Brown Skin Feminisms: Hip Hop and Sexism, Part 1

I witnessed a disturbing Twitter interaction between two rappers (one male, one female) and a popular hip hop/urban blog over the past 24 hours. It all started when the male rapper (an up-and-coming hip hop star with a Shawn Carter co-sign) sent out tweets (jokingly) referring to past sexual exploits with the female rapper (a well-known indie rapper from NYC). It was inappropriate from the start for my tastes, but it probably would’ve been easy to dismiss after the first tweet. However, even after she asked him to cut it out, the male rapper went on to send an even more explicit tweet pointing to the way the female rapper supposedly liked to “receive” sex (based on his fantasy experience!). Now, it was clear to me from the beginning that this was all a joke to him. The female rapper didn’t find it so funny. Now I don’t know her well at all but I am some what acquainted with the female rapper through a mutual close friend. Therefore, I could sort of pick up how she was feeling about the whole conversation through her responses. I myself took exception to the whole exchange and even (sub-)tweeted a message that expressed my disdain. She did the same by making a remark or two about it but she quickly moved on.

It was not until this morning that my last feminist nerve was completely worked to no end. I woke up to read my timeline on Twitter (as we social media addicts tend to do each morning) only to find that the male rapper was complaining to the popular hip hop blog about reporting on his twitter exchange with the female rapper from the night before. They had, in fact, reported it as a news story. He would go on to apologize to the female rapper for his joke-gone-too-far and the aftermath. For its part, the blog only felt it necessary to apologize to the male rapper for exposing his wordplay with a friend. They mentioned the female rapper in the tweet, but did not offer her one world of apology for defaming her name before its thousands of blog readers. UGH! Of course I went on an all out twitter rant!!!!

What is the deal with the sexism in hip hop in 2011? I know that this topic has become so cliché and normalized it’s kind of sickening. But it still drives me crazy…why must hip hop and sexism go together like ODB and Mariah; babies and pacifiers? As a life long hip hop lover and critic, I am tired of it all. I, of course, cannot blame one segment of the population or a particular group of people. Anyone who comes into contact with or has anything to do with the production (I mean this in a cultural sense here) is partially responsible. There is no accountability for anyone: the artist, the consumer, corporate record labels, advertisers, and scholars/critics; not a one of us. We let soooooooo much slide in the name of a dope beat, some commercial success, and/or “keeping it real”. Well…for me and my crew (hip hop speak for my friends), it’s a wrap for keeping it real if we are only going to simply keep it real ignorant. For my part, I plan to use this space over the next few weeks to further investigate the role of feminism in hip hop discourse and production. Furthermore, I would like to look at how feminists can fight sexism in both the commercial and underground arenas of hip hop in the 21st century. More to come…

Communication and Pain, pt 2.

A sub-theme of Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is the question of whether or not human beings can understand one another. The main character loses his wife, and begins to realize that there were depths to her that he was unable to comprehend. In a flashback sequence, after the main character hears that his wife has gotten an abortion while he is away, he witnesses a scene in which it is questioned whether the idea of physical pain can be transferred from the sufferer to the viewer. What is empathy (?), asks the sufferer/performer who puts his hand through an open flame in front of a confounded audience. The scene is focused on sight and viewing, not on talking or explaining. Is pain, and thereby empathy, better translated through imagery and action (rather than speaking)?

These questions bring us back to Veena Das (Life and Words:2007), who questions whether empathy can be translated through the words I am in pain. Rather, what Das finds is that traumatic experiences are left unspoken, memories are “forgotten” and left behind. Das finds that trauma and pain haunts through lapses and dis-junctures. What Das and Murakami both seem to indicate is that trauma and pain are things rarely spoken of, rather they’re already “known” or they’re transferred through imagery (and silence). Trauma and pain are those things which are unspeakable.

While one aspect of Murakami’s questioning of empathy is in regards to pain, he also focuses on pleasure. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, has almost as much pleasurable sex as it does torture in it. The strange thing is, much of the sex in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle could be considered psychic sex. Yes, psychic sex. A supporting character in the novel is a psychic prostitute – she has sex with people through their minds, typically in a dream space. These “psychic sex” scenes are described as being even more lucid than physical sex, and certainly more pleasurable. Because they are enacted purely through the mind, and in a dream space, the psychic sex scenes also give Murakami the ability to push the boundaries of what a person might normally experience during the sex act. While Murakami questions whether or not we can adequately empathize with pain, he doesn’t question whether pleasure can be adequately transferred between two people.

But I want to go back to the problem of pain and empathy, and communication. Because I still question what we can really get across to another. I also question why the discussion of empathy is always focused on pain – why isn’t it focused on pleasure? What is it about the pain of another that we have become so focused on?

The Aesthetic Imperative of Death, pt. 2

All organic life must inevitably
die. The death drive,however, introduces a certain ambiguity into this inevitability, transforming a biological necessity into a modality of wish fulfillment, an aesthetic possibility. Death, then, exists as a pathos, not a thing in itself that makes itself apparent to us, but as a promise - a promise of inanimate sufficiency, of intact near-nothingness - the object of all our striving. The death drive obliges us, its inclination to arrest life, to freeze it in a slow and gelid rest. Here, in this effort to contain the colors and inconsistencies of animate living in a sedated stasis,
a deathly aesthetic begins to take shape.

The death-drive seeks out the pleasurable quasi-nothingness from which primordial life emerged and to which it must, in death return. The aesthetic of the drive, then, is one that lies on either side of the animate; it is an aesthetic in which life creates a characteristic chasm.
All the same, the death drive is a preservational drive. It can only preserve what it knows - life. If the death drive wishes to carry on, it must be satisfied with life at its bare minimum, an extreme sleepiness that only insinuates death. In its block of ice, the heart must still beat ever so slightly.

The aesthetic of death, then, is one in which in that moment of ghostly stillness so desired, there remains a trace of the entropy of animate life. It is a grainy photograph that suspends living matter in time and space yet forces us to consider its ever-vibrating particles. It is the visible bullet wound in a taxidermied animal, mounted in a glass case forever caught in in flight or on the hunt, yet bearing the sign of its mortality - its authenticity.

Piss Politics

The forceful assimilationist Bennie (in the musical Rent) asks his former friends if they "really want a neighborhood where people piss on your stoop every night." It doesn't seem to be much of a wager to guess that the answer, for most, is no. I would prefer a neighborhood where people do not piss on my stoop.

All sorts of dizzying policies, social movements, monetary exchanges, and physical force(s) have led to many neighborhoods especially in Manhattan, parts of Brooklyn, and the Bronx becoming safe from human excrement in most places where it used to be quite common (of course exception can be made for partying young people on weekend nights especially on the Lower East Side).

To many people's unabashed delight, a new piss politics has taken over; human piss has been replaced with the piss and shit-smears of countless shih-tzus, labra-doodles, french bulldogs, cocka-poos, and pomeranians. Forget homeless queer youth of color on the piers and in the streets in the West Village and Chelsea, we now have countless pugs and pekignese to walk and clean up after. It's one way you know that these neighborhoods have changed for the better in just a few short decades. Dogs, after all, with a few notable exceptions, are a sign of wealth, comfort, and predominantly white segregated neighborhoods.

For the record, it isn't the dogs' fault. It's is just an observation of what we make room for when we "clean" our streets and what kind of values it betrays. I don't think sanitation can explain why we have literally removed people from the streets who we think piss and shit on them to make room for our dogs to do so.

Cogito Ergo Sum?

What am I
Thinking
Now
Then
Whenever
I think of
What makes me
What I am
To me
Presented to
You
Through
Some other self
Within
Me?

“What? I didn’t quite get that the first time around.” Communication and Translation, part 1?

I need to foreclose the thought that language is our main form of communication (as humans). Like too much peanut butter in your mouth or cotton candy in your hands, language can be clunky, hard to use.

On the other hand, we can’t forget that language has the ability to spread the idea of revolution, to translate ideas into action, or to enrapture us in the experience of a good storyteller. Language might be sufficient when we are learning how to turn on our computer (even that requires a mix of hieroglyphs and previous electronic knowledge), but is language sufficient when you are explaining the time you felt an irrational sense of fear, or you are telling someone that you’re still in love. Was your experience properly translated and understood by the (an)other?

I want to go deeper, to understand those silent spaces of not-speech, of not-language. At the same time I want to craft my writing so that what you read on this page is a physical experience. What is language really? What are the potentials of language, and what are its unique abilities? Where does the use of language end and our emotions and physicality begin? I’d like to place my microscope upon those shadowy spaces.

I need to foreclose the idea that we might never fully understand one another. That we are all islands, that we cannot communicate adequately.

Yet, I still have my doubts.

In Life and Words anthropologist Veena Das (2007) writes that, in the face of violence, there is a “poverty of words” (91). There are some things that words cannot describe, that people do not want to describe. Das argues that these things are intimately connected to the question of what we consider to be human – while the victim of violence knows that the perpetrator is human, we question whether a human could do such a thing. Humans do indescribable things to other humans. Das’ work points out that these things are indescribable precisely because they question the limits of the human.

“Words can show one’s numbed relation to life just as gesture can tell us what forms of life, what forms of dying, become the soil on which words can grow or not” (Das, 2007:94). In other words (pun not entirely intended), words and language are furiously wrapped and connected to human experience, to society. Words “grow or not” based on how we live our lives, what we experience and what we deem as being human. Words and languages morph and exchange alongside our human lives. Language cannot be understood alone. Language must be contextualized.

UFO Photography (Part 1?)

The photograph of the alleged Unidentified Flying Object has become a genre all its own, perhaps one of the true and lasting aesthetic creations of the Cold War. Though manifesting itself in a wide variety of forms, our popular corpus of UFO imagery and folklore spews forth from a relatively small number of iconic photographs, most of them taken in the first two decades following World War II. As proof to the fringe only, the photographic evidence of extraterrestrial visitation upon the human race is located squarely within a twilight zone; the doubt of odd angles, blurry edges, unfamiliar colors. They never offer “proof” in the high-definition sense. And yet for any who have seen them and studied them, there is an undeniable seductive quality to UFO photography. To me, it was the cocked arm of the Solway Firth Spaceman, so nonchalant, looming behind the smiling face of the daughter of Jim Templeton. A gesture from beyond.

The changing facades of Western postwar living are captured alongside the otherworldly invaders. Leafy New Jersey streets and urban light-pollution; middle-class weekend trips to the moors. Backdrops so unassuming; they never meant to be photographed. Yawning and grainy. They’re always a disarmed quality, like the landscapes you first lay eyes on after a too-long nap. So banal as to come around the bend to uncanny. In this state, even the trees seem dangerous. Knowing.

There’s always a strange moment in the midst of a UFO enthusiast’s road of discovery, when the incriminating photo blooms onto the monitor and the eye searches for what’s different, what’s foreign, that promised break in reality. As per the genre, the enthusiast knows that something is wrong with this picture, something cosmically wrong, but he or she doesn’t know where yet. In this weightless space, hunting the intruder, everything is anticipation and everything is suspect.

And suddenly, there it is…

Threading the link between thought experiment and horror fiction is old-hat. Our cultural appetite for the macabre, the popthropologists says, comes from the win-win decadence of death without death; experiencing the adrenaline while the consequences are suspended along with our disbelief. This idea works well enough for zombie or slasher films, but it doesn’t suffice for the ancient stockpile of ghost stories, haunted Dutch Colonials on Long Island, UFO narratives, demonic visitations, in which actual danger to physical life and livelihood are rarely present. Ghosts, and Extraterrestrials, are not feared because they kill.

Just like it’s impossible to imagine one “living” death, it’s impossible to grasp the reality of the extraterrestrial entity. In the massive corpus of science fiction concerned with humanity’s relations with alien life, otherworldly beings are crudely stereotyped by human authors in as a disagreeable a manner as would any Orientalist. This species is passionate and violent, that one is stoic and intellectual. There is little variation between individuals, as we know real entities. But if the extraterrestrials were depicted as such, as unique and different from one another as individual humans are to each other, then their alien glamour would evaporate. The racial Other also exists bounded by stereotypes. So what is different here?
Maybe it’s about something not-belonging.

The Aesthetic Imperative of Death, pt. 1

Death is a singular event: no one can die my death in my place. As an event that is unrepeatable, essentially unknowable, all that we might say about it is rhetorical or speculative. It is, more than anything, that which is one’s own, about which only the one whose death is in question can speculate. With what certainty can we speak about death? If we consider Heidegger’s conclusion that “Death is the Dasein’s ownmost possibility” (Heidegger 307), the answer is obvious: none. Even the possibility of death, the possibility opened up by death, exceeds potential or imagination. It is a possibility that is non-actual, the “possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all.” (306) Death is possibility set free, approached only by speculative fictions, which by absconding from the reality in which their force is expressed, mirror the very structure of death.

However, the possibility of death is not given. “Being-towards-death,” Heidegger writes, “as anticipation of possibility, is what first makes the possibility possible.” (307) The possibility, it would seem, condenses as we look towards that deathly horizon and wait, and death, then, must be contingent upon that Being that steadily approaches it, the being that, by his forward glance, purports to make it possible. And yet, we must reconcile this element of contingency with the inevitable necessity of death, both the actual death to come and the death that is always-already a part of Being. After all, if the being is oriented towards his own death, if it resides in him like as a trace, his death must precede him, must exist synchronously with Being, waiting until the two converge again. As we advance towards this pre-existing terminus, perhaps we find that it all looks familiar. Perhaps we have been here before. Perhaps this was here from which we departed.

Death is the telos of seduction. With each desire we are seduced by death: its promise, its possibility furnishes the goal of life. As Freud postulates in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, life takes the form of the pursuit of pleasure where pleasure consists in the fulfilling of wishes, the quieting of tension, the end to a mad pursuit. When the frenzied searching stops, energies are emptied out and there is a serene and easeful calm whose character cannot be isolated, neither theoretically nor practically, from that of death. Pleasure, then, is that moment of stillness in which we savor the faint taste of our own death.

Through pleasure, then, we invoke our own death in order to forestall it. We forestall it only so that we may invoke it yet again. Death would annul the possibility of seeking pleasure, foreclosing the return of death’s ghostly presence, its restful nature – it would abolish the tendency that prompts it. The death-drive thereby plays a role left vacant by death: where death destroys, the drive preserves. And yet, what it seeks to preserve is the bare minimum, the ecstasy of near-nothingness, a less-than-being that is, even so, more than nothing. To live a life of pleasure, then, is to postpone death by dying.


Heidegger, M. Being and Time. (Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson) Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962.