"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.