actually crazy. I mean, if some guy married me, blatantly cheated on me, vowed to out-hate me and started calling me Bertha for some reason I'd go berserk too. This got me thinking of the concept of madness and how much it depends on perspective. When we take plain Jane's POV, Bertha is stark ravin' mad. But when we live a life from a new perspective, that is Antoinette's, she seems a lot more normal... just drunk. Of course, one instance doesn't make a trend.

I used my sain brane to dig for more instances in which the point of view determines sanity. Susanna Kaysen's book came to mind. She talks about her experiences of being admitted to the loony bin because the suits think she's crazy. But getting her side of the story makes her seem like any other teen filled with hormones, angst and confusion. Another instance is a short story by H.P. :Lovecraft. I'm going to omit the title not because I want to seem hip by dropping title-less references that can only be detected by proficient movie-watchers and book-readers with a good memory, but because I can't remember the title and I don't feel like googling it. At any rate, in the story a race of alien scholars study other species by switching consciousnesses with them over huge spans of time and space. One of these cognitive trades is with a human, let say Joe. While the alien learns about humanity through Joe's body, Joe's mind is in the alien body and kept locked up for the alien society's protection. When Joe's mind is returned to it's rightful place he tells everyone what happened and everyone thinks he's crazy, when in reality (the reality of the story that is) he's right.

I'm not saying every crazy person is sane, but I do believe craziness is relative. Drop me in any pre-depression era and suddenly "Joe texted me to google J-Lo cuz she tweeted a pic of her new 64gig ipad" becomes crazy talk. I wanted to wrap this all up somehow with a cool message about perspectives, insanity and a detailed Beautiful Mind reference but I can't think of one. So instead I'll just comment about how this entire blog is basically me talking to myself, so now who's crazy?!?!

Be Not Ashamed of that Which You do in Private

Let's talk masturbation, but not the taboo autoeroticism that causes pubescent teens to have moral dilemmas... okay maybe a little. But really it just serves (in this web-log at least) as an analogy for writing. But don't give me all of the credit, the analogy comes to us from the mind of Helene Cixous in "The Laugh of Medusa." While commanding women to write with an assertive exclamation point, Cixous draws a comparison between the presumably female reader's current writing and masturbation.

 "you've written a little, but in secret... as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty - so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time."

I can relate to this passage... because of my writing that is. But I am curious as to the direct comparison to masturbation because Cixous tells me that writing is for me. Not that everything people do for themselves is masturbation, but if I'm writing for me why should it matter whether or not I write in secret? I suppose what Cixous is really driving at is the concept of not being held back from writing due to some perceived finger wagging of shame from "the man." So while writing can be like masturbation, it doesn't have to be, in fact it probably shouldn't, according to Cixous. This is all well and good for women, but what about male writing? I know that male writers do not face the same challenges of women writers, but that doesn't make male writers impervious to the pitfalls that lead to masturbatory writing.

Take William S. Burroughs' "The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead" for example. This text is an example of a male author running the risk of masturbating in public... in literary terms of course. Burroughs' novel faced criticism from a critic whose full critique I cannot remember, but one part accused it as Burroughs playing with himself in an autoerotic fashion. Sure, the book is filled with a lot of graphic sexual encounters of men on men, and as a gay male author it's easy to see how it could be construed as a masturbatory act, but that's not what the critic was driving at. Instead, he accused Burroughs of not conveying any sort of message, and that the novel was purely for self satisfaction. I have a problem with that criticism though, because I agree with Cixous, to an extent.

I'm a firm believer that not all writing has to convey a message, because writing is indeed for the writer. Even works purely meant to convey messages (such as pamphlets) are for the author, because they have an inner desire to share a message that is satisfied through writing. Accusing an author of being selfish or writing to a narrow audience is dumb because all authors have a self motivating reason to write, or else they wouldn't do it. Holding all writers to the standards of "great male writers" is not only limiting to women but all writers. You need not be great to write, you only need a desire. Ultimately, I agree with Cixous in that writing is for the writer, but I don't see the harm in masturbatory writing. While it may be limiting to some, it may be a place of comfort for others. So here is my message to the world... of writers: what you do in your own time in the privacy of your bedroom is your business, but you need not be ashamed of it ;)

Comfortable or Discomfortactive? You Decide

Having little patience for lollygagging and thumb-twiddling today, I want to get right to a quote by Judith Butler in her text Undoing Gender.


"What might it mean to learn to live in the anxiety of [the challenge of difference], to feel the surety of one's epistemological and ontological anchor go, but to be willing, in the name of the human, to allow the human to become something other than what it is traditionally assumed to be?"

I took this to essentially ask what it would be like to ditch preconceived notions of humanity and embrace the discomfort associated with it.  In our class discussion on this quote, one student said that "being uncomfortable is being productive." I started to take a mental jog through uncomfortable moments in my life and rated their productivity. I thought of dental cleanings, sitting for too long while writing an essay, working out, even my mental jog was being productive, but enough metacognition, this is supposed to be about discomfort.

I'm a firm believer in the human need to label what we don't understand. Once we achieve that, we can rest in the comfort of knowing. But often times those labels can be misleading, which is why we need to let our "epistemological and ontological anchor go." For example, take the phrase "the frumious Bandersnatch." The average human English speaker not well read in Carroll might not know what a frumious Bandersnatch is, so there is a lack of understanding. The likely response is to label it as nonsense. While the label enables the user to talk about the unfamiliar subject, it is a false of understanding and a false feeling of comfort. Much in the same way, labeling who is human and who is not may seem comforting, but only to those with the label maker in hand. The last thing we need is to use labels to possess and comfort us like Dexter and Deedee. Instead, we should reconstruct the assumptions of humanity for the sake of humanity . Sure, reconstructions may be uncomfortable (especially those of the facial variety), but they are productive.

Zine-o-phobia

No, I don't have zine-o-phobia... nor do I have xenophobia about Zines. I will admit though at my first encounter with Zines I found them to be quite foreign and strange. But by now (as my loyal readers know) I have created my own Zine page and I'm even so fortunate as to have it exist in the Special Collections at the Michigan State University library. I'm not trying to gloat, my work exists as a piece in the compilation that is the collective genius of my English class. While each page was sensuously unique (partly due to varying levels of artistic ability but mostly due to different kinds of creativity born from different heads of different people) there is was one page that struck me as both ridiculously complex yet sensibly simple.

For the sake of space I don't want to make the image huge, but I at least the complexity is apparent. The primary message as I read it was "Womanhood is an experience not merely a trait. We laugh about it, we vent about it, we yell about it, we joke about it, but most importantly we grow from it" with delightful visual enhancements to the italicized words. Additionally "Wimmens Comics" is talked about alongside a comic that further illustrates (pun intended) the way in which the comics allow for an expression of thoughts, voice, sex, and sexual identity.

I liked this page a lot because at a glance, I thought "wow, there is a lot going on here." Once I read what I called the primary message, I thought "that makes a lot of sense, I like that." Then I thought more about womanhood and the complexity involved. Then I thought back to the complexity of the page. Then I thought about how much time I had to think when our teacher said "take a couple more minutes find a page you like." Then I realized how the complexity of the page reflected visually the complexity of womanhood. It is not something that can be simplified with a lot of white space, but rather a complicated interplay of DNA, growth in society, anger, joy, sex and identity.

"March Madness"

While misleading titles can be annoying for some readers, I figured I'd clear the air in the second sentence of this blog so the NCAA doesn't come down on me for using their trademark slogan (which wasn't theirs to begin with). I am writing this in March, and I wanted to write about the madness covered by Judith Butler in her intro to Undoing Gender.

While I have loosely been familiar with terms like transsexual (TS), transgender (TG), and hermaphrodite, I knew little about what the words truly meant, or the differences between them. While Hermaphroditus of Greek mythology clued me in (not personally) to the last of the three terms, I didn't get a full understanding of the spectrum of gender until I took a brain-development and neurology course in college. There I learned of the many processes involved with biological gender determination including chromosomes, hormone levels, hormone receptors, and many more. Essentially, I learned about the many variations of intersex individuals out there. In a Teacher Education course I finally learned about TS and TG and what separates them. I even read some adolescent fiction on it (Luna for those who are interested/ curious).

With all of the handy knowledge I collected, Butler was still able to hit me with a left hook with an issue regarding TS, TG, and intersex people. While TS and TG people identify with the opposite gender or sex they have been labeled with in the American sex dichotomy, intersex people and queer theorists seek to get rid of labels entirely. I had never thought of the conflict before, especially when surgery is involved. Butler was able to make a strong point on the matter, "although intersex and transsex sometimes seem to be movements at odds with one antoehr, the first opposing unwanted surgery, the second sometimes calling for elective surgery, it is most important to see that both challenge the principle that a natural dimorphism should be established or maintained at all costs." Forcing people into roles that don't fit them can be tragic, as was the case for David Reimer. So why is there a continuation of labeling process? Probably because people tend to fear what they don't understand. So society crams everyone into two neat little boxes so that the next generation grows up not understanding any more than the previous one, and the cyclical monster takes hold.

"I Wanna Publish Zines, and Rage Against Machines"

The opportunity to create a zine page for something had me giddy with excitement. The loose guidelines and free reign of the assignment felt like Steve Pink film (without Lewis Black sadly). Speaking of men, my zine page was about the newsletter "At-Home Dad," a publication that reaches out to (you guessed it) at-home dads. The newsletter offers advice about raising children, as well as fun activities to do both in and out of home, and the organization of play groups. The first issue was a collection of articles found in other sources that mentioned the soon-to-be-released newsletter. There was a lot of messages about the emotions of fathers who (by choice or by circumstance) stay at home with the kids, which I was ready to cram onto a 2.74 X 4.25 slip of paper. With my ecstatic boyhood creativity gently boiling over and creating a loud hiss as it hits the electric range-top heater, I set out to create my zine page. Remembering that I was in college, articles, essays, and text book reading took charge of my school time, leaving me to slap together the following page.

While I still have a sense of pride in my work i feel that the messages represented are difficult to interpret provided a lack of total understanding of the base material. That being said, I can use handy dandy words to explain some of these oddities. The headline of the page is meant to emphasize the the descriptor used for a male parent, which often gets confused when he is at-home with the kids. The Mr. Mom label was frowned upon (see lower left image) in the newsletter. The convention of labeling an at-home dad as a mom is like calling a craft gun a hand gun.... not to mention the conventions surrounding the stereotypical user population of the two items in my simile. The fact of the matter is that many dads feel embarrassment about it, usually due to a loss of a job, or simply because they are in a different gender role (see middle top image). The evil archer is a caricature of some assumptions presented in the newsletter. They were assumptions made about the at-home dads that reduced them to creeps and even so low as child molesters. I drew the newsletter as a shield against such hurtful word-arrows. It allows fathers to find a community of others like him that will accept and respect what he is doing for his family. Hopefully, others will come around too. 

Eroticism, Pornography and... Zombies? (Part 2)

At the risk of having my blogs run long I decided to make this a two part work. As you hopefully know from reading Part 1, I was discussing the ways in which Audre Lorde's differentiation between the erotic and the pornographic can be exemplified by comparing her definitions of each to elements in the 1943 film I Walked with a Zombie. Before part 1 inexplicably left the reader hanging, it demonstrated the connection between Lorde's erotic and the film's Voodoo. So if my comparison is any good, then the film must have an opposite to hold hands with Lorde's pornographic.

On the opposite end of the spectrum from the lively Voodoo people is the emotionless zombie Jessica. While her outward beauty remains, she wanders without free will or an ability to object to operations and testing. She is reduced to an object possessed by her husband, Paul. She is, at first, considered alive because of her outward beauty... but only acknowledging outward appearances without the concern of the subject for the sole purpose of our own satisfaction and gratification seems wrong, kind of like a porno.

The sexual acts of pornography are done for money, not for lust (unless you count leaked home videos, but that's an arena I'm not about to dive into). Therefore, there is very little emotion involved. Sure they may appear to be utilizing one another's life force, but it's just acting, just like Jessica (get it? emotionless, acting, movies... never mind, I thought there was a joke there).

So why does this matter? Why should we acknowledge a difference between eroticism and pornography and venture out through the fields to find our own Voodoo dance of the erotic? Like usual, I turn to Hollywood for answers. In the film, the combination of the Voodoo (erotic) and the zombie (pornographic) result in the destruction of the zombie. I don't see how pornography could be killed, especially by the erotic, but I do think that an embrace of Lorde's erotic can have positive effects. Killing a zombie is a positive in almost everybody's book. Since Lorde describes pornography as an abuse of another's emotion, I think it's safe to say that eradicating abuse would be a good thing. So by practicing sharing in another's emotions in the way outlined by Lorde's erotic, we can avoid abusing another's emotions.

Eroticism, Pornography and... Zombies? (Part 1)

The word erotic has come to be known for the evocation of sexual love, lust, or desire. The use of erotic in this way (such as erotic literature) has caused it to become closely linked with the pornographic. However, in her essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” Audre Lorde sets up the pornographic and eroticism as opposites. The concept of a commonality between the two is due to the fact that our society is “taught to separate the erotic demand from most vital areas of our lives other than sex” according to Lorde (p. 54). So how can we easily separate the concepts of eroticism and pornography that are so closely connected in our minds? Easy, add Zombies.

Back in 1943 a movie was released under the name I Walked with a Zombie. The film provides some classic horror with zombies and Voodoo magic while boasting an impressive 7.3/10 on IMDB for a movie I had never heard of. While the film is tame compared to our modern taste in horror... and sex appeal, it can be used as an analogy for the dichotomy of the erotic and the pornographic as presented by Lorde.

Lorde speaks of the erotic as “an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives” (p. 55). Now, picture that creative life force manifesting itself as dancing at night. Add a few ritual drums and flames and you have the Voodoo practices seen in I walked with a Zombie. The concepts of Voodooism and eroticism are also similar in that they are misunderstood and therefore made taboo in the realm which they exist. So if practicing Voodoo is similar to excepting the erotic, what does the pornographic look like in the film? For the answer, be sure to catch Part 2! (da dum daaaaaa)

To Be Continued....

Where in the World is the Enemy?

I spent a lot of my childhood chasing a woman in red all over the world only to find out later that she was a villain. I wasn't sure of her crime, or why she was considered the enemy, so I grabbed my deerstalker hat, magnifying glass, and cocaine (not really) to get to the bottom of things. I decided to start with some Wikipedia research only find it was protesting SOPA. Having lost faith in the internet I turned to an ancient technology for retrieving information known as "books."

I turned (pun intended) to bell hooks' Feminist Theory from Margin to Center, and after a few failed attempts of "Ctrl+F" I discovered that I would settle for reading. In a chapter titled "Sisterhood" I found an interesting passage regarding white women liberationists which claimed they insisted that "only men were the enemy" and that they "did not acknowledge and confront the enemy from within" (p.46) Now before you take Lit's one-hit-wonder to heart (let's face it, "Miserable" and "Addicted" had fun wordplay, but nobody remembers the music), you should know that hooks was only addressing those who were not willing or prepared to take part in the struggles to raise political awareness (p.46). This seemed to me like a call to break away from a bourgeois way of life, and begin "working together to expose, examine, and eliminate sexist socialization within ourselves" in order to "strengthen and affirm one another and build a solid foundation for developing political solidarity" (p.47-48).

This act isn't always so simple, and come to think of it, not always smiled upon. In the time i took reading, the SOPA protest had passed and I finally found out was Ms. Sandiego had done. Turns out she worked for seemingly ominous organization known as the ACME Detective Agency then went rouge to find her own way. In my twisted literary perspective it appeared to me that a white woman broke away from conventions and sought solidarity. In the name of education, young students are taught to track her down and put her away. Oh the messages we teach our children. While working together to better ourselves may seem like a sunny-meadow-with-hand-holding-and-rainbows fantasy, hooks is more realistic about it. She acknowledges that there will be conflict, but that conflict with respect can be productive. So I guess it was wrong of Carmen to run and wrong of me to chase her. We should address the conflicts, both in ourselves and with one another, in a manner that allows for the progressive movement toward a more accepting and tolerable society.

No Fear Woolf-speare

A movie I haven't seen asked me "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and my response was "what is there to fear?" After all, a different movie told me that Neo was the One; with him around we shouldn't fear anything. But then I realized that "Neo" was just the word "one" all scrambled up,  so I turned to Beauvoir for a better understanding of "the One."

It seems as though the One can't be defined without the Other. According to Beauvoir, "no group ever defines itself as One without immediately setting up the Other opposite itself." So everybody is either One or the Other, and members of the One group degrade the Others. I don't want this to turn into some Alejandro Amenábar moment, so instead I'll turn to the good doctor Theodor Geisel. In his world, the One group is defined as sneetches with stars upon thars, and the Other group is defined as the sneetches without any stars. I tried painting a star on my stomach but it didn't make me any more accepted, so I read the rest of the book and found out why. Oddly enough, the U.S. doesn't have a machine that can mix up our genders so randomly the dichotomy breaks down. If it did exist, I feel like the name should include Queer Theory somehow, but I'm not clever enough to give it a catchy title. Instead I think I'll look back to Woolf and see if I can find a space in between One and the Other.

In "A Room of One's Own" Woolf talked of a fusion between the masculine brain and the feminine brain to create something great, an androgynous brain. The androgynous brain isn't limited by either side, and has the ability blur the lines of men and women. Woolf brings up Shakespeare as an example. William puts women in positions of power and gives those characters enough intelligence to know how to use it. Also, his Seuss-like ability to queer notions of gender identity are apparent in stories in which women dress as men, or men dress as women. While cross dressing isn't extreme, the audience is seeing a boy, acting like a woman who is acting like a man. Perhaps our old friend William could have helped with my gender machine, or at least given it a good name. But what about his sister, Judith?

Woolf creates a supposition in which one Judith Shakespeare has all of the same talents as her more famous brother, but is not able to pursue writing because of the treatment of women at the time. While William had the great androgynous mind, the only reason we know about it is because he was a man. How many great androgynous minds have gone to waste simply because they existed in the skull of a woman? The thought of it is sad, but Woolf encourages her audience to keep writing anyway, even if it only exists in obscurity. I take this as a sign of hope. Even if a woman's work is in obscurity, the hipsters will embrace it and eventually it will become too mainstream for them as it becomes embraced by society as a whole.

What is Really Ailing Feminist Criticism? Yet Another Opinion

After diving into Susan Gubar's "What Ails Feminist Criticism" then swimming through Robyn Wiegman's "What Ails Feminist Criticism? A Second Opinion" I've decided that I don't like being in the water. The juxtaposition of these two articles is comparable to a college-aged girl criticizing her mother for not liking her new friends. That's not to say the articles should be reduced to the rantings of an old woman and the overzealous rebuttal  of a college freshman. In fact they are far from it. Wiegman's piece addresses Gubar's  argument point by point and aptly addresses shortcomings and hypocrisy. The problem I see with the works as a whole is a failure to convey feminism in a positive light.

As a fresh-on-the-scene student into the world of feminist literature and criticism, I have become my own prime example for illustrating the issues with Gubar and Wiegman's articles. Basically, my exposure to feminist criticism has been limited to a negative public view and these two internal attack and defense dialogues. While I admit some internal checks and criticism can be healthy, you can't expect much outward productivity when you can't even handle the battle from within. So what is feminism all about?

From what I've learned through Gubar, Feminism is a body being infected by bacteria (or factions of feminism) that don't sit well with the white blood cells (emphasis on white); and that feminism grows weaker by attempts to "slim down" the word woman or make it "disappear altogether." While my brain works to cram feminism into framework regarding postcolonial and poststructuralist ideas, I can't help but realize one of my few preconceived notions of feminism was that it delt with women. Now I have a feminist telling me that other feminists are compromising the word woman... it seems like I should get a second opinion.

Enter Wiegman's piece with talk of murder - a nifty attention grabber, but it doesn't sound like the diagnosis I was looking for. Sure enough, Weigman tells me that "Gubar is not alone in lamenting the course of contemporary feminism" and that she had a hope to not "lend fuel to the popular fire that feeds on the rhetorical battles among feminists." So what I gather is that there are plenty more people lamenting contemporary feminism, and there is a popular habit of forming battles among feminists. Sounds like an ailment to me, so what does the doctor order? A healthy dose of rhetorical fighting, despite Gubar's hope. While Weigman's piece addresses points that need to be brought up in retaliation to Gubar's piece, I can't help but notice a viscous cycle. An attack from within, a retaliation, a rebuttal on the retaliation, a criticism of the rebuttal on the retaliation, and so on.

Basically I'm just left to wonder, not where can feminism go from here, but how can feminism go from here?